Balcony Blues

Kudos: Nineteen year-old British actor Tom Holland takes a pretty decent Marvel movie to a higher level of fun. With the help of a spot-on Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Holland busts out a vexatious yet wholesome new version of the decidedly non-Marvel Spider Man. He’s an oasis in the take-itself seriously Marvel desert.

Complaint: Was the uneven Luc Bresson film Lucy the closest we are going to get to a Scarlet Johansson Black Widow star-turn movie (even though of course Lucy wasn’t even Black Widow except in spirit, and, partially, in her powers) Underutilization continues to plague the Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow character in this, Scarlet Johansson’s fourth Marvel project.

Kudos: Continuing to be the coolest mainstream actor going, Downey has the lines here that bring to mind his stellar performances in the first Iron Man and first Avengers films. While he’s never bad, part of the problem with Avengers: Age of Ultron was Tony seemed to be going through the motions a little too much.

Complaint: It may be true Black Widow deserves her own movie on the heels of the projected 2017 release of a new Spiderman with Holland and a projected 2018 film featuring Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), who is introduced here. Yet in its haste to bring us new characters and round up all the old ones except Hulk and Thor, this produces essentially an Avengers 3 instead of a new Captain America. Cap himself (Chris Evans) also gets shortchanged. In his own movie.

Kudos: The scene where the Stark forces and the Cap forces battle it out on the airport Tarmac is rather exciting action movie stuff, even if it did take another Spider Man-style interloper to juice things up further. Here it is the equally jovial Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) in a brief but effective appearance.

Complaint: Elizabeth Olsen will will forever be on my favorite performance list if for no other film than Martha Marcy May Marlene. It’s not Olsen’s fault that her Scarlet Witch character is mostly a befuddling mess. Either she has supernatural powers that usurp the rest of the collected crew or she doesn’t: you can’t have it both ways.

Kudos: The irrepressible William Hurt, often a master of overacting, actually contributes the proper air of bureaucratic stiffness required of his character Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross. When Hurt blurts warnings about the requisite government oversight needed to overrun The Avengers’ antics, it not only sets up the looming tension between the libertarian Cap and the guilt-ridden Stark, but his words and mannerisms also come off like what a character with a bag-of-wind name like Thaddeus would actually sound like.

Complaint: Leaving aside Hurt, the rest of the ancillary characters leave a lot to be desired. Baron Zemo (Daniel Bruhl) is a very vanilla villain, Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp) provides Cap with his first on-screen smooch and little else; and, as much as I admire them both, Marisa Tomei (as Spider Man’s mom) and John Slattery (as Stark’s dad) also add only slightly more than their prestigious names to the proceedings.

Kudos: What better bad guy to hold our attention than a charismatic, actually non-villain superhero fighting against another superhero like himself?

Complaint: Memo to The Marvel Movie Gods: Captain America: Civil War mostly gets it right, but now that you’ve beaten this horse to death, can you skip the superhero-vs.-superhero next time and give us real, honest-to-God villains again?

Pretty Good Marvel Effort Advances The Superhero-Versus-Superhero Theme That’s Been Going Around Lately (Like Zika)….4 stars (out of 5)

Is there any doubt Ernest Hemingway would have deplored the gross sentimentality displayed in Papa: Hemingway in Cuba? Short of being merely misguided, this sloppily mounted biopic of the gifted writer in 1959 Havana commits the even greater sin of not seeming to care about its subject. The first film shot in Cuba since that same year of 1959 was hampered during production by having to cut corners in its budget to satisfy falling under a trade embargo cutoff. Yet its occasional out-of-focus shots are the least of its worries: its screenplay seems to have wandered onto the set straight from a nonchalant high school writing workshop.

Written by Denne Bart Petitclerc, a confidant and friend of Hemingway (Adrian Sparks) who died in 2006, Petitclerc is changed in the film to a character named Ed Myers (Giovanni Ribisi). Director Bob Yari, a veteran producer with minimal directing experience, presumably chose to have much of Petitclerc’s script rewritten over the long decade since his death. Why else would Myers blurt out in the newsroom, “Give me some background on this Castro fellow” nearly halfway through the film after several trips to Cuba? Would Petitclerc on his own actually have undermined not only the stature of Hemingway but that of himself as well?

