Adnerb the Movie Nerd

Movie reviews from a middle school teacher's perspective

The Electrifying Life of Louis Wain

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This movie won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but it sure was mine. This is the kind of little British drama you can usually find on PBS.  It is the true story of Louis Wain. If you are like me, and never heard of him, I suggest you google his name before watching the movie.  Take a look at his very interesting, and sometimes bizarre, drawings and paintings of cats.  Before Louis Wain, people believed cats belonged outside catching mice.  Most would not have dreamed of keeping one in the house. Wain’s drawings were so popular that they helped launch cats as companions and pets.  In “The Electrifying Life of Louis Wain” Benedict Cumberbatch does an outstanding job of showing us Louis’s unorthodox mind.  His life is hard and confusing to him (he may have been autistic or suffered from schizophrenia) until he marries his sisters’ governess – played delightfully by Claire Foy.  Their romance is so sweet and Louis is blissfully happy.  But this being a true story, unfortunately, it doesn’t stay that way.  The electricity in the title refers to the Louis’s belief that electricity can pull us forward in time and help us hold on to our memories.  This idea inspired him to create cats that became more and more psychedelic over the years. But his inner demons cause his life to become sadder and his sanity more tenuous.   Olivia Colman adds her terrific voice as the narrator.  This story gave me a deep appreciation of this man I had never heard of, and his unique and powerful pictures of cats. If you’re interested, you can find this mesmerizing tale on Amazon Prime.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web

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I was very disappointed in this movie.  I read the original book trilogy by Stieg Larsson and enjoyed the Swedish movies with Noomi Rapace immensely.  I even enjoyed David Lagercrantz’s reboot of the books, although they are not as gritty and intense as the original series.  So I am very perplexed by this movie.  It took some of the most intriguing parts of the book and threw them out the window.  The aspects of the story not in the book that were added are boring and bring nothing to the story beyond the conventional.  Claire Foy is the latest actress to play Lisbeth Salander. She does a decent job, but in the end her portrayal falls flat.  In a nutshell, Lisbeth is approached by Dr. Frans Balder (Stephan Merchant in a brief and ineffectual role), who wants her to hack into the NSA and steal a missile progam he created.  Frans has an autistic son, August, who in the book doesn’t speak and whose drawings contain a clue to a killer.  In the movie version, his son speaks and seems perfectly normal except for his almost savant facility with numbers.  Why change this interesting and compelling character and turn him into a normal kid?  Anyway, Lisbeth discovers her twisted sister, Camilla, who everyone had assumed was dead is, yes, you guessed it – alive.  It is Camilla who is out to steal the program, sell it and destroy her sister in the process.  Camilla’s character is never fully developed so you only begin to really understand why she hates her sister so much through some quick exposition.  The last chestnut is the addition of an American NSA agent, who comes to Lisbeth’s aid, and fortunately is also a sniper with access to a .50 caliber sniper rifle, supported by the incredible computer wizardry of Salander’s hacker friend from the series, Plague. Anyway, instead of watching this one, I would watch the American “Girl with the Dragon Tatoo” starring Rooney Mara or better still, the original Swedish version that starred Noomi Rapace.  Skip this one, you will be glad you did!

First Man

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‘First Man’ is a well made film that explores the mostly forgotten aspects of the story of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon.  It is a pretty accurate portrayal of not only the steps NASA’s space program went through to reach that goal, but also the emotional toil the space program took on Armstrong and his family.  We are given an in-depth look at how the astronauts trained and what it was like to be in an early space capsule.  I learned a lot about Neil Armstrong (as portrayed by Ryan Gosling) that I didn’t know.  He comes across generally as an emotionally stunted stoic, barely talking to his wife and sons, terse and distant with his peers;  and yet the movie touchingly depicts his soft vulnerable side too.  To Armstrong, going to the moon was not a big ego trip to become a celebrity; it was his job.   I understand that some people are up in arms because the movie doesn’t show Armstrong actually planting the American flag on the moon; and have implied that this movie is insufficiently American-centric, or even anti-American.  Those are definitely people who have not seen the film and perhaps should actually see it before commenting (the flag is shown on the moon in background, and there is scarcely any way the events can be portrayed as done by anyone but Americans).  I do not want to spoil the film, but there is another focus of this movie that comes out, something else that happened up there.  This isn’t a movie for everyone though.  It is not as exciting or fast paced as say “Apollo 13” or even “The Right Stuff.”  I was also disappointed in the way Claire Foy, playing Armstrong’s wife Janet, was underused.  I do understand this wasn’t her story,  I just wished she had been given more screen time.  All in all I think anyone interested in the early days of the space program will want to see this movie.