The best thing I can say about Michael Pearce’s Beast (in a movie that is rife with good things) is that I can’t think of a movie where an unknown director directing his first feature-length film (Pearce), an unknown lead actress, starring in her first film (Jessie Buckley) and an unknown lead actor, starring in, really his first film (Johnny Flynn – Love Is Thicker Than Water) have excelled more. The direction is purposeful, stylistic, and detailed. At the same time, the performances between the leads are combustible. The story is rich enough to carry you from the starting line to the checkered flag in a movie that ultimately failed to live up to its initial promise, due mostly to errors in editing and an overall storyline that might have been a tad ambitious for this novice in their craft. It’s a difficult movie to recommend if you’re not a hardcore independent movie film buff. But, if, like me, you try to watch anything that comes close to looking like an intense, original, emotional drama, this movie will fill that need. And even if you leave feeling a little unsatisfied, you’ll leave knowing that the director and both leads left everything they had on the floor. If nothing else, it’ll encourage you to look for future films that any of these three people might be involved with.
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Category Archives: 2018
Tully (2018)
Tully. Wow. Way to toy with me, Jason Reitman (Up In the Air, Juno). I will definitely have a spoilers section for this movie, but I will let you know when it happens. I can start by saying that this definitely hit me with an emotional punch. And I say that sort of tongue and cheek because I did not find this movie all that emotional. Reitman has a way of writing and directing his stories in a way where you are completely invested, but also in a way where you don’t need to keep your tissues nearby. Instead, he tells his stories in a way that gets you interested from the get-go creating characters who you wrote for and then hitting you with a gut punch when you least expect it. Ultimately, this results in his movies staying with you long after most movies you’ve seen have been forgotten. In Tully, he reunites with Charlize Theron (Mad Max: Fury Road, A Little Trip to Heaven) when the two teamed up for the fantastic Young Adult. I wouldn’t say that the Academy has shut out Theron (certainly not in the way that Jake Gyllenhaal has), but to have just two Academy Award nominations (Monster, North Country) is, if nothing else, a little surprising. I don’t know if her performance in this film will be enough to land the coveted acting prize, especially with an April release. But I will say that she carried this movie, and it goes in a couple of different directions along the way that is held together by her evenness and Reitman’s adherence to the story when it sort of felt like things were untangling a bit.
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You Were Never Really Here (2018)
So conflicted…Lynne Ramsay’s (Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin) You Were Never Really Here really is not a great movie. Yet it received an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes and 4 stars on Roger Ebert’s website. A few times during my viewing, I wanted to say aloud, “This movie sucks,” but, of course, that is something I would not do. But you can imagine how surprised I was when the movie received a round of applause after its conclusion. I was flabbergasted, but I was in an art theatre (this was the only place it was showing). It had been a good year and a half (Arrival) since the audience had last clapped at the conclusion of a movie. So I decided I would read a little about this movie and see what I missed that others saw. First, I will say that the performance of Joaquin Phoenix (Gladiator, Walk the Line) was extremely good. He was so even and heavy as a down and outgun for hire suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from what he witnessed while serving in the military and from suffering from events of his childhood he was never able to process. If we only look at Phoenix’s character as a character study, we’ve got something. We’ve actually got something good that we could build different stories around that would work. But this story? This story revolves around an issue that, honestly, many people will have a problem digesting. I understand that we want to have intrigue and surprises in the story, but not at the cost of what becomes the focal point of everything that happens. Ramsay could have done the same thing with a twist on the story that wouldn’t have made us squirm in our seats so much that really could have been as equally effective. Granted, this movie was adapted from an existing novel. Still, I believe the plot could, and should have, been changed. Hence, my internal conflict.
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