The film also regretfully reveals some of the fan boy text of the letter Myers initially writes to Hemingway. The prose isn’t pretty. Neither is the device that has Myers’ fellow journalist girlfriend actually mail to Hemingway one of the letters Myers keeps tossing in the wastebasket. In fact, the entire subplot of Myers and his girlfriend (Minka Kelly) who stays behind while he flys off to adventures with Papa is not only stale formula but also a needless diversion in a film full of them, including interminable nude swimming scenes and shots of typewriters.

Part capable travelogue (Hemingway’s Havana residence, Finca Vigia, now a museum, is prominently displayed), part exaggerated thriller (Hemingway and Myers manage to dump off Hemingway’s boat a load of weapons meant for Castro’s rebels just seconds before federal agents mount the vessel looking for them), and part Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? parody (Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary do a great deal of verbal sparing here–little of it convincing), Papa: Hemingway in Cuba painstakingly begs for our attention. Yet Hemingway here might as well be James Patterson for all the insight on his character the film exudes.

Painted as a gruff and heartless drunk who repeatedly bullies Mary only to subsequently casually apologize, the complexities of the historical figure of Hemingway remain shunned here. Plagued with a hereditary manic depressive nature; many head, spinal and intestinal injuries suffered from a lifetime of accidents and boxing injuries; and chronic untreated alcoholism, Hemingway was nonetheless apparently a much gentler soul than this film depicts. As biographer Paul Hendrickson asserts in “Hemingway’s Boat,” “Underneath there was a bookish man in glasses trying to get his work done, and finding it harder with each passing year.”

A Scornful, Boilerplate Biography Sadly Neglects A Literary Icon’s Complexity…1 star (out of 5)

Forget Apocalypse Now. Toss aside Conrad’s venerated Heart of Darkness. When it comes to obtaining a vivid realization of the essence of Amazonian culture, check out Ciro Guerra’s amazing Embrace of the Serpent. The stunningly shot black-and-white Colombian Oscar nominee frames two separate interactions, 40 years apart, between a pair of white explorers and an Amazonian shaman. The shaman, Karmamakate the World Mover, is simply one of the most memorable film characters in recent years.

Both actors who portray Karmakate are riveting. In the early 1900s, an ill German scientist, Theo, approaches Karmakate (Nilbio Torrres) seeking the sacred, mysterious drug yakruna. Decades later, another white man, Evan, an American, wishes to follow in the footsteps of Theo. The last survivor of his Cohiuano tribe, Karmakate (Antonio Bolivar) is no longer the vibrant young force he was previously. but a weakened shell of his former self. In many ways, Embrace of the Serpent will trace his remarkable evolution during the second trip, tracing a growing willingness to help in his approach to Evan.

The film intertwines two seperate river voyages taken by the men. In the first Karmakate is clearly in charge. For example, he forbids the sick man to eat certain foods out of a respect for the universe. By the second journey, Karmakate is at first a broken man struggling to remember his former powers.

Throughout, Karmakate possesses a vitality to be reckoned with. On several occasions he bemoans the white man’s attachment to all his “things,” which he says make him crazy. He encourages Theo to toss his bulky cases into the river. Theo protests since they contain valuable diaries and drawings, which he declares will give his fellow scientists knowledge of Karmakate’s people and their beliefs.

Later, when visiting a tribe, Theo has his compass stolen. Upset, he frets to Karmakate that it was his concern the tribe’s natural navigation instincts would be compromised if they possessed such a device. Here the same Karmakate who decried the white man’s “things” takes a different tack. He waves off Theo to let it be. Depriving the tribespeople of the knowledge provided by a compass wouldn’t be fair, he asserts.

What gives? Is an advocate of upholding tradition to the point of claiming that dreams provide a fuller guidance for man than science, suddenly reconsidering? The film’s skillful nuances provide a deeper complexity to the tensions between the two men. When a starving Theo, still in frail health from malaria, spears a fish and ravishes it raw in defiance of Karmikate’s edict, our sympathies are with him. His logic that his efforts to spread the word regarding this nearly lost society’s insights should be important to Karmakate also seems justified.

