Tag: Sarah Gadon

Seagrass was watched as part of the Seattle International Film Festival 2024! It had its showing on Monday, May 13th as part of the festival, and it was the Seattle premiere of this film! You can check out my interview with director, Meredith Hama-Brown, here!

Judith (Ally Maki) and Steve (Luke Roberts) are going through something. Judith is a Japanese Canadian, and Steve is “White Canadian”, and being an interracial couple comes with a lot of difficulties other couples never have to face or talk about. But they are now working on couples therapy. The one they picked is actually many days long and a vacation spot, with other couples. A nice destination to air out their issues and work together to find their love again. In a beautiful area!

And this is one that is for the whole family. They have two kids (Remy Marthaller, Nyha Huang Breitkreuz), who also have their own problems growing up, being of mixed ethnicities, and their identity. But on this vacation is an area with a lot of kids, and kids activities, so they have plenty to do and fun to be had, while their parents are having a bit less fun.

The catalyst for this story is that Judith’s mom died recently, and Judith has been in a funk ever sense. Hopefully they can work on their issues. Hopefully the last decade wasn’t a waste. Or was it?

Also starring Sarah Gadon and Chris Pang, as another Asian/White couple at the resort, with their genders swapped from our two leads. Although notably, the man is Chinese Canadian, not Japanese.

Scenic cool cave shot but don’t worry, the cave MATTERS. Seagrass is a film that is one step away from being a thriller, purely for tense moments in their drama. Honestly, I wondered if this might turn into a murder story. Or a ghost story. Or something. I was a bit scared at times, as they really ramped certain events at the end. And the camera work. The camera really liked to linger, or do some far away shots, and it had me wondering if something was going to pop out and the genre was going to switch.

I think that can all be attributed to the wonderful acting and script for this story. While its not as tense as films that make you clench early on and never let go, it gives subtle hints of a potential ending disaster, and you never know if this is going to be the time for a boiling over point.

Maki does a lot of great work here specifically. Roberts is a good standard dull white guy, who isn’t unable to understand view points outside of his own. But Maki has to put in the full range here. And she is wonderful for it.

I didn’t know exactly where Seagrass was going with its story by the end, but it chose a very nice path, with some powerful final words. I am also glad that the 1994 Vancouver Hockey riots were a part of the story as well. Always important to include those into movies, if at all possible.

3 out of 4.

Picture me, young and wild, in the summer of 2016. I heard about this small film coming out and it promised to fill all of my desires for a film at the time.

First it had a mysterious and pretentious name, Indignation. Good, that means there is probably intellectual dialogue at least. It promised to be a serious drama. And it had one of my top three favorite young actors at the helm.

I needed to see this film! But alas, didn’t get to the theater, didn’t get a screener, and then I mostly forgot about it. But it is December, damn it. Good film time. At some point it just clicked on me, I rushed out to gain a copy and watched it when I was ready to potentially feel depressed.

All I really had to do to prepare was to look at my college loans.

Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman), a Jewish born boy, is heading off to college. He is leaving his home in New Jersey to go to a smaller college in Ohio, basically a different country, while his friends all go and sign up for the Korean war. Not Marcus though. He wants to be a lawyer. He wants to argue and show off his intelligence.

They immediately put him in a triple room with two other Jewish students, guys who didn’t join the one Jewish fraternity in a prominently Christian campus. How Christian? Well, the Dean (Tracy Letts) requires every student to go to a few of his sermons every year, not all of them, just about ten or so (I forgot), where he preaches for an hour on morality, rules, and more.

This is really just one of the problems Marcus finds himself in when he gets there. There begins to be problems with the roommates. And he meets a girl, Olicia (Sarah Gadon), who opens his eyes. And his trousers, as she is technically more experience than him and he really doesn’t know how to handle it. She does know how to handle it though, if you know what I mean.

Needless to say, college will change little Marcus, for the better, for the worse, it is hard to determine.

Also featuring Danny Burstein, Pico Alexander, and Linda Emond.

Just a car ride and chill, right?

This seems to have turned into an example of a poor, simple movie reviewer getting over hyped on very little amounts of detail. I expected a film full of arguments about religion and academia. About what it means to grow up Jewish. Maybe some antisemitism. Instead I received a regular drama film with a couple above average scenes.

