Braven is basically On Deady Ground/Above the Law/Under Siege/Out for Justice or any Steven Seagal masterpiece of the early 1990s meets one of the best movies of all time (Young Guns) meets one meets the best Christmas movie of all time (Home Alone). And I don’t know if that sentence is a ringing endorsement or enough to get you to stop reading right now. In all honesty, it’s both. Lin Oeding’s feature-length debut, Braven, is far from a perfect movie. It is very, very flawed. But it is also highly entertaining. If Die Hard is your thing, then the Jason Momoa-led (Aquaman, Justice League) Braven will also be your thing. I can’t say you’ll love or remember much from it 24 hours later, but you will enjoy it, especially if you turn your mind off. Also, if he wants it, Momoa can be the new Segal, though he’s already proven he has more acting range than the former ever showed.
Category Archives: 2018
Woman Walks Ahead (2018)
Inspired by true events, Susanna White’s (Our Kind of Traitor, Nanny McPhee Returns), Woman Walks Ahead is a pretty good movie made worse by its Hollywoodization. The film takes true events and changes them for no real reason. The general moviegoer would never have known the difference between what transpired and what was fictionalized. But the fact that there was a differentiation between fact and fiction didn’t do anything but cheapen the movie. One of the hardest things for me to do when reviewing a movie is trying to determine if the liberties that were taken to strip a movie of its factual basis while still claiming to be based on a true story truly advance the movie past the point where it would have arrived to if it had just followed the facts. There is a big difference between Based on a True Story versus Inspired by True Events. Literally, almost anything can be inspired by a true event. To be fair, Woman Walks Ahead never says if it is based on a true story or inspired by true events. But then again, if you see a movie that features Sitting Bull, you probably would draw your own conclusion that the movie was based on a true event. We don’t need a caption at the start of the movie to tell us this. So you can do one of two things…enjoy the movie as it is, which does have a lot of factual aspects to go with its fictional elements, or pick at the movie about its discrepancies between fact and fiction until you get to the point where you can find no joy in it. I often try to go with the former than the latter, but it’s so hard sometimes…especially when you have a movie that would have been just as good had it used its factual components as it is with its fictional elements. From what I gathered from my research, Woman Walks Ahead would have left us with a similar feel at the end if it had followed the story more true to its actual form. Continue reading Woman Walks Ahead (2018)
Puzzle (2018)
Appearances can be deceiving…both in people and in the arts. Longtime producer and first-time director Marc Turtletaub crafts together a soft, tender story of a middle-aged woman (Kelly Macdonald – Anna Karenina, No Country for Old Men) searching for an identity she didn’t even know she was searching for in the understated, well-executed Puzzle. It’s a movie that, despite its premise and, specifically, its non-descript trailer, gives life to a well-narrated tone that explores each of its five lead characters in a way that you would never think that competitive puzzle building could. I, specifically, only really saw this movie because I was trying to break my own record for the number of movies I saw in one year. As I approached triple digits, there weren’t many remaining that really caught my eye as something I needed to see. However, the 83% critic/78% audience score for Puzzle was enough for me to give the movie a try, and I needed only to see the first 15 minutes or so to know that this was a movie that I would also be reviewing.
Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Why did the Mad Titan Thanos (Josh Brolin – W., Labor Day) feel the need to grab hold of the power of the six Infinity Stones to destroy the universe? I think it’s important to understand what causes a villain to do certain actions rather than just to have a bad guy. The stronger the arc of the villain and our ability to sympathize with them on any level allows us to understand further and appreciate the underlying of who they are. In this Avengers: Infinity War (directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo), we have a powerful bad guy motivated by a tortured past and willing to destroy all of the good guys in the universe to atone for it. After the planet Titan that is no longer inhabited because he was not allowed to prevent the things from destroying it, he thought he would prevent it. Instead, he lost his planet and everyone on it. Vowing not to let something like that happen again, he makes it his mission to balance out the universe by wiping out half of it completely. But to do so, he’ll need all six of the Infinity Stones that will power his Infinity Gauntlet, which will then allow him the ability to bend time, space, energy, and the laws of physics and reality.
Borg Vs. McEnroe (2018)
The 1980 Wimbledon Men’s Championship Match was one of the greatest tennis matches of all time. It featured the number one player in the world (Sweden’s Bjorn Borg) who was seeking his fifth street title in the most famous tournament in the sport against the upstart American John McEnroe, who had quickly climbed to be the number two player in the world. Young director Janus Metz captures the history of both men and their rivalry up to this point in their careers while centering on this all-important match. Fans of tennis, I think, will adore this match, and fans of any sports movie will find this to their liking. It’s a hold-nothing-back take on two of the most influential tennis players of all time. From groundstrokes to aces to backhand slices to overhead spaces, Borg Vs. McEnroe effectively captures the in-game action. Effective storytelling that contained tons of flashbacks of each player as a youth as well as the half dozen years before the tournament, as well as the other matches in the tournament that led to this culminating final, showed two true character studies that a rookie director effectively captured. While the non-sports fan might feel lost with all of the back and forth while the non-tennis fan might get confused about some of the particulars about the sport (particularly how the sport is scored), there is enough outside of the court that will keep the audience engaged as they try to figure out these two externally very different competitors who, I think, could relate to one another in ways that they could not relate to any other person on either. Forget the fact that you’ll never think that McEnroe isn’t Shia LaBeouf (Man Down, American Honey), Borg Vs. McEnroe is a must-watch movie for most movie fans and certainly for the fan of sports dramas.
Continue reading Borg Vs. McEnroe (2018)