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Operation Christmas Drop

  • Title: Operation Christmas Drop
  • IMDb: link

Operation Christmas Drop movie reviewOperation Christmas Drop is your typical schmaltzy holiday fare featuring a character rediscovering the meaning of Christmas. In this case, our leading lady is Kat Graham starring as workaholic Congressional aide Erica who is sent halfway around the world on Christmas by a Grinch of Senator (Virginia Madsen) to find reasons to shut down a military base that dares spread goodwill during the holidays. I half expected Madsen to start looking for Dalmatians to skin as the script by Gregg Rossen and Brian Sawyer requires so many one-note characters to force the plot along.

The military operation that gives the film its title, where U.S. Forces drop crates of humanitarian aid across several isolated islands, has been going strong since 1952 providing the backdrop of the base in Guam and the reason for Erica to be in tropical paradise at Christmas. Alexander Ludwig plays the goodhearted pilot who lives for Christmas and helps the base make the most of the occasion. He’s even able to help rekindle a bit of Christmas spirit within Erica despite the entire reason for her arrival being to deliver a report justifying the base’s closure.

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Once Were Brothers: Robby Robertson and The Band

  • Title: Once Were Brothers: Robby Robertson and The Band
  • IMDb: link

Once Were Brothers: Robby Robertson and The Band Blu-ray reviewAs the documentary’s title suggests, Once Were Brothers: Robby Robertson and The Band focuses on Canadian-American rock group primarily through the lens of guitarist and songwriter Robby Robertson. Filled with terrific music, interviews, and some fun archival footage, the film by director Daniel Roher may not offer much in the way of surprises but does deliver a solid music documentary on how the group came to be.

From their time as a backup band to rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins and later Bob Dylan to The Band’s mainstream success, we get the story behind the band’s inventive nature embracing a wide variety of influences to create their own sound which continues to influence musicians to this day. The film also covers the more common themes of drugs and the fallout of the group. Included here are interviews from Martin Scorsese (who shot the group’s 1978 concert film The Last Waltz), Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Peter Gabriel, Van Morrison, and others.

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Slay the Dragon

  • Title: Slay the Dragon
  • IMDb: link

“That’s an astonishing manipulation of democracy.”

Slay the Dragon DVD reviewGerrymandering, the process of taking advantage of redrawing voting districts to favor one political party’s interests, has been around for two centuries. Slay the Dragon takes a hard look at the Republican change in 2010 led by REDMAP which used modern technology to take the practice to extremes to remap states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin in ways that led to the disenfranchisement of voters. Rising to meet the challenge were groups created by private citizens focused on reclaiming their power by fighting the process of gerrymandering on both state and federal levels.

Directors Chris Durrance and Barak Goodman do a fairly good job of explaining both the practice of gerrymandering and its effects. While primarily looking at how private citizens such as Katie Fahey worked to organize against the practice, the documentary details the Tea Party’s wins in the 2010 election and the subsequent redrawing of the districts were just the first steps in a conservative agenda that included undercutting unions and suppressing voters prior to the 2016 general election.

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The Social Dilemma

  • Title: The Social Dilemma
  • IMDb: link

The Social Dilemma movie reviewThe Social Dilemma takes a hard look at social media and how it is changing the way we live. With testimony from experts who worked at various social media cornerstones, the film examines how social media takes advantage of its users and distorts the world around them as it delves into social media affecting behavior and how someone can take advantage of the complex algorithms to affect change on a global scale.

Director Jeff Orlowski‘s documentary is a warning about how social media is changing us in both expected and unexpected ways as greed and capitalism continue to push development forward into even more questionable territories. How social media apps play on emotion to keep you online and play into reinforcing your own beliefs in creating separate clusters of people with their own facts, how social media has raised a generation who tie their own self worth to the likes of strangers online whose suicide rate is astronomically higher than the generation before it, and the idea of how easily these apps can be used to take advantage of the misinformed for nefarious purposes such as changing the outcome of an election are all truly frightening.

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Artemis Fowl

  • Title: Artemis Fowl
  • IMDb: link

Artemis Fowl movie reviewIn an age where every comic book and young adult novel is scooped up by a studio hoping to build the next big movie franchise, you can see why something like Artemis Fowl would be appealing. Originally planned for the turn of the millennium, the project spent nearly two decades in development hell at various studios before Disney was eventually able to heavily adapt the events from the popular novels to film. Maybe they should have taken a little longer.

Artemis Fowl is a mess. We’re introduced to the brilliant teenager Artemis Fowl, Jr. (Ferdia Shaw), we know he’s smart as the script continually reminds us, who discovers his father’s (Colin Farrell) stories about magic and fairies are all true after Sr. is abducted by a mysterious figure who hopes to trade him for a mystical artifact she hopes Jr. can find (despite the boy having no practical knowledge of his father’s secret life). Thrown into the mix are Lara McDonnell as a sort of elvish soldier and a giant dwarf played by Josh Gad who narrates the film by explaining events to authorities (often breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience) in a vain attempt to keep the runaway train on its tracks.

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