Adnerb the Movie Nerd

Movie reviews from a middle school teacher's perspective

Kidnap

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Let’s start with the good news. I love going to the movies.  My husband and I  go just about every week, which means we see around 50 movies a year, just  about all of them at our local Cinemark Theater.  I would like to give Cinemark Egyptian Theater a shout out.  This week they donated some promotional ‘Dunkirk’ filmstrips to my school. Hats off to Cinemark and their general manager Derick Glover!  Now for the bad news. ‘Kidnap’ is a very sub par movie.  Halle Berry deserves much more.  The basic idea is that her son is kidnapped from a park when she takes her eyes off of him for a minute to take a phone call.   Knowing she has no time to call the police, she jumps in her own car and the chase is on!  Oh that there was more than just a chase! I hate movies that have their main characters do incredibly stupid things to move the plot.  She carelessly loses her phone, runs out of gas, sets down a gun to check out a noise so that one of the kidnappers can pick it up.  She has the presence of mind to pick up a butcher knife, and then puts it down to rescue her son while the kidnapper/murderer is lurking. To top it off, after miles and miles of speeding cars, weaving traffic, horrific crashes and a stop at a sheriff’s office; only one motorcycle cop manages to appear, and of course promptly tries to stop her as she’s screaming her kid’s been kidnapped, just before the bad guy crunches him.  But, once things are safely resolved (and I don’t think I’m giving you a spoiler there), cops galore show up, helicopters included!  And in less time than it takes them to escort her and her son away, the news is already telling us about the state wide kidnapping ring this has exposed!  I call..well, you know what!  ‘Kidnap’ is only 82 minutes long and I still kept looking at my watch!!  Definitely skip this one and wait for Halle Berry to be featured in a movie that deserves the acting chops she was not allowed to use in this one!

The Circle

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As a teacher, I worry about my students’ total immersion in social media.  Is instant access a good idea or is it potentially harmful to society?  “The Circle” attempts to get us to think about these questions.  Emma Watson, sans her English accent, plays Mae Holland, who lands a dream job at The Circle, the world’s most powerful social media company (Think Google+ Facebook+ Twitter).  The “bad guy” is the company’s founder played by the always likable Tom Hanks, who  proposes 24/7 world wide surveillance on everyone, everywhere, by the use of tiny little cameras that blend in with their surroundings.  Emma agrees to become the first person in the world to use these cameras as a way to ‘total transparency,’ to be under scrutiny at virtually all times, sort of like Jim Carrey in ‘The Truman Story,’ except the twist is she is a willing participant.  She is watched world-wide by everyone, except when she has three minute privacy breaks to use the restroom or is sleeping.  As you can imagine, there are some horrendous implications to this kind of public life with tragic results.   John Boyega was so wonderful in the new Star Wars movie, but he doesn’t have much to do in this one.  I would have loved to see more of him.  Apparently, The Circle was Bill Paxton’s last film, and he is interesting in a small role as Mae’s father.  I found the topic really interesting, but the movie itself moves slowly and really doesn’t pick up until the end. ‘The Truman Story’ was a much better movie; I would recommend re-watching that and wait until you can see this one on the small screen.