Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Beginners Review

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When it comes to movies surrounding the subject of love there seems to be two types of relationships. Most of the time in a romance movie what is showcased can best be classified as movie love; a relationship between movie characters that can sometimes be interesting, but usually falls flat and ends up exactly where you predicted. Then, there’s that rare kind of love that few filmmakers have managed to capture; the kind that makes you truly feel for and care about these characters and makes pray that- with all their beautiful chemistry and quirky moments- happy ending is a head and not because you want the film to follow the unprinted rule of the romance film, but because you truly believe this is the kind of love that should last. In a profound tale of love, life and the ups and downs you’ll find in both, Beginners has a relationship of this kind and so much more.

In one of his best performances, Ewan McGregor plays main character Oliver Fields who finds out that his father is gay and if that wasn’t surprise for him enough, next he finds that his father has cancer. Oliver’s father, Hal, is played by the always excellent Christopher Plummer with potent honesty. In Hal you’ll find a man, who even in times of sadness, needs to have a bit of fun. The idea of the Hal Fields character could’ve been over the top, but due to the eloquent writing and a fabulous performance, the character feels real.

This bleak tale of Oliver spending as much time with his father as he can is juxtaposed with a delightful showcasing of Oliver’s growing relationship with the incredibly charming french actress, Anna. Anna is played by promising actress, Melanie Laurent. I’ve only seen her before in one of my favorite films, Inglourious Basterds, and seeing her in this once again makes me want to see her in more. The relationship between Anna and Oliver is quite honestly one of the greatest and most believable relationships ever filmed.

The other star and charmer of this film is the dog, Arthur. Every relationship in the film is not one of cinema, but one of purity. And I mean every relationship; Oliver and Anna, Oliver and Hal, Hal and his new found boyfriend, even Oliver and Arthur. Beginners effectively succeeds in the way it doesn’t try to be anything more than it is and what Beginners is, is extraordinary.

All around, Beginners is just an unbelievably spectacular film. The direction is spot on, the performances are award-worthy, the writing makes for a mellow, yet awe-inspiring tale of us and the relationships that stick with us. What else can be said? Beginners is just a truly awesome movie on all accounts, in fact I’ll say it, Beginners is a masterpiece. I only say that when its warranted and for this film it is undoubtedly warranted.

Grade: A+

50/50 Review

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I’m finding it hard to get started here without making this just like any other review of a great movie, but I suppose I can start with the facts. 50/50 is a touching film about a young man’s diagnosis with cancer and how his life and lives of the people around him are affected. It may be common knowledge at this point, but the reason this film was created was because the screenwriter, Will Reiser, dealt with similar issues when  he was diagnosed with cancer. In this way, it’s hard not to find honest and true moments making 50/50 an excellent movie through and through.

In a film that combines heartfelt drama with laugh-out-loud comedy, you’ll find in 50/50 a truly compelling and enjoyable story. Seth Rogen is hilarious as always delivering his signature blend of comedy, Anna Kendrick is always enjoyable, but the true star here is of course Joseph Gordon-Levitt. This is a young actor confident in his ability and rightfully so because he really is an incredible actor, his performance in 50/50 is nothing short of breath taking.

Every single moment, story arc or plot point in this film had the potential to fall apart and seem forced or even stereotypical. Instead, 50/50 is a breath of fresh air. It’s a difficult task to put your finger on exactly why that is because it’s honestly a combination of everything. Take most of the fundamental reasons dramas can be great and the fundamental reasons comedies can be great, put them in a blender and the delicious beverage that results is 50/50.

In a film with a simple story about fighting cancer, 50/50 tells a timeless tale about playing the cards you are dealt. At times you find yourself looking at your own situation and asking what you’d do in this situation. You draw similarities between your own friends and family. It’s somewhat ridiculous how much a single film can make you feel from time to time. This film is able to accomplish so much due to its subject matter and because it is a very well made film on all accounts.

Just about everything in this movie works. When the characters are sad, you are sad, when the characters are happy, you are happy, when the characters are laughing, you laugh and best of all the film isn’t forcing or tricking your emotions. It’s just that these characters are so honest and relatable that it’s hard not to feel real emotion. There’s not much else that can really be said here, 50/50 was an awesome film and I can’t wait to own it and watch it over and over again.

