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: 2013
Homefront (2013)
Homefront is not a movie I would normally watch (let alone review), but it had been in my Netflix queue for quite some time. February and March are usually the months where I watch some of my more mindless movies. That’s not to say before I even begin reviewing that this was a poorly made movie or one that you shouldn’t watch. It just means that this is a movie that you watch purely for entertainment purposes, and its storyline does not require a lot of thought or concentration. Also, I have over 400 movies reviewed at the time of this writing, yet I still have not reviewed a Jason Statham (The Mechanic, The Transformer) movie. That has mostly to do with the fact that I don’t watch a lot of Statham movies. I actually kind of like him as an action star, but my movie watching these days tends to take me away from The Mechanic, The Transformer, The Expendables, and The Fast and the Furious franchises. Although, based on their box office numbers, there is definitely an audience for Statham-type movies. But, now in my early 40’s, I find myself drawn more to movies as an art form rather than I do for pure entertainment purposes. And I almost laugh at this, considering the movies that I watched 15 years ago compared to the movies I watch today.
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The Hunt (2013)
Mads Mikkelsen is most notably known as a villain. Whether you recognize him more as the man opposing James Bond in Casino Royale or as Hannibal Lecter on NBC’s hit show Lecter, he’s very adept at playing the bad guy. But, in the most poignant performance of his career and one that earned him praise across the globe, Mikkelsen stars as Lucas, a kind and gentle daycare employee falsely accused of molesting one of his students in the Danish film and Academy Award-nominated foreign language film The Hunt. I struggle with movies that are subtitled. My philosophy often is if I can view a good movie in English or one that is in another language that will force me to spend a couple of hours reading while also trying to pay attention to the visuals on the screen, why wouldn’t I pick the movie in my native language? Unless a movie (or one of its leads) is nominated for an Academy Award (Amour, Maria Full of Grace), is recommended by a friend (The Lunchbox), or doesn’t have an English substitute (North Face), I’m probably not going to give it a chance. It’s not because I think that those movies will be bad. Like everyone, I have a job and many other hobbies, and, frankly, time is limited. However, when a foreign language film does breakthrough, and it is one that I think is well made, it is a film that I am likely to remember for a long, long time, if not for the rest of my life. This was certainly the case with The Lunchbox and North Face and is also the case with The Hunt.
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Mama (2013)
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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Thanks For Sharing (2013)
Stuart Blumberg’s Thanks For Sharing is a much softer and more humane look at the trials and tribulations of sexual addiction than is Steve McQueen’s 2011 Shame. Both movies broach this once taboo topic with relatively deep character studies. While both films tell fairly compelling stories, neither earned much at the box office. Together, the two movies generated just over $4 million domestically. I think that fact that these two movies were both made over two years and the two attracted stars like Mark Ruffalo, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tim Robbins, Michael Fassbender, and Carey Mulligan shows that there are those in Hollywood who want to bring the issue come to light even if the general public is still a little reluctant to make it to the theater to check out these movies on the big screen.
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