Movie reviews
Owowowowow. I went to to doctor this morning and the nurse did a blood draw and I don't know what she did, she hit something deep in my elbow but it hurt like hell and it still hurts. Owowowow.
So as I think I've mentioned I've had a changeup in my movie-preview freelance job which basically requires me to watch as many movies as possible that are out on DVD. I've been trying to do at least one every two nights. So you might be getting more movie reviews from me than usual these days. After loving both "Avatar" and "Sherlock Holmes" and really liking both "Brothers Bloom" and "Sunshine Cleaning" I suppose I was due for some movies that didn't thrill me so much.
I went into this one pretty cynical. It is certainly possible for a movie to be a broadly-appealing, mainstream crowd-pleaser feel-good movie and still be a good movie ("Jerry Maguire," for example) but many films that fall into the above description I find to be manipulative and treacly with the emotion kind of shoved down my throat. Cough, choke. I kind of expected that to be the case for this movie but was hoping to be wrong because I pretty much go into every movie hoping that I'll love it. By half an hour into "The Blind Side" I was pleasantly surprised. It wasn't as sentimental as I feared, it was kinda getting to me. I love a good inspirational, tearjerking family-friendly drama as much as the next person, but it has to not make me roll my eyes. Much.
Sadly, that didn't last. One review I read (that was much more scathing than the one I'm writing here) described the film as a talking Hallmark card, and yeah, it kind of is. What bothered me about it was that the central character, this black teenager, didn't have any agency or presence in the film at all. I'm not sure if it was the actor or the writing, but the kid is basically nothing but a passive object for white people's agendas and character arcs. What did HE think? What did HE feel? We get a few tossed-off lines about him putting things behind him but basically everything we know about him is from what the other characters TELL us, instead of what the character himself shows us. The movie started to lose me around the time they treated us to a really cliched montage of Michael doing summer training with the little kid as his drill sargeant. It was so precious my eyes were rolling out of my head. And that KID. My God, did they put out a casting call for the most obnoxious, overacting child actor ever? I wanted to strangle him. The precociousness was laid on with a trowel.
Everyone in the movie is a saint. Nobody asks any tough questions or delves into anything past the surface. Things just magically happen and we're supposed to accept it. The kid's teachers, who were among the more interesting people, vanish half an hour into the film. We're told that Michael isn't stupid but it's never explained why he can write well but has to have his exams given to him orally. It's just another story about the outsider who teaches the family About What's Important In Life. I kept waiting to find out how Michael grew up having such polite manners when he seems to have come from a pretty awful ghetto where nobody else acted like that.
As for Sandra Bullock, yeah she was good, but I didn't think she was such a revelation. It wasn't some groundbreaking performance. It wasn't anything more than I'd expect from a competent actress of her stature, frankly.
It's not a terrible movie. I didn't feel I'd wasted two hours but neither would I really care to watch it again. It just left me kind of cold and feeling a little jerked around emotionally. Would not have been my choice for a Best Picture nominee.
Wow. One would think you couldn’t go wrong with ninjas, right? One would be really, really mistaken. This is one of the worst movies I’ve seen all year. Plotless, populated with cardboard-cutout characters, it somehow makes ninja fighting excruciatingly boring. By minute twenty I was looking at my watch wondering how long I’d have to endure more of the godawful mess.
Raizo is an orphan trained from childhood to be an unstoppable ninja, blah blah, becomes disillusioned when one of his friends is killed by the master, yadda yadda, vows revenge and goes rogue, et cetera. The movie opens with a shockingly gory massacre of druglords and then lapses into every cliché in the martial-arts movie genre, and doesn’t use any of them with any creativity or interest. Rain is very pretty as the title character but is basically a walking fortune cookie, and the unstoppable ninjas who are impossible to beat one on one are suddenly able to be dispatched with a single blow when he’s facing twenty of them at once. I love me a good martial arts movie but you gotta work with me here, people. Give me something to sink my teeth into besides such craptastically fake-looking CGI blood that I started to wonder if it was intentionally fake-looking.
