Tag: 2 out of 4

Movies in 2014 brought us some incredibly new and wonderful experiences. Boyhood took 12 years to film, doing a little bit each year to watch the actors grow old. Birdman was edited in a fine way to make it seem like just one long continuous shot. Both fantastic films, my 1 and 2 from the year.

But there was another movie that was unique last year that interested me. The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby. On its own, it doesn’t seem like that innovative of a film. However, it is collectively three films in one.

On the surface it is just about a relationship. Specifically, the three versions are called Him, Her, and Them. Him is the plot from mainly the guy’s point of view and Her is the girl’s point of view. Them is a more typically told story, telling bits and pieces of their sides and is a much more standard film.

And I wanted to see it all of 2014. I wanted to watch it as soon as it hit Blu-Ray. It has been on Netflix for months, all three parts! Welcome to Day 3 of my Fucking Finally week.

First comes love…

Conor (James McAvoy) and Eleanor (Jessica Chastain) have had a long relationship. They even married! Serious stuff. But no one would describe their lives as remarkable. Eleanor came from an academic family, but left her PhD program in Anthropology, when she got pregnant. Conor is the son of a restaurant God in NYC, who also has bad relationships, and is now attempting to run his own restaurant without his dad’s help.

But then one of the worst things happen. They lost their baby boy, really young. Their grief came in different ways, driving a wedge between them. After a few months, Eleanor wants to take a brake from their relationship, frustrated where things are going, and that is really where our story begins.

In Him, we mostly get to see Conor flailing about trying to deal with his emotions by repressing them like a motherfucker. They still come out in bursts, like when he has attacked unruly customers. His best friend and chef (Bill Hader) is even getting sick of his shit.

Conor sort of starts to stalk Eleanor a little bit as well, following her around but never having the courage to talk to her until he resorts back to a kid in middle school and passes her a note, quite creepily. His story also features Ciaran Hinds as his father, and Nina Arianda as an employee who has feelings for him.

Then comes stalking after heartbreak and sadness…

In Her, we don’t even see Conor for the until the awkward scene above. James McAvoy is barely in this film and it is definitely all about Eleanor.

It starts with her injury and then her going on her own to the hospital. Eleanor decides to go home with her parents and sister. The mom (Isabelle Huppert) is French through and through, always seen with a glass of wine. Her dad (William Hurt) is still a psychologist at the local university, and her younger sister (Jess Weixler) has a little boy of her own, but no man or boyfriend in her life. She was already living with the parents still. Her family tries to get her help, but can’t seem to provide enough help on their own, the awkwardness of the whole situation. Some psychology degree, am I right?

So she does go to the local college to take a few classes. There she develops a nice bond with another psychology professor (Viola Davis), who is able to talk to her like a real person about normal things, since she knows nothing about Eleanor’s last few months. Her time alone allows Eleanor an attempt to find herself, and interact with Conor on her own terms in her own ways. Slowly, surely, and eventually full of hope.

In Them, it is the longest of the films at just over 2 hours. However, it is literally just everything you seen before. You still get the scenes between them, but this time you also get some of their individual scenes.

Them is packaged in a way so that it can be their complete story in a regular time frame for a regular movie. A movie about sadness and grief and how two different people cope. Technically, some of the scenes between them we see from a few different angles, but it is just a cram packed version with less individual detail on each character. Although, when watching it, it still felt like it featured a lot more of Her than Him.

Then comes alcohol to end all of the sadness!

Five hours, twelve minutes. That is how long watching these three movies took overall. That is if you want the full experience. The good news? You don’t have to see all three for the full experience!

In fact, you shouldn’t watch all three, and definitely not in the same week. You should only watch Him and Her, or Them, not all three. If you just watch the first two, you will get a very unique experience and you will get it in three hours, nine minutes. A much more reasonable amount of time. If you are feeling lazy or want a very regular saddish drama, then just go for Them. Its like a not very effective cliff notes.

Now, I watched them in Him, Her, and Them order because it just seemed to make sense. I knew the films were about the woman leaving, so it makes since to keep some mystery and watch Him before Her. Doing so allowed the film to answer questions are different times and felt like the best experience.

