The movie “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” is without a doubt the most unusual war related movie I have ever seen. Within the first 30 minutes it became pretty obvious that the entire purpose of this film and the reason why it was made was to prove that treating war hero’s like Football stars or like any other celebrity makes absolutely no sense, most especially when they are first returning home from some battle scarring incident and they are still recovering from the mental and physical damage. The question I asked myself within the first 30 minutes of this movie was, “is the obvious point this story is trying to make enough to justify and sustain a two-hour movie?” My conclusion for the most part when the film completed was, that no it was not. Much to my surprise I found a great deal of this film rather boring because most of the story involves a group of soldiers and the main character Billy Lynn, played by newcomer Joe Alwyn getting ready for and attending a halftime ceremony for them during a football game. Another backstory involving a film producer, played by Steve Martin had to do with putting these soldiers in some kind of a movie portraying what they went through in IRAQ and for the most part I thought that this part of the story was unnecessary and could have been something that was added on to make the movie last a full two hours. The director Ang Lee directed this film and from the trailers I have seen and Lee’s involvement, I was expecting a classic war movie, but instead I was overall pretty disappointed.

The acting was good in this film, including Kristen Stewart who played Lynn’s sister and Vin Diesel who plays an army Sargent and squad leader in IRAQ were both very good in their roles, but unfortunately not enough to save this film. The comedy actor Chris Tucker also makes an appearance in this movie as a Hollywood agent trying to negotiate a movie deal for the soldiers. I thought that he seemed to be somewhat miscast in his role and the entire movie idea did not really work, given the subject matter. There are many flashbacks in this movie showing the main battle the soldiers and Billy Lynn were involved in and the movie did a good job showing some of the psychological damage war can do to anyone, including even the insane desire to return to battle after miraculously surviving certain death.

I give this film a very marginal recommendation, mainly because it was way too boring for too high a percentage of time and the point of the story was not compelling enough to warrant a two-hour movie.

While watching the beginning of this excellent science fiction movie about the arrival of aliens entitled “Arrival”, I remember thinking after seeing the tragedy the main character in this movie Dr. Louise Banks goes through in the very beginning of this story, “How can anyone get through something like that and go on with their life afterward?” Then I thought that one way would be to be called to help the United States Military to communicate with Aliens that just arrived in the form of 12 egg-like pods around the world. At least the importance and the enormity of a task like this would be something that would at least distract her from her recent tragedy, so that just maybe she would be temporarily able to move on with her life. As it turns out this tragedy at the beginning of this film, is a thread that connects all the elements of this entire story and results in a surprise ending that might be considered as surprising and impressive as “The Sixth Sense”, that was released in 1999.

The part of Dr. Banks is played very well by Amy Adams is a world famous professor and linguist and should a miracle on the scale of aliens visiting us from some other world, millions or billions of light years away ever happen, who better to be called than an expert on Language and Communication and Mathematics. The Mathematics professor role is also played by very well Jeremy Renner. Over the years many movies about aliens visiting us from other planets have been made but this is the first one I can remember that had everything to do with the cerebral aspects of such an event, rather than the same old special effects and war confrontations almost every other movie like this has been made before. For the first time in my experience with movies like this, the science aspects of how the world would handle this kind of an amazing event was addressed. During an an alien visit like this one, we would have great difficulty communicating with the aliens, they would not look like us at all (in this case they looked like Octopus-like creatures), everything about the way they think would be different including how they would interact with all the laws of physics including most importantly, the aspect of time. In this movie it was suggested that these aliens do not think of time in a linear way, instead, their concept of time can exist at any point in time. Any alien method of writing and communicating would be vastly different that ours; in this case, the aliens write using smoke-like circular symbols that Dr. Banks works on translating during a majority of this film. I thought all of the science and mathematics behind trying to understand these very complex smoke circles was extremely well done in this movie and even believable, when the communication codes behind them were finally understood towards the end of the story.

As would happen in real life, the Unites States military is involved with the alien arrival and the head of the operation Colonel Weber is played very well by Forest Whitaker. During the movie, there are several conflicts between the scientists and the military as well as the decisions of other countries in dealing with the other alien spaceships that have landed in 11 other locations around the world. When the word “weapon” comes up during the conversations with the alien creatures, several countries starting with China overreact and this causes some major conflicts as the movie concludes. The conclusion of this movie is both surprising and outstanding and ties everything together perfectly and for me reminded me of the ending of the Sixth Sense.

The movie Arrival is a great production and gets my highest recommendation.

The story of American Pastoral is based on a Philip Roth novel that takes place right after World War 2 ended and stretches over some of the most difficult years in this country’s history, through the Korean War and then Vietnam and the 60s, followed by Watergate and Nixon and into the early 1990’s where the movie starts at the end, with a 45 year high school reunion. This movie does a great job reminding you about the extremely turbulent time in this country in the 1960’s where we were involved in a war that we had no business being involved in. While sitting through this 2-hour movie, I was reminded of all the protesting, the hippie culture, Jane Fonda and all of the horrible images of young men being flown back to the United States in body bags. Protesting a horrible war like this was definitely understandable, given the insane injustice of this country constantly acting as the police force for the entire world despite the huge cost of so many young lives.

The story of this movie is mostly about the Vietnam War and how deeply it affected the young people of the 1960’s, even to the point of blowing up buildings to protest the war and in some cases, not even caring what terrorist acts like this can do to innocent people, including their own families. The last movie I can remember that even remotely touched on this subject was the outstanding film “Running on Empty” that came out in 1988 and was one of the last movies for the actor River Phoenix. I remember that movie having one great and extremely well acted scene where the actress Christine Lahti meeting her father in a restaurant for the first time in 20 years because she had been living underground after bombing a weapons facility that forced her to go underground with her husband and 2 children to avoid prosecution. The movie American Pastoral has a scene like this too but follows a similar and far more depressing story line.

In American Pastoral, Jennifer Connely andEwan McGregor play Dawn and Swede Levov, the parents of a very impressionable young child played at first by Ocean James and then in later years by Dakota Fanning. At first, their lives are idyllic with Swede a former high school football star who takes over his father’s glove factory in of all places, Newark New Jersey. The family lives on a farm in a small fictional town called Old Rimrock New Jersey (I checked this town does not exist). Apart from this family’s seemingly perfect life is the very severe stuttering problem of their daughter. At numerous points in this movie watching this young girl trying to say difficult words like “beautiful” or other words that start with hard consonants and similar alternative replacement words do not exist are extremely painful to watch even if you never had this problem yourself.

What this film does so extremely well, is to show very clearly that a severe stuttering problem for any young person, especially a girl is anything but trivial and can cause long term problems in life. The family’s ineffective and stupid therapist even suggests that the young girls stuttering is caused more from her competing with her beauty queen mother for her father’s attention, more than any other reason. There are several subtle suggestions that this young girl’s very bad choices in life due to her rage over the Vietnam War could have been caused by her constant frustration and humiliation when she even tried to speak during her entire childhood. What this film does the best is demonstrate that very bad decisions you make in life due to anger or other reasons can destroy not only your life but also the lives of people who care about you. Many of the scenes that address this issue are very depressing and difficult to watch, especially towards the end of the film and because of this, the story does not follow the typical Hollywood ending. This movie also marks the directing debut of Ewan McGregor.

I thought that American Pastoral is an extremely well acted movie and I do give it a high recommendation.