Released in 1989 and probably Patrick Swayze’s biggest hit in terms of box office and long term popularity, this movie is now considered to be a cult classic and has been shown on Cable TV stations probably more than any other movie in the last 30 years. There is nothing really special about the story because it’s a formula we have all seen many times before. A mentally sick egomaniac rich businessman, played by Ben Gazzara thinks he can own people in an entire town with all of his money and forces them to pay him for protection from the criminals he hires to threaten them. The character of Dalton, who is a bouncer in nightclubs is played by Patrick Swayze, comes into town to rescue yet another nightclub that is being slowly destroyed by nightly violence and vandalism. Some of the famous lines from this movie are, “Be Nice” as Dalton explains the best way to handle some thug in the nightclub. The logic of this makes sense. If a nightclub has to constantly replace damaged and destroyed equipment due to bar fights, then the owner of the nightclub is going to go out of business pretty quickly. The concept of taking the fight outside sure makes a lot of sense but unfortunately, way too many fights still take place inside the nightclub despite the famous “be nice” and “take it outside” mantras Dalton gives during his lecture of how to be a good bouncer. The other way overused line in this film is, “I thought you would be bigger”, which over the many years since this movie was released is now a highly recognized movie line.

One formula that always works in movies like this is the presence of someone who embodies pure evil, from his looks and the things he does in the movie. The part of Jimmy, who is Brad Wesley’s top goon is played by Marshall Teague and does a great job at being a criminal major lowlife throughout this story. The other part of the formula involves a love story between Dalton and a doctor he meets in an emergency room after one his bar fights, played by Kelly Lynch. This relationship would make no sense in real life because why would a doctor be attracted to a bouncer who wanders the country breaking up bar fights? The fight scene between Dalton and Jimmy towards the end of this movie is one of the best I ever seen. You just had to admire the weeks it probably took to choreograph this complex fight that ends with Dalton pulling Jimmy’s throat out with his fingers, which of course is ridiculous and probably not even possible to do.

Another huge flaw in this story is how quickly Dalton’s doctor girlfriend so quickly forgives Dalton from witnessing this murder and doesn’t even call the police after Jimmy is killed. A good deal of this story is ridiculous and is nothing more than a series of scenes that are excuses for another bar fight or action scene but the point here is the movie formula and nothing that would actually happen in the real world or make sense. Sam Elliot  plays Wade Garret, Dalton’s best friend and is a bouncer from another club who visits Dalton at the midpoint of this movie and his presence is the final part of the movie formula. Their friendship leads to more bar fights and more insight into Dalton’s past, that includes a story of another fight he had where he pulled a man’s throat out of his neck. The ending of this movie is completely absurd and leads to more fights and murder which once again is never reported to the police. Like all Hollywood movies, the ending scene shows that Dalton and his girlfriend are in love and back together again, despite the fact that he just committed multiple murders.

The major part of this film that stands out for me more than any other is the fact that Patrick Swayze chain smoked throughout the entire film and wound up at only age 57 dying of Pancreatic Cancer. The contrast between his chain smoking and the fact that he was in such fantastic shape during this film, shows once again why smoking should never be allowed in movies. Ben Gazzara also died of Pancreatic cancer in 2012 at age 81. The blind singer in this movie who had some of the corniest lines in this movie including, “Gentleman, Wade Garrett”, died of lung cancer at only age 41, which is yet another example of the dangers of smoking.

Road House is a stupid but entertaining movie and if you can forget you have a brain for about 2 hours it can be very entertaining. Overall, despite some reservations and a stupid ending, I do recommend it.

Most jobs people have are not the kind of jobs where if you screw up or are incompetent or just have a bad day that someone will die. What happens in cases like this is that the one bad day is forgotten or the mistake you made is bad enough to get you fired. If you’re a manager over other people, the mistake you make can not only screw up your job but the jobs of several others you are supervising. If you’re the CEO of a company like Enron, all the companies involved in the financial crisis and most recently Wells Fargo, your mistakes can bring down the whole company, or cause huge fines and your options are to resign yourself, wait to be fired and of course as all CEO’s in situations like these, deny you knew that anything illegal or stupid was going on to cause the crisis. Even in extreme cases like this, with huge responsibility and ramifications, nobody really dies. This is not true if you’re a doctor and in certain situations a nurse where if you make a mistake someone can die; for jobs like these there is no room for error. When human lives are on the line there has to be a higher standard, a higher level of responsibility, of safety and redundancy because if a mistake is made then people can die, and sometimes many of them.

On April 20, 2010, the worst oil spill in the history of the Petroleum Industry happened in the Gulf of Mexico on the Deep Water Horizon oil rig. We find out at the start of this movie, which stars Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell and Kate Hudson, that the crew on board the Deep Water Horizon was the crew responsible for the exploration for oil and not the actual extraction of oil, a task that would be taken care of by the crew that followed them.

