sonofbeach-sheet Reviews

Born Again: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church (1987)

A Nonjudgmental Look at Independent Baptist's

[19 December 2016]

Many think the Southern Baptist church is very strict and conservative until they get a glimpse of one of these. What Jerry Falwell, Bob Jones, Jack Hyles, Lester Roloff, and the like were. They are all over the country mostly in suburbs and small towns and tend to appeal to the lower middle-class and upper working classes. Their music is little more than hymn books, Bible is King James only, and dress code is no shorts for anybody or pants for the women.

Of all the places chosen for this documentary, it was Worcester, Massachusetts! Not a place known for fundamentalism! Thick New England accents, an Italian-American pastor and various other ethnicity's, mainly Irish, Polish, and Lithuanian.

The story focuses mostly on the pastor, his wife, and teenage daughter, a large extended family persuading a brother to get saved and join the church, and a single, financially strapped father of 3 boys trying to get his ex-wife to divorce her current husband and come back to him.

Excellent documentary filmed in 1984 when the Moral Majority was starting to die out.

Interstellar (2014)

First Review in Years

[8/10 · 20 August 2015]

Okay, I don't know where to start, except first and foremost I am from the older generation that thought The Breakfast Club was a great teen movie and Matthew McCounaughey appealed to my crowd, despite his Texas drawl, so I'm picky about which movies I go to and have been for more than a decade now, since most movies have become cookie cutter. I don't know much about Christopher Nolan except the Batman series. But are a huge fan of Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg, which this movie seemed to steal a lot from.

I initially went to this movie for three reasons: (1) A coworker of mine and sci-fi buff told me about it (2) I love sci-fi. And (3) one of my favorite old actresses, Ellen Burstyn, had a role as an elderly woman of the main character's daughter. Wanted to see her in it. But her role was reduced to like next to nothing.

So me and my wife went and saw the movie. In the opening scene you see Ellen Burstyn in age makeup, even though she's looking good in her early 80's today, giving a speech about her life as a young farm girl and several other Southwestern/Midwestern prairie twanged old country people giving speeches about the hard world they lived in. Is this about The Great Depression? So you see this simple farm family going about their lives and a young girl telling her dad about a "ghost" in her bedroom and the family chasing after a drone. I didn't see the point of this, but then the main character, Cooper, goes into the principal's office for a meeting and they rule out his son to be a farmer. I'm like, what? I didn't realize this movie was set in the future, even though he's driving a 2010-ish Dodge Ram pickup. And those old folks must have been children when this was set. Okay, fine.

So Cooper leaves his family because he feels called to explore space for an inhabitable planet for mankind because Earth is dying and soon enough, space travel is revealed to be claustrophobic, lonely, unpleasant, and dangerous.

I sit through the whole movie wondering when Old Murph (Ellen Burstyn) will appear and sure enough she does at the very end. It turns out those old folks interviewed are living on space stations in the 22nd century! Cooper wakes up on a space station after an unsuccessful mission with no fanfare, even though he's been missing for over 80 years, but only gone a little more than two years his time. And Cooper reunites with Murph on her deathbed for 2 minutes after spending most of his mission trying to get back to her and she tells him to leave and carry on with his mission, because she has her family with her, which none of them care about Cooper, nor does he care about them.

I found this fascinating with the fact it's not set more than several decades in the future with American society looking downright primitive today, but space travel far advanced than what people have now.

BTW, I'm the one that wrote the plot synopsis of this movie.

Idiocracy (2006)

Best overlooked movie of 2006

[8/10 · 6 June 2007]

Many people that have seen this movie don't "get it", and rightfully so. That's exactly what is portrayed in this America of the future, a hellhole full of trailer trash, inner city types, pure sloth, bad computers that "can't be wrong", synthetic food, and reading material that consists of not much more than Maxim-type magazines.

Of course this movie poked fun at a lot of what's wrong with mainstream society today, but we really seem to be headed in that direction, considering people actually care about the lives of Paris and Britney and that they watch without wrestling even cracking a smile or shaking their head in disbelief.

Luke Wilson is perfect as the straight-arrow everyman with no ambition that is selected in an Army experiment that is forgotten waking up in the future 500 years that finally gets a challenge in his life.

Main downside to the movie is it tends to drag around between 1/3 and 3/4 of the way through.