Sometimes, when I’m at home looking for something to watch, I’ll say an actor’s name to my voice-activated remote control. After recently rewatching and reviewing 3:10 to Yuma, I was interested in seeing what other Russell Crowe (Gladiator, Cinderella Man) movies I might be interested in rewatching or viewing for the first time. When I saw Fathers and Daughters, a movie I had never heard of before, I decided to play the trailer. Within 30 seconds, I stopped the trailer. I had successfully been teased enough to want to watch the movie without knowing more about it. I didn’t need to read any reviews, which may have turned me off. I saw it was a relationship movie that revolved around a past traumatic event that involved Crowe. That was all I needed.
Category Archives: Diane Kruger
Welcome to Marwen (2018)
Meh. I hide decent hope for Robert Zemeckis’s (Cast Away, Allied) Welcome to Marwen. Parts of the trailer looked kind of corny, but so did parts of his trailer (as well as the movie) for Forrest Gump, the Oscar winner for Best Picture in 1994. Zemeckis has also achieved success with unique movies like Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her, The Polar Express, and more. Combine that with the special talents possessed by Steve Carell (Beautiful Boy, The Way Way Back), and I thought that there was a legitimate chance that the pair could make this odd story work. I don’t think either can be at fault for this rather mediocre film. Sure, there is a story here, but I think it was probably better told in the 2010 documentary Marwencol. Perhaps Zemeckis got a little cocky and thought he could further dramatize a story and turn it into a Lars and the Real Girl type of movie, a film which, despite my original reservations, I ended up loving and a film that I can’t recommend enough. Comparisons between these two movies were made from the first trailer and continued all the way through the movie. Unfortunately, in the end, Zemeckis and Carell could not achieve the same mastery that Craig Gillespie and Ryan Gosling could eleven years earlier. The problems with Welcome to Marwen were numerous and far exceeded most of the positives brought to the table.