Drama

Lemon

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Lemon
  • IMDb: link

“I knew you were crazy. I thought it was good crazy. I liked it. I liked it a lot; I thought it was fun. Now I know you’re bad crazy.”

Lemon DVD reviewWriter/director Janicza Bravo‘s oddball dark comedy stars Brett Gelman as a thoroughly-unlikable and constantly-sullen actor and theater teacher with a blind girlfriend (Judy Greer) who wants nothing to do with him, an equally-pretentious prize student (Michael Cera sporting some insanely ridiculous hair) with whom he has a very unusual relationship, and a dysfunctional family (Fred Melamed, Rhea Perlman, Shiri Appleby, Martin Starr, Hannah Heller, and David Paymer).

It’s hard to root either for a man lacking all empathy or against such a sad sack who is little more than the butt of life’s series of jokes. Isaac’s misadventures include belittling a theater student (Gillian Jacobs), fretting about the state of his relationship, accidentally killing his friend’s birds, awkward attempts to woo a new love (Nia Long), and taking jobs as the face of sexually transmitted diseases. More than a little self-indulgent, every character and event in the movie pushes the oddball style past credulity highlighting either the humor or misery of its protagonist (often both at the same time), which makes it difficult to take either that seriously.

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Goodbye Christopher Robin

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  • Title: Goodbye Christopher Robin
  • IMDb: link

Goodbye Christopher Robin movie reviewBased on the true story of writer A. A. Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) and his creation Winnie-the-Pooh, Goodbye Christopher Robin is more than it initially might seem. Much like Milne himself, returned from war with PTSD and struggling with getting back to work as a writer, the script by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Simon Vaughan struggles before getting the man and his family into the setting which would eventually help create one of the world’s most-beloved fictional characters.

The rest of the household consists of Milne’s wife Daphne (Margot Robbie) who is more concerned with prestige, fame, and money than her husband, their young son Christopher (Will Tilston) whose interactions with his stuffed animals will lead to the inspiration behind Milne’s most-popular work, and his nanny (Kelly Macdonald). The film turns out to be as much about the young boy as his father and how the growing fame slowly destroyed the relationship which the creation of Pooh helped create between father and son. For a film about Winnie-the-Pooh, it’s more melancholy than I expected, but it also proves to have some unexpected depth.

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American Made

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  • Title: American Made
  • IMDb: link

American Made movie posterWe’ve seen this all before. And even if we’ve seen it done better at times (see Charlie Wilson’s War, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, American Hustle, and others), American Made certainly entertains. Director Doug Liman and screenwriter Gary Spinelli come together with star Tom Cruise to offer us another one of those stories too crazy not to be true.

Cruise is in fine form. I’ve remarked before that I have always enjoyed the movie star more when he’s able to unleash a bit of the crazy. And American Made certainly has enough crazy to go around. The film is based somewhat loosely on the real experiences of former TWA pilot Barry Seal (Cruise) who went to work for the CIA in the late 70s and 80s running clandestine reconnaissance missions in South America while also working on his own making money smuggling drugs into the United States from Columbia. After introducing us to his Seal, his wife (Sarah Wright) and the CIA agent (Domhnall Gleeson) who enlists him and funds the dubious enterprise, the insanity begins in earnest. What makes things work is Seal is just smart enough to know when to take advantage of the situation and just dumb enough to not know when he’s over his head.

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The Circle

/ / Home Video
  • Title: The Circle
  • IMDb: link

The Circle Blu-ray reviewThere’s an interesting premise to this adaptation of the Dave Eggers novel about a woman forced to redefine concepts like privacy and community after being hired by one of the world’s largest technology companies. The Circle (think Apple meets Facebook, but more cult-ish) provides Mae (Emma Watson) with all she’s every wanted, including healthcare for her ailing father (Bill Paxton). However, the level of intrusiveness the company not only engages in but celebrates opens the door to some big questions (which, unfortunately, the film doesn’t really do much to explore).

It would have been very easy for The Circle to be a thriller about the invasion of technology and destruction of privacy, an evil corporation out to do bad things with data, and a world seeming unaware at what they are giving up. The film, however, has bigger aspirations than that, bringing some intriguing questions to the forefront while constantly fighting off the tendency to fall into easy cliche.

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Dunkirk

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

Dunkirk movie reviewChristopher Nolan‘s Dunkirk is surprisingly bad for such an accomplished director. Set during the Dunkirk evacuation of mostly British troops surrounded by Axis forces during World War II, Nolan brings his talents to bear in crafting a visually impressive film. However it’s three-part story, amateurishly cut together in confusing fashion, featuring a migraine-inducing overbearing score (which the director has been infatuated with ever since Inception), without a single trace of emotional resonance, left me detached from both characters and events for most of its running time.

The film inter-cuts three separate plot threads of vastly different lengths creating all kinds of trouble when the threads have to be woven together later in the film. The shortest of these centers around Tom Hardy as a fighter pilot whose action takes place mostly far above the fray. The next, in terms of length, involves a civilian boat hired to help evacuate soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk. And the longest story centers around soldiers on the beach, most notably Fionn Whitehead and Aneurin Barnard, desperately searching for any way off the coastline before the German army arrives.

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