Movie Review: Back to Black


The problem with being hugely successful at a young age, especially in the show business industry is if you realize that you are extremely depressed, even though you are world-famous, rich, and have won several awards – the only place you can go is down. This has happened to far too many celebrities in the music industry, including Elvis, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. Most recently the downturn of the life of Brittany Spears has been almost daily celebrity news for years.

The new movie/biopic “Back to Black” is about the life and tragic death of Amy Winehouse, who died in July 2011 at only 27 years old. Her tragic and untimely death was after she had a huge hit album, received 6 Grammy Awards, and was world famous and wealthy. Despite great success, what Amy really wanted to be married and have children. From Amy’s perspective, her world famous career had her believe that it was all causing her to miss out on what she wanted the most.

Like Whitney Houston, Amy’s alcohol and drug abuse was caused by dating and then marrying the exact wrong man, who caused her nothing but frustration and misery. Amy’s only way of coping with her personal life was to drink heavily, which eventually caused her to die of alcohol poisoning at the young age of 27 – after being sober for a long period of time after rehab. Losing her mother from lung cancer was another huge cause of pain in Amy’s life and despite this, Amy continued to chain