The Ray Pletcher Blog

   My film review of the classic 1990 film The Hunt for Red October starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name.    

 Who doesn't enjoy watching Christmas movies? Whether its Miracle on 34th Street or Die Hard millions of people watch Christmas movies every year. I have created a vlog post where I give my list of what I think are 5 great Christmas movies. This list is not meant to be the 5 best Christmas movies of all time but rather 5 great Christmas movies that are worth watching at Christmas time.     

Tom Cruise always delivers in his movies and Jack Reacher is certainly no exception. At the age of fifty when this movie came out, Cruise certainly shows no signs of slowing down in this riveting mystery thriller. The film of course opens up with the terrifying execution of five random citizens by a trained sniper and the police conclude that James Barr is their man. District Attorney Rodin (Richard Jenkins) and Detective Emerson (David Oyelowo) urge Barr to confess and they will let him take his pick between a life sentence in prison and death row. Barr’s response, three words written on a piece of paper, GET JACK REACHER. Who’s Jack Reacher? That’s exactly the question Rodin and Emerson find themselves with and Emerson being the excellent investigator who determined Barr was the sniper responsible for the killings is quick to learn that Jack Reacher was a seasoned army investigator who up and quit two years ago and has dropped off the grid ever since. Rodin wants to know how th...

RETIRED EXTREMELY DANGEROUS that is the meaning behind the title of the movie RED an action-adventure thriller starring Bruce Willis which does plenty to live up to the title. This adventure follows Frank Moses, a retired black-ops agent played with great skill by Bruce Willis who lives a peaceful albeit boring lifestyle who has started up a long-distance romance with an insurance check girl in Kansas City named Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker) who is paid an unexpected visit by high-tech assassins who want his blood. After tearing the team to shreds Moses sets out to save the girl of his affections from the forces of his enemy and reassemble his old allies to aid him in his mission of survival and to unravel the mysterious circumstances he has found himself in. Moses learns that his pursuers are responsible for the death of a New York Times reporter and that they are systematically killing off a certain group of individuals for a mysterious reason which he with the help of his team work...

James Cameron masterfully manages to bring to life the horrifying event of the sinking of the RMS Titanic to its viewers by giving audiences two fictional characters to follow to create a psychological link in the viewer’s mind to that fateful night. Those two characters are the stars of a love story that just so happens to take place on the Titanic’s last voyage. Leonardo Dicaprio plays Jack Dawson a poor yet very charming painter who falls in love with the wealthy seventeen-year-old Rose Bukater played by Kate Winslet. The love story between the two definitely isn’t one without conflict as both reside on different areas of the social spectrum and Rose is engaged to be married to the snobbish selfish businessman Cal Hockley played by Billy Zane and Rose’s mother played by Frances Fisher pushes her daughter to no end to stay in line and keep the family fortune alive. Amidst the romantic drama that plays out the captain is pressured to get more headlines to end his career with a...

  Have you ever been stuck in summer school before? Well, that is what the 1987 picture Summer School starring Mark Harmon is all about and more.Summer School follows Freddy Shoop played by Mark Harmon, a high school gym teacher, who is tasked with teaching remedial high school English over the summer. At first, Shoop copes with not getting to go on vacation with his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend by just going exclusively on “field trips” with his students until his boss gets wind of it. Then the fun and games are brought to a halt and he is fired unless he can get all his students to pass an upcoming important English standardized test.  Summer School may not have a pitch-perfect script, but it is one wild ride that delivers the laughs and the emotional beats that you need to deliver a fantastically entertaining motion picture. Shoop is in charge of a bunch of reckless remedial English students who are all reckless in the full meaning of the word. The students p...