The nightly news is horrific. Zelensky has emerged as a hero leading a nation of heroes. Even if you never pray... pray now.
So this 2020 movie has received a lot of award nominations, and this year it is a contender for Best Original Song at the Oscars. Performed by Reba McEntire, the song WAS good. Too bad the movie didn't live up to the song's inspiring lyrics. The plot was pretty much non-existent: Desperate, filthy and toothless, a young addict named Molly (played by Mila Kunis) turns up on her mother's doorstep looking for help. Glenn Close's character (Molly's mother) is rendered slightly unsympathetic by her own finely honed survival instinct, but that seems like a script problem. Whether Molly has really finally hit rock bottom creates the sole thread of believable suspense throughout the movie. All other questions of motivation and character, including those of Mom, and especially the cardboard cut-outs of father and step-father, generate a shrug. We wonder, or at least we want to, why Molly's 15th rehab will be different. I wasn't sure she was doing "the work," and, worse, I wasn't convinced that the movie makers knew the answer to that question, either. And at the end of the movie, I wasn't terribly invested in understanding what about Molly had changed on the inside. A good song, yes, but the movie was a little pitchy.
