The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019)

Whenever a movie is picked up for a theatrical release from South By Southwest, it's either just weird enough or just mainstream enough to hit a sweet spot.  Here we have both.

Zach Gottsagen plays Zac, and kudos to the filmmakers for casting an actual Down Syndrome Person in a lead role.  Zac is holed up in a long term care facility for seniors, kind of cast on the scrap heap.  With the help of his roommate Bruce Dern, he escapes and is symbolically reborn, even squeezing through the narrow opening and landing in his birthday suit looking like a baby in a diaper.

He crashes into Tyler (Shia LeBoauf) who is forced to go on the run after doing a bad thing to some bad men Marshall and Ratboy.  Tyler is on the run and brings Zac along, for various reasons. Along the way they travel on foot and by raft, a la Huck Finn, while being chased by the bad men as well as Eleanor (Dakota Johnson) who worked at the seniors facility and was ordered to Find Him.

Zac is interested in wrestling and wants to go the the wrestling school advertised by the Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Church).  The classic hero's journey that he must make it there.  But what happens when he finds the Wizard?

Good casting, photography, a nice spin on a classic story
* * * * * (highest)

Crazy Heart (2009)

First the good news -  The original music starring Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett was the best part.  All the songs gave the story a nice arc.  

 - otherwise, it was a tired story about "Bad Blake" (Jeff Bridges) , a George Jones type figure, fading from prominence with the help of an alcohol and related problems.  The withdrawn old man falls in love with Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a young reporter and grows up.  Hero's journey complete.

Another Six Degrees of Colin Farrell, who was a good part playing Tommy Sweet, the new country bro who is the nemesis of Blake, his protege who eclipses the old man's success.  

* * * of 5    Best Actor for Jeff Bridges.

Moon (2009)

Sam Rockwell stars as "Sam" a space dweller on the Far Side of the Moon, working for a private mining company.  Deployed for 3 years, he's coming to the end of his tour and is getting antsy.  On a outing to one of the mining outposts, named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, he suffers an accident and wakes up in the infirmary, being tended to by GERTY, the computer (voiced by Kevin Spacey).

He later discovers there is another person on the space ship, his twin, although he does not recognize him as such.  It turns out that the private forces of evil are cloning Sam.  GERTY is the  overseer of such activities.

Very reminiscent of 2001:  A Space Odyssey with the talking computer, the spare space ship, and the foreboding sense of what the future might actually look like.  A selection of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, it certainly had the look of that.

However, it was a very thin version of 2001.   * * of 5.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

On the heels of Won't You Be My Neighbor, a documentary, comes this other version which is "based on a true story" but takes a quite different look.



Tom Hanks stars as Fred Rogers, and Matthew Rhys (Lloyd) is a journalist send to interview Mr. Rogers.  Lloyd is a hard-hitting investigative journalist and tries to size up Mr. Rogers  as someone who is not what he appears.  But Mr. Rogers turns out to be better than promised and helps to transform Lloyd into a better adult.   What starts off as 400 words of fluff turns into 10,000 words of self help.

A nice story to wrap up a 40+ year career of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.

* * * * * (no bad movie with Tom Hanks)