Here’s a quick peek at what I’ve written up lately. For the full review, click on the title link!

Movie Review: J. Edgar

A brash young upstart rising up the Government ladder thanks to a little bit of skill and a whole lot of being at the right place at the right time.  Someone who liked to throw on a pretty frock every now and then, and lived with a dashing young man amid much speculation.  A touch insecure, lived with Mommy for way too long, but managed to hide most personal foibles under a thick cloud of Type A….  Oh, enough about me in my twenties, let’s get on with the review.  Clint Eastwood’s look at J. Edgar Hoover is one that skims the span of his life and shows not a cross-dressing laughingstock or a larger than life hero, but a man, the good, bad and sometimes downright ugly.  It’s not the most organized movie ever made, but it’s an interesting look at a powerful man, and his efforts to create one of the most powerful Bureaus in the United States.

Movie Review: The Descendants

Hawaii.  Land of the Lost, land of palm trees and black sand beaches, spam and shave ice, natives and haole.  In The Descendants, a family whose lineage in the islands goes back for generations (but looks about as haole as Gwynneth Paltrow in Micronesia) deals with changes within and without the nuclear family.  As a man who must figure out how to go on when his wife is diagnosed with an untreatable brain injury, George Clooney gives a performance that will surely have the Academy sitting up and taking notice.