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Action & Adventure

Sleepless (2017) Movie Review By Darrin Gauthier

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Sleepless.png

Director: Baran bo Odar
Writers: Andrea Berloff (screenplay by), Frédéric Jardin (based on the film “Nuit blanche” written by) (as Frederic Jardin) 
Stars: Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan, Dermot Mulroney

Plot:  A cop with a connection to the criminal underworld scours a nightclub in search of his kidnapped son.

Running Time: 95 Minutes

Rotten Tomatoes Score: Critics 23%   Audience  38%

Why I Watched It: It was on sale at itunes for $1.99 and I had heard it was real bad so I wanted to see for myself and boy did I.

Random Thoughts: Now in all my reviews I either give the IMDB score of a film or the Rotten Tomatoes score, I prefer RT cause it has critics and audience and I also feel the IMDB scores can get a little iffy, Sleepless is just that case it’s IMDB score is 5.6, that’s audience and that’s a big difference from 38%, now take it with a grain of salt but in my experience RT is closer to what I rate the films.

Another rant I don’t believe in the “film that’s so bad it’s good” a bad film is a bad film now some can be entertaining I view them as cinematic trainwrecks, you begin to laugh at the pure stupidity of the film, spoiler Sleepless is one of those films.

What I Liked: This film is a mess pure and simple and really besides that there isn’t a lot to like, I like Michelle Monaghan a lot she’s a very good actress and very likable and she really tries here and yes she is on the best things in the movie.  Dermot Mulroney is good here he knows what movie he’s in.

Jamie Foxx does try here but he’s more of a presence here, the script undermines everyone but Foxx is trying to be Denzel here and it doesn’t work but in the right action film Foxx is fine.

What I Didn’t Like: Man this script is bad, the film is so dumb it’s mind boggling, but almost everything across the board is bad, really bad directing, terrible editing, this film does feel like it got stripped down you can tell this was suppose to be a longer film.  They tried to focus on the action scenes and not only are they boring but they’re filmed like crap.

The main villain is played by Scoot McNairy and boy does he give a bad performance, he’s trying so hard to be cool and bad it’s funny, he’s a cliche and he thinks he’s cool, he tries the deep cool voice, the whole nine yards and it’s just cheesy goodness but in a bad way.  Poor David Harbour, thank God Stranger Things have saved him from movies like this, it might not stop him from being in them but he’ll make more money.  I think I’ve seen him in this same role three times, he’s fine but he’s a plot point that’s it not a character.

The sad thing is if you’ve seen the trailer they give everything away but to be fair all these twists are so cliched you see everything coming a mile away, this was a cliched cop movie in the late 80′s.  The film seems like a rudderless ship, no one clearly in charge, no clear plan.  This was meant to be a vehicle for Jamie Foxx but it still could have been good.  There’s one scene so dumb I have to tell you about it, so the big finale, that by the way goes on for ever, it takes place in a parking garage for a Vegas Casino, so the bad guys use tear gas,  think about it, there is so many dumb things about it that you have to marvel no one said anything.

Final Thoughts: A really badly made film, this was just one misstep after the other, only really talented people could make this big of a mess and still get released.

Rating: 2/10

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Horror

Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015) Movie Review by Darrin Gauthier

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INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 3

Director: Leigh Whannell
Writers: Leigh Whannell,  Leigh Whannell (characters) 
Stars: Dermot Mulroney,  Stefanie Scott,  Angus Sampson 

A prequel set before the haunting of the Lambert family that reveals how gifted psychic Elise Rainier reluctantly agrees to use her ability to contact the dead in order to help a teenage girl who has been targeted by a dangerous supernatural entity.

Running Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

Rotten Tomatoes Score: Critics 58%   Audience  52%

Why I watched it: Saw the first two, loved the first one and thought the second one was alright, not nearly as good as the first one but it had it’s moments.

Random Thoughts: As a rule I hate prequels, I find them a huge cash grab, everyone movie ever made could have a prequel the key is and this is big is there a story better than the one you told to tell that happened before.  Most times prequels tell us what we already know, the tension is gone cause we know where they have to end up.  Now with Insidious 3 it’s a bit different cause we don’t follow the family from the first two we follow the psychic played by Lin Shaye and I have to admit it was a good idea, cause if you’ve seen the second one you know a sequel would be trickier than a prequel, and they could show us another case she dealt with and of course maybe how she first encountered the further so I was on board for a prequel.  Also Whannell wrote the first two so I trusted him with this one.

What I liked: I horror franchise is a strange animal cause you look at the movies as part of a whole, is this entry decent enough to not hurt the overall franchise and clearly Insidious is a franchise now.  The question you ask is does this movie fit into the overall feel of Insidious and I say yes, Lin Shaye is the reason to watch the film, her character Elise Rainer is a classic horror character, she’s tortured, she’s gifted and ultimately doomed. This time out we see her backstory and also they do a nice job of fleshing out her character, in this third film she is a full character not a secondary character we know some thing, she know a lot more about her.  I will say I’m a sucker for a scared character in a horror film, someone who’s seen the evil or the monster and is scared not a coward per say but someone who knows I can’t do this.  This is a nice story of someone who knows evil is out there and tries to stay away but is pulled back because deep down she wants to help people and that’s always a cool story.

I’d like to take some time to also talk about what I think this film is about, loss, it’s a big part of this story, the main character the teenage girl has lost her mother, so that means the father has lost his wife, Elise has lost her husband.  Everyone is in pain here, there’s also a small sub plot with a couple who lives in the apartment next store, it’s an old couple and the wife isn’t doing well she has some form of dementia, at one point when the father talks to his daughter he mentions the cat lady who lives next store, well something happens to her and we find the husband sitting in the lobby and when the father talks to him the husband has this little speech about his wife and how long they were married and how she was once a young and beautiful women, and now people just call her the cat lady and how she was so much more than that.

