Gideon58's Reviews

That's a good movie. I'd watch it again.

Can't believe it took me this long to watch it.

Nice review of Coming Home, I only seen it a for the first time half a year ago for an Hof.

Thank you Citizen, it's been on my watchlist a long time, I wish I had gotten around to it sooner.

I needed you in the HoF when I nominated it; glad you enjoyed it

Hey I loved Coming Home as your nomination. I just checked and I never reviewed it so I will. My thoughts are the same as Gideon's about the film.

I remember you liked it. I think you were one of the first to watch it, and you were one of the people I had in mind when I picked it.

You can't go wrong with a Jane Fonda movie, at least not her serious films made in the 70s-80s. I wish we'd see more of them.

They Shoot Horses Don't They? is a good one.

TAMMY

Melissa McCarthy has proven she has the chops to be a genuine movie star with the ability to command the big screen in films like Spy and her Oscar-nominated performance in Bridesmaids, but her credibility as a big screen comic mistress is stretched to its limits with a silly and pointless 2014 comedy called Tammy, which somehow attracted an A-list cast of movie stars to assist McCarthy but still only manages to deliver sporadic laughs.

Tammy is a married fast food employee who gets fired from her job by boss Keith (Ben Falcone, who also directed and wrote this mess), goes home to learn that her husband (Nat Faxon) has been cheating on her with her friend (Toni Collette) so she decides to blow town in Grandma's car, but Grandma (Susan Sarandon) wants to accompany Tammy on the road trip, which Tammy only agrees to when she learns that Grandma has $6700 in cash.

What follows is a very scenic road trip that is really pretty to look at but involves some really silly misadventures including Tammy and Grandma's drunken encounter with a guy (Mark Duplass) and his horny dad (Gary Cole), who hits it off with Grandma and Tammy's robbing a fast food joint when she thinks she needs the money to bail Grandma out of jail. Tammy and Grandma's getaway leads them to Grandma's cousin Lenore (Kathy Bates) and her lesbian lover (Sandra Oh) who provide help for our hapless heroines when they really need it.

Let me assure you that you are eyes weren't playing tricks on you when you read the names of some of the actors that got involved in this junk. Apparently there are some really credible actors out there who have respect for McCarthy and her talent because I really can't see them doing this film for artistic fulfillment. Maybe they needed the money, but I seriously doubt if most of the actors involved really needed the money I think they just wanted to ride the McCarthy gravy train, which is kind of hot right now, but they really chose the wrong vehicle to ride here.

McCarthy does bring the occasional laugh, especially in the opening where she gets fired from the restaurant and even Sarandon, an actress who I thought would be above such nonsense, doesn't manage to look completely ridiculous and neither do Bates or Allison Janney and Dan Aykroyd, who play Tammy's parents. This film was definitely given a bit of a budget...there is some exquisite location photography along the way including an incredible finale at Niagara Falls, but this is really for hardcore McCarthy fans only.

Zero interest in seeing Tammy.

That review actually makes me wanna see Tammy. That could be my next review if I can find it.

Ohh, Tammy got a 2/5...I think I'll pass on that one.

Despite how big of a star she is now, I don't think I've ever actually watched a Melissa McCarthy movie.

If you're interested in seeing a good Melissa McCarthy movie, I would recommend Spy.

HEART AND SOULS

Ron Underwood, whose other directorial credits include Tremors and City Slickers. knocks it out of the park with a richly imaginative, if overly elaborate comic fantasy from 1993 called Heart and Souls, a wonderfully entertaining comic confection that takes the concept of the childhood imaginary friend to an all new and delicious level.

One night in 1959 San Francisco, a telephone operator (Alfre Woodard) kisses her sons goodnight to go to work; a two bit thief (Tom Sizemore) fails to retrieve some valued stamps he stole from a young boy; a waitress (Kyra Sedgwick) realizes she made a mistake turning down her boyfriend's proposal; an aspiring opera singer (Charles Grodin) freezes during an audition and walks off the stage disgusted with himself. These four strangers board the same bus, which ends up getting into an accident with a car carrying Bill and Eva Reilly (Bill Calvert, Lisa Lucas), who are on their way to the hospital to have their first child, Thomas. Our four friends die in the accident but find themselves bound to Thomas as proverbial guardian angels whom only Thomas can see and hear.

As Thomas gets older and starts going to school, his guardian angels start to have his parents and teachers questioning his sanity, so the angels apparently have the power to be invisible to Thomas as well, but the inability to leave him. About 25 years later, a grown up Thomas (Robert Downey Jr.) is reacquainted with his angels and learns that he must help them with one final task before they are able to go to their final resting place.

Underwood has undertaken a pretty large task here, thanks primarily to a somewhat complex screenplay by Brent Maddock, S.S.Wilson, Gregory Hansen, and Erik Hansen that presents characters in a very specific and restrictive fantasy that sometimes trap the characters in positions they don't really deserve or understand. It's a little unsettling when we first see the angels with little Thomas and marvel at how they seem to have just accepted what has happened to them. Milo, Sizemore's character, seems to be the only one interested in finding a way out and Penny, Woodard's character, is the only one who seems to speak about her earthly life before the bus crash. I actually found myself getting angry when the angels decided to leave Thomas when he was 7 and the scene of him mourning their departure was heartbreaking, but a little patience was quickly rewarded with a bonus where it was revealed that Thomas still has wounds from the angels leaving him when he was a child.

