Billy Ray’s (Breach, Shattered Glass) Secret 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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Category Archives: Suspense
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 Tribune, The 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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Crimson Peak (2015)
Guillermo del Toro. Some people love the movies he has directed. Some people don’t love them. I think I am starting to land in the second group. I know he found his early cult following with movies like Hellboy and Hellboy II while also receiving critical accolades for films like The Orphanage and Pan’s Labyrinth. For me, his movies aren’t must-see (I’ve had Pan’s Labyrinth on my list of movies to watch for years, but each time I think I might want to watch it, I put something else on instead). Hellboy and The Orphanage were both okay, but del Toro is no early M Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs). While Crimson Peak has had mostly positive reviews (69% on Rotten Tomatoes), it hasn’t hit home with audiences. Its marketing campaign has hurt its inability to categorize it as humor, mystery, suspense, romance, or drama. This movie attracted del Toro’s best-ever cast ensemble (Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam, Tom Hiddleston). Still, with an estimated budget of $50 million and only half of that amount accumulated in revenue from the first two weekends, Crimson Peak might barely break even. This movie is by no means great. It was an okay watch, but my life certainly would not have been altered if I had not seen it. I absolutely will never watch this movie again. It certainly is not a horror film, so even though the previews look scary and categorized as horror, you’re not going to be scared. If you like del Toro’s other movies, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by this one. If you’ve never seen one of his movies before (other than maybe Pacific Rim), I’d suggest watching either The Orphanage or Pan’s Labyrinth at home and base your decision on your fondness of either of those movies.
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A History of Violence (2005)
I remember when I first saw A History of Violence in the theaters in 2005. It was not what I was expecting at all. I remember thinking the movie was decent, but not what I expected. 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 beef with his nomination was that he was only in one scene (basically the last scene in the movie). To warrant this kind of acclaim, I felt that 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, and anyone could have played this performance, and it wouldn’t have affected the movie. If anybody deserved a nomination for this movie, it would have been Viggo Mortenson (The Road, Eastern Promises), who, as he always seems to do, hit a home run as this movie’s lead.
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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 doing a quick scan of his filmography, he hasn’t directed a movie I’ve liked in a decade (2005’s War of the Worlds). And I get wanting 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 a movie like that or a movie like Amistad or a film like Schindler’s List, I must then 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.
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