Ed's Review Dot Com

Big Beach Films, Cooper’s Town Productions, Labyrinth Theater Company

Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Ortiz, Richard Petrocelli, Thomas McCarthy, Amy Ryan, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Lola Glaudini

Jack, (Hoffman) is a limo driver. He has a couple for best friends and they set him up on a blind date. He meets Connie (Amy Ryan) and sparks fly. But everyone in this story is messed up. Jack is very meticulous about every detail. He wants to do exactly right and will work and work and study to do it exactly right. As his relationship blossoms with the shy and inexperienced Connie, his friends relationship is falling apart.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays some really WEIRD characters. For example, his character Wilson Joel in Love Lisa who huffs gasoline to get high and spends his life driving around flying model airplanes all over the place is a strange one. This guy is really strange too, but I must say perhaps he’s not the strangest person in this story! Anyway, Jack Goes Boating brings the character from the play to the big screen. As such, it’s a dreary little film where the sets and the scenery is not much of the story. Everything is wrapped up in the characters and these characters are well played and well developed. Jack’s best friend Clyde is very close. A little too close sometimes. He constantly tells Jack “I love you” throughout the story. But it seems a genuine caring for a friend and nothing more. Clyde and Lucy are a couple, but as time goes by their relationship is coming apart. They are abusing substances and not letting go of past mistakes. Meanwhile Jack and Connie are hitting it off. Jack hears from Connie that no one has ever cooked for her. Typical of his nature, he goes way overboard. He lives in a room with a hot plate, and never cooked in his life but spends hours and hours taking cooking lessons and practicing the one meal he just has to cook for her because she asked for it. He’s very into details like this! This is an interesting character study, but it didn’t totally catch me on an entertainment level. If I let this go a while, I may come back and raise the rating on it, because it might be actually better than I originally thought of it. But as I thought about this, it seems that only if you’re in the mood for a deep, dark character study, you might enjoy this, but if you want an entertaining movie to spend and evening with, this is not it. Sometimes character studies are really interesting, but these people are all so weird, that I wonder whether I’m wasting my time even caring what happens to them. I’m just not convinced that this was that good of a film and I don’t think I would recommend it, unless of course, you like these kinds of films. Nice try, but it just wasn’t interesting enough to make the time worthwhile.

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Everest Entertainment, Cha Cha Cha, Mockingbird Pictures

Alexandria Salling, Connor Kramme, Annette Bening, Eileen Ryan, Samuel L Jackson, Naomi Watts, Cherry Jones, Kerry Washington,  David Ramsey, Kay, D’Arcy, Bradford Alex, Jimmy Smits, Elipida Carrillo, Simone Lopez, Carla Gallo

Mother and Child is one of those trilogies in a single movie stories.  It’s basically about 3 women.  First is Karen (Annette Benning) who became pregnant when she was 14 and gave the baby up for adaption.  Now 35 years later, she’s always regretted what she has done and is a very bitter, actually mean, person.   The second is her daughter, Elizabeth (Naomi Watts) who has grown into a woman with hardly any heart.  She’s a tough cookie and doesn’t trust anyone, especially men, but not opposed in the least to use her attractiveness to gain whatever advantage she can.  She went to Mexico for a tubal ligation when she was 17 and was shocked when she suddenly turned up pregnant.   The third story is about an African American wife who wants a child but cannot have one.  She and her husband are given the opportunity to adopt, but later complications arise.  The mother decides to keep the baby and the husband decides something even worse.

This is a typical indie type film, very, very slow to develop.  In one way the story is very cut and dried and you’re certain where it’s going to end up.  But there are a number of surprises coming along, and not what you would expect.  The way the lives of the three women cross is really strange and amazing.  There are twists and turns galore.  Truly it’s very ironic and very sad, and I would say depressing in a lot of ways.   This is not a friend family feel good picture by any means.  It’s very dark and deep, and it develops very, very slowly.  If you stick with it to the end, you will see that it’s very well written and the actors are very good as well.  But my fear is that a lot of people are not going to want to stick through the whole thing to get the the twist ending where two people meet who you would never have expected to get together.  If you like deep sincere indie films, you’ll like this one I’m sure, but be warned that it is a very slow developing relationship picture and not an easy thing to watch.  If you’re looking just to be entertained, this isn’t it, but if you don’t mind working through an intense film, it’s good.

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Sanctum Australia, Great Wight Productions/ Osford Films, Relativity Media

Richard Roxburgh, Ioan Gruffudd, Rhys Wakefield, Alice Parkinson, Dan Wyllie, Christopher Baker, Nicole Downs, Allison Cratchley, John Garvin

Sanctum is a story of one of the worlds top divers, Frank McGuire (Richard Roxburgh) and a team of divers (and a few adventurers with a little less experience) off on an expedition to one of the largest and most beautiful caves ever. Deep in the ground accessible only by an arduous climb or a parachute, they have the misfortune of being down deep in the cave when a tropical storm hits big time and the cave begins to flood. The way out being blocked, they have to find another way out by following the underground water to the sea. It’s a long dangerous journey and only a small chance they can make it out.

