Mama was, by all accounts, supposed to be THE horror movie of 2013. The various trailers with the two little girls and the long stringy hair covering their faces walking up and down walls, sleeping underneath their beds, and possessing the characteristics of a wild animal were sure to get the hairs on the back of your neck up. Attaching Guillermo del Toro’s name to the credits as a producer doesn’t hurt the scare factor either. Mama was another movie that forced me to buy into the hype. It looked like my kind of movie. It starred one of my favorite actresses, Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty, The Help), and it appeared creepy. This movie looked like a winner. It also didn’t hurt when my high school students said, after opening weekend, that it was both “good” and “scary.” Well…the movie wasn’t good, but it did have its share of scary moments. There wasn’t anything unexpected, but there were still moments when you felt like you were sitting on pins and needles. Off the top of my head, I’m not sure what the scariest movie of 2013 was, but it certainly was not Mama.
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Category Archives: Jessica Chastain
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
This review will be brief. Unfortunately, I need to be more well-versed to write a comprehensive review of this movie. I certainly can’t write one as well as a critic who reviews movies as their profession. I’m sure I can’t write one as well as somebody who knows the facts of the takedown of Osama bin Laden. Like the movie Lincoln, this movie is an important educational tool and should be seen by many, but as a vehicle of entertainment, it underwhelms. I told my friends after our viewing that I’m growing a little tired of movies being an hour or longer than they need to be. This is the case with Zero Dark Thirty. Not only was it over two and a half hours long, but it felt like it was two movies in one.
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Lawless (2012)
Tom Hardy (The Dark Knight Rises, Warrior) is quickly establishing himself as a leading man in Hollywood. Since really coming onto the radar after 2010’s Inception, Hardy went on to win audiences over in the surprisingly good Warrior before donning a mask as Bane and becoming 2012 biggest villain in The Dark Knight Rises. In a movie full of top-notch acting, Hardy turns in the performance of his young career in John Hillcoat’s (The Road, The Proposition) Lawless.
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The Debt (2011)
The Debt is the second highly acclaimed Helen Mirren (The Last Station, Gosford Park) movie I watched last month. The first was The Queen, for which she won the Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role Academy Award. I had high expectations for The Queen and was disappointed by it. I found it boring and just not nearly as good as all the critics made it out to be. It also starred Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon, Underworld), who I’m not the biggest fan of. I also had high expectations of The Debt, but they needed to be higher to see the movie in the theater. After watching it at home, seeing it on the big screen would not have been much different. The movie was a good movie that had a reasonably interesting (though not entirely believable) story that held my interest the entire time.
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Take Shelter (2011)
The most overlooked performance by a lead actor in 2011 was Michael Shannon’s performance as the delusional Curtis LaForche in the Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories) bone-chilling drama Take Shelter. Though Shannon’s acting career began in 2001, and the first three movies he appeared in (Pearl Harbor, Vanilla Sky, and 8 Mile) each grossed over $100,000,000 at the box office, it wasn’t until 2008 when he earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor after two jaw-dropping scenes as a mentally unstable man in Revolutionary Road.
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