Official Secrets: A Whistleblower's Tale

Official Secrets may not be the best film of 2019. But it may be the most important.

At a time when corruption, greed, self-interest, deceit, obfuscation and vulgarity seem to be the rule, we need to remember that honest, decent, moral, ethic people are still among us.

Katharine Gun is one of these individuals. In 2003, she was a British intelligence specialist who received an official memo from the US directing Britain to join in an illegal plot to enlist UN countries to vote for the war in Iraq.

Outraged at the deception and aware of the lives that would be lost, Gun blows the whistle on this scheme. As we know, it didn't stop the war. But it did get Gun arrested for breaking the Official Secrets Act.

The movie is part political thriller, part newspaper story, part courtroom drama. It doesn't use sensationalist or gimmicky measures to intrigue the audience, still the Movie Slut was riveted throughout.

Kudos to Keira Knightley for portraying Gun as the larger-than-life woman she is.

Ad Astra: To the stars

Hamlet isn't the only one with daddy issues. Meet Major Roy Mcbride (Brad Pitt). Like his father, he's a highly respected astronaut. When we meet him, he's about to embark on the mission of his life.

It seems dad disappeared on Neptune (of all places) years ago. Now Major Roy has been enlisted to convince dad (Tommy Lee Jones) to come down to Earth. But wait!! Is Roy actually being used to draw his father out for more nefarious reasons?

Roy's space odyssey is only one half of this story. The other, more Hamletesque part, is his internal struggle. The ferocious battle between love and hate of a parent who abandoned him.

Pitt does a powerful job of almost making this film seem profound. Alas, it's a feat far, far beyond human grasp. As impossible, at least for now, as his voyage to Neptune.

If there's an Oscar category for best performance in a crap movie, Pitt's a shoe-in.

The Goldfinch: Soars on screen

Ansel Elgort as grown up Theo

Last night, the Movie Slut finally reached page 771 of The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Today, she saw the movie based on the book. It's only the second time in her movie-obsessed life that MS has liked a movie more than a book.

Clearly she was not on the Pulitzer committee.

It is almost a surprise that a neat plot and salient messages were buried under page after page of boozing and drugging, needless repetitions, and a throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach. The movie seemed to peel away layers of cold-weather padding to reveal a chic little dress.

For those who refused to invest days of their lives to reading the tome, it tells the story of  13-year-old Theo Decker, who loses his mother in a terrorist bombing and how the tragedy informs the rest of his life. It's also the story of a 17th-century work of art that survived a fire that took the life of the painter and is now saved from another disaster four centuries later.

BTW, the other movie the MS liked more than the book is the 2009 film Up In The Air .

Where Did You Go, Bernadette: Not far enough

The Movie Slut has nothing against message movies. What she hates is a movie that hits her over the head with its message. Again. And Again. And again.

The message here is that creative folks who are deprived of creating are pretty obnoxious people.

And who better to play the part of such a deprived individual than Kate Blanchette overacting and overchanneling Katherine Hepburn.

This movie tries and fails to be funny. When her husband considers a bit of R & R at a psychiatric institute, she refers to it as the "loony bin." And we thought that term went out with the rotary phone.

Bernadette was an award-winning architect who became a stay-at-home mom—bored, unfulfilled, unchallenged. Instead of the inane antics we see on screen, Bernadette, who we're to believe is so intelligent, could have read "The Feminine Mystique" and learned she has "the problem with no name," which was given a name in 1963 when Betty Friedan wrote the book.

Blinding by the Light: Awed by the music

Summer 2019 may not be the summer of peace & love. But at the multiplex, it is the summer of music. "Blinded...," now in theaters, which is based on a true story of a Pakistani teen living in England who becomes a Bruce Springsteen uber-fan, is just the latest.

It follows Rocketman (Elton John) reviewed below; Yesterday, a fantasy involving the Beatles and lost memories; Echo in the Canyon, a doc about mid-60s rockers (The Byrds, The Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield) who lived in Laurel Canyon, California; Rolling Thunder Review, Martin Scorsese's doc of a 1975 Bob Dylan tour: and David Crosby: Remember my name.

The Movie Slut loved them all. But back to "Blinded..." This exuberant flick has the good sense to depart from reality in the service of creativity. It includes musical song & dance numbers right out of an old-time Hollywood movie. Best of all, it shows how and why the Boss and his music, which could be called quintessentially American, appealed to this Pakistani kid living in Luton, England.

Luce: Did he or didn't he?

The first time we see Luce (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) he's a high school senior, handsome, smart, popular. He's delivering a speech with his Mom (Naomi Watts) and Dad (Tim Roth) beaming in the audience.

We soon learn that he was adopted at the age of seven. In his earlier years, he was a conscripted child soldier in Africa. The central question in this controversial and thought provoking film is simply this:  Can such a child be rehabilitated?

The movie zigs and zags between the answers to that question.

Enter Luce's high school teacher (Octavia Spencer.) She assigns an essay which Luce completes in a disturbing fashion. Now she's convinced he's not the teenager he appears to be. But, hey, she's got some heavy baggage of her own. Should we believe her?

Luce is a movie that delves into the thorny issue of race in America. Talk about thought provoking. At the same time it must be remembered that Luce is hardly a typical teenager, black or white.

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood

With Once upon a time Quentin Tarantino brings a fairy tale to the multiplex. He sets it in 1969, sprinkles it with with real people and real news stories, and saturates it with upbeat, bouncy '60s music.

The story involves two buddies (Brad Pitt & Leonardo DeCaprio) who fulfill their roles on and off the screen. A diva of an actor and his stunt double, who doubles as his cleanup guy and heavy lifter in real life.

Like many fairy tails, this one  has some grim, dark moments and some characters who mess
with our heroes.( Boo.) But Tarantino does not give us a Grimm's fair tale ending. Thank you very much, Quentin. 
 
The Movie Slut loved the ending. Sure it was alternative history. So were the endings in Inglorious Basterds when he killed off all the Nazis and in Django Unchained when he massacred the slave owners. The difference here is that he showed some restraint and maturity. While there are violent scenes in Once..., it's not an over-the-top gore-fest.