Reviews

The lead actors in Nature of Love are terrible. They are terribly miscast for their roles, and totally unbelievable. The male lead is supposed to be a famous outdoorsman but comes across as a "Hey bro!" surfer dude who merely reads his lines without any acting. The female character apparently has never heard of the internet and so attends a resort where she is surprised by everything she sees. The lead actress comes across as a cross between a Valley Girl and Lucille Ball -which is a fairly unlikable combination. And she has a body that is completely unsuited for the outdoorsy woman she is supposed to be morphing into. If you cut her, she would bleed gravy. In my opinion, she was the least toned and least attractive female in all the scenes at the resort.

It seemed completely unbelievable right from the start that a bored, wooden outdoorsman and a clueless, unintelligent city girl with too much makeup would fall in love. And as the film progressed, there was zero chemistry between them. Indeed, this was the rare Hallmark film in which both my wife and I disliked both lead characters.

In one scene, with spectacular scenery, the couple is canoeing on a lake. But they are using wooden paddles, as if this is the 1950's. Out nationally-known outsdoorsman puts only two inches of the tip of the paddle in the water as he rows. Even the lead female character, a city girl who has never before held an oar, rows better than he does.

In another scene, the lead characters prepare to ride a zip-line that is sloping upwards?? Apparently, for convenience, the scene was filmed at the end-station of the zip-line rather than at the starting station of the zip-line. I mean, c'mon!

Before their film-ending kiss, the characters are planning to hike the Appalachian Trail together. I hiked 1,300 miles on the Appalachian Trail one summer and it is completely unbelievable to me that these characters would last 10 days on the AT. Indeed, the female lead would not last 10 miles. With equal realism, they might as well plan to compete in the Olympics in the 100 meter sprint. Look at the models in a Patagonia catalog and compare them to the creampuff characters in this film. Apparently, the director never thought to do that.

Beautiful scenery, but the script, casting, acting and lack of authenticity make the Nature of Love a very bad film experience -even when judged on a Hallmark curve.

The contrast is so stark: the trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi which preceded a showing of Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2.

The latest installment of Star Wars has the same formula - 3-5 main protagonists, fighter ships zipping around shooting with the same sound effects and the same universe-defining concepts - the Force, an evil empire. How boring, how been-there-done-that.

** Possible spoilers***

Then GOTG, Vol 2 come on the screen. We meet a living planet named Ego and a highly-evolved alien race called the Sovereign and a super-empath named Mantis. We get a glimpse of the Watchers - a immensely-powerful alien race that observes but does not intervene. We learn the back-story of Nebula, who suffered amputations to her body that were replaced by cybernetic prostheses. We learn more about the Ravagers - both the internal gang politics on one ship and the loosely-organized network of galactic pirates that they have become. We see the unrestrained use of a kind of weapon (Rondu's arrow) that is original - we have never seen this combination of weapon attributes before.

And all this cosmic fantasy is leavened with familiar 80's music and references to Sam and Diane on Cheers and a way-cute baby Groot character and a humorous shtick involving a character named Taserface and the shock of Drax's lack of a verbal filter.

GOTG has the advantage of drawing from deep funds of creative ideas that are in over 50 years of Marvel comic books. Thousands of those comic book ideas were not-so-good (or downright bad) and will never again see the light of day but there were also hundreds of good fantasy concepts and character ideas. And Marvel Studios seems to have a combination of people and production values that is able to consistently turn out high-quality movie product.

The GOTG universe (and MCU)is exciting - rich in imagination with a wide-open creative future. In contrast, the Star Wars cupboard seems bare. An endless loop of fighter spacecraft battles, light sabers and taverns populated by weird aliens.

J L Family Ranch, or J L Ranch, is a horrible money, even as judged by Hallmark TV movie. It is bad in almost every way that a movie can be bad.

Jon Voigt, who is apparently too old to move or act, begins to understand that there is a legal threat to his ownership of his family ranch. What follows is a long series of emotionless, whispered conversations between various family members and with other townspeople. A variety of side plots are introduced concerning daughters, grandchildren, etc. We meet Voigt's lifelong enemy, played by James Caan. The two septuagenarian actors, Caan and Voight, have a whispered showdown that was surely intended to be dramatic and intense - but instead is a snooze-fest.

The plot has a glacial pace. It is also absurd - Voight never gets a lawyer, but instead encourages his neighbors to come to his property and have a shoot-out with the federal agency representatives. A senator is trying to divert federal money to a solar company he owns (really?) and he needs the water on Voight's land - huh? What? Then a helicopter swoops down with a miraculous solution to the problem. Aw c'mon, was this written by a school kid?

The acting is non-existent. Voight and Caan both act and look as if the worms were already at work on them - both look mildly bewildered as they deliver their lines, as if they are unsure of where they are.

The directing is terrible - unclear story-telling, bad lighting, dull camera-work, poor editing, bad musical score.