First of all, I went to see this when I was pretty sick. As it was, I had to walk out to the restroom 3 times during the movie. Second there were only 2 other people in the whole theater, so that’s not a great sign either, but I did see it in 3D in a very large theater. The photography was breathtaking as was the 3D. This was filmed in Queensland, Australia and all the actors are Australian, so it took a bit of effort to catch all the dialog at times, but this isn’t about the dialog anyway, it’s about adventure. There are some faults in this film which will turn off some people. I’m not sure if they did the right things every time, and I think they went over the heads of most of the people who will be watching this. James Cameron spoke about this, and he wanted to give a movie to a director friend of his who has never done a feature film before. So he wanted to pick a topic that is close to the directors skill set. James and his company have spent many years diving down to the Titanic and making IMAX documentaries about underwater diving. In fact, James remarked that he spent more hours on the deck of the Titanic than the captain. This director has worked on the 3D documentary films, so the idea was to do something they’re used to, and an underwater cave drama was drawn up and put together to match those skills. As a result, they are very technically familiar with the special equipment and most of us who are about as familiar as we got watching Thunderball, I don’t think they gave us some of the technical explanations causing some people to make wild assumptions of errors in the movie that are not really errors. But they occasionally made stupid choices just to move the story along. You have to enjoy this as a fantasy adventure and try not to make everything too literal.

In that way, this is a lot like the Poseidon Adventure in the sense that it’s a disaster/survival story in a surreal surrounding that makes us suspend belief a little bit to make the story more exciting. (Could they really climb up ((down?)) the Christmas tree like that?) I really enjoyed the escape in this film, in the way I enjoy the Earth Day films from Disney or the Himalaya climbing adventure stories on the Discovery Channel. But there is also a lot of family relationship drama as well. Again, much like the Poseidon Adventure, as each person reaches a personal climax in their life, they are also facing dangerous situations and some survive for a while and some don’t. How the rest react is part of the story. Frank has been a cave adventurer and a diver all his life, and his son has had no chance to really know his father. As they have to depend on each other to survive they have to learn to appreciate each other, something they’ve never done. I’ll never have the opportunity to dive in a cave like this, and I was able to experience it thanks to the special filming and diving equipment developed by James Cameron, so regardless if this film pales in comparison to some of his huge hits, this is a great adventure and has a place in itself. It’s a pleasant escape from our hum drum lives for a few hours and that’s valuable too.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog

Morning Dew Entertainment

Catherine Thompson, Nathan Mitchell, Patricia Place, Rick Macy, Tayva Patch, Katherine Nelson

One of the finest stories of Joseph Smith and the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, this is the story of Emma Hale Smith, Joseph’s wife.  It begins with an elderly Emma talking with her daughter and reminiscing on her amazing life.  It goes into a flashback of Emma of a small child with a strong faith with an unbelieving father who forbid prayer in his home.  But that did not stop Emma.  She met Joseph and they married without her father’s blessing after giving up on ever winning him over.  Emma’s Story shows that she was certainly a strong woman, who had a lot to deal with in her life filled with joy and tragedy, heartbreak and love.  It covers the translating of the gold plates through the hard days in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, and Missouri.

Very fairly portrayed, with doubts and flaws as well as triumphs, it is a great story.  It’s nice to see it all through Emma’s eyes.  Certainly she didn’t always know all the plans and schemes, but she was a strong supporter and a muse and guide to her husband.  She sure had to put up with a lot.

This certainly is a great story and a strong inspiring American tale of a difficult time in the history of the Unites States.  It’s a very good story, even if you know nothing of the LDS history.  Certainly above all, it’s a love story.  There is no doubt Joseph would never have been able to accomplish what he did without Emma by his side until the end.

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Carnaby International, Camaby Film Productions, Hanover Films

Danny Dyer, Noel Clarke, Emil Marwa, Lee Ingleby, Keith-Lee Castle, Christina Cole, Terry Stone, Neil Maskell, Emily Booth, Stephen Graham

Oh brother!  First off,  this is a British film.  Nothing wrong with that, but the dialect is distinctly difficult to follow for us mere Americans, and I have a feeling the humor is placed directly in The Isles as well.   This is billed as horror film, but it’s really is a satirical send up of Horror films a la Scary Movie, with all the funny taken out.

Vince is handling his divorce badly, so his “blokes” suggest a wild party weekend in a small town out in the middle of nowhere.  But when they arrive, something seems unusual.  There are no men, only women.  Where did all the men go?  As time goes by, they figure out that there is a strange virus that affects only women and turns them into blood thirsty zombies.   The rest of the film these guys try to figure out how to destroy the women and escape.

Oh brother.  What a sad mess.  I’m sure somewhere out there, someone gets the humor in this.  But it is beyond me.  The guys are all asses, and they play like little kids.  They have ways to defeat the zombies, but screw it up being stupid.  In fact, I’m sure my IQ dropped at least 10 or 15 points just from watching this film.  I was really disappointed because I thought it might be fairly good (although low budget) from the description. But it passed me by completely which is what I would recommend on this one for you too.  Pass it by completely!

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog