Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyer’s Club, Mud) stars as a balding, crooked-toothed, potbellied Nevada gold prospector in a movie that, without his acting talent, would have been completely sifted through the Hollywood stream of consciousness. Instead, while flawed, Stephen Gaghan’s (Syriana, Abandon) Gold is a watchable experience that takes audiences on a wild goose chase along with most of its stars. It ultimately makes the destination an endpoint and the journey worthwhile.
Category Archives: 2017
Revenge (2017)
Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge (a terrible title since it has the same name as the Kevin Costner 1990 movie, a 2002 Roman Polanski film, a 1971 Shelley Winters film, and more) might be the best movie of 2018 you never heard about. However, I can’t think of a better one for a movie that makes no bones about it, a movie about revenge, and nothing more. Driven by a first-time director in Fargeat, a cast that has no one that you’ve ever heard of, a marketing campaign that likely consisted only of trailers on just as unknown straight to DVD releases, Revenge earned less than $125,000 at the box office and its limited May 2018 release, the movie resonated with the critics (92% with 119 reviews) though, with more than 2400 ratings, just over half (55%) gave the movie a favorable review. Much more than a simple popcorn flick, Fargeat creates an extremely likable protagonist in Jen (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz – Somewhere Beautiful, Rings) and three extremely unlikeable antagonists who I’ll bring up in subsequent paragraphs. You’ll find yourself cheering hard for Jen and hoping, even if you are against violence, that those who have wronged her get what they deserve.
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The Rider (2017)
Simply stated, the best thing going for Chloé Zhao’s (Songs My Brothers Taught Me, Nomadland) The Rider is its authenticity. The plot is not that different than hundreds of other movies you’ve seen before. Yet, it feels refreshingly new and real at the same time. This is due primarily to the vision of the young and talented Zhao as well as the decisions that she made along the way. This includes her hiring of locals to play all of the characters in the film, her choice of setting (Pine Ridge Indian Reservation), her hiring of cinematographer Joshua James Richards to capture the exhaustive landscape of the South Dakota reservation, and her decision of filming this to almost feel like a documentary. Every decision she made worked. Film purists will love this. Those who need the flare or those who need to need forced attempts to bring out the sentiment might be disappointed. I found myself to be somewhere in the middle. The film has a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes (83% audience rating). That feels about right for the critics and a little high for the audience score. I will say early that I likely would not have seen this movie if it hadn’t been recommended to me by a longtime friend. While I didn’t like it as much as she did, it was a very good recommendation and a film that I’m glad that I saw.
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The Greatest Showman (2017)
I’m not going to lie. The only reason I watched Michael Gracey’s The Greatest Showman was that it was the topic of one of the sermons at my church. Each year we have a summer movie series (In 2018, the movies were Forrest Gump, Good Will Hunting, The Princess Bride, The Shawshank Redemption…I had seen all four, of course, and watched all of them again before that week’s service to refamiliarize myself with each of these amazing films. Then on Labor Day weekend, we have our Family Weekend, where the children of our church sit with their parents rather than going to the classes that they usually go to. We show a truncated version of a movie, and this year it was The Greatest Showman. So I added it to my Netflix queue. It arrived two days before my church service, and I watched it the night beforehand. I’m not a fan of musicals, although I will say that the incredible La La Land has, if nothing else, allowed me to consider that I could potentially enjoy a musical. And, while it certainly wasn’t my cup of tea, I did enjoy The Greatest Showman and would actually consider watching it again one day with one or more of my three young nephews.
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Disobedience (2017)
Soft, subtle, disciplined, loving, sad, purposeful, and real. Sebastián Lelio’s (A Fantastic Woman, Gloria) Disobedience is all of these things and more. But as well as it does most of these movies, there are a couple of things that it just doesn’t hit on. I’ll have a spoilers section for this film later in this review. First, I will say that the film is very well made, but it doesn’t leave feeling very emotional when it is over. At its base is this life story, but Lelio fails to draw us into it soon enough, and then when he does, it feels very uneven and leaves you uncertain of each of its lead characters’ decisions. Ultimately, it becomes a movie that lacks the poignancy it set out to achieve. But it does dig deep into an important and unfortunately controversial topic of yesterday, today, and tomorrow…that of same-sex attraction and same-sex relationships. It’s so unfortunate that, as a society, we have not fully embraced same-sex relationships yet. For whatever reason, it feels like too many people treat gays or bisexuals as lesser people, similarly to how African Americans were treated in this country until the 1960s (and many would say beyond that and even into today) or how people of Middle Eastern descent were treated in the early 2000s after the September 11, 2001 attacks. To hate someone or treat some as lesser than how you’d treat someone else because of race, color, gender, religion, or sexual orientation is absolutely ridiculous to me. I’m embarrassed for people who discriminate. And, particularly right now, I am slowly choosing to distance myself from people who have such extreme views against gays. I’ve written about it in other reviews. I write about it in my poetry. This is because I am so invested in watching really good movies, such as Disobedience, about the topic of same-sex attraction or homosexuality. And I applaud the due diligence that directors pay to make these movies worthwhile experiences.
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