After watching Widows, the best movie of 2018 that has been released before Thanksgiving) I can very confidently say that if you team up director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Shame) and writer Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl, HBO’s Sharp Objects), I’m going to have my butt in a theatre opening weekend. I’ve heard about Widows for months now but never actually saw the trailer until the day before I saw the movie. And I still haven’t seen the whole trailer. I needly only watch the first half of it to know that it was a movie that I wanted to see and that it was a movie I wanted to see right away. With all due respect to A Star Is Born, I think that its parade walk to 2018’s Best Picture just hit a major roadblock in McQueen’s masterpiece of a movie. The man who was narrowly beaten out for Best Director (Alfonso Cuarón – Gravity) hardly seemed upset when half an hour later, his 12 Years a Slave won topped Gravity (and others) for the Best Picture of 2013. He’s been off the grid for the last five years (save for a few shorts), but he is back with a movie that might be better than any of his previous three masterpieces (12 Years a Slave, Shame, Hunger Strike). The only thing missing is an appearance by Michael Fassbender, but you won’t even notice. Not only has McQueen delivered the best movie of 2018 (so far), but he’s brought the best ensemble of the year, one that will likely garner awards for a couple of people and a surefire one for the film’s protagonist Veronica (Viola Davis – Fences, The Help). And while some might think I’m crazy to suggest that her performance in Widows is better than her performances in Fences, The Help, or Doubt, I would counter that she led a star-studded cast in this movie. In contrast, while she was fantastic in her other three films, she wasn’t the center character. AND, I am still upset that she was put up for Best Supporting Actress in 2016 Fences, an award that she won) because that was a leading performance and would have won Best Lead Actress. She was not anymore a supporting character than Denzel Washington was. But I digress…
Continue reading Widows (2018)
Category Archives: Manuel Garcia-Rulfo
The Magnificent Seven (2016)
I’m starting to think that Hollywood is either completely out of original ideas or knows that they are guaranteed a minimum hundred million dollars at the box office if it remakes a movie and has a starting cast of Hollywood A-listers. There is absolutely no reason why The Magnificent Seven needed to be remade. I have not seen the first one, but I imagine it was probably a pretty good movie when it was made…56 years ago. There have not been many great westerns produced in this century and, while they were good, most of them have been remakes (3:10 to Yuma, True Grit). There have been others (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Homesman). Still, there really haven’t been many in this genre of films when compared to others. While I appreciate a good western (Young Guns was my number one movie of all time from when I was 15 until I was about 25), I dislike a bad western just as much as I dislike a poor movie in other genres. And while I wouldn’t necessarily call The Magnificent Seven a poor movie, I definitely would call it an unneeded one. Unless you love westerns, there’s no need to see this movie. This absolutely is a movie that you don’t need to see on the big screen.
Continue reading The Magnificent Seven (2016)