MCU picks its
blonde Wonder Woman to fight
shapeshifters and Jude
Click the pic below to watch the TRAILER:
Tag: Brie Larson
GLASS CASTLE (2017) movie review
My friend Matt is always challenging me to write the story that makes me bleed. It’s the one that comes most viscerally from your gut, from your experience, from your life, from your sorrow, from your joy, from the thing that makes you tick and move forward at the same time. This film bleeds author Jeannette Wall’s life story allowing tandem past memories to engage with present conflicts.
This director Destin Daniel Cretton, who gave us Short Term 12 (2013), has a gift for telling those stories that hurt to tell.
Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts give the performances of a lifetime as they attempt to parent on the run from one temporary living situation to the next, one binge drink to the next, one family fight and hungry belly and life lesson to the next.
We ache with Brie Larson as she suffers and survives in her films like Short Term 12 (2013), Room (2015), and now in Glass Castle. Her character has changed her status in life and made it to New York as a writer, but her interactions with her homeless parents only force her to deal with the demons from her past.
It’s a true story about a girl whose love for her father transcends his poor parenting, his cruelty, his ever-brimming promises to build life into a perfect glass castle for those he loves most. The ebb tide flows in with her belief in him and out with disappointment and carries moviegoers on the journey of forgiveness as they learn alongside her what it means to be like the tree that has lets suffering make it stronger.
KONG: SKULL ISLAND (2017) movie review
What do you expect? It’s King Kong. Huge hairy beast destroys all in his path save the lone girl love interest. Kong, we know, has a heart and a weakness for blondes. So is he truly the monster? As with all good monster flicks, there is always a bigger problem and you’re “gonna need a bigger boat.”
If your expectations mirror mine, they will be more than met with twice the explosions and ten times the classic Samuel L. one-liners (including his iconic JP “Hold onto your butts”). Amazing.
Brie Larson is a gem, as always. Believable, determined photojournalist with a bleeding heart to let photos end wars, she bravely tracks into the unknown jungle island with the baby-faced band of troops just leaving Vietnam. 
What few of them realize is that their mission is skewed from the start, and now they need two men to help them escape: Tom Hiddleston, rugged, cut-jawed, tracker-for-hire and quirky, marooned WWII pilot John C. Reilly.
The cast is lovely. Sweet Thomas Mann (from last year’s Me & Earl & the Dying Girl) adds to this outstanding gang of hopefuls. Believe it or not, I’d watch it again just to hang out with these people. They chose a cast of people I’d want to have dinner with. They are all delightful, even though, yes, many get squashed by a Kong foot or skewered by a giant spider leg. The sequence in the Kong graveyard is so beautifully filmed it’s worth the price of admission.
It’s fun. The pace works. The cast works. The film feels comprised of thousands of hero shots, mostly of Kong himself, the true hero of his film.
SHORT TERM 12 (2013) movie review
If you never see another indie film…
If you’re sorry Newsroom ended and love John Gallagher Jr…
If you adore Brie Larson…
If you work in any way with humans who need you to be there for them even when that work fills you with pain…
Short Term 12 somehow manages to plumb the depths of human interaction without wounding you permanently in the process. Don’t get me wrong. It destroys you, but it also offers unconventional, inescapable hope. Set in a temporary foster home in California, a small team of young workers deal with the daily lives of kids living in-between homes in the system while processing their own similar demons.
The language is unfiltered, but so is the truth. Kids from all sorts of backgrounds find shelter in foster care, for better or worse. Sadly, too many stories of abuse, crime, and mental illness pervade these adolescents’ lives. Now and then, however, one success story feels worth the retelling. It gives us hope knowing that our work is not in vain. It sees us though the next difficult day knowing that there just might be a silver lining. 
This film offers that story.
ROOM (2015) movie review
Shut ins. Captives. Mother and son make the most of their tiny prison. To him, his whole world is Room. Room is real. TV is not real.
The film offers sweet narration from the child’s perspective, from Jack on the day he turns five. He wakes up to greet the day and each object in Room: “Good morning Chair. Good morning Sink.” He and his mama exercise and wash clothes and bake a birthday cake. Almost all seems lovely from the boy’s eyes, but even he can see his young mother’s far off, wounded, fearful expressions. Her sorrow is not his yet. For that they are both grateful.
The film offers sweet narration from the child’s perspective, from Jack on the day he turns five. He wakes up to greet the day and each object in Room: “Good morning Chair. Good morning Sink.” He and his mama exercise and wash clothes and bake a birthday cake. Almost all seems lovely from the boy’s eyes, but even he can see his young mother’s far off, wounded, fearful expressions. Her sorrow is not his yet. For that they are both grateful.His whole world is within Room with his Mama and the nightly visitor that he hides from named Old Nick. He never speaks to Old Nick who sometimes brings them things they need then stays the night.
Everything shifts when Mama reveals her precious secret one day: there is World outside of Room.
This film is divided in half: daily life inside Room, then life outside in World.
Yes, they escape. It may be important knowing that before you watch a film like this. The painfully dark, horrifying concept of abduction is lightened only somewhat by escape as reentry takes as much if not more gumption for survival.
I do not know how Brie Larson was able to play such a role, to embrace this character in such a desperate situation. Larson did shine similarly in an (almost as difficult to watch) indie film from 2013 called Short Term 12 about the staff and students at a temporary group foster care center. R-rated for a ton of foul language, it presents realistic and difficult subject matter. Seeing Short Term 12 did something amazing for me. It renewed my own hope and endurance in the ever-exhausting field of education. It’s worth it to be there for students. That film was a much needed shot in the arm. Room is mostly heartbreaking, but hopeful in its own way.
Hope is a strong word. Hope is weapon against despair. Hope grows, like the leaf on Room’s skylight that showed them seasons, change, future flight, and rebirth. There is life outside of Room. Goodbye Room. Hello World.
Splatter: on FILM 