Driving home from the theater last night, I saw something really quite lovely. Turning down a curved street, and entering my line of vision for no longer than a second, I saw two people in conversation sitting on a ledge outside of a hotel. The pair—one a man, his back to me, and the other a woman, a warm smile on her face and a soulful tenderness in her eyes—each sat with their legs pulled up to their chests, almost as if they were mirrors of each other.
They were experiencing a genuinely human moment, captured through the film of my windshield. It was a silent movie. It ran for 1.5 seconds or less. But that snippet had more life, energy, and emotion than every shot in Solo: A Star Wars Story put together.
Now, you may be thinking: what do two people sitting on a ledge in real life have to do with a multi-billion dollar franchise’s sequel/prequel? In execution: nothing.
The HBO film Fahrenheit 451, adapted from the book by Ray Bradbury, begins with a quote attributed to the Bill of Rights: “It is better to be happy than free.” The attribute is erroneous. It’s fake news. (See what they’re doing here?)
Ramin Bahrani adapts the Bradbury novel to address new media, and this fake quote encapsulates the central mission statement of the vague government body in the film. This is a government who tasks fire fighters with burning books instead of putting out fires, the aim being to Continue reading Fahrenheit 451 (2018) Movie Review→
RBG is an exceptionally standard biographical documentary. It outlines the career and legacy of United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, from her early days studying law at Harvard and Columbia to her continuing efforts as a feminist symbol and legal influencer cheekily nicknamed the “Notorious RBG.”
The CNN-produced doc makes little effort to hide its partisan bias. The film opens with voiceover snippets from various right-wing news outlets that fiercely criticize Ginsburg. These clips are meant to Continue reading RBG (2018) Movie Review→
Wade Wilson, aka Deadpool, is a Canadian mercenary turned cancer victim who is presented with a cure via a branch of the Weapon X program. Turned into a mutant, Deadpool receives Wolverine’s healing factor, full-body deformity, and increasing mental instability. He often exercises psychopathic tendencies and suffers breaks from reality that manifest themselves as fourth-wall breaking banter. At his most stable, he is a member of X-Force or X-Men. At his most unhinged, he slaughters every superhero in the Marvel universe.
Deanna (Melissa McCarthy) and her husband Dan (Matt Walsh) are dropping off their daughter Maddie (Molly Gordon) at the sorority house for her final year of college. Maddie isn’t out of the car more than a minute before Dan informs Deanna that he wants a divorce and is selling the house.
This instigates Deanna to go back to school and finish her degree, which she had to abandon 20 years earlier when she got pregnant. Now she will be attending college in the same graduating class as Continue reading Life of the Party (2018) Movie Review→
I have very little to say about Breaking In. My main takeaway is that it is the definition of average. A conventional home invasion movie that takes itself more seriously than a home invasion movie of this sort ought, there is little to chew on here.
The story is thin enough that the runtime can be graciously under 90 minutes, but it is also thin enough to make 90 minutes feel too long. Shaun Russell (Gabrielle Union) takes her two children to a hideaway estate in upstate Wisconsin. It is the high-security home of her deceased father, who had some vague ties to criminal Continue reading Breaking In (2018) Movie Review→
Every year, I like playing a little game of Summer box office predictions. The rules are simple (and the game is played officially at Trivia Club and /Film, if you’re interested): Pick which 10 films, and three dark horse candidates, that you think will gross the most money domestically during the Summer movie season.
This year, the game’s outlets are shifting their definition of what the Summer movie season is in order to include Avengers: Infinity War. Avengers was initially slated for release on the first weekend of May, but Disney pushed its release up a week.
For the sake of this article, I’m just going to keep the traditional definition of Summer movie season, which is the first weekend of May to Labor Day weekend. It kind of makes the predicting harder, given that Avengers is almost certainly going to be the highest grossing movie of the year, and if the film were included in this competition it would be number one with a bullet.
All the same, this year’s crop of Summer movies is pretty strange from a box office standpoint.
Dean Devlin is a producer known for work on big budget, blockbuster action movies: Independence Day, Godzilla (1998), etc. Last year, he made his big screen directorial debut with the heavily panned Geostorm, which itself was a big action film aiming to be a blockbuster.
With Bad Samaritan, Devlin returns to feature directing. Only, this time the subject matter is a lower-budget dramatic thriller. Sean Falco (Robert Sheehan) is a wannabe photographer who works a valet business with his buddy Derek (Carlito Olivero). To make ends meet, however, the two of them run scams using Continue reading Bad Samaritan (2018) Movie Review→
In Overboard, Kate (Anna Faris), a mother of three who is working two jobs in order to support her family and pay her way through nursing school, is hired to clean the yacht of a spoiled, wealthy man who has never worked a day in his life. The man is Leonardo (Eugenio Derbez), and he is about to take over his ailing father’s business.
The creative pairing of Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson have produced three feature films: Resolution, Spring, and now The Endless. I will admit that I have not seen their previous two films (although, they made a short for the anthological horror sequel V/H/S: Viral that I did not care for).
Without the context of their previous work, and not really knowing anything about The Endless prior to seeing it, I found the experience of the film to be Continue reading The Endless (2018) Movie Review→
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