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bodinehist
Reviews
The Boss (2016)
Don't waste your time or your money.
I love Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Bell, but this movie was terrible. The plot was unfocused, the characters underdeveloped, and most of the the "jokes" crude and poorly timed. I left wondering who the target audience was supposed to be because I cannot picture anyone enjoying this film. With so much talent, it was painful to watch its lukewarm opening disintegrate into vulgar attempts at cheap laughs that never came. The whole thing just made me feel sad...and not in a good way. I hope Melissa McCarthy will continue to work on her writing because she clearly has a great sense of humor, but this film reflects poorly on her talent.
Dark Shadows (2012)
This film tried to be too many things and failed.
I had only a passing acquaintance with the original series but had high expectations of the film as i am generally a fan of Tim Burton. I loved the setting's Gothic darkness peppered with the kitsch of the 1970's, but beyond that the film was a disappointment. Not funny enough to be a parody and not serious enough to be an homage, this movie wasted the talents of its cast.
Burton didn't seem to know who his audience was, and as such, story elements and characters were introduced helter skelter without any sense of how they fit into the film or would play out in the end. For example, David Collins, a boy who is supposed to be so highly disturbed by his relationship with his dead mother's ghost that a full time psychologist and a string of nannies have been employed by the family to keep him under control, is completely manageable and relatively polite. The audience never sees him acting oddly upon her instructions or even conversing with the dead relative, much less showing any signs of being disturbed. Meanwhile, his cousin appears to have some anger issues, and the audience has no idea why until the last ten minutes of the movie when it's revealed out of nowhere that she had been turned into a werewolf as an infant. Despite the bizarre timing of this revelation, it has no bearing on the outcome of the story at all. Instead, "disturbed" David's ghostly mother, a character whom we know nothing about and have never seen until the climax of the film, ultimately brings about the downfall of the antagonist.
I had the impression that much of the story was left on the cutting room floor, which may be the result of trying to fit a five-year-long soap opera into a two-hour movie. The result was a morass of flat, unsympathetic characters and loose strings that left me with little desire to learn where they led.
The film had moments of humor mostly tied to the incongruity of the two time periods, the most noteworthy of which was the use of the clever use of 70's music tracks, but this was not nearly enough to make up for the film's flaws. Overall, it felt like I was being told a joke by someone who doesn't know how to tell a joke.
The Deep Blue Sea (2011)
98 minutes I will never get back.
I entered this film with high expectations and was sorely disappointed, and for someone who usually enjoys period films with strong character development, that's saying something. Everything I needed to know about the character(s) was revealed in the slow spiraling first ten minutes of the movie during which I was already looking at my watch and waiting for the pace of the film to pick up. It never did.
Here is the story: bored, well-to-do housewife, has left boring, and sadly loyal husband with a difficult mother for shallow, self-consumed air force pilot only to find that the relationship doesn't work. We don't know exactly why. He is certainly damaged by the war and hates his current mundane life, and it's hinted that he's not smart enough for her, though for some inconceivable reason she can't seem to break her infatuation with him. She hates her life and herself, so rather than spending it sitting in a dark flat staring at the walls and hoping for lung cancer to set in, she decides to kill herself. This is where the audience comes into the film.
Unfortunately for the us, she fails, so we are forced to endure watching the remaining 90 minutes of the film in small, yet amazingly interminable snippets of her life, any of which, if developed at all, had the potential to be interesting. By the last 20 minutes, it was a toss up which of us, her or me, would survive to see the light of day.