Gideon58's Reviews

A few people have recommended Cake so it's been on my watchlist for a while. I may have to bump it up a little bit, (after the 2016 Oscars and the 1950's countdown).

I was surprised...much better than I thought it was going to be.

You read my review before I added pictures, Citizen...had no idea you were watching so closely, lol!

I'm online today poking around MoFo....I'm always happy to see a film that I liked and reviewed, being reviewed by another respected reviewer. We had similar thoughts on the film too.

Needless to say, Citizen, that respect is mutual.

An intelligent and witty screenplay and three charismatic lead characters are the primary assets of Bull Durham, a film that is part sports movie, part romantic comedy and part character study, the parts so equally crafted into one of the surprise hits of 1988.

The setting is Durham, North Carolina and their minor league baseball team, the Durham Bulls where we meet our leading triangle: Ebbie "Nuke" Laloosh (Tim Robbins) is a fledgling pitcher with the team, he has a bullet for an arm but not a clue what to do with it; Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) is a cocky know-it-all catcher who spent three weeks in the majors who has just joined the team and is assigned to be Nuke's mentor; Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) is a sexy Bulls groupie who every season picks a member of the team to be a spiritual and sexual companion with for the season. It is the tangled relationship between these three characters on this sleepy cinematic canvas that make this movie work.

Director and screenwriter Ron Shelton mounts a story that provides surprises at every turn. First of all, Annie, who initially appears to just be sex on legs, is a woman with brains and is knowledgeable about baseball and shares her passion for the game with the players she adopts each season. I loved that during her first bedroom encounter with Nuke, she ties him to the bed and just reads poetry to him all night. But what really makes this story unique is that Nuke's relationship with Crash becomes just as important as the one with Annie. It is a little unsettling watching everything Crash says be correct which makes you wonder why he's not in the majors, a question not really addressed but we don't really care. Shelton's rich screenplay earned him an Oscar nomination for original screenplay and his direction is atmospheric and evocative.

The three lead performances are nothing short of superb...Costner has never been so charismatic onscreen and Sarandon creates a heroine who is equal parts sex appeal and intelligence. Tim Robbins officially became a movie star with his Nuke and even though the chemistry between Costner and Sarandon is off the charts, this film was the launching pad for an offscreen relationship between Sarandon and Robbins that lasted almost two decades. A rich and strikingly unconventional motion picture comedy that assumes the viewer is looking for something with a little substance and delivers.

Julianne Moore finally received the Oscar that has been alluding her for about 20 years with the 2014 drama Still Alice, an unsettling, yet three-dimensional examination of the effects of a disease which are, in many ways, a lot more devastating than the actual end of life and how the lead character attempts to control what is happening to her.

Alice Howland (Moore) is a brilliant, 50-year old linguistics professor at Columbia who is married to a fellow professor (Alec Baldwin) and mother of three grown children who learns that she has developed early onset Alzheimer's disease and once Alice works past the denial of what is happening to her, the film shows this strong woman try to control what is happening to her, use it to her advantage, and eventually lose control of what is happening to her.

Co-writers and co-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland have crafted a compelling and squirm worthy story that reaches beyond the scope of the average disease of the week movie. We watch a believable progression here as Alice first tries self-diagnosis without telling anyone what is going on and after finally opening up to her family, attempts to be her own doctor and tries to fight what's happening to her in her own way and track the progression of the disease herself. It seems that Alice thinks that she is too smart for this disease and that with early diagnosis, she can control it, but the abnormality of what is happening to her is disturbing...there is a wonderfully effective moment in the film where Alice is visiting a facility for Alzheimer's patients and doesn't correct the woman giving her the tour who thinks she is visiting for the sake of a parent.

The film also provides a believable look at the effects of the disease on the victim's family...a husband whose denial pushes him further away while a distant younger daughter finds a relationship with her mother that she never had before.

Moore makes us love and care about Alice and her Oscar win wasn't really a surprise, though I personally think she's done better work, but Baldwin has rarely been better and Kristen Stewart is an eye-opener as Alice's youngest daughter, but this is Moore' show and has rarely commanded the screen the way she does here...a consummate actress providing moments of joy and pathos from one scene to the next.

