Friday, August 31, 2018

August Movie Reviews


*****  Exceptional
****    Great
***      OK
**        So So
*          Blah

All Saints is a Christian-centered movie about a preacher to is assigned to a failing church in order to sell the land and close it down. With a congregation of twelve, it's not worth maintaining. He is faced with a group of refugee farmers from Myanmar who don't have money and are having a hard time feeding their kids. The church has no money, but a lot of acreage so they decide to put the land to work in hopes of saving the church. Really bad performances, incredibly bad dialogue, and lots of unrealistic hope that God is talking to them and will save them. In the end God doesn't talk to anyone and all their plans fail, but like a good religious movie, it doesn't matter. *

The Clapper is about a man who is a professional audience member for infomercials. Every now and then he's given a line to say, but for the most part they want him to be anonymous, just the average American consumer. He's called out for his disguises by a talk show host and becomes famous. Because he can no longer be anonymous, no one will hire him. I can't tell if the script was just lousy or the characters were purposely idiotic with low IQs. They don't comprehend what each other is saying nor are they able to articulate what they feel. If cognitively impaired on purpose, there was something discomforting about this talk show host using them as the butt of his jokes. Or was this for comedic effect? If so it was bad. There were moments that should have been funny but weren't, should have been sentimental, but weren't, and should have been clever, but weren't. It missed the mark at every opportunity. The weird or lack of character development left me confused. The photography was beautiful. Too bad. **

The Florida Project is about the life of Moonie, a precocious  six-year old potty-mouth whose incredibly low-life, immature mother is a scam artist by day and a hooker by night. They live in a purple-painted budget motel just off the highway called the Magic Castle managed by Bobbie (William Dafoe) and filled with other low income families. She runs wild and unsupervised with a gang of friends getting into all kinds of mischief. The story is delightfully filmed from the perspective of a child. The photography is exceptional. Love the way colors are used. Love the opening with Kool and the Gang's song "Celebrate."  Brilliant performances. So incredibly sad. ****

Good Hair Chris Rock narrates this documentary on black hair and what people do to get "good hair". It was fascinating. I had no idea black women can spend anywhere from $1,000 to $3,500 on a hair weave made from Indian hair. Or that people in India go through a religious ceremony and cut their hair off for God because hair is vanity. The temple then sells their hair to those who delouse, clean, condition, cut, and sew it to make hair weaves and one hair weave salesman can carry $15,000 worth of weaves in a suitcase and sell them all to salons in a matter of a few hours.  Or the black market where people actually steal the hair right off a sleeping Indian woman's head. Some of it was more than disturbing like the relaxer perms that people give their 2 year old daughters. The whole documentary was amazing and Chris Rock was hilarious. ****

The Greatest Showman is a musical (!) about P. T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman) and the beginnings of his circus in the 1800s with themes of honoring diversity and following dreams. It was fun. The music was good but nothing special and a little odd it was modern in a nineteenth-century setting. Performances were good. ***

Half Magic is an incredibly lame movie about three women who meet at a women's empowerment class and become instant best friends. Yeah, like that is realistic. They attempt to change all the horrible things in their lives by doing candle magic. The lead character's name is Honey. There is absolutely no substance to this film. The performances were really bad, the script really bad, and the plot really bad. *

Ingrid Goes West is about a psychotic woman who is obsessed with social media and becomes delusionally attached to women who have "perfect" lives, loving them as distant best friends and hating them in very scary ways when they don't reciprocate. It's frightening!  It also serves as a cautionary tale of how we shouldn't pretend we know the people we meet online. Oddly enough it was a comedy. Aubrey Plaza who stars as Ingrid is outstandingly insane. ***

In Harmony was a French movie about a horse-riding stuntman who is injured and in a wheelchair. The insurance company is trying to screw him over and his claims adjuster keeps trying to pressure him into signing their lousy deal. They end up falling in love, but she's married with kids. The horse was gorgeous. ***

I, Tonya is the story of Tonya Harding, notorious Olympic figure skater involved in the knee bashing of Nancy Kerrigan, her competitor. Such a sad low-class life surrounded by stupid people, filled with bad choices, and experiencing way too much domestic violence. The movie portrays her as almost innocent, or a victim of her situation. Too bad she wasn't able to crawl up out of the sewer overcome all the adversity with the talent she had.  ***

The Man Who Invented Christmas is about Charles Dickens's writing of A Christmas Carol. As he develops the characters they come to live and torment him with suggestions.  It was cute. Great performances. Christopher Plummer plays Scrooge and has outstanding lines and a smart ass mouth. It kind of reminded me of my favorite movie of all time the spectacular in every way Shakespeare in Love only not as clever or as well-written. Still it was good. Great sets, costumes, performances and enjoyable. It made me want to READ A Christmas Story. ****

November Criminals is about a high school student dealing with the grief from his mother's recent death. Then his friend is senselessly murdered.  Everyone keeps saying it's gang related only because the boy was African American. He wants answers, answers he never found in the death of his mother,  and goes search down dark alleys to find them. I really like Ansel Elgort --cute, pouty-lipped boy with great acting skills. Chloe Grace Moretz is his girlfriend. Lots of pouty lips in this movie. ****

