Category Archives: Mystery

The Girl on the Train (2016)

The Girl on the Train will often be confused with and frequently compared to Gone Girl, 2014’s box office success that also registered well with the critics. Both were highly anticipated adaptations of successful novels by two more popular present-day writers. Both movies revolve around complex female characters who may not be mentally stable. It’s easy to see how some people might say that The Girl on the Train could be considered a rip-off of Gone Girl, but it’s not. The book had already been written, and the movie had already been in the works. The movies are actually quite different from one another. And, with that said, it’s easy for me to see how The Girl on the Train might achieve the same financial success, but how its 43% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes is slightly less than half that of Gone Girl‘s 88%. In addition, the movie was far less captivating and much less memorable. Nonetheless, The Girl on the Train is an okay movie. It is much better than the book. And while it doesn’t offer the same intriguing storyline as Gone Girl, it’s worth checking out.

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10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

Perhaps one of the most unconventional sequels of all time, 10 Cloverfield Lane assembles almost no resemblance to 2008’s cult classic Cloverfield other than maybe its name. The movie takes place in rural Louisiana, while Cloverfield takes place in New York City. We never truly know how much 10 Cloverfield Lane will be in the future, but we can assume it’s as soon as a couple of days and as long as a couple of weeks. Cloverfield was a shaky camera-found footage film about aliens invading the city. 10 Cloverfield Lane is not that. It’s more like a spin-off than it is a sequel. An alien invasion is a possibility for how these characters find themselves. Still, it is just one of the possibilities described by Howard (John Goodman – Flight, Barton Fink), the film’s antagonist. Goodman might be better than he ever has been before. It certainly is his darker role and the first movie in many years (King Ralph, anyone) in which he has played a starring role.

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Escobar: Paradise Lost (2015)

I cannot help comparing Escobar: Paradise Lost to Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Beach. There were quite a few similarities and also quite a few differences. I’ll start with the differences first. Except for The Man in the Iron Mask (which wasn’t promoted as a blockbuster), The Beach was DiCaprio’s first marketed movie since Titanic. It had a massive promotional campaign and was expected to vault DiCaprio even further as Hollywood’s next leading man. I had huge hopes for The Beach and liked it. Unfortunately, the movie was panned by audiences and critics alike. But before I get pounced on for enjoying it, please note that I saw this movie when I was about 24. That is my defense. I cannot defend the actions where I have watched the movie about three times since then. But I like the idea of a paradise that’s too good to be true and a lead character suddenly so far over his head that he has no means of getting out. This was a similarity to the much less marketed Escobar: Paradise Lost, a movie that received mixed reviews but, for the most part, had as many people who didn’t like the film as it had people who did.

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Secret in Their Eyes (2015)

Billy Ray’s (Breach, Shattered GlassSecret In Their Eyes is a movie with a trailer that makes it look amazing. With an all-star cast that includes two Academy Award-winning actresses, a mystery/suspense/drama, and a murder of a teenage girl with close ties to the main character’s plot, this movie was sure to be a surefire hit, right? Not so fast. When the mixed reviews started rolling in, you had to wonder what was keeping this moving from being great. There were enough negative reviews that would have saved me from seeing this review or at least had me wait for a home viewing if I weren’t a person obsessed with seeing as many movies as possible in the theater. It turns out I could have easily waited for or maybe skipped it entirely. While entertaining, it’s not a movie that needs to be seen. When all is set and down, I can’t see this landing as even one of the 25 best movies I’ve seen this year. It wasn’t the most disappointing movie I saw this year because I had tempered my expectations, and it still held my interest the only time. However, it was very uneven, pretty far-fetched, and didn’t have an audience for it. I think these suspense/mystery/drama-type movies are losing their audiences (at least in terms of watching them in the theater). With the influx of superhero movies, Pixar and other excellent animated films, and more and more quality independents, movies like Secret In Their Eyes are slowly becoming a dying bread. Of course, there are exceptions, especially when a movie is excellent or win it is based on a book that just about everybody reads (see the astounding Gone Girl for both of these exceptions). But if a movie such as Secret In Their Eyes gets just average or even slightly average reviews, it’s just unlikely to do well in the theaters anymore, regardless of which stars are on it.
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Spotlight (2015)

There are a couple of different ways to start the review for Spotlight. I could talk about the cast (quite possibly the ensemble cast of the year). I could talk about the hypocrisy that is organized religion. I will mention both of these in this post. But I will start with the old-fashioned newspaper reporting that used to be our number source of reliable news. In many ways, it is unfortunate that newspapers aren’t what they used to be, nor will they ever be again. With the invention of the Internet, it was only a matter of time before most newspapers folded while others had to majorly trim their staff, editions, and the number of pages produced with each issue. Where will The Chicago TribuneThe Washington Post, and The New York Times be in 20 years? Well, if the changes in the previous 20 years are any indication, I’m not sure these newspapers will even be around in 20 years. If they are, they might be entirely electronically based. There will still be a place for prominent metropolitan newspapers, but it will not be in the print variety. There are still things that I am interested in in the Washington DC area that I feel can only be fully addressed in something like The Washington Post. Still, I haven’t purchased a physical newspaper in over a decade and only read one if I saw it sitting at a bar when I’m eating dinner, in the school library, etc. Likewise, I go online to The Washington Post to get the same information that I cannot find elsewhere, but their website isn’t nearly as user-friendly as some other sites I go to. And finally, after I read several articles, I’m told that I reached my limit for the month and that I need to pay for a subscription to read anymore. Well…how hard is it to use a different device that hasn’t yet recognized me to access the same material? And am I going to need to read more than five articles a month? Nope. I have other resources that I still have at my disposal. Long story short…I still want and need these major newspaper articles to survive. Yet, I haven’t given a cent towards any of these papers in over a decade, and I don’t plan to. If these newspapers are going to survive, they need to do something to tap into my monetary resources.
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