As the movie starts, a crew from another oil company is dismissed by BP (British Petroleum) executives before they had a chance to check the cement surrounding the underlying pipe of the oil rig and the reason for this was to save money, approximately $125,000. Considering the enormous market capitalization of British Petroleum, 186 Billion in 2010, and the 126 lives at stake, this was the first major mistake the company made to save on the bottom line. We later find out that the oil rig had numerous problems with parts and equipment and once again because of the bottom line, very little of these problems were ever fixed, making the oil rig even more dangerous to the 126 people who were working on it. Most alarming were the two water and oil pressure tests that were ran right before the explosion due to the concerns of the two engineers played by Russell and Wahlberg. Despite the findings that one of the major pipes from the ocean floor, 5000 feet below to the rig was having major pressure problems, the rig was still declared usable to by the BP Executive on board the rig, played very well by John Malcovich. The BP executive looked for a reason to not believe the test by running a new test on a kill line. This one horrible decision is the main reason why 11 people were killed and billions of dollars of damage to the ecology and economy of the area then happened. Once again, as has happened so many times with companies forgetting that the lives and safety of their workers should be their number one concern, people died.

As far as the movie, there is not much of an involved story here, just some up front stories of the personal lives of some of the men who were lucky to survive this oil spill and the main part of this includes Kate Hudson who plays Wahlberg’s wife. What follows just demonstrated the incompetence and bad decisions of some of the executives responsible for this very preventable accident.

When you see the amazing technology and complexity of oil rigs like the Deep Water Horizon in this film, anyone would have to believe that there could be 1000 things that can go wrong. Considering this accident in 2010, the world is very lucky that there have not been many more accidents like this one or even worse over the many years since ocean oil exploration began. The statistics of the losses caused by this oil rig tragedy in 2010 are staggering. The spill took 87 days to stop. 11 people on board the rig when it exploded died and were never found. This was the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, an estimated 8% to 31% larger in volume than the previously largest, the Ixtoc I oil spill. According to the satellite images, the spill directly impacted 68,000 square miles of ocean; which is comparable to the size of Oklahoma. By early June 2010, oil had washed up on 125 miles of Louisiana’s coast and along the Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama coastlines. Oil sludge appeared in the Intracoastal Waterway and on Pensacola Beach and the Gulf Islands National Seashore. In October, weathered oil reached Texas. As of July 2011, about 491 miles of coastline in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida were contaminated by oil and a total of 1,074 miles had been oiled since the spill began. The cleanup cost BP 14 billion dollars. Some estimates are that the penalties and fines BP had to pay are as high as 90 billion dollars and another 6.2 billion from lawsuits. Considering all of this, it is hard to believe that BP still even exists.

Overall, I thought this movie was very well made with outstanding special effects and I do recommend it.

It is very hard to believe that this great movie, “The Pursuit of Happyness”, arguably Will Smith’s best performance came out almost 10 years ago.  The best part about this film is the unbelievable story and the fact that all that happens in this movie is true.  Chris Gardner, who is played by Will Smith, was a man in his 30’s who was always just about go to under financially. He was married, with one young son and his latest and riskiest current method of making a living was buying and then selling portable x-ray machines.  There are several scenes in the beginning of this movie showing a large number of these x-ray machines in Gardner’s apartment which meant that now that he had invested in so many of them, he now had to sell all of them to make a profit.  The contrast between the extremely intelligent man we grow to know Gardner is, compared to the man he was at the beginning of the movie who is trying to sell portable x-ray machines is one of the most amazing parts of this story.

The terrifying message behind this film is that homelessness can come to any of us and all it might take are just a few bad decisions or stupid mistakes which very often are born out of desperation. I know this first hand because some years ago when I was 19 years old, I was homeless on a bus myself. The beginning of this great film shows Gardner trying and mostly failing at his attempts to sell portable x-ray machines to different doctors and hospitals in the area.  As Gardner’s desperation grows, his marriage goes from bad to worst and eventually his wife, played by Thandi Newton leaves him to raise their son, played by Will Smith’s own son Jaden Smith alone. What follows are horrible scenes of standing in the lines of homeless shelters and sleeping overnight in very depressing locations including the men’s room of a subway with his young son.  What is worse and more depressing about all this is that Gardners 7-year-old son is along for this horrible ride through the horrors of homelessness.  His cries of desperation and constant questions to his father as to what is going on is heartbreaking and at times impossible to watch.

The other part of this movie is the most triumphant part and what turns this from a story of tragic disaster into a story of survival . Through an intern program with a major financial institution, Gardner sees an opportunity to save his life and the life of his son. But when he enrolls he has no idea that the intern program, which hires only a small percentage of the interns in the program as full-time employees, pays no money.  This only leads to more homelessness and desperation for Gardner and his son and Gardner’s pursuit of this last-ditch effort to save his life and survive is one of the most inspiring I have ever seen in any movie.

The end of this movie, which I will not spoil, has one of the most emotional endings I have ever seen in any movie and because of this last scene, Will Smith should have won his first Academy Award, although he was nominated.

If you have never seen the Pursuit of Happyness you owe it to yourself to see it because it is a one of a kind great movie. The movie spells Happiness “Happyness” for reasons that are not really explained in the movie, but I can only figure that they wanted the word Happy fully spelled out somewhere in the title. Another message from this movie would be that to be happy, like everything else in life, there is a price to pay.