Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Our reviews and thoughts on the latest releases, classics, and nostalgic favourites. Things we loved, things we hated, and worst of all, things we were ambivalent about.

Switched For Christmas

The Christmas Note

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Gretchen (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and son Ethan (Dylan Kingwell) have moved homes to be closer to her family, especially as they approach the holidays. Their small family is tinged with sadness, but Ethan especially is a gung-ho kid, determined to make the best of things, eagerly introducing himself to new next door neighbour, Melissa (Leah Gibson). Melissa is a bit shy, perhaps not as keen to return his enthusiasm, but it seems Melissa is destined to be tied to Gretchen and Ethan anyway.

While Melissa’s at work, her mother’s landlord rings Gretchen’s doorbell instead, asking her to deliver the news: Melissa’s mother is dead, and Gretchen needs to clean out her apartment post haste. Gretchen is reluctant to break this kind of news to a virtual stranger, but the again, she doesn’t have a lot of choice. Blame the goodness of her heart for volunteering to help with the clearing out; Gretchen’s really getting entangled, especially when they find a note from Melissa’s mom confessing a secret baby given up for adoption in the hears before Melissa was born.

Since Gretchen needs a distraction, she and Melissa go on a bit of a caper, combing their small town for bread crumbs that may lead them to this mystery sibling.

A bit of a departure for Hallmark, this Christmas movie isn’t a romance at all, it’s love in the form of family. And what could be warmer than finding Melissa a family just as she’s lost the only relative she had left. It’s going to be difficult, but young Ethan has an ace in his back pocket: he’s using his letter to Santa this year to call in a favour. 😉

The Place Beyond The Pines

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This movie was primarily filmed on location in Schenectady, New York. Schenectady literally means “beyond the pine plains” in Mohawk, so now you know where writer- MV5BMTcyODUxMjIzOF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNjE3MzM0OQ@@._V1_SX1500_CR0,0,1500,999_AL_ director Derek Cianfrance got the name (it’s where his wife grew up). As for what it’s about, well, that’s another story.

It’s about a motorcycle stunt driver played by Ryan Gosling who finds out he impregnated a carnival groupie the last time he was in town, so he drops out of the circus in order to be a Baby Daddy, except the groupie (Eva Mendes) already has someone to help raise her child (Mahershala Ali), so there’s not a lot of extra room for a bum. In order to show what a good provider he can be, he and his buddy (Ben Mendelsohn) start robbing banks. And you know what? It actually works. For a little while, they’re almost a happy family. But robbing banks is a risky business that eventually catches up with him. Enter trigger happy cop guy (Bradley Cooper). Later MV5BYTczY2U4ODctMGU3Ni00MmYwLTlmMDktOGUzZDcyMTM5OGEwL2ltYWdlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjcyNzA2MjE@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,1500,1000_AL_ Cooper will be remembered as a hero but we’ll all know he’s dirty. And what do dirty cops do? They run for public office!

It’s an interesting movie because it’s about that place where two lives intersect, and how quickly they can change the course of each other’s lives. And it’s also about legacy, and the burden that the little carnie baby is going to carry with him for the rest of his life. The Place Beyond the Pines is a search for truth; it displays the emotional intensity that the Gosling-Cianfrance combination brought in Blue Valentine (which I love but can’t stand to watch). And it reminds us about the shades of grey in everyone: how the “bad guy” bank robber can rock his baby gently to sleep, and the “good guy” cop can be corrupt as hell.

Ginger Snaps

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Some horror movies take place in dark alleys, or abandoned houses, or deep woods. But others, like this one, know that real terror lives and hides in the suburbs – perhaps in your own backyard.

Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins), two twisted teenage sisters, social outcasts by default, are totally and completely obsessed with death. Their parents have come home to so many gruesome death scenes, no amount of blood, nor dismembered body parts, nor daughter’s corpses can faze them. The teachers at school, however, are not so desensitized. Trips to the guidance counsellor remain ineffective.

One night, at a park just like the one where you pushed your toddler on the swings, the sisters are attacked, and Ginger is mauled by a large and aggressive creature. Bigger than a dog, uglier than a bear, Brigitte just barely wrests her sister away from the blood thirsty animal, its pursuit interrupted by its encounter with a van. Creature eviscerated all over the quiet neighbourhood cul-de-sac, the sisters flee, leaving driver Sam (Kris Lemche) to guess at the impossible. Ginger’s been bitten by a werewolf, and her life (and her body!) are about to change in unexpected ways.

