Review: ‘Goodnight Mommy’

GoodnightMommy_Poster

As opposed to unstoppable monsters or slashers or any sort of undead situation, “Goodnight Mommy” derives its terror and tension from horrific situations which could plausibly happen. People don’t have to be possessed by demons or chased by aliens or hunted by psychopaths, they can just have problems which manifest themselves in a way that is, to say the least, not healthy for everyone involved. Thick with an atmosphere of dread and some good old fashioned Fear and Loathing, this is a movie that unnerves well before it gets to anything really shocking, but then it does a little bit of that shocking, too. Well, dependent on your exposure to these types of movies, anyway.

The movie starts with Lukas and Elias, twin boys, alone, playing in fields and woods by their isolated home. When their mother comes home, her whole face is bandaged, with only her bloodshot eyes and mouth exposed, and the twins are immediately off put by her appearance. She explains that they need to keep the house dark and quiet as she recuperates, she acts very sternly when enforcing the rules, and she only refers to one of the two boys, all of which upsets them and makes them question whether or not this woman is actually their mother. Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Steve Jobs’

203827r1We’re all sick and tired of the same old biographical picture formula, right? It’s been done for years and we have seen it time and time again, regardless of whether the film’s subject is an athlete, a businessman, an inventor, an artist, it simply does not matter, we get the same thing over and over, which is to say, a “greatest hits” package of a person’s life, tracing their steps from childhood to as far as they can go, if not all the way to death. By shoving everything that happened to a person into a two to three hour movie means we just skim the surface, we get the superficial details, with very little insight, and then before we know it, the movie is all over. Might as well have just listened to music while reading a boring, by the numbers biography. But with “Steve Jobs,” this is not the case at all, a different tack has been taken, one that is very effective and which tells us more than the “birth to death” biopic could have told us.

Written by Aaron Sorkin and based on an authorized biography of the same name, “Steve Jobs” does not start with the person’s birth and childhood and work its way through his youth all the way to the end when he became one of the most popular people in the world through his work with Apple, but instead this movie cherry picks three very specific moments in the life of Steve Jobs and these three moments are actually quite similar, giving the movie a very interesting structure with which they were able to work in, and by limiting the scope of the story, Sorkin, director Danny Boyle and actor Michael Fassbender were all able to get way more out of this character and managed to tell the story of someone’s life without getting bogged down in all the extra details.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Bridge of Spies’

BridgeOfSpies_Poster

Based on a pretty amazing true story, “Bridge of Spies” is an old school style Cold War era thriller, a movie about spies and geopolitical tensions and the ominous specter of a full blown thermonuclear war threatening to break out at any moment, but more specifically it is about some of the hidden and secretive actions of rival governments, and also how these governments view the populace and use them to their own ends, and how the populace could in term actually find a way to use their governments.

James Donovan (Tom Hanks) is a successful insurance lawyer at a large law firm in New York City, and one day he shows up to work to find that he has been elected by seemingly every other lawyer in New York to be the defense counselor for Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), a man arrested and charged with multiple counts of espionage and accused of being a Soviet spy. Drawing the short straw, he in convinced rather easily that this is in the best interest of the justice system itself, as it needs to appear obvious to everyone that this accused Soviet spy is still getting the full benefit of the American constitution, and Donovan sets out defend this man, all the while suffering anger and vitriol from the public at large.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Crimson Peak’

CrimsonPeak_MoviePoster

From the director of such modern horror classics as the vampire film “Cronos” and the ghost story “The Devil’s Backbone” and the wickedly dark adult fairy tale “Pan’s Labrynth,” each one creepier and spookier and more violent than the last, comes a…costume drama of manners and high society? Well, in a way, yes absolutely, this is the case, but of course Guillermo Del Toro isn’t just making a turn of the century love story in the style of “Wuthering Heights” and “Pride and Prejudice,” he takes this classic genre of storytelling and infuses it with what he knows and does best, and that is telling the tale of monsters, whether they be vampires or ghosts or the scariest type of monster of them all, humans. This movie is about a woman having to choose between two suitors but also having to survive a bad situation which she doesn’t realize is bad until it is too late.

This is “Crimson Peak.”

Continue Reading …

Review: ’99 Homes’

99Homes_PosterHey Orlando, Florida, congrats on being in a movie starring Michael Shannon and Andrew Garfield! Too bad it’s because you had one of the biggest mortgage foreclosure markets in the country, but at least they filmed the movie there and brought some much needed economic support to the region. Oh…the movie was filmed in New Orleans, Louisiana? Well…better luck next time, I guess.

“99 Homes” is the story of a man trying to provide for his family during a very tough time, and what that man is willing to do to both himself and others so he can care for the ones he loves. It is one thing to sit in relative comfort and say to yourself that you have certain moral lines and ideas about ethics and legalities, it is another to have your comforts taken away and to be put into a dangerous position, one which makes you reevaluate what you may be willing to do.

Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is such a person, a honest and hardworking family man who finds himself without work due to the worldwide economic collapse of 2007, and due to the lack of work and lack of funds, finds himself on the receiving end of an eviction, one from his long time family home that is packed with memories, which makes it all that much harder. But now the bank owns the home, and working as a rep for the bank is asshole realtor Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), who spends all of his time pressuring families to sell their homes for a few thousand dollars so he can flip them, and if they don’t take the pay out, he just waits for the eventual eviction process and takes the home then.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Walk’

TheWalk_MoviePoster“The Walk” is an okay movie for about an hour or so, and then it ramps up and spends most of the second half of its runtime being great, though with caveats. To simply compare this to the excellent documentary “Man on Wire” is to miss the point of this dramatic recreation of events told first in memoir form and then via nonfiction film, as this is a movie all about making you feel what it is like to do what happens, how it would have been perceived, what it would have been like for the audience to be the man on the wire. It is a just a bit of a shame, then, that “The Walk,” in setting out to accomplish this, instead beats the audience about the head with its insistence on the feeling of creating such a feat, the transcendence that we are supposed to feel, shoving down our throats the notion that this is important. This could have been whittled down a bit and reshaped and it could have then become a great piece of moviemaking, but instead we have to settle for something that is merely good, with problems that it regularly threatens to overcome and rise above but never truly does.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Martian’

TheMartian_Poster“The Martian” is a movie about hope and survival, both from the perspective of a lone person and that of an entire community, banding together for a common goal, for a common good. It is not too much to say that this is a movie about the better, more positive aspects of humanity. Instead of focusing on our differences and our foibles, it is a story about setting that all aside to achieve something seemingly impossible. There is no “bad guy,” though there is still plenty of drama. Continuing on in the face of impossible odds and unbelievable circumstances, the power of human connections, this is one of the most positive, life affirming movies to come out this year.

It is the near future, and NASA has already completed a couple of manned missions to Mars, and this story starts with the third mission being scrubbed just a couple of weeks in because of unforseen inclement Martian weather. During the evacuation, botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is lost and presumed dead, as the crew leaves him behind in order to keep all of them from dying as well. But lo, Mark is not dead, but alive. Injured, but alive. He makes his way back to the habitat they have set up and he starts taking steps to stay alive as long as possible until he find a way off the planet, or until a rescue mission can be mounted back on Earth, which would take four years to complete. In the meantime, Mark is all alone on a desolate planet in which nothing grows. And he wants to live. Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Sicario’

sicario_ver8“This is the land of wolves.”

“Sicario” sets itself apart from other drug movies by taking such an intense, in your face, this is how it really is approach to the story; this is about the ongoing drug war here in the Americas, where an outrageous demand for an illegal product in one country results in a massive amount of casualties in another, where governments take whatever approach they can to try to minimize the damage, and in which there are people willing to do some very questionable things for an outcome that ultimately may, if they are lucky, only chip away at the overall problem. How far are you willing to go for something you truly believe in? What can you sacrifice, in terms of those you know and even just yourself? Hard questions have hard answers, and sometimes arriving at those answers ends up being worse than simply not knowing. Ignorance is bliss, but it also exacerbates the situation because how can a problem be fixed if one pretends it doesn’t exist?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials’

MazeRunnerTheScorchTrials_Poster“Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials” is the continuing adventures of Thomas and his friends in yet another dystopian future, this time set in a world that appears to have been burned to death by the sun (or what we call, Arizona). Did you want to see another film in which a ruined future is run by an evil entity which can only be brought down by the chosen one and his/her teenage friends, but only after several films which have no endings and instead only cliffhangers to questions no one cares about? Because boy oh boy do we have yet another one of these movies for you.

Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) wakes up to find himself in the hands of an organization hiding away deep in some giant warehouse or mountain or something, and he is reunited with his friends in a facility housing dozens of other teenagers. The one thing all these kids have in common is their immunity to some disease, as well as their dopiness when they blindly believe that this company simply wants to send them to some far away island where they can live out their days in paradise. Doesn’t that sound a lot like when your parents told you that your family pet was sent to a sweet farm upstate? Only Thomas and one other kid seem to question the motives of this company, and they set out to, yes you guessed it, save the day for everyone by exposing the company.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Grandma’

Grandma_Poster“Grandma” is the rare kind of movie, a film in which the lead character is a woman “of a certain age,” which is refreshing and wonderful because of the well documented plight of actresses in Hollywood and movies at large and how hard it is for women to get decent roles in good movies which amount to more than just “wife” or “girlfriend” or “prostitute.” Now of course this is a low budget film made outside of the system, but naturally often times the system must be fought from the outside, and this movie is a noble blow in that fight. Funny and heartfelt, this is exactly the kind of indie festival darling that has the power to break out and be seen by more people than expected, and deservedly so.

Widowed poet Elle (Lily Tomlin) starts her day by breaking up with her girlfriend of four months Olivia (Judy Greer) because Elle is incapable of saying whether or not she loves her, driving Olivia away, and before she can even recover from this trauma, she gets another surprise – her granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) shows up on her door asking for $630 so Sage can pay for an abortion later that evening. As Elle is broke and has no credit cards, she agrees to help Sage raise the money. And from there they go around town, visiting friends and acquaintances from whom they might be able to get the money they need. Meanwhile they naturally learn a little bit about each other and themselves along the way.Continue Reading …