riversideriverside Reviews

Test Pattern (2019)

Did everyone involved finish film school?

[27 January 2022]

How are we supposed to believe that an articulate, well-groomed, beautiful black woman would fall for an inarticulate, goofy-looking, badly groomed shlub of a white man? The editing is disjointed and otherwise sloppy. The acting and writing aren't much better.

And isn't a rape victim supposed to go to the police first re: a rape kit and a search for the rapist?

The Life of David Gale (2003)

The Big Misunderstood

[3/10 · 22 July 2021]

The movie supports capital punishment. Gale deserved to die because he was complicit in Harraway's death. Anyone who assists another person in suicide is guilty of homicide.

Was this the director's intent? Was the story overwritten at expense of clarity?

The Bystander Theory (2013)

Criminally Vapid

[1/10 · 15 August 2020]

Looks like some buddies piled-on to raise the rating of this incredibly rotten movie. Bad acting, bad writing, bad direction and no respect for the intelligence of the viewer. It's as though it was made by high school kids who have no sense of drama and mystery. The one star was an accident.

Zero Stars!!!

Hold the Dark (2018)

Book and Movie not the same

[3/10 · 28 January 2019]

What's missing from the movie is what explained everything in the book of the same name. That omission is why the movie seems so incomplete. I loved the book, which I read first, therefore the movie only became curiosa for me. I had passed on watching the movie after seeing it's trailer on Netflix. Then shortly thereafter I read the book.

I'm surprised the author allowed his work to be "transferred" to film (okay, probably for money). The movie fails for many of the reasons he publicly stated about novels to movies prior to the movie's production.

Read the book.

The Florida Project (2017)

Unvarnished Look At Moral Degeneracy

[10/10 · 20 May 2018]

No matter what the writers and the director intended, The Florida Project amounts to this:

It is an unvarnished look at moral degeneracy. The film has all the elements of a sociologically unexamined struggle during hard times in contrast with the natural exuberance of children within the environment of a false Disneyland under the sway of a particularly malignant mother figure. The pain of this false Disneyland is made even more excruciating for its proximity to the "real" Disneyland. While the "real" Disneyland upon close examination exists in fear of the Disneyland that includes the film's Magic Castle and Futureland and Halley.

TFP's brilliance spares us from the Disneylandish sociology that relieves adults of responsibility for their actions and attitudes. Halley loves her daughter? Really? No, not really. Halley, who has more power over Moonee than the economy does, uses Moonee as a sacrificial attack upon a world that she, Halley, has largely made for herself. TFP's entirety resonates from this fact.

Save for the humanity of Bobby who may just as well have been sitting in the audience with the rest of us wondering what the hell lies ahead for Moonee in her mother-created Futureland.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017)

Legitmate Story Is Victim of Violence

[1/10 · 25 January 2018]

Vaughn's character, Bradly, at the beginning of Brawl in Cell Block 99 is somewhat reality based. Bradly is rough-around-the-edges but capable of sensitivity. He's smart enough for certain activities while too dumb for the larger world.

Then the movie descends into a nightmarish festival of violence done-up in a cartoonish style. Any smarts that Bradly exhibits with getting things done is countervailed by his ever increasing stupidity. That stupidity is consistent with how the rest of the movie plays out.

Don Johnson's performance has to be one of the worse in cinematic history. It is a pathetic and disrespectful nod to Strother Martin's character in Cool Hand Luke. He delivers his lines, though meant to be brutish, with a resigned laziness that seems aggravated by the discomfort of recent cosmetic surgery.

All We Had (2016)

Good Effort But Flawed

[5/10 · 20 April 2017]

The film has the strengths aforementioned on this site. But the improvisation, and other scenes like it, in the house between mother and daughter near the end failed and were very annoying. And there was something particularly unbelievable about Ruthie's rebelliousness at one point when things improved for her and her mother. Luke Wilson's role was performed masterfully.