That Blog Thing - Movie Reviews, Film Reviews, Entertainment, Film Entertainment, TV Reviews: life

Monday, 11 February 2013

Kyle Review

Relationships are never easy to figure out. There is almost no one you can talk to who can give you perfect advice on the subject. They are confusing. Partly because you have trouble really understanding the other person. Mainly because they are not you. Nowhere is this more difficult to figure out than in school.

Not only do you have the task of learning all sorts of information and figuring out what you want to do with the rest of your life, but you have the added stress of trying to figure out people. School is a proving ground for more than just test scores and knowledge. It is a proving ground for life.

Which is why it is so difficult. It is why there are so many films about the school, and particularly the high school experience. Juggling the two can be hell. Doing it on film can be even harder to figure out. You have to find a way to compress a story of what is most often a romance into an incredibly short period of time. Anyone who has attempted it knows it is a lot harder than it seems.

So I applaud Amy Hill for making the attempt. Although I am not entirely sure that she pulled it off. She appears to have fallen into a trap that many have in their attempts. I have fallen pray to it myself. The idea of having a particular scene in mind and writing to that. In this case it is a scene of two young school chums walking home together.

What the film lacks is a progression of character and dialogue. From the get go it is unclear as to what each character is doing and why they are there. The implication at one point is that they had made plans to walk home together or that the young girl has agreed to be walked home. This has not really been set up properly and thus we run into problems.

There are certain elements to the characters which are interesting. Their family lives and what they plan on doing when they grow up, but it feels like this has not entirely been thought out and the characters are designed to find reasons to talk rather than to actually attract the audience and keep them engaged for the full 12 minutes.

Still, the concept is pretty cute and worth looking at. I look forward to seeing what else the filmmaking has out there. To see what I am talking about, check it out below:

You can also check out more content at Film Annex.

Friday, 21 December 2012

Anne Perry Interiors Review

Every writer has a story. Something that brought them to who they are and what they do. Sometimes they are really cool stories, and sometimes they are not. Other times they are stories that a writer has been so affected by that they just don't talk about it all that much. Never the less it is a story and it is the backbone of what makes them writers. It tends to inform the stories they tell and how they tell it. In some ways you have to have one in order to be a writer. My experience has been that if you don't, your stories don't tend to be that interesting. They come off flat and not really worth the time to read, which is not to say that you can't find a good story to tell if you work hard enough. Writing just tends to come easier if you have a story that you really need to tell. The story flows better and emotionally connects with people reading it. At least that's been my experience given my own history as a writer.

Anne Perry is a writer with a story to tell. Interestingly enough though, she seems to avoid talking about it with any great detail. You can find details if you are interested and they are put forward in the documentary about her, but it's a difficult topic to hear about. Once you do though, you can completely understand why it might be hard to say much about it. A writer internalizes most of their problems and emotions. That is why they tend to write such great stories, because what they won't say to a person, they will say in the words on the page. It can be buried under a lot of the things the stories they are telling need in order to make it interesting for the reader, but they are there if you look hard enough. For Anne Perry it seems that finding that involves reading into the opposite of what she writes about. She is searching for something deep and meaningful in her life, and many of her characters apparently reflect that reality but the reason for their search is the real prize of understand her.

Ultimately, writing is a long and difficult process for everyone. Even for someone who has written 40 books it takes time to make it feel and sound right for the people who might one day read it. This movie is a long and drawn out process but the pay off, for lack of a better way to describe it, is well worth the time and effort to get through it. Anne Perry - Interiors is a film worth watching for any writer who has ever felt frustrated sitting at a table staring at a blank page or computer screen. For anyone else, it's a deep inside look at where the urge to write tends to come from and will give you a deeper understanding of the life of a writer.

You can check it out on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, and I Love Docs.com

Monday, 17 September 2012

Silver Linings Playbook Review: Can you find the Silver Lining in your life’s Playbook?

“Life is a struggle that no one actually survives.”

It’s a difficult thing to do, figure out how to cope with the world around you and the problems you encounter. Things are hard, they take work and even then there aren’t really any guarantees you’ll achieve anything. Is it any wonder that people go a little crazy? How crazy can things get though? Perhaps what’s crazy is the world around us, or even the people in it. No matter what it is some people can’t cope, or they don’t cope very well. At the core of Silver Lining Playbook is the question of what do you do then. How do you deal with a world that makes you crazy?

The story centers around Pat, a guy recently released from a mental institution after a traumatic incident sent him over the edge with a condition he didn’t know he had. Now living with his parents, he struggles to figure out how to move forward when in some ways he is still very much stuck in the life he left behind. With no job, no prospects and a town full of people who know what happened to him, he tries to find some aspect of his life to hold onto while managing his condition. What he ends up holding onto is his wife. Very much out of his life since the incident, Pat becomes focused on the idea of getting his wife back despite the reality that he isn’t allowed to communicate with her.

Sufficed to say this proves to be more difficult then it seems to him and he begins looking for a work around to this problem through his very supportive friends and family. There’s only one problem, his friends and family aren’t the benchmarks for normality either. And this becomes the perfect mix for a family rom-com with an interesting twist on it. It’s long been a staple of the romantic comedy genre to question the idea of normal. Stories from the 80s and 90s were big on this kind of theme, particularly in the realm of the high school drama version of a romantic comedy. Since then many stories have tried to establish what normal is, or at least what we want normal to be with some success here and there.

For Silver Linings Playbook however, normal is in fact the abnormal. Most of the characters have some strange way of dealing with the world. But in particular what makes it all work is the quirky way in which Pat, as played by Bradley Cooper, lives in the world. He is very honest and direct with people about what he sees or feels yet he does it with a kind of charm and openness about himself that it’s hard to feel insulted by him. Topped off by the fact that he has learned to try and look for the silver lining in even the most horrible things.

What’s interesting is that because of the unusual nature of the characters, I was never quite sure where they will end up. Romantic comedies have a tendency to go in certain ways. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. More recently they’ve tended to get a little ridiculous with their storylines. This film feels neither ridiculous nor cheap. It goes for the emotionally honest moments and with Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro, Chris Tucker and Bradley Cooper in the roles they manage to hit them pretty well.

Can you find the Silver Lining in your life? I can honestly say that this movie is something of a silver lining in my life right now.

Paper.li