I thought it was a great little human moment and to give it to a supporting character was a nice tough to show everyone has their story and it’s easy to just overlook people.  There’s a few moments like that, Lin Shaye has a nice scene where she talks about her husband and how he killed himself.  It’s moments like this in a genre story that’s so important, to stop and have a character moment is key in us caring about the horror.  If we like the people we care what happens, it sounds simple but so many horror films skip that step and just give us stock characters.

So it’s a horror film is it scary, yup, there’s a couple of moments that got me, it’s not as scary or as intense as the first one but it’s as spooky as the second.  The funny thing with the Insidious films is that it’s kind of a combo ghost and demon story, kind of a haunting and a possession story.

What I didn’t like: The main story with the family, the daughter, younger son and father is cookie cutter, we’ve seen it a thousand times and it’s a little too cliched for a film trying to have more depth.  The daughter played by Stefanie Scott is fine, her performance is good just doesn’t have the family vibe with the rest of the cast her and Dermot Mulroney don’t seem like father and daughter, I know that could be on purpose but it does hold the story back.  The film does rely on the annoying “the sound is super loud when something scary happens” I hate that and yes they rely on jump scares a couple work.  There are call backs to characters from the first two films and I wish they were in it more.  Shaye as to carry a lot of the film and it’s nice to see her playing off characters we know I wish they had more time together.

Final Thoughts: For a horror prequel and a third entry in a franchise this was a pretty decent movie, it wasn’t great but it was good enough for what it was, I like the character moments and I liked we had emotional depth to the horror.

Rating: 6/10

Drama

Jobs (2013) Movie Retro Review by Stephen McLaughlin

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JOBS

Director: Joshua Michael Stern
Writer: Matt Whiteley
Stars: Ashton Kutcher, Dermot Mulroney, Josh Gad, Matthew Modine, J.K. Simmons

Not to be confused with the 2015 Michael Fassbender film ‘Steve Jobs” which I will review in good time and I decided to review the one that came first. This movie is the story of Steve Jobs’ rise from from a college dropout into one of the most creative entrepreneurs of the 20th century.

It has to be said that making a biopic about Steve Jobs is a great idea and you wonder why it took so long for a movie on his life to be made. Opening at the 2001 launch of the “IPod” with Ashton Kutcher is the title role as an older Steve Jobs was a neat way of hooking the audience into the movie and it also reminded our current selves that announcing a device you could fit in your pocket could store over 1,000 songs was a pretty big deal over 16 years ago. In the room the audience gasp at the reality of such a device. Just like we did back then.

The Filmmakers had a tremendous opportunity to make an interesting character based and informative movie about Steve Jobs who created ‘Apple” but instead used him as the presence of Apple’s story instead. It may appear nitpicking but I felt the movie should have been called “Apple” instead, but from what I have read the company had no input in the making of this movie at all.

“Jobs” quickly takes us back to the early seventies to where it all began. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is interesting to a point and having watched (and reviewed) the documentary about IBM a few months back “Silicon Valley” it was nice to see things from another perspective in the era of home computing from the major players.

I’ll be honest, apart from mainstream media attention I have to admit I didn’t know too much about Steve Jobs other than his “Apple” life story. I was interested into seeing his personal life and how he became one of the most powerful men in the technology world. This movie doesn’t do this and although the cast of Ashton Kutcher (Steve Jobs), Josh Gad (Steve Wozniak) JK Simmons (Arthur Rock), Dermot Mulroney (Mike Markkula) and Matthew Modine as John Sculley is very steady. The movie is more a time line of his life (to an extent) and the company.

This is where the problem lies with “Jobs” it isn’t sure what it is meant to be projecting as Jobs personal life is portrayed in bullet points and only skims the surface of the man and his personal problems. It also displays a lack of pace and the fluidity appears start / stop at times. I learned that he had a daughter Lisa that he denied for a very long time and it’s not until later on in the movie it appears he had a change of heart and a teenage Lisa is portrayed and in his life at this point. There was no emotional storytelling in relation to this or to others which I felt was a missed opportunity.

Away from these issues I learned more about the business side of Apple and Jobs relationship with his board and colleagues. Kutcher portrays him as best as he could and picks up some of the mans traits and mannerisms which I should give him credit for. Kutcher in my opinion isn’t the greatest actor in the word but his scenes with Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak were fun and lightened the story with humour between them. Josh Gad to me was the best thing in the movie and although I didn’t know much about Wozniak other than what most folk know about him through various interviews, this movie gave you an insight into what it was like to be Steve Jobs’ colleague, company partner and friend.

With a supporting cast of Mulroney, Simmons and Modine this is another saving grace to the film and particularly Mulroney’s portrayal of Mike Markkula who is the long suffering business partner of Jobs who endured some awkward moments throughout the film protecting Jobs in particular during the boardroom scenes that both Simmons and Modine excelled in.

Another positive throughout the movie is the soundtrack. From Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train” and Bob Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Leather” to the brilliant “Life’s Been Good” by Joe Walsh which add to the era and fit well into the story.

In summary, if you wish to learn more about Steve Jobs I wouldn’t recommend getting that from this movie. That’s not to say it’s a bad film. “Jobs” is interesting enough to keep you entertained for a couple of hours and learn a few things about how “Apple” began in a garage and what it became today which is quite astonishing. Just don’t look for a deep thought provoking insight into one of the most brilliant minds of a generation.