THE THRILLERS OF IT ALL: Movie reviews of Man From Reno, The Mafia Only Kills in Summer and A Wolf at the Door by Howard Casner
Posted: April 5, 2015 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alex Bisconti, Ayako Fujitani, Christiana Capotondi, Dave Boyle, Fabiula Nascimento, Fernando Coimbra, Ginevera Antona, Joel Clark, Kazuki Kitamura, Leandra Leal, Man From Reno, Marco Marini, Michael Lerman, Michele Astori, Milhem Cortaz, Pepe Serna, Pif, The Mafia Only Kills in Summer, Wolf at the Door | 1 Comment »First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r
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Warning: SPOILERS
Man From Reno is a new neo noir about a mystery writer who becomes involved in a real/reel life mystery. Not a particularly original idea, though I always found it a kind of fun one, and here the writers Dave Boyle (who also directed), Joel Clark and Michael Lerman do get a certain amount of satisfying mileage from it.
It starts out very strongly with Sheriff Paul Del Moral (Pepe Serna, one of those character actors who’s been around forever and been in just about everything) making his rounds in fog as thick as a fur coat (these scenes are especially well filmed and unnerving). He comes upon a car in the middle of the road with its trunk open. In going around it, he strikes a man with Asian features. But soon after taking the man to the hospital, the man disappears. Read the rest of this entry »
OR DOES IT?: Movie reviews of IT FOLLOWS and 3 HEARTS by Howard Casner
Posted: March 27, 2015 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 3 Hearts, Benoît Jacquot, Benoît Poelvoorde, Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Gainsborough, Chiara Mastroianni, David Robert Mitchell, It Follows, Jake Weary, Julian Boivent, Keir Gilchrist, Maika Mona | 2 Comments »First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r
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Warning: SPOILERS
Teen sexuality in movies has changed quite a bit over time, of course. In the 1930’s and ‘40’s, teens were seen as innocents who got caught up in chaste, but ridiculous romantic misfires (like Andy Hardy).
In the 1950’s and 1960’s, it became a social issue with fears of juvenile delinquency (Rebel Without a Cause), unwanted pregnancy (Blue Denim) and if you’re Natalie Wood, a trip to the loony bin (Splendor in the Grass). And we haven’t even got to those luridly bad, but fun movies they showed in high school about STD’s.
Then finally, with the arrival of such films as Friday the 13th, Halloween and Carrie, teen sexuality became associated with death, with all the bad boys and girls getting theirs after having done the deed and only the virgins managing to survive.
And today, we have yet another version of when teens have sex with writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s new horror film It Follows. Read the rest of this entry »
ASHES TO ASHES: Movie review of Cinderella by Howard Casner
Posted: March 20, 2015 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Ben Chaplin, Cate Blanchett, Chris Weitz, Cinderella, Derek Jacobi, Helena Bonham-Carter, Holliday Grainger, Kenneth Branagh, Lilly James, Nonso Anozie, Richard Madden, Sophie McShera, Stellan Skarsgard | 4 Comments »First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r
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Warning: SPOILERS
There is one absolutely lovely and magical moment in the new live action, non-musical Disney version of the animated, fully musicalized Disney version of the classic Charles Perrault fairy tale Cinderella.
Our titular character, frustrated and defeated by the cruel treatment at the hands of her step-mother and step-sisters, takes to horse and rides off into a distant woods where she stops the Prince from hunting down a stag.
What’s wonderful about this scene is that the previously optimistic (and rather annoyingly Pollyanish at times) Cinderella is finally the person she really is, beaten down, sad, furious at the circumstances she has found herself in, while the Prince, in turn, is finally the person he isn’t: here he pretends to be a mere apprentice and not royalty.
Who’d have thought something this sophisticated, clever and witty would have come from a carefully fine-tuned and micromanaged to the nth degree movie from the Disney studios, but the screenwriter Chris Weitz (who has given us such fun bon bons as Antz and About a Boy) pulled off something of a coup in this particular scene.
Other than that, for my money, Cinderella is something of a mixed bag when it comes to success. I know it’s been socking it away at the box office, but I’m afraid that it only intermittently works for me. Read the rest of this entry »
OLD AGE AIN’T NO PLACE FOR SISSIES: Movie reviews of Run All Night and Faults by Howard Casner
Posted: March 16, 2015 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Beth Grant, Boyd Holbrook, Brad Inglesby, Bruce McGill, Chris Ellis, Ed Harris, Faults, Jaume Collet-Saura, Joel Kinnaman, Jon Gries, Lance Reddick, Leland Orser, Liam Neeson, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Nick Nolte, Riley Stearns, Run All Night, Vincent D’Nofrio | 2 Comments »First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r
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Warning: SPOILERS
Two movies have opened recently in which the central character use to be top of his game, but time and their past deeds have caught up to them, leaving a ruin in his place.
