The Conversation

Gene Hackman plays a private surveillance investigator on the top of his game. He pulls a high-paying job, but becomes suspicious that his client is planning to murder the subjects he's spying on. That puts him into an interesting moral situation, questioning whether he should intervene, or just do his job.

Color Me Kubrick

This was a fascinating situation based mostly on actual events where a broken down failed artist in London started telling random people in artsy bars that he was Stanley Kubrick. And since the real Kubrick was such a recluse, there were enough people that didn't know what he actually looked like, so a lot of people bought it. He used it to get free drinks and dinners and entry to posh events. This ending wraps up a little too fast and eneventully for my taste, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Clean and Sober

This was a very interesting situation, but like Coming home, I think the ending wrapped itself up too quickly. I liked the story arch in the beginning. Whereas most stories begin with the lead character in a comfortable status quo until the inciting incident begins their journey. Michael Keaton starts out just about as low as he can get, an alcoholic coke addict with a dead overdosed girl in his bed, who had recently embezzled and lost $90,000 from his brokerage firm. It sets up a very interesting situation. But then as the movie nears the 115 minute point the story seems to take a quick look at it's watch and decide to go ahead and wrap things up.

Coming Home

In this story an officer is sent off to battle in the Vietnam war. His wife stays home and volunteers at the VA hospital. Over the time that he's gone, she ends up falling into an affair with a paraplegic veteran partially out of pity. It sets up an interesting situation. When the husband returns he quickly finds out about it, and understandably freaks out. But then they explain the situation, apologize, and tell him to calm down. And he does.

I was annoyed at how easily he calmed down. The movie spends an hour and a half building up this situation, which then crumbles to pieces and falls into a nice orderly pile almost immediately.