I found another unknown film on Netflix tonight and I wondered if it was going to be as good as yesterday’s The Girl Next Door. Spoiler alert: it is not.
US Census Bureau agent Steve Kady (Jeremy Sisto) arrived in the small town of Rockwell Falls and found a bizarre fact. For the last 100 years, the population of Rockwell Falls has been 436. Steve was beginning to be treated as more than a guest, and, as the mystery deepened, Steve was shocked at the depth of the conspiracy he had discovered.
I never got into this movie. The look felt cheap. The acting was, at best, adequate. Jeremy Sisto was constantly over acting. It felt like a film you might find on Sy-Fy or Oxygen.
Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit appeared as Deputy Bobby Caine.
There was a lot of silliness in the movie and it did not feel scary or tense. The whole pop. 436 thing was explained in the most ridiculous way and it made no sense for why the people of the town did what they did. They also stated that it was God’s will to keep Rockwell Falls at teh number 436. No real reason. Just because.
And you had better not get to 437.
A real waste of time. I did not find this enjoyable at all. I disliked this one a lot.
Every once in a while, you come across a movie that leaves a pit in your stomach. A film that is disturbing and painful to watch, dealing with an area of life that is so shockingly cruel and evil that it is difficult to comprehend how another living, breathing person could commit such a heinous series of crimes against another person. Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door is that kind of movie.
We start the film with an adult David Moran (William Atherton), who had tried to save the life of a hit-and-run victim, reflecting back on his teen years in 1958 and on his first crush, Meg Loughlin (Blythe Auffarth). Meg and her sister Susan (Madeline Taylor), who was just badly injured in the same car crash that claimed their parents’ lives, had to come and stay with their Aunt Ruth Chandler (Blanche Baker), and her sons, Willie (Graham Patrick Martin), Ralphie (Austin Williams), and Donny (Benjamin Ross Kaplan).
Aunt Ruth immediately began to torment Meg and her sister. David (Daniel Manche) was conflicted about what was happening and was not sure what he could do to help. Things get worse as Ruth whips Susan for Meg’s perceived improprieties.
After Meg tried to go to police officer Lyle Jennings (Kevin Chamberlain) for assistance, Ruth had her tied up in the basement, while her boys watched. The abuse grew worse until, after an escape attempt by Meg, Ruth took the torture to a different level.
This was a movie that absolutely ripped out my heart and kicked me in the stomach. It was such a disturbing and anguish-inducing group of scenes that horrified me and caused me to feel empty inside. It is worse yet when considering that this movie is based on a true story, the murder of Sylvia Marie Likens in 1965. The film adapted the novel of the same name by Jack Ketchum.
It is an uncomfortable movie. It is a painful movie. It will make you mad. It will make you sick. It is hard to watch. I can absolutely see how this would be a divisive movie for an audience, but I think it is important to shine a light on the darkness because the darkness exists. We can’t put our head in the sand and pretend that these horrors are not out there. They are.
Is this movie entertaining? I do not think that is the way to describe it. It is an extremely effective horror film. It is, again, not a film I want to watch again any time soon. I still think it is filled with powerful performances, especially from Daniel Manche and Blythe Auffarth, and a story that we may not want to hear, but that we must see.
I really do not know much about Bob Marley. However, this looked to be an interesting story in a reasonably short documentary on Netflix, focusing on a major event in the middle 1970s in an unstable Jamaica.
The event I am referring to is the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, a singer whom had always been a dedicated fighter for peace.
Honestly, we do not know much about what happened still and the film speculated about the role of the CIA or about the local political leaders.
There were a lot of the people in the area talking about the situation. It was interesting, but the story did not grip me as much as I would have liked it to. It was fine and the political aspect was appealing, but maybe since I was not as much of a fan of Bob Marley, that was a reason why it did not grab me to the extent that it did.
This movie is Castaway meets LOST meets The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
And it is as awesome as that sounds.
When I was looking through Netflix’s film selection for Black History Month, I came across this sci-fi horror monster movie. It was the right length for my viewing tonight and it sounded interesting. Produced by Jason Blum, there was already a pedigree in horror films for Sweetheart. This was so great.
After her boat sank in a storm, Jennifer Remming (Kiersey Clemons) washed up on the shore of a mysterious island. She discovered her friend Brad (Benedict Samuel), who had also washed up on shore, but had bad injuries and he died soon after.
Jennifer buried him, but there was something monstrous that showed up that night. Some kind of creature appeared and took Brad’s body away. Watching one night, Jennifer saw the monster come from out of the water, eventually returning to a black hole in the water.
