Talk about a gut punch of a movie. As a pro wrestling fan, I’ve known of the tragedy of the Von Erich family for years. However, while I know of the circumstances around each of the brothers, I was only familiar with the one brother who made it to the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now World Wrestling Entertainment – WWE). Kerry Von Erich had a two-year run as The Texas Tornado in the early 90s. His time in WWF was when I was getting into pro wrestling, and The Texas Tornado was one of my favorites. A biopic about the Von Erich family had been in talks for years before Sean Durkin’s (The Nest, Martha Marcy May Marlene) The Iron Claw came about. I’ve read pre-screener reviews about how emotionally devastating this movie was for months. While I felt prepared for my watch, I left feeling wrecked. What a masterful feat.
Category Archives: Maura Tierney
Beautiful Boy (2018)
I love a good story about drug or alcohol addiction. And I love great actors who constantly bring it in their roles. So I had super high expectations for Felix Van Groeningen Beautiful Boy, the true story of the relationship between an 18-year-old son (Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name, Hostiles) battling drugs and his father (Steve Carell – Foxcatcher, Battle of the Sexes) who is willing to do anything to fix the problem, but is unsuccessful in all of his attempts. The trailer definitely made it seem like my type of movie. I should have been wary of the 67% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, but I was encouraged by the 77% audience score. But as I watched this from the lens of a critic, I kept circling back to the same question. If you had these actors in place, you could have done hundreds, even thousands, of different stories about addiction. So why did they pick this story? It wasn’t anything special. It lacked vision. Van Groeningen, as a novice director, was completely in over his head, and he wasted the performance of both of its leads by telling a story of a story that wasn’t unique, was stale in its delivery, and left us feeling unattached to its characters. In a word, Beautiful Boy underwhelmed.
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