Liam Neeson has recently suggested that he is retiring from the action genre that gave new life to his career with the unexpected, but very effective, success of that modern day version of John Wayne’s The Searchers, Taken. After that, it was movies like The Grey and A Walk Among the Tombstones as well as others whose title seem to suggest just where this through line was going.
Now, he’s playing, Jimmy, aka The Gravedigger, an over the hill hit man, someone who has seen better days but now falls asleep drunk in a bar and farts while out, only to awaken in order to humiliate himself by asking for money from Danny, the son of his old boss and best friend, Shawn. In order to earn the money, he has to play Santa.
Things take a bad turn when Jimmy’s estranged son Mike sees Danny kill someone in a drug deal gone bad. Things take an even worse turn when Jimmy kills Danny in order to stop him from killing Mike. And then things take an even worse turn when Shawn has all his men focused on killing Mike and then killing Jimmy once he knows his son is dead. Read the rest of this entry »
THERE’LL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND SEQUEL: Movie reviews of Queen and Country and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Howard Casner
Posted: March 11, 2015 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bill Nighy, Caleb Landry Jones, Callum Turner, Celia Imrie, David Strathairn, David Thewlis, Dev Patel, Diana Hardcastle, John Boorman, John Madden, Judy Dench, Lillette Dubey, Maggie Smith, Ol Parker, Pat Shortt, Penelope Wilton, Queen and Country, Richard E. Grant, Richard Gere, Ronald Pickup, Tamsin Greg, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel | 688 Comments »First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r
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Warning: SPOILERS
Queen and Country, the new semi-autobiographical film from writer/director John Boorman (the semi part) is a sequel to Boorman’s earlier film Hope and Glory, an episodic comedy about a young lad’s picturesque adventures during World War II.
When we last saw the wee Bill, he had arrived at school to see it on fire from having been bombed during the Blitzkrieg, prompting him to yell out, “Thank you, Adolf”. It’s nearly a decade later now and Bill is an older teen and is conscripted into the army during the Korean War.
How you respond to Queen and Country will probably depend on how you respond to the way Bill is dramatized here. Personally, and to be ruthlessly honest, I found him a poor excuse for a human being who, first, has an amazing inability to fully comprehend just how lucky he is, and second, for someone whose future lies as a filmmaker, an amazing inability to understand, empathize or read the people he interacts with. Read the rest of this entry »
NOT QUITE 20/20: Movie reviews of Focus, What We Do in the Shadows and All The Wilderness by Howard Casner
Posted: March 3, 2015 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Adrian Martinez, All the Wilderness, B.D. Wong, Cori Gonzales-Macuer, Danny Devito, Evan Ross, Focus, Gerald McRaney, Glenn Ficarra, Isabelle Fuhrman, Jemaine Clement, John Requa, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Margo Robbie, Michael Johnson, Rhys Darby, Stuart Rutherford, Taiki Waititi, Virginia Madsen, What We Do In The Shadows, Will Smith | 179 Comments »First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r
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Warning: SPOILERS
Focus, the new film written and directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, comes from a genre with a proud heritage: the rom con game. It’s a genre that was extremely popular in the greatest period in film for romantic comedies, the 30’s, with such movies as Trouble in Paradise and Desire. But it has always had an endearing quality, as in such films as It Takes A Thief, The Pink Panther, The Thomas Crown Affair, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and more recently, Duplicity.
And this latest entry does have some of the qualities of these other films that ingratiate them so much to us: a cool and suave leading man; even cooler cons; and more than a touch of wit.
In addition, there is one marvelous scene of grifting involving an Asian businessman who loves to gamble and who finds himself going nose to nose with the movie’s hero on a series of more and more outrageous bets. You know what’s coming, though when it does, you’re not sure how it could possibly have pulled it off. And then when it is explained, you marvel at the audacity and chance taking of it.
But this scene also works for reasons that much of the movie doesn’t. In the end, though there are some nice moments here, Focus never really quite rises to the level of many of these other films.
KING, QUEEN AND PAWNS: Movie reviews of Kingsman: The Secret Service, Song of the Sea and Timbuktu by Howard Casner
Posted: February 18, 2015 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Abderrahmane Sissako, Abel Jefri, Brendon Gleeson, Colin Firth, Dave Gibbons, David Rawle, Fionnula Flannagan, Jane Goldman, Kessen Tall, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Mark Hamill, Mark Millar, Mark Strong, Matthew Vaughn, Michael Caine, Samuel L. Jackson, Sofia Boutella, Song of the Sea, Taron Egerton, Timbuktu, Tomm Moore, Will Collins | 1,046 Comments »First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r
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Warning: SPOILERS
Kingsman: The Secret Service, the latest entry in a comic book franchise, this one with an espionage theme, is, in many ways, an impressive and handsomely made movie.
