MOVIE - Inferno

PG-13 (2:02)

Wide release 10/27/16

Viewed Roadhouse on Halloween with Cyra!

RT Critic:  20  Audience:  43
Critic's Consensus:  Senselessly frantic and altogether shallow, Inferno sends the Robert Langdon trilogy spiraling to a convoluted new low.

Cag:  3/Liked it once I started understanding what was going on....but not great

Directed by Ron Howard

Sony Pictures

Based on the book by Dan Brown

Tom Hanks, Ben Foster, Felicity Jones

My comments:  For the first third of the movie I was totally and completely confused, as I imagine anyone watching this would be, unless perhaps they'd read the book.  There were three or four different factions of people working against?? with?? each other and major flashbacks.  As it slowly started making sense I enjoyed it more.  You had to really pay attention, and it would help if one had a tiny sense of 

RT/ IMDb Summary:  Tom Hanks reprises his role as Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon in director Ron Howard and screenwriter David Koepp's adaptation of author Dan Brown's bestselling novel Inferno, which finds Langdon using Dante's The Divine Comedy as a tool in the race to prevent a devastating global pandemic. 

Movie - The Reluctant Fundamentalist

R (2:08)

Limited Release April 26,2013

Viewed Sunday, 5/26/2013 at The Loft 

RT Critic: 55% Audience: 71%

Cag:  6/Awesome; Absolutely bowled me over

Directed by Mira Nair (director of Monsoon Wedding, one of my all-time favorites)

IFC Films

(from the book of the same title by Mohsi Hamid)

Liev Schreiber, Kate Hudson, Kiefer Sutherland, and the wonderfully new-to-me Riz Ahmed (who stole the show, wow!)

My comments:  I had no idea what I was going to see, other than I'd taken the book out of the library and returned it before getting a chance to read it.  So when the credits came on at the beginning of the movie, I was really surprised....Hudson, Schreiber, Sutherland?  I loved the views of Pakistan, Istanbul, New York City.  What I realized when I came out was how tantalizing the "idea" of America and the "American Dream" must be to some, and I can see more and more why people from other countries hate the US.  It didn't get very good reviews from some, but I loved the way it was put together, the story it told, and the way the story was told.  So cudos to writers, actors, and director.  I loved it.

Fandango synopsis: We begin in 2011 in Lahore. At an outdoor café a Pakistani man named Changez (Riz Ahmed) tells Bobby (Liev Schreiber), an American journalist, about his experiences in the United States. Roll back ten years, and we find a younger Changez fresh from Princeton, seeking fortune and glory on Wall Street. The American Dream seems well within his grasp, complete with a smart and gorgeous artist girlfriend, Erica (Kate Hudson). But when the Twin Towers are attacked, a cultural divide slowly begins tocrack open between Changez and Erica. Changez's dream soon begins to slip into nightmare: profiled, wrongfully arrested, strip-searched and interrogated, he is transformed from a well-educated, upwardly mobile businessman to a scapegoat and perceived enemy. With time, he begins to hear the call of his own homeland. Taking us through the culturally rich and beguiling worlds of New York, Lahore and Istanbul, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a story about conflicting ideologies where perception and suspicion have the power to determine life or death.: