Prepare yourself. I’m unsure if I’ve had a movie theater experience with a more constant stream of tears since 1997’s
Titanic. I know there have been movies that have scenes that have affected me more, and there have been home viewings where I don’t feel the same pressure to hold it together as I would in the theater. So, while I was having sort of a sentimental day before I engaged with this movie, for whatever reason, I was wiping away tears early and often in this movie. In some ways, it was eerily reminiscent of 2008’s
Slumdog Millionaire. It starred Dev Patel (
Chappie, HBO’s
The Newsroom) and revolved around the story set, mostly in the present, with flashbacks to childhood memories in India. Much like the fantastic
Slumdog Millionaire put Patel on the map for the first time,
Lion will certainly launch him to leading man status for years. Though he didn’t appear on screen until the movie was about 40% over, he commanded every scene he was in from that point going forward to transform this movie from extraordinary to must-see. In a year where the top lead actors have portrayed characters riddled with guilt, doubt, regret, and self-loathing, Patel holds his own with the more accomplished Denzel Washington (
Fences), Ryan Gosling (
La La Land), and frontrunner Casey Affleck (
Manchester by the Sea).
Continue reading Lion (2016) →
After two movies, the jury is still out on Joel Edgerton as a director. After catching fire with 2015’s surprise hit The Gift, Edgerton tried his hand with material based on a true story, adapting and writing the screenplay for Garrard Conley’s novel Boy Erased. To be perfectly transparent, I had extremely high expectations for this film. This was a novel I read a couple of years ago, well before I knew that a movie based on the story was in the process. I enjoyed the book, and when I saw that the cast was to include Edgerton, Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, and Russell Crowe and that it was already being mentioned in Oscar discussions before it was released, I was more than excited. However, I knew that the topic of this film was controversial. When I read the book, I was not dissatisfied with the ending but felt rushed quite a bit. Boy Erased was one of my ten most anticipated films of the year. And like a few others in my ten most anticipated films of the year (namely First Man), it ultimately failed to impress. A film that should have been ripe with emotion left me completely unaffected.
Oh, man, what a fantastic movie is. This was my second viewing of The Hours. I first watched it in 2010 and remember being extremely surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I would not have given this movie a chance back when it came out in 2002, but my interest in films has changed dramatically since then. Now, that’s not to say I still can’t enjoy a blockbuster (I watched Captain America: Civil War earlier in the same day and loved it). Still, I am much more into the human aspect of independent dramas like The Hours than I am about action movies or comedies. This movie deals with depression, a topic that I am, unfortunately, very familiar with. It does it from three different periods with three stories that are sometimes loose (and not so loosely) during others. This movie knotted Nicole Kidman (Cold Mountain, Rabbit Hole) with, surprisingly, just her third nomination to date (as of May 2016) and her first and only win. With a prosthetic nose, she was virtually unrecognizable as Virginia Woolf. But it wasn’t her physical characteristics that stood out. It was how she immersed herself in the role of a woman who you would think had it all but was so mentally troubled that she could not find any happiness in her life. An accomplished actress, this is the performance of her career in a movie that shouldn’t be missed by anybody who views life with a cup-half-empty sort of mentality.