James Mangold’s (Logan, Walk the Line) Ford v Ferrari is the perfect movie to see in the theatre. It has action. It has drama. It has a clear protagonist. It makes you want to stand up and cheer for the good guys. This racing movie is much better viewed on the big screen than on a small screen at home. Likewise, a movie theater’s surround system is a better experience than any surround system you might have at home. With that said, this movie has gotten much better acclaim (91% critics, 98% audience on Rotten Tomatoes) than it probably deserved. I haven’t seen many racecar movies, but this movie fails compared to a film like Rush. However, this is a good and highly entertaining movie.
Category Archives: Tracy Letts
Lady Bird (2017)
I think if you told someone that Saoirse Ronan (The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Lovely Bones), the actress who won audiences over with her innocent portrayal of a conflicted young Irish immigrant navigating her way through 1950s New York City in 2015’s fabulous Brooklyn (which earned her a Best Actress Nomination) is the same person playing the lead role two years later in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, they’d look at you funny before looking at pictures of her from both movies, recalling scenes from each, and then of nodding their heads and saying, “Yeah, I guess that is the same actress.” While a movie I didn’t really resonate with and definitely near the bottom of the Best Picture nominees in the lackluster 2017, I did appreciate her performance…one that was just as honest and true as the one she gave in Brooklyn. And similarly to 2015, her work in this movie is likely the third or fourth-best of the year and landed Ronan her second Academy Award nomination.
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The Post (2017)
I was able to preview Steven Spielberg’s (Jaws, Saving Private Ryan) The Post two years before it was released to the public and even a year before it went into production. It was called Spotlight, and it won the Oscar for Best Picture. It was a fantastic movie. I wish I was more than kidding, and with that, I could be more positive about my viewing of, what I hoped could be, one of the best movies of the year. That was months ago when I only knew of the movie title and that it starred Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep. In my head, I envisioned a movie about an army outpost and was very intrigued. But then I saw the preview, and I wished the movie would have been about a post office instead. Then, when I was halfway through the movie, I wish I had been watching a movie about a bedpost, a fence post, or any other post that would have represented something far less predictable and boring than the waste of talent and time that was being projected on the screen in front of me. It was one of those times (I’ve had many recently) where I have been more than grateful for having a MoviePass. The thought of actually paying for some of these 2017 movies is even more terrifying than the disappointing IT, a movie that was neither scary nor good. And, except a couple of non-Oscar nominated movies that I am still looking forward to but have yet to see (Hostiles, The Florida Project), The Post successfully ends 2017, the worst year for movies so far this century.
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Christine (2016)
Rebecca Hall (The Gift, Everything Must Go) does what many actors and actresses have tried and failed to do…successfully portray a person with an untreated mental disorder. In this case, the mental disorder is depression. For many actresses, it is hard to put themselves in that mold if they’ve never directly that disorder. I’m not sure if Hall has ever experienced a major depressive episode in her life. Still, if she has not, she did a great job researching Christine Chubbuck and bringing this character to life in a way that makes you feel like she’s that one co-worker of yours who you know is struggling with life but doesn’t know bad it really is. Chubbuck, a reporter for Sarasota’s WXLT-TV news broadcast, made headlines when, while live on air, stated, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in ‘blood and guts,’ and in living color, you are going to see another first —attempted suicide” before shooting herself in the head and splattering blood against the back wall. She died later that evening in a local hospital.
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