Reviews

Nothing short of epic. The greatest roundtable of the series.

I had watched the US Traitors and believed I'd seen the best the format had to offer, but surprise surprise...this is emotional, cerebral and absolutely ridiculous.

It makes a world's difference having everyday people on the show as opposed to reality stars who are used to being on camera and might treat the show more as a business opportunity. As much as they repeat that it's just a game, this cast of characters treats it like it's really life or death.

There's the person I was before the banishment and the person I am today. (They are not the same)

It's funny, it's sweet, it's passionate. Just saw this at the Norwalk Film Festival and it's one of the pieces that really stuck with me. Both leads are pitch perfect.

I just saw this at the Norwalk Film Festival and I was blown away at the beauty and soft ferocity of it.

It takes place in this beautiful overgrown cabin with light bleeding through everywhere. It's about light and sound and this almost animal purging of music from their bodies with machines in this organic living space, bathed in light. It was my favorite piece from the festival so far. A true gem.

What a beautiful coming of age story about a biracial boy raised in the suburbs by a white couple and all the rites of passages he goes through attempting to reach his potential.

Kaepernick's future and polarizing position in life is so clear from the childhood he had. It's history repeating itself, for not just him but any nonwhite child growing up in a predominantly white community or schooling.

The difference is the highs he achieved, that allowed this story to be financed. I really enjoyed it. The performances were good and the moments were touching. I was actually left wanting more.

If you're not interested in conversations about race or seeing black people navigate America, this might be the wrong entertainment for you.

The most heartwarming and loving finale I've ever seen from Big Brother. An alliance dominated the second half of the season, but it never stopped being riveting and suspenseful. To see a rightful winner and the way the entire cast came together to love on one another, was so much more beautiful than I ever could've imagined.

A perfect ending to a great season.

This first episode creeps across a plantation full of hiding in plain sight and disillusioned enslaved people as horror is a toy button randomly nudged against and poked at by slavers who couldn't care less if tonight is the worst night of a slave's life or if it's just a Thursday.

It's slow and haunting and it doesn't stop to let us know many of the faces we see, but it got under my skin and I'm ready to keep going.

This film reminded me a lot of a 2009 film called Triangle. That also had a series of...memory blanks and...encounters with familiar people.

But that film was linear. The magic was in seeing the mystery evolve before your eyes. Instead of revealing this 'altered reality' in a straight and follow-able fashion, this film goes for the toilet bowl. It just drops you in and spins and spins and never lets you get rooted in a character...a narrative...a place...anything.

All you can do with The Broken is sit back and watch repeated flashback after repeated flashback until they finally just say "IT'S THIS," and you yawn back, "Okay." This aims for substance, but it's style kills the story. They build the mystery, but annoy you with it enough that the revelation just isn't worth something you'd never want to watch again.

And I mention Triangle, because there are a good amount of similarities, but that's a film you want to watch 50 times. This is a film you might try to watch twice, because you just couldn't pay attention the first time.

There isn't a good reason why this shouldn't be in the same class of psychological thriller as Black Swan and Triangle, but if I had to watch that car crash one more ******* time.....

But I didn't expect a good, tense film to break out. I figured this would just be some trash straight to DVD film, that I just skim through, laugh at the ridiculous stuff, see Gemma and call it a day.

But right from the opening shot it was a lot better than I thought it'd be. It was tense and menacing and all without a word being spoken. It didn't get as ugly as I was afraid it would from the opening, but it got a lot more interesting. I kept thinking I knew what type of story they were telling and they kept surprising me.

All 3 gave great performances, and I liked that it was only the 3 of them the whole time. Well written, well shot, well acted and I liked the ending...especially with the clever credit. It's much better than the sum of Gemma's bits, and that's saying a lot.

There's nothing wrong with this film. The cast is good, the direction's not bad, Michael Shannon gives a really good performance... I remember Jon Hamm saying in an interview once that it's crazy that "good isn't good enough anymore." He meant that everyone expects everyone to be the best thing ever or else they'll ignore. I don't feel that way, but this is probably gonna come off like that.

This film is good, but that's not good enough for me. It tells the story of what happened, but was just so flatly uninteresting, even while interesting things were happening with curious characters. By the time the film ended, I felt nothing. I would have rather watched a documentary, because in an effort to tell a true, ridiculous story, it did so in the flattest, most subdued way possible. I'm not asking for style, for style's sake, but this is just an anonymous film with Tarantino-esque characters and no one to really connect with.