Enjoyed your review of Still Alice. I had very similar thoughts on the film when I reviewed it some months ago.

The Royal Tenenbaums is the bizarre and unpredictable black comedy of family dysfunction that combines the loopy sensibility of Woody Allen with the absurdist theater stylings of Edward Albee and provides surprises and laughs from opening to closing credits.

Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) and his estranged wife, Ethilene (Anjelica Huston) raised three children together who all turned out to be different kinds of child prodigies: Chas (Ben Stiller) was a child financial wiz who is now raising twin sons and has never really gotten over the death of their mother; adopted daughter, Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) was a professional playwright by the time she was 12, is now married to an older psychiatrist (Bill Murray) and lays around in the bathtub all day watching TV; Richie (Luke Wilson) was a teenage tennis champ who cracked up on the court one day, hasn't played since and now claims to be in love with Margot, as is his childhood friend, Eli (Owen Wilson). The fun begins when Royal announces that he's dying and that he wants to reconnect with his family, especially the grandsons he's never met.

This is a bizarre cinematic canvas but it works due the consistently entertaining central character. Royal Tenenbaum is a lousy husband, lousy father, you can practically see the grease sliding off of him and it's impossible to believe anything that comes out of his mouth, another great movie character who speaks without filter, but whether or not it's the truth is the question but you don't really care because the guy is so darned likable and that is due to Gene Hackman's sparkling performance that earned him a Golden Globe and his chemistry with Anjelica Huston is viable and you can still see the love between these two people even if they're not together anymore.

The screenplay by director Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson makes a couple of detours into facets of the prodigies' lives that just aren't that interesting. As long as the story stays focused on the rascally Royal, the movie is witty and vibrant and when it's not, you might find yourself looking at your watch. But Anderson and Wilson's screenplay and the acting genius of Gene Hackman make this journey a joy.

Nice review mate.

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Thank you Optimus.

The pursuit of the "American Dream" has rarely been brought to the screen in such an outrageously over the top and uncompromisingly violent manner as it was in 2013's Pain & Gain, an absolutely incredible drama of crime and corruption that is all the more disturbing because it really happened.

This is the unbelievable story of Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), a bodybuilder and personal trainer who decides to kidnap a wealthy client named Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub) with the aid of a co-worker (Anthony Mackie) and a God fearing ex-con trying to stay sober (Dwayne Johnson), but Lugo gets greedy...he doesn't just ask for a ransom, he tortures his victim and blackmails him into signing over all his assets to Daniel so that everything that Kershaw owns will belong to Lugo, but Lugo and his pals don't realize that capturing such a massive piece of the pie requires detailed planning, something they don't have a clue about because these three guys are basically idiots whose brains are in their biceps.

Since this is a true story, it's kind of hard to gauge exactly how accurate Christopher Markus and Stephen McFreeley's very talky screenplay is, but we are asked to accept a whole lot here...the torturing of Kershaw is outrageous and it is hard to believe that he actually survives what happens to him. It's hard to accept that our three heroes get away with as much as they do for as long as they do. It's ridiculous that no one believes Kershaw when he escapes and tells his story. There is payoff to this story, but these three guys cause way too much carnage and make way too long a list of innocent victims before that payoff happens.

Watching these guys get away with everything that they do is all the more aggravating because these guys are idiots and not very likable, though Johnson's character, Paul Doyle, does possess some very engaging qualities and caring about this character is initially very easy; unfortunately, the screenplay methodically destroys the character and takes away any sympathy you might have accrued for the three central characters and I can see how one might like these guys if the film is caught in the right mindset, but I didn't.

Director Michael Bay has a cinematic eye for violence here that approaches Tarantino territory, giving us an up close and personal look at the relentless gore presented here. The performances are mostly over the top, though I absolutely loved Johnson who keeps a sad character likable and Shalhoub as the most durable kidnap victim I have ever seen. The film is overlong, stretches credibility and has plotholes you can drive a truck through, but if idiotic people doing consistent rotten and getting away with it for way too long is your idea of entertainment, have your fill here.

I liked Pain & Gain. If anything, I thought it was well cast.

