Hello everyone and welcome to my podcast,
I reviewed the horror film, Insidious. Insidious is about a family trying to defend their family and comatose son from evil spirits.
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My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
Release Date: July, 2011
Plot Outline: An overweight teen lives his life
Terri... I don’t really know what to make of this movie. Terri was very bland. The entire movie felt monotone and uneventful. There weren’t any life lessons to be learned or anything of the sort and yet…I really enjoyed it. I just can’t tell you the exact reasons why.
Terri was charming in a way. The relationships throughout the film were sweet and warmed my heart. The characters were very likable and overall the film had a very realistic feel, which makes it easy to relate to.
The character Chad disturbed me. It was very obvious that he has many emotional and psychological issues. He made a few scenes tense and uncomfortable.
In my opinion, Terri wasn’t anything special but I enjoyed watching it. I just don’t think I will remember it for very long and I am uncertain of the purpose of the film.
Release Date: 2011
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Bechdel Test: Fail
Plot Outline: A man struggling with depression finds his voice in a beaver puppet.
The Beaver started out strong. It has a strong cast full of talented, well respected actors. I was surprised that Jennifer Lawrence was in this. I didn’t realize that until I started watching the film. Though The Beaver was original, the idea of the puppet was unique and intriguing, I felt that the film did follow the usual script of a family falling apart and then trying to bring themselves back together. That doesn’t mean that the film isn’t good, it just means I have seen it before, without the puppet.
Watching The Beaver was surprisingly emotional. This is a story about a man’s mental illness. This man is falling apart, his family is falling apart. It feels sad and it feels real, even though the puppet is a thing. You can easily see this family’s pain and resentment and fear. Watching the family fall apart is much like watching a train wreck. You want to look away but you just can’t. It is captivating.
Like I said before, The Beaver started out strong…”started” being the key word. I felt that the end of the movie was weak and lazy.
I did enjoy watching this film, I wasn’t bored but after it finished I wasn’t left with much, just an hour or so of being entertained. It isn’t memorable but it was a feel good film for the moment.
If you liked The Beaver, watch: Stuck In Love (though I liked Stuck In Love a lot more)
Plot Outline: A man summons a demon in hopes of finding his girlfriend that was stolen by another demon and taken to hell.
Release Date: 2009
Lo was…something else. It was quite interesting to watch. I was pretty confused the entire time and just didn’t know how to feel or react. It wasn’t like a real movie. It was this weird spoof of demon movies. The acting was awful. It was very over dramatized with the facial expressions that it was laughable. There was random singing…and the story was silly. And yet…I was intrigued. I couldn’t stop watching it. I needed to see where this insanity went.
Besides the make up and costumes, I felt like this was a movie I could have made with my friends. There wasn’t anything really special and it barely seemed like a real movie.
I did however love the ending. Throughout the film I was very curious as to how Lo would end. It was so odd that I couldn’t imagine what they would do. I was pleasantly surprised with the ending. It was y favorite part of the entire movie.
Release Date: August 27th 2010
Plot Outline: A doubtful priest decides to uncover the truth of demonic possession and films his exorcism for a documentary.
I love a good exorcism/demon movie so I was excited to see The Last Exorcism. It was a bit of a twist from the traditional exorcism idea which I was a big fan of. I liked the idea a lot, a priest not believing in demons and exorcisms and says he will perform them to expose frauds.
The start of the movie was just great. I loved the priest and his dialogue. He was very intelligent and sweet. He had a good heart, an overall likeable character.
As the story progressed us as the audience had so much doubt. We don’t know what is going on at all; we don’t know what is real and what is fake. Is she possessed? Is she faking it? Mystery! And I loved it.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Last Exorcism until the ending. The characters were likeable and intriguing, I was confused, the plot was fairly original, and it was suspenseful and mysterious. The Last Exorcism had everything going for it but they just didn’t know how to end it I suppose. The ending was terrible…beyond terrible. It really ruined the whole movie for me. I saw this in theaters. In unison the entire audience let out disappointing groans and whining. You could actually feel the sense of disappointment overtake the entire theater.
