Tag: Drama

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: MANCHESTER BY THE SEA – slow burning, heartbreaking character-driven drama with hugely affecting performances all round.

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Image result for manchester by the sea poster

I had planned on watching Manchester By The Sea, written and directed by Kenneth Lonergen, last night anyway, but feeling somewhat shamed by a buddy’s implication that I watch too many genre movies, I could not waver on that plan!  As soon as I heard Casey Affleck had produced a performance worthy of acclaim, culminating in an Oscars nomination for Best Actor, I was intrigued.  Wee Affleck?  In a role that Matt Damon was originally set to play?  But then I suddenly remembered that this wasn’t the first time he’d been nominated, and sure enough, a trip to Wikipedia shows that he was nominated as a Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

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Movie Review: SHUT IN – a good performance from Naomi Watts overshadowed by the spectacularly bad “WTF?” reveal.

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Image result for shut in poster

If there’s one single thing about movie marketing I absolutely cannot stand, it’s the bait and switch.  It usually happens when either the studio knows they have a dog on their hands through test marketing, or they find themselves with a movie on their hands that defies a target market.  I remember there was a big stink from fans of the 2012 movie John Carter, based on the John Carter of Mars series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, because of a weak and ineffective marketing campaign.  The trouble here was with the movie, a wretched piece of badly written drivel.  When movies can spend close to $100 million alone on marketing, sometimes a movie is just so poor that the studio cuts its losses and declines to throw good money after bad.  An example of not knowing who to market to is the recent movie A Monster Calls, with an ad campaign that tried to appeal to the same crowd as those who loved The Iron Giant and The BFG.  Last night’s movie, Shut In, is a classic example of marketing bait and switch.

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Movie Review: I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER – welcome return of Max Records, but this small town dark drama is almost overpowered by an early plot twist.

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For me, the most notable thing about I Am Not A Serial Killer (other than the horrendous title) is that fact that it’s headlined by Max Records, the child star of Spike Jonze’s excellent 2009 adaptation of Where The Wild Things are.  I remember seeing The Sitter theatrically, but completely forgot about it, and by extension the fact that Records made another movie.  His headlining role surprised me because the movie also stars Christopher Lloyd – regardless of who the movie is actually about, Records wouldn’t necessarily be the first name in the credits with Lloyd also in the production, so it would have been great to have been a fly on the walls of those contract negotiations.  In the end, it doesn’t really matter – Records absolutely deserves his billing.

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