I recall seeing A History of Violence in theaters for the first time in 2005. It was not what I was expecting at all. The movie was decent, but it didn’t quite live up to my expectations. This was also when I started to get into the Oscars. I remember being flabbergasted when William Hurt (The Doctor, Children of a Lesser God) received a Best Supporting Actor nomination. At that time, my issue with his nomination was that he appeared in only one scene (basically the last scene in the movie). To warrant this acclaim, you needed to be on the screen for more than 15 minutes. As I watched it again (for just the second time ever) last night, I realized that he didn’t deserve the nomination, not because he was only on the screen for 15 minutes, but because his performance sucked. He was such a minor character that anyone could have played this role, and it wouldn’t have affected the movie. If anybody deserved a nomination for this movie, it would have been Viggo Mortensen (The Road, Eastern Promises), who, as he always seems to do, hit a home run as this movie’s lead.
Category Archives: Drama
Room (2015)
The Road meets Life Is Beautiful meets Panic Room?
Little-known director Lenny Abrahamson (Frank, What Richard Did) may have just quietly crafted the most beautifully disturbing and profoundly affecting movie of 2015. As I wrote my review of Steve Jobs yesterday, I tried to remember the last time I was moved to tears while watching a movie. Ironically, while Steve Jobs brought out almost no emotion in me, two of director Danny Boyle’s previous films (Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours) had a profound and lasting impact on me and my life. Those two movies were nearly perfect. While Abrahamson’s Room is by no means perfect, it is rich, intelligent, gut-wrenching, and, unfortunately, a little too real.
I will provide spoilers for this movie because it is a vital film that deserves in-depth discussion. I will let you know when these spoilers are revealed, so you can continue reading for now if you haven’t seen the movie. I’m assuming you’ve watched the trailer. If you haven’t, you can watch the trailer now, or do what I did and see the movie. However, I would do one of the following two things before continuing with this review. I didn’t know how much of an impact Room would have on me when I went in. I learned a little bit about the film going in. I didn’t know how little I knew. This movie will appear on many critics’ end-of-year top 10 lists and will likely receive some severe Academy Award nominations. I hope that more moviegoers will give this movie a chance. Is it slow? Yes, it is not The Avengers. Is it more important than The Avengers? Yes, it’s like 1000 times more important than that money hog. It might be the most important movie of 2015. It might be one of the most important movies of the last decade. When lesser movies would have stopped, Room stepped full-throttle on the pedal. Room is a challenging film to digest, and it will feel uncomfortable at times for many moviegoers. While not currently my favorite movie of 2015 (it’s currently #2 for me), this is the best-made movie of the year.
Steve Jobs (2015)
The much-anticipated Steve Jobs exists so much as a single entity that we may forget that the 2013 Ashton Kutcher Jobs movie ever existed. Steve Jobs has been a much bigger hit with critics (85% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes versus 27% rotten) and audiences (the 2015 movie earned more than half of what the 2013 movie grossed in its first week alone). While neither Kutcher nor Michael Fassbender (Shame, 12 Years a Slave) looks anything like the actual former CEO of Apple, Fassbender is a much more credible dramatic actor than Kutcher ever will be. That is reason enough to give Steve Jobs the nod over Jobs if you debate which one to watch. This review will not compare the two movies, as I have not seen Kutcher’s Jobs and do not plan to do so. For whatever reason, I wasn’t looking forward to the Fassbender vehicle as I thought I would have been, and it turns out that trepidation was justified. Steve Jobs was a decent movie that I can only recommend with the caveat that, while you might like it, you won’t enjoy it as much as you had hoped.
Bridge of Spies (2015)
Bridge of Spies. The ultimate cure for insomnia. Okay, okay, it wasn’t that bad. It actually started great. It was also based upon a true story, so it had that going for it. But Lincoln, War Horse, and Munich were all Steven Spielberg-directed movies, and I found all three of those to be incredibly dull. I’m a huge Spielberg fan, but after a quick scan of his filmography, I haven’t liked a movie he directed in a decade (2005’s War of the Worlds). And I want to branch off from the science-fiction/action-adventure genre that really defined him, but he seems to be missing something when it comes to these dramas. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule.
Saving Private Ryan was one of the greatest movies ever made. So, while I appreciate his desire to recapture the glory he achieved in movies like Amistad or films like Schindler’s List, I must wonder why he’s wasting his time on a film like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Worse, based on how poor that movie was, why was he set to direct a fifth installment of the series? Long story short, this isn’t the same Steven Spielberg of the 1980s and 1990s. There will be fans of the style of films he seems to be mainly concentrating on now (heck, Munich, War Horse, and Lincoln were all nominated for best picture), but all three of these movies (as well as Bridge of Spies) just felt long and tedious to me.
99 Homes (2015)
99 Homes was a movie I was confident I would love. I was wrong. It was good, but not great. It had unavoidable flaws. Even with the most accomplished director, it couldn’t have avoided some of its pitfalls and still fit in a two-hour time frame. Just like an unusually high number of films that I’ve seen this year, I knew very little about this movie going in. My knowledge of the film was reduced to knowing that it starred Andrew Garfield (The Amazing Spider-Man, The Social Network) and Michael Shannon (Take Shelter, The Harvest), that it was a heavy R-rated drama based on home foreclosures, and that it was scoring a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes at its time of release. I hadn’t seen a single preview of the movie, but what I did know about it was enough for me to see it. There was a 100% chance I would see this movie in the theater. While this is a pretty good movie, it doesn’t require a theater viewing. It’s not going to win any awards. If you get a chance to see it on Netflix or cable, give it a shot. You may not love it, but it’ll grab your attention. While it is predictable and gets in its own way, it is a tense and engrossing film. Furthermore, it continues to showcase Shannon’s dominating screen presence. Love him or hate him, he creates memorable characters.