Gone Girl.  OMG.  Some good acting (the woman detective and the shyster lawyer) mitigate the pain, but this is still a slog—bad plot, stereotyped characters, some ridiculous dialog, and a hackneyed score make me wonder, why bother?  You shouldn’t.  Because the author of the book wrote the screenplay, I assume the book is just as bad (never read it—too damn expensive—and now I never want to).  Maybe all those fans see something I don’t, but my knee-jerk reaction was that this was the stereotypical story of the excessively jealous spouse.  The entire universe is contained in that microscopic black hole—no problems important to society are permitted in.  Typical of Hollywood, I guess, and too many books in this genre—boring pablum for the masses!  Not recommended.

Interstellar. Another slog, almost three hours of it!  A real bladder-buster where you keep wondering, “Is this going to get any better?”  Forget the fact that the herky-jerky screenplay should have been trashed like the one of Ishtar.  I hate to admit that the outline of this movie loosely follows the first two books in my “Chaos Chronicle Trilogy,” a journey from a dystopian Earth to star colonies, but all resemblance ends with its mind-numbing technobabble and bad acting—or maybe good actors wasted by a bad screenplay (why I don’t mentioned actors’ names here)?  Only hard sci-fi addicts will understand what the Nolan duo is trying to do and realize they fail miserably.  Everyone else will wonder why they wasted almost three hours of their lives on this drivel.  If you want some good hard sci-fi, watch Avatar, Alien (not its sequels), Blade Runner (and most other movies based on Phillip K. Dick stories), and possibly a few others that Hollywood didn’t succeed mutilating.  Not recommended.

Scorpion.  I’m going to break my rule and review a TV series.  After three or four episodes, I’m already tired of Walter O’Brian’s band of misfit geniuses.  Lots of cute stuff going on, including the little autistic lad, and Walter learning to love a normal woman could sustain some soap opera-like romance, but the last installment I saw had to borrow Hetty from NCIS Los Angeles to make it interesting.  It’s mildly more intriguing than that other show about geniuses, The Big Bang Theory, because O’Brian’s geniuses actually do something instead of sitting around like the Friends or Seinfeld cast.  Casting MENSA as a secret organization out to destroy O’Brian’s gang would make it more interesting.  Otherwise, you might want to find a movie on Netflix instead.  Watch only if you’re tempted to subject yourself to a reality show.  (BTW, the hotty—women tell me he’s one—who plays O’Brian has a cameo in Interstellar, as does Matt Damon as a wacked-out scientist, but I can’t say that this is a good way to get your foot in the Hollywood movie world’s door.  Or, for Matt Damon, maybe it’s a way to show him out the door?)

St. Vincent.  A real sleeper.  Filmed in Brooklyn, Bill Murray is the lead, a Vietnam vet with a troubled life.  He becomes St. Vincent of Sheepshead’s Bay, though (where did the stupid Google ad writer get “St. Vincent de Van Nuys”?—that’s a continent away!).  Naomi Watts, as Daka, and Melissa McCarthy (at last a decent role for this talented actress), as Maggie, have their own troubled lives—Daka is a pregnant stripper and “lady of the night” who services Vincent, while Maggie is a single mom trying to take care of a kid and fend off legal action from a lout of a husband who wants custody of her kid.  The latter is really the focus, as Vincent shows him how to survive in that NYC borough (self-defense and calculating horse race odds among the life skills taught), but Vincent probably learns more from the kid.  The priest at the school, Brother Geraghty, played by Chris O’Dowd, is also hilarious, but there are times when this is a dark comedy.  I can summarize by saying that it’s a movie that teaches us to find humor even in life’s adversities.  A must see if you enjoy excellent and original film-making.  (If measured by these four reviews, you have a 25% chance of doing that, but a larger sample probably reduces that percentage considerably.  Have you seen the previews of Exodus Meets the Gladiator?)

And so it goes….

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