Yet make no mistake. Embrace of the Serpent’s greatest strengths are displayed when it contrasts the innocence of the native culture with the predatory nature of the outsiders. In parallel scenes in both journeys, the travelers encounter a Christian missionary who flogs the young children under his care. In the latter, the degradation of invasive Western ideas grows even worse. Unlike the unwavering vision of Karmakate, the mutation of Christian doctrines presents itself in full force. A messiah figure who wears a crown of thorns, seems right out of Ken Russell’s The Devils. I won’t spoil where he is headed, but it’s enough of a shock to have Karmakate and Evan bolt out of his compound in the middle of the night.

There is an enormous amount of food for thought in Embrace of the Serpent. Karmikate’s mistrustfulness of the white man is nicely offset by his parallel compassion. His Cohiuano tribe is a fabrication (as is yakurna) yet the universality of this film’s vision cannot be denied.

Embrace of the Serpent takes a jolting turn when it embraces trippy scenes straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet it does not pretend to be a wild-eyed Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog’s 1982 odyssey depicting a mad Westerner’s attempts to bring an opera house to the jungles of South America. It does pose a pivotal question: are Western outsiders prisoners to a linear way of thinking in their ethnocentric dismissal of cultures like the Amazonian one depicted here? What is mankind losing
as a result? One look at Karmakate and it should be clearly apparent.

Mind-Altering Film In Pursuit of A Mind-Altering Drug….4.5 (out of 5) stars

Everybody Wants Some!! is Richard Linklater’s most deceptive film. On its surface it is light as a feather but hang out with it for its 100-minute (and far too short!) length and its 11 unique characters leave an indelible impression. Linklater, the director of numerous classics (Before Midnight, Boyhood) is also adroit at the offbeat (Bernie) and the pure entertainment, such as Dazed and Confused, his excellent look at high school in the 1970s.

Dubbed by former college baseball player Linklater as a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some!! (named after a Van Halen song) takes place at a Texas university in 1980. Its subjects, the college’s acclaimed baseball team, inhabit two houses on campus. The team’s two ringleaders couldn’t be more different from each other yet they share a swaggering confidence. Finnegan or “Finn” (a superb Glen Powell) is a rabble-rousing firebrand. McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin) suffers the role of the severe competitor, coiled as tight as a cobra.

Maneuvering through the tangle of camaraderie, is the film’s narrator, Jake (Blake Jenner), a wide-eyed and fearless freshman. When he walks into the team house for the first time, Jake encounters McReynolds, (a mustached Keith Hernandez lookalike), who promptly declares “I hate pitchers” when he finds out Jake’s position. Thus begins a whirlwind of witty posturing, raucous bickering, and even some honest-to-God hazing. This stuff only works when the dialogue is crisp and the editing sharp. Linklater, as savvy a filmmaker as there is, provides both in spades, and uses a well-chosen, varied soundtrack (everything from Rapper’s Delight to Stiff Little Fingers) so integrally edited, it seems like another major character.

When the film’s lead female character Beverly (Zoey Deutsch), (a theater major!) enters the scene, she barely alters the guys’ chemistry, except, of course, Jake’s. He’s clearly smitten yet appears to be taking a lesson from the film Swingers in waiting a while to make his move.

It’s at least somewhere around the halfway point when this hilarious coming of age comedy that rivals Barry Levinson’s Diner actually ventures onto the ball field. Here, in a brief serious turn, the film assumes an assured feel for the leadership and mental preparation crucial in the makeup of a successful baseball team. All the crazy head games surrounding the constant pursuit of sex and laughs and drinking suddenly coalesce into meaningfulness. When McReynolds goes in the batter’s biz against the off-the-wall major league pitching prospect Jay Niles (Justin Street) and subsequently lectures the 95-mph-fastball-tossing egoist on what it means to be on a team, he speaks with a deep-rooted authority directly pulled from his sense of community. This excellent scene is about as far away from the cliches of a sports movie as it gets.

Everybody Wants Some!! earns its authenticity through Linklater’s ability to produce wonderful characters doing ostensibly ordinary things. Make no mistake, this film is shot through an idyllic prism. Realism tempered by 35 years of distance can certainly skew things entirely in the opposite direction. Although this film possesses such a romanticized slant it borders on tongue in cheek, Linklater, bracing his scenes with such a wealth of
believable detail, makes it impossible to want it any other way.

