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Reviews
Unbroken: Path to Redemption (2018)
Plays out as if it were 2 movies in one.
The first 2/3rds of the movie were a well written, well-acted biographic movie. It establishes the characters well, draws you into their lives and does a decent job of making you feel connected to them. While there are small snippets of troubled behavior, and you can tell that Louis Zamperini is most definitely dealing with internal demons, on the whole it seems to be the story of the beginning of a happy romance. You're rooting for these characters to live a happy life together.
Around the halfway mark, things take a very different turn and begin to go rapidly downhill. To avoid spoilers, I won't go into the specifics, but I feel like the movie did a decent job of showing how trauma that has not been dealt with can suddenly spiral very badly out of control. Some painful but powerful scenes play out during this section.
Roughly 2/3rds in... a different movie starts? Religion was barely a blip on the radar during the movie you'd been watching up to this point. A couple little quips from Louis establishing he was not a fan of it was all even mentioned until this point. Around this mark though, religion becomes THE focus and an advertisement for Christianity just takes over. You literally spend roughly 20 of the last 30 minutes in a mass/sermon, after watching 60 minutes prior that had effectively nothing to do with religion at all. Now I recognize this is a biographic movie, and it's just telling what happened in his life. The way it played out in the film though felt very...jarring. If you're a Christian, you'll likely be happy with this sudden and complete swap of focus. If you're not, you'll probably be left scratching your head asking "Where in the heck did all this proselytizing come from?"
I give the first 2/3rds of the movie an 8/10. It was good, and I liked it. I give the last 1/3rd a 3/10, for suddenly surprising the viewer seemingly out of nowhere with a sermon on how great Christ is. Overall I'll split the difference and call it 5/10.
The Date Whisperer (2023)
Average movie with a very bad plot.
TLDR: A fairly average movie, but the utterly ridiculous plot premiss knocks the overall down from average to below-average.
The whole premises of the conflict between the two main characters, Sam(antha) and Matt, made little to no sense. None of the following gives anything away that isn't seen in the trailer.
Sam is extremely mad at Matt for convincing her father to divorce her mother. Generally something that could cause some anger, sure, but her father left her mother because he's gay and came out. Sam says she's happy for her father living his truth, and yet for some inexplicable reason her anger with Matt is so great that she's willing to make an outrageous bet that if he loses means he can't be in the wedding (he's the best man).
Now clearly this makes perfect sense because...wait, what??? It's not her wedding. It's not Matt's wedding. It's her father's wedding! So if she wins a bet, that neither groom is even aware of let alone involved with, then somehow she gets to decide that the best man in a wedding that isn't hers suddenly can't come anymore? What???
Plot premiss aside, the leads do the best they can with the script and screenplay they were given and they have decent chemistry. They start out a bit stiff, but the pair gets better as the movie goes on. I feel like Anne Patterson, who played Milly, actually had the best performance of the movie though. She played the shy but "adorkable" role well, and I feel like her and her love interest actually had more chemistry than the leads. The rest of the movie is pretty typical for a TV Rom-Com. If you like them great, if you don't then not great.
Horse Latitudes (2020)
A story about moving around a lot and yet going nowhere
Looking for a movie about lessons learned, with character growth and development? Don't look here.
Now mind you, I'm not saying every story needs a happy ending. Generally though, when there isn't one it's because of some reason. Some profound realization, some major personal growth moment, other external factors pulling the characters apart, etc. This movie had none of that. It was going, and going, and then it just...wasn't anymore. If anything, the main characters both take steps back in their lives and end in a worse state than they began. Not really much else to say because nothing really happened.
Father of the Bride (2022)
Should have been named "Feel Sorry for the Bride"
So first off, to be clear, this is NOT a comedy. There's very little if any humor in it at all. It's not a spoiler to say the Father & Mother of the bride are getting a divorce, as it's literally the first scene of the movie. The father proceeds to spend basically the whole rest of the movie, showing WHY they are getting said divorce. He is, put plainly, an >insert profanity here<.
He spends his screen time antagonizing his whole family. He talks down to them, he talks over them, he ignores everything they say and everything they want. He forces himself to be the center of attention, and by his own statement (multiple times) says that because he has money he gets to make all decisions. This ignores the fact that the Bride & Groom expressly state they don't even want his money, but he forces the issue. This is interspersed with solo scenes of him moping around, sad faced, lamenting the current state of his life (which he's brought on himself by his own horribleness). It's clear the writers try to include moments where you're supposed to feel some sympathy for him, but this is completely overshadowed by the fact that he is written as an absolutely unlikeable >repeat profanity here< who doesn't actually earn any sympathy.
When you've made it through 90 minutes of a 2 hour movie, and you realize that you simply don't care about anything at all that is happening in the slightest, that's a giant red flag. When you dislike a character enough that you don't care about the writers sad attempt at a redemption arc, another big red flag. This movie was a great example of both.
Bridal Boot Camp (2017)
There is bad, there is horrible...and then there's this.
(I will preface this review by saying, I am the epitome of the target audience for this type of movie. I'm an absolute sucker for made-for-tv rom coms, and I've watched hundreds upon hundreds of them. Seriously, I have a list.)
The writing in this movie is, in a word, atrocious...
Shortly into watching, you are introduced to the "Bridal Boot Camp". The theme: If you don't conform to the 1950's stereotype of the "perfect" wife, you suck, your marriage will suck, and your husband won't love you. Yep, you read that right. Seriously, I'm not kidding.
The "instructor" starts off with the cliche of insulting all the participants, and then proceeds to give a set of rules which may have well been titled "How to set gender equality back 60 years". And she's actually serious about them, it's not written as a joke. Any self respecting woman who wasn't born 4 generations ago not just walking out of the class at this point defies belief, but yet...
I made it through the second segment of the "Boot Camp" (which was just more of the same message), about 30 minutes in, before actually turning the movie off. Perhaps only the second or third time I've ever done that in my 500+ history of rom-coms. It's among the worst writing I've ever seen in a rom-com.
If you want to see women desperate to learn from an instructor trying to mold them into Donna Reed while treating them like crap, then this movie is for you! If not, then avoidance is suggested.
Angel Falls Christmas (2021)
No divine inspiration here
So I'll start by saying, I'm an absolute sucker for these Hallmark TV romantic comedy/dramas. I've seen literally hundreds of them, and have also watched One Tree Hill completely. It's safe to say that I am the epitome of the target audience for a film like this.
That said, unfortunately this movie just felt...off. As has been mentioned, Murray's vocal cadence is strange and off putting throughout the whole film, and his stiff performance doesn't give Lowndes much to play off of at all. It wasn't him (he's better than this performance), it was a stylistic choice, but it was a bad choice. I'll blame the director for this though, not Murray.
In terms of the overall plot, the best I can say is that it also just missed the mark. Given the material they were working with, and the stylistic choice mentioned above, I once again can't blame the leads. Expecting Murray to portray what they wanted him to, while hamstringing him like they did, just set it up for failure. That's the best I can explain it, without getting into "spoilers". I'd rather not spoil the movie anymore than it already was, as it turns out it was spoiled all on it's own...