Movies -- A Recap -- Part XXVIII -- The Wild Ride Edition

The Rescue is the completely amazing story of the 2018 rescue of the twelve Thai children and their soccer coach from a flooded cave in Thailand.  The footage that was captured is stunning, and the story behind it -- everyone coming together to save these stranded children -- was even more incredible.  The commitment shown by all the rescuers was inspiring.  Totally worth watching.

If you're in the mood for something funny and heartwarming, try Come as You Are.  Two guys in wheelchairs and one blind guy hire a driver (played by Gabourey Sidibe) to drive them to Montreal to visit a brothel that specializes in sex with disabled people.  This one is a win.

The King's Man is apparently the third in the Kingsman series.  I never saw the second one, but I can decidedly say that it is worse than the first, Kingsman: The Secret Service.  Despite that qualification, it is nevertheless a type of movie which it's hard to screw up too badly.  Here are the hallmarks: the story is usually slightly overly-complicated but nonetheless predictable, there's lots of shooting, there is some sort of love interest or flirtation, the good guys win.  This one fits the bill, but loses points because it takes itself just a little too seriously.

The Green Inferno is terrible.  I'm really only including it here so that you don't make same mistake I did and try to watch it.  I didn't even finish it, and I don't often give up on movies -- they're not that long generally, and I'm pretty willing to at least try to understand what a filmmaker was doing.  But this one was just ... bad.  It starts out okay, with some student activists who decide to head to the Amazon in an effort to save the rain forest.  It goes sideways with some characters that were too easy to hate.  It gets worse with gratuitous violence.  It completely goes off the rails with an inexplicable plot, and that's where I quit.

I heard about The Poseidon Adventure from Ira Glass during an episode of This American Life.  I wasn't sure about it, but after some of our recent successes with older movies (which are vastly better than most of the new junk that's out there), we decided to give it a try.  Count on the good ol' library to have a copy on DVD.  First of all, it has a spectacular cast.  Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine are probably the two most famous names, but you'll surely recognize Shelly Winters, Roddy McDowell, Jack Albertson, Red Buttons, and others.  In the movie, an ocean liner capsizes.  A gaggle of passengers, led by Gene Hackman with the help of a young boy who had thoroughly explored the ship try to find a way out before the ship goes down.  It's more intense and dark than I expected.  Just goes to show what kind of good stuff they jammed into those old movies!

Every Which Way But Loose is a wild ride if ever there was one.  Clint Eastwood plays one of two trouble-making brothers, sons of a spit-fire of an old lady who really was the star of the show, in my opinion.  Other than, that is, his pet orangutan named Clyde.  There is really no explanation for why Clyde is there, but he sure does add some comedic value to the film.  In truth, I fell asleep and missed probably the last 20 minutes, but I feel like that actually wasn't the important part of the movie, so I'm going to go ahead and include it on this list anyway, even though I have no idea what happened and can't tell you whether it's worth watching.