I love a good story about drug or alcohol addiction. And I love great actors who constantly bring it into their roles. So I had super high expectations for Felix Van Groeningen’s
Beautiful Boy, the true story of the relationship between an 18-year-old son (Timothée Chalamet –
Call Me By Your Name, Hostiles) battling drugs and his father (Steve Carell –
Foxcatcher, Battle of the Sexes) who is willing to do anything to fix the problem, but is unsuccessful in all of his attempts. The trailer made it seem like my type of movie. I should have been wary of the
67% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, but I was encouraged by the 77% audience score. But as I watched this from the lens of a critic, I kept circling back to the same question. If you had these actors in place, you could have done hundreds, even thousands, of different stories about addiction. So why did they pick this story? It wasn’t anything special. It lacked vision. Van Groeningen, as a novice director, was completely in over his head, and he wasted the performance of both of its leads by telling a story of a story that wasn’t unique, was stale in its delivery, and left us feeling unattached to its characters. In a word,
Beautiful Boy felt underwhelming.
Continue reading Beautiful Boy (2018) →
Before reading this review on Jonah Hill’s (True Story, War Dogs) directorial debut effort Mid90s, I ask that you watch this quick 90-second video that someone compiled about him and put on YouTube. It is heartbreaking and hopefully will change your impression of this living legend of an actor. Perceived for many years as being Hollywood’s next fat man, perhaps in the same mold as the gone-too-early Jim Belushi, John Candy, Chris Farley, Hill broke into Hollywood with roles in iconic comedies like Superbad, Funny People, Get Him to the Greek, Cyrus, This Is the End, 21 Jump Street, 22 Jump Street, Hail, Caesar, Knocked Up; movies that in one way or another accentuated his overweight character. And if you, like me, laughed at the jokes aimed at his weight in any of these movies and are feeling guilty after watching this clip, first of all, relax; you were supposed to. Secondly, reevaluate. It doesn’t take a genius to see that Hill has battled his weight throughout his career (he has numerous roles interspersed in his career in which he is thin).
As is the case with many biopics (since being hosed over by what I believed to be a movie based entirely on a true story in Remember the Titans), I like to read about what parts of the movie were factual and which were fictional to tell a better story. A good biopic often becomes great when you learn that what you saw on screen happened in real life. A good movie that bases its claim on being a true story or inspired by actual events but one that you later find out has been predominantly fictionalized loses much of its original appeal. And, honestly, there is no devastating dagger to a movie that I love when I learn that what I thought was a true story is not nearly as much as I thought.
Interested in seeing Björn Runge’s (Happy End, Daybreak) much anticipated The Wife? Do yourself a solid. Skip and see the remarkably well-made 
It takes a long, long time to land on the moon. So much can be said for the research, development, and execution of the Apollo 11 spacecraft on the lunar surface on July 21, 1969. You can also say as much as Damien Chazelle’s (