Month: January 2024

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The Beekeeper

The Beekeeper

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In The Beekeeper, Jason Statham plays Adam Clay, a literal beekeeper who works on the country estate of Phylicia Rashad’s Eloise.  How Rashad wound up in a Statham kick-punch vehicle I’ll never understand, but she’s a nice presence for as long as she’s around.  One day, Eloise gets a “Your computer is infected with a virus and you must call this number to clear it up” prompt on her laptop.  Like most senior citizens, she doesn’t know it’s a scam and calls the number.  The office she reaches has people wearing headsets and looks like a repurposed strip club, a telltale sign that the operation is not on the up-and-up.  The MO of this techno boiler room is to trick the person on the other end of the line to hand over their login credentials for their savings accounts.  For a movie that leaves reality behind fairly quickly, I have to acknowledge the filmmakers for using a relatable crime as the genesis for this story, and not the usual mobsters and drugs angle.

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May December

May December (Netflix)

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May December is not merely clever, it’s diabolical.  That’s the best way I can describe a movie that adopts a persona to hide its true intentions–while telling a story about characters who do the exact same thing.  On the surface, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is a professional actress who wants to learn everything she can about Gracie (Julianne Moore), the basis of her next role in an independent movie.  Like the real life case involving Mary Kay Letourneau, Gracie seduced Joe (Charlie Melton) when he was in grade school.  Elizabeth says she wants to give a true performance of Gracie and does what actors normally do to prepare for their next role.  She interviews the people involved, scouts locations and scours the media coverage of the incident.   However, it soon becomes evident that Elizabeth’s intentions aren’t as noble as she says they are.  Additionally, understanding Gracie and Joe is difficult, given how they’ve learned to shield themselves with their own performances for the past twenty years.

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The Iron Claw

The Iron Claw

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It’s easy to start believing in curses, when bad things keep happening to you.  For Kevin Von Erich (Zac Efron), the eldest brother of the family at the center of The Iron Claw, the idea of a curse goes from being laughable to credible with each mounting tragedy.  I can’t blame him for deciding that his children will not inherit the Von Erich last name, because if there really is a curse, it surely would pass over someone named Adkisson.

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The Boys in the Boat

The Boys in the Boat

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The Boys in the Boat tells the story of the eight-man junior varsity rowing crew from the University of Washington who, against all odds, made it all the way to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.  As you may recall, this was the same Olympics where Jesse Owens won four gold medals and single-handedly dealt a crushing blow to the Nazi belief in Aryan supremacy.  I wasn’t aware that the American rowing crew also took home the gold at that same event, but since the movie establishes that it’s an inspirational sports movie from the outset, I was certain that they would triumph in the end.  The only questions remaining were who these boys are and how they would get to that point.

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