Let’s go into some detail here. There was one main scene between Lerman and Letts’ characters, lasting maybe even twenty minutes, about how Logan’s character reacted and saw the world. If the whole film was packed full of scenes like that one, it would be fantastic. A nice serious drama with great dialogue.

There were also a few great scenes between Lerman and Gadon, on sexuality and may also be worth the price of admission. It just felt like the rest of the film fell flat.

I won’t call it boring, but I will say it feels incredibly lacking. A story is there, but one that never gets fully fleshed out. At 110 minutes, I feel like it could have cut out almost thirty and still given the same exact story.

Maybe there is something I am missing, but honestly, Indignation has turned into an incredibly disappointing film.

2 out of 4.

My decision to watch The 9th Life of Louis Drax seemed to happen almost by accident. In fact, I had four options for screeners to go see, an overwhelming number of choices. One of them was about to come out in theaters, so I didn’t want to rush the review. Another one didn’t come out for almost two months, and there would be more future screenings. So it came down to this film and a war film.

I settled on 9th Life merely because it seemed weird. Both films seemed interesting, both had mysterious components. But this title was just a bit stranger.

And hey, going on to read the IMDB page really didn’t answer any questions. I figured it was based on a book and would just be an actual unique movie to witness. I just didn’t imagine it would also be intense, haunting, and emotional.

And hey, you know what they say.
Wires on the head, sexy in bed.

Louis Drax (Aiden Longworth) is not your average little kid. On his 9th birthday, he finds himself falling off a cliff, straight into the ocean. You see, Louis Drax has always been accident prone. His birth was an accident, he almost killed his mom, Natalie (Sarah Gadon) in the process and needed an emergency C-Section. When he was a baby, a light fixture fell on him in his crib, breaking ribs. But Louis survived. Louis survived electric shocks, food poisoning, and more, and damn it, he is going to survive this.

Sure, he was declared legally dead for over two hours and is now in a coma, but he survived. Sure, his dad (Aaron Paul) allegedly pushed him over the edge and is now on the run missing, but he survived. He is now having visions in his coma, causing him to flashback through his life, but he survived.

And he has a great coma doctor to help him in Dr. Allan Pascal (Jamie Dornan), who also gives TED talks about coma stuff that is totally relevant to the plot. However, Pascal’s relationship with Natalie, as they both mourn over Louis’ fate gets a bit too personal and with the dad potentially stalking around, it can get bad.

At the same time, they really have to get to the bottom of all these accidents. Why is God seemingly out to get this little boy, causing him to need to see a psychiatrist (Oliver Platt) for all of his issues?

Also starring Lina Roessler, Julian Wadham, Molly Parker, Barbara Hershey, and Anjali Jay.

Ah, what a happy little family. 9th birthdays are always full of falling from heights, right?

The 9th Life of Louis Drax is the type of film I would love to talk about, complete with spoilers, but that is now how my site has worked. So I will respect that and keep things vague.

9th Life was a movie going experience. Not in the same way of something like Lord of the Rings, but an emotional roller coaster, going more than up and down, but also backwards, looping, spinning, and in circles. I’m sorry, that hyperbole was kind of shit. The intro showed Louis going through accidents growing up, including as a baby, and it basically made me horrified. I cried. And that was just the beginning. (Editor’s Note: Yes, I also cried at the ending).

Louis in the coma was a strange place, full of flashbacks, weird creatures and demonic voices. What was happening in real life at the same time was just so odd and strange. In terms of the mystery, I figured it out for the most part about halfway through. However, I was wildly wrong on the smaller details and guessing a big part of the end didn’t take away from the actual experience.

No, we don’t get to see Dornan’s penis. Stop asking. This is like Fifty Shades of Grey all over again.

The acting from Gadon, Dornan, Longworth, and Paul were all top notch. This is probably the best acting I have seen from Paul since Breaking Bad. He had me in tears at one part as well. Gadon’s character was appropriately weird, Longworth carried every scene despite being such a young actor, and Dornan was a very relatable character. It was easy to see his mistakes and understand why he was making them, while also finding him sincere in all of his actions.

And shit. This movie despite being fiction is about real diseases and problems. Again, if I went into specifics, it’d count as spoilers. There was one really odd scene at first that didn’t feel realistic. However, it fit within the universe that the movie had created, so it wasn’t completely out of place. It did provide a very haunting and sad ending as all of the threads were finally unraveled.

The 9th Life of Louis Drax surprised me. I both want to see it again and kind of never again. Good performances all around and damn it, an original story as well.

4 out of 4.

Rawr Dracula! Vampires! So hot right now, of course we need to revisit the main man behind the bat, the one, the only, Vlad.

Dracula Untold (I promise I won’t get into how much I hate “this is the real story” nonsense for fictional stories that keep happening, I swear) wants to talk about how one man came to be the Dracula that people fear today. A real vampire. Not a sparkly boring person. Not a bunch of kids in private school. Just a guy who has standard vampire powers and standard vampire weaknesses.

But before we get into that, in case you didn’t know, this is becoming a franchise. Not just vampires. But all the classic Universal monsters. It was originally starting with a 2016 remake of The Mummy, then Wolfman, then eventually a Frankenstein thing, but they tacked this one on too. They are going to bring all the monsters into a movie and have them fight other monsters I guess. And it might fail terribly. And yes, it is a lot like Avengers. But I mean, it might be cool, as long as these movies are good, right?

Well, some bad ass armor could help, but why doesn’t it glow and shimmer?

This movie isn’t set in the modern day. I already told you it is about Vlad The Impaler (Luke Evans), the real inspiration for Dracula. Not that Vlad in real life was a vampire, it looks like Bram just took his name and hierarchy and ran with it.

Either way, Mr. The Impaler got his name for being a bad ass. He was recruited at a young age in the army and killed killed killed. Now he is a Prince of his own area, Transylvania, and wants to live life in peace. There is also a local vampire in a cave nearby, but ignore him. Either way, some Turks come knocking on his door, asking for the normal payment. But because some of their scouts were found dead, they assumed the Transylvanians came out and killed them. Now they payment is some cash and 1,000 boys to fill their armies. What! No!

So he goes to Mehmed the Conqueror (Dominic Cooper), the Turk leader to appeal to his better nature. Well, he ain’t having it, even when he offers up himself instead of the boys. Now they want 1001 boys, with the additional one being his son, Ingeras the Young (Art Parkinson).

Well, shit. What’s an Impaler going to do. Sell his soul to the devil for temporary vampire powers to defeat an entire army? Yeah. Thank goodness he knows where Master Vampire the Vampire (Charles Dance) is to get his powers on. As long as he doesn’t drink blood in 3 days, they will be temporary. If not, well, full on vampire.

He also should keep it secret. Very Catholic lands here. They don’t like Vampires. Maybe his lady, Mirena the Woman (Sarah Gadon) will find some parts of it interesting though.

Also featuring Diarmaid Murtagh as Dumitru the Untitled.

Shit, they also got Patsey from Holy Grail in here?

This might be one of those movies that would be better not seeing the trailer? That is my guess. If I didn’t see literally every cool thing a dozen times from trailers, I would have enjoyed the movie more. But Dracula didn’t do anything cooler than those few scenes. Namely the bat attack related scenes.

Other than that, it is mostly a poorly acted period movie. We got accents, we got swords, horses, chivalry and more. And just a lot of bad overly dramatic acting.

And if that is what you want in your “NO THIS IS THE TRUE STORY” films, then you might actually love it.

Unfortunately, no matter what happened with this movie, we were getting the next two anyways. Universal is going to make this Monster Avengers thing happen, damn it. Maybe the final outcome will be cool. Maybe the next movies will be good. But this is not the Iron Man of the Monsters universe, unfortunately.

1 out of 4.

Enemies are quite annoying. Everyone probably has a few. I know I have several, including: The Morlocks, Jafar, Tropical Flavored skittles. The list just goes on and on and on.

But what if your enemy was yourself? I have heard that if your enemy is yourself, it is often your worst enemy. That has got to suck. The film Enemy is actually based on that concept!

Actually, it is based on a novel, The Double. It is definitely not based on the movie The Double that came out this year, also dealing with doppelgangers, and it most certainly has nothing to do with the movie The Double from a few years ago.

Huh. Maybe The Double (2014 film) is a twisted doppelganger of The Double (Book) and it prevented Enemy from being a regular doppelganger of The Double (book). The Double (2014 film) stole Enemies identity!

My head hurts. Oooh beards!

Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is your average regular college professor. He teaches about totalitarianism and dictators! A theme that may slightly be relevant to the movie. He lives with his girlfriend Mary (Melanie Laurent) and she thinks he is a cheating fool. He has been weird lately and keeping secrets and making secret phone calls.

Why? Because Adam has made a relevation. After watching a movie recommended by a coworker, he noticed a bellhop in the background. And that bellhop looked just like him. Turns out this Anthony Claire (Jake Gyllenhaal) has only been in a few pictures, all side who gives a shit roles, but by golly, he looks just like him. After a lot of sleuthing Adam is able to set up a meeting with Anthony.

Shit. Is. Bananas.

Well, when someone seems to be an exact replica of you with a different personality, who also knows where you live and who you interact with, it is pretty easy to get paranoid. Anthony himself has a pregnant wife (Sarah Gadon) and is in a committed relationship.

What can either of these gentlemen gain from this doppelmagic and more importantly, what can they lose?

It is hard to stalk someone when you don’t know which one is your husband.

Reading up on an analysis of the film and book after I watched the movie, there was apparently a lot that went over my head. Intellectual smart person stuff that might require reading or degrees in movie theory to get. And don’t worry, i am not letting that fact get affect my view. I just had a recurring “what the fuck, spiders?” thought going through my head throughout the movie. I’d say its a small enough part to get by.

Enemy is incredibly well acted and Jake G is showing off over the last few years a great side to himself. With this, Prisoners, End of Watch, I’d almost be willing to watch most anything with him as a main actor in it. Dude figured it out and it was good.

Enemy is not a quick movie and one that requires you to pay attention. It has a small number of important characters in it and really tries hard to drive the appropriate emotions through silence. However, the film is also really friggan yellow. And that just in general bugs the crap out of me. Over filtering.

I hope another film comes out with a similar plot to make more duplication jokes. Really.

3 out of 4.

Belle is one of those indie movies that makes a lot of noise early in the year, yet usually gets ignored when it comes time to award season.

Not saying this film is deserved awards or anything, that is just when it was released. A nice indie number that is indeed not about Beauty and the Beast, but instead, racism in the victorian era. Ah yes, the Victorian era, where women wore corsets and giant dresses all the time, and men wore…I guess mostly regular clothes. And wigs!

But this work of fiction, based on books, is also pseudo historically accurate. Namely the character Lord Mansfield was actually Chief Justice of England during the time of the movie and presided over several cases that are relevant to the plot. Sweet. But the rest is just guesstimated fluff. I love fluff!

Despite the picture, this is also not a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood.

Dido Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) was born in the West Indies and she is a mulatto. Her mother was a local, but her father was of the English Royal Navy (Matthew Goode) and he has decided to claim her and take her to England. Because he is at sea all the damn time, he places her in the care of his uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson) and his wife (Emily Watson), even though she is BLACK and they are distinguished members of society.

But they get over it, kind of, and raise her as an aristocrat with her cousin Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon). However, she is still slightly shunned by society and not able to play all the reindeer games. Like when it comes time for suitors, she is told she cannot interact with the other gentleman as none of them would find her desirable.

Also at the same time, Lord Mansfield is ruling on a case involving a ship who threw slaves overboard out of necessity to survive, running low on supplies. They echoed it as similar to throwing cargo overboard and want to collect the insurance on their haul. His ruling on this and the events surrounding it could change Britain forever and some people think that having Dido around might influence his decision.

We also have Sam Reid as a young freedom feeling lawyer, Tom Felton and James Norton as brother suitors of varying tastes, and Miranda Richardson and Penelope Wilton as…other people.

I guess I would conclude Belle is a good movie, just one that is pretty darn predictable. Oh sorry, I am concluding before I describe.

Yes, Belle is well acted and I felt good by the end. But a lot of the movie just felt like Victorian filler in the middle. The plot is literally finding suitors for a few ladies. Is this a Jane Austen novel in secret?

Which is my main complaint. Not that predictability is a necessarily a bad thing, but if I kind of know what to expect the entire movie and it follows the path pretty straightforwardly, what is the point? It should have a lot of stuff going on for it in the middle to really make up for that fact.

And it has a few unique events to be sure. Well acted, as I already said. Outfits are nice, message is nice. But I kind of just expected something more. The film itself was incredibly safe.

2 out of 4.