Got my new hearing aids (Starkey in ear) this morning. They are SO MUCH BETTER. My ride was at 7:00am. I made friends with the intake lady and chatted with a farmer named Terry. The guy who gave me my hearing aids did all kinds of tests and even downloaded a program to my phone. Home by 9:30am.

The last long scene, at the gas station, is the kind of ending the film deserves. These days happy endings are legislated by contract. It is true to the Bobby Dupea we have come to know. It shows him escaping from all his lives, because he can’t face any of them.

Bobby wheels his father’s chair out to the shoreline; He tries to explain his life, cannot, and breaks down in tears. This scene, so wonderfully performed by Nicholson, remorseful son, whose piano playing never pleased his father is the Bobby that all the other Bobbys seek to conceal.

The father never speaks. Carl is friendly in a distant, jolly way. Bobby is attracted to Catherine, a musician of class and poise, and she has sex with him, but scoffs at the notion that they have a future: “You have no love for yourself, no love for family, for friends–how can you ask for love?”

He drives from California to an island off the Washington coast, where his family lives communally. He reluctantly brings along Rayette, then dumps her in a motel and goes for the first time in years to meet his father, Nicholas, his brother, Carl Fidelio, and Carl’s student and lover, Catherine.

Afraid of commitment to Rayette, Bobby has sex with Betty (Sally Struthers best known for the tv show All in the Family) We read the motorcycle logo on his T-shirt: TRIUMPH. That gets a laugh, to mask the sadness of the scene. Betty isn’t what he’s looking for, either.

We get the first glimpse of Bobby’s concealed idea of himself: “It’s ridiculous. I’m sitting here listening to some cracker asshole, lives in a trailer park, compare his life to mine.” The action moves easily through the blue-collar world of Billy and Rayette.

The beginning, set in the oil fields of California, gives no hint of the second. Bobby is an oil-well rigger who lives with Rayette Dipesto (Karen Black), a waitress with big hair, frosted lips and a worship of Tammy Wynette. She’s pathetic in her hunger for him, her fear of losing him.

Five Easy Pieces is about a character who doesn’t fit. There’s not a scene where he’s comfortable with the people near him, not a moment when he feels at home. The movie’s story traces a journey through a life where Bobby disappointed people, could not be counted on, misbehaved, underachieved.

A memorable line: “I faked a little Chopin, and you faked a big response”, but what it has above all is Bobby Dupea: He’s a voluntary outcast who can’t return to his early life, yet has no plausible way to move forward. He’s stranded between occupations, personas, ambitions, social classes.

The film’s greatest influence came through the screenplay, by Bob Rafelson and Carole Eastman; it allowed detours and digressions, cared more about behavior than plot, ended in a way and tone that could not have been guessed from its beginning.

Idiosyncratic characters, in dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, in a plot free to surprise us about the characters, in an existential ending not required to be happy. Five Easy Pieces was, you could say, the first Sundance film.

Five Easy Pieces proved in 1970 that Jack Nicolson was a great actor and a star. Ten years into his career, he flowered as a screen presence, as Jack the lad, the outsider, capable of anger, sarcasm, self-pity, also capable of tenderness and grief, ready for violence but not very good at it.

Given the enormous success of the original Die Hard (a movie I didn’t enjoy nearly as much as this one), producer Lawrence Gordon must have crossed their fingers before risking this sequel to a relatively untried director. But they did the right thing: This is terrific entertainment.

Die Hard 2 is an especially well-crafted picture. It tells a story we can identify with, it has a lot of interesting supporting characters, it handles the action sequences with calm precision, and it has a couple of scenes that are worth writing home about.

Willis spots one of the conspirators. But he can’t convince airport security chief (Dennis Franz), who resents an outside cop on his turf. Because Die Hard 2 is so skillfully constructed and well-directed, Willis is single-handedly taking on planeloads of mercenaries in a fight to the finish.

A skilled band of terrorists plans to seize control of airport operations by electronically bypassing the control tower. They’ll shut off the airport lights, leave dozens of planes circling overhead and then cause one flight to crash. What they want is a fully fueled standby plane.

Again, this time he plays a cop on vacation. He’s in Washington’s Dulles airport waiting for his wife’s flight to land on a crowded evening during the Christmas season. And scheduled into the same airport at the same time is a military jet bringing a South American drug tyrant to justice.

Why is Willis so effective in a movie like this? He combines a relatively athletic physique with the appearance and manner of Everyman. Here is a man who will not give up, who will not admit defeat, who doggedly carries on in the face of adversity.

Die Hard 2 (1990), enters Bruce Willis in a decathlon of violence, and he places first in every event, including wrestling for guns, jumping onto conveyor belts, being ejected from cockpits, leaping onto the wings of moving airplanes and fighting with the authorities. Whew!

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There are a couple of nice dialogue touches; Edward Norton says, “I liked him right up until the moment I shot him…” The ending is suitably ironic. This is just the movie for two hours of mindless escapism on a relatively skilled professional level.

