About Time was a movie I watched for the first time a year after its 2013 release date. Despite relatively high Rotten Tomatoes scores (70% critics, 81% audience), I recall being unimpressed by it. Many accounts I follow on TikTok are of people giving film reviews. While most, if not all, of those I follow in this niche, are younger than me, more often than not, I generally agree with their assessments (hence, my reason for following them). So often, About Time is referenced in a video. The film is often called beautiful, poetic, and devastating. Some have gone so far as to call it a gut punch. Those characteristics I seek out in my romantic dramas, so I signed up for the rewatch, thinking I must have missed something. It turns out that I didn’t. My second viewing did hold my interest more than my first, but it still felt very average. I’m even more uncertain now about what others see in this film that I missed.
Category Archives: Domhnall Gleeson
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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Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015)
Honestly, there is no point in reading this review until after you’ve seen the movie. There is no way that my review on a Star Wars movie will influence whether you see this movie or not. So this review will have spoilers. Not to belittle my review, but this is mostly my honest thoughts on the film and not whether you should see it. If you come here quickly to look at the score, I gave it an 89/100. Undoubtedly if you’ve watched the other films, you need to see this film in the theater. If you are newer to the franchise and wonder which movies you need to see before watching Episode VII, I would say you should watch IV, V, and VI. Those are the ones that will help you best understand this film. There is no need to see I, II, or III. I don’t know if you can fully appreciate VII without seeing IV, V, and VI first. It is assumed that you have seen these films. If you haven’t, there is no real effort or desire to explain anything that happened in the past. Continue reading Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015)
Brooklyn (2015)
Hands down, the best romance of 2015 is John Crowley’s (Intermission, Boy A) terrific Brooklyn. Note that I did not say that this is the most romantic movie of the year, but rather the best romance. This movie features no wining and dining. There are not the passionate, hot and heavy, sometimes stir a little in your seat scenes that you might be used to in movies like Titanic, The Notebook, Pretty Woman, Before Sunrise, (500) Days of Summer, Dirty Dancing, or Ghost. This isn’t R-rated. It isn’t PG-rated. It is very appropriately rated as a PG-13 movie. It’s the closest thing that well resembles the process of two people meeting each other by chance, getting to know each other first casually and then on a much deeper level before falling into an intense and meaningful love that is both believable and beautiful. I did not know this was a love story going into the film. My mantra this year is to know as little about a movie as possible going into it. That doesn’t mean I’ll see just anything. I do have to see first that the film is getting positive reviews. But if it does have decent reviews and it does have Oscar buzz, I’ll make every effort to see it. Brooklyn was a movie that was the most straightforward film in the world to understand, but at the same time, almost impossible to truly comprehend. And in a word, that is love.
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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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