Reviews

Roma is a film about life. It's about all of the beauty of the human condition as well as the brutality and suffering that goes along with it.

The story follows a maid in Mexico City who tends to a well-off family and her experiences with them and the other people in her life. Through beautiful shot composition that add to a sense of realism, the plot moves like a flowing river. By the end, you will have gasped, laughed, cheered, and maybe cried with our main character Cleo.

The film is so well shot and edited. It lingers and moves deliberately, always letting you soak in what it wants to show you. Even when things get tense with the odd natural disaster or near death experience, it never feels like it needs to move faster and get a reaction out of you. Plenty of times I got lost in the scenery and forgot about the characters on the screen. I felt like a trespasser into Cleo's life at times. In a pivotal scene in a movie theater, I started watching the movie the characters are supposed to watch and lost track of the conversation they had and I felt like I was intruding on their business. It felt like I was in the theater with them, sneaking bits if their conversation as if I was eavesdropping on them. To say the least, this film immersed me in its world so well. The sound design is minimal and adds to the realism. With the odd bit of song being sung or being played over the radio, but never as background music. The bare sound adds to the realistic atmosphere created and really lets the film breathe at times.

This is a great film and definitely one I'll have to watch again soon. It was funny, tragic, and beautiful, just like how real life can be.

Sorry To Bother You is a weird film. Not that that's a bad thing. It takes strange twists and turns, all while saying interesting things and presenting something thought provoking.

STBY is about Cassius "Cash" Green, a man who just needs to make a buck at his horrible telemarketer job and just get by. After finding he has a talent for sales while using his "white voice", he's propelled to the upper echelon of elite salespeople at the company. But that's just the first act. Any more and I'll spoil what this film has in store for you. The pace of it all is very quick and kept me wondering what could happen next. Every time I thought I knew where it was going, it jerked me into another dimension. The only gripe I had with the story is that the side plot of the friend who is trying to get with his girlfriend seems totally unnecessary. It could be taken out of the movie completely and nothing would be different.

The acting is great, with all the actors either embracing the insanity or not knowing what exactly to do with it. Everyone is fun to watch and see how they would react to their new situations.

The cinematography was excellent. From the first act and how dull and drab and out of focus everything is due to our main character's disinterest in his life and job, to the second act's sharp clarity where he is focused on doing the best he can at his job. The third act feels like a dream where everything is bright but hazy. There's a lot of great subtle visual metaphors throughout that make it fun to analyze as well. I would love to watch this again and see what I missed.

The soundtrack for this is just as trippy and weird. Lots of loops and weird instrumentation can be heard. Some members of the band Tune-Yards do the composition and it really does show. It keeps the kooky and psychedelic atmosphere alive.

Aside from some wonky "white voice" lip sync and the one story gripe, this is an awesome movie. Don't expect to laugh as much, but definitely expect to say "WTF???!!???" a whole lot.

I don't like slow burn movies like The Witch or It Follows. They usually are so careful and plodding, that when the Big Thing that happens in the end comes around, I'm usually just glad it's over. But Hereditary kept me glued to the screen the whole time, never letting me go, plodding along and gripping me the whole way through. And when that Big Thing happens, holy moley does it happen.

Hereditary is about...well...uh...a grandma dies....and...and then some weird stuff starts happening. It's hard to really get into this movie without ruining it. The story really takes some twists and turns, slowly feeding you information along the way, horrifying you all the while. It feels more like a family drama than horror at times, but then something will happen and remind you that you're here to be real spooked. Everyone in this film does a fantastic job of playing their part. Toni Collete is a FORCE as the mother. She is crazy and complex. Collete really puts on a show here and drives this one home. Alex Wolff, who plays the son, gives a great performance here as well. The best and most shocking scene in the whole film is given to him, and he nails it out of the park. And don't even get me started on the little girl, Milly Shapiro. She dosen't say much, but she had a presence in this movie like no other.

The camera work is amazing. As Toni Collete's character makes models and dioramas, the whole films feels like you are trapped inside one with this family. Don't expect jump scares in this either. The horror in this movie is plain and KNOWS it's scary. It dosen't need any frills or build up for it to scare or horrify you. The effects in the movie are all practical as well, so it really adds that realistic factor of the horror.