One of the most hilarious movie ever made hands down! I love Pain&Gain

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''Haters are my favourite. I've built an empire with the bricks they've thrown at me... Keep On Hating''
- CM Punk
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I don't know, there were moments in the movie that made me laugh, but I don't think they were supposed to.

My mom's fave movie. I liked it, but was too young to even get what's going on. Dad told me it depicts very well Germany in the era. Except the numbers, i only remember the scene when Liza says to York "F* him!" and he says sarcasticaly "I do." Is that the climatic confrontation?

Yeah, pretty much, because Fosse focused a good deal of the story in the movie on this romantic triangle (Sally, Brian, Max) which was invented purely for the movie and was not a part of the Broadway show. Once Sally learns about Brian and Max, we know that it is pretty much the end of the triangle and more importantly, the end of Brian and Sally.

The Best Man Holiday is the soapy and melodramatic sequel to the 1999 film about a group of African American college friends who reunite for a wedding and are rocked by the contents of a book that one of them has written. This film reunites the same characters 15 years later for Christmas and old resentments and passions are reignited but the connections to the first film seem to be essential to caring about what's going on here.

This 2013 comedy drama finds the primary action centering around author Harper Stewart (Taye Diggs) trying to calm pregnant wife Robin (Sanaa Lathan) and save his failing career by using best friend New York Giant Lance Sullivan (Morris Chestnut). The other main storyline involves Julian (Harold Perrineau) finding his business being seriously threatened because of his marriage to a stripper (Regina Hall) he met in the first film. We also find a health crisis for one of the characters that ends up bringing everyone together.

On the positive side, the film does meet one of my requirements for a good sequel: it begins almost exactly where the first film left off; however, it also assumes that you've seen the first film and if you haven't, a lot of what is going on here is going to be rather confusing and difficult to invest in, despite the fact that a lot of the resentments and emotions presented here are universal. the first film is the springboard that makes the viewer care about what is going on here. This is my opinion though...I thought The Brady Bunch Movie would only be entertaining to people who watched the television show, but I've learned I was wrong about that and I have to go out on the same limb here...I seriously doubt that if you never saw the first film, that you will give a damn about what's going on here and the fact that it goes on forever doesn't help.

The cast looks amazing....most of the them haven't aged a bit in the 14 years since the first movie and I've always been a sucker for a movie that features African American characters who are wealthy, successful, and intelligent, but the soap opera elements of the story really bog things down here and right around the time the third act commences, I found myself looking at my watch wondering if this movie was ever going to end. The last 25 minutes of this movie gives new meaning to words like "corny" and "predictable", but if you saw and enjoyed the first film, you might be able to get through it.

2002's Spiderman is Sam Raimi's ambitious and expensive big screen realization of the Marvel comic book hero that does provide some entertainment value, despite a screenplay that tries to encompass WAY too much.

Unlike Superman, who we learn is actually from another planet, this story introduces us to Peter Parker, a nerdy high school earthling who happens to get bitten by just the right spider that provides him with super powers that poor Peter can't explain and isn't sure what do with initially.

And that's where a lot of the problems with this film lie...though I love the moment where Peter wakes up and discovers the changes in his body, the film wastes too much time making us watch Peter play around with his powers and figuring out exactly what he can do...the jumping over rooftops and disposing of lunch room bullies is just so contrived and "been there done that" and the wrestling match with Macho Man Randy Savage just seems like so much filler. There's even five to ten minutes of screen time devoted to Peter designing his Spiderman costume...seriously? The romantic triangle with Peter, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), and Harry (James Franco) just seems like part of another movie, as does Harry's messed up relationship with his father.

There are things that work here, especially the casting of Tobey Maguire as Peter/Spiderman...I liked the fact that Raimi chose to cast an ordinary looking guy and not a body builder or professional wrestler in the role...Maguire makes Peter instantly likable. Also loved Willem Dafoe in the extremely complex villain role, a man whose personal and business failures have completely shredded his mental faculties. I think if screenwriters Stan Lee and Stan Ditka had concentrated a little more on the Peter/Green Goblin conflict and a little less on romance and exposition, this film could have been something really special.

I've not seen it since release, but I remember the script being the thing I liked most about Spider Man and the whole thing was better than the sequel which, naturally, everyone else things is brilliant.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.