Category: Reviews of Movies
Night of the Living Dead: Directed by George A. Romero. With Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman. A ragtag group of Pennsylvanians barricade themselves in an old farmhouse to remain safe from a horde of flesh-eating ghouls that are ravaging the East Coast of the United States. The movie opens with a couple going out to a cemetery 200 miles away from home to put a wreath on a grave. Maybe it’s a brother and sister? Maybe! But my main focus is that this is a surprisingly fantastic transfer, I had heard the copyright on the film had...
Fall: Directed by Scott Mann. With Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Mason Gooding, Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Best friends Becky and Hunter find themselves at the top of a 2,000-foot radio tower. I think going into this movie I had low expectations, but by the end of the movie I was impressed with how everything played out. The movie opens on a fantastic great opening sequence to set up the characters and motivations, followed closely by some great great shots of a house while a voicemail plays setting up the rest of the film. True, there’s some exceptionally stupid behavior on...
How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town: Directed by Jeremy LaLonde. With Jewel Staite, Ennis Esmer, Lauren Lee Smith, Katharine Isabelle. When “town slut” turned sex columnist Cassie Cranston returns for her mother’s funeral it spices things up in the small town of Beaver’s Ridge when a group of eccentric town folk, each with their own motives, convince her to plan an orgy. I think this is the first time that I’ve seen Jewel Staite in the leading role of a movie, kinda wish we could see more of her, other than her time on Firefly then Stargate...
The Visitor: Directed by Giulio Paradisi. With Mel Ferrer, Glenn Ford, Lance Henriksen, John Huston. The soul of a young girl with telekinetic powers becomes the prize in a fight between forces of good and evil. I started this one becuase I was drawn in by the amazing artwork on the Kanopy page for it: www.kanopy.com/en/video/11413791 but alas, that artwork did not live up to what I was hoping for. Even the art on the wikipedia page is pretty cool: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visitor_(1979_film) The movie is nominally about a war between cosmic powers for the fate of humanity, but that story gets...
The Fisher King: Directed by Terry Gilliam. With Jeff Bridges, Adam Bryant, Paul Lombardi, David Hyde Pierce. A former radio DJ, suicidally despondent because of a terrible mistake he made, finds redemption in helping a deranged homeless man who was an unwitting victim of that mistake. If you want to know what 90’s film making was like, this movie is a great look into the transition from the nitty gritty 80’s style to the slightly less gritty but still grungy around the cuffs 90’s films. This is by no means one of Robin’s better films, nor is it Jeff Bridges’....
Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee: Directed by Charlie Russell. With Dean Barrow, Rocco Castoro, Neil Cavuto, Janice Dyson. Life and death of software pioneer John McAfee who developed the software: McAfee Antivirus. I only tangentially knew about John McAfee and what he was up to in the later parts of his life, but this 1hr 45min movie gave a peak behind the curtain and there’s not much to like about what he was up to, from the supposed ties to governmental hacking and cartels to the over use of drugs that eventually lead to his...
Dave Made a Maze: Directed by Bill Watterson. With Meera Rohit Kumbhani, Nick Thune, Adam Busch, James Urbaniak. Dave, an artist who has yet to complete anything significant in his career, builds a fort in his living room out of pure frustration, only to wind up trapped by the fantastical pitfalls, booby traps, and critters of his own creation. A sweet story of an artist trying to find himself in an unsure world, coupled with some seriously dark underpinnings. The entire movie is a gift to puppetry and carboard art, and per the credits there was an entire team dedicated...
Mary Shelley: Directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour. With Elle Fanning, Bel Powley, Owen Richards, Joanne Froggatt. Life and facts of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who at 16 met 21 year old poet Percy Shelley, resulting in the writing of Frankenstein. This is apparently pretty dang close to a true story of her life from my understanding and if that’s the case she lives an exceptionally liberated life filled with freedom and heartbreak. There’s nearly nothing about her most famous story in the film, at least not on the surface. It’s not until the very end of the film when one of the...
Richard Jewell: Directed by Clint Eastwood. With Paul Walter Hauser, Sam Rockwell, Brandon Stanley, Ryan Boz. Security guard Richard Jewell is an instant hero after foiling a bomb attack at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, but his life becomes a nightmare when the FBI leaks to the media that he is a suspect in the case. I think we’ve all met people like Richard Jewell, over compensating, overweight, overstimulated people with exceptionally high aspirations but lacking the abilities and authority to accomplish much of what they see for themselves. Despite the air of being an imposter in nearly every scene, Jewell...
Red Rocket: Directed by Sean Baker. With Simon Rex, Bree Elrod, Brenda Deiss, Sophie. Mikey Saber is a washed-up porn star who returns to his small Texas hometown, not that anyone really wants him back. Directed by Sean Baker, best known by me for doing The Florida Project, “Red Rocket” has many of the same things that made TFP so captivating, from the shooting style to the dialogue, I really got the feeling that I was a fly on the wall during most of the scenes. The main character “Mike Saber” is a blown out ex-porn star that feels he...