Let The Good Times Roll: 1980 Style (With Baseball)…4.5 stars (out of 5)

Unfortunately Don Cheadle, despite displaying savvy acting chops in playing the ever irascible Miles Davis, does a disservice to one of the 20th century’s leading jazz musicians. In Miles Ahead, which Cheadle directed and co-wrote, unmoored diversions plague what amounts to more of a made-up buddy/heist picture than a serious look at a complex man.

In his hope to get about as far away from boilerplate biopic riffs as possible, Cheadle often goes out of tune. There’s guns, drug deals, a freaking car chase, and even a made up felony here, but where is the desired backdrop demonstrating Davis’ musical mastery, especially his ability to constantly change musical directions while maintaining an uncanny quality?

Flashback references to his Blue Note-era bop days are flimsy, consisting of how he met his first wife, Frances Davis (Emayatzy Corinealdi) and his unfortunate harassment by police outside New York’s legendary Birdland nightclub. The best musical passage is at the end of the film, when we’re treated to a present-day band that includes septuagenarians Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea. The only historic musical associate who receives much screen time is Gil Evans, who’s portrayed leading a recording session for the hardly groundbreaking Porgy and Bess album.

The main thrust of Miles Ahead is trying to get inside Davis’ angry head during a period in the late 1970s when he essentially went AWOL from the music business after suffering from degenerative hip disease and holed himself up in his Upper West Side New York City apartment. We encounter Ewan McGregor as a fabricated ostensible Rolling Stone journalist desperately trying to get an interview with Davis, and even more enthusiastically trying to steal a long-awaited demo tape from him. Then, after Davis pulls out a gun inside his record company’s office in pursuit of what he perceives to be $20,000 they owe him, we’re suddenly on our way to Rush Hour-land. I was hoping for more of a Clint Eastwood’s Bird scope here rather than an awkward mix of gangsta and watered down jazz sequences.

It’s somewhat of a shame since Cheadle’s acting is often frighteningly good. Due to his intensity, we do get it that Miles was a bona fide crazy son-of-a-bitch, and certainly a self-centered one, but it’s what the film leaves out that screams for attention. Miles Davis was also pretty much a genius, and while hagiography was certainly not called for here, a little more respect certainly would have been nice.

A lost opportunity…2.5 stars(out of 5)

It is all the harder to swallow the premise of this fanciful film when it starts out with its antihero (Jake Gyllenhaal) writing the first of a series of lengthy personal missives to the customer service department of a vending company that cheated him out of $1.25. This in the emergency room of a hospital where his wife was just pronounced dead.

Serving as a vehicle for Davis Mitchell (Gyllenhaal) to eventually meet the vending company representative Karen Moreno (Naomi Watts) who reads his heartfelt letters, the writing of them sort of begins to make sense once the realization strikes that Davis is one tortured, looney dude.

Expressions of grief may take on all sorts of manifestations but in Davis’s case, he’s rather unique. He likes to dismantle things–expensive things, including a computer or two in the investment office where he works under his equally distraught, punctilious father-in-law (an excellent Chris Cooper). While the meetings with Karen progress from oddball cutesy to more pensive, Davis’s grieving graduates from taking things apart to busting them up.

The film’s funniest scene has Davis jumping out of his car clad in a suit and tie and offering to help a wrecking crew who are about to take down a house. After pleading to work for free, Davis eventually ups the ante and actually pays the crew the entire $141 in his wallet. The reactions of the cynical, flinching contractor is priceless.

Demolition is ultimately no comedy. Gyllenhaal, continuing to play the type of outsider, mentally fragile character he so well portrayed in Nightcrawler, does a great job in almost saving this movie from its excesses of fragmentary capriciousness. It’s a film of some fine moments even if its better impulses almost go up in flames in a series of somewhat manipulative plot turns during its finale. Davis’s scenes with Karen’s challenging 15-year-old son (Judah Lewis) mostly ring true.

What Demolition has to say about grieving is certainly insightful and oddly entertaining, yet those aspects seem distinct from, rather than overlapping with, its lighthearted, prosaic quirkiness. Director Jean-Marc Vallee previously helmed Wild and Dallas Buyers Club. Screenwriter Bryan Sipe also wrote the Nicholas Spark stinker The Choice.

