In 1989, director Rob Reiner was just starting to make people forget actor Rob Reiner (Meathead from “All in the Family”) when he created a cinematic standard for romantic comedies. Helped by an all-star team (writer Nora Ephron, cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, stars Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan), Reiner’s “When Harry Met Sally” is the Woody Allen movie for everyone who doesn’t like Woody Allen movies, a Manhattancentric look at Baby Boomer relationships with romance and pathos leavened by cunning wit. Crystal and Ryan are the friends who think friends can’t be lovers (or is it vice versa?) until they are.
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Every good journalist knows when something is old news. “Shock and Awe,” the story of the good journalists who were skeptical about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, should get the Pulitzer Prize for irony. Not because the lonely crew of the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau was ultimately vindicated, but because it’s 2018, and every sane person has known for at least 10 years that the WMD excuse for invading Iraq was bullshit. Old news. And it’s not even that good a movie. There are a lot of speechifying moments that smell of made-for-TV fakeyness. Surprise! Rob Reiner directed and co-stars.
I get the fact that Martin Scorsese needs to move on from the Mafia to a new generation of criminals, which explains “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013). I’m just not sure what I was supposed to get out of this movie. It’s voyeuristic fun watching the decadent rise and unsurprising fall of pump-and-dump stock millionaire Jordan Belfort, as played by Leonardo DiCaprio. At several points, however, we’re fed the notion that Belfort was somehow helping everyone else while he was helping himself. That’s just typical self-serving sales bullshit, but not surprising. A salesman’s first priority is to sell himself.
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