Category: Greg’s Reviews

Eventually, This Will Be a Review of the Movie ‘Husbands’ by John Cassavetes

l_04cc8fa5400ad4dc573b11ccac91abf4


Rob Fortucci, one of my best friends, commissioned this review.  I met him in tenth grade—in film class, no less.  First hour at Dwight D. Eisenhower High School, in affluent/middle class Shelby Township, Michigan.

By the time we met we had each already cultivated our respective cinephile statuses.  Mine was completely traditional—my parents and grandparents are movie buffs and introduced me to all the kid-friendly classics, everything from Spielberg to Chaplin.  At around 12, I started venturing out on my own into more ‘subversive’ territory, as one does.  By the time I met Rob at 14, I was already a Kubrick, Scorsese, and Allen fanatic, and a true student of the 70’s and ‘golden age cinema’.
Continue reading Eventually, This Will Be a Review of the Movie ‘Husbands’ by John Cassavetes

The Blair Witch Project: Stop Not Liking It

blairwitch


The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Written and Directed by Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez
81 min.

Warning: This review contains spoilers.  Please have seen this movie before reading.

The Blair Witch Project may be the most effective movie ever made.  It’s certainly one of the best.  I say ‘effective’ because its goal—to scare the shit out of you—is so cleverly achieved that it boggles the mind.

This movie is effective for the same reason any movie is effective: it’s a clear, soundly constructed story, told creatively by way of great performances, well-crafted shots, and brilliant exposition.  Exposition in particular is such a difficult thing, and is so often mishandled, generally leading to the complete and utter unwinding of a movie.
Continue reading The Blair Witch Project: Stop Not Liking It

The Master: P.T. Anderson’s Bunch of Footage That Got Released Somehow

master


The Master (2012)
Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
144 min.

Warning: this review contains spoilers I guess.  Nothing happens in this movie though, so you can’t really be ‘spoiled’.

The Master isn’t a movie.  It’s a bunch of footage.  I’ll get to that, but first I need to walk you through how I feel about P.T. Anderson’s filmography. Excluding Hard Eight.  Let’s just pretend Hard Eight doesn’t exist.  That’s not difficult, since nobody has seen it or even heard of it.  So, starting with Boogie Nights:

Boogie Nights is about a guy, Dirk Diggler, that part is clear, but then, for no reason, there’s a bunch of footage of other guys—ancillary ones.  This is because P.T. Anderson wanted to make a three-hour movie.  Which is insulting.  It’s insulting because rather than try to make a good movie that people will like, he simply wanted to make a three-hour movie.  And the way he attempted to do this (I say ‘attempted’ because the finished version is 155 minutes) was through loading it with superfluous side characters whose arcs don’t matter.  They matter so little that their conclusions are either mind-blowingly lazy (the shot of Rollergirl sitting in a high school classroom shoved into a montage at the end) or completely nonexistent (we must visit the deleted scenes on the DVD to see what happens to the black porn actress.  Apparently the guy she married beats her for some reason.)
Continue reading The Master: P.T. Anderson’s Bunch of Footage That Got Released Somehow

ATM: The Worst Movie Ever to Come Out of the Worst Genre Ever (A Bunch of Dudes Stuck in a Room and They Don’t Know Why)

ATMsmall


ATM (2012)
Directed by David Brooks
Written by Chris Sparling
90 min.

Warning: This review contains spoilers, but it doesn’t matter, because this movie sucks.

In ATM, a guy parks his car about a hundred yards from an ATM for no reason.  I guess just to make his friend walk really far in the freezing cold.  What an asshole.  Then, a few minutes later, after a bunch of stupid devices have conveniently put all three of our main characters in a glass-enclosed ATM together, they’re afraid to exit because they see a guy 25 feet away wearing a coat. I’m not kidding.  They live in New York City, yet they’re afraid of a guy, I guess, because he’s wearing a coat.  It literally just looks like he’s waiting for them to leave so he can use the ATM.  But then, to prove their illogical suspicions were actually correct, the coat guy suddenly murders a guy walking a dog.   As it turns out, the coat guy is a weird murderer who stakes out people at ATMs.
Continue reading ATM: The Worst Movie Ever to Come Out of the Worst Genre Ever (A Bunch of Dudes Stuck in a Room and They Don’t Know Why)