This only matters if you care about my recommendation of course. The best experience would just be Him and Her, no Them, because it is mostly repetitive. It sucks that I cannot wipe Him/Her from my memory before Them to give an unbiased review of it. But Them on its own didn’t feel like a great movie. Obviously I had the issues of it being full of scenes I had already seen (does that sound weird?), but it also cut out a lot of other scenes that I felt were necessary.

That’s right. Watching the condensed two hour version felt lacking. Shocking discovery, I know.

Them is Shit. Him and Her combined are a good experience. If you were going to watch just one of Him and Her, it won’t be good. It would just be odd and you don’t want to be odd.

Oh yeah, for whatever reason, the movies end differently. I have no idea why this happens, but Her has the best ending, in my ever so humble movie reviewer opinion.

Fucking finally. Those are the words I said when I sat down to watch The Interview. I mean…fuck! What month is it? September? 2015?

The Interview was supposed to come out on Christmas of 2014 (after being pushed back from October to re-edit a little bit to make it better for NK), and I first saw a trailer for it way before all this North Korea bombing controversy happened. I was stoked to see it. I was sad when my screener was cancelled. I cheered on the good fight from Alamo Drafthouse saying that they would still show the film. And then it was on VOD like, right away and Netflix probably within a month of that. So it has been easy for me to consume and watch an review for over 9 months.

And I am just now reviewing it. What the hell happened? Why did it keep leaving my point of view and get pushed back? As a real answer, January I specifically put a lot of effort into finishing my best/worst of 2014 year lists, then I had to worry about watching all the rest of the Oscar nominees. Then I just forgot.

So without to much more delay, I am presenting you with a review of The Interview to kick off my “Fucking Finally” review week! Not just a bunch of movies I should have watched a long time ago, but movies that have been super available to watch and I somehow just didn’t do it.

I just couldn’t handle the fake smiles and forced friendships

Dave Skylark (James Franco) is the host of Skylark Tonight. He is very outspoken, in your face and not much of a professional. The good news is that he doesn’t have to be professional, because all he does is interview celebrities and talk gossip. He is an entertainment journalist, the lowest of the lows. Kind of like being a movie reviewer!

Aaron Rapaport (Seth Rogen) is his very good producer who has recently reached 100 episodes with the show. Wow, 1000 episodes of making technically shit TV, but it used to be even bigger shit before he came along. He never thought he would be doing this. He thought he would be a serious producer for serious news programs that actually made a difference in the world.

That is when they find out that North Korean leader, Kim Jung Un (Randall Park), is a big fan of Skylark Tonight! He also recently secured nuclear warheads and is waving them around like a metaphorical dick to the rest of the world. By just making a few phone calls, they are able to set up an interview with the Supreme Leader and a free trip to North Korea! Sure, they have to ask pre-approved questions and are limited what they can talk about, but it might elevate Skylark Tonight to be an important news program! Sure this interview will suck, but other political people will have to accept their invites if they interviewed friggan Kim Jung Un!

Enter the FBI (Lizzy Caplan, Reese Alexander). They want them to kill Kim Jung Un, using advanced poison technology that will in no way bring it back to them or the USA. Oh what a fun trip this will now be!

Also featuring Diana Bang as the NK Chief Propagandist, and Timothy Simons as a worker on the show who is just a super yes man.

Radio communication devices are always 100% effective next to each other.

If there is one thing The Interview had going against it, it could in no way ever live up to the hype that began to surround it. North Korea allegedly threatening to bomb movie theaters if they showed the film? (This of course, unconfirmed, as it was a message from the Sony Hackers, who probably weren’t actually North Koreans and just fucking with people). I mean, we had the POTUS speak out about free speech and wanting the movie to be shown! If a movie threatens the security of America, it better be the funniest, most crass piece of work ever done!

And guess what? It wasn’t. When boiled down to the essentials, it is only mildly offensive (barely) and average in humor. People judge comedy films much harsher if they aren’t full on spectacles, so an average comedy is generally seen as bad or a waste of time. Remember The Guilt Trip? Of course you don’t. That was an average comedy forgotten by time. The Interview won’t be quickly forgotten thanks to the months of free press the film got. But it definitely wasn’t a huge Sony conspiracy either. They lost millions upon millions over the hack and probably didn’t make all the money they had hoped for The Interview either. Although, it is their biggest movie in terms of money made through online distribution, so it has that going for it.

