Thumbnails Jul 22

by Tony Medley

It Ain’t Over (10/10): 98 minutes. NR. Written and directed by Sean Mullin, this is Yogi Berra’s tale, told by interviews with a myriad of players, managers, broadcasters, celebrities, and writers, including his beautiful wife, Carmen, Joe Garagiola, his life-long friend who lived across the street when growing up, Billy Crystal, Joe Girardi, Bob Costas, Derek Jeter, Joe Torre, Larry Doby, Jr., Roger Angell, Tony Kubek, Vin Scully, and many more.

Of course, we hear a lot from Yogi, too, and a lot of Yogi-isms, including some others wrote and attributed to him. But his wife Carmen says that it’s easy to tell the fakes from the real ones because the real ones actually make sense when you think about them.

It takes Yogi from growing up on The Hill in St. Louis, to being wooed by Branch Rickey, who didn’t sign him when he was with the St. Louis Cardinals but immediately tried to sign him when he moved to the Dodgers, but by then he had already signed with the Yankees, and his service in the Navy in WWII when he took part in the Normandy Invasion on June 6, 1944.

It also gives the best, detailed analysis of Jackie Robinson’s steal of home in the ’55 Series. Yogi insisted he was out until the day he died. The film shows various angles. The truth is still hard to determine but I think I changed my mind. You don’t have to be a baseball fan to enjoy this American success story.

Official Competition (8/10): 110 minutes. R. Humberto Suáreez (José Luis Gomez) is a billionaire who wants to leave a living achievement behind, so he hires two stars, Félix Rivero (Antonio Banderas) and Iván Torres (Oscar Martínez) and a famous director, Lola Cuevas (Penélope Cruz) to make a film he hopes will be memorable. Torres considers himself an “actor” who looks down his nose at Rivero, whom he considers a mere movie star. Lola, for all her beauty, is a brutal director. What results is a satire about movie-making that caricatures the silliness, arrogance, and hubris of the industry. In Spanish.

Both Sides of the Blade (7/10): 115 minutes. R. Based on Christine Angot’s novel 'Un tournant de la vie Juliette Binoche has the hots for two men. She’s living with Vincent Lindon, all the while carrying the torch for Grégoire Colin with whom she had a relationship when she met Vincent. After 10 years she sees Grégoire on the street and her infatuation with him re-inspires her rapture. She tries to balance what’s going on in her heart by being dishonest to both men when things get beyond her and them. Brilliant performances by Binoche and Lindon. American studios make junk like superhero and horror movies but the French still make films that are about ordinary people and their problems. In French.

Jurassic World Dominion (7/10): 146 minutes. PG-13. The story of the reincarnation of the dinosaurs apparently ends with this convoluted tale of a madman trying to destroy the world. I had a hard time making heads or tails of the story and what the bad guy’s purpose was. Our good guys, Chris Pratt, Laura Dern, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Sam Neill are in big trouble but do their darndest to save the world. Throw in is Jeff Goldblum who gives his usual unique performance.

Even were the story terrible (and it’s not), the special effects are outstanding and well worth sitting there for 2 ½ hours. As an aside, I kept thinking about real history. Although not a hard number, the best estimates is that Homo Sapiens (us) has been on the earth for at least 200,000 years (although the earliest were certainly not very close to what we have become, see https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/homo2/mod_homo_4.htm ), and civilization has been with us for only about 15,000 years. How long did dinosaurs roam the earth? More than 174 million years! https://www.livescience.com/3945-history-dinosaurs.html . That’s not 174 million years ago, that’s how long they dominated the earth, while we’ve been here for only 200,000 years. To put it in perspective, for every year we’ve been here, that’s equal to 870 years that the dinosaurs were here. Think about that. Anyway, it’s an enjoyable movie mainly for the special effects.

Interceptor (7/10): 98 Minutes. TV-MA. Netflix. While many may find this preposterous, I set reality aside and enjoyed it. It shows a military woman ,who has been disgraced due to her making sexual attack claims against a commanding officer, being returned to her post at a missile interceptor station in the middle of the ocean having to defend the station and the country against a military attack.

Reminiscent of Steven Seagal’s Under Siege (1992) without the humor, only this time the person taking on the bad guys is a woman (Elsa Pataky). The story is well-structured and the tension palpable throughout. It does, however, strain credulity to see a woman prevail in repeated hand to hand combat with bigger and stronger men. But that’s the woke world in which we live, but I still liked the movie.

Recommended Reading: Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty by Dennis McDougal tells how the L.A. Times and Harry Chandler created Los Angeles (hard to believe but true); King and Queen of Malibu by David K. Randall tells about the Rindges who bought the 25,000+ acre Malibu Rancho in 1892 for $10/acre and the fight to keep it all private.