The Damned United (2009) – Biography, Drama, Sport Solid performances and engaging story, but a bit morally confused. The Last Station (2009) – Biography, Drama Top shelf acting, surprisingly interesting premise but slow to start. The Sensation of Sight (2006) – Drama Not bad, but has been done better.
Every once in awhile, a melodrama manages to incorporate the typical themes of the genre yet elevate itself above the cliches that go along with those themes. Genuinely moving without falling back on the stereotypes that could easily be expected of it, The Greatest is an excellent example of how melodrama can and should be done.
Ninja Assassin is simply blood and guts for the sake of it.
I’ve been meditating on this film all day today, trying to determine the reasons why it didn’t sit quite right with me. I read some bits and pieces of reviews in an effort to suss out why it left me feeling so adrift and vaguely discomfited, but all I found was praise, mostly for Jim Carrey’s return to more serious fare. Carrey does give a solid performance, I can’t deny that, but still there’s a prevailing sense of ickiness I can’t shake about I Love You Phillip Morris.
I fully admit it: I prejudge movies by their poster. Given that the entire intent of motion picture PR is to get you to believe a film is good enough to see just by its poster, I guess that makes sense. The thing is, sometimes the marketing team goes horribly wrong and I see a poster, like the one for Exam, for instance, and mistakenly believe it’s going to be a tired hybrid of The Apprentice and the Saw movies.
I’m not entirely sure Nowhere Boy is a movie that needed to be made in the first place, but I can give it this much: It was well-acted and very pretty to look at.
It’s really a shame that Metropia didn’t have a more original plot.
I had gotten the impression from the designated genre and quirky, derivative movie poster that Accidents Happen was a comedy. I suppose it is if having some humor in your movie qualifies it for being as much, but in actuality, this film is not the light and eccentric indie fare I expected. It was instead quite dark and rather unsettling in many places.
Despite the overt moral and period setting, this is a film that feels entirely personal.
There should be something refreshing about a movie like Chloe, that makes the effort to shunt the male lead aside and focus on the women characters instead, especially when it takes the extra step and incorporates lesbian themes. This isn’t something we often see in films with stars as big as Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore. The trouble with Chloe, though, is that the nature of its plot completely subverts any feminist efforts it might have been seeking to achieve.