Ahem. Where were we? Oh yeah. The acting in the movie is fine, Franco was a completely different person (or a more exaggerated Franco, hard to say). Rogen was his normal self. Park did an interesting Un (is that the last name? I have no idea how it works in North Korea). Bang was pretty good in her role and the FBI was more or less irrelevant.

There are a lot of long scenes, a double edged sword. If you don’t find the current joke funny, it will stand out and be awkward. I don’t have to finish the second half of that statement I think. You get it by now.

Either way, I think the main reason I avoided it for so long is because I knew it couldn’t live up to the hype and knew I might not like as much as I had hoped.

I am coming into The Age of Adaline a few months after it hit theaters. This really means that I cannot in good conscious make any jokes about a crossover movie of Avengers: Age of Ultron and this one, which came out roughly around the same time. That would be silly.

So instead I will talk about how little I know about this film. I am literally going in knowing nothing about it, not even who is in the movie. I figured out it was based on a book, probably a popular modern romance.

And hey, not all popular modern romance novels are bad. Sure you got your Twilights, but there is also The Fault In Our Stars! Shit, this is all teenage stuff. I am not as familiar with older adult romance novels.

Given the genre, I hope (like always) I can get a good cry out of it.

My emotions are like this elevator: They look really pretty but they get ignored by the rich all day.

Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively) has had an interesting life. Born on New Year’s Day, 1908, she has always had a party for every birthday. And right now she has had 108 birthdays.

But no, she isn’t old. She is young, attractive, and looks like she is around 29. In fact, her body is 29, despite the years around the sun. Due to a freak accident, involving drowning, body chemicals and lightning, somehow she no longer ages. Science, magic, fantasy shit.

So now she has to move every 10 years, or else people get weirdly suspicious. Or if she ever gets too close to someone romantically. That is a huge issue for her, never getting to love again.

Now it is modern day, and of course, someone likes her a lot. Ellis (Michiel Huisman) is rich and is impressed by her intelligence and poise. They like each other a lot. She even gets to meet his family! He has a Momma (Kathy Baker), a sister (Amanda Crew), and a dad (Harrison Ford). The dad of course being someone Adaline had a relationship with over 40 years prior.

Also starring Ellen Burstyn as Adaline’s much older looking daughter and featuring Hugh Ross as the narrator.

“Dad, remember the girl who broke your heart before you met mom?”

I loved the concept of The Age of Adaline, once the movie told me what was going on. Shit, I might have tried to watch it in theaters if I actually knew what it was about.

This is by far the best acting I have seen from Blake Lively. Savages and Green Lantern weren’t great for her, and of course Gossip Girl isn’t known for its great acting. But she is fantastic in this film. So is Harrison Ford, who also has had quite a few stinkers/unforgettable roles lately. Let’s not forget he did Paranoia. In this film he reminded us he was a great actor, which is good news for those dying to see Star Wars VII.

The story was a good one, the acting was good, but the major downfall with this film was its ability to drag. Which is this romance in a nut shell. It is like the rich and prestige, going to fancy dinner parties where people do a lot of small talk, having the same conversations with their friends. That is just the general feeling of the first half of the movie when it is set in modern times. Adaline is worried about being caught, her daughter just wants her to finally live her life, and discovering Ellis. I don’t think it gets truly interesting until she finally meets the dad, and the awkwardness really begins. The awkwardness allows for the best acting in the film and is where Ford starts to shine.

An okay romance, with a decent plot, and some fine acting. But it did not make me cry.

No, this is not a The Hangover reference. This is just a group of brothers who are best friends who love movies.

The Wolfpack, a term never really applied to them in the documentary that I remember, is about a group of best friend brothers because they literally have no other friends. How could six brothers have no friends? Well, they lived in NYC on the 16th floor four bedroom apartment and they aren’t allowed to leave.

That sounds crazy, and it is. Their dad is the only one who left the home for any real amounts of time and the only one with a key. The mom was a certified teacher and homeschooled the whole family. They maybe were able to leave the apartment a few times every year, but some years they never had the chance to leave. None of this is technically illegal, because no one was chained up, they weren’t being abused, they had a loving house hold apparently. The dad was just very paranoid and protective.

So the brothers Mukunda, Narayana, Govinda, Bhagavan, Krisna, and Jagadesh, and one sister Visnu, looked to each other for companionship and social fun. They also turned to film.

Sounds like my life, except I was allowed to leave home and chose to stay inside.

FILM. A big part of their lives, as the dad was able to buy a lot of bargain DVDs and VHS tapes so they watched a shit ton of movies. They were able to get a lot of the classics and every single kid loved movies with all their heart. Hell, they loved them so much, they even recreated a lot of their favorite films. They would write down all of the dialogue, make a script, give each brother and Visnu a part, design costumes of varying quality and film the whole thing scene by wonderful scene. Tarantino films mostly, apparently.

But hey, there is a documentary about them! That means something must have changed eventually, right? Of course. Eventually the oldest boy, while the dad was getting groceries, just decided to leave the house and explore, consequences be damned. And then their lives changed forever…The outside world is a lot different than the movies.

The Wolfpack is a weird documentary, in that you assume it HAS to end with someone getting arrested, or a murder, or something. Maybe a big philosophical discussion about how to raise a kid properly. But no, it just ends with the family getting adjusted to society and having their children go outside once in awhile, discovering how the world is different than the movies.

As a movie watcher, I often find myself excited when I am watching something about movies. This feels like a more realistic version of a small plot from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Which means I was excited about The Wolfpack. But in all honesty, The Wolfpack was frankly overhyped to me. I expected something life changing after my watching. I expected to learn something poignant about family and film. But in reality, this was just a documentary about a strange family that was living with weird circumstances.

Yeah, there are interesting parts in it. It is amusing seeing them play out their film fantasies. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t feel like something I need to ever watch again or would rush out to show friends, like a truly great documentary.

A cool and interesting story, but not a lot more after that.

I have beard envy. So one of the main reasons I find myself willing to watch a movie is if a main character, male or female, has excellent facial hair. I barely know how to shave, let alone make my beard grow to any great and professional level.

It is why I wanted to even see Mortdecai, damn it.

So if you show me a movie poster of Cop Car with Kevin Bacon‘s head, with the most glorious of stereotypical cop mustaches, I will drop whatever I am doing (no not my baby) and see it as soon as I can. Plot, other actors, director be damned. I just want to see the mustache.

Aww, they gave the mustache little aviators, a badge, and everything.

You have never seen two kids more badass than Travis (James Freedson-Jackson) and Harrison (Hays Wellford). They are just 10, but they ran away from home. Even have some beef jerky in order to have food for their trip. Shit, they’ve been gone for hours, saying curse words, they are probably 50 miles away from home now.

And then they find a fucking cop car! How badass! They are brave enough to throw rocks at it and touch it. But no one comes to yell at them. Strange. Shit, it is unlocked too. And the keys are inside. Should they? No… Then they’d get in real trouble.

BUT WAIT! They have already ran away from home. So fuck it. Who cares if they don’t know what all the buttons do. Who cares if they don’t know to drive. Once they get to the road, there are no limits. They can do anything. There are even guns in the vehicle. GUNS! YEAH! GUNS!

Of course, the car belongs to an actual cop. Sheriff Kretzer (Bacon). He was out in the middle of nowhere for a reason. Not a good, honest to goodness cop reason. And he needs to rectify the situation immediately, no matter who gets hurt along the way.

Also featuring Shea Whigham as a dude and Camryn Manheim as a woman.

“GUNS! YEAH! GUNS!” – Me, 10 seconds ago.

For a movie about a guy trying to murder a couple of kids, it was overall pretty tame. It isn’t that long (86 minutes) because it doesn’t have a lot of anything to work with. I expected our cop to be a bit more crazier and a lot more vicious. I mean. Cocaine was involved? Where is the kiddy torture? I don’t condone kids getting tortured, I just expect movies with simple plots to go to the expected dark areas!

Just like there isn’t a ton of plot to talk about, there isn’t a lot more to say about the film. The kids are stupid and probably act just like 10 year olds. The cop is pretty damn smart, I am surprised he found a way to find the kids at all given how big the world can be.

But the film just didn’t give enough. It was tame when a viewer would want more. More shenanigans!

More. Shenanigans.

I miss Chris Farley. I don’t know a single person, outside of future review comment trolls, who hated the guy. He had some of the best sketches on SNL, was always full of energy.

Sure, his movies are hit and miss. Sometimes terrible. But they helped elevate David Spade way more than he could on his own. Sure, he mostly wasted it after the fact, but he tried, damn it.

