Stuart Blumberg’s Thanks For Sharing is a much softer and more humane look at the trials and tribulations of sexual addiction than is Steve McQueen’s 2011 Shame. Both movies broach this once taboo topic with relatively deep character studies. While both films tell fairly compelling stories, neither earned much at the box office. Together, the two movies generated just over $4 million domestically. I think that fact that these two movies were both made over two years and the two attracted stars like Mark Ruffalo, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tim Robbins, Michael Fassbender, and Carey Mulligan shows that there are those in Hollywood who want to bring the issue come to light even if the general public is still a little reluctant to make it to the theater to check out these movies on the big screen.Continue reading Thanks For Sharing (2013)
Liam Neeson (Schindler’s List, Taken) continues his one great movie, one terrible movie, one great movie, one terrible movie streak with the intense Non-Stop, perhaps the second most exciting airplane movie ever made (and no, I’m not ranking it behind Snakes on a Plane). I think Air Force One set the standard back in 1997, but Non-Stop is precisely that…nonstop. It’ll keep you glued to the screen for its 1 hour 47 minute running time. Is this movie plausible? Absolutely not. Does that deter from the experience? Only if you’ll let it. Are the coincidences totally out of control? Of course, they are. But if you want to be entertained with an action-oriented whodunit, you could do much worse. I wish I had seen this movie on the big screen. So far, 2014 has been terrible for film, but Non-Stop is the best movie of the year’s first half.
The most overlooked movie of 2013 may have been Shawn Levy’s (
A comedy sequel that is better than the original is rare to find, if not impossible. I’ve had this conversation with some of my friends before. The example that we agreed upon was National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. It’s debatable if this is even really a sequel, though. We couldn’t find another sequel that was even really comparable to the first in terms of hilarity. The Hangover Part II was funny but offered nothing new, and the first The Hangover was hilarious. After watching The Hangover Part III (which I found absolutely terrible), I liked the first two even less. Many great comedies (Old School, Wedding Crashers, Groundhog Day, There’s Something About Mary) certainly made plenty of money to warrant a sequel but went the smart route (at least to me) in not making a movie to make a movie. A couple of franchises did the original proud by being *almost* as funny (the American Pie franchise comes to mind). Then there were other franchises that waited so long to make their sequel and had such high expectations that they were bound to fail (Meet the Fockers wasn’t anywhere close to as funny as Meet the Parents, while Little Fockers was more of an embarrassment than was The Hangover Part III). Likewise, The Naked Gun is an all-time classic, but The Naked Gun 2 1/2 and The Naked Gun 33 1/3 are worth watching but are not nearly as funny). So there wasn’t a massive precedent for 22 Jump Street being as funny or funnier than 
The first movie of 2014 likely to earn a Best Picture Oscar nomination, save for perhaps The Grand Budapest Hotel, is Richard Linklater’s (Before Midnight, Before Sunrise) Boyhood. Boyhood is unlike any movie ever made or likely to be made again anytime soon. It had been quietly filmed for over 12 years and only recently (six months or so before its release) started making noise and getting people talking. Linklater shot scenes for this movie once a year for the last 12 years and let the fictional character of Mason (Ellar Coltrane) literally grow up before our eyes in the span of two and a half hours. This film’s uniqueness and the way it perfectly captures the story of one American boy growing up in the state of Texas during the first 12 years of the 21st century. He responds to both world events, and his life’s predicaments are breathtaking. The story itself is not one that I think would wow anybody if it were shot like an average movie. But the story isn’t the movie. The story is about about Mason and how he ages from a 6-year-old to an 18-year-old.