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Poor Boy's Game (2007)
A film with the younger man in mind
I will watch Danny Glover in anything, and he did not disappoint. You may notice if you scan the ratings that the scores hold consistently for females across age groups and decline noticeably among males as they age. I believe I know why. The reconciliation is less true to my experience of male interactions and difficult to believe despite the best efforts of the leads. The less experience one has of male interactions, the more satisfying the ending will be. I thought it was interesting that the female ratings blipped up a bit in the 55+ range; I wonder if it's because the bad man gets it and the supporting female actress ends up with the good man. I'll know when I know what women talk about when there are no men around, I suppose.
Reds (1981)
A tour de force not for everyone
Although I liked this film very much for its breadth of vision and depth of characterization, with many fine performances in the minor roles supporting the well-focused portrayals by the main characters (and it has one of the most memorable lines of any film in the last thirty years), I have not met very many people who enjoyed it, and their reasons were various.
Those who enjoyed it did so for one of three reasons: admiration for the career of one or another of the actors in it, interest in the period or the politics of the early twentieth century, or curiosity about whether Diane Keaton could actually pull off a purely dramatic role. The film is long and tends to meander somewhat, and neither the visual impact nor the sound track is enough to hold the attention of someone who isn't automatically captivated by the subject matter.
More specifics about what I liked about the film? Jack Nicholson's uncharacteristically understated portrayal of F. Scott Fitzgerald; Warren Beatty's hyperactive and endearing performance, which I would have enjoyed disliking but could not; the eye-level view of Russian Bolshevism and the early U.S. Communist party; the memorable line I alluded to earlier, when the ax-handle-wielding union buster confronts Reed in the exchange
"Who you?"
"I write."
"You write? . . . No--you wrong!"