Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone in “Aloha ” 2015. Neal Preston

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Yes, “Aloha” was released back in 2015, and a lot has happened since then, don’t you know. I’m only seeing and sharing it now because I’ve fallen in serious “like” with Emma Stone’s eyes, Bradley Cooper’s career and the political world.

We find ourselves in Hawaii, where this film was made, where real lava flows and entire suburban neighborhoods went up in flames.

In these happier days, we’re watching a famous military contractor (Cooper) who has just returned to the fabled islands of palm trees and surfers and guitar strummers and who gets in trouble with two different women.

This movie reconnects him with a long-ago love (Rachel McAdams) who is (are you ready for this?) married to the pilot (John Krasinski, “A Quiet Place”) of the plane that just delivered him. Now, that sort of thing happens so often, I’m surprised that an Oscar-winning writer-director like Cameron Crowe just stumbled on such an idea.

I guess this sort of thing happens, but it’s being sold as a set-up for a love story, which is OK because American women are in the market for a good love story. As long as it’s a really, really good story, well acted by beautiful, talented people like Emma Stone, who plays a gorgeous Air Force “Watchdog” for a mysterious guy (Bill Murray — yes, that Bill Murray, who used to be on Saturday Night Live and plays here a wealthy, suspicious space entrepreneur).

Stone is (are you ready for this?) a very blonde native Hawaiian (?) who is part Chinese, part Hawaiian and part God knows what else. She deserved a rewrite and a better agent. Since 2015, she has landed better parts.

Now as you know the now-famous movie gunslinger Alec Baldwin has some gun trouble, but here he is aboard this group in 2015, as a grumpy general. Baldwin went on to bigger real life trouble and finally had redemption in 2024.

In fact, almost everyone in this film has gone on to better things.

Just pay attention to the facts at hand. A suspicious spacecraft, with an even more suspicious load aboard, is in this script, as an important part of the U.S. space program in Honolulu, Hawaii. I’m betting that you didn’t know such a strange program was going on in Hawaii. I didn’t either, but it all unfolds happily in the end with everybody happy … except for Bill Murray running away down Waikiki Beach. Thanks for listening.

“Aloha” streams on Netflix and is rated PG-13, in case that’s important to you at a time when an election will change America, including Hawaii, forever.

J.P. Devine of Waterville is a former stage and screen actor.

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J.D. Souther, the singer and songwriter who co-wrote twangy yet debonair hits for the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt that helped define the Southern California country-rock sound of the mid-1970s, has died. He was 78.

His death was confirmed by a representative for the Eagles, who said Souther died at his home in New Mexico without specifying a cause or saying when he died. The musician was due to launch a tour next week in Phoenix.

Souther — whose best-known songs included the Eagles’ “New Kid in Town” and “Heartache Tonight,” Ronstadt’s “Faithless Love” and his own “You’re Only Lonely,” which gave him a top 10 pop hit in 1979 — was also an actor with roles on TV’s “Thirtysomething” and “Nashville” and in movies including “My Girl 2” and “Postcards From the Edge.” Among the other acts who recorded his songs were Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, George Strait and the Dixie Chicks.

In January, Souther performed onstage with the Eagles at Inglewood’s Kia Forum, where Don Henley introduced him as part of the “tightknit community of songwriters and singers” that he and the Eagles’ Glenn Frey would turn to in the ’70s “when we would get stuck on a song or we’d try to start some new material.” He added that Souther was partially responsible for three of the Eagles’ five No. 1 singles, which also included “Best of My Love,” a tender, harmony-drenched ballad about a guy “lying in bed, holding you close in my dreams / Thinking about all the things that we said, and coming apart at the seams.”

John David Souther was born in Detroit but grew up in Amarillo, Texas, where he played jazz drums before taking up the guitar. He moved to Los Angeles in the late ’60s and met Frey, with whom he formed the short-lived duo Longbranch Pennywhistle; the group built a following at West Hollywood’s Troubadour and released a debut album in 1969 before breaking up the following year.

Souther then launched a solo career while Frey took a gig backing up Ronstadt, whom Souther was dating; Henley joined Frey in Ronstadt’s band along with guitarist Bernie Leadon and bassist Randy Meisner, which laid the groundwork for the four eventually to form the Eagles. David Geffen, whose label Asylum issued the Eagles’ first LP in 1972, “sort of” asked Souther to join the group, Souther told The Times in 2008.

