Zachary Levi
Gets jacked for Big remake – it’s
Teen boy v CG
Click the pic below to watch the TRAILER:
Category: Drama
ROCKETMAN (2019) movie review in haiku
1917 (2019) movie review
REVIEW in HAIKU
Soldiers tasked to go
warn of a war trap get bombed,
stabbed, shot, drowned, rescued?
RATING: A (best film of the year)
OLD MAN & THE GUN (2018) movie review in haiku
Redford proves again
that age is just a number.
Still the Sundance Kid
JOJO RABBIT (2019) movie review
REVIEW in HAIKU:
Waititi’s Hitler
Youth film laughs while the world breaks
Moral conundrum 
REVIEW:
A MUCH darker film than is advertised. I wasn’t going to see it. I’ve seen enough WWII films. Everyone knows that the Holocaust wasn’t funny.
Then the trailer suggested a playful new take from the Hitler youth side about a boy whose imaginary best friend is Adolf Hitler.
And it is playful and funny, so over the top it’s like satire. Until it isn’t. Until it gives up the game we are enjoying and slaps audiences with the weight and reality so hard and fast, you’re left reeling. I get it. War is ugly. But the set up and smash hurt too much.
Acclaimed director Taika Waititi must have known the rollercoaster he’d be sending people on, known that making a PG-13 film about a war isn’t possible.
It opens much like a Wes Anderson scene from Moonrise Kingdom, young scouts at camp with a bit of a bumbling scout master. Now switch scouts for Nazis and camp games to battle tactics. Boom and the games are up and the rest of the film is recovery time for the boy, then home with his mother and imaginary friend, Hitler, until he finds a young Jewish girl in his attic.
It’s violent and dark and makes us laugh. This is NOT a children’s film. I’m not certain what audience this was made for. But it’s brutally awakening, as it should be. It’s either a wickedly brilliant social commentary on the politics of present day, or it’s a cruel Jekyl & Hyde creating a humorous play within a hideous scenario. A perfect scene is the little boy who has scrounged through garbage cans for food scraps, sitting at a dinner table across from Adolf gorging himself on the feast of a unicorn head. It’s gruff and grim and cannot possibly be as happy as it looks. The payoff does not match the promise. And perhaps that’s the point.
RATING: C+ …it adds up= A for visuals and unique story, perhaps even for social commentary… F for fooling me into loving characters who were going to be killed in such an abrupt and unforgivable manner… I’m still not all right.
JOKER (2019) movie review
REVIEW:
The dance of the madman.
Is slow.
Is emotional.
Is gripping.
Is the insidious dripping of water that finally drives you insane.
Is akin to slowly painting on a mask in wide, calculated brush strokes.
His reality remains skewed and sharp and sour.
Comes from a long festering narcissism.
Is fueled by fear and devastation, longing and loss, abuse and pain.
He’s alone and aware of it.
He’s had enough, and then he snaps.
Joker (2019) is a slow building crack in one man’s glass persona. So intensely introverted, the long-suffering soldier, son. Arthur says he feels he never existed until people started taking notice of his first acts of violence. Now people see him and smile, or better, they fight. He becomes the hero he’s always dreamed of being.
The smile motif also carries through into the classic crying clown, ever masking true emotion with a painted expression.
His small world shatters slowly, in tiny pricks to his subconscious that he fights until he has little fight left.
Therein lied the fear of the fateful masses who watched this color-soaked film on its first weekend of play as I did. He is anyone with a long-laden life of abuse and neglect. He’s the potential product of his poverty, of an angry society a-smoke with crime fascination.
Joaquin plays the role of a lifetime, memorable, wrenching, wicked, vain. He really lives it and we are left leering at his laugh-lines as they deepen.
He is to blame for his crimes, yet we can take up the mantle as caregivers for our neighbors, help them people feel seen, show all a kindness, so-called deserving or not.
Only the children in this film have time for him. They look without judgement beyond the mask into his childlike eyes blurred by abuse.
It’s a dance on a triple tiered stair and a late night subway ride. Joker’s loner journey of broken dreams and bad luck becomes a midnight rampage of death-tolled insanity. You never would have known that this writer /director also made The Hangover. The Hangover, then this.
RATING: R (for raw & rough, and for remind me to pick up a psych text book and read it next time instead of sitting again through this exhaustingly tragic film)
CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? (2018) movie review in haiku
REVIEW in HAIKU:
Surprise! McMarthy
Can act without slapstick or
hijinx. She’s got chops.