Crazy On You (Sympathetic Mix) …3 (out of 5) stars

Poised to simultaneously mock and admire an eccentric but lovable fuddy-duddy (Sally Field), Hello, My Name Is Doris succeeds in creating a character who sticks to the bones. Marred by a sluggish start and more than a sprinkling of boilerplate sit-com plot strokes, the film succeeds in presenting a 60-something nonconformist who often startles the viewer with her perky authenticity. Field, who holds two Oscars on her mantle, is by and large so winning that the sheer effort of her performance ultimately drowns out the film’s many shortcomings.

While not to be confused with the superior Grandma with Lili Tomlin, Hello, My Name Is Doris does a much better job than last year’s While We’re Young in tackling the subject of cross-generational personal interaction. Doris Miller, smitten like a schoolgirl by a 20-something new arrival at her office, stalks John Freemont (Max Greenfield) on Facebook with the help of her friend’s all-knowing 13-year-old daughter. All the while we begin to sense Doris has issues with her conflicted brother, who, along with his more strident wife, want Doris to move out of the old Staten Island homestead she shared with her recently deceased mom. Trouble is, Doris is also a chronic hoarder, so she begins therapy at their suggestion.

The scene where her therapist raises in the air piece by piece of Doris’s accumulated belongings for keeping or discarding possesses a stong element of pathos. Trouble is, it also demonstrates the essential hollowness of the film’s serious side. Her house may be junk-filled but it’s also strangely sanitized.

Just as clutter never looked this good, director and co-writer Michael Showalter displays a hint of how seriously disturbed Doris is regarding her family and her circumstances, only to equivocate and pull back. Here he cuts to yet another comedic scene of her newly acquired 20-something friends encouraging her fresh foray into their nightclub culture. There they figuratively wink behind her back at what a fool she is.

Doris usually seems to get the last laugh but her interior situation remains mostly unchanged despite her ostensibly blossoming discovery of younger generation payoffs. En route she receives plenty of kicks–both the thrilling variety and the more hurtful, bruising ones.

Sally Go Round The Hoses…3.5 (out of 5) stars

Wearing its art film standing as a badge of honor, The Witch succeeds in thumbing its nose at the conventional horror genre. Replete with oblique period dialogue and actors often seemingly bent on delivering lines in a manner to further obscure comprehension rather than clarify it, The Witch isn’t an easy go. What makes it worthwhile is an uncanny sense of craftsmanship from director Robert Eggers. What makes it rather stunning is the emergence of actress Anya Taylor-Joy as Thomasin, who is beginning to “blossom as a woman”–not a good thing in New England in the 1630s.. Thomason is gradually suspected of witchcraft by her pious family after her younger brother, baby Samuel, suddenly disappears while under her care during a game of peek-a-boo.

Thomasin is the film’s focal point. As she becomes a reluctant catalyst to a hardening of tormented tolerance into full-blown vengeful paranoia, it’s easy to identify with her frustrations. An innocent provocative comment to her younger siblings about jokingly being a witch herself becomes an eventual tipping point in a family’s descent into hysteria.

A word about the dilagoue, reportedly pulled from Olde English documents of the early seventeenth century: imagine a largely incoherent Tom Hardy in both The Revanant and The Dark Knight Rises. Multiply by two or three. What would not be a problem if this were an Elizabethan period piece borders on pomposity in a horror film.

What keeps Eggers from going off the grid is a precise eye for set design and costuming and a good ear for the huge role that music plays in the horror genre. Taylor-Joy is a pure delight to behold, her buoyant innocence contrasted against the doom and gloom of The Puritan era. The Devil’s up-close presence in this world is as real as Donald Drumpf’s imprint on the present-day presidential campaign. Eggers may be going for a spooky, atmospherics-laden slow-burn with a little of The Excorcist on the side, but the killer effect is he’s painting a full fledge sneak-up-on-you Hieronymous Bosch. Without its playful ending, The Witch would likely be accused of being a mere academic exercise with genre trappings. As it stands, it’s the best thinking-man’s horror flick since The Babadook.

