Six years later we get Mother’s Day which has a great cast whose talents are obscured by a bad movie. The movie begins a few days before the titular holiday and takes place in Atlanta.
Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) gets the wake-up call of his life when he is told by doctors that he is HIV-positive and has roughly 30 days to live. Considering he’s a hard-living rodeo cowboy who ekes out a living as an electrician and who never used intravenous drugs, he begins by denying he has the virus. But soon he’s scrambling to find a way to live beyond the month he was given. This is the true story at the root of the new film Dallas Buyers Club.
Butter is one of those brilliantly written films that is a joy to watch. Screenwriter Jason Micallef’s script was so good, it won him a prestigious Nicholl fellowship in 2008, one of only five such awards handed out to writers by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Now his script has been brought to the big screen and the finished product is a real winner.
Read more‘Butter’ is a brilliantly written film & a joy to watch
[rating=2]Starring: Jennifer Garner, Joel Edgerton, CJ Adams, Dianne Weist, David Morse, Rosemarie DeWitt
Director(s): Peter Hedges
Writer(s): Peter Hedges and Ahmet Zappa
“Jim Green” (Joel Edgerton) and “Cindy Green” (Jennifer Garner) are a happily married couple who live in Stanleyville. Stanleyville is named after the town’s most famous former resident, the man who founded the Stanleyville Pencil Making company. There’s a museum in town dedicated to him, and to pencils and that’s where Cindy works. There is a serious drought in the area. Jim works at the pencil factory which is struggling.
Read more‘The Odd Life of Timothy Green’ – odd, but not good
Ricky Gervais writes, directs and stars in The Invention of Lying, a new film that also stars Jennifer Garner, Louis C.K., Jonah Hill and Rob Lowe. But just to be clear, Matthew Robinson co-wrote and co-directed this interesting look at … Read more
Jennifer Garner gives a great performance in Catch and Release but the film doesn’t do right by her.
[rating=2]Starring: Jennifer Garner, Goran Visnjic, Will Yun Lee, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Terence Stamp
Director(s): Rob Bowman
Writer(s): Zak Penn, Stuart Zicherman, Raven Metzner
As I sat down to watch Elektra, I was half hoping that I’d like it and wonder why everyone had been so hard on it. That all the naysayers were just plain wrong.
Sadly, they weren’t. Not completely.
Elektra started off interesting, but soon slowed and eventually derailed. The story doesn’t hold together all that well, and ultimately proves far bigger than the movie could properly contain.
The film picks up a few years after the events of Daredevil, the Ben Affleck action flick from which Elektra was spun off. Elektra, who died in that dark superhero yarn, has been restored to life by an ancient, mystical Asian cult. After being kicked out because of anger problems, she sets about working as an assassin for hire.
Elektra is soon given a high priced assignment: Kill a single father and his teenage daughter. But when she has second thoughts about carrying out her mission, she finds herself dragged into an epic struggle of good versus evil, that will force her to come to terms with her own dark demons.
The first problem with Elektra is that the heavier mystical elements don’t come into the story until about half way through the film. As a result, its takes on a different tone, where the pseudo realism of the beginning gets turned on its head.