Archive for the ‘Drama’ Category
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2016
BEYOND THE RING is an amateurish underground fighting drama allegedly based on a true story and starring the Brazilian Taekwondo Grandmaster Andre Lima as himself. Depending on what parts of it are true it’s a deeply personal story and/or a weird vanity project.
In the movie Andre is a Taekwondo instructor (at one of his actual L.A. area schools it looks like), a widower and single father of teenage son Joseph (Joseph Nerlinger) and pre-teen daughter Jessica (Aycka Lima). He stopped competitive fighting after his wife’s death and gets real stubborn when his brother-in-law Patrick (Martin the bad guy in KARATE KID Kove) comes around trying to make sure he’s taking care of the family well and what not.
The hook is that one day Andre finds out his daughter has a brain tumor, and his insurance doesn’t cover her surgery, so he ends up taking an underground fight against a guy called Zulu (Justice Smith, BLOOD AND BONE, THOR) to try to raise the money. My assumption was that real life Lima really had a sick daughter and maybe did some kind of tournament fighting to pay for the surgery, not an illegal thing like this, but I’ve found some biographies of him online and none of them mention his family life at all. I guess this is one of those unverifiable martial arts tall tales, like how BLOODSPORT is supposed to be based on a real guy called Frank Dux who claims to have taken part in a real Kumite. But if the guy’s daughter (who I believe is playing herself in the movie?) didn’t really get sick that would be an unethical truth-stretching in my opinion. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andre Lima, Gary Busey, Gerson Sanginitto, J.J. Perry, jiujitsu, Justice Smith, Martin Kove, Rigan Machado, Tae Kwon Do, underground fighting
Posted in Action, Drama, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Monday, March 21st, 2016
Looking back through my notebook I discovered that I wrote most of a review of STEVE JOBS back when it was in theaters, but I never typed it up. I guess since it wasn’t nominated for best picture I didn’t catch that when I was doing all the pre-Oscars reviews. But I think it’s a movie worthy of more attention than it got, and it’s available on video and I use a Mac so it seems only fair to finish it.
Steve Jobs was a genius and also an asshole. That’s kinda the basics of Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, and many of his other screenplays, and therefore I have to guess something he can relate to. Like his other computer history piece THE SOCIAL NETWORK I think this one leans in the direction of genius not justifying assholishness, but it seems to be a question he struggles with.
I’m a little – not alot – familiar with the playwright turned TV mastermind’s work. I know people who adore his shows Sports Night and The West Wing, and some who are masochistically fascinated with The Newsroom.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Sorkin, biopic, Danny Boyle, Jeff Daniels, Kate Winslet, Michael Fassbender, Michael Stuhlbarg, Seth Rogen
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 18 Comments »
Thursday, March 17th, 2016
LET’S GET BIZZEE is a 1993 indie movie starring Doug E. Fresh, famed rapper, beatboxer and chief executive officer of The Get Fresh Crew. That’s right, it’s a Doug E. Fresh vehicle. Do you remember something like that ever existing? I don’t. But it does, preserved forever on VHS.
After seeing it, though, I understand why nobody ever talks about it. It has the dramatic quality of some crappy comedy like DISORDERLIES or something, but there aren’t many jokes in it, and zero that are funny. I think it might be intended as a serious drama about local politics.
Fresh – who now goes as D. Edward Fresh (I totally made that up) – plays Sam Baker, a kid who has just graduated high school. His mom says he needs a job and his ex-girlfriend says she needs $2,000 or she’s gonna tell his mom he has a baby. Meanwhile, the womanizing, limo-riding assemblyman Dillon (Anthony Chisholm, UP TIGHT, 13, CHI-RAQ) has made a deal to allow the projects to be destroyed and turned into condominiums. Sam is against it and does a little rap about it in the park, which leads to him hanging with a few local activist types and starting a petition against it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Chisholm, Doug E. Fresh, hip hop, Lisa Nicole Carson, Zero External Reviews on IMDb
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, March 9th, 2016
Ronnie and Reggie Kray were identical twin gangsters who ran London’s East End in the ’50s and ’60s. They owned night clubs (part of the movie SPARROWS CAN’T SING with Roy Kinnear was filmed in one of their clubs) and hung out with celebrities including Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra. Ronnie was gay, and was involved in a political scandal, allegedly having sex with and supplying men for the conservative politician Lord Boothby. The brothers were crazy and vicious and in ’69 got twin life sentences for different murders.
I’m not sure when they did all those weird stop motion films with the creepy dolls and shit.