For Whom The Ax Tolls…4 stars (out of 5)

Deadpool throws so much snark and bluster against the wall that much of it sticks. If you are willing to overlook all the misses, there’s a good time to be had here. It’s mostly refreshing to encounter an R-rated Marvel celebration and takedown of a character who is a perpetually ranting lout. Sure, the film may have needed better editing in order to condense much of its motor-mouthed, potty-humor barrage, but as it stands I sure had a lot more laughs here than in viewing, say, Hail Caesar.

None of this admittedly self-congratulatory stuff would have worked nearly as well if the lead had been someone other than Ryan Reynolds. While it was evident Reynolds was clearly moving up in the acting world with his previous role in Mississippi Grind, here he continues to squelch the smart-alecky pretty boy image. Or at least the pretty-boy part.

With an opening sequence that should impress even the most jaded action movie fan and a surprisingly good performance by Morena Baccarin (Homeland) as Deadpool’s love interest, the film isn’t quite all snap and smut. There’s even a love story lurking here amidst the preoccupation with impalement, masturbation, and crotch punching.

Don’t worry if, like me, you’re a Superhero film dabbler, or even a novice. I was surprised to learn there was a Green Lantern reference though I have no idea where it was since I skipped that prior Ryan Reynolds DC Comics turkey. I did comprehend the reason People magazine with Ryan on the cover is product-placed a couple of times throughout Deadpool is a reference to his having won its Sexiest Man Alive designation.

Here, underneath his Spider Man-style red mask, Deadpool is harboring a serious disfigurement. So much so that he avoids revealing his newfound face to his old girlfriend even while trying to rescue her. Her first comment upon eventually seeing his face is a pretty funny line. Hey, it’s February, and unless you count 2015’s late-release art films, that means it’s the doldrums at the cinema. In the take-what-you-can-get mode, Deadpool rates as one pretty cool package.

An impudent, ill-tempered, R-rated Superhero….4 stars (out of 5)

In Hail Caesar! co-directors Joel and Ethan Coen lean fairly hard on silliness. In what amounts to a simultaneous spoof of, and tribute to the Studio Era of Hollywood, the Coens provide commendable optics of splendid cinematography and surefire editing. Their presentation of a 27-hour trajectory of a day-in-the-life of studio “fixer” Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) often amuses while ultimately wearing thin.

Set alongside a kidnapping plot where studio star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) gets snatched by a group of communist Hollywood screenwriters calling themselves “The Future,” Hail Caesar! is on solid ground when replicating musical and comic scenes from Hollywood’s heyday. Adding just enough exaggeration, here’s Channing Tatum as a song-and-dance man leading a group of sailors on a “we’re sailing off and we’ll sure miss all the dames” tap-dancing number replete with beer bottles that seem to have a mind of their own. And there’s chipper Scarlet Johansson in a mermaid costume doing a water scene with Busby Berekeley-style choreography, only to finish and morph into a nasty trash-talking ingrate who loves talking back to Mannix. Side plots of Mannix being wooed for a job by Lockheed, and trying to quit smoking while showing up daily for Catholic confessions, however, further drag the film’s momentum.

Clooney is a hoot playing a Whitlock who mugs his lines while filming the full-of-hot-air biblical epic (also called “Hail Caesar!”) that is being shot at the unnamed studio which resembles MGM. It’s after Whitlock gets kidnapped that the film falters.

The screenwriters possess little believability, so what satire is intended drags more than zings. Their preposterous fate seems more like a bad joke than a terribly clever one. At this point I longed for more of Johansson’s character, DeeAnna Moran. Unfortunately, the outcome of her-out-of-wedlock pregnancy that jolts the PR-conscious studio also leaves a lot be desired. Her promising presence in the film seems unduly abridged and stilted.

Brolin manages to somewhat save the day. His self-assured Mannix keeps the studio running smoothly by means of coercion, bribery, and smooth-talking, the latter of which is ably demonstrated with his handling of twin gossip columnists, both wonderfully played by the irrepressible Tilda Swinton. Just when it’s tempting to grant Swinton the best supporting role in a film full of big name actors, Frances McDormand shows up as an old-school film editor who encounters a hilariously strange turn of events. With acting talent this good, this film should have been better.

Witty But Wearying Look at The Dream Factory….3 stars (out of 5)