Blue Bayou was a film I knew nothing about three days before my viewing and one I have been incredibly excited about since. I love a well-crafted, heavy drama, and this film told me, after watching the first 45 seconds of the trailer, that this was something that I would see opening weekend. The Rotten Tomatoes scores enhanced my excitement about the movie (73%, 96%).
Category Archives: Alicia Vikander
The Light Between Oceans (2016)
The Light Between Oceans was a terribly flawed movie that is very likely to bore many, if not most, of its moviegoers. This was evidenced by the guy sitting behind me who was sawing logs for the entire second half. But I am a sucker for broken relationship movies caused by some sort of strife, and that’s exactly what I got here. The only thing I knew about this movie was that it was about a couple living on a small island while he managed a lighthouse and that they found a baby in a boat they took as their own after she suffered a series of miscarriages. I actually wish I had gone in knowing nothing about this movie at all. All I needed to know was that it was a heavy drama, that it featured one of my favorite actors (Michael Fassbender – Shame, Steve Jobs), one of the next great actresses of our time who absolutely arrived on the scene with two massive performances in 2015 (Alicia Vikander – Ex Machina, The Other Danish Girl), and the director of one of my favorite movies of all-time (Derek Cianfrance – Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines). That enough would have gotten me in the theater. And that is enough for me to give this a positive review despite a story that had much promise but had some uneven turns and ultimately led to characters making decisions that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. What I loved most about this movie (which will be the focus of this review) is how two different people can face the same ethical dilemma and how the decision can eat one person up so much that they almost can’t live with themselves. In contrast, the other person can continue living their life peacefully as if the decision they had to make was whether to have sausage or pepperoni on their pizza the night before.
The Danish Girl (2015)
The closer that each of my reviews is to awards season, the more unconventional they become. For the past four or five years, I’ve tried to see absolutely everything I can. If a movie gets nominated in one of the big six awards, I will see it regardless of how I feel about it. Sometimes this can be a painful experience, but it’s part of what I’m trying to do. So before I get into my review of The Danish Girl, I want to talk about the Best Actor Academy Award nomination category. In a year where the male lead performances have been far below the caliber that they have been in recent years, the battle for Best Actor comes down to two people. These include Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything, My Week With Marilyn) for this movie and Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant. When Matt Damon (The Martian) or Michael Fassbender (Steve Jobs) are the next guys in line behind these two, you know it’s a two-dog race. I am a massive fan of both Damon and Fassbender, but they each have at least three movies in their filmography in which they delivered better performances than the ones they gave this year.
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Ex Machina (2015)
Sometimes when you see a movie that you know nothing about, you are treated with an unknown little treat…a film that will stick with you forever. Ex Machina is that movie this year. My comparison here is to the Brad Pitt/Morgan Freeman gem Seven. It was a movie in which I knew nothing. I had only heard that it was a movie I must see through word of mouth. Seven probably has a place forever reserved in my all-time top 25. That’s how good it was. But I think a lot of this initially high rating was because of how in awe of it I was when I saw it in a such a small, rickety stage theater converted to a movie theater in Lexington, VA, in the fall of 1997. Now, Ex Machina is not in the class of Seven. But like Seven, it is a gripping, carefully scripted movie, and one that will stay in your head for a very long time after its viewing. Ex Machina will be hard to beat for the best movie of the first half of 2015.
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