Movie reports

This sequel to the Star Trek reboot is big, loud, and messy.  But it's still a lot of fun.  Kirk is a more than a bit of a stiff in this one but the rest of the cast make up for him.  Lots of special effects, explosions, and people fighting on moving vehicles and on high places.  Recommended.

 An apartheid era cop sees that his force is stretched thin keeping blacks down so he decides to see if he can get away with robbing a bank.  He does, and so he decides to rob some more.  Eventually they realize it's him, they catch him, and try and convict him.  But of course he busts out of prison and keeps on robbing banks until the South African government get sick of him making a mockery of them.  He escapes and gets gunned down in the good old USA.  It's all gritty, intense, and gripping but it's also glorifying a lawless thug who used the apartheid system to enrich himself and to commit robbery.  In the end I didn't like this one because they wanted me to like a repellent criminal, they wanted to make him seem like some kind of folk hero when in fact he was a weasel.  Good performances all around, especially by Deborah Kara Unger, in an unlikable film.

I don't give a shit if you don't like pro wrestling.  Turn your nose up at it, say it's 'fake.'  I don't give a shit.  It is, no matter what the intelligentsia try to say, a very hard form of performance art.  It combines storytelling with athleticism, and it's practitioners are some of the best actors in the world, it takes talent to get beat up and stay in character all the time.  Pro wrestlers suffer an inordinate amount of injuries and their careers are short due to the heavy workload and the dangerous moves they must do in their performances.  This film tells the story of a female wrestling show that came about during the wrestling boom of the early 1980's.  You can tell the women who were this league loved what they did and many of them clearly miss it.  This is a fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking film about them and the men who were behind the endeavor.  Highly recommended.