Soon after, Jennifer’s boyfriend Lucas Griffin (Emory Cohen) and friend Mia Reed (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence), who had also been on the boat, arrived on a raft. Lucas and Mia were happy to see Jennifer, but they were not too anxious to get back in the raft and leave, no matter how much Jennifer protested.
There are several interesting things going on in Sweetheart, including some intriguing implications about what Lucas and Mia may have done to survive on their raft. The monster is very mysterious and we do not know what it is or where it comes from, and I like that very much. They do not feel the need to go into details that do not further the story.
The third act is just great too. The final confrontation is absolutely worth the wait. Kiersey Clemons is a star and she dominated the screen. I loved this because Kiersey Clemons showed that Jennifer was smart and capable, which many times in films such as this, the characters are not. I never thought she was doing anything stupid and I loved how she was written here.
The film looked great. They use some wonderful techniques to shoot the film and the night sections of the movie are some of the best.
I was pleasantly pleased with Sweetheart and enjoyed the film tremendously.
An unbearably heavy and pain-filled documentary this early morning. It is Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, the doc short from 1955 that looked at the concentration camps of the Holocaust, ten years later.
The imagery of the film is horrifying, shocking evidence of man’s inhumanity to man, specifically the Jewish people who were targeted by the Nazi Party for extermination.
Treated like animals, if not even worse than animals, the Jewish men and women spent years in an intolerable situation thrust upon them from some of the evilest monsters the world has ever seen.
The documentary, narrated in French, spoke of the daily horror and the inglorious end suffered by the prisoners of these camps. Written by Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol, it was a struggle to finish for him. The combination of black and white war footage and color pictures of the present day (1955). These ungodly images were punctuated by the score written by Hanns Eisler.
Resnais was tentative about making this film until he found out that Cayrol would be involved.
It is an important film because it is a time that must never be forgotten, because the horrors found at places like Auschwitz or Majdanek must never be allowed to happen again.
I find this hard to classify because I do not want to minimize the documentary so I will be skipping that part of this review. This can be found on HBO Max and it should be a doc that everybody sees during their life.
There was a new documentary that appeared on Netflix this past week entitled The Tinder Swindler, and it is a compelling, amazing and eventually sad documentary about the way someone could take advantage of others who were looking for love or for solid relationships.
Simon Leviev used the dating app Tinder to target certain women and con them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to this new documentary. In the film, we hear the stories of how Simon wormed his way into the life of two individual women and how he sent them into debt by borrowing money from them, both cash and with credit cards, that he never had any intentions of paying back.
The two women had different relationships with Simon. Cecilie had a romantic relationship with him, believing that she was special in his life. Meanwhile, Pernilla had formed a close friendship with him after they realized that they were not going to work as a couple. Both women were drawn close in with Simon and were used to provide him with money.
Their stories show just how dangerous it can be to hook up with someone online and how social media can be a detriment to a positive relationship.
It is not until the doc focuses on a third woman, Ayleen, who discovered the truth about Simon in an article on the internet from the journalists who had been tracking this case for awhile. She decided that she would turn the tables on the swindler, and she does so in a dramatic and fully satisfying manner.
However, the end of the documentary was a shock as the details about Simon’s current situation is revealed and it ends the story in an extremely disappointing way.
A remarkable story of greed and crookedness that is completely believable in this day and age. It goes to show you to be very cautious when online because there are criminals everywhere.
The 400th movie in the DailyView was a film I had never heard of before and was on Peacock. I loved Robin Williams and the premise surprised me. Unfortunately, The Big White felt like a poor man’s Fargo.
Paul Barnell (Robin Williams) and his wife Margaret (Holly Hunter) had been having problems, especially with money. Paul’s brother Raymond (Woody Harrelson) had been missing for five years so Paul tried to cash in a life insurance policy on him.
Insurance investigator Ted Waters (Giovanni Ribisi) told Paul that they could not Raymond declared dead until he was missing for at least 7 years.
Paul, desperate to figure something out, discovered a dead body in the dumpster outside his work. Paul decided to take the body and make it seem as if it was his brother come back, only to die accidentally.
Ted never believed the coincidental result and a couple of thugs (Tim Blake Nelson and W. Earl Brown) who had put the man in the dumpster in the first place both were putting the pressure on Paul.
