Director Eli Roth is one of the few directors along with Wes Craven and George A. Romero who only seems to be interested in making horror movies. Roth directed and co-wrote the new movie “Thanksgiving” that is unusual in that nobody would necessarily know this is a horror movie based on the title. I would wonder how many people walk into the theater expecting a family film with their kids. The beginning of the film also provides an improbable reason for the insane murderer who follows (a Black Friday rush on a department store), that I thought was a good new idea for a horror movie.
This movie is nothing we have not seen before in other similar horror movies. Some insane person who is wearing a mask (in this case a Pildgrim mask), goes around killing people in some horrific ways, one of the worst was the scene where the woman was put into an oven, still alive. Enough over-the-top gore already. In my opinion, there is no reason to be this cruel in any horror movie. What is the point?
There are chase scenes, new ways to kill people I have not seen before, and in the end, a trick ending that almost works and then a ridiculous promise for possible sequels that based on the ending, does not hold water.
The three known actors in this film are Patrick Dempsey, Gina Gershon and one of the stars of the great series “Suits”, Rick Hoffman, who played lawyer Louis Litt.
The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this horror film are way too high 82%, with my rating 70% and a recommendation mostly for fans of Eli Roth.
How the NFL draft works and in fact all major sports in the United States is, the worst teams the year before are the ones that pick first, and unfortunately this means that some of the greatest athletes in college are forced to play for the worst teams. This has been true of Sequon Barkley of the Giants who has had a career in the NFL far less than it should have been, only because he was so good at Penn State he was was one of the first players picked in the NFL draft, eventually picked by the Giants, who have frequently had very bad offensive lines.
When a running back in professional football does not have an effective offensive line, he will not gain the yards or have the huge breakout runs required for a great NFL career. This is the number one problem when a great running back in college is drafted high in the NFL draft to a bad team. Sequon Barkley’s idol is Barry Sanders who during his career with the Detroit Lions that ran from 1989-1998, somehow was able to be a great running back with one of the worst teams in NFL history – and average 5.0 yards a carry totaling 15,269 yards, currently 4th all time. Sanders was another victim of being a very high draft pick and mired on a bad team for his whole career. Despite this, Sanders 5.0 average per carry is second only to Jim Brown who at 5.2 yards per carry with the Cleveland Browns was on a very good or great team during his entire career.
What is most amazing about the new Amazon Prime documentary, “Bye Bye Barry” is that Barry Sanders retired from the NFL in 1999 and it has taken 24 years to produce a sports documentary about someone who is arguably the greatest athlete in the history of the NFL. The best part of this documentary is the many highlights of Sanders’s best breakaway runs – some of the very best in NFL history. There are also many scenes showing the relationship between Sanders and his father William Sanders, who for the most part was not a good person. William would frequently say to Barry that he was the 3rd best running back after Jim Brown and himself, even though William never played in the NFL.
This documentary also includes many celebrities who are all huge fans of Barry Sanders. Including, Jeff Daniels, Tim Allen, Eminem, Rodney Peete, Emmitt Smith, Dan Patrick, Bill Belichick and Jalen Rose. Knowing that Barry Sanders has so many famous fans, 24 years after he retired, is another tribute to his greatness.
Barry Sanders’s career in college at Oklahoma State, especially his junior year before he went into the NFL will probably never be broken. In 1988, Sanders ran for 2628 yards, with a 7.6 yards per carry average, and scored 37 touchdowns in only 11 games, en route to the Highsman Trophy. Numbers that nobody who follows college football thought would be ever achieved.
The all-time rushing leader in NFL history was Emmett Smith who played for the Dallas Cowboys and the Arizona Cardinals for a total of 15 years and 18,355 yards with a 4.2 yards per carry average. Even Emmett Smith admits that Barry Sanders is the best running back in the history of the NFL. It has been speculated that if Sanders played for the Dallas Cowboys, rather than the Detroit Lions he would have run for over 20,000 yards at over 6.0 yards per carry. Records that might never have been broken. For me, the best thing about Barry Sanders was his humbleness and his class. Every time he scored he never celebrated, he never spiked the ball. He just walked over to the referee and handed him the football. No player in the NFL has ever shown the level of class and professionalism that Barry Sanders did.
The documentary Bye Bye Barry is also about Barry Sanders’s decision to retire from the NFL in 1999. After the Lions mismanaged the team for years, letting go of some of the best players, and in the 1998 season, Sanders had an average (for him) record of 1491 yards and only 4.3 yards a carry, he decided to retire at only age of 31. For some time after Sanders retired, he was one of the most hated athletes in NFL history. Fans in Detroit could not understand why after 9 years Sanders had enough of losing and never getting the blocking he needed to gain the yards he wanted to gain to remain at the top of the NFL. Days before he retired from the NFL, Sanders traveled to London and then faxed his resignation to the Detroit Lions. Despite his greatness as an NFL running back, Sanders had enough of football and just like he always did, just handed the football to someone else, and walked away.
The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this documentary are a correct and perfect score of 100%. I agree with this rating and give this great sports documentary the highest recomendation.
From the trailers and TV commercials, the new movie “Napoleon”, directed by Ridley Scott, looked to be a huge epic and best picture nominee for this year’s Oscars. The problem with this film right from the start is the performance of Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix, who for the first 3rd of this movie seems to be sleepwalking through his role, with way too few lines. Joaquin’s lack of dialogue does pick up later in the story, but despite more lines, Joaquin still seems to be too bored and disinterested to be the star of this historical movie. His half-asleep personality throughout this film will probably preclude any chance at an Oscar nomination. Then due to the relatively low ratings of 69% on Rotten Tomatoes – there is a high probability that this movie might not be nominated for many Oscars, if any. The many problems with this film are a shame because this should have been a great movie about one of the most controversial and important war generals in history.
Where this movie does succeed in a very big way is with the extremely well-shot battle scenes, showing the horrific ways young men in the early 1800s died in battle. Many of the soldiers are ordered to stand right into the line of fire while a small ball of iron obliterates their chest, and legs or just blows their heads off. Some soliders are even playing drums just waiting for their turn to die.
Then there are the small and large cannon balls, also made of iron that blow up everything around the marching soldiers, cutting hundreds of them to ribbons. This movie starts with the beheading of Marie Antoinette with a guillotine, and right from the beginning, this film is not for any moviegoer who is disturbed by the constant visuals of death. In the early days of warfare, death was commonplace, with little or no medical expertise to save any soldier wounded in battle. At the end of this movie, it was mentioned that in the 61 battles that Napoleon led in his lifetime, 3 million men died. There was no mention of how many were wounded.
The other failure in this movie was the lack of detailed explanations of the battles and why they were being fought. Some of the brilliant Napoleon’s battle strategies are shown, but not enough, missing the point that Napolean’s genius as a general is one of the most interesting parts of his life story.
Napolean’s relationship with Josephine, played by Vanessa Kirby I thought was covered well enough, revealing several details about their marriage and divorce that most people probably did not know. There was too much of the movie devoted this Napoleon and Josephine and not enough about Napoleon’s war career. This movie does tend to be slow and boring in too many areas.
The other good news is that this movie, while long at 2 hours and 38 minutes does not seem to be too long.
The Rotten Tomatoes rating of 69% is probably too low, with my rating of around 75% and a recommendation mainly for the history lesson and the extremely well produced battle scenes.
A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies. 