The pace of the movie is slow, slow, slow, and relies on whispered conversations to advance the action.

This film has no action, no humor, no narrative tension and almost no romance. And the film's ending defies credulity, and also manages to be unsatisfying and inconclusive. A genuinely bad film on every level.

We don't expect greatness from a TV movie. We understand it will have a predictable plot, lame dialog and low production values. And The Christmas Blessing does indeed have all those defects, but it also has problems that are far more profound. The Christmas Blessing repeatedly pushes away its audience by being internally inconsistent, eye-rollingly unbelievable and amateurish. My wife and I were in the mood to like this movie, but its flaws were so great that we didn't enjoy it.

The first flaw is Casting! Neil Patrick Harris plays a surgeon who has returned home. Given that he is a surgeon, he must be in his 30s (or older), yet his Dad is played by Hugh Thompson, who also appears to be in his 30's (and who, by the way, looks nothing like Neil Patrick Harris.) "Father and Son" look so clearly to be about the same age that my wife and I kept shaking our heads in disbelief every time they were shown together.

And another major character, a 10-year old boy, has a father who is played by Shaun Johnson, who looks in this film to be in his mid-50s. The casting of these two father/son combinations is so incongruous -so ridiculous - that it destroys any "suspension of disbelief" that a sympathetic audience might have.

The second major flaw is the story-telling. We meet a 10-year-old boy, played by Angus Jones, who is depicted as a lonely but normal boy who is good at basketball. Later in the movie, we learn (in totally unconvincing medical scenes) that he has been long diagnosed with a severe cardiac condition that will likely be fatal. Wow, that's a surprise, completely inconsistent with how the boy has been depicted Remarkably, the female lead character has a similar issue. We have followed this female character for the entire film -she jogs constantly and has appeared to be healthy - and she has been dating the surgeon character. In the film's last 20 minutes, she suddenly faints. The healthy lady jogger and her surgeon boyfriend discover that she has an undiagnosed liver condition that requires constant hospitalization and is untreatable and terminal. Her surgeon boy-friend never noticed anything -no jaundice, no symptoms - no signs at all of illness. But we are now asked to believe that, out of the blue, she is dieing and her only hope is a liver transplant.

What lazy story-telling! What ever this TV movie was intended to be, it ultimately comes across as nothing more than a shallow attempt to manipulate the emotions of its viewers.

Lastly, The Christmas Blessing depicts the medical profession and illness in a completely unrealistic way. For example, shortly after her life-saving liver transplant, the patient is visited by her boyfriend at her hospital bed - and she is shown as being completely recovered from her transplant. There is no pain, no weakness, no fatigue and no IV tubes! She is seemingly ready to go jogging in a day or two, as if she had received a pedicure rather than a liver transplant. It is mind-boggling - the kind of lapse you might forgive in a grade school play but not in a TV movie.

Yucch, The Christmas Blessing is a real clunker of a film - it is really bad even as measured against the low standards of Hallmark/Lifetime movies. Stay away!

Here's the good news: the acting by the two romantic leads (Haylie Duff and Antonio Cupo) is good and they are assisted by a strong acting performance by veteran actor Jay Brazeau in the role of the business owner and father of the male lead. This movie would have been a total train-wreck without these actors.

Now the bad news: Hats Off to Christmas suffers from terrible writing. It goes beyond scenes that are so poorly written that they damage the 'suspension of disbelief;' the film relies on cheap and cheesy plot devices that are unrealistic but intended to manipulate the emotions of the viewer. Many Hallmark romance movies are guilty of this, but Hats Off is the Al Capone of "cheap and cheesy."

This Hallmark movie has it all, doled out in the most unrealistic and clumsy scenes imaginable:

• a backstory involving a dead husband (and father)

• a young son who is wheelchair-bound. Doctors think he is medically capable of walking, but emotional issues from the trauma of his car accident are suspected to be the real issue preventing him from walking again. Anyone want to guess where this plot-line is going?

• a female lead character, Mia, who overhears a fragment of a conversation about plans to address her employer's business problems and misunderstands what she has heard. Mia doesn't seek to confirm anything or wait for an announcement - instead she ends her relationship with the man she is starting to love and submits a letter resigning her job. Its hard to like characters who over-react in such unrealistic ways.

• a short scene where the male romantic interest, Nick, organizes a football game for the boy in the wheelchair. The boy makes a pass that goes about five feet and it is declared a touchdown. Then the boy is handed the football, and Nick pushes the boy's wheelchair downfield while everyone pretends that they can't catch him. This scene was intended to be uplifting, but is so deeply insulting to "wheelchair athletes" in the real world that Hallmark should be ashamed.

• so many "changes of heart" that it keeps your head-spinning. Not only do the romantic leads run hot and cold on each other repeatedly, but the major adversary in the film inexplicably "changes heart" and offers up some terms that resolve a lot of difficulties.

• supernaturally intelligent kids that advise their parents on their relationship issues (a core Hallmark plot device.)