While I think there are some good ideas in the film and some moments were decent, much of the movie is a mess. The whole “Tourette Syndrome” storyline with Margaret never worked, was played for comedy and was never resolved. Ted went off the rails big time in the movie and that did not feel right. The love interests were odd characters just for the sake of being odd.
Robin Williams is great as usual. Woody Harrelson was playing a character that he has played in many other movies.
The story is messy and convoluted. It has some moments, but I think it would be more effective if it had been edited down.
It was not a terrible movie I watched, but it could have been so much better.
In 2020, a series of films were released first on the BBC and then a week later on Amazon Prime. This series of films were all under the awning of Small Axe and they were all written and directed by Steve McQueen. It was a series that I wanted to watch at the time, but just did not fit them into my schedule. That oversight then is my benefit now as I can use these films in the DailyView during Black History Month.
The first film is the true story of the Mangrove restaurant in west London and the subsequent trial of the group known as the Mangrove 9, a group accused by the police at the time of organizing and starting a violent riot.
The Mangrove restaurant was targeted by the police at the time under suspicion of criminal behavior going on, despite the fact that there had been no evidence of anything taking place. Trinidadian immigrant Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes) opened the Mangrove in Noting Hill during the 1960s and the place immediately became a local spot for black people to meet.
The restaurant is watched by racist Constable Frank Pulley (Sam Spruell) and Pulley leads several assaults and raids on the establishment, tormenting Frank and his employees.
The neighborhood rallied behind the Mangrove and organized a protest against the unfair police actions. After the police instigated violence among the protesters, several arrests are made and the group is placed on trial.
Letitia Wright played Trinidadian Black Panther leader Altheia Jones-LeCointe, and she does a magnificent job. She brings a power to her performance that I did not expect. Other featured actors included Malachi Kirby, Nathaniel Martello-White, Richie Campbell, Alex Jennings, Samuel West, and Darren Braithwaite.
The courtroom scenes in this movie are extremely compelling, especially when Altheia and Darcus, who were defending themselves, cross examined some of the key witnesses of the case. The judge certainly seemed to be favoring the prosecution and created anxiety among the viewers with how unfair he seemed to be.
The film does a great job of showing how much agony the defendants were in from the searching for justice that did not appear to be coming.
Roland Emmerich, director of this film, made a snide comment about Marvel, DC and Star Wars movies destroying the movie business. Then, ironically, he puts out a movie like Moonfall, which is really close to a super hero movie and is just so much worse than all of the super hero movies recently.
In Moonfall, the moon falls toward earth. Yup, that was the plot. At least at the start. We were getting the Emmerich 2012/Independence Day/The Day After Tomorrow type of disaster film where the moon had mysteriously come out of its orbit and would eventually crash into the earth, causing massive destruction and death. Thankfully, a plucky group of characters including Jo (Halle Berry), Brian (Patrick Wilson and Dr. KC Houseman (John Bradley) take off to try and save the ear5th while their family members and kids try to avoid dying on the planet.
It is the same as any other disaster movie you have ever seen and felt like all of Emmerich’s films blended together into one. The group of people on the earth, which included Brian’s son (Charlie Plummer), and, for some reason the unbelievably wasted Michael Peña, were characters that I could not care about less. They were a total waste of time.
By the way, into the third act, the film changes pace and tries to escape the disaster movie genre and become a high concept sci-fi film, and it failed miserably. The HUGE amount of exposition that happened at the very beginning of the third act totally dragged any little bit of momentum the film may have had to a grinding stop.
The CGI is not great either, especially the destruction on the earth. It was very limited amount of special effects on earth, certainly no where near what you may expect in a disaster film.
Emmerich seemed to have little skill at creating realistic or compelling real humans. The dialogue is terrible. Their interactions are wooden and lacking any real true feeling. He should just stick to his overarching destructive tendencies.
Moonfall can’t even become a dumb disaster movie. It failed at most of the traits of the movie. I disliked this film. And, sorry Roland, it has nothing to do with Marvel, DC or Star Wars. Moonfall is just a crappy movie.
I almost did not go to this movie. I am not a fan of Jackass and it does not feel like the humor I enjoy, but it worked out for me to see it and I went.
And I hated it.
Hated it.
I’m not sure whether the cast was more tortured or if I was.
I hate it when there is vomit in movies, so a film that featured the Vomitron, which is real vomit, is not going to be something I like.
Honestly, I may have giggled twice in the entire movie. I found nothing funny. It was just a bunch of poop, pain and more penises than I have ever seen in a movie.
