Movie Review: Anna


The biggest problem with the new movie “Anna” is the chronological jumping around, easily the worst I have ever seen. Its 3 years ago, its 6 months ago, its 6 months later, its present day, its 3 years ago again, then its 3 months from now. I lost count on the number of scene transitions that involved flashback story telling, that at this frequency will never work for any film. At some point, a screenplay should be re-written to reduce flashback story telling so that it makes sense to any audience, not increase it to this extremely annoying level. There is nothing wrong with telling a story in chronological order.

This movie stars newcomer Sasha Luss, Luke Evans and respected actor Helen Miren, who could not have read this script before taking the part.

There are great similarities to the movie “Point of no Return” starring Bridget Fonda, released in 1993, with Ann Bancroft in the Helen Miren and Gabrielle Burn in the Luke Evans role. The idea is the same, take a disaster woman who happens to be attractive and turn her into a contract killer. Point of no Return is a far better movie than this one.

There are a number of very good hand to hand combat scenes in this movie, including one in a restaurant that was very impressive. With all movies like this one, with one highly skilled martial arts character and so much gunfire, the fact that nobody can easily kill one person with so many guns, is always ridiculous. I would appreciate more realism as opposed to one woman who is built like a high fashion model taking out 25 men armed with weapons.

I agree with the low 26% rating for this film on Rotten Tomatoes and do not recommend this movie.

Movie Review: Toy Story 4


“Toy Story 4” is the 4th installment of a great animated movie franchise, and all four of these movies are of the highest quality. Considering the amount of software development, planning, science and hundreds of technical decisions, involved in creating the extremely impressive graphics for these movies there is no way that Pixar would ever forget the most important part of any film – the screenplay. Arguably this fourth movie could very well have the best story of all of them, and I thought it was the most emotional of the 4. Like so many movies with special effects, decisions are made to forgo any story believing that explosions and computer movie graphics are all that is needed. This is never the case with any film that is produced by Pixar.

Toy Story 4 has the same two actors that have appeared in all four movies: Tim Alan and Tom Hanks, the first Toy Story released in 1995. Both actors where as always, outstanding in their parts as were all the new voices played by Annie Potts, Tony Hale, Keegan Micheal Key and even Keanu Reeves.The Rotten Tomatoes rating for Toy Story 4 is a very high 97% and I agree with this rating. Toy Story 4, like all four movies in this franchise are for both children and adults and I highly recommend this great film.