December 2015

The Danish Girl

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Danish Girl
  • IMDb: link

The Danish GirlAdapted from the novel of the same name by David Ebershoff, The Danish Girl is a movie that is constantly telling the audience it is an important movie without ever showing us why. The movie gives us the story of artist husband and wife Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) and Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander) and Einar’s struggle with his own sexual identity leading him to take on the identity of Lili Elbe.

The movie tackles the issues of Lili’s sexual identity head-on while examining the effect of his changes on both his relationship with his wife and his artistic career. First, Vikander and Redmayne are both terrific in the film. However, aside from giving the leads meaty roles to dive into, The Danish Girl struggles in making the story of one of the first recipients of sex reassignment surgery interesting.

Don’t get me wrong, The Danish Girl a capable film that does justice to its sensitive subject matter, given Elbe’s standing in the LGBT community, but it’s certainly more notable for the performances of its two lead actors than its script. One could argue it’s dangerously close to the category of Oscar-bait.

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Joy

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Joy
  • IMDb: link

JoyWritten and directed by David O. Russell, Joy gives us the story of a New York single mother and her miraculous invention that changed her life. Jennifer Lawrence stars as the title character Joy Mangano in a role that allows her to showcase far more of her talents than the Hunger Games franchise. The movie is completely built around Lawrence’s performance, and on her back it succeeds.

Fighting through every obstacle including her family (Robert De Niro, Édgar Ramírez, Virginia Madsen, Elisabeth Röhm), frustration, fear, money troubles, and those who attempted to steal her invention from her, Joy is a story of perseverance, determination, and conviction. If there’s a moral to Joy it’s that you have to fight for your dreams every step of the way.

Joy isn’t without its flaws, there are large parts of the story the script skips over (such as Joy’s jump to QVC’s main competitor HSN and the reasons behind it). There are also some notable odd editing and sound mixing issues, the most prominent of which takes place during pretty awful dubbing of Joy’s duet with her husband (Ramírez).

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Carol

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Carol
  • IMDb: link

CarolMuch like Brooklyn, Carol is a beautifully rendered period piece about a young woman’s awakening highlighted by the performance of its lead actress. Sadly, much like Brooklyn, Carol also has the same deficiencies and the performances overshadow, but don’t obscure, the script’s weaknesses.

Although she plays the title character in the film, Cate Blanchett is not Carol‘s leading lady. That honor goes to Rooney Mara as shopgirl and aspiring photographer Therese Belivet whose head is turned by the glamorous older woman who she immediately connects with in a ways she has never been able to with her longtime boyfriend (Jake Lacy).

I’m not sure if Therese is a lesbian, bisexual, or just sexually curious, but then again I’m not the only one as the script itself seems unsure about who its leading character is and what she wants. Because Therese doesn’t know who she is (something characters in Phyllis Nagy‘s script directly point out at least three separate times) the movie struggles to understand her true motivations. And if the movie doesn’t know who she is, how can we?

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Longmire – The Calling Back

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Longmire – The Calling Back
  • wiki: link

“I always assumed you had to be really tough for your job. It never occurred to me that you were just you.”

Longmire - The Calling Back

Walt (Robert Taylor) runs into all kinds of complications while looking into the rape of a young Native American woman (Julia Jones) by local oil workers. First, because the crime took place on the reservation but by American citizens the prosecution of any case falls into a legal quagmire a Federal prosecutor would need to untangle and neither Walt nor Mathias (Zahn McClarnon) have the jurisdiction to investigate the case on their own. Also standing in the way of the truth is a traumatized victim who is hiding facts from Walt about that night, the girl’s ball-busting mother (Irene Bedard) who is more concerned about how the tragedy effects her than her daughter, and the lack of a proper rape kit and DNA evidence to match up to the perpetrators if they can even be found and brought to trial.

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Coming Soon – Star Trek Beyond

/ / Film News & Trailers
  • Title: Star Trek Beyond
  • IMDb: link

This first trailer gives us a look at the upcoming Star Trek sequel in which the Enterprise will apparently get destroyed (again) and the crew will be forced to fend for themselves planetside. Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, and Anton Yelchin all return. Idris Elba and Sofia Boutella also star. Star Trek Beyond opens in theaters on July 22nd.

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