Any person's reaction to the sudden loss of a loved one, most especially a spouse is probably as different as their DNA. The movie "Demolition" is about the subject of grief and sudden loss of a spouse. The different way this depressing subject is examined is how the husband, played very well by Jake Gyllenhaal handles the shock and grief in extremely unusual ways which include trashing his house, volunteering to demolish other houses, taking machines apart and organizing and examining each individual part. This movie starts with a car accident which is tastefully shown as Gyllenhaal's wife is driving the car where he is the passenger and his reaction to her being hit on the drivers side by another car and then a flash of deployed air bags. I was relieved that the car accident scene was done without too much graphic display because that is the last thing any driver needs to see. We are all as drivers in this country at the mercy of the bad decisions, alcoholism or the texting of others whom we share the roads with.
From the beginning this movie is highly unusual and certainly not a big budget or widely released summer movie. After the accident Gyllenhaal has a problem with the hospital's emergency room vending machine where he loses $1.25 but rather than just attempting to get a refund he sends a long letter to the company that manufactured the vending machine and included the entire story about his wife's car accident, her death and even the details about his life after she died. What follows is a semi-relationship with a woman in the customer service department of the vending machine company played very well by Naomi Watts followed by a friendship with Gyllenhaal and her sexually confused son. Of course any movie like this would not be interesting if the entire story were just about a man going insane from grief and performing strange acts and there has to be several additional side stories to keep the audience interested. The challenge of this movie was; is an unusual story like this compelling enough to keep audience interest throughout the entire two hours? There were parts of these two hours that were slow at times, but for the most part this story did keep my interest the entire time.
When this great movie was released in the summer of 1994 I originally thought that it was going to be mostly a comedy. When I saw it, I knew that this movie was not only going to win the Academy Award for best picture and it was far more than just a comedy; this was a great drama that had moments of tremendous emotion unprecedented in my movie-going experience even to this day. Tom Hanks won for best actor for the second year in a row, having already won the previous year for Philadelphia about a gay man who was dying of AIDS. This picture also won for best director for Robert Zemeckis and best screenplay for Eric Roth , which represents the top four for all awards given by the Academy of Motion Pictures.
Probably the greatest parts of this movie include the empathy that you gain over the two hours for Forrest Gump who is mildly retarded and has physical problems with this legs that he eventually overcame. Despite Forrest's mental disabilities he was able to go to college on a Football scholarship and excel as a running back and then inexplicably volunteered for the Vietnam War. During the movie, several flashbacks, where Forrest met President Kennedy and other famous people in history were shown that provided a humorous and different dimension to the film that I have never seen in any movie. Additionally, the empathy you feel for Forrest include his difficulty in making his childhood girlfriend his wife mainly because of his mental disabilities and her very bad childhood and as a result her dangerous lifestyle as a "flower child" . Forrest chasing Jenny is the central plot of the story and is the source of the best emotional scenes most especially the ending which was almost impossible to sit through.
In all my years of watching movies I have never had a worse experience as far as an emotional overload at the end of a movie, with the possible exception of "Terms of Endearment" , which came out in 1983. For those who have not seen this movie after almost 22 years, I will try to not give anything away, but there is a devastating death at the end that is unbearable to watch and the barometer I always use to measure any movie is audience reaction. At the end of this movie in the theater I was in, there was not a dry eye anywhere. The music, the emotion of the actors and at the very end a floating feather, which was symbolic of life was extremely well done but just made the whole ending so difficult to get through.
When it was all over, I remember having great difficulty getting out of the theater when it was time to leave at first because of the crowd and then because of seeing the emotional devastation in the eyes of so many people in the crowd. I also remember driving home being especially difficult because of the emotional roller coaster I had just experienced.
I have not seen Forrest Gump too many times after I saw it in July 1994 mainly because of the ending, but for those after 22 years who have not seen it, you owe it to yourself to see it at least one time, because you will never forget the experience.
This is probably the most unusual movie about war ever made. There are very few scenes of war action in this movie and instead the entire 2 hours was about one thing: what is war really all about. Is it about the young 19 year old kid that gets killed because he was too poor to go to college or have a friend in a high place who can sign a form and get him out of a tour in Vietnam or IRAQ, or is it about the people who make the high level decisions that decide whether an innocent child or innocent people die in order to attain a higher goal and maybe save lives in the future by preventing a suicide bomber or terrorist attack. What we all agree on is that war is always the worst of humanity and war is hell .
We all know that war is no longer what it was in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam war. Now we have billion dollar drone planes that fly all day long unmanned and can take pictures of the enemy and at any given moment can blow up a building a road or a group of terrorists. The movie Eye in the Sky is about this new war and the decisions that are made that might save lives or could take innocent lives and the reality is that in our current dangerous world these decisions have to be made every day.
This movie did an excellent job in showing how difficult decisions like this are to make; so difficult that in about 10 different circumstances the officials involved did not want to make the life and death choices necessary and passed the ultimate decision to someone else. The major dilemma in this movie was the potential opportunity lost of blowing up a building to kill several suicide bombers before they could kill many people in a shopping mall or maybe kill a small child who was right outside of the building selling bread. The acronym CDE is used quite a bit in this movie and it stands for Collateral Damage Estimate and its this number which is given as a percentage that complicates the decision on whether to blow up the building populated with several North African terrorists and the military accepted risk of killing innocent bystanders.
Most of this movie is about 5 groups of people in different locations all watching and identifying terrorists through the use of a drone in the sky and amazing small robot drones that look like hummingbirds and a small flying bug that can fly close outside of a building or even inside undetected and record images that can be transmitted all over the world. The military technology in this movie some of the best I have ever seen depicted and is the backdrop of the the debates that go back and forth that are based on moral, legal and military complications. The decisions that are delayed, deferred and ultimately made and how they all conclude are the best part of the acting and final message of this movie.
It was sad to see Alan Rickman in one of his last performances in this movie and his last line really stood out as the best, "never tell a soldier about the cost of war". Alan Rickman was a great actor and he will definitely be missed. The actress Helen Mirren is also very good in her role as a high level military officer who ultimately makes the final decision on whether to blow up the building.
