The first thing I found most amazing about this mostly religious movie is how much the critics on Rotten Tomatoes disliked it, at only an 18% approval, even though the audience ranking was 88%. It is true there are things to dislike about this film but it is very far from a bad one, regardless of your religious beliefs. As anyone would know from the trailer of “The Shack” you know it is about the abduction of a very adorable young girl and the extraordinary pain her father goes through after she is abducted. Of all the things that can go wrong with raising a child, having them taken from you by some disgusting animal and then either never found or killed are at the very top of the list. One wonders how anyone could ever hold a job or even sleep again, after going through a horrible event like losing a child through an abduction by a known child kidnapper. Another movie or documentary related to this issue could be stories about people who have gone through a nightmare like this and somehow found a way to survive. Most of us would never recover from something like this, I know I wouldn’t. Under these extreme circumstances, any chance of a return to any kind of a normal life would be impossible.

The process of casting this movie must have been a difficult one because the producers found a young girl played by Amélie Eve to play the abducted child in this film, and she is far and away the cutest and most adorable child I have ever seen in any movie. Her childlike cuteness makes watching this movie that much more agonizing both before the abduction happens and afterward when her father, mother and older brother and sister try to go on with their lives without her. With a child as special as this one, any parent would be constantly keeping a watchful eye, but the horror with a life reality like this is that you cannot always be aware of where your child is 100% of the time and as is depicted in this movie, the father’s temporary distraction was more than justified.

The recent great movie “Manchester By the Sea” is another movie about the overwhelming grief over the loss of a child but the difference with this film is that it tries to rationalize the grief and anger at God by using 3 religious muses who visit with the father of the young girl, Mack Phillips, played by Sam Worthington at a remote shack in the woods where the young girl’s dress was found after she was taken. The 3 muses are played well by Octavia Spencer,
Avraham Aviv Alush and Sumire Matsubara, but the problem with their presence in this film and what they say to the grieving father in the shack is that their answers to his questions about God and evil and why things are they way they are in the world, come off more like riddles out of a fortune cookie than anything that makes any real sense. Perhaps the screenwriter wanted people to come up with own conclusions to questions that really have no real answer that could ever satisfy anyone who has gone through grief and loss to this degree. For me what I took from all their comments about God and real life is, “if God is in charge of all the good things in the world, what makes any of us believe that he would have any control over all the evil in the world”.

A huge flaw in this movie was at the beginning where Mack Phillips is born into a family with an alcoholic father and there is a huge event that happens after several scenes of extreme abuse of his father towards him and his mother. This major event is then never discussed or referenced ever again for the entire remainder of this film, that also includes all of the conversations with the 3 muses as Mack tries desperately to get past his anger towards God and his grief. This is very obviously a gigantic flaw in this movie and I am at a loss that this large of a glaring omission could have been left out of this film. Despite this flaw, I thought this movie was very well done and I do recommend it.

This movie had me wondering two things. How many people has the X-Men character played by Hugh Jackman stabbed in the new movie Logan? How many did he decapitate and how many people did he stab or decapitate in all the movies he has been in while playing the Wolverine? As far as people being stabbed and killed, this movie has to be the all-time record because in this latest and last installment of the Wolverine, he comes across a young girl played by young actress Dafne Keen who stabs, kills and decapitate’s almost as many people as the Wolverine does. If I had to guess, in this movie there are probably as many as 250 actual stabbings and about 75 people actually die. Somewhere this gets rather tiresome and in the case of this film, represents major overkill, pardon the pun.

For this latest installment, the story is mostly a good one, but too much of the time the story degrades down to a chase movie where the Wolverine is trying to transport Patrick Stewart, who reprises his role as the leader of the X-men Professor Charles Xavier and the young 10-year-old girl Wolverine named Laura to some place in North Dakota known as Eden. The ratings for this movie on IMDB (8.8) and Rotten Tomatoes (94%) are extremely high, but for me given the movie did not surprise me that much and the story was pretty average my rating for this film would be more in the low 7 range.

See this movie if you are a big fan of the Marvel Comics X-Men stories or are a big fan of Wolverine, but if you are not, you should not expect to see anything more than a pretty average film.

Overall, given the good points in this movie and the acting, I do recommend Logan.

I remember the movie Twister that I saw when it first was released in May 1996 as one of the few movies that I saw twice within 2 weeks, mainly because the special effects were so spectacular. When I first saw this movie I could not believe that in the year 1996 we had the computer technology to create scenes of huge tornadoes destroying buildings and lifting cars and huge trucks up in the air. All of the budget for this movie went to the computer special effects as there was not much of a screenplay or really a story for this film, other than storm chasers trying to catch a tornado being formed so they could drop a device called “Dorothy” that could record the internal structure of a tornado. Many of the lines in this movie between Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt were extremely corny as they were either arguing or chasing the storms. “We Got Cows”, “We Got Sisters”, just to name two. The story and the bad dialogue didn’t matter for this movie because the entire purpose was the incredible special effects that lead toward the amazing climax that involved a Level 5 Tornado. Of course, many of the scenes, especially at the end were ridiculous and nobody would survive, but any kind of common sense or logic didn’t matter for this kind of a movie.

Tragically a few days ago we lost one of the stars of this movie Bill Paxton, during a heart surgery and he as only 61. Paxon had a very good run as a movie star and I am sure he would agree that the best movie of his career was Apollo 13 that came out in 1995. The academy award winning actor Phillip Seymore Hoffman also had a small part in this movie and he passed away of a drug overdose in February 2014. These two actors had many more great films in their future and they both left us far too soon.

If you have still not seen the movie Twister its a must see for some of the best special effects ever made.