Grade: A

Drive Review

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When you do something enough you find out what you’re good at, what you’re bad at, what you find difficult and what you find easy in regards to that something. Take for instance, writing a movie review. I’ve found that generally it’s rather easy to write a review for a bad movie, it’s fun to rip it a part. There’s those movies in the middle of good and bad that can be a little more difficult at times because you find you have to nitpick, but the true difficulty comes when you find you have to review a truly incredible film that you’d consider a gift to cinema. You find yourself wondering if you’ve given it enough respect and fully established why the film is as good as it is. This is a very difficult review to write because Drive isn’t just the best movie of the year so far, it’s one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen.

Where do we begin? The music? Not yet, we’ll get to that. The direction? We’ll save the best for last. The acting? Maybe in a bit. The writing? We’ll get to that soon. The violence? That will certainly be talked about. How about the characters? The mood? The setting? The subtleties? The action? The art? How about we just start with a bit of a plot summary? That works. Drive is a film about a man who drives for movies, but moonlights as a getaway driver. He becomes close with a beautiful woman and her son. When he finds they may be in danger, he stops at nothing to see to their safety.

Obviously I’m keeping a lot of key plot points out so that you can discover them for yourself, but yes the plot and story aren’t very complex nor is the writing. I for one don’t like to be spoon fed information and in Drive you find some of the greatest examples of showing and not telling. Every single piece of story that needs to be told is told, no more no less. Every single aspect of the movie is well thought out, fascinating, and put together seamlessly, making for the magnificent movie that it truly is.

In Drive you’ll find fabulous actors playing relentlessly interesting characters with depth and feeling. There is not an intense, dramatic or loving moment that doesn’t work because the moments are never forced, they’re honest. Ryan Gosling is fantastic as the hero for his time and place, Albert Brooks is amazing as the conflicted villain, with Ron Perlman as the brutish partner, it’s ridiculous how brilliant Bryan Cranston is in “Breaking Bad” and to see him acting here in a completely different part just makes you want to smile, and Carey Mulligan is equally as enticing as the pure and innocent female lead.

This is the work of a truly master director, Nicolas Winding Refn, who defines his direction from the moment the film begins and keeps it constant through out. He cares about his characters, he cares about the story he’s telling, he cares about every single detail, at the end of the day it’s clear to see that the man doesn’t care about the paycheck, he cares about his movie and it shows. Subtly, with a direction that is cool and calculated, Refn blends and balances the worlds of beautiful art and pure entertainment and the only way you can describe it is perfection.

Every supreme brush stroke that makes for the beauty that is Drive was slaved over and created to be savored. Whether you’re taking in the uniquely timed and surprisingly fitting music, the raw and honest violence that’s some how done tastefully even though it’s some of the most grotesque violence ever placed in an artistic film such as this, the specifically chosen and delectable shots, the palpable and real relationships between the compelling characters, or any number of the many aspects that make this a brilliant film because that’s just a few, than you’re simply taking in one part of the extraordinary big picture that is Drive, a film that is, by all definitions of the word, a masterpiece.

Grade: A+

Moneyball Review

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It’s sad to take an entire genre of films and pass judgement on it. I will say though that for the most part I’m not a huge fan of sports movies. Obviously there are some great sports movies. Just last year, The Fighter came out and that was a great movie. There’s even occasions, rare ones, but occasions where you’ll find a masterpiece in the sports genre, take for example my favorite sports film, Raging Bull. For the most part though sports films just seem to follow a similar pattern and in that way lack a certain level of thrill or even entertainment. Moneyball may have in some aspects followed similar patterns, but it managed to be a truly awesome movie.

Moneyball is a brilliant film that looks at Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, and his attempt to make his baseball team a champion regardless of the fact that they have the least money of all other baseball franchises. There are a few details that make Moneyball slightly stereotypical, because the story is told from such a different and interesting perspective and executed so well.

I am not a very avid sports watcher and as a result I did not know this particular story as some of my friends did. Subsequently, there was actually a lot of drama in this movie for me. I had no idea what was going to happen and I was interested through out. And I could care less how historically accurate the movie is because that’s exactly what it is, a movie. The ideas it was establishing dealt with a lot more powerful issues than just baseball and the ideas were expressed due to the plot and brilliant execution of this particular story.