All these guys standing around laughing at people who have done something stupid and are hurt make me feel as if they are nothing but a bunch of assholes, not just jackasses. They also pulled some bits that felt cruel, not funny. The thing with the bear. The thing with the rattlesnake in the dark. I was really worried that a couple of these Jackasses were going to have a heart attack doing these.
The best part about the film was when they brought out the vulture because that bird was frightening. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. It was horrifying, and that did not include them throwing raw meat into the crotch area of Wee Man for the vulture to eat. The bird was easily the best moment.
Otherwise, I hated so much of this movie. Even a few of the moments that could have been funny had already been in the trailer (such as the Machine Gun Kelly backhand or the bicycle riding into the wall) and it was spoiled.
Oh, and the beginning introduction with the Godzilla penis thing… may have been one of the worst thing that I have ever seen.
A magical fantasy combined with a real life feel, Beasts of the Southern Wild was a powerful film of life, family and courage.
Six year old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) had a lot to face for someone so young. Her father Wink (Dwight Henry) was having serious health problems and their home in a bathtub in a southern delta at the end of the world was being threatened by natural disasters and an army of prehistoric creatures called auroch. When her father’s health deteriorates, Hushpuppy goes in search of her long lost mother.
The film is centered around an amazing performance from the young Quvenzhané Wallis, the youngest actresses currently to have been nominated for Best Lead Actress Oscar at the Academy Awards. There is a force of nature feel to the young girl and she dominates the screen with every moment she appears. She plays brilliantly off Dwight Henry, who gives a tremendous supporting performance, with a complex character unlike any that I’ve seen before.
The blend of the fantastic and the realism of the world is another impressive feat that this movie pulled off. To be such a mixture of the two film types and to be so successful at it is a true compliment to the film’s director, Benh Zeitlin.
Not only did Quvenzhané Wallis receive an Academy Award nomination, but the film itself was nominated as Best Picture at the Oscars. It was recognized as an original, beautiful story that you just do not see evryday.
All of this was coming from the POV of Hushpuppy, so everything depended on the imagination of the young girl. Everything that was going on around her was adapted into the world that was created in her mind. Without the presence and power of Hushpuppy, this does not work nearly as well.
This was a surprisingly powerful and emotional experience and should be a film that you check out.
The February section of the DailyView continues with the rom-com films with Forgetting Sarah Marshall, starring Jason Segel, Kristen Bell and Mila Kunis.
After a five year relationship, actress Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) dumps Peter (Jason Segel), composer and sad sack boyfriend. Peter spirals out of control and goes through a series of meaningless one night stands, but he could not get over his broken heart.
So when his step brother Brian (Bill Hader) convinced him to take a trip. Peter went to Hawaii and coincidentally wound up at the same hotel as Sarah and her new boyfriend, rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand).
Depressed Peter was helped out by one of the hotel employees Rachel (Mila Kunis), who provided him a room at the hotel. Peter and Rachel hit it off and started hanging out while he kept running into Sarah and Aldous.
This was a lot of fun. I loved the film, from the beginning right through to the intriguing ending. How can you not love Dracula The Musical (with puppets)! Jason Segel went all out (and all off) to make the movie funny. He had great chemistry with Mila Kunis.
Russell Brand was perfectly cast as Aldous Snow and he was cool in the role. There were some great cast members here too including Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, Liz Cackowski, Jack McBrayer, Taylor Wily, Steve Landesberg, Da’Vone McDonald, Maria Thayer, William Baldwin, Jason Bateman, Billy Bush, and Kala Alexander.
Many times I do not like this kind of raunchy comedies, but I found Forgetting Sarah Marshall to be a smartly written, intelligent and fun film that used the humor in an excellent manner.
Woody Allen has been a controversial figure for many years. The accusations that have followed him have turned off many people. It can be a struggle to support an artist like him who has been accused of such terrible things. People like Michael Jackson, Mel Gibson and Woody Allen have created such amazing work over the years, but can someone enjoy the work knowing how potentially horrible they are?
Annie Hall is a great example, because this movie is fantastic, but the whole time I was watching it, I kept thinking about Woody Allen.
Putting that aside, Annie Hall is great. I loved how Woody Allen started off just speaking to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, which he does several times throughout the movie.
Allen played comedian Alvy Singer who was reflecting upon his failed relationship with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). The story bounced around giving us moments throughout the history of the relationship and of Alvy’s life, filled with neuroses and paranoia. Annie Hall is the great love of his life, but I am not sure that he ever truly realized that.