I wanted to see I Am Chris Farley, which yeah, is a made for TV documentary. It aired on Spike TV. I was curious about Farley before he was big on SNL, and since they interviewed tons of his former friends and coworkers, it would feel great to hear some behind the scenes stories of some of the bigger sketches.

Shit, they were even able to get Lorne Michaels to do an interview, and I assume that dude is super busy.

Maybe it isn’t a “traditional documentary” on a “respected channel” that is worthy of a “Review” but I am “writing” it anyways.

This is a short post because there isn’t a lot to talk about. I learned about Farley’s earlier life. I learned about how he played Rugby in college, how he got into sketch comedy and eventually SNL.

The highlight of course would be the stories about and dealing with Matt Foley: Motivational Speaker. And the stories we hear are told by Adam Sandler, Mike Myers, Dan Aykroid, David Spade obviously, Bob Odenkirk, Bob Saget, Christina Applegate, his brother Kevin P. Farley, Pat Finn a college friend, and more actors of course.

As a suggestion, you might want to have a copy of the SNL: Best of Chris Farley on hand, because you are going to want a lot more Farley than the documentary can give you and want to see the sketches without tons of interruptions from his friends telling stories. Pure. Unadulterated. Farley.

But if you are cheap, just watch Tommy Boy instead. It will get you through the urges I suspect, but not fully satisfy them.

Back in 2012, there were a lot of shitty horror movies. In fact, The Apparition, The Possession, and The Devil Inside would have all made my worst of the year lists if I did them back then.

But there was some hope. We received Sinister. Sure I only gave it a 3 out of 4, but in reality, I think what they did with it was very innovative. It featured Ethan Hawke, who I tend to love or hate (this time was a love). The cinematography was wonderful. The world they built was just overall eerie, and it didn’t feature a lot of jump scares. Just everything in general was scary and creepy as fuck. It was my favorite horror film of the year obviously and I was totally ready for a sequel.

However, maybe the filmmakers or studios weren’t ready for a sequel? Sure, they didn’t rush it out, as they waited 3 years for the next film. I am happy they didn’t try and make this a yearly affair. Those wither up and die rather quickly. Despite my own excitement for Sinister 2, it received barely any pre-screenings for the public or press, which is generally a sign that they know they are releasing a terrible film and just want to get it over with.

The PR company probably just wanted everyone to show the film in small kid focus groups instead. That must be it!

Given what happened in the first film, we don’t expect a direct follow up from our last family. Obviously. So less star power. But hey, we do have our Deputy (James Ransone), who still doesn’t have a real name. But we can call him Ex-Deputy now. He left the police force after the awkwardness of the first film and is getting obsessed with Bughuul and his myths. He is burning down houses to prevent more families from being killed. If no one new can live there, he can protect them! He heads to a farm in Springfield Illinois that had a bad church based accident, but wouldn’t you know it, a family is squatting there. Fuck.

Courtney Collins (Shannyn Sossamon) is living there with her two kids, Dylan (Robert Daniel Sloan) and Zach (Dartanian Sloan). They are hiding from the husband/dad (Lea Coco), who of course was an angry man and slightly abusive. Of course Bughuul and his posse of kid ghosts are trying to get the smallest kid, Dylan, into turning slowly evil. He is being peer pressured into watching creepy videos of death scenes, a few of them a lot more graphic and fucked up than the first film.

Now Ex-Deputy really doesn’t know what to do. He wants to protect the family, but weird stuff will happen while they are in the house, but if they leave, the real tragedy will take place. Fuck. While dealing with that, he is also interacting with Dr. Stomberg (Tate Ellington), who has information on potential Bughuul sightings in Norway with Ham radios. Weird. Also Lucas Jade Zumann plays head kid ghost, Milo.

The power of motion capture compels you!

Sinister 2 is not as good as Sinister. Everyone anywhere will agree with this fact. But just because it is technically worse on every level does not make itself a bad film.

Specifically on what is worse, the cinematography is just completely average. A regular movie. What really built the tension in the first film involved these sleek sexy shots. The fear didn’t involve jump scares, but appropriately creepy scenes and the occasional movement, sure. Outside of creepy videos in the sequel, the only scares came from very expected jump scares.

