Archive for the ‘Drama’ Category
Thursday, February 18th, 2010
I never heard of Lee Daniels before he got a best director nomination for PRECIOUS, BASED ON etc. Turns out PRECIOUS… is his third movie as a director, SHADOWBOXER is his first, and Kent M. Beeson insisted in the comments that I had to see it.
I’ve seen a few interviews and things with Daniels, and he seems like a nice, normal guy. Based on these movies alone, though, you’d have to assume the motherfucker is nuts.
SHADOWBOXER is a very serious crime drama. It has some colorful characters and intense violence, but it’s not an action movie at all. It’s focused on the characters, and with its lush colors, weakness for soft lighting and classical music it’s a similar style to PRECIOUS. It’s the story of a male-female team of assassins who, when hired to take out a crime boss’s pregnant wife (Vanessa Ferlito from DEATH PROOF) decide instead to deliver the baby and take mother and child into hiding.
The two killers have a strong attachment, they take care of each other, and they are lovers. And, uh, they’re played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Helen Mirren. Hahem. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cuba Gooding Jr., Helen Mirren, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lee Daniels, Mo'Nique, Stephen Dorff
Posted in Crime, Drama, Reviews | 35 Comments »
Sunday, February 7th, 2010
I wasn’t planning to see THE BLIND SIDE, but I’d seen 8 out of the 10 best picture nominees already, and I heard it wasn’t that bad. So what the hell. Figured I could start filling out the checklist and have a review for Super Bowl Sunday.
Adapted from part of a Michael Lewis football book, this is the true story of how a completely uneducated homeless kid in Tennessee who barely spoke and didn’t know what an ocean was got brought into a private Christian school, adopted by rich white people, learned how to play football and got his grades up enough for a college football scholarship. He was Michael Oher, now an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: John Lee Hancock, Kathy Bates, Lily Collins, Ray McKinnon, Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw, watchable but should be so much better feel good true story football movies
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Sport | 61 Comments »
Thursday, February 4th, 2010
Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) is a very overweight young black woman, afraid to talk in her junior high math class, fantasizing about being married to her teacher. She reminds me of the kid from BAD SANTA – a nice, kind of weird, troubled kid keeping to herself and holding up an emotionless face as everybody throws things at her (both literally and figuratively). So far it seems like problems we can handle. But then she gets called into the principal’s office and gets kicked out of school for being pregnant. With her second child. To her own father.
And trust me, it gets worse. This is like 5 minutes into the movie, including the opening credits. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Mariah Carey!?!, Oprah, Paula Patton
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 60 Comments »
Thursday, January 28th, 2010
BRINGING OUT THE DEAD is Martin Scorsese at his most nightmarish and hallucinogenic, a movie almost entirely in helicopters-overhead-paranoid-end-of-GOODFELLAS mode. That’s ’cause it’s about night shift EMT workers, which I think we can safely assume is probly a pretty stressful job. The movie is written by Paul Schrader based on one of those “this job is fucked and we’re all on drugs” type exposes, like Kitchen Confidential was for chefs.
Man of the hour Nic Cage plays Frank Pierce, who doesn’t get enough sleep and thinks he sees the ghosts of everyone he’s failed to save. He has a hard time feeling like a hero since most of the calls he gets are DOA or false alarms. He’s always doing CPR on dead babies or begging the hellishly overcrowded hospital to take in a vegetable. He’s so tired of bum-out cardiac arrests (“COME ON, PEOPLE!” he scolds) that he’s happy dealing with the notoriously foul-smelling drunk Mr. O, who calls in every time he’s wasted. The one time Frank does succeed in resuscitating a guy he feels guilty about it and imagines the man telling him to let him die. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Mark Anthony, Martin Scorsese, Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, Paul Schrader, Tom Sizemore, Ving Rhames
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Reviews | 60 Comments »
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Time for a little history lesson. Not about the American post-slavery period known as Reconstruction (which is what this movie is about) but about TV movies. It’s hard for young people to wrap their heads around now, but there was a time when TV movies actually could be big events, a major shared element of our culture. This was when there were only a few channels, and none of them were SyFy, and movies about giant komodo dragons or snakes were not yet common. Believe it or not there were even sometimes TV movies where the people making them actually tried to do a good job. In fact, there were honest to God movies on TV that put some theatrical films to shame, like Spielberg’s DUEL and Carpenter’s SOMEONE’S WATCHING ME. Of course, most of them weren’t as good as that, but alot of them were at least memorable. In the ’70s and ’80s there were true crime movies to creep the shit out of us, like THE HILLSIDE STRANGLERS, THE DELIBERATE STRANGER, I KNOW MY FIRST NAME IS STEVEN. Or if you want to get real frightening there was the nuclear war movie THE DAY AFTER.
1979’s 4-hour mini-series FREEDOM ROAD fits into the Important Historical Epics category like ROOTS or SHOGUN or I WILL FIGHT NO MORE FOREVER or some James A. Michener type shit. It’s about a man who goes from a slave to a soldier to a delegate to an educated black man to a senator and freedom fighter uniting former slaves with lower class whites to stand up against racist politicians and thugs and create a stable life for themselves. But the main reason to watch it is the star: Muhammad Ali. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfre Woodard, Civil War, historical drama, Kris Kristofferson, Muhammad Ali, Reconstruction, slavery, TV movies
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 31 Comments »
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
So Mandela (Morgan Freeman) has just been elected president of South Africa. The headlines ask, “He can get elected – but can he run a country?” Mandela says it’s a legitimate question.
Apartheid ended a few years earlier, but the white Afrikaners still aren’t ready for this. In his first day as president he has to make a speech explaining to the white people in his office that no, contrary to rumors they are not fired. Whatever they did in the past is in the past. If they don’t want to work with him then fine, pack your shit (paraphrase), but otherwise he needs you so stay and do what’s right for the country.
The mistrust goes both ways. Mandela’s head of security (Tony Kgoroge) knows this is gonna be a tough job, but when he asks for more men Mandela gives him a bunch of white South African cops, the enemy of the African National Congress. He has every reason to believe these scary motherfuckers could plan an assassination themselves, but Mandela wants them for their symbolic value. If he goes around with an integrated security team then that says something. What else can he do, really? Somebody’s gotta put their toes in the water. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Clint Eastwood, Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman, South Africa
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Sport | 46 Comments »
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
UP IN THE AIR looks like a good candidate for the LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE of the year – the one I like but I’m kind of baffled by how intense the praise is during Critic’s Christmastime, the Season of Bountiful Awards and Lists. If I didn’t foresee that possibility I might not even review it – after all I recently discovered I didn’t even do a writeup of SNIPER, why would I bother with this? But this way if I start resenting it I can read this and get some perspective. I’ll have a record that I thought it was a pretty good movie.
It’s the story of Ryan Bingham, a guy who flies around the country to lay people off. He works for a company hired by other companies too chickenshit to swing the ax themselves. He has a whole rap about how you weren’t meant to be stuck in this job and you need to take this opportunity to follow your dreams. He’s good but, come on, people aren’t really buying it, except out of desperation. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Danny McBride, George Clooney, Jason Bateman, Jason Reitman, Vera Farmiga
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 27 Comments »
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
THE ROAD is a good movie, better book. If you’re thinking about reading it but haven’t got to it yet I’d say read it, then see the movie. The movie (directed by John Hillcoat, who did THE PROPOSITION) is very faithful to the book (by Cormac McCarthy, who did No Country For Old Men) and illustrates it well, but it can’t really do the same thing.
In case you don’t watch Oprah, the story is about a man and his son after civilization has been destroyed by some unnamed disaster. They’re cold, hungry and worn out and trying to push their little cart of belongings across the United States to the coast. They don’t even really know what they expect when they get there, they just don’t know what else to do. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Charlize Theron, Cormac McCarthy, Garret Dillahunt, Guy Pearce, John Hillcoat, post-apocalypse, Robert Duvall, Viggo Mortensen
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 25 Comments »
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
(this review has more spoilers than usual because there’s alot to analyze.)
BIG FAN is the directational debut of Robert Siegel, known obviously to most Seagalogists as the writer of THE ONION MOVIE. He was the editor for The Onion comedy newspaper, then left to write scripts. This one caught the attention of Darren Aronofsky, who was gonna direct it for a while until he decided to have Siegel write a wrestling picture instead.
This one does have some things in common with THE WRESTLER. Both are smartly written, observant, bleak dramas about working class dudes in sports subcultures that don’t usually get much respect. The premise sounds like a comedy: an obsessive sports fan has to decide what to do after getting beaten up by his favorite player. I can imagine the Adam Sandler or Rob Schneider vehicle they could make out of that, but this is more of a drama with some squirmy, uncomfortable chuckles here and there, kind of a minimalistic TAXI DRIVER type character portrait. And for those of us who have written extensively about aikido masters it brings to mind some disturbing hypothetical scenarios. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Kevin Corrigan, Michael Rapaport, Patton Oswalt, Robert Siegel
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
BRONSON is pretty entertaining. Tom Hardy, some British actor who’s apparently substituting Treat Williams style as Mad Max in FURY ROAD, worked out and scaried up to play some real life dude they tell us is famous as “Britain’s most violent prisoner.” His real name is Michael something but he calls himself “Charlie Bronson.” He does have a mustache, but it’s a twirly circus strongman type deal and with a bald head, it’s not a Bronson vibe at all.
Hardy seems a little self-conscious at times, but then so does the character. The important thing is that he throws his full weight into the craziness, spending a good deal of the movie naked, smeared in paint, getting in knock down fights with the screws, yelling that everybody’s a bunch of cunts. One of his main hobbies is taking hostages, even though it never seems to get him anywhere. I like when the warden asks him what he wants and he thinks about it for a second and asks, “Well, what’ve you got?” Usually his only demand is a disgusted “Fuck off,” which is too bad because I read that the real guy likes to make demands like an inflatable doll, a helicopter and a cup of beans. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Nicolas Winding Refn, Tom Hardy
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 78 Comments »