Underwood has put a great deal of detail in the mounting of this elaborate fantasy, including some really offbeat casting choices that worked...Robert Downey Jr. offers one of the best performances of his career as the troubled Thomas...love the moments where the angels inhabit his body, reminiscent of Steve Martin in All of Me. Sizemore and Woodard are a lot of fun too and loved David Paymer as the bus driver. A warm and winning comic fantasy that left me feeling all warm and gooey inside.

MAN OF THE YEAR

The star and director of Good Morning Vietnam reunited for 2006's Man of the Year, a squirm worthy political thriller that starts off to be something very different than what it seems to be presenting initially, casting a severely unflattering look at politics, the media, and the corporate eye on the almighty bottom line.

The late Robin Williams stars as Tom Dobbs, a comedian who hosts his own political satire television show a la Bill Maher and Jon Stewart, whose vocal lambasting of everything going on in DC has fans suggesting that he run for President himself, despite protests from his manager (Christopher Walken) whose primary concern seems to be that Tom made more money as a comedian than he will as President.

As Tom actually begins mounting a campaign as an independent candidate, a company called Delacroy has just invented a new computerized voting machine that will be utilized in this coming election and send stock profits for Delacroy well into the stratosphere. Tom's campaign gains momentum and he ends up winning the election at the same time that a programmer at Delacroy named Eleanor Green (Laura Linney) discovers a glitch in the new voting machines that prove Tom didn't win, but Delacroy doesn't want their profits messed with and go to extreme lengths to silence poor Eleanor.

Director Barry Levinson has produced a bone-chilling drama that unfolds very slowly to reach that point...we think we're going to get a light comedy about a comic who wants to play President and it's nothing like that at all. Even though Dobbs is a comedian, once he starts the campaign, he is dead serious about what he's doing, even if he's not always sure what he's doing and isn't always as funny as people expect him to be anymore. But the character always remains true to himself, he never lies about anything and offers no promises to the people but change. Now these Delacroy people are another matter...what they put poor Eleanor Green through is heartbreaking and terrifying to watch and it's truly disturbing to think that if I have a job where I discover something important is wrong, is it possibly safer for me to look the other way? This movie poses a lot of uncomfortable questions and offers no easy answers.

Williams, Walken, and especially Linney do solid work here, as do Jeff Goldblum and Lewis Black, but this is really a triumph for writer and director Barry Levinson, who has crafted a chilling story that has just gotten more topical over the years.

ST. VINCENT
Despite a story that strains credibility at every turn, the 2014 comedy drama St. Vincent is viable entertainment thanks to some really splendid performances from a clearly hand-picked cast.

Bill Murray plays Vincent McKenna, an insensitive alcoholic womanizer who owes money to everyone and is always looking for easy ways to get out of said debt who finds himself the unlikely babysitter and mentor for a little boy (Jaeden Lieberher) who has just moved in next door to Vincent with his mother (Melissa McCarthy) who is in the middle of a messy divorce and custody battle with the boy's father. As expected, Vincent becomes a very unlikely father figure for this boy.

Director and writer Theodore Melfi really knew what he was doing when he cast Bill Murray in the leading role in this story because if anyone else had been playing this role, I probably would have turned this off about 25 minutes in...this Vincent is really a slime bucket. Not five minutes after meeting this woman and her son, he is trying to bilk money out of her to watch her son and to pay for a fence that he damaged. Things are further complicated by Vincent's relationship with a pregnant stripper/prostitute (Naomi Watts) whom Vincent treats like crap and why she is so enamored of the guy is a complete mystery. The character actually displays a little potential when after initially watching the boy get bullied after school, steps up when he sees the boy's only form of defense is to slap his bully across the face...it's at this moment that we see potential in this relationship and that it could be beneficial for both.

However, Melfi's screenplay has Vincent being a credible role model one scene and a horrible one the next. And just when you think there's no potential for this character to be redeemed, we see him tending to his institutionalized wife who no longer recognizes him.This guy is boorish, insensitive, and completely unworthy of audience sympathy, but he evokes just that because of Bill Murray's delightfully unhinged performance that is partially a creation for this particular film and partially manifested through the show business legend that is Bill Murray making us love a character who absolutely doesn't deserve it and he's not alone here...Melissa McCarthy is surprisingly effective, cast radically against type, playing the closest thing she has ever played to a regular human being, a newly single parent struggling with it and hanging on by a thread, while Watts actually does the comic scene stealing as a woman who sees something in this man that the rest of us don't.

The film's overblown finale is a little hard to take as is the bonding of the boy with his bully, but this is a journey worth taking because of the very gifted Bill Murray doing what he does best.

Oops.

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Thanks for the heads up, have taken care of it.