About Time was a movie I watched for the first time a year after its 2013 release date. Despite relatively high Rotten Tomatoes scores (70% critics, 81% audience), I recall being unimpressed by it. Many accounts I follow on TikTok are of people giving film reviews. While most, if not all, of those I follow in this niche, are younger than me, more often than not, I generally agree with their assessments (hence, my reason for following them). So often, About Time is referenced in a video. The film is often called beautiful, poetic, and devastating. Some have gone so far as to call it a gut punch. Those characteristics I seek out in my romantic dramas, so I signed up for the rewatch, thinking I must have missed something. It turns out that I didn’t. My second viewing did hold my interest more than my first, but it still felt very average. I’m even more uncertain now about what others see in this film that I missed.
Category Archives: 2013
Homefront (2013)
Homefront is not a movie I would typically watch (let alone review), but it has been in my Netflix queue for quite some time. I usually watch some of my more mindless movies in February and March. Before I even begin reviewing, that’s not to say that this was a poorly made movie or one that you shouldn’t watch. It just means that this is a movie you watch purely for entertainment purposes, and its storyline does not require a lot of thought or concentration. Also, I have over 400 movies reviewed at this time, yet I still have not reviewed a Jason Statham (The Mechanic, The Transformer) movie. That has mostly to do with the fact that I don’t watch a lot of Statham movies. I like him as an action star, but my movie watching these days tends to take me away from The Mechanic, The Transformer, The Expendables, and The Fast and the Furious franchises. Although, based on their box office numbers, there is an audience for Statham-type movies. But, now in my early 40s, I find myself drawn more to movies as an art form rather than I do for pure entertainment purposes. And I almost laugh at this, considering the movies I watched 15 years ago compared to today’s movies.
The Hunt (2013)
Mads Mikkelsen is most notably known as a villain. Whether you recognize him more as the man opposing James Bond in Casino Royale or as Hannibal Lecter on NBC’s hit show Lecter, he’s adept at playing the bad guy. But, in the most poignant performance of his career and one that earned him praise across the globe, Mikkelsen stars as Lucas, a kind and gentle daycare employee falsely accused of molesting one of his students in the Danish film and Academy Award-nominated foreign language film The Hunt.
I struggle with movies that are subtitled. My philosophy often is if I can view a good film in English or one that is in another language that will force me to spend a couple of hours reading while also trying to pay attention to the visuals on the screen, why wouldn’t I pick the movie in my native language? Unless a film (or one of its leads) is nominated for an Academy Award (Amour, Maria Full of Grace), is recommended by a friend (The Lunchbox), or doesn’t have an English substitute (North Face), I’m probably not going to give it a chance. It’s not because those movies will be bad. Like everyone, I have a job and many other hobbies, and time is limited. However, when a foreign language film does break through, and it is well made, it is a film that I will likely remember for a long time, if not for the rest of my life. This was certainly the case with The Lunchbox, North Face, and The Hunt.
Begin Again (2013)
Begin Again had all of the makings of a great movie. It had an all-star cast with Mark Ruffalo, Keira Knightley, Hailee Steinfeld, and Catherine Keener (in addition to Maroon 5’s Adam Levine). It had a fantastic soundtrack (with most of the songs sung by Knightley). But most importantly, it was tying itself to John Carney, the screenwriter/director’s 2007 gem Once, perhaps the most incredible “musical and performing arts” movie you’ve ever heard of. I started off really liking this movie. After 30 minutes, I felt confident it would be as good as, if not better than, Once. The problem was that, as believable as Once felt, this movie felt unbelievable by its third act. It was a movie that stretched so far past the idea of a feel-good story that you really couldn’t take it seriously at all. If I had to break down the three acts, I would give Act One an A, Act Two a C, and Act Three a D (based on the implausibility of not just the last act itself, but because it doesn’t effectively bring resolution to any of the issues the characters are dealing with in the first two acts of the film). This movie reminded me of August Rush, but I’ll need to watch it again to see if that’s a fair assessment. I do remember wanting to like August Rush much more than I did.
Mama (2013)
Mama was, by all accounts, supposed to be THE horror movie of 2013. The various trailers with the two little girls and the long stringy hair covering their faces walking up and down walls, sleeping underneath their beds, and possessing the characteristics of a wild animal were sure to get the hairs on the back of your neck up. Attaching Guillermo del Toro’s name to the credits as a producer doesn’t hurt the scare factor either. Mama was another movie that forced me to buy into the hype. It looked like my kind of movie. It starred one of my favorite actresses, Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty, The Help), and it appeared creepy. This movie looked like a winner. It also didn’t hurt when my high school students said, after opening weekend, that it was both “good” and “scary.” Well…the movie wasn’t good, but it did have its share of scary moments. There wasn’t anything unexpected, but there were still moments when you felt like you were sitting on pins and needles. Off the top of my head, I’m not sure what the scariest movie of 2013 was, but it certainly was not Mama.
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