Apple TV+ continues its string of movies that should be better than they are with the Jennifer Lawrence-led (mother!, Silver Linings Playbook) Causeway. Like many of its predecessors (Swan Song, Palmer, Cherry, Greyhound, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Finch, On the Rocks), first-time director Lila Neugebauer’s Causeway benefited from a successful marketing campaign, only to leave viewers to wonder what the original hype was about. However, I’d be remiss if I left off CODA, the Best Picture winner of 2021. The streaming service has potential as a movie distributor but has laid its fair share of duds. Causeway is no exception. It’s a mediocre movie at best.
Category Archives: Jennifer Lawrence
Don’t Look Up (2021)
Best Picture nominee? Don’t Look Up? Really? This movie had a wide December release. It earned less than one million dollars at the box office and was out of the theaters in under two weeks. Its 56% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes further suggests that this is different from a film one would deem to be selected by the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences as one of its ten best films of 2021. Yet (sigh), here we are. The biggest tragedy might be that this isn’t a bad film but is unfairly getting bashed for its affiliation with the other nine movies up for Best Picture in arguably the worst collection of films for any year.
Red Sparrow (2018)
Lots to unwrap with Francis Lawrence’s (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, I Am Legend) ambitious spy thriller Red Sparrow, a 2018 early summer release that flew, mostly, under the radar domestically ($46 million) but excelled internationally ($150 million). Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle) is, as of 2018, probably the actress who can command the most money per movie. If not number one, she’s pretty darn close. But, obviously, that doesn’t mean that every movie she does will earn her an Oscar nomination or earn $100 million. And she’s not exactly choosy. Since bursting onto the scene with 2010’s Winter’s Bone, the first of her four Oscar nominations and one of the best breakout performances in the last 25 years, Lawrence has gone on to star in more than 15 movies before the release of Red Sparrow. And while she can excel at portraying various characters, a Russian spy will not go down as one of her Top 10 performances of all time. It’s not that she was bad as Dominika Egorova, a Russian ballet dancer who is more or less forced into the life of being an undercover operative after a terrible leg injury ruins her dancing career and leaves her needing money to pay for her mother’s medical expenses.
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mother! (2017)
There are two different types of people in the world. There is the group of people who, when asked if they’ve seen Darren Aronofsky’s (The Wrestler, Black Swan) mother, will say no. And then there is the group of people who kind of look at you with a bizarre look on their face and shamingly say, “Yeah,” and hope that you don’t ask any follow-up questions. And that’s not to say they are embarrassed by admitting that they’ve seen the movie (we’ve all been at a theater before when we walk out with our heads down, hoping that we don’t see anybody that we know because we don’t want them to know we just paid to see a movie that was THAT bad), but because the film is so far out there that a follow-up question asking the person what they thought about it or if they liked it might allow them to draw conclusions about us. Aronofsky makes movies that you either love or hate. I absolutely adored The Wrestler and Black Swan but passionately hated Noah. I have a certain respect for Requiem for a Dream and have desperately tried but have been unsuccessful in my attempts to sit through The Fountain. If you have not liked a single one of the movies that I just referenced, I can almost guarantee your experience with mother! will not be an enjoyable one. However, if have liked one or more of the five previously mentioned film and are willing to go into mother! I cannot promise that you’ll enjoy it with an open mind, but I do think you will appreciate it. I found myself appreciating it far more than enjoying it, but I THINK I still enjoyed it. I will say this…the film started as a normal film might start, but ended differently than any film I’ve seen before. And the entire time, I could not look away from the screen. This film absolutely offers something that you just haven’t seen before, especially with a cast as magnificent as this one.
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Passengers (2016)
Passengers is one of those movies that your interest would be better served if you looked at the audience score rather than the critics’ scores. A 30% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes would suggest that you skip this one. But a 70% audience score suggests something more. This was one of my most anticipated movies of the year. Plus, I try to see everything. But even I was skeptical when I saw how it was getting panned by so many different critics. Even my most respected site (Roger Ebert’s site) only gave the movie 1.5 stars. But I talked to a couple of different people who go to the movies a lot, and they said, despite some holes, that they recommended it. The only thing I knew about Passengers going in (I never saw a trailer) was that it starred Chris Pratt (Jurassic World, Guardians of the Galaxy) and Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook, Joy) and that they were lost in space. And while I suppose there were holes in this movie, they didn’t in any way deter my enjoyment of this film. The parts that I found more troublesome than anything else were the personal emotions and the relationship between the two leads, and, really didn’t even have a problem with that.
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