Meh. I hide decent hope for Robert Zemeckis’s (Cast Away, Allied) Welcome to Marwen. Parts of the trailer looked corny, but so did parts of his trailer (as well as the movie) for Forrest Gump, the Oscar winner for Best Picture in 1994. Zemeckis has also succeeded with unique films such as Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her, The Polar Express, and more. Combined with the exceptional talent possessed by Steve Carell (Beautiful Boy, The Way Way Back), there was a legitimate chance that the pair could make this odd story work.
Category Archives: Genre
Ben is Back (2018)
Lucas Hedges (Lady Bird, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri) had much early Oscar buzz surrounding his name for his work in Boy Erased. I was as hyped as anyone for that movie and that performance. As I mentioned in my review, Boy Erased was based on a book I had read before, and I knew there was a movie to be made on it (which rarely happens). I liked the book and appreciated its adaptation into a film. It deals with a controversial issue that I have strong thoughts on, and I wanted to see how it played out on film. And with a cast of Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Joel Edgerton, and Russell Crowe, I thought it would definitely be a Top 10 contender. However, it completely underwhelmed, and Hedges’ performance in the film was not as great as I expected. I did not expect Hedges to dominate every screen he was in during two other 2018 performances after the release of that October. However, he was fantastic as the bully of an older brother in the handful of scenes he was in Mid90s (a film that had no other name actors besides him. He set the screen on fire, matching Hollywood’s finest actress over the last 25 years, Julia Roberts (August Osage County, Erin Brokovich), in the under-the-radar, poignant Ben is Back.
Bird Box (2018)
A Quiet Place meets The Mist meets The Happening meets The Road meets I Am Legend (specifically with one of the alternating endings). That’s a quick and easy way to describe the effective Netflix release Bird Box. Many people will compare A Quiet Place to this film because of its proximity to release dates. I would have been upset if this was a cheap rip-off of, perhaps, the biggest surprise hit of 2018, replacing not making noise with being unable to see the change. But Bird Box is based on a 2014 debut novel of the same name by Josh Malerman, years before previews of A Quiet Place were even created. This makes the movie even more enjoyable. You get to wonder about Malerman’s inspirations rather than assuming that it was the novel he was trying to emulate.
The Mule (2018)
Every trailer for a Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby) directed movie over the last decade-plus has made the film look like it would be a guaranteed Best Picture nominee. Whether that proves to be fruition (American Sniper, Flags of Our Father) or not even close (The 15:17 to Paris, Hereafter) doesn’t affect how great the trailers are. Over the last 15 years, Eastwood-directed movies have earned hundreds of millions more combined than they would have otherwise received had they not had terrific trailers. This is true of 2018’s The Mule. After seeing the trailer for The Mule for the first time in early October of 2018, the film instantly vaulted to my most anticipated movie of the year. When it wasn’t screened very much before its opening, I got a little worried. Then I saw the mixed reviews start to come in. At the time of this writing, The Mule has a 62% critics square and a 74% audience score, a little lower than I anticipated based on the trailer but right around what I expected them to be after seeing the film.
At Eternity’s Gate (2018)
Though he was playing a man who was about 25 years younger than his actual age, I could not imagine an actor doing a better job portraying the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh than Willem Dafoe (Platoon, The Boondock Saints). It’s a performance that will net Dafoe his third Best Actor nomination (he also has a Best Supporting Nom for 2017’s The Florida Project), and it could be the one that nets him his first Oscar win. While I don’t think it will happen (and I don’t have a particular reason why in this year’s wide-open field), it will be a movie that many people might not otherwise be interested in a Van Gogh biopic. At Eternity’s Gate worked for me. I am often willing to give a biopic a chance unless I find many of the film’s portrayals fictionalized. Nothing upsets me more than a story claiming to be true that turns out to be anything but factual. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case with Julian Schnabel’s (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Lou Reed’s Berlin) stylistic character study of one of the most famous and mystifying artists ever. Filmed as artistically as Van Gogh lived his life, Schnabel exceeded the confines of a conventional biopic and created something that felt new and refreshing, regardless of the darkness in which Van Gogh lived.