THE KRAYS is a 1990 movie about the Krays, directed by Peter Medak (THE RULING CLASS, SPECIES II) and written by Philip Ridley (writer/director of THE REFLECTING SKIN and THE PASSION OF DARKLY NOON). I guess that combination is why it’s not a traditional gangster movie. It gives the twins a creepy DEAD RINGERS kinda vibe and spends less time than you’d think on their criminal activities.
In fact, the first 20 minutes is about their childhood. We see their traumatic experiences during the war, and how much time they spent surrounded by women while the men were off fighting. They were protected by their mother Violet (Billie Whitelaw, TWISTED NERVE, THE OMEN, SLAYGROUND) and spoiled by their Aunt Rose (Susan Fleetwood, CLASH OF THE TITANS). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Billie Whitelaw, Gary Kemp, Jimmy Jewel, Martin Kemp, Michael Kamen, Peter Medak, Philip Ridley, Susan Fleetwood
Posted in Crime, Drama, Reviews | 10 Comments »
Thursday, February 25th, 2016
BROOKLYN is my best-picture-nominee-completist viewing for this year. When the nominations were announced the only ones I hadn’t seen were THE REVENANT (which was about to come out and I was excited to see), ROOM (which I had been told was very good so I was already interested) and this one (no interest). And I’m not saying it changed my life or nothin, but it’s a good movie I never would’ve watched otherwise.
Saoirse (pronounced sur-shuh) Ronan plays Eilis (pronounced AY-lish) Lacey, a young woman who works in a shop in a small town in Ireland in 1952 (pronounced nyn-teen-fiff-tee-too). But she doesn’t get paid much and people are starving and her older sister Rose (Fiona Glascott, RESIDENT EVIL) arranges for her to go to the U.S. where there might be better opportunities. A priest (Jim Broadbent, SUPERMAN IV) sets her up with a home at a boarding house, a job at a department store and even night classes in bookkeeping at a college.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Emory Cohen, Fiona Glascott, immigration, Ireland, John Cromwell, Julie Walters, Nick Hornby, Saoirse Ronan
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Wednesday, February 24th, 2016
ROOM is a movie that would be better to know nothing about. I knew a little more than I should’ve, and that wasn’t too bad. But if you were planning on seeing it anyway, read this later.
It’s mostly a two-person movie: a mom (Brie Larson, GREENBERG) and her son Jack (Jacob Tremblay, THE SMURFS 2), who is turning five today. But they can’t go to Chuck E. Cheese or something because they live inside a small room that they can’t leave. It has no windows except for a skylight.
I wonder if they’ll do straight to video sequels like they did with CUBE. Hopefully they saved the set.
But they make do. She has the ingredients to make a humble birthday cake. No candles, though, which makes him cry. They decorate Room, as they call their world, with garbage, call objects by names like it’s Pee-wee’s Playhouse, do regular exercises and play games to keep their bodies and brains okay. They thread together a bunch of eggshells and draw a face on it: “Egg Snake is our longest and fanciest friend,” narrates Jack. Livin it up.
Like THE LOVELY BONES this is childish fantasy used as an escape from evil and tragedy. They don’t come out and say it at first, but Ma was kidnapped and locked in here at age 17, and gave birth two years later. So that tells you who the father is. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brie Larson, Emma Donoghue, Jacob Tremblay, kidnapping, Lenny Abrahamson, Sean Bridgers
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 22 Comments »
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2016
SPOTLIGHT is another one of the best picture nominees. I’d already seen it anyway. It doesn’t seem to me like signs are pointing to it as a potential winner, but it definitely feels like your traditional perfectly-good-movie-that-wins-best-picture-and-makes-you-resent-it. Unlike BIRDMAN or ARGO it is not about actors or Hollywood, except in the sense that it allows actors to shine in a big cast with mouthfuls of dialogue. But the appeal is they get to portray professionalism, a courageous Fight Against the System, and a true story about a heavy topic: the massive cover-up of child sexual abuse among Catholic clergy.
It’s an ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN type deal. The Boston Globe‘s “Spotlight” team of reporters who do long-term investigative journalism sort of stumble across this thing, an old story that no one paid much attention to that has bigger implications. They talk to victims, look at records, connect the dots, do the math, and start to suspect that the atrocity is much bigger than anyone realized. If it’s 3% of priests, let’s see, how many priests are in Boston? And 3% of that is… HOLY SHIT, that’s too many molesters in my opinion.