The film puts a twist on the classic werewolf tale by equating it in some way to womanhood. Ginger is bitten on the full moon, also the day of her belated first menstruation. “The curse,” my grandmother used to call it, though she never suggested it might accompany fur on my knuckles or a tail on my heinie. Ginger is transforming in more ways than one. With wolf blood in her veins, she is confident, more alive. She withdraws from her sister as she enjoys this new feeling of self-determination. Though she confuses her new need to hunt as a new need for sex, she manages to satisfy both, sometimes in one go. Her wolf side is like her newly discovered sexuality, both grant a marginalized young woman a certain power over men, and that’s an intoxicating feeling no matter how tragic the consequences.

John Fawcett’s film is clearly low-budget; even for 2000, the effects are unimpressive. Yet it forces him to explore the theme in creative ways, defining womanhood and femininity in new terms. There is a subversive, feminist filament running through this film, with generous deposits of coal-black humour and diamond-sharp wit.

There is a beast inside each woman, and she’s hungry like the wolf.

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Albert Nobbs

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Downton Abbey ain’t got nothin on Mr. Nobbs. He’s a servant extraordinaire – no one’s better at anticipating his customer’s needs and the restaurant hums because of his competence. Every night he goes back to his little room, counts his tips fastidiously, and hides them under the floorboards after totting them up in his ledger. So when he’s assigned a new roommate, he’s paranoid his secret will be revealed. No, not the cash. His boobs. Albert Nobbs is not a mister after all.

Albert (Glenn Close) started passing as a man after a traumatic incident at the age of 14. Realistically, it was a way to live safely and an opportunity to earn more money. But he has lived in isolation and constant fear of discovery ever since. Now all he wants is those few extra bucks so he can buy a little shop and live independently. The only thing stopping him is the lack of a wife – which, as you can imagine, is a bit of a roadbump. Luckily he meets someone to inspire him (Janet McTeer), and he soon turns his eye upon a lovely young kitchen staffer (Mia Wasikowska) who hardly knows what to do with the attention of a creepy little old man. Plus her lust bucket is filled with thoughts of the new mechanic (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who is handsome and manly and also, it turns out, a drunken bully.

Both Glenn Close and Janet McTeer received Oscar nominations for their respective roles in the film, pretty much a given considering the depth of their perfomances. There’s an ache to watching them – to Close in particular because we are so aware of Albert’s constant pain and discomfort. She never makes a single misstep. And to its credit, the film resists moralizing, or false contextualizing to make it more relevant to today’s social and political climate. It just is. Which is fine, indeed excellent, when it comes to watching stunning performances but the film itself does suffer from being a little too close, a little too one-note.

That Thing You Do!

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Imagine Tom Hanks on the whirlwind press tour for Forrest Gump. He’s tired of talking about himself all day long. He needs to recharge his creative juices. So what does Tom Hanks do? He spends a month doing press junkets by day and writing a script while eating room service in his hotel room every night. The pages were probably stained with ketchup.

That Thing You Do! was born unto us. It’s about a band of young dudes in 1964 who experience fame for the first time as their pop song rises up the charts. Band-467 It’s sweet and wholesome and damn if that song wasn’t catchy – it even got played on our 1996 radio waves for a brief blip in time. Real 60s music was too expensive (and it had been done well and to death in Forrest Gump, thought Hanks) so it was cheaper just to have stuff written. That Thing You Do! was the result of a competition for a “faux-Beatles” song, and it was Adam Schlesinger, the bass player from Fountains of Wayne, who won. When you hear the song in the movie (and BOY do you hear the heck out of that song in the movie!- 11 different times, and the song went on to be nominated for an Oscar but lost to You Must Love Me from Evita), the actors aren’t really playing, but they could have been. Tom Everett Scott, Steve Zahn, Ethan Embry and Jonathan Schaech all learned to play their instruments, and learned every note of every song that appeared in the movie.

Charlize Theron appears in the movie as an early groupie of the band: it was only her second movie credit. Tom Hanks auditioned her and knew instantly that she’d be famous one day. She was the first person he auditioned, and the first person he cast.”No matter what, I will always claim to have discovered you” he wrote in her script. She won her first Oscar in 2004.

Tom Everett Scott almost didn’t get the part because Hanks thought he looked too much like Hanks. The crew nick-named him Tom Junior and before every take Hanks would remind him “Don’t do it like me!” – but you know what saved him? Tom’s wife, Rita Wilson, thought he was cute.

Speaking of which, when we saw Tom Hanks at the Tribeca Film Festival, he said that this was the movie he was most proud of, because his whole family 2205573,9QsfDywp4n5t1ZzuCiZFMx1wAtqhZbnzpd6pe701UzN1Em+3vDb9zfon3uv_jNxJfz3ogxTr3jHE26akqhRXcA== showed up to work on it. Wife Wilson appears as a cocktail waitress, but Hanks was so tired from pulling 19-hour days the day she showed up on set, he didn’t even recognize her, merely noting that she was “an attractive lady” and he hoped she’d be nice to him. His son Colin also briefly appears in the film, and his daughter Elizabeth even brieflier. Unrelated but also of note: keep your eye out for Bryan Cranston playing an astronaut, and Jonathan Demme playing the director of a major motion picture.

So yes. Tom Hanks wrote, directed, and co-starred in this movie, and even composed some of the music (surprise! He’s also a drummer in his spare time). It was Sean Penn who encouraged him to direct (they were trick or treating with their kids at the time), saying it would ultimately make him a better actor. that-thing-you-do-whysoblu-7

Tom Hanks’ favourite part? Bruce Springsteen once told him that he nailed the scene when the band first hears their music played on the radio. And really, how much better of an endorsement can you get?

The Princess And The Frog

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I want to like this movie. I do love the New Orleans vibe, the beautiful bayou, and DISNEY’S FIRST BLACK PRINCESS. But in addition to this movie just not feeling up to Disney’s standards (or, I suppose, mine), it’s not even what it promises.

Disney’s first black princess is in fact a frog for most of the movie. So kudos to whoever came up with that little workaround: how to have a black princess without actually committing to it, kind of like how they just had their first gay character without actually doing that either. Person of colour, yes, but did that colour really have to be green? Classic movie, Disney. Also, how many of the characters feel like stereotypes? There’s a pimp, and a Mamie, and one with a fat ass and missing teeth. Erm. Tug on the ole collar. The voices alone feel deeply racist. And let’s not forget the bit fat white saviour, even if he is cleverly voiced by John Goodman.

And the truth is, the setting isn’t quite as spectacular as I wish it was either: put through Disney’s rock polisher, it’s scrubbed clean of any true colour. The score is kind of cool, kind of jazzy, but the songs are unforgivable generic, totally unmemorable, un-sing-alongable.

There’s no real flair here, and even worse for Disney, no magic.

Scream

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Twenty four years ago, Drew Barrymore in a blonde wig lured people into theatres where Wes Craven was reinventing the slasher flick, and his career, with a little help from a fresh spin on the genre from Kevin Williamson’s script.

A year after her mother’s death, Sydney (Neve Campbell) and her friends are targeted by a serial in a white mask (“Ghostface”) who taunts them with horror movie trivia. The movie was meta and self-referential, it launched a franchise and reinvigorated a flagging genre. In many ways, Scream has influenced much of modern horror. It walked a thin line between satire and homage, carefully peeling back the layers of our expectations while forging new ones, yet still managing its own frights and thrills at the same time.

Craven assembled the ultimate 90s cast: Campbell, Courteney Cox, Skeet Ulrich, Rose McGowan, David Arquette, Matthew Lillard, Jamie Kennedy, some of whom actually spanned the entire four movie franchise. Sydney (Campbell) was hypocritical, Gail (Cox) the most unobservant journalist known to history, and Dewey (Arquette) a remarkably inept deputy, yet somehow they managed to evade even the most determined killers.

Scream broke the fourth wall by naming the standard horror film rules, yet played at subverting them with each new twist: 1. You will not survive if you have sex 2. You will not survive if you drink or do drugs 3. You will not survive if you say “I’ll be right back” 4. Everyone is a suspect 5. You will not survive if you ask “Who’s there?” 6. You will not survive if you go out to investigate a strange noise.

The 5th installment of the franchise is due in theatres (if such a thing still exists) in early 2022. This will be the first without Wes Craven at the helm, but new directors Radio Silence (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) seem intent on honouring his legacy, although, to be fair, rarely does anyone intend to make a disappointing movie that fucks up an entire franchise. But sometimes that happens anyway. And we’re in a very different place with horror than we were in 1996; Jordan Peele (Get Out), Robert Eggers (The Witch), Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), and Ari Aster (Midsommar) are making arthouse horror and elevating the game. Of course, Radio Silence are the duo behind Ready Or Not, which would seem to suggest they’re up to the task.