It was soooo good. Why did they have to ruin it? Whyyyy?
Release Date: August 6th 2010
Plot Outline: A group of misfit NYC dancers compete against an evil gang of dancers.
Now, I know the Step Up movies aren’t what one would consider to be a “good” movie. There’s nothing great about them. The plot it mediocre, the idea has been done 100 different ways, they are corny and predicable. I’m sorry, but I love them! Step Up and Step Up 2 were highly entertaining. I could watch people dance for hours and hours, especially extremely good looking people.
I was pretty excited with I heard Step Up 3 was coming out. I however was not thrilled about it coming out in 3D. I hate it when movies are in 3D. I try to avoid them. They are usually bad and only meant to be seen in 3D. That was my mini rant about 3D. Moving on…
Though the Step Up’s aren’t great in general, Step Up 3 was beyond terrible. I normally love the dancing and can excuse the bad acting because I understand that if you are talented in one way such as dancing, then you probably aren’t talented in the field of acting. It wouldn’t be fair to be so
multi talented. I usually excuse the terrible acting in performance films but I just couldn’t in this one. All of the actors seemed like they were trying way too hard. It was painful to watch them try to become the characters.
Also, the characters were just ridiculous! They were doofy and unlikeable. And there was some feud with some dancing gang/ninjas. I’m not sure what was going on. I was confused. Whatever they were supposed to be I just didn’t like them.
The main purpose of the Step Up movies is to enjoy the dancing. Even the dancing was terrible in this movie! None of the dance sequences were that diverse. I felt like I was watching the same dance just in different ways.
It was nothing more than one of those pathetic teen movies, the group of talented misfits, the mysterious girl that is actually on the enemies side but falls in love with the good guy and switches sides, the battle at the end that the good guys of course win.
I expected all of this, I really did. But I also expected exciting dances to watch. Step Up 3 just didn’t deliver.
Release Date: September 25th 2009
Plot Outline: A remake of the 80’s version. Fame centers around talented students at the New York Academy of Performing Arts.
Fame was…interesting. I have so many emotions about it, negative emotions. I didn’t see the 80’s version so I am solely basing this review on the 2009 version.
The beginning of Fame reminded me a lot of American Idol or Americas Got Talent, one of those American “reality” talent shows. It was difficult to distinguish which people were the awful ones and which were the talent. It was amusing because some of the performers I thought were terrible actually turned out to be main characters. Now I say “main” loosely which I will explain soon.
Fame skipped around an enormous amount, way too much to get to know any of the characters, any of their names, and of course to develop any characters or story line. There were so many characters that it was difficult to keep track of them. When one would come back on screen later I would think, “Oh wow, I totally forgot about them”. Fame must have been a fan of skipping around because it also skipped over time very quickly. Freshman year was all of a sudden Sophomore year. What I didn’t like about it was that all the characters were in the same position and had the same conflicts as the year before. There wasn’t really any progression.
You could tell Fame was trying to have substantial characters and story lines because every once in a while we would get small tidbits of a characters life and struggles but not enough to really know the character or really care.
One thing I actually loved about the movie was the performances throughout the movie. They were very good. The actors were quite talented. I was obsessed with Kherington Payne, she played Alice. Her dancing was fantastic! I was so jealous! I want to dance like that!…like anything remotely good.
I didn’t really have a problem with Fame because I love watching people dance. I love all of those lame dancing movies like Step Up, Center Stage…they aren’t good but I will re-watch them a number of times because I am so drawn to the dancing. So, I wasn’t bothered by Fame until the end that is. The ending was a huge issue for me. Being a musical/dance movie the ending should have been phenomenal. It wasn’t. The ending was so anti-climatic. I was extremely disappointed. I was looking forward to the fantastic musical piece at the end, the fantastic ending every musical/dance movie is supposed to contain. The end performance was not nearly as good as the performances throughout the film
All in all Fame was sucky but highly entertaining.
