Upgrade

Last night I went to see Upgrade, a movie that I wouldn't normally see but one I enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would.  In a dystopian future where houses, cars, and even soldiers are automated, Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) and his wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo) are attacked by cyborgs.  Asha is killed and Grey is paralyzed in the attack but a reclusive CEO of a tech company (Harrison Gilbertson) offers to implant a computer chip in Grey's spine to give him back the use of his limbs.  This computer chip, called STEM, is sentient and has the ability to talk to Grey and take over his body when the need arises (this provides many comedic moments).  Grey uses his enhanced abilities to track down his wife's killers and unravels a conspiracy with a wild twist at the end.  The characterization is completely over the top and the acting is laughably bad but I really enjoyed this movie.  The premise is really interesting and, if you think about it, it gives a subtle message about the role of technology in our lives and how we become slaves to it rather than vice versa.  But, honestly, don't think about it too much!  What makes this movie so much fun is the action.  There are some great fight sequences and a fantastic car chase.  This movie has a kind of Blade Runner and Terminator vibe to it that I really dug.  My fifteen year old self would have loved sneaking into the basement to watch this movie on HBO at 2:00 am (I watched Blade Runner and Terminator countless times on HBO at 2:00 am) and I think it will eventually became a cult classic just like those movies!

Beast

A friend of mine recommended Beast to me so, of course, I had to see it yesterday.  It is a fascinating and intense psychological thriller that I will be thinking about for a long time to come.  Moll (Jessie Buckley) is a young woman with a troubled past and a domineering mother (Geraldine James).  She begins a relationship with Pascal (Johnny Flynn), a young man deemed unsuitable by her family and a suspect in a series of unsolved murders, which causes a scandal in the close-knit community of Jersey.  During the course of their relationship she begins to wonder if he is guilty and the action takes a really interesting turn.  Both Buckley and Flynn give absolutely riveting performances and you cannot take your eyes off of them when they are onscreen together.  You really cannot tell which one is the hunter and which is the prey.  James gives a chilling performance which is somewhat baffling until some information about Moll comes to light.  What makes this film so suspenseful is that information about the characters is revealed very slowly so you are always kept guessing about both Moll and Pascal's motivations and I had all kinds of wild theories running through my mind.  The visuals in this film also contribute to the menace with a dark and foreboding forest juxtaposed with waves crashing against the shore.  I found the tension to be almost unbearable and I would highly recommend it to fans of psychological thrillers.

Colorado Rockies Road Trip

My dear friend Tony took me to my first Colorado Rockies game (he also took me to my first Denver Broncos game and I took him to his first Colorado Avalanche game) and since then I always try to catch a game whenever I am in Denver during the season but it has been a while.  I've been missing Tony lately (he died of colon cancer several years ago) so I decided that it would be fun to go on a road trip to see a few games this summer.  Over the weekend I saw two games in the homestand against the Los Angeles Dodgers and, even though the Rockies lost both games, they were really exciting.  The first game on Friday night was a lot of fun because there were so many runs (the final score was 11-8) and I got to see my favorite player, Nolan Arenado, get a home run!  The game on Saturday was also fun, until the seventh inning when the Dodgers got eight runs (the final score was 12-4)!  I really love the atmosphere at Coors Field and it was a lot of fun to be in Denver for the weekend!

Note:  Sometimes thinking about Tony makes me sad but being in Denver brought back so many happy memories of all the Broncos, Rockies, and Avalanche games and concerts we went to.  I am lucky to have had such a great friend in my life!

Adrift

I went to see Adrift during a Thursday preview and I thought it was a pretty good, if typical, survival story.  Tami Oldham (Shailene Woodley) is a free spirit who is working odd jobs in order to travel the world.  While working at a marina in Tahiti she meets and falls in love with Richard Sharp (Sam Claflin), a yacht owner sailing around the world.  He asks her to join him but first the two of them take a job sailing a luxury yacht from Tahiti to San Diego and on the way they run into Hurricane Raymond.  The movie begins when Tami wakes up in the wreckage of the yacht after the storm and can't find Richard.  When she sees him floating, severely injured, on a dinghy in the distance, she makes repairs to the yacht as best she can and sails towards him to rescue him.  The action moves back and forth between their romance on Tahiti and their intense struggle to survive with a plot twist that I didn't see coming but should have.  The cinematography is stunning and the wide shots of the tiny yacht in the middle of the ocean are incredibly effective in conveying their isolation and the camera work is very immersive, so much so that there were many times when I found myself holding my head up to keep above the water.  The storm sequences are absolutely thrilling.  Shailene Woodley is hit or miss with me but she gives a fantastic and believable physical performance here as a woman determined to survive and Claflin is always nice to look at.  I think the flashbacks in the narrative take away the tension and the sense of peril at times but I liked this movie and would recommend it.

Summer Reading: Everyone Brave is Forgiven

The first selection on my summer reading list was Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave and I was eagerly anticipating this novel (hence the reason I began with it).  Unfortunately, it fell a little flat for me (as did Little Bee, another novel by Cleave). Mary North is an eighteen year old London socialite who signs up for a job at the War Office on the day that war is declared in 1939. She wishes to be useful but she is also motivated by a need to rebel against her wealthy family. When she is assigned to be a teacher of students left behind in the evacuation, she meets and falls in love with Tom Shaw, a school administrator. She also meets Alistair Heath, Tom's roommate, and her feelings for him complicate her relationship with Tom, especially when Alistair is stationed on Malta during a brutal blockade. A romance set in war-torn London seems like it would be right up my alley but, honestly, I had a hard time engaging with the story. I would pick it up for a few minutes and then set it down again and it was a struggle just to finish it. The story felt very episodic rather than a cohesive narrative. It was mostly vignettes about Mary in London and Alistair in Malta with lots of secondary characters and secondary plots that seemed to go nowhere. The romance seemed like an afterthought rather than the focus and the reunion between Mary and Alistair (which is why I kept reading, to be honest) was disappointingly anticlimactic. While Cleave's prose is incredibly beautiful and descriptive, the dialogue between the characters is unrealistic.  They engage in witty banter rather than heartfelt communication and that made the characters rather one-dimensional and kept them at a distance. I suppose Cleave's motivation for this device was to show the British stiff upper lip in the face of adversity but it backfired with me because I didn't really care about what happened to the characters. In the end, this novel didn't really appeal to me and I wouldn't recommend it.

Note:  Have you read Everyone Brave is Forgiven?  What did you think?  I seem to be in the minority on this one.