Not just jump scares, but a lot of them were audio based jump scares, where my ears were blasted with terrible sounds. Their way of doing eerie music during the kill videos was just a scratchy record player attached to the olde fashioned camera. Maybe my theater just made everything stupid loud, but regular objects being freakishly loud to attempt scares got really old, really quick.

In terms of plot, it was interesting to have the abuse plot. It was good to have something not focused on the evil spirit, but halfway through it made me wonder if it would have better if they still stayed in the abusive house. You know. Cause demons. It was also enjoyable to have a link to the first film, in regards to the deputy, although I definitely forgot about his character completely. Another good note is they didn’t try to go into the backstory of the demon. No, we focused on the dead kids and a point of view of a kid instead of one of the adults. It was a nice change, just still not as good as the first.

Also, the last scene was stupid. Setting up for a future movie with a different twist. It was just dumb. True fact.

I don’t know a lot about American Ultra. I do know that it has some nice buzz words to get more butts in the seats though.

A lot of big movies have American in the title now. American Sniper destroyed the box office, so people really love American shit. Then we have American Beauty, American Psycho, American Pie, you name it! American to start off your movie is like a golden ticket.

And then of course whe have Ultra. That puts it at the top tier, and it sounds a lot like Ultron. Maybe they want people who love America and love the Avengers to see their film. If they can bring in those two demographics, they would be walking their way over to the billionaire club.

Again, knowing nothing about the movie, this has to be their plan right?

“And bring in an established couple from other movies! Like those kids from Adventureland!” – Movie Exec

Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) is a small town, do nothing, stoner. He has never left his West Virginian town and any time he attempts to leave he ends up having a panic idea. The thought of going places just freaks him the fuck out.

Thankfully he has weed. And the love of his life, Phoebe Larson (Kristen Stewart). She is basically perfect and deserves someone way better than him, as he is a constant screw up. But for whatever reason, she loves him back. Even when he kills two men outside of the convenience store that he works.

Shit. Shit shit fuck. He didn’t even know he could kill a man, and technically they attacked him first. He already has enough trouble with the law, weed smoker and all. It has something to do with the strange lady (Connie Britton) who came to his shop and basically said just gibberish. Next thing Mike knows, other strangers are trying to assassinate him and wouldn’t you know it? He can fight back! Magical Stoner Powers activate! Sometimes it can be good to be a government sleeper agent.

Also starring Tony Hale as a CIA employee, Topher Grace as a mean CIA dude, Walton Goggins as a hitman, John Leguizamo as a dealer, Stuart Greer as a sheriff and Bill Pullman as “mysterious CIA man.”

To John Leguizamo, Thanks For The Drugs, Jesse Eisenberg.

One exciting fact about American Ultra is that it written by Max Landis, who also wrote Chronicle. Huh. Chronicle. The great movie that was directed by Josh Trank, who recently directed a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Fantastic Four movie as his next main project. So weird that two guys who worked on an indie movie both got much bigger movies that were released in the same month three years later.

One thing I hate as a movie watcher is hearing other people echo commonly held complaints that they just regurgitate from the internet, without realizing they never gave it any thought. For example, a very popular “opinion” is that Stewart is terrible and cannot show emotion. People of course got confused with her real self and playing a hated character. For those that think that, they will be happy to know that Stewart shows a lot of emotion in this film: fear, sadness, extreme happiness. She is all over the place. And she also does a fine job.

As for the rest of the movie, American Ultra is a very strange film. Not fully comedy, not fully action, and not really a normal action comedy. And don’t even think it, because it is definitely not a stoner action comedy either, like Pineapple Express. It is a strange mash of all of these genres, and not in a normal or bad way. It reminds me of Red State. Red State was a hard movie to describe, clashing together different genres and keeping you on your toes. This film is of course nothing like the actual Red State, but I think you get my meaning.

American Ultra almost perfectly embodies the 2 out of 4 rating on this website. It is an enjoyable movie yes. Sometimes the jokes work really really well, thanks in a lot to the chaotic nature of a few scenes. And sometimes the movie feels like it drags and you just want to get to the next scene. We call that pacing issues in the biz, and it can make or break or apparently average out a film. But it did have some nice acting from our leads and some pretty slick shots at the same time. It can be worth a watch eventually. I think the people who love it are going to just really love it.

I’d like to think I can keep a secret. Unless it is any form of gossip. If I hear about gossip, I will most definitely pass it on to somebody. Everyone knows that if you tell something to a married person, their spouse gets auto-dibs on the secret anyways.

