The family drama is a tricky genre to tackle on film. While most family units struggle to find equilibrium, emotions run high and drama runs rampant. Parents and children often find compromise difficult, creating awkward tension and resentment. Nothing puts a damper on family harmony other than death and when that death concerns one of the younger children, sadness and remorse cover the entire household like a dark cloud no one can escape. Louder Than Words is a prime example of a family trying to cope and accept the fact that one of their young members has died. It is a solid family drama detailing an extremely serious subject filled with utterly honest performances.
Category Archives: Review
Behaving Badly
Bad movies are a dime a dozen these days. Studios tend to churn out absolute garbage in the hopes of appeasing wide audiences. Unfortunately, these absentminded studio executives take tired and recycled plots, repackage them, hire poor excuses for writers, and spotlight some attractive, young actors. Throw in some well-known performers to add a touch of “class” to the production and off they go. Behaving Badly is one such example and it is a movie so bad, that it is an insult to the good name of filmmaking.
Guardians of the Galaxy
With superhero movies being the annual norm come summertime, many audiences salivate at the very thought of seeing their favorite comic book characters portrayed on screen. The entertainment juggernaut that is Marvel has been riding this wave for over a decade and the results just keep getting better and better. Guardians of the Galaxy continues this popular trend and it is a sci-fi-action film that is as exciting as it is funny. Few films manage to capture that magical spirit but Guardians pulls it off in more ways than one.
Child of God
Many artists share their beauty with the world. They know what they want, they follow their hearts, and they proudly display their work for all to see. To call James Franco an artist is fairly appropriate. He has a unique style from his acting to his directing to his writing. The man definitely has a lot to say because it seems as though he’s somehow involved with every movie that gets released these days. His latest film Child of God (which he directed and co-stars in) is a dark and very disturbing look at a man living on the edge, and on the brink of absolute madness.
Happy Christmas
Just about every family has a black sheep, someone who goes against the grain and tends to annoy the heck out of his or her relatives. Though irritating and a burden, this individual can be full of life, piss and vinegar, making for a very colorful and downright entertaining character. This type of person has been brought to life on screen many times before but in the new dramedy Happy Christmas, we see a more realistic side to this controversial personality.
Honour
Honour is a film that addresses a topic that is far from honorable. Honor killings take place all over the world and take the lives of many people (mostly women) who have brought great shame and humiliation to their families. Many factors contribute to this form of murder: religion, marrying or having sex with a member of a different race, and so forth. Old fashioned thinkers believe it to be totally necessary to end the life of a loved one simply for going in a direction that is contrary to their family’s beliefs. This practice is atrocious and it is explored a bit in the lackluster Honour.
Boyhood
Richard Linklater is a filmmaker with one of the most impressive and eclectic resumes of any artist working today. From Slacker to Dazed and Confused to Waking Life to Before Sunrise and its sequels, the man certainly has a gift when it comes to making quality films. His latest work Boyhood continues this trend of supplying exemplary art on the movie screen and it is without a doubt, one of the best movies of 2014 thus far.
Life Itself
Remember when film criticism relied upon a simple “Thumbs up” or “Thumbs down”? This was an extraordinarily powerful way to gauge a movie’s quality and it was through this method that film critics and journalists ever since have adapted to their own ways of judging cinema. Roger Ebert was one of the pioneers of the “Thumbs up” approach and he was not just a talented writer and critic but a force for good in American pop culture. His intelligence and supreme wit have made him a cultural icon and the new documentary Life Itself beautifully sums up the man’s life.
They Came Together
In Hollywood’s endless endeavor to churn out likable romantic comedies, many of them fall through the cracks, landing into film obscurity. There are comedies, satires, and parodies. The new rom-com They Came Together seems to blend all of these descriptions together into one mixed bag of quirky, goofy fun. The film’s humor is unorthodox with narration that references the ridiculously predictable rom-com formula. The two headlining actors, whose chemistry is predictably on point, are Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler and with their cute flirty relationship and history making America laugh in the past, they definitely share the screen well.
Snowpiercer
The end of the world is a very common theme in science fiction films. Dystopian futures seem to breed colorful characters and gripping plots. Sometimes these type of films succeed in providing fictional fun but other times, they fail miserably. In the dreary, sometimes enjoyable Snowpiercer, a select group of people not only struggle to survive in a less than desirable situation but struggle to achieve balance in a very rigid and bizarre class system.
Unger the Radar 