• scenes where kids say something for about 30 seconds that advances the plot and are then told "Time to go to bed now. Its past your bedtime" leading to a scene where the adults talk between themselves. If you're a kid in a Hallmark movie, it is seemingly always your bedtime.

-completely unrealistic depictions of financial analysts and business operations and decision-making.

Some of these plot-devices might have worked in a movie that developed these situations adequately. In Hats Off, they are briefly introduced, and amateurishly disposed of as mere devices along the road to getting the romantic leads to realize they love each other and finally, to kiss. This move has such lazy manipulative writing and is so cheap and cheesy that I took no joy in the events that it showed.

I just saw Gravity for the 2nd time, both times in IMAX 3D. Relieved of the suspense of following the plot, I was able to be a lot more analytical about what was working well and why the experience of Gravity is so overwhelming.

1. Musical score - This is probably the best musical score on a film that I have ever heard. Bullock and Clooney could have been pealing potatoes and the musical score would still have elicited an emotional response from the audience. But given the action on screen, the meshing of the musical score was just perfect. I can't emphasize enough how much the music carries the movie at spots. And yet, the music is never intrusive. I now realize that the musical scoring is an artistic accomplishment that is unsurpassed by any other aspect of Gravity, such as cinematography.

2. Sound and sound effects. - Given the sterile scenes of space, the sound effects have unusually high leverage in Gravity. Indeed, sometimes the bumping and rattling sounds are doing the story-telling. The low frequency part of the bumps and rattles are set to great amplification (in the sound mixing) to create the in-theater experience of shaking and vibrating -complementing what astronauts Ryan and Kowalski are undergoing on the screen. I'm not a sound expert, so I can't judge whether Gravity's sound effects and mixing were simply "ordinary excellence" or "ground-breaking excellence" -but the sound engineering was very,very good and unusually important and effective.

3. The visual effects. The progression of scenes in Gravity forms a sequence of "reveals" of first-time visual effects, so as to keep us in a continuous state of amazement for the first half of the film.

(a) the first reveal is the magnificent Earthscape that serves as the backdrop for the first third of Gravity. By the way, there is an error in the 3-D version.

(b) the second reveal is the unprecedented realism and special effects associated with the zero-gravity movement of the astronauts in space. This keeps us entertained until:

(c) the third reveal, which is the point-of-view of a spinning astronaut. We've never seen anything like that, and it persisted for what felt like several minutes. It was a very dramatic storytelling technique.

(d) the fourth reveal of a new visual effect is the "head-wound" of the third astronaut. The head-wound is on screen for just a few seconds, but it certainly is a powerful visual and really shakes the audience. We have never seen anything like that, either.

(e) the fifth reveal of new visual effects is the complexity and "reality" of the external view of the International Space Station (ISS). Wow! If the viewer hasn't bought into the movie at this point, then they must be a different species than I am.

(f) the sixth reveal is the visual scenes of the destruction of the ISS by the satellite debris. This scene is probably the visual highlight of Gravity. The decoupling of sound from the carnage (in the vacuum of space)is completely correct but makes this a new experience. We hear Ryan's breathing and the bumping sounds as she moves around the structure, but these personal Point-Of-View sounds are unconnected to the visual scenes of large structural explosions and shredding. All of this is matched by a musical score which swells with the destruction and guides our emotions.

After the ISS destruction, Cuarón has used much of his bag of tricks (for visual effects)and he turns to Sandra Bullock, alone and shed of her space suit, to carry the film with her acting and make the film more human.

4. Acting. After a second review, I realize that Sandra Bullock does considerably more than saying "uh-uh-uh-uh." She has a fair number of very fine acting moments. Her voice and face acting are excellent during her initial discussion about her dead daughter. Her entire lengthy scene within the Soyuz lander module is very well done. Other than tears that form spherical drops that float towards the audience (Cuarón's seventh reveal of a new visual effect) this segment of Gravity depends almost totally on Bullock's acting for success. And successful it is! I closely studied Bullock's acting and she does a masterful job of carrying these scenes. Very nice job.

On second viewing, even Clooney has his acting moments, when there are closeups of his face as he delivers key lines. His best scenes are when he reports to Houston on the Space Shuttle destruction, and when he tells Bullock that he needs to de-tether from her. Well done! He won't win an acting Oscar for this, but he can certainly be proud of his personal acting performance.

5. Pacing/film editing. The pacing was superb - creating an extremely intense experience with well-timed "quiet moments." I am not an expert, but everything about the editing seemed to work well. ***********************

For a film where virtually every aspect was an A+, the ending of Gravity still seemed like a B on second viewing, a bit of a let-down. It wasn't terrible, though, and it did have the virtue of not lingering overly long. But it was a bit anti-climatic and arguably did not deliver the emotional impact that it should have.

Overall, I thought the emotional intensity and power of Gravity was staggering, almost rising to the level of cinematic poetry. This is a must-see film.