Wonder Woman

I could spend half the night crafting an argument that “Wonder Woman” (2017) is a metaphor for Cold War geopolitics, but this blog is not called “One Million Word Reviews” (thankfully). So let’s start by saying it’s a pretty good action movie and a pretty good setup for a bunch of lucrative sequels. I’ll bypass all the Girl Power raving because that ground has been heavily trod by others. I will say that special effects and the Hollywood business model have both evolved to the point that a female action hero franchise is plausible, and its novelty makes it refreshing.

21 Grams

I presume Alejandro González Iñárritu was trying to make an artistic statement about the randomness of life by scrambling the timeline in “21 Grams” (2003), but it just didn’t work for me. Maybe it was punishment for my habit of trying to guess what’s going to happen next – it’s hard when next isn’t really next. Usually these kinds of movies sort themselves out and you can catch on. But in this unsatisfying rendition, where three families cross paths at a tragically metaphorical intersection, I was still stuck at the stoplight, blinker on, trying to figure out which way to turn.