Tag: Drama

Movie Review: PASSENGERS – limp romantic drama/sci fi mashup not even Lawrence and Pratt can save.

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passengers

Chances are, if you went to see Passengers based on the previews alone, you’d have gone in expecting a sci-fi thriller with a solvable mystery at its core.  The movie, which stars fan favourites Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games trilogy) and Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World) certainly looks that way from the minute or so of carefully edited clips that you get.  The giant, somewhat dark looking spaceship in deep space, the two leads running around while things go to hell – and why are they the only two to wake up?!  So, yeah, if that was what you were expecting, I bet like me, you came out of the theater disappointed.

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Movie Review: SWISS ARMY MAN – movie’s heartfelt core almost cancelled out by quirk overdose

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swiss-army-man

I don’t typically dismiss a movie based on a trailer, and I wouldn’t say I’m particularly prescient about a movie based on a trailer either, but when I caught the trailer for Swiss Army Man, I balked.  I remember coming away from it thinking, whaaaaat? and probably wasn’t alone.  But I generally like Paul Dano’s characters, and while I can take or leave Daniel Radcliffe, I’m impressed with his continuing efforts to escape the career event horizon known as Harry Potter, so I figured I would see it at one point.  Last night was that point.

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Movie Review: ARRIVAL – Sci Fi with a strong emotional core, and satisfying payoff at the end.

On By ANDREW HOPEIn Movie Reviews2 Comments

arrival

This year’s Hopes Thanksgiving Movie was markedly different to last year’s choice – Spectre – and more enjoyable for a variety of reasons, but not entirely successful.  I’ll start by saying that I’m a huge Denis Velleneuve fan – his last four movies (including Arrival) have shown a real sense of diversity both in content and tone, and I consider that to be the mark of a confident director.  I’m eagerly anticipating his Bladerunner sequel – as I said in my reviews of Enemy and Sicario, I can’t think of many directors out there right now that I’d be as excited to see directing it.

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Movie Review: HACKSAW RIDGE – surprisingly lightweight everywhere, but the war scenes are typically intense Gibson set-pieces

On By ANDREW HOPEIn Movie Reviews4 Comments

hacksaw0001

In these days of keyboard #outrage, it’s easy to be shamed by association, and even by not taking a public position against certain things or people.  The single-mindedness of the insulated social justice warriors of the internet draws crude inference from expressed lack of opinion, drawing associations where none are present.  I’ve seen it on Facebook recently where if one does not publicly condemn Donald Trump or Brexit, you must, therefore, stand for them and all the terrible things associated.  It’s a divisiveness that is nothing but self-serving.  I haven’t been a victim of this, but I read a very brief review of Hacksaw Ridge the other day that went along the lines of “if you pay to see this movie, you’re supporting the racist, misogynist views of Mel Gibson”.  This guilt-by-even-tenuous-association is disgusting, but it speaks more of the mindset of the “writer” than it does of the other party.

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Movie Review: I ORIGINS – nice performance by Michael Pitt, but the movie lacks the courage of its conviction.

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i-origins-movie-review

There’s a somewhat interesting story behind I Origins – the movie itself, not necessarily the movie’s story.  Mike Cahill, writer and director, unable to resolve story issues during development phase of his follow up movie to Another Earth, essentially scrapped the draft and turned to writing, instead, an origin story for his original concept.  Hoping it would allow him to address the story issues of the first draft, I Origins was produced as a prequel to the main concept, which was set up at Fox Searchlight sometime in late 2015.

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