I have "Stardust" and "The Pursuit of Happyness" coming from Netflix tonight. Onwards and upwards. Looking forward to both of those, actually, as have heard good things.
So as I think I've mentioned I've had a changeup in my movie-preview freelance job which basically requires me to watch as many movies as possible that are out on DVD. I've been trying to do at least one every two nights. So you might be getting more movie reviews from me than usual these days. After loving both "Avatar" and "Sherlock Holmes" and really liking both "Brothers Bloom" and "Sunshine Cleaning" I suppose I was due for some movies that didn't thrill me so much.
I went into this one pretty cynical. It is certainly possible for a movie to be a broadly-appealing, mainstream crowd-pleaser feel-good movie and still be a good movie ("Jerry Maguire," for example) but many films that fall into the above description I find to be manipulative and treacly with the emotion kind of shoved down my throat. Cough, choke. I kind of expected that to be the case for this movie but was hoping to be wrong because I pretty much go into every movie hoping that I'll love it. By half an hour into "The Blind Side" I was pleasantly surprised. It wasn't as sentimental as I feared, it was kinda getting to me. I love a good inspirational, tearjerking family-friendly drama as much as the next person, but it has to not make me roll my eyes. Much.
Sadly, that didn't last. One review I read (that was much more scathing than the one I'm writing here) described the film as a talking Hallmark card, and yeah, it kind of is. What bothered me about it was that the central character, this black teenager, didn't have any agency or presence in the film at all. I'm not sure if it was the actor or the writing, but the kid is basically nothing but a passive object for white people's agendas and character arcs. What did HE think? What did HE feel? We get a few tossed-off lines about him putting things behind him but basically everything we know about him is from what the other characters TELL us, instead of what the character himself shows us. The movie started to lose me around the time they treated us to a really cliched montage of Michael doing summer training with the little kid as his drill sargeant. It was so precious my eyes were rolling out of my head. And that KID. My God, did they put out a casting call for the most obnoxious, overacting child actor ever? I wanted to strangle him. The precociousness was laid on with a trowel.
Everyone in the movie is a saint. Nobody asks any tough questions or delves into anything past the surface. Things just magically happen and we're supposed to accept it. The kid's teachers, who were among the more interesting people, vanish half an hour into the film. We're told that Michael isn't stupid but it's never explained why he can write well but has to have his exams given to him orally. It's just another story about the outsider who teaches the family About What's Important In Life. I kept waiting to find out how Michael grew up having such polite manners when he seems to have come from a pretty awful ghetto where nobody else acted like that.
As for Sandra Bullock, yeah she was good, but I didn't think she was such a revelation. It wasn't some groundbreaking performance. It wasn't anything more than I'd expect from a competent actress of her stature, frankly.
It's not a terrible movie. I didn't feel I'd wasted two hours but neither would I really care to watch it again. It just left me kind of cold and feeling a little jerked around emotionally. Would not have been my choice for a Best Picture nominee.
Wow. One would think you couldn’t go wrong with ninjas, right? One would be really, really mistaken. This is one of the worst movies I’ve seen all year. Plotless, populated with cardboard-cutout characters, it somehow makes ninja fighting excruciatingly boring. By minute twenty I was looking at my watch wondering how long I’d have to endure more of the godawful mess.
Raizo is an orphan trained from childhood to be an unstoppable ninja, blah blah, becomes disillusioned when one of his friends is killed by the master, yadda yadda, vows revenge and goes rogue, et cetera. The movie opens with a shockingly gory massacre of druglords and then lapses into every cliché in the martial-arts movie genre, and doesn’t use any of them with any creativity or interest. Rain is very pretty as the title character but is basically a walking fortune cookie, and the unstoppable ninjas who are impossible to beat one on one are suddenly able to be dispatched with a single blow when he’s facing twenty of them at once. I love me a good martial arts movie but you gotta work with me here, people. Give me something to sink my teeth into besides such craptastically fake-looking CGI blood that I started to wonder if it was intentionally fake-looking.
I have "Stardust" and "The Pursuit of Happyness" coming from Netflix tonight. Onwards and upwards. Looking forward to both of those, actually, as have heard good things.