A sub-par movie with excellent performance best describes Bart Freundlich (Wolves) as slightly disappointing After the Wedding. It’s not that this movie was bad. It was just so far-fetched, yet it tried to take itself oh so seriously. When everything added together, it was hard to take this movie seriously, even when each of our leads did so without batting an eye. It should have been a movie I disliked because of its many flaws. Yet, as flawed as this movie was and how easy it is not to recommend, I still found myself thoroughly entertained and enjoying it.
Category Archives: Billy Crudup
Alien: Covenant (2017)
Ridley Scott’s (Gladiator, The Martian) brainchild franchise proves a few things. First, the Alien series still has legs, its sequels continue evolving, and Scott has no plans to let his baby fall into the wrong hands again. Ridley’s monster first burst onto the screen in 1979’s Alien, a movie that did for space travel what Steven Spielberg’s Jaws did for swimming on beaches. It certainly wasn’t the first movie set on a spaceship. But, if it wasn’t the first horror film set in space, it was undoubtedly the first one we all remembered as the first one. And, just as the tagline of the original movie poster suggests, In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream, nothing can be more accurate as we sit down and prepare ourselves for one of the Alien movies.
Jackie (2016)
Less than a month ago, I would have said Natalie Portman (Black Swan, Brothers) was the one lock for an Academy Award win. Her portrayal as the grieving Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the wake of her husband’s assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald. Portman just looked the part, and it felt like this was the role she was born to play. Portman is a fantastic actress, and she did an above-average job in Jackie. But this movie was so flat and depressing that I wonder if it’s going to be enough to take out Emma Stone in La La Land, the movie that has been gaining lots and lots of steam in recent weeks. As I look at this list of contenders for Best Actress, I’m not overly impressed. This definitely helps Portman. This film only had to be pretty good to convince me that she should win. Unfortunately, the movie did not live up to my expectations at all. While I learned a lot about Jackie Kennedy, her relationship with her family, the media, and the people of America, and the events that occurred on November 22, 1963, and the week afterward, I felt this movie overall was very dark and very dull. Though only an hour and a half, it felt like a three-hour snoozefest. It’s hard to recommend a movie that felt more like a history lesson that you should be required to watch in your 11th-grade US History class.
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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 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.
Continue reading Spotlight (2015)