Heavy military boot camp movies cannot help but draw comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The groundbreaking drama showcased the lengths to which the United States Military Academies sometimes go to “break” their recruits. Another great example is the under-appreciated but long-remembered G.I. Jane. Both films featured recruits who were not wanted (Full Metal Jacket with the obese, dimwitted Leonard “aka Gomer Pyle” Lawrence, played fantastically by Vincent D’Onofrio, or Demi Moore as the lone trial candidate in a U.S. Navy female integration program in G.I. Jane). A similar example is Men of Honor, the story of Carl Brashear (Cuba Gooding Jr.), the first African-American U.S. Navy Diver.
Category Archives: Based on a True Story
Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody (2022)
Bohemian Rhapsody, Ray, What’s Love Got to Do With It, or Walk The Line, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody is not. Kasi Lemmons’s (Harriet, Talk to Me) is not even on the same level as this year’s disappointing Elvis. Naomi Ackie (Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Lady Macbeth) did not encompass the legendary Whitney Houston nearly as well as Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody), Jamie Foxx (Ray), Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line), Angela Bassett (Angela Bassett), or Elvis. Under the right direction and with the right lead, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody should have at least been a lock for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role. But, alas, it wasn’t meant to be.
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The Forgotten Battle (2020)
Take a few pieces of Dunkirk, add a touch of All Quiet on the Western Front, layer in some 1917, shave in some Saving Private Ryan sprinkle, and finish it with some Letters from Iwo Jima. The result is Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s ( The Thing) 2020 under-the-radar masterpiece, The Forgotten Battle. This 2020 Netflix film was one I had just heard of after finishing All Quiet on the Western Front, another Netflix original that was equally exceptional.
She Said (2022)
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 a 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.
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-length film on a lesser-known, albeit more 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 more slowly than you both wish and expect. I am uncertain if I would have 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.’