Woody Allen was all over this movie and he brought his best work. Annie Hall is considered one of the greatest movies made by many cinephiles. It is definitely funny and Allen’s constant neurotic behavior as well as his one liners keep the film a good time.
Diane Keaton is excellent as the title character, and she does win an Academy Award for Best Actress. Annie has a real arc of a story across the movie, making more change than probably any character. I guess as the character who the film is named after, that makes some sense.
The rest of the cast is filled with some fascinating cameos as well as some solid actors. The cast included Tony Roberts as Alvy’s best friend Rob, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Shelley Duvall, Christopher Walken, Collen Dewhurst, Jeff Goldblum, Janet Margolin, Truman Capote, John Glover, Sigourney Weaver and Beverly D’Angelo.
At some point, you have to be able to separate the artist from the art, because if you can’t, you miss out on some awesome stuff. That is the way it would have been with Annie Hall if I could not do that separation. And I enjoyed the film tremendously.
Today we are blending together the rom-coms with Black History Month and we get The Photograph, a 2020 film that I missed in the theaters because of the pandemic.
The Photograph told two intermixed stories from two different time frames. Famous photographer Christina Eames died unexpectedly, leaving her estranged daughter Mae (Issa Rae) filled with questions. When Mae discovered a photograph, it lead to an investigation into her mother’s past life and her love, Isaac (Y’lan Noel). As she was looking into the mystery, she entered a relationship with a journalist, Michael Block (LaKeith Stanfield).
LaKeith Stanfield and Issa Rae were wonderful in this film, showing an undeniable amount of chemistry between them. Both are exceptionally strong, up and coming actors that have huge futures ahead of them. This showed that they are capable of tapping into the romantic side of their repertoire. Because of them, the present day story was much more compelling that the story of the past, which felt fairly typical.
Some of the film was set in New Orleans and that backdrop added to the flare of The Photograph.
There are a strong cast of black actors in this ensemble including Courtney B. Vance, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Teyonah Parris, Milton “Lil Rel” Howery Jr., Rob Morgan (Turk from Daredevil), Chanté Adams, and Jasmine Cephas Jones. The cast also included Chelsea Peretti.
The Photograph was fine. The performances of the main two stars carried it through a fairly predictable story.
As the calendar turned to February, one of the semi-focuses for the DailyView will be some rom-coms (as well as some films for Black History Month). Rom-coms will be the main films until Valentine’s Day. So for the first of February, I watched one of the most well known rom-coms of the last 20 years, the adaptation of the Nicholas Sparks novel, The Notebook.
In a nursing home, Duke (James Garner) read a story to a woman (Gena Rowlands) who was suffering from dementia and had no memory. In the story, Duke read about a young girl named Allie (Rachel McAdams) from a wealthy family who met a local worker Noah (Ryan Gosling) and they fell in love. Noah was not whom Allie’s parents wanted their daughter to fall for, and their disproval led to the young lovers to split.
Noah enlisted in the army and went to war while Allie waited and hoped to see him again. After years, Allie met a new man (James Marsden) and she fell for him. He proposed to her and she accepted.
Noah had returned from the war and, with the financial help from his father (Sam Shepard), bought his dream home, rebuilding it from scratch. When Allie saw a photo of Noah and his newly constructed home in the newspaper, she felt drawn to see him in order to wrap up the past. However, their love would not be denied.
I was torn by this movie. I thought the acting was superb from the cast, especially from James Garner and Gena Rowland, whose identities were anything but secretive. I found Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams to be exceptional as well, early on in their careers.
However, there was a ton of sentimentality in The Notebook that it felt overpowering at times, and not in a good way. I also had trouble with some of the character choices made, especially from Allie. She treated James Marsden’s character just horrendously, playing him along and treating him with a lot of disrespect that he did not deserve. I felt terribly for Marsden, and this made me feel as if rooting for Allie and Noah was a bad thing.
Then, there was an amazing scene with Garner and Rowlands in the third act that was heart-wrenching, but it was tainted by what had happened before. The “mystery” of who they were really ruined the story structure of the relationship with Noah and Allie.
There are a bunch of clichés throughout the movie and it felt somewhat manipulative because of it. I don’t think there is any doubt that Garner and Rowlands and their story was way more compelling than the story of Noah and Allie, which ends up being kind of ironic.
As I said, I am torn by The Notebook. Despite its flaws, there are some solid scenes and some great acting. I just wish that I liked the leads more.
EYG- Embrace Your Geekness 