They discover lawyers who were involved with settlements between the families and the church. The families were led to believe the church would punish the abusers and getting some money for the kid to live off of would be the best thing to do. Whoops. They just made them move and let them keep working. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Billy Crudup, Brian d'Arcy James, John Slattery, Josh Singer, journalism, Liev Schreiber, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Stanley Tucci, Tom McCarthy
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 40 Comments »
Monday, February 22nd, 2016
Do you remember the Will Ferrell movie THE OTHER GUYS, how the end credits were a big animated info graphic about the banking crisis? It connected to the scheme by the villains in the movie but seemed jarringly serious at the end of a cop movie parody from the director of ANCHORMAN where Ferrell carries a wooden gun, has an evil pimp alter ego and has a chief played by Michael Keaton who quotes TLC all the time and works a second job at Bed Bath & Beyond. That’s why it’s not completely out of the blue that its director Adam McKay has made his first non-comedy, THE BIG SHORT, which has been nominated for many awards including Oscars for best picture, director and adapted screenplay. This is not the classic funny-man-yearning-for-respectability-with-corny-Oscar-bait-movie gambit. This is a rage that’s been fighting to get out.
Based on the non-fiction book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Moneyball author Michael Lewis, the movie tells the stories of several small-timers and outsiders in the financial world who had the foresight to see that the housing market was built on fraud and was destined to collapse. They figured out a way to basically bet against the banks, who gladly accepted the offers because they believed their own lies. They thought these people were crazy and giving them free money. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adam McKay, Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, financial crisis, Finn Wittrock, John Magaro, Michael Lewis, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carrell
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Reviews | 21 Comments »
Tuesday, February 16th, 2016
ANOMALISA is a sad, sometimes funny story about loneliness and petty, ugly human nature. If I told you it had some bizarre, seemingly unfilmable premise then that would all add up to tell you it was a Charlie Kaufman film, but it actually doesn’t have that. It’s just about a guy who travels to Cincinatti to speak at a convention and the night he spends at a hotel. Nothing crazy. It’s mostly very realistic, a frank look at relationships between men and women. It’s animated, though.
It’s all done in a beautiful and unique form of stop motion. Other than being made with small materials it’s almost entirely an attempt at naturalism, no cartoonish stylization at all. One exception is that they left the seams between the mouth and eye sections, which in other movies done with this technique such as PARANORMAN or THE BOXTROLLS were digitally removed. But this is a Charlie Kaufman movie so pretty much everything that seems a little strange – those seams, the androgynous facial structure of most of the characters, one actor providing most of the voices – turns out to be intentional and thematic.
We could compare this to Wes Anderson’s THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX as another unusual stop motion feature that fits naturally into the filmography of its live action auteur. But that one emphasized the hand-made-ness, showing off the imperfections in animating fur, using cotton balls for clouds and puffs of smoke. ANOMALISA miraculously mimics human intimacy in rubber. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Charlie Kaufman, David Thewlis, Dino Stamatopoulos, Duke Johnson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, stop motion animation, Tom Noonan
Posted in Cartoons and Shit, Drama, Reviews | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, February 9th, 2016
CAROL is a story of love – long, drawn out, dangerous, afraid-to-say-anything love. Young Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara, NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET remake), working as a shopgirl, seems practically hypnotized when she spots customer Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett, INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL) in her fur coat, Christmas shopping for her daughter. When Carol forgets her gloves on the counter it gives Therese a reason to contact her, and they strike up a relationship outside of the store. Who does Carol think she is, Cinderella? Well, some of the men in the movie treat her like O.J.
See, this takes place in the 1952 (five years before CRYSTAL SKULL), when women falling for each other was treated like a shameful crime or a sickness. Carol recently split from her husband Harge (Kyle Chandler [THE WOLF OF WALL STREET], looking more and more like Robert Foster as each minute of the day passes), and he’s still trying to work it out. But when that’s obviously not gonna happen he threatens to use a confessed lesbian incident against her in custody hearings. That’s devastating to her because her daughter is the only thing that matters to her.
It’s a movie where women dance with men and look over at each other from across the room. They have to make up alibis just for being together. Saying Therese is her assistant. If they’re sitting at a table together and a dude comes over and starts talking to them they have to act like he’s not interrupting, and sit and listen to the motherfucker. And he has no idea. He probly figures they’ve been sitting together wishing for a man. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Carrie Brownstein, Cate Blanchett, Kyle Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, Phyllis Nagy, Rooney Mara, Todd Haynes
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Romance | 8 Comments »