Review:
Melissa McCarthy surprised me. She brings layers of grief, sensitivity, and longing to the character of Lee Israel. Lee is a writer with too much responsibility and very little hope until she finds she has a talent for forgery – writing “lost letters” in the voices of famous authors. Her comrade is the equally down and out, but is somehow able, perhaps by example to bring her out by showing just how low you can go in desperation.
It’s another sad tale with disagreeable characters written with gruff realism by Nicole Holofcener who somehow always manages to write dispicable people who remind us of ourselves, making this another odd cocktail of a tale: one of sorrow AND human resilience.
BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY (2018) movie review
Freddie Mercury’s life demands a big screen experience. Flamboyant, flippant, often flustered, Mercury was a showman with the pipes to match.
His talent surpassed the world’s ability to process it. He was a diva through and through who envisioned massive crowds enthusiastically applauding his music. One performer can’t do it alone. The Queen band became his family, and he theirs. His wife, ever-supportive, endured a lot but remained his rock and comfort even after they split.
His huge personality paired with an equal ego. He was haughty and callous, exclusive yet extroverted, and Rami Maleck plays him beautifully.
When Mercury was diagnosed with aids, however, he was humbled. His world closed in and he searched for his true companions again. His band took him back and remained family to the end.
This bio-pic places audiences on stage for the largest concert in history. Every minute, the exploration of vibrant color and lighting in each shot, not to mention the phenomenal costuming, makes this an incredible viewing experience.
Bohemian Rhapsody
Rami Malek (Freddie Mercury)
A STAR IS BORN (2018) movie review
The premise: a skilled performer finally gets her big break and true love only to find that one cannot exist with the other.
Bradley Cooper wears many hats over his trademark blue eyes for this film: singer, star, writer, and director – he’s a regular Streisand.
Lady Gaga nails every note but gives only a few unforced sequences. Her first few scenes with Cooper are decently honest and raw. As soon as her character reaches performance mode, however, she’s back to standard Gaga: almost meat suit, Kermit dress level.
Her character is allowed some complexity: she’s snarky but subdued, impulsive but fearful. Yet, we never know much more about her than her immediate feelings. Cooper’s Jack character gets more backstory, but character gaps make him the big/hearted addict performer only.
Brilliant musical numbers performed as live stadium shows interrupt the otherwise arduous pacing revealing huge character gaps and content foibles including Dave Chappell’s one perfect scene which feels dropped in like an afterthought.
The scenes in the house were O’Russell-esque: wild with conversational dialogue and frenzied POV. Delightful with perfectly cast Andrew Dice Clay as her father. Otherwise, most dialogue felt messy and foul-mouthed, forgetting continuity and consistency in favor of Gaga power ballads.
FIRST MAN (2018) movie review
How could they have known they were sending a crippled man to the moon? Emotionally broken, tripped up over and over, Neil Armstrong’s journey into space was fraught with death. He knew the risks but pushed on. We know that there are many ways to grieve, so many faces, steps, phases. Each day a smaller crescent shows until the grief washes over and you are full once more.
Director Damien Chazelle’s newest dazzler wasn’t what I expected at all. It’s pensive, somber. It doesn’t have the heat or pace or pressure of Whiplash. It’s not fueled with color or pizzazz like LaLa Land. Rather, this feels more Malick-esque. Somber tone throughout, it steps softly into each phase of the story. The tension sits on brows, in close proximity always leaning forward, waiting.
So much is shot in POV, allowing viewers an experiential almost widescreen VR approach. No doubt the Executive Producer, Spielberg, had a hand in that. We feel the Eagle’s Landing and step onto the lunar soil ourselves, then we glimpse the long horizon and slice of earth through the visor.Gosling’s Neil Armstrong is perfectly poised and tenuous. He is calm and calculated, exacting and still. His silence screams his character’s pain and grief.
His counterpart Claire Foy holds the audience in the same spin as well. Her eyes echo the stories of loss without words, pain so deeply felt it changes you, drowning out all but the one focus. For the Armstrong family, loss bolstered drive that became history-making.
From his sweet fathering moments holding his kids, playing, laughing, to the ever-present near-death scenarios involved in space travel, Gosling holds our gaze with his. “I see the moon and the moon sees me. …Shine on the one I love.”
Splatter: on FILM 