From a technical perspective, it’s incredibly well done with the best costumes, sets, and music money can buy. It doesn’t stint and there is nothing in this film that is an old piece of tat or is cheap as chips.
The acting is also first rate, raiding the cupboards as it does for the actors who are left who managed to not appear in The Lord of the Rings or The Harry Potter series.
And it has some beautifully well staged and directed second unit scenes of carefully, even wittily, choreographed episodes of extreme violence.
In many ways, those who like these sort of studio type tent pole films will probably find it hard to carp at anything they see.
So why did I find the whole thing dispiriting and extremely depressing?
A ROOM WITH A VIEW TO KILL: Movie review of The Loft by Howard Casner
Posted: February 11, 2015 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bart De Pauw, Eric Stonestreet, Erik Van Looy, James Marsden, Karl Urban, Matthias Schoenaerts, The Loft, Wentworth Miller, Wesley Strick | 1,023 Comments »First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r
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Warning: SPOILERS
The Loft, a new neo-noir thriller based on a Belgium film of the same name, is about five married friends who go in together and purchase a condo (hence the title) where they can take their mistresses in secret. Things go a tad awry when one of them shows up one morning and finds a dead woman in the bed. Since the five are the only ones that have keys, then one of them must have done the deed.
But who?
This is actually quite an intriguing concept and the main reason to see the movie. No matter however else I may have felt about it, I did find myself sticking around just to find out who dunnit.
Of course, the ne-noir aspects of the movie are like the articles in a Playboy Magazine. They’re the reason why you say you read it, when in all honesty you are engaged in activities that stick the pages together.
Here, one may be going for the thrills and chills, but I suspect deep down in the audience’s heart (of which the vast majority I suspect are mainly men, many married), they are really there to see some hot man on woman action of husbands cheating on their wives.
However, I should warn you that if you are, you might find the movie a bit of a bait and switch. Read the rest of this entry »
AND THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY: Movie Reviews of A Most Violent Year and Mommy by Howard Casner
Posted: February 5, 2015 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: A Most Violent Year, Albert Brooks, Anne Dorval, Antoine-Olivier Pilon, David Margulies, DAvid Oyelowo, J.C. Chandor, Jessica Chastain, Mommy, Suzanne Clement, Xavier Dolan | 801 Comments »First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r
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Warning: SPOILERS
How you feel about A Most Violent Year, the new neo-noir written and directed by J.C. Chandor, will probably depend on how you feel about the central character, Abel Morales, an up and coming entrepreneur; you know, the to dream the American dream type person, which in this case means playing with the big guys when it comes to the heating oil business.
He has worked long and hard to create a business than is not only as successful as others who have mainly inherited their companies, he is slowly encroaching on some of their territory. To make room at the top for him and his family, he has just signed a contract to buy his own storage facility, but has less than a month to come up with the remaining $1.5 million to secure it, which he expects to get in a loan from a bank.
He also wants to do it honestly and not break any laws, including taking money from his wife’s less than ethical family. And honest he is. We know this because we are told this, over and over and over again. So I guess it must be true (and there’s no real evidence to doubt it).
In many ways there is much to admire in this young turk. What he’s doing isn’t easy and, as I said, it is the American dream, after all. Read the rest of this entry »
HERMAN MELVILLE IN A SUB and CHECKOV IN TURKEY: Movie reviews of Black Sea and Winter Sleep by Howard Casner
Posted: January 31, 2015 | Author: Donald | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Ben Mendelsohn, Black Sea, Demet Akbag, Dennis Kelly, Ebru Ceylan, Haluk Bilginer, Jude Law, Kevin McDonald, Melisa Sӧzen, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Scoot McNairy, Winter Sleep | 2,659 Comments »First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r
Warning: SPOILERS
After WWII, Germany was being fought over by the Western Powers (England, France and the U.S.) and the Russians. They ended up splitting the country in half, in a riff on that Solomon and baby thing.
In Black Sea, a new action film written by Dennis Kelly and directed by Kevin McDonald, cold war politics come back to haunt the characters as a submarine crew made up of equal parts British and Russian go on the hunt for some Nazi gold with the goal of splitting it between the two.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Before I continue, I should reemphasize how I start these reviews: Warning: SPOILERS.
I feel I should do this because there will be spoilers. My god, will there be spoilers, spoilers galore. They will flow like the River Nile and spray the canvas like the drops flung forth from a fighter’s broken nose during a Mixed Martial Arts bout.
They will flow because I found the plot to Black Sea to be one of the most preposterous ones I’ve come across in some time. Read the rest of this entry »
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