Better than The Post but not as good as Spotlight, Maria Schrader’s She Said tells one of the most important stories of this century, one that helped ignite MeToo. This movement dismantled 30+ years of silence around the subject of sexual assault in the movie/television industry. I wanted to like this movie more than I did. Unfortunately, because there is so much recency with this story and its fallout, it limited opportunities to learn something new. That’s not this film’s fault, but it was something that I carried with me as the story unfolded. Films about newspapers breaking stories may have lost their place in today’s environment. There is so much information that anyone interested in learning about a particular case can research online before a story is developed into film, television, etc. Unfortunately, social media has not helped the newspaper or television reporting industry. However, films such as The Post, Spotlight, or She Said can help us separate fact from fiction when we are inundated with information overload.
Category Archives: Based on a True Story
The Good Nurse (2022)
While Netflix offered its Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, a ten-part mini-series on, perhaps, America’s most notorious serial killer, the same company also brought to its streaming service, as well as to the big screen, a feature-lengthed film on lesser known, albeit more another prolific serial killer in Tobias Lindholm’s The Good Nurse. This review will undoubtedly contain spoilers. If you have yet to see The Good Nurse, I recommend a viewing, though I’ll caution that it operates slower than what you both wish and expect. I am uncertain if I would have given as invested in The Good Nurse had I watched it at home rather than at the theater. This is all to say that it deserves the attention the director, the writers, and the actors put into it.’
Till (2022)
As I watched the beginning of Chinonye Chukwu’s (Alaskaland, Clemency) true story Till, my mind kept returning to two different thoughts. The first was the film’s timeframe, thinking about my grandparents and realizing that the film’s lead character, Mamie Till-Mobley (The Harder They Fall, The Devil to Pay), was about the same age as my grandparents when the film took place (mostly) in 1955. The second was how I thought Till felt like a stage play, as much as it did a feature-length movie. I pondered how a live experience might feel. Sadly and shamefully, I only became aware of Emmett Till’s story for the first time when I saw the trailer. While I knew there were parts that I knew would be brutal, it was it wasn’t until we got to the film’s second act that I truly began to understand the story’s magnitude and felt that this story would be nearly impossible to pull off as a stage performance because of how draining it might be for the actors to go through the experience repeatedly, as well as how a live performance might devastate unprepared attendees.
Elvis (2022)
Ray, it is not. Walk the Line, it is not. Straight Out of Compton, it is not. Bohemian Rhapsody it is not. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby) is slightly better than the disappointing Rocketman. The highly-anticipated Austin Butler-led (Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, The Bling Ring) biopic had lofty expectations, considering that it was the one that the Presley family agreed was the true reckoning of Elvis’s life and legacy. While engaging for its lengthy 159-minute run-time, the film often felt disjointed and needed direction. With its shifting narrative, viewers often wondered if this movie was about Elvis Presley or more about Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks –Captain Phillips, Sully), his deceitful, longtime manager.
Breaking (2022)
Abi Damaris Corbin’s quiet feature debut, Breaking, is a movie that does everything Nick Cassavetes’s disaster John Q failed to do when it managed to make $71 million domestically in 2002. Of all the things Denzel Washington has saved in his movies (subways, jets, submarines, locomotive trains), holding up a hospital and forcing a doctor to perform life-saving surgery on his son was, by far, his worst. Unfortunately, Washington’s always-solid performance couldn’t save an absurd script based on a ridiculous presence. The based-on-a-true-story Breaking offers breakout performances by Corbin and the film’s lead, John Boyega (Detroit, The Woman King), most notably recognized for his role as Finn in the latest Star Wars movies.