Reviews

The movie starts out with the beginnings of a pretty straightforward plot but quickly launches into an imaginative but abstract fantasy world. While each scene was visually interesting and some were quite beautiful, I was simply completely lost, not knowing what I was watching.

The scenes quickly came and went with almost nothing explained, events seemed random, there was no clear plot, or characters, or story line, or emotional connection or development. It was like flipping through an artist's sketchbook, it felt like 50 two to three minute animation sequences that were related only by having similar style. Or like watching a long fever dream that came in dozens of separate scenes.

It was hard to even pay attention, my wife fell asleep during the movie, a few people left the theater before the end, as we almost did. It would have been fine for 15-20 minutes but to sit through over 2 hours was torture. I am honestly perplexed by the positive reviews that call this a masterpiece or really even watchable. Perhaps there is a mythology or folklore that everyone else is aware of that somehow ties it all together? I understand that Miyazaki has a great reputation but this artistry is too abstract and unreliable for me.

Peter Dinklage is a beautiful, sensitive, unusual actor, but since Game of Thrones keeps choosing movies that are tragically terrible.

This was a movie that not only left me with a gaping pit of nothingness at the end but forced me to watch an attractive yet nihilistic pit of despair for 2 hours hoping for one single redeeming quality that never arrived.

But bit by bit, story line, theme, acting, it was a soul crushing waste of time. The plot was at turns exaggerated, unbelievable, soulless and irritating. The wasted talent was palpable. I wish someone could deliver me with the hours that I wasted watching this movie and hoping that there would be some reason why I wasted my time.

Having grown up watching monster movies, supernatural horror and thriller movies, I thought I had seen everything but this film is unique and captivating. The premise unfolds slowly with a series of wild twists and before you know it you're half way into a unique movie where you have no idea what is going to happen.

But despite being pretty weird the acting and story are excellent. The lead actors manage to be vulnerable, sensitive, sexy and euphoric delisted the grotesque appearance. The relationships are portrayed pitch perfect and the scenery and cinematography are spectacular. I speak no Swedish at all but the subtitles didn't detract from the experience at all because the acting was so good.

Despite the weirdness the themes are familiar, coming of age and self-realization arriving through a romantic tryst and this familiarity helps to keep the film accessible and relatable. A movie I'll remember for some time.

I caught this on Hulu. I was pleasantly surprised and am a little surprised by the low ratings. The story is a common one of a young man going to somewhat desperate measures to support his family when he doesn't have a lot of good options and is lured into the oil and gas industry. It was very well acted by the lead and I thought realistic. It will resonate with anyone who has been up against the wall financially and has had to scramble and rely on the charity of strangers to get a leg up.

I know this is shallow but I just couldn't get past the fact that Nicole Kidman was so obviously wearing a wig for most of the movie. They tried to make her look old and worn and unattractive but it was like high school theater make-up. Here wear this wig, bad leather jacket and stagger around a little.

Maybe it's a fine line between a sparse thriller and an overwrought plot trifle but this was definitely the latter. It was a 15 minute story stretched to 2 hours.

I kept waiting for the plot development until I realized it was not going to arrive. The shots of LA were the movie equivalent of clip art. I like Kidman and think she has the potential for a lot more heart than she is usually given but this was just a waste of time.

This movie is a slow-paced character drama, or, alternately a long "bottle episode" with basically two characters mostly in one location. There isn't a lot of action and most of the plot hangs on one decision being made by the main character. The dialogue is a bit flowery, with actual quotes from Plato and other classic authors. A lot of people are going to call this movie dull but some will be fascinated by the psychology and subtleties and mash-up of intellectualism and romance.

Margaret Qualley plays an "accidentally attractive" young female nerdy scientist (replete with cute mathematical and molecular tattoos) dedicated to furthering her father's research to save the Earth which is a somewhat undefined state of apocalypse. I thought her acting was quite good as she portrayed a hopelessly conflicted and lonely but somehow winsome character.

I won't spoil the story but it revolves around a somewhat bizarre love triangle including the longest of long distance relationships and a young woman torn between her dedication to her father, her long-distance affair and the attractive man right in front of her.

Unfortunately (and supremely ironically) the movie hinges on tragic and completely absurd errors in science that any layperson can identify, so strange to have a movie with lots of scientific meaning and content that is nowhere close to reality.

Nonetheless I enjoyed the movie maybe because I'm a sucker for bottled romance and young intellectuals.

Caught this on Netflix, I thought it started well and drew you into a story about teens, using and buying and selling drugs. Pablo Schreiber jumps off the screen, he does an excellent job and was perfectly cast, showing the corrupted raw instincts of a military veteran gone bad. The story is ultimately one that has been told many times but is a good tense gritty crime drama. Without giving away spoilers I can't go into the plot but think of a combination of 8 Mile and Breaking Bad. Every character was desperate in their own way in a tightly woven story.

I hate to say it but I think the weak spot was Eliza Taylor who is not up to the challenge of carrying the film and was a bit too soft for the part. I was surprised to see Lena Headey and it took me a minute to recognize her, she did a wonderful job as Eliza's boss. The best part of the film was the middle and the end did not live up to the tension, but overall worth watching.

When you think of Hawaii you think of resorts, surfing, TV shows, etc. but this movie shows you the seedy underbelly that everyone knows is there but nobody talks about. Washed up blue collar families, dead ends, petty rivalries, gangs, desperate people on the dole, too much pot and booze, and a chance to escape that never materializes.

It'd hard to watch people make bad choices but the self-destructiveness is all too understandable and while you want them to make better decisions you can see why they don't. I thought the characters, families, and plots really resonated, and were rendered with intense realism even while being far from uplifting. I thought the Hawaiian background was very true to life and not what you normally see.

While the acting was raw and amateurish I thought it was very powerful in that it depicted how real people would probably behave under the circumstances. The plot twist mentioned in the summary was a little awkward but served to give the story more meaning from a racial and equality perspective.

Overall I feel like I found a hidden gem on Netflix and am glad to have watched it.

I caught this on Netflix, I was drawn in by the premise and the 4 3/4 out of 5 stars on Netflix (I always wonder what that means).

At first I was thrown off by the dubbing, the dialogue was obviously dubbed in English, which seemed strange since I was looking at 3 Anglo-looking European or American actors, but I eventually figured out that they were Scandinavian of some variety.

To get right to it, the story and plot wasn't great and it was pretty stilted at times but I have to say the cinematography, scenes, shots, lighting, and backgrounds were truly spectacular (seriously). It was like watching an episode of Planet Earth or the Discovery channel. I don't know anything about cameras or film making but the scenes were beautiful and captivating.

There was very little plot or background, I guess the 3 characters were supposed to be ex- soldiers on an adventure. They looked like, respectively, a soldier, a soccer mom, and someone who works in a brewery. But hey they are all attractive enough and really I thought the acting was pretty good, given what they had to work with. There was no chemistry, or like negative chemistry, between the two characters that were a couple, but maybe that was part of the point. I think the entire movie had just 3 actors.

This could have been a tense thriller like Blair Witch or Descent which is maybe what they set out to do but after a bunch of build up, without mentioning any spoilers, the whole story was a bit of a let down and not much to it (but shot in beautiful scenes). In retrospect the story is probably a lot more realistic in terms of what would actually happen in a situation like that but you go into the movie expecting ghouls or supernatural monsters or whatever so it's kind of a let down.

I ended the movie pretty disappointed but there were definitely some unexpected bright spots, I'll be looking for the actors and director in other movies. It just seems like they had a good idea and they lost all of their funding 1/3 the way into the movie or something.

I caught this on NetFlix last night. I thought it was good, a good movie that tells the story very well and with excellent acting. I had never seen any of the actors before and was pleasantly surprised. This is a character drama without much action besides the interpersonal drama which I enjoy but maybe isn't for everyone.

The story will resonate with anyone who grew up in a small town and was bored and frustrated by that limited existence. Sarah Barton works at the grocery store, is bored with her job and her life, and looks around at all of the people still in the town and can't imagine growing up and living here her whole life. Her mother and boyfriend are in town but they don't do much to help her tolerate it. She wants something to happen in her life but doesn't know how to go about it.

In drifts Pepper, a classic charismatic drifter with a dark side, who befriends Sarah and leads her into a sordid world of striptease, sex and drugs.