Release Date: October 21st 2005
Plot Outline: A diverse group of high school students stick together to teach their principal a lesson.
Kids…what can I say about Kids?
Ummm….well. The message was a strong and positive one. The wardrobe definitely enhanced the message, with the kids sporting t-shirts with messages like, “Fight the power”.
That was all well and good but the acting was beyond horrendous! It was…I don’t even think there are words in existence to describe how I felt about the acting. Lets just say that I turned the movie off despite the positive message.
Because I turned Kids off so soon I don’t really have much to say about it.
Let me know how it was if you can manage to sit through it!
Release Date: April 18th 2008
Plot Outline: A woman in her late 30’s still suffers from survivor’s guilt from a school shooting she experienced in High School.
The Life Before Her Eyes tried to be an emotional drama but simply ended up coming off as doofy because of the bad acting. Uma Thurman doesn’t do emotional very well. There were so many moments of her staring off into space, trying to keep an emotionally exclaimed face. It was supposed to be deeply emotional but I couldn’t help but laugh and roll my eyes. I can not tell you how many times I rolled my eyes while watching this. I really should have kept a count.
The Life Before Her Eyes was full of flashbacks. I liked the idea of it but the flashbacks seemed random, not well placed, and seemed to appear without any sort of purpose or connection.
Ohhh how slow the plot developed! I was SO bored for most of the movie. It was to the point where (sadly) I was excited when the school shooting was shown because I needed something to happen!
Something that bothered me in The Life Before Her Eyes was that Diana (Thurman) didn’t seem to like her child at all. It was just so odd. It seemed like she hated her. That wasn’t even just me either. Even the daughter says, “You hate me.” to her mother. I felt so bad for this little girl. They didn’t have a strong relationship at all. Her daughter was very intelligent, us as the audience can even see that and yet, Diana (Thurman) talks to her like a two year old. She is very condescending towards her young daughter.But then again, she didn’t seem to have a strong relationship with her husband either. Also, I didn’t see the connection between younger Diana and the best friend Maureen (Eva Amurri). They had nothing in common whatsoever.
Obviously, there wasn’t good chemistry among any of the characters in the movie and the behavior Diana displays towards the other characters makes her extremely unlikable.
There was a major twist at the end but I didn’t like the twist at all. It didn’t even really make sense to me. I felt like it came out of nowhere and it wasn’t well placed. Maybe I missed something but I found a lot of plot holes.
Whatever, I didn’t like the movie enough to care. But this just made me hate The Life Before Her Eyes even more.
Release Date: January 19th 2009
Plot Outline: After his return from Iraq, a soldier is assigned to a Casualty Notification Team. He struggles with ethical dilemmas when he becomes romantically involved with the widow of a fallen officer.
I enjoyed the first half of The Messenger; it was emotional, sad, and extremely interesting. By the second half of the movie I felt like I was watching a completely different film.
The first half of the movie was more about the soldiers dealing with families of the departed. The second half gets into the soldiers messed up lives and we just watch them running around being ridiculous and reckless. Notifying family members wasn’t in the second half of the movie at all, which confused me because I thought that was what the movie was about. I suppose I was wrong.
One thing I loved about The Messenger were the camera angles. They were phenomenal. The angles always showed exactly what needed to be seen. There wasn’t usually a lot of background. A lot of the movie focused mainly on faces, stressing the importance of emotions and facial expressions in the film. If something was needed to be seen in the background then it was shown.
There was one scene in particular that displayed this: The two main characters (Foster, Harrelson) tell a man that his daughter has died in battle overseas. He begins to cry and in the background we see a little boy playing with his toys on the floor, we gather that it is her son.
The angles were very well done. They made each scene more intense. I would imagine this would also cause the actors to act better knowing that a lot of the scene is strictly focused on their faces and their reactions.
A friend told me that the actors, Harrelson and Foster didn’t know how the people were going to react so it was kind of an inprov movie. I looked up everything I could about that aspect of the filming but couldn’t find anything stating what she claimed. So let me know if anyone else has heard that.
Movies According to Des 