They’re also handy in traffic jams, and there are nice sequences in which traffic lights are manipulated by the Seth Green character, who hilariously insists he is the real inventor of Napster, which was stolen by his roommate while he was taking a nap, thus the name.

Stella drives a bright red Mini Cooper. Eventually, there is a fleet of three. They need Mini Coopers because their size allows them to drive through very narrow spaces, when they drive down the stairs and onto the tracks of the Los Angeles subway system.

After a chase through the canals of Venice, and after one betrayal and one murder, the action shifts to Los Angeles. Wahlberg and company, who have lost the gold, are determined to get it back again, and enlist Sutherland’s daughter, Stella (Charlize Theron), who is a safecracker.

His confederates include Charlie (Mark Wahlberg), a strategic mastermind; Steve (Edward Norton) second in command; the computer whiz Lyle (Seth Green); the getaway driver, Handsome Rob (Jason Statham), and Left-Ear (Mos Def), who can blow up stuff.

The Italian Job 2003, is nothing more, or less, than a slick caper movie with stupendous chase scenes and a truly ingenious way to steal $35 million in gold bars from a safe in a Venetian palazzo. The safe is stolen by a gang led by Donald Sutherland.

I watched the movie Moon about one man who was stationed on the moon for three years and who had only a computer to talk to. As I watched it, I remembered that I am one man stationed at Renova Flats with only a cat to talk to. The movie was scarier than I thought but more so because I am alone.

Loved this movie and one I've seen quite a few times!💕💕

It’s a blast to hang out with these people. For all its brashness and big personality, American Hustle is a character study at its core, an exploration of dissatisfaction and drive, and the lengths to which we’re willing to go for that elusive thing known as a better life.

The movie is big-hearted and a little messy, but that’s apropos given the characters, their insatiable greed and their brazen schemes. But their clothes are more than just a kitschy source of laughs: they’re a reflection of their characters’ ambition.

The director does not judge any of these people for their idiocy or their aspirations. He revels in their quirks and foibles. We even end up feeling sympathy for Jeremy Renner as crooked Mayor Carmine Polito. He’s a criminal, too: He’s on the take and coaxes more powerful politicians to join him.

Richie DiMaso is a hotheaded and tightly permed FBI agent who’s eager to make a name for himself with a big bust. Richie forces them to help him net even bigger fish to get themselves out of trouble. But he also finds himself falling for the sexy Sydney and she may feel the same way.

Irving has a young son and a wife: vulnerable and passive-aggressive Rosalyn. With her fake tan, high hair and vicious nails, Rosalyn is a force of nature. Her complexity and unpredictability make her fascinating to watch and Lawrence is a radiant scene-stealer.

He meets Sydney Prosser, a scrappy young woman with dreams of reinventing herself in high style. It’s her idea to don a fake accent and take on the alter ego of the posh Lady Edith, a Londoner with elite banking connections, and in doing so, she kicks Rosenfeld’s cons into high gear.

We start with glorious sight of Bale’s paunchy Irving Rosenfeld plastering a horrendous hairpiece onto his shiny dome. He plays the swaggering Rosenfeld, the owner of a small chain of Long Island dry cleaners who makes his real money through fake art and fraudulent personal loans.

American Hustle features Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. The movie is based on the Abscam sting operation of the late ’70s and early ’80s, in which a con artist helped the FBI catch members of Congress taking bribes.

American Hustle, (2013) is a 1970s crime romp that’s ridiculously entertaining in all the best ways. The unreliable narration and urgent zooms, the 1970s milieu of flashily dressed scammers and mobsters, the carefully chosen pop songs underscoring key emotional moments.

This is a movie, I promise you, that grabs you and won’t let you think of anything else. It’s wonderful when a director like Lumet wins a Lifetime Achievement Oscar at 80, and three years later makes this film, one of his greatest achievements.

It doesn’t simply go wrong; it goes wrong with an aftermath we care about. Its story has deeply emotional consequences. That’s why an actor with Albert Finney’s depth is needed. As for Hoffman and Hawke they make us stop thinking of anything else and start thinking only of Andy and Hank.

The brilliant debut screenplay by Kelly Masterson takes us up to a certain point, then flashes back to before that point, then catches us up again, then doubles back, so that it meticulously reconstructs how spectacularly and inevitably this perfect crime went wrong.

Meanwhile, their father Albert Finney starts looking into the case himself. Finney has been married forever to Rosemary Harris and still loves her to pieces. Hoffman is married to Marisa Tomei. Hawke is divorced from Amy Ryan, who would happily see him in jail for non-payment of child support.

Sounds good on paper, before everything goes wrong. That’s when the movie becomes intense and emotionally devastating. These two brothers can feel emotions rare in modern crime films: grief and remorse. And they still need money.

Andy suggests they solve their problems by robbing a jewelry store. He has it all mapped out as a victimless crime: They won’t use guns, they’ll hit early Saturday when the shopping mall doesn’t have many customers, and the store’s losses will be covered by insurance.