I thought the interplay between the two leads was excellent and they clearly had chemistry and played their parts so well it didn't seem like acting at all. A scene near the end (no spoilers) where they both know they're lying to each other but are both pretending that they're not was played extremely well.

The scenes, supporting actors, and even costumes were so perfect for rural small town America that it was possible to believe every detail of the story.

The ending, while not completely "uncompromising" was satisfying and I thought both hopeful and realistic.

Overall a good movie.

I was intrigued by the premise of the movie and the clearly flawed and complicated but somehow hopeful character of Roger. I also loved that it was Norwegian (I'm American) and all of the Nordic characters, scenes and themes.

However, for me, about 30 minutes into the movie it took a few sharp detours and I ended up not really knowing what I was watching. I could not possibly see how the later scenes followed from the earlier scenes, they seemed completely incongruous. The characters began to behave completely irrationally, I guess motivated by some background that we were never told about or something, I was lost.

There were many extremely graphic scenes, I guess you can't really get away from the graphic violence these days in any suspenseful movie but I thought they were just way over the top and took me out of the story.

I began to lose interest about 2/3 through but did manage to finish, and the ending tied up the story in such wildly implausible tying-of-knots that I literally laughed out loud.

I'll definitely watch for the actors again and look forward to seeing other Nordic themed movies. Hopefully they can show some restraint with the gore next time.

Once again Tarantino shows us that he knows how to make about half of a good movie. He sets up an intriguing if wildly implausible premise, a nattily dressed ex-dentist has become an expert bounty hunter who makes his money killing the uneducated white trash of the pre-Civil War south. And the dentist doesn't embrace slavery and has a soft spot for slaves.

Christoph Waltz plays this part with aplomb and fits perfectly into Tarantino's uniquely paced scenes and dialogue, handling what would otherwise be impossibly wordy expositions as if he always spoke that way.

And so the movie begins and we're taken through a few scenes showing the dentist's perfect poise and implausible shooting accuracy. He frees a slave (Django) and forms a relationship with him and initially we aren't sure what direction the film will go.

Unfortunately, with the stage set, this is about where it starts to come off of the rails. Tarantino's fetish for completely over the top violence was originally his signature but now is a stain on his films. He approaches the border of addressing "adult" topics and conflicts such as racism, slavery, cultural issues, or a great showdown between two prominent characters, and seems able to immerse himself in these issues to understand them well enough to portray them on the screen.

But like a 14 year old who would rather play video games than do his homework, he quickly pulls the plug on any serious story telling and descends into mindless splatter- filled violence which, once started, can only increase through the rest of the film until it reaches a disgusting big red goopy climax. Slaves eaten by dogs, slaves killing each other with hammers, men wailing in pain after being shot or crushed, 20+ person shoot- outs with red paint coating every visible surface... it's hard to watch and doesn't tell a story or really do anything for the viewer, it's just self-indulgent nonsense.

Tarantino clearly has talent in coming up with good story ideas, providing viewers with an immersive experience into other times and places, and attracting great actors and getting great performances out of them. It's too bad it's all wasted on his mental masturbations.

I can't help but to wonder about the people calling this movie a "masterpiece" and wonder if they have ever actually seen a good movie or read a good book. If watching a movie just to see 100 people graphically killed and dismembered before your eyes is your idea of supreme entertainment then maybe you should think again.

I saw this on HBO recently. It is a great counter-point to "Zero Dark Thirty" which, it is now even more clear, summarized and dramatized the work of a group of CIA analysts that spans many decades. The character "Maya" from Zero Dark Thirty is shown as a young analyst obsessed with catching OBL. The truth is that there were a group of analysts, mostly women, who were all collectively obsessed with catching him, and their work spanned a time frame much longer than many know, going back around 10 years before most of the public had ever heard of OBL.

This movie sheds more light on what goes on behind the scenes and (without revealing any secrets or classified information) how analysts collect and organize the blizzard of seemingly unrelated data to draw conclusions and direct agents in the field. It is hard to imagine working on such an unbounded, complex problem for 10, 20 or even 30 years without reaching the goal, and then to finally and suddenly get there. It makes it clear that the credit for stopping OBL goes far beyond one analyst, one special forces operative, or one president, and is the culmination of dozens of person-years of hard work.