Only the Brave is about the Granite Mountain Hot Shots, fire fighter team in Prescott, AZ. All-star cast with Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Connelly, and others. Great story, excellent performances, very  sad. ****

The Queen of Versailles is a documentary film about the incredibly arrogant David and Jackie Siegel, American multi-millionaires, who live lavishly and are building the largest, most expensive house in the USA based on the design for the French castle at Versailles. Then the economy tanks in 2008 and they start losing everything. Well, "losing everything" is relative. I could live off a tiny fraction of what they lost and consider myself wealthy. Does that stop Jackie from spending frivolously? Hell no. They have to lay off most of their employees and house staff and because they are so entitled and lazy everything goes to crap. Literally. Their dozen mangy dogs are shitting all over the floor and everyone just walks around stepping in it. BLAH! Other pets in aquariums are starving to death because the kids are too lazy and irresponsible to feed them. Oh, and when her precious dogs die, she STUFFS them! Or skins them and lays their fur on top of the piano. It was all I could do not to vomit every five minutes. I searched online because I wanted to see if there was any currently information on them and their post-filming situation. They sued the film company for defamation! Really? If anything they should sue each other for making themselves look so badly!! Excellent documentary, but so repulsive I'm only giving it two stars because I should have turned it off.**

The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe was actually a three-hour mini-drama. It covers the sordid parts of her biography told to a psychiatrist she saw late in life. The actress (Kelli Gardner) who played her was phenomenal, the best rendition of Marilyn Monroe I think I've ever seen.  Susan Sarandon played her schizophrenic mother and that gorgeous Jeffrey Dean Morgan was Joe DiMaggio. Costumes were outstanding with most being replicas of Marilyn's famous dresses.  It was surprisingly excellent. ****

The Secret Scripture is one of those Irish horror movies where the bitter, jealous priest has a young newly-married woman committed to an insane asylum  for NYMPHOMANIA after she rejects his advances and marries another. Fifty years later when the institution is being shut down, a new psychologist comes in to re-evaluate the woman. Her file states she was pregnant at the time of her commitment. Rumor has it it was the priest's baby since her marriage was not known. Around nine months pregnant as she's watching the nuns give away the babies of other girls, she attempts to escape, swims the ocean and gives birth to the baby on the beach. Her records show she killed the newborn right after birth. She constantly talks about the baby to the orderlies as if he's not dead. They think she's crazy. Through the years she has kept a secret diary in a Bible for fear she will forget her memories due to the electromagnetic shock treatments they constantly give her. Outstanding performances, exceptional story. So many of my favorite actors in one film: Rooney Mara, Aidan Turner, Theo James, Jack Reynor, and Vanessa Redgrave.. *****

Sweet Bean is a Japanese film about a doriyaki baker with demons and the 76 year old woman who begs him for a job. He refuses her due to her age and possible inability to do the job. He uses canned bean paste which she tells him tastes like shit. She offers to make homemade bean paste. This, of course, has customers lined up around the block.  One of the customers notices her mangled, misshapen hands and it is discovered she is from the leper community.  Business grinds to a halt. It was a sad commentary on how we treat people we erroneously perceive as threats and the power of rumor. Sweet, sometimes slow, but good story. One always knows when it's a Japanese film - lots of food preparation and cherry blossoms. ***

Thelma was some kind of Norwegian supernatural lesbian movie...yeah, I don't know what I was watching. *

The Wall is a psychological thriller about two soldiers who have been casing an American construction site in Iraq after the war during reconstruction. All the workers have been shot and they are trying to figure out if it was an ambush now deserted or if there is a sniper waiting. After 20 plus hours the sergeant gets impatient and decides to chance it. The sniper shoots him and he's left laying out in the open. When the other solider comes to his defense, he also gets shot and throws himself over a wall for cover. He's pinned there. The sniper has access to his radio, asking him questions about his life while taking shots at him when he reveals his location. It's pretty frightening. The ending was surprising...just when you think it's over, it's not, then it kind of doesn't end. Very strange. Excellent performances. ****

Wonderstruck  This was such a weird movie with a disconnected story I was wonderstruck why anyone bothered to make it. It's about a boy in 1977 (WHY?) who's mother has died and he doesn't know his father. In a freak accident (lightning strikes the telephone he's using...REALLY?), he loses his hearing (HUH?), escapes from the hospital and takes a bus to New York in hopes of finding his father based on a bookmark he found in one of his mother's books. A parallel story takes place about a girl in 1927 who is deaf and she heads to New York. Both of them converge on a natural history museum.  It was so weird and the performances horrible. Now, some great actresses were featured: Michelle Williams (who I love) had a minor role as the boy's dead mother, and Julianne Moore was a silent screen actress who is the girl's mother. By the end of the movie they do present the connection between these two kids, but it was so desperately contrived and the plot so unrealistic it made me shake my head repeatedly and so violently I kept getting dizzy. It felt like a fantasy that didn't quite live up to it. I liked the cabinets of curiosity history, but instead of some kind of magical twist to bring the story to life it relied on pure coincidence to keep the plot moving.  So weak. *

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