“I considered it, and we rehearsed a set and played it for David [and Eagles managers] Elliot Roberts and Ron Stone at the Troubadour one afternoon,” Souther recalled. “Truthfully, it took all of a minute afterward to say, no, the band was exceptional as it was, and I was quite happy to stay home and write. I think they were relieved, as well.”

In 1973, Souther teamed with Chris Hillman of the Byrds and Richie Furay of Buffalo Springfield to form the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band, which made a pair of well-regarded country-rock albums. Souther resumed his solo work with 1976’s “Black Rose,” which featured a duet with Ronstadt in “If You Have Crying Eyes,” and 1979’s “You’re Only Lonely,” whose title track topped Billboard’s adult-contemporary chart and went to No. 7 on the all-genre Hot 100.

James Taylor, left, and J.D. Souther perform in Atlanta in 1981.

(Rick Diamond / Getty Images)

After 1984’s “Home by Dawn” failed to match that commercial performance — the LP was “that unfortunate curiosity that’s later called a ‘critical success,’” he said in a Times interview in 1990, “meaning nobody bought it” — Souther took a break from recording, discouraged in part by the music industry’s growing reliance on MTV. “I wasn’t a huge fan of music videos because I thought they encouraged an excess of production as opposed to a real focus on the heart of the music,” he told the New York Times in 2012.

Yet as a songwriter he scored a hit in 1989 with Henley’s MTV-approved “The Heart of the Matter,” which he penned with the Eagles star and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. That same year he appeared in his first movie, portraying a singer doing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” at a party in Steven Spielberg’s “Always.”

A two-time Grammy nominee and a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Souther — whose survivors include two sisters and a former wife and her daughter — later moved to Nashville and returned to record-making in 2008 with the jazzy “If the World Was You,” which he quickly followed with several more albums and a recurring part as a grizzled country music fixer on ABC’s soapy “Nashville.”

Asked what inspired him to start recording again, he told The Times, “I probably quit making records because I thought that making records was making me crazy. Turns out I was crazy anyway.”

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Transformers One beautifully tells a classic origin story between two legendary characters in the Transformers universe, Orion Pax and D-16, and their early friendship on their planet, Cybertron. If you somehow don’t know these names or the promoted premise, avoid the advertising and let it be a nice surprise, though you will probably guess before the reveal. The dramatic story buildup, the twists and betrayals, and the character revelations combined with the animation were all so good that I at one point had a tear or two rolling down my face, though there is plenty of action and comedy as well. Even without Peter Cullen voicing Optimus, this was One of the best Transformers movies I have ever seen.

Unlike the live-action Transformers of the last two decades, Transformers One is set entirely on their home planet, Cybertron, with no humans to take focus away from the Transformers (while this was not necessarily a bad thing in those movies, it is a nice change of pace). At first, our main protagonists do not have the ability to transform effectively making them lower-class citizens who are relocated to working long hours mining for Energon (their primary source of energy). Orion Pax has dreams of being more and his best friend D-16 joins Orion on his adventures, whether he likes it or not. After brief highs and lows, the pair venture out of the city, along with former/coworkers/reluctant allies B-127 and Elita, to the largely desolate planet looking for a lost artifact, but what they find changes their relationship, their status, and the fate of the whole planet.

The world-building story is amazing. If you have never seen anything Transformers-related, you will have no problem watching this movie. There are easter eggs and nods to the franchise, however there is enough exposition to be able to enjoy this as a stand-alone film, while at the same time it is not so much information that it feels too dense or overwhelming. A few plot points are predictable, even more so if you know the characters and/or have seen other movies (not just other Transformer movies). Nonetheless, this character-driven story is excellent and well told by the voice actors and animators.

Speaking of the voice actors, they were all good choices to play their respective characters. Chris Hemsworth plays Orion and Brian Tyree Henry plays D-16. Side note: Henry is the only main actor’s voice I didn’t recognize, but after looking at his filmography, I should have (he has been in two Godzilla/Kong films, The Eternals, and the Spiderverse movies). I immediately recognized Laurence Fishburne, and it made me happy that he got to say “The Matrix” quite a few times (not the same Matrix, obviously, but it was still fun to hear). For the second movie in a row (following The Killer’s Game), there is an MCU reunion since Scarlett Johansson plays Elita. And Keegan-Michael Key is hilarious as B-127.

Okay, enough stargazing. Overall, I really enjoyed this movie and would highly recommend it to all audiences of all ages. It is fun, thrilling, funny, and emotionally engaging. Even if you know where the story is headed (which is highly likely given the premise and promotion), the story is so well told that it still packs an emotional punch once it reaches its climax.

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