The only issues I had with this movie are that it drags a bit a few times, and one of the special effects looked very unrealistic when it happened. It was near the end in the son's bedroom when something was on the wall. When it crawled away, it didn't look very believable to me and jarred me out of the magic that had been established already.

All and all, catch this movie. Easily the best movie I've seen this year all around. It'll take a really special movie to knock this one out of that front place. With the subtle scariness, to the brutal horror, this movie is everything you'd want out of a good classic horror movie.

This won the Best Film at the Oscars 2016 over The Revenant, The Big Short, and Mad Max: Fury Road. That got me interested because I loved every one of those movies that year. "Man this has to be a great movie if it won over the movie that Leo finally got his Oscar in," I thought to myself as I selected it from Netflix.

Spotlight follows the story of the Boston Globe special reporting team of the same name as they uncover child molestation and abuse in the catholic church. The story itself is really an interesting story. The pacing of the movie is fluid and it never bored me. Every time there was a break in the case, a rush of excitement hit me. I'm glad they didn't focus too much time on 9/11, as I was afraid it would just kill all the momentum it had been rolling up the whole way. The performances of everyone, especially Mark Ruffalo and Michael Keaton, were great. Liev Schreiber was a commanding presence in the movie as well, with his quiet, but almost intimidating role as the main editor.

But other than the great acting and an interesting plot, nothing really is special about the movie. The movie is boring to just look at visually. No colors stand out in a wash of grey, white, and black. I get that maybe it's because duh newspaper, but it is not a movie for spectacle. The camera work was really boring as well. No interesting shots or composition were to be seen in the whole film. I watched it maybe 3 days ago and I can't, for the life of me, remember any scene vividly. Nothing was noteworthy of my memory.

It's an interesting story, an important story, but shot in the most boring and drab way. It has a lot to say with great acting, but it just failed to really wow me.

I loved this book a lot. I'll get that out of the way right now. It was fun to read and hipped me to a lot of media I still love today. I know it's not great, but it holds a special part in my heart as a book I loved as a teenager. I almost walked out of the theater at least 4 times while watching the movie. The "Welcome to the resistance" line had me out of my seat, getting my coat. I only sat back down to finish it because I realized this trainwreck was probably almost done so why waste 10 bucks.

That being said, I'll try to look at the movie as a movie and not as an extension of the book in this review.

So the movie is really badly paced. It clips from one scene to another at such a breakneck pace it got hard for me to follow at points. As someone who read the book before, it was easier for me to follow for the most part. But my poor girlfriend, with whom I watched this with in theaters, was left feeling like she was always one step behind. It felt like RPO had so much to show me but so little time. It just rushed everything at you so briskly, that you don't have enough time to take it all in.

As for the plot and story, it was either too predictable or just didn't feel right. The plot just seems to happen for the most part, mostly because of the previously mentioned pacing. Things just move from one thing to the next, not feeling very natural or like any sense of progression happens. The only moment that really wowed me in the entire movie was the Shining scene. It was so cool to watch it all play out. It was the only time I really felt like I was apart of that universe or that I was in the OASIS with them. The lead character actor wasn't fun to watch and the girl who played Art3mis was boring as all hell. Maybe she wasn't written well, but it felt like Art3mis was chalked up to "The Girl Character That Likes The Boy Character". The ending felt really hokey and awful. I won't spoil it, but it makes all the hard work that Wade does almost moot in a way. It's really weird that they chose the ending they did.

The visuals were fun to watch, which is the only good part for me. The action set-pieces were a blast to see. Although the constant current media nods and other properties almost jarred me out of it whenever I saw a Spartan from Halo or Tracer from Overwatch walking around. Also the battle scenes were just so crowded with so much stuff, it was hard to focus on anything. It just felt like so much was happening, I couldn't concentrate on anything. But altogether, the visual aspect was a real treat and a standout part of the movie.

All and all, I wish that this movie was so much more. Maybe if they had split it up into three films, one for each key, it would have been better. It would have allowed for a more in depth story and not this blink-and-you-miss-it pacing. I really wanted this to be a good movie, but all I got was just more proof that Spielberg has lost his touch.