The acting in this film is pristine. Philip Seymour Hoffman is always a positive, this is Jonah Hill’s best performance and you can’t go wrong with Brad Pitt in a leading man role because he’s never given a performance that wasn’t satisfactory. There have been some dull movies, but he’s always played his part. He’s a truly magnificent actor and he’s fantastic in Moneyball.

In the film Moneyball, what you find is a very inspiring and yet honest tale about overcoming even the most relentless obstacles and never forgetting to believe in what’s important. I’ve truly never been as enthralled with another baseball movie than I was with Moneyball. It was written in the unwritten contract of movie reviewing that you have to make some kind of pun when reviewing a sports film so here it goes, Moneyball was a home run.

Grade: A

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark Review

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For the life of me, I can’t fully understand why my expectations were so high for this movie. It might have had something to do with the attachment of Guillermo Del Toro’s name, unfortunately though he didn’t even direct it. It could have to do with the fact that this year actually reinforced my fate in the horror genre after the film Insidious was released. A Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark trailer was played before every viewing of Insidious and that was good marketing because I was very excited to this movie. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed with the end result.

From the very beginning the film set a very intense and gloomy mood with a disturbing scene in which a man removes a woman’s teeth to give to the voices in his wall. It was a well made opening scene to set up a unique horror story. Then we meet our main characters, Sally, her father, and her step mother and that’s when the stereotypes and the disappointment begins. After the opening credits there were a handful of sequences I could definitely say I enjoyed particularly one where our main protagonist, Sally, crawls through her bed covers slowly. We know what’s to come. We just don’t know when.

Aside from a few select scenes such as that, the audience goes through agony as we have to watch scene after scene of actions that shouldn’t have been taken but are and lines you’d expect to be said and are of course said. I was sad to see Guy Pearce (a personal favorite of mine) in this dull horror flick playing the father we’ve all scene in any other lame horror film like this who of course doesn’t believe his daughter. It’s not that he was bad, he was just in a bad movie. Katie Holmes was decent and Bailee Madison was very believable as the trapped daughter.

All and all, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark had a very interesting premise and a lot of potential. It just seem the filmmakers were too afraid to actually be too out of the ordinary because they managed to take a very unique idea and make just like any other cliche filled horror movie. And it wasn’t even one of the those horror movies that you can laugh it because it’s so stupid. It found a middle ground between amazing and awful and just managed to be sad. It’s truly a disappointment to state this but Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark was was just not the horror film it could’ve been.

Grade: C-

The Tree of Life Review

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If you want to look at a film as simplistically as possible there are essentially two sides to a truly amazing film. The first side is one of art, the side where you look at the film from a filmmaking stand point and appreciate its themes and the way it excels in its craft. The second side is one of entertainment, this is the side that makes you want to watch it over and over again, the side that puts reasoning behind the question of why we watch films and the answer is simple, escape. What makes a masterpiece is when the art and the entertainment combine, collide and balance each other out. The Tree of Life is a movie that was very heavy on the art aspect and a lot lighter on the entertainment side.

This is not to say that I believe The Tree of Life was not a good film. I’m merely stating that there were many points that made you think, but didn’t necessarily give you much enjoyment. But that sounds a bit worse than what I’m trying to express. It’s not that I wanted to gouge my eyes out right after seeing it, it’s just that I wouldn’t sit down and watch it again anytime soon. One viewing will be just fine perhaps for a life time. That’s not even to say that it was extremely boring, I just got what I needed out of it and that most certainly wasn’t an excess amount of entertainment.

The Tree of Life was a rather mesmerizing piece of art, well put together and well acted on all accounts. It was executed masterfully for the exact story it was telling. What you find in this film is the exact ideas a director wanted to express with out thinking about what the critics would say or even the general audiences. He just made the movie he wanted to make and he made it very well. While at times The Tree of Life was slightly dull at other times it was mysterious and rather breath-taking.

The Tree of Life was a very broad and interesting look at life and the events and people who make us who we are. It’s a gigantic feat to take on ideas like these in any art form, but it’s not as if these ideas haven’t been tackled before. There have been movies that have been created that attempt to tackle these same types of broad ideas and no, The Tree of Life was not the master of expressing these themes. Other films have established ideas such as these and they’ve done it better. To put it bluntly, The Tree of Life is a pretty great movie, but it just wasn’t nearly as life changing as it was attempting to be. That’s just me, for someone else it may very well be the most life changing piece of art in existence. Decide for yourself.

Grade: B+