Apple TV Movie Review: Wolfs


The most interesting thing about the new Apple TV movie “Wolfs” starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt is how two of the top actors in the movie industry chose a screenplay this run-of-the-mill, mundane, and boring to collaborate and star in. Are there so few great screenplays in Hollywood to choose from or was this production part of a favor bank that both Cooney and Pitt were obligated to join?

The story is extremely simple. Two “cleaners” Brad Pitt, known as Margaret’s Man in the credits, and George Clooney, known as Pam’s Man are called by a frantic woman who thinks that a young man in her apartment may have killed himself by accidentally jumping off her bed and crashing into a table.

This young man played by Austin Abrams appears in this movie almost the entire time, wearing nothing but socks and underpants. He runs from Pitt and Clooney, several criminals throughout a city, many times in the rain, wearing only socks and underpants. I cannot remember ever seeing something this strange and unusual in a comedy/action movie before. Why not have this poor actor wear some jeans – or shoes? Running through a city in socks had to be a major challenge, to say the least. What was the idea here? Just to do something different? This time to show an “underpants running man”?

Was all of this supposed to be funny? Unfortunately, most of the attempted “underpants running” humor in this movie did not work as well as the competitive banter between Clooney and Pitt that for the most part was boring at best.

What follows is the discovery of drugs and a scheduled drop-off that leads to some gunplay and an ending that seems to just degrade into a very run of the mill, seen this many times before ending.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for Wolfs is an equally anemic 68% – a number I agree with, and I do not recommend this movie.

Movie Review: The Boys in the Boat


The new movie “The Boys in the Boat” is one of those all-time true sports stories that is based on a book, The Boys in the Boat, written by Daniel James Brown. Then a production company bought the rights to this story, producing this movie, directed by George Clooney. I think the main reason for the low Rotten Tomatoes score of only 58% is because of too many scenes of a rowing team competing and practicing, which is not visually interesting enough to create a memorable sports story. 

This is a story of a college rowing team from The University of Washington, that won the gold medal in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. This is the highly significant Olympics where the world’s fastest man Jessie Owens won the gold medal while Hitler looked on, hoping that Germany’s athletes would support his claim of the master race. This is a miracle sports story that involved 8 members of a rowing team who were extremely unlikely winners of any trip to the summer Olympics of 1936. All of the rowers were practically homeless victims of the Great Depression, several living in metal boxes within mud fields.

Due to a lack of clout, The University of Washington had to come up with five thousand dollars to finance the trip to Berlin, otherwise forfeiting their place to the University of Pennsylvania. I thought this was one of the most significant parts of this story, given that the team went on to win the Gold Medal.

The secondary story involving one of the rowers, Joe Rantz falling in love with another college student Joyce Simdars, was very done, but nothing we have all not seen before.

The main known actor in this film is Joel Edgerton who plays Al Ulbrickson, the coach of the rowing team. There are several typical well-done scenes of conflict and coaching in this story, but once again, making a memorable sports story about a rowing team is not an easy task, even considering the historical significance of winning a gold medal in Berlin Germany in front of Adolf Hitler, right before the start World War II.

I do not agree with the low 58% ratings for this film, with my rating a solid 75% and a recommendation, due to the acting and the historical significance of this story.

Movie Review: Ticket to Paradise


With all the scripts that are written within any given year and with so many hard-working producers looking for the best screenplays, especially when it comes to coming up with a great movie idea that would pair George Clooney and Julia Roberts – it’s very hard to believe that “Ticket to Paradise” was the one chosen.

Fundamentally this entire idea about a young woman Lily, played by Kaitlyn Dever “traveling in Bali and is about to marry a young man who lives there”, is not strong enough to support a two-hour movie. Lily’s parents Georgia and David are divorced for many years and then plot (using subtle ideas) to try and sabotage her wedding. The reason for this is – they were married far too young and they want to stop their only child from making the same mistake.

These are a very boring 1 hour and 44 minutes of tedium, dead and dry dialogue, culminating in disbelief that a movie this lame was ever made. It was hard enough to stay awake during this film and even harder to understand why Roberts and Clooney were able to stay awake when they read this script.

The only real bright spot is the continuing emergence of actress Kaitlyn Dever, a rapidly rising new star, starting with her appearance for years on the “Last Man Standing” sitcom and most recently her outstanding performance in the Hulu series “Dopesick”, about the opioid crisis in this country – a great series reviewed within this website.

Unfortunately, this movie is so slow and boring it is impossible to recommend and I do agree with the Rotten Tomatoes critics who are giving this movie a mostly correct 56% rating.