Category: Movie Reviews

Movie Review: THE WHOLE TRUTH – a mostly uninteresting courtroom drama with a twist! Unfortunately, that’s not so interesting either.

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The Whole Truth is a curiosity to me, I have to say.  The courtroom drama, which stars Keanu Reeves (John Wick, The Matrix), Jim Belushi, Renee Zellweger, Gabriel Basso, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Dr. Who, and the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror, season 3), was directed by Courtney Hunt, whose sole movie to this point, Frozen River, garnered her an Academy nom for best original screenplay in 2008, and written by Hollywood veteran Nicholas Kazan, an Academy nominee in his own right for 1990’s Reversal of Fortune.  There are a number of reasons why this movie failed to engage me, the least of which was a super-late night viewing.

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Movie Review: A STREET CAT NAMED BOB – this true story of a recovering addict and his cat is sweet, surprisingly deep, and genuinely uplifting

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In my review of Einstein’s God Model, I described myself as an agnostic skeptic – I’ll add cynic to the list. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.  When people do bad things, my philosophy is that the underlying nature of the human race is deceitful, false, and hurtful, and I rarely get surprised.  Conversely, when people do good things, I tend to want to know what their true motivations are.  Like Holden Caulfield, I don’t put a lot of faith in most people.  Having said that, I try to keep my cycnism in check – I like people, and I also believe that cynicism is a personal philosophy that, like others, could – and should – be self-challenged.  This is how I choose to start a review of heartwarming British drama A Street Cat Named Bob?

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Movie Review: EINSTEIN’S GOD MODEL – decent premise, but the story is far too big for the limitations of its low budget

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Confession time: I’m an agnostic skeptic.  A perennial fence sitting, no-side choosing unbeliever.  It pertains to science as well as religion.  I’m squarely on the side of empirical data.  If you can’t show me something that exists, all your anecdotal, mathematical models, and theories of the mechanics of the universe isn’t going to sway me.  But I’m conflicted because I LOVE all that stuff.  I love quantum physics, I love the supernatural, and I can because I’m no “expert” in either of them-  meaning, I can enjoy the concepts and mentally consign them to the sci-fi and horror realms I enjoy without having to invest any “faith”.  Einstein’s God Model, a low budget sci fi feature written and directed by Philip T. Johnson, attempts to tell a story combining theoretical physics and the afterlife – how could I not be drawn to it?

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Movie Review: XX – selling itself on the gender of the moviemakers, this horror anthology barely rises above mediocre

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Horror anthology movies go back decades.  It’s true, kids!  Further back in time than the V/H/S franchise, there was Tales From The Darkside The Movie, a little while before then, Creepshow – a decade before that Amicus played around with Tales From The Crypt, and The House That Dripped Blood.  The format has been around for a long time, and has its origins in the famous EC Comics of the 1950s.  It’s likely to be with us for some time too, but the stories have evolved over the years.  I just finished watching one of the latest such movies, XX – billed with the header “Four Deadly Tales By Four Killer Women”.  What’s this, a feminist horror anthology?

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Movie Review: KONG: SKULL ISLAND – mostly enjoyable franchise reboot, but lack of strong characters don’t do the fantastic visuals any favours

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I don’t know exactly how old I was when I saw the original King Kong, but I couldn’t have been any older than five.  I recall with reasonable vividness sitting in front of our black and white TV in the Springburn neighbourhood of Glasgow, Scotland, absolutely enthralled by the sheer spectacle, the charm, of the 1933 production that heralded a new era of moviemaking.  There is likely nobody in the western world who doesn’t know King Kong – even if they have never seen the original, Kong exists among the pantheon of famous movie monsters, along with Godzilla, Freddy Kruger, Jason Voorhees, Frankenstein, and Dracula, to name a few.  Kong has a place in our hearts because he reminds us as ourselves.  Possessed of a humanistic sense of justice and primal strength, Kong represents us – stripped of the daily bullshit and phoniness that we all succumb to, Kong is us laid bare, and mostly shat on by the kind of assholes we have to deal with now and then.  Too high and mighty an opinion for you?  Not a problem – Kong also works as a spectacle monster movie, even when the scripts are no good, the nature of the beast guarantees battles between colossal creatures to feed the eyes.

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