Nothing else to say
Nearly a month ago, I caught up with an old romantic fantasy called Somewhere in Time from 1980.
As I have always been a fan of time travel, I managed to overlook the questionable approach to that phenomenon because the leads (Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour) had such palpable chemistry and the John Barry score was enjoyably hypnotic.
If you were asked to come up with the most prominent film director of the 21st century and the name was not Christopher Nolan, you would be climbing a rather slippery slope.
After his breakout second feature Memento, Nolan began a steady rise as the most revered of directors of the last century. When coming up with this list, I knew sticking to the “one film per director” rule would prove most difficult with him, because even his lesser movies are still worth watching. That said, when you make a film that is possibly the most popular of all films this century, one of the best sequels ever made, the best of its genre (superhero/comic books), and, after not getting a Best Picture nomination, even (allegedly) made the Academy start having more than five Best Picture nominees,…yeah, I had to go with The Dark Knight.
There are a lot of things I would tell my younger self to have done differently, but one for sure is to have read more Stephen King novels. Actually, any of his novels.
Perhaps the main culprit was that I was imitated by the page count of the books (especially IT). You can disagree with him on Twitter all you want, but your just being silly if you think he is a bad writer (and this coming from someone who has yet to read one of his books).
Throughout my four years of being on my High School Speech team: there was one unwritten rule that seemed to be the most concrete (when it comes to written speeches): Never write a speech about speech team.
True, one should write what one knows, but there were so many speeches about speech team (especially in the Original Comedy event, which I was mainly in) that it was a cliche even before I entered High School. What I never mentioned was how the idea came from having just seen the Spike Jonze film Adaptation.
As someone who has yet to visit New York City (still near the top of my bucket list), I in no way feel I can say what director in the history of cinema has best captured the city.
A few names do come to mind: Martin Scorcese, Nora Ephron, Sidney Lumet, and Woody Allen (despite his troubled personal life). Then of course there is Spike Lee. While he has not entirely relied on New York for all of his films, his best ones (namely Do the Right Thing in 1989) have helped shape parts of the city that never sleeps in our movie going psyche.
There are a few variables as to why it took me longer than I would have hoped to get to see a Quentin Tarantino film.
For starters, my mom had only two movies I was not allowed to see growing up, and one was Pulp Fiction because she thought it too weird (the other was The Exorcist, which one cannot blame her for in the long run). My older brother’s last bit of cinematic knowledge I remember him passing on to me (before he lost interest) was on QT, and I eventually got to Pulp as well as other films of his, the first being Kill Bill Vol. 1 in 2003. Yet my mind was truly opened a year later, with Kill Bill, Vol. 2.
It’s been around a year and a half since Pepsi had the unfortunate plug in Madame Web, making Pepsi supporters redder in the face than the red in the can of its rival soda company.
There were scarce a number of product placement that were unfortunate in recent cinematic history, but at least Pepsi was not in the shameless promotion. What Amazon has going for it in the newest version of War of the Worlds is so wanton I legit thought of spending some time apart with my Prime Benefits relationship.
In the past 15 years, I’ve been blessed to get to work a lot in my Church’s children’s ministry.
This has included being a camp counselor 11 times, plus another 3 at another Christian Camp. Yet all of this can’t hold a candle to what Rocky Braat has achieved in the film Blood Brother (and continues to achieve).
Movie titles can indeed be a slippery slope.
On one side, you have movies like the recent KPop Demon Hunters, a title that tells you directly what it is about yet can scare people away from its subject matter (for the record, I loved that film and can’t stop listening to the soundtrack.) Then you have a movie titled Weapons, which, while singular and simplistic, is about so much more.
This is one of the best premises for a film I can remember. In a normal town, a child narrator explains that, at 2:17 AM, all but one of the kids of an Elementary classroom woke up, ran into the night, never to return. That is as far as I can go, because …well, you will thank me later.
Like most of my fellow millennials, I became consciously aware of great child performances beginning with Haley Joel Osment in 1999’s The Sixth Sense.
This would pave the way for child actors of the 21st century such as Nicholas Hoult (2002’s About a Boy), Miranda Cosgrove (who broke through in 2003’s The School of Rock), Abigail Breslin (Oscar nominated for 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine), Hailee Steinfeld (also nominated for 2010’s True Grit), Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild (yet another nomination), Tye Sheridan in 2013’s Mud, Woody Norman in 2021’s C’mon C’mon, and the more recent discovery of Alfie Williams in 28 Years Later.
Then, there is Jacob Tremblay. Within ten years, he was in the likes of 2017’s Wonder (my little sister’s first date movie), Luca, and The Little Mermaid remake, just to name a few. Yet all that started with his enormous impact in 2015’s Room.
His role was no easy task. He plays the role of Jack, who has spent the first five years of his life inside of a single room. This is sadly due to his mom, Joy (Brie Larson), being kept as a sex slave in the shed of “Old Nick”. The film details Jack’s soon discovery of the situation, and eventual escape into the real world.
There have been some haters of sorts over the years of Brie Larson. I’m not sure if it has to do with anything in her personal life or her role as Captain Marvel in the MCU (regardless of how you feel about those films, she still does a solid job in the role). It’s when people say she can’t act that I laugh. Even before this, she was in the likes of Scott Pilgrim vs the World and the vastly underrated Short Term 12.
She didn’t win the Oscar for Best Actress for nothing here, and the scene where she runs to Jack in the car is as tearjerking as anything I have seen in fiction.
Obviously, this is not an easy watch of a film, so parents, keep the kids away from this one.
Even with the subject matter and the totally mood shift midway through, the film is still spell binding. I will go to my grave thinking Jacob Tremblay was robbed of a Best Actor Oscar nomination (even though he would have been passed over by the inevitable win of Leo in The Revenant). He is the glue that holds the film together, making that rare case for film to be both hard to watch yet hard to keep your eyes off of.
(As of this writing, Room is available to rent on Amazon and VOD).
Nothing else to say