Acrimony is a great word, defined:

From Dictionary.com:

noun
1.
sharpness, harshness, or bitterness of nature, speech, disposition, etc.:
The speaker attacked him with great acrimony.

I recently saw Tyler Perry on a talk show where he mentioned that he also thought that Acrimony was a great word and he had to look it up to make sure he had the correct definition. To me the word has always represented a very high level of anger, caused mainly by a major injustice in a person’s life or the need for revenge.

In order to do justice to a word like this, Tyler Perry had a very tall order ahead of him and had to write a screenplay that was believable in terms of the buildup to an ending where everyone in the audience would believe that the woman scorned can be understood based on all she had gone through to get to this final moment. The scorned woman in this movie, played extremely well by Taraji P Henson, went through hell.

On all counts, I thought that Tyler Perry’s screenplay scored and provided the buildup and emotion that made me believe everything that happened in this movie. I cannot remember a movie I have seen in a long time that provided this many emotions in two hours. Jealousy, rage, indifference, misery, fear, failure, success, regret, love and hatred. What I don’t understand the most about this movie is that the critics on Rotten Tomatoes are only giving this film a very low rating of 25%. This could be that they don’t like or are jealous of Perry’s success as a movie maker or for perhaps because they think they have seen elements of a movie like this before. There are elements of other movies in this one and even in some of Perry’s other movies but I thought this film was outstanding because of the unusual and believable story and the many twists and turns throughout the entire two hours. This is why it is so extremely difficult to write a screenplay that is loved by both the audience and critics; a concept reinforced when I read critical comments about a good movie like Acrimony that in my opinion are all dead wrong.

A couple meets in college, there are good times and some bad times and then the realities of having to make a living and having a big dream cause conflict and understandable financial problems. Life happens. As this story unwinds through the many years of a couple’s relationship the harsh life realities of work, luck, misunderstandings and timing come into play and are written about brilliantly in Tyler Perry’s impressive screenplay. Some critics are comparing this movie to Fatal Attraction that was released in 1987 but in terms of a real story I thought that this movie greatly exceeds the story from that movie.

I thought this movie was extremely well written and acted and I highly recommend it. The critics are wrong. This movie should be seen.

When we all hear that Steven Spielberg had directed a new movie, even if that movie is mostly an animated one, we all expect a top notch high quality experience 100% of the time. Spielberg’s latest movie is “Ready Player One” and I believe the first movie that he has directed that is mostly an animated feature film. The concept we have seen before – a human world and a computer world that people transfer to and from. The difference between the science fiction concept here and the 3 Matrix movies from 15 years ago is that in this film people choose to play a game where they know they are in a 3D world that they want to experience, but the world in the Matrix was created by computers that have taken over the world and the people in the Matrix had no idea that they were trapped in a world created by computers and are being used as batteries. In my opinion the science fiction concept of the Matrix that debuted in 1999 is the greatest ever produced in movie history.

As expected the special effects for this movie and mostly computer graphics were very impressive. The story at time was extremely convoluted and towards the end hard to follow and involved the inventor of this computer game and 3D world embedding 3 keys or Easter eggs in the game and whoever finds all 3 keys would win a great deal of money. The clues and eventual conclusion I thought was overly complex and not believable and in the end I thought the entire movie was way too long.

As I have said so many times in this blog, special effects will never be great enough to offset a bad or average story. The most important thing for any movie will always be the screenplay and I thought the screenplay in this film was less than Spielberg’s normal standards. Overall, I thought that Read Player One was just an average movie and I give it only a marginal recommendation.

This movie represents an experience that rarely happens to me. A movie that is very highly reviewed – 96% on Rotten Tomatoes that I did not like at all. This is supposed to be a farce that is funny and it was not at all funny. At times like this – also with the movie “Call me by your Name” it almost seems as if critics are paid off to like a movie that is obviously bad. I thought this movie was very boring and I actually had to walk out early. I just do not understand why this movie is highly rated. For these reasons I of course, do not recommend this boring and rather bad movie.