September Movie Reviews

*****  Exceptional

****    Great

***      OK

**        So So

*          Blah

And Then I Go was about a boy who is bullied, beaten, alienated and harassed constantly. School is intolerable. He suffers from anxiety, insomnia, nightmares and cries a lot. The adults in his life are so incredibly INCOMPETENT at connecting with him and his parents pathetically ineffective. His equally-misfit best friend decides they need to use his father's guns and get revenge, and they begin planning to shoot up the school. Excellent movie, but disturbing. ****

Bitter Harvest is about the Holodomor, the systematic genocide by starvation of the Urkraine people by Stalin in 1930s. Around 5 - 10 million people died. I'm embarrassed to say I've never even heard of this.  Great movie, a little melodramatic, but still good. ***

Conviction Outstanding title! Boy, I love a good title especially one that has something to do with the storyline! It's about a man (Sam Rockwell) who is wrongly convicted of murder. His sister (Hilary Swank) spends years getting into college, then law school all to prove his innocence. Excellent story about sibling love and devotion and CONVICTION. ****

A Dangerous Method is about the early years of psychoanology, Carl Jung, his relationship with a patient, and his relationship with Sigmund Freud. Keira Knightley is one kick-ass crazy person! Her performance is exceptional. I hardly recognized her. ***

Difret is based on a true story about a fourteen-year old Ethiopian girl who is abducted by a group of men, beaten, and raped...because that is how the men in this culture get a wife. These backward societies never cease to amaze me. She escapes, they corner her, and she shoots her abductor/future husband. Tribal tradition demands she dies, but a lawyer represents her and sets precedent for marriage laws that make abduction illegal. Good story. Sad. ****

Gerontophilia is about Lake, an eighteen?-year old kid who has a fetish for elderly people. He gets a job in a care center where they treat the patients like crap and he falls in love with one of the men.  He spends his time drinking and playing strip poker with him and then the medical staff drugs his friend into a catatonic state. He kidnaps him and they drive across country so his elderly lover can see the ocean one last time. It was very weird and initially uncomfortable as Lake is a "gerontophile". Is he taking advantage of them? It sure seems like it. After a while it felt more like a gift: this older man's last fling with a gorgeous young thing. Still it was weird and a little slow. I thought it was a docu-comedy on aging the way it was advertised so I was a little disappointed. **

The Good Son is about a boy (Elijah Wood) who's mother just died. While his father needs to be away on business, he is sent to live with his uncle, aunt, cousin and the ever psychotic Macaulay Culkin who does terrible things. Everyone think Elijah is having a difficult time dealing with the loss so they think he's lying when he tries to tell them about the crazy kid. It was a little slow, with incredibly (horrible) melodramatic music. Culkin is great at delivering his lines, but often misses the emotion in them. With more emotion his insanity would have been more believable, but he was just a little kid so he gets props for his age. Beautiful scenery. ***

The Keeping Hours OH. MY. GOD. This was so heart-wrenching. It's about a couple who have the sweetest five-year old boy. They get married, then as they leave for their honeymoon are in a car wreck and the little boy dies. Due to grief and stress, couple gets divorced. Years later renters who have been renting their house exit abruptly and trash the place leaving broken windows and general chaos. The man goes back to clean up...his son's ghost is in the house and asks where his mommy is. She's remarried and has a new family. The man gets her and they moved back into the house to be with their son, rekindling their relationship.  The former tenants had contacted a medium for advice and she shows up at the door. She tells him to find out from the boy why he's back, what unfinished business he has and how they can send him on his way although clearly they really don't want to send him anywhere! It was an outstanding ghost story about grief. No stupid special effects or scenes of horror. Adorable kid. If they would have given him devil eyes or if he would have levitated, I would have turned it off in disgust, but none of that nonsense. Great ending, but a real tear jerker. I have no clue what the title means. ****

A Life Lived was about the life of a dollar bill and how it changes hands and weaves itself through the lives of people, most of them connected in some way. Really, really bad performances. The homeless guy had a beard that was clearly fake. But interesting idea. **

Love of My Life is about an architect (Anna Chancellor) who has been diagnosed with brain cancer. She is scheduled for surgery in five days and may or may not come through it. She doesn't want anyone to know, but since it's a comedy her family find out and one of her daughters tells her ex-husband who shows up and claims she is the love of his life and it's now time to get back together and live the life they should have. Her current husband says she's the love of his life, her other daughter has meet a man and claims he is the love of her life, and the first daughter says she needs to meet the love of her life before her mother dies to make her happy. It was about the quality of life and assessing what kind of life you leave behind when you die. It was cute. I like Anna Chancellor. She's in a lot of good British comedies usually playing supporting roles and here she is the main character. ***

Marjorie Prime is a futuristic story about an older woman who has dementia and she has an AI companion who is the spitting image of her deceased husband at a youthful forty years old (Jon Hamm). He is fed her memories by not only her, but her daughter (Geena Davis) and son-in-law (Tim Robbins). The more he knows the more real he becomes and able to act human, however, they select the memories they want him to have and everyone skirts around the suicide of the woman's teenage son many years before. Then she dies and her daughter has an AI that looks like her mother and she also avoids the topic of the suicide. Then the daughter dies and her husband has an AI created for his wife and again, avoids the topic of the brother's suicide but come to find out his wife committed suicide. The end was interesting with all three AIs in the same room and everyone dead and they carry on as if they are a family with memories. The family secret themes were interesting. It was a little slow at times and Geena Davis kept slurring her words but I don't know if that was just the way she talks or if she was struggling with false teeth. It was a bit distracting.  Aging is a bitch. I get that. **