Best Kept Secret is a documentary not even about a real secret. So I guess I can talk to you all about it and not feel like a dick for betraying its trust.

Best Kept Secret is actually about a teacher, in Newark, New Jersey, who just wants to do what is best for her kids and help them get jobs after they graduate high school. It is hard for her, even though her class is only four guys and she has over a year left to do it, because the kids are all very autistic.

And you will get to meet each and every one of the kids and their families and their struggles. They aren’t on even playing field of course. One guy can talk a lot more than the rest, some can barely say a thing, but damn it, they are working on it.

The hardest part about all of this is making sure they have a job after they finish high school. Most of them want to work (and honestly, apparently they all want to work at Burger King). They want to keep learning and get better at communication. They don’t want to live at home or in a home for the rest of their lives where they live only to exist and never do anything great.

Normally a joke statement, the struggle is actually real here.

So yes, the stakes are indeed very high for these individuals. But the issue this documentary brings up is that the tend to lack support and it can be frustrating. For the case of this teacher, she probably works 100 hours a week, planning, teaching, and coming up with leads for these kids to make their lives better. She is awesome for that fact.

But what this documentary does NOT talk about is overall increasing funding for people with special needs to increase their quality of life. It doesn’t ask for any sort of law reform to stop budget cuts anywhere. It does none of these things. It just showcases the reality of the situation in one of the poorest areas of the country with a higher than average number of special needs children.

And frankly, I think that did a disservice to the situation. Maybe I have been watching too many grand scale documentaries lately, but the small focus of this documentary just didn’t feel right. I got a personal look onto the lives of five people, and that was it. It feels like the documentary should be part of a series, going into different people’s lives, instead of a standalone feature. At the end of this one I am left wondering, “Well, yeah, now what?” It doesn’t really make any claims at all, so it just feels a bit pointless. Sure, there are some interesting things in here. But usually documentaries just do something more for their given topic.

Also, the ending felt like a kick in the nuts. The part where they update you on where everyone is now after all the filming. That part sucked a lot. Reality blows.

I recently just went through this crazy movie playing site called Netflix. It is honestly where most of the documentary reviews on this website come from. But it seems like every 2-3 weeks, I keep thinking there are no more documentaries left for to me watch, that are recent enough to be worth reviewing! Oh no!

So to give myself a few months of rest on the search, I went and scoured the entire site for documentaries that were appealing to me, recent, and hopefully worth writing about. I actually was able to find a good 10 or so titles. And then I picked them out of a hat and got The Widowmaker. This way, I keep having a hat to go to for my next review, if there is no inspiration in any given week or on the weeks that HBO doesn’t make a new controversial doc.

“What kills the most Americans?” you may ask yourself. Is it cancer? Nope. Gun violence? Nahh. Overdosing on Marijuana? Of course not. It is heart disease! The silent killer. The widowmaker because it is so sudden and hard to detect. Usually the first sign you have heart disease would be in the form of a fatal heart attack. I may not be a doctor, but I know that the odds of surviving anything fatal is close to zero!

But what if…just hold on and wait…what if…there…was…another detector?!

I love you like this heart loves…not having an awkward dark spot?

The Widowmaker is a documentary set up with a purpose. It wants you to know about all the research done into heart disease detection and how there are easy ways for doctors to test if you have that issue. The problem is that there is opposition in the field, because people profit greatly off of current practices used to help people with heart conditions, namely in the form of stents. They count as surgeries and they get paid a lot per stent. There is more to the issues than that, of course, which the documentary will gladly talk to you about.

But as it got longer and longer, like a kid with ADHD my mind began to wander and I wanted them to get to the main point quicker.

The beginning of the documentary had a good affect of hooking me in. Scattered throughout it are even a few 9-1-1 calls just to heighten up the sense of urgency and fear (which is arguably, a pretty unnecessary and silly thing to include). But after they talked about a guy developing a way to solve it, that is where my heart stopped caring. It has good information, sure, but something about the second half just felt like it dragged on forever.

Still, this is the kind of documentary meant to get the viewer off of their feet and write a congressman or something to demand change! I instead will just lay here watching movies, hoping I don’t have heart disease, but if I do, that other people are activist enough to make it so my disease can be detected before any crazy heart attacks.