Love or hate him, Terrence Malick has a unique style. Personally, he’s not for me. The New World was a decent enough film, but it left me wanting more. I had such high hopes for The Tree of Life, only for it to result in one of my most frustrating and tedious theater-going experiences ever, that I was ready to write him off. However, there is often an anomaly. For me, it was his devastatingly beautiful portrayal of World War II in 1998’s The Thin Red Line. Rightfully or not, The Thin Red Line will forever be associated and compared with Saving Private Ryan, another World War II-based Best Picture nominee of 1998. And, if I’m being 100% honest, I did not know that Malick directed the Thin Red Line until after I finished watching it.
Category Archives: John C. Reilly
Kong: Skull Island (2017)
Kong: Skull Island was my most anticipated movie in the first quarter 2017. And while it won’t be up for any end-of-year honors and won’t end up on my year’s top ten list, I found Kong: Skull Island to be a very engaging, exciting, and, if possible, original. While it wasn’t perfect, this movie was fantastic. As excited as I was to see it when I initially saw the trailer, I wasn’t feeling it the day of my viewing. Even with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 79%, I still felt like I would be disappointed. Since seeing it in the theater, I haven’t watched the most recent King Kong movie (the 2005 one starring Naomi Watts and Adrien Brody). I remember liking it a lot. But I don’t remember many of the details. I do remember it being extremely long. It honestly felt like it should have been two movies, which is why I haven’t watched it since, even though there has been a copy of the DVD on my bookshelf for the last decade.
The Lobster (2016)
Yorgos Lanthimos The Lobster is one weird movie. I don’t often do well with movies I find to be weird. Some movies that have gotten high ratings with the critics are so utterly dreadful that they are virtually unwatchable. The tone is simple, the dialect is weird, and the actions are peculiar, but the overall strangeness of these movies makes the experience a chore. I know some love Wes Anderson and to each his own. The Lobster feels very similar to one of these Anderson movies, but, oddly enough, it held my interest. While I didn’t understand why a movie so strange needed to be made, I found it engaging, and it really didn’t feel like I was watching it just to say that I watched it. While I didn’t like it and would never watch it again, there were parts of it
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The Hours (2002)
Oh, man, what a fantastic movie is. This was actually my second viewing of The Hours. I first watched it back in 2010 and remembered being extremely surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I would not have given this movie a chance back when it came out in 2002, but my interests in films have changed dramatically since then. Now that’s not to say I still can’t enjoy a blockbuster (I actually watched Captain America: Civil War earlier in the same day and loved it), but I am much more into the human aspect of independent dramas like The Hours than I am about action movies or comedies. This movie deals with depression, a topic that I am, unfortunately, very familiar with. And it does it from three different time periods with three different stories that are loosely at times (and not so loosely) during others. This movie knotted Nicole Kidman (Cold Mountain, Rabbit Hole) with, surprisingly, just her third nomination to date (as of May 2016) and her first and only win. With a prosthetic nose, she was virtually unrecognizable as Virginia Woolf. But it wasn’t her physical characteristics that stood out. It was how she immersed herself in the role of a woman who you would think had it all but was so mentally troubled that she could not find any happiness in her life. An accomplished actress, this is the performance of her career in a movie that shouldn’t be missed by anybody who views life with a cup half empty sort of mentality.
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We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
Wow. We Need to Talk About Kevin is not a movie for everyone. It’s a movie that most people I know could not get through. This movie aimed to educate and encourage discussion about a topic that feels like it is becoming all too familiar. It’s hard to target an audience for this movie. It has two things going against it that might turn viewers within the first 15 minutes or at any point after that. The first and more important one is the topic. This movie tells the story of a mother whose 16-year-old son is in prison after having murdered many of his classmates in a mass killing that resembles the Columbine High School massacre. There will be a large number of people who will not even consider watching a movie based on a topic like this. The second, and far less important, reason, why people might struggle to make it to the end is because of its, at times, randomness. It goes back and forth between the present and past and between real and imagined life. The transitions are inconsistent. If you’ve seen either Melancholia or The Tree of Life, it sometimes has that sort of feel. I liked Melancholia and hated every second of The Tree of Life. However, I gave. We Need to Talk About Kevin a chance. It held my attention for the entire movie.
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