Missionary is about a Mormon missionary who befriends a woman and her son. The woman has an affair with him (which seemed really wrong, by the way), and he starts believing they are his celestial family appointed by God. Separated from her husband, they decide to get back together again and the Mormon becomes absolutely psycho in the worst way possible. I loved it he quoted Bible verses to justify his bad behavior. LOL. And it definitely had a moral lesson. Great story. It was quite scary. I'll never see Mormon missionaries in quite the same way again! ****

Miss Stevens is about a high school English teacher who volunteers to take three students to a drama competition. One of the kids who has some kind of "behavior disorder" and is or should be on medication. He has a bit of a crush on her. She has her own problems dealing with the recent death of her mother and sleeping with a married man at the competition. She's sad, the kid's sad and they are drawn to each other, but she tries to keep a professional distance from him. There is a certain sexual tension between them but it wasn't enough to make it interesting or uncomfortable. I kept getting up and doing things without putting the DVD on pause so you know that's not a good sign, but I never turned it off. The kid was mesmerizing, but the movie didn't seem to have a point and the teacher was kind of irritating. **

Never Let Me Go is a creepy sci-fi futuristic movie about genetically-engineered clones who are created so they can be organ donors when they grow up. The story begins at the English boarding school where the cloned children are being taught and trained to live on the outside world. Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Kathy (Carrie Mulligan) are in love, although only ten-twelve years old so they hardly understand it.  Ruth (Keira Knightley) is Kathy's best friend. Jealous of her friend's impending relationship steals him away depriving her of true love. As they age out they are moved to a communal center where they wait until they are old enough to become donors. At that time they start donating their organs one at a time until they reach "completion" which is just a nice way of saying DIE from physical trauma. Some donors "complete" after the first transplant, others keep on donating up to four. Most die at number three. There are rumors if there are donors who are in love and can prove it, they can get a four year deferment to postpone the inevitable. Weird, weird movie. A little slow, very disturbing, but the performances were good. Stupid, stupid title. The title should have been Completion, nice double-entendre word that says it all. And so obvious a title. (This is the title of the novel the movie is based as well.) ***

127 Hours is about a solo hiker, climber, mountain biker, outdoorsman who heads out for a bike ride/hike/climb in the wilderness of Utah, falls down a crack in a mountain, a boulder falls on his arm pinning him miles away from civilization. He didn't tell anyone where he was going and has little food or water left. It was really outstanding and James Franco was superb. ****

The Party This was hilarious. It's a dinner party just starting in honor of the promotion of the hostess (Kristen Scott Thomas) as Minister of Health, the guests are arriving (Patricia Clarkson, Emily Mortimer,  Timothy Spall,  Cillian Murphy, and Cherry Jones) each adding more drama to the mix. Her husband (Bruno Ganz) is sitting in the living room acting very strange and she keeps getting calls from her lover. Then one by one the guests have announcements and everything goes to hell. It was fun, the performances were outstanding, and I loved the ending. It must have been a play. ****

Take Shelter is about a man who starts having horrible nightmares about storms and people attacking him. Then during the day he keeps hallucinating thunder. He feels compelled to build an underground tornado shelter in anticipation of this deadly storm premonition. Everyone thinks he's crazy and he's definitely acting crazy. He loses his job and starts seeing a counselor at the recommendation of his doctor. His mother was commit to an insane asylum when she was in her thirties so he thinks maybe it's starting for him, but he's still compelled to build. I just couldn't wait to get to the end to find out if it's a premonition or if he's just crazy. ***

Tully is about a woman (Charlize Theron) who is nine months pregnant and about to have her third child. One of her children has undiagnosed special needs. She's exhausted and then pops out the third one and is triple exhausted. She is gifted a night nanny, a young freespirited woman who works graveyard so she can get some sleep. I wasn't sure where this was going and although I figured it would resonate with women with a lot of kids, it seemed pretty mundane to me. By the end of the movie I saw the point, however, I think the point was wasted and should have been slightly more apparent earlier in the plot. I'm still a little confused by some of the scenes. **

Unstoppable is an impending-disaster movie about a run-away train starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pine as a train engineer and conductor who after nearly getting in a head-on collision with the monster train, put their engine in reverse in an attempt connect to it and stop it before it takes out Stanton, Pennsylvania. Absolutely riveting and never a dull moment. The train kept growling, like in the movie Titanic when the ship kept growling as it was sinking. That was fun. Loved the opening credits how they did them with the trains. Washington has some great comedic lines and Chris Pine is gorgeous. Outstanding performances by all. I was up standing, jumping around with my hands over my mouth it was so intense. Loved it. ****

A Very Sordid Wedding This movie has the weirdest cast of crazies I've ever seen! And I'm saying that with a southern (Texan) accent. It was a HUGE cast. It's main theme was about gay rights and southern culture. It had some funny lines, but the DVD was damaged so it kept skipping and stalling. Finally I turned it off, but it didn't stop me from speaking and thinking with a Texan accent right up until bedtime! *

A Wrinkle in Time was absolutely horrid. Most of the performances were embarrassingly bad, the story nonsensical, the costumes and make-up  were like very cheap Walmart Halloween crap, and the special effects were pathetic. Obviously Disney put no money into production and a lot in promoting it hoping the big names would bring in the big bucks. Throughout the whole movie I kept asking myself (usually out loud) what the heck was that, where did that come from, or what was the point in that scene? Very disappointing especially considering all the hype. *