This is a film you'll forget you saw 5 minutes after it's over. And I don't wanna say there are wasted performances or anything...just...I wanted something more. Something to discern it from any other straight to VOD crime film, however true. Something more than just good cinematography, good casting and believable performances.

I'm not greedy...I didn't need this to be David Fincher's Zodiac or Spike Lee's Summer of Sam or Patty Jenkins' Monster or Silence of the Lambs. But this makes We Own the Night look like The Departed.

It is what it is, I guess.

It felt like Spike was trying to make a comment on the black family, the black man's responsibilities towards it, and the popular belief (as well as in a lot of cases bitter truth) that a lot of young black men get women pregnant then head for the hills. And it tried to get that point across by giving this guy a piece of that bitter truth coated in a male fantasy of sex with gorgeous women who are guaranteed not to form emotional bonds or make expectations on your time/money/fidelity/emotions. And on top of that, instead of bringing a child into the world who will test your patience, take every dollar you have to your name, and force you to grow up and confront what you had to go through growing up and what you didn't have as a child, they promise to get out of your hair and pay you for the troubles. It even throws in the popular myth of fetishizing of the black male sexual prowess.

But what we en up getting is some getting a fun gigolo run, a couple mixed emotions and it all basically turning out alright for him. And a gov't sideplot/cheap shots thrown in, because why not.

Spike, Spike, Spike. 5 steps forward, 7 steps back. But it did get me thinking a lot. Mostly of the better film we could've gotten if the script wasn't mostly trash, but I guess the thoughts are worthwhile.

...and I just couldn't understand why people never mentioned it or brushed it off like it wasn't good or something. I mean, when I left the theater, I thought Denzel did it again. Fast forward to today, when I watched it again. Now, I think the director was trying to make an Oliver Stone pic, or Network for the health care system. But this film is so damn hammy and corny and obvious and ridiculous, that all you can do is grin and wait for the hits to keep on coming. I mean, it makes Spike Lee feel understated.

And the sad part is, you can see a great Denzel performance in the making. You can tell he was all in and thought this could be the next Philadelphia...but the movie is about 10 or 15 years too late, and way too contrived and blunt for you to believe in the story or the characters.

I love what this wants to be. And in some ways, this is to hospitals what Inside Man was to banks, but putting those two films next to each other shows how far off this film was. It's worth a watch, but if you had really good memories of it like I did, it's probably better left alone.

I was so ready to give up on this weird, navel-gazing, unfunny, aimless awkward-off between Juno Temple and Michael Cera. Then...slowly, but surely, all these pointless awkward scenes started to mean something. They were trying to show you what the regular constant of these kids' lives in Chile was, before they introduced something strange. And just when I thought...alright, it's just another white girl losing it movie, it changes again. And it builds and it grows and it rewards you for staying with it over and over.

But I can't blame you if you hated it early on. As good as Juno Temple is and as knowingly hateable as Michael Cera's oddball character was, there's almost nothing to the first half of the movie. But it does change, and by the end I couldn't look away.

Not an amazing film, but much more than what I thought it was initially. It helped me understand how such good talent could be attracted to something like this.

But I also have to say, where it ends, might've just annoyed you all over again.

It just ended up feeling like a kind of disjointed, slow sketch comedy American Horror Story.

The whole movie felt too flat and blunt. It's like they thought up clever or funny ideas, but threw them out in the simple way possible. And then they made sure to let them linger, as if they were pausing for audience laughter. Hell, sometimes it even felt like a laugh track would improve the movie.

I mean, the "Scary Movie"s are full of those broad and cheap laughs. This on the other hand, is quirkier and WANTS to be more than that. And unlike the Scary Movies, it DOES feel like one whole story, instead of a bunch of sketches spoofing horror flicks. But every scene felt like it dragged on for too long, way past when you "got" the joke and were ready for them to go deeper or move on or add more layers or something. And that made it come out stale. Over and over, it took you out of the movie, and reminded you that this is just a bunch of funny friends who went out there with a camera and a simple idea to have fun. That idea...just happened to only be 20 minutes worth of story and gags, that they had to stretch out to an hour and a half.

And as much as I could respect the kind of story they wanted to tell, the ways they were trying to milk comedy, and the characters they created...it's just not well edited or put together. There's not enough story, the jokes were too on the nose, and I left it kinda disappointed. This had a lot going for it: great cast, clever creative people behind it. But you might be better off just watching "This Is the End" instead.

Oh, and a certain scene with Riki Lindhome was really random and fully appreciated...

I so badly wanted to like this movie. I mean, I could look at Zoe Kravitz all day, Jason Clarke is my guy for The Chicago Code and the trailer really hooked me. But I just couldn't deal with the constant feeling that this was just a really really badly edited film. It had a lot going for it. The cast is really solid, the acting is there and it's not one of those navel-gazing angst movies. Real, big, serious things things happen that make it more than a generic, "growing up in a broken home sucks" movie.

But...I can't help but feel like it wasn't exactly put together or presented in a really effective way. Almost every single scene felt like each cut didn't match the music, cut awkwardly, lingered too long, didn't switch to a medium shot when it really needed to. The editing wouldn't match the flow of the dialogue.

But that's nitpicking. On a bigger level, It felt like things just happened. Something would happen that so easily could've been hinted at or foreshadowed ahead of time, but they just didn't. You could honestly move most of the scenes around and it'd make as much sense. But it's just aimless and random and the scenes were so isolated. It felt like the characters never referenced anything that happened before the scene they're in or was gonna happen in any scene later on. Every other scene you were left wondering, over and over again, "why?" or "that's it?" or "really?."

You couldn't follow any character all the way through and have it be a satisfying story. People disappear, reappear, show up for random scenes, mean less, mean a lot and just get underused over and over again. Every time you realize what they're trying to get across or say with a character, all you're left wondering is...well why didn't they just put a little scene of ______ that'd lead to where we're at now? They had so many powerful relationships and symbols and places and situations to do something with, but most of the time, the movie just wanted to show you them, so that you knew they were there. It's not really a narrative, it's a disjointed diorama. It's pieces of a movie. The parts don't move. They don't push the next domino forward or explain how one thing influenced the next or is connected. They're just there, because these things happened?

My favorite scenes were when she took care of her dad after he came home drunk and bloody, when her mom first came home, and when her sister came home with the baby. But it felt like all of her family was underused, thrown away at times and sloppily handled. I felt like there was SO much there, to tell a story about how people were constantly hurting her, leaving her, and coming back when life beat them back down. But it instead they each felt like 5 minute short films that were only really connected, because the same actors and sets were involved.

I think...with stronger editing, it could've come together better, but it just felt like the script or the director wasn't ready, or it needed a strong producer to ask those little questions that'd pull the film together. Instead, this is kind of a lighter, choppier Precious, that doesn't do as good a job setting up it's wants, characters, story lines, themes, or narrative. And I really wanted to like this.

I'd recommend watching Precious, Thirteen, Kidulthood, Half Nelson or Love & Basketball if you were interested in this.

As a guy, sometimes this movie would really work for me. The cast is great from top to bottom. Rob Corddry was perfect. Analeigh Tipton never wastes a minute on screen. I've never seen Teresa Palmer before, but I'll be looking out for whatever she's in next. And Nicolas Hoult keeps showing me range I didn't know he had.

But at times they just pushed too hard for that sort of...fairytale...hakuna matata..."the world is made of roses" vibe. They'd show some really interesting, quirky ideas of life in a zombie outbreak, but then they'd get really sitcom-y when things should've gotten a little more serious. And a lot of it just felt too written. Like they didn't earn something that happened, a writer just decided it's time to happen now.

R talked too much, too soon. Soldiers dropped their weapons too quickly. Everything just got accepted so quick. It felt like everyone was just playing their part to help these two's love story, instead of being real characters that act in any way that makes sense.

It's a great idea. There are some really nice moments. And even when it gets dumb, it doesn't get as dumb as a lot of summer blockbusters can get. And it makes sense for the story it's telling. It just kinda disrespects zombie movies a lot. And doesn't find the balance between fear and love like it wants to. And kinda wastes a really really great premise, taking shortcuts to help make these two's world-changing love work.

It's kind of a testament to Teresa Palmer and Nicolas Hoult that the movie stays together and still pulls you in. They make odd leaps and choices at weird or off times. The problem is, this movie really respects the love story it's telling a hell of a lot more than the world they built around it.

But I still liked it.

Like a lot of people, I'm a sucker for zombies. And I think guys and girls who are just happy to see a prettier Kristen Stewart who can act and Tony from Skins doing a really good job will like this. And zombie fans who don't care too much about the details or scares and have been itching for Zombieland 2 will like it as well.