I found the interviews to be very candid, much more so than I expected, and they touch on subjects such as how information is relayed between analysts and agents "downrange", how analysts can get comfortable with the idea of hunting people down and killing them, and whether or not "extreme interrogation techniques" are useful or morally acceptable. The CIA can have an image of being bureaucratic, incompetent, and occasionally brutal and arbitrary. However, the people interviewed come across as passionate about their work, dedicated, empathetic, and extremely human despite the intense jobs they have.

Rather than just have people talk into the camera, the producers spiced things up with scenes of analyst whiteboards, connect-the-dots type animations, eerie footage of battlefields and locations in the middle east, dramatic but staged scenes of analysts talking while driving through well-known DC area locations, etc. This is primarily just eye candy but serves to move the narrative along and give you something to look at while they unveil the story. I didn't find this distracting but I can see how some people would.

Overall well worth watching if you are interested in the subject and are open to a relatively favorable view of the CIA and its employees.

My wife is a complete, total, and obsessed Twihard. She's read the books many times and seen the movies uncounted times, and gets all of her girl friends into it too. While I can admit that there are some good qualities to the movies (they are immensely popular after all), it all just gets to be a bit too much after a while. This movie gives a great outlet for those who are tired of the Twilight movies and want to laugh about it.

The whole point of the movie is to loosely follow the original plot to set up zippy one-liners and make fun of pretty much everything about the original movies. This basically works, many parts of the originals really are completely ridiculous and very spoof-worthy. This movie drags in some places and some of the lines fall completely flat, but hey it isn't intended to be a piece of art. It is all pretty low-brow slapstick humor and I got the impression it was done in a hurry, but I had at least 10 full belly laughs.

I can't imagine how Jenn Proske kept a straight face delivering some of her lines, and she must have spent time studying Kristen Stewart's acting, because she does a perfect exaggeration of Stewart's little pouty angsty faces. She even has the hand gestures down. It makes you realize how good of an actress Stewart is, to be able to play the same note again and again and make it convincing, but it is a delight to see it mocked too.

Many of the scenes are nearly exact replicas of the originals, and you can tell that the cast had fun getting the details right.

It definitely started to drag at the end but hey if you want an hour's worth of Twilight recovery, it's definitely worth it.

BTW if you like this and want to see more, see Colt Ford's video for "Chicken & Biscuits".

I was surprised at the low ratings for this movie here, reading the reviews, it sounds like some people didn't even realize that it was a parody. I think it only makes sense if you saw (or were forced to see) the Twilight movies and got tired of them. If you really liked the originals and don't like to see fun being poked at your favorite characters, or if you just don't like dumb slapstick humor, you might not like this one.

I must be out of touch with modern pop culture because I have no idea how people can spend 2 hours watching movies like this, and the flood of top ratings and positive reviews on this site make this all the more mysterious. I was even more surprised that several friends and neighbors highly recommended the movie. So, my curiosity piqued, I watched it. Perhaps this negative bias overly influenced my reaction.

Maybe it would have helped if I had been an avid fan of the comic book -- that seems to be necessary to accept the absurd back story. But I found the plot, story, characters, and cinematography to be unbearably predictable and far-fetched. I realize the movie is supposed to provide some indulgent escapism. But setting it in Afghanistan ruined this for me, which forced me to think about the terrible realities there. Setting it in a fictitious city like Gotham would have helped.

Iron Man has a lot in common with Spiderman (not to mention the long list of formula superhero adaptations before it), but I enjoyed that movie much more, as it had a much more plausible human side, and a humble super hero main character is much more palatable to me than the smarmy Robert Downey Jr. who acted like he needed a good paddling.

Despite a lot of dozing off and eye-rolling, the highlight in the movie for me was Gwyneth Paltrow, who is not only cute but did a marvelous job of acting the conflicted role of Stark's better half, and somehow didn't look ridiculous walking over piles of broken glass in 4 inch heels.

Perhaps it is a comment on our culture that enormous sums of money are spent making and watching movies like this? Do we truly have nothing better to do with our collective time?