Capturing the raw emotion of two people who believe they’ve found love at first sight is no small challenge for any film. Like Crazy attempted to do it on a relatively slim budget. And let there be no doubt, capturing the feelings of a couple who fall in love and then struggle to cement that …
Category Archives: Movie Reviews
Way late review: The Descendants
Watching dramas about characters thrown into tragedy along with their dysfunctional families can often be funny and not necessarily because laughs come at their expense but because they confront us about some (often painful) truth about ourselves and those around us. The Descendants is such a film. Matt King (George Clooney) is a lawyer who …
Way late review: A Better Life
Proving that making a point doesn’t have to happen as a result of preaching, A Better Life successfully tells the simple story of an illegal immigrant Carlos (Demián Bichir) who struggles to make ends meet while keeping his teenage son, Luis (José Julián), away from the gangs of East L.A. There is no doubt, A …
Way late review: Take Shelter
After working closely with those impacted by and helping out with the aftermath of a devastating tornado I’m not crazy about watching films that have tornadoes as a central prop. Take Shelter is more about a man struggling with losing his sanity than it is about the storms around him, whether they be real or …
Way late review: Grizzly Man
Timothy Treadwell and Werner Herzog were made for each other. Unfortunately their meeting meant the death of Treadwell, as Herzog’s Grizzly Man documents Treadwell’s life and death at the paws of the grizzly bears Treadwell felt were his surrogate family. Knowing how things end makes Grizzly Man an uncomfortable watch, not because we get to …
Way late review: The Adventures of Tintin
2011’s scariest movie of the year, The Adventures of Tintin? Maybe not, but the animation style first made popular by the just as terrifying Polar Express is not comforting. Even more disconcerting is Tintin’s orange on a toothpick head. His boyish looks mashed up with his Bourne like skills don’t make sense. Every other character …
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Way late review: Hugo
Martin Scorsese’s love letter to cinema, Hugo, is like most love letters – full of passion, often beautiful, yet lacking in anything resembling a cohesive narrative. Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan who keeps the clocks ticking behind a train station in Paris. Why he and almost everyone around him have British accents is …
Way late review: Being Elmo
It’s Elmo’s world, we only get to watch it. That’s until Being Elmo exposes the red furry one’s diabolic plans to rule the world! OK, so maybe the documentary Being Elmo isn’t anything like that. Part of me wishes it was or at least dared to take a bizarre twist in the third act in …
Way late review: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
When I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind a number of years ago for the first time I remember being disappointed. I wanted E.T. and instead I got a bizarre story of a man who sees a UFO and proceeds to lose his mind. Years later I appreciated Spielberg’s first alien movie much more …
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Way late review: Project Nim
If the story of a chimp raised by humans told in Project Nim sounds vaguely familiar to the blockbuster Rise of the Planet of the Apes, there’s a good reason for that. The screenwriters for Rise were well aware of Nim, the chimp whom scientists wanted to see if they could teach sign language as …