Apple TV+ – Page 3 – STREAMING MOVIE NIGHT

2024 Apple TV+

Rated: R

Length: 1 hr 48min

Action ~ Comedy

Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams, and Poorna Jagannathan.

“You take a job, you give your word, and that word is the measure of a man.”

George Clooney stars as a New York fixer called by a distressed woman in an upscale Manhattan Hotel room. She was given the number by a friend with the instructions only to call when you find yourself in a dire situation that puts you at odds with the law. She had picked up a young man downstairs in the hotel bar and taken him to her room. Now he is lying in his underwear in a pile of glass, bleeding and seemingly dead. Panicked she has called the number her friend had given her. The fixer who won’t give out his name (and for the purposes of this review shall be called Clooney) instructs her to stay put and don’t touch anything, not even a drink.

Clooney arrives and proceeds to question her and investigate the body lying on the floor. Before he can get started “Fixing” the situation, there is a knock at the door. Before they can address who it might be, someone enters and they both hide. Brad Pitt enters the room and after convincing them to come out, tells them he is the “Fixer” she called. “Fixers” don’t like to use their names so from here on out the second anonymous “Fixer” shall be called Pitt for this little review. As there is some confusion as to which fixer got called first and who is going to “Fix” the situation, Pitt points to the hidden camera in the corner of the ceiling and calls his boss.

She then explains to both fixers and the distressed woman, Margaret (Amy Ryan) who just happens to be The District Attorney of Manhattan, that they will all be involved in cleaning up the mess in her hotel. Clooney and Pitt reluctantly agree to work together and clean up Margaret and send her home with explicit instructions to not look back and “This never happened”. As they are cleaning up the young man and the mess Pitt discovers a backpack filled with 4 bundles of Heroin. Definitely a snag as they both realize that someone will be looking for the drugs and need to address that side of the situation.

What follows is a comedic action filled drama as Clooney and Pitt try to get rid of the body and the drugs. They soon realize through many twists and turns that nothing is as it seems, and they find themselves in the crosshairs of more sinister situations. Right up until the end it does keep you guessing as to what is really going on. It does get a little hard to follow as it twists and turns through the underworld of The Albanian and Croatian Crime Families. Clooney is what you expect, the seasoned professional jeering at the younger newbie Pitt. Reminds me of Ocean’s 11 and their chemistry in that movie.

At the very end as the credits roll there is a video clip of the hotel’s camera footage that really explains a lot and kind of ties the whole plot together. I nearly missed it as the “Next Movie” on the streaming service cut it off. I had to go back to catch the rest of it. So don’t miss that if you watch the movie. I liked it, I thought Clooney, Pitt, Ryan, Abrams, Jagannathan and Buric(who I remember from 2012) all did a great job. There was talk of a sequel but the Director called it off after Apple broke it’s word and contract by keeping the movie solely for their streaming site rather than releasing it theatrically.

Greedy and selfish if you ask me. On researching this movie I discovered the hidden secret on streaming services, they are not our friends. Kidnapping and selfishly holding Major Picture Releases for hostage under the guise of getting more subscribers. I have a ton of movies to review this week but I am going to make room for an Editorial on the Streaming Services and their practices.

So, yes I liked it but I don’t think I would watch it again. Just not that memorable. There are better Clooney-Pitt movies and given Apple’s greed I think I will boycott it and never watch it again. So if you want to watch it you have to subscribe to Apple TV+ for 10.99 a month, or get their free 7 day trial for new subscribers and then cancel within the 7 days. No charge and the movie is yours to watch in that period.

Two thumbs up, maybe……

2020 Sony Pictures

Rated: PG-13

Length: 1 hr 31min

Action ~ Drama ~ History ~ War

Directed by: Aaron Schneider

Starring: Tom Hanks, Stephen Graham, Rob Morgan, and Elisabeth Shue.

“The only thing more dangerous than the front lines was the fight to get there.”

Tom Hanks stars as US Navy Captain Ernest Krause commanding his first ship, The USS Keeling Destroyer codenamed “Greyhound”. The year is 1942 and Greyhound is assigned as an escort to a convoy of 37 merchant and troop ships headed for Liverpool, England. They have aircraft escorts as well, but they can only fly so far before they reach the point they have to fly back before they run out of fuel. Same thing on the other side of the Atlantic, the British escort fighter planes can only fly out to meet them so many miles. The middle of the Atlantic between these two Airplane boundaries where there is no Air protection from the Nazi U-Boat Submarines was called “The Black Pit”.

The Nazi U-Boat name was short for the German word “Unterseeboot”, meaning Under Sea Boat, shortened to U-Boat. It is the German term for Submarine. It was in The Black Pit where the German U-boats took advantage of the Convoys lack of air cover to hunt ships in the convoys. Without air support they were easy targets. They would typically travel in packs referred to as Wolfpacks to better hunt and sink Allied convoy ships. “Greyhound” details the 40 hour journey across the Black Pit by Captain Krause and his crew aboard the USS Keeling. As one of the four escort ships they encounter numerous U-boats and fight to destroy them and keep the convoy safe.

It is a stress filled, adrenaline fueled 40 hours fighting off ruthless U-boat attacks from every direction. There is little time for eating and no time for sleeping during the highly dangerous passage. Tom Hanks does an excellent job of portraying the Captain on his first mission across the Black Pit, displaying all the various emotions a first time Captain put into that precarious situation must have felt. The loss of men and ships weighing heavily on the man assigned to keep losses from happening. Stephen Graham also does a good job of portraying Lieutenant Commander Charlie Cole. You might remember him as “Baby Face Nelson” in Public Enemies(2009) or as “Tony Pro” Provenzano in “The Irishman”(2019), he has been in a lot of movies.

Elisabeth Shue plays Captain Krause’s girlfriend but you only see her in the very beginning of the movie before he departs out to sea. I thought it was a really great depiction of what it must have been like to cross the Atlantic during WWII. It is a nail-biter that will keep you on the edge of your seat as U-boats seem to come out of every direction to hunt and kill. It is based on the novel The Good Shepherd by C. S. Forester. Although not a true story, it is a pretty accurate account of the crossing by hundreds of Convoys during WWII. During the course of the war there were 3,500 ships carrying millions of tons of cargo sunk. 72,200 souls were lost forever on those ships.