If you talk to anyone who’s eighty years-old or older, I bet they’d have an interesting story to tell.  That person would have met some interesting people, seen and done things that few others had, witnessed great change over time and experienced every emotion under the sun, only to admit they have more questions than answers.  That’s Train Dreams in a nutshell, a tale of an unremarkable man who built railroads and bridges to support his family, only to find everything that mattered to him gone in an instant.  While his story is uniquely his, he’s also an everyman who forces us to reckon with life as we know it.

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I like to think I’m a funny guy.  That being said, I’ve never once considered going on stage on open mic night.  Not only do you need to be fearless, you have to get total strangers to laugh at your jokes while they’re busy getting drunk.  Maybe this is why the movie has a character everyone refers to as “Balls”.  You gotta have balls to be a performer, figuratively for ladies, of course.  And while the amateur stand-up comedian at the center of Is This Thing On? is both funny and ballsy, the movie isn’t the story of him becoming famous.  It’s about what drove him to write his name on the call sheet to begin with.

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In the old days, people who sought out back-alley bargains knew what they were getting.  In the era of digital commerce, however, buyers only know a seller’s user name and can’t tell whether what’s for sale is legitimate or not until a package arrives.  Conversely, sellers don’t know who they’re scamming or how their victims will react to being swindled.  Cloud takes a harsh look at the perils of ecommerce in the cloud era, where new-fangled criminality hides behind anonymity and revenge is sought through on-line doxxing forums.  It’s a canny, secretive film that progressively builds towards a shocking climax.

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“What inspired William Shakespeare to write Hamlet?” is the sort of question that propels historical fiction, a genre that reflections the modern mind’s insistence on understanding everything.  The origins of a consequential work of art simply can’t remain a mystery after so much time has passed.  With that mindset, if we take the clues (a.k.a. historical facts) and align them with the play, an answer will surely reveal itself.  Superficially, putting the puzzle pieces of history together is what Hamnet is about.  However, the movie is much more than that; it’s also a thoughtful discussion about art, life and how both affect us in distinctly different ways.  As such, Hamnet is part literary detective work, part metaphysical curiosity, and the results are  spellbinding.

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F1: The Movie would have been an entertaining movie regardless of who was cast in the leading role.  It’s infinitely better with Brad Pitt in the driver’s seat, though.  As one of the few remaining actors who is also a star, Pitt gives the movie its electricity.  It also helps that he’s comfortable with putting his rugged good looks on display again.  If Pitt had insisted upon obscuring his good looks with glasses, a beard and long, scraggly hair, few would want to see that movie.  (If you got my reference to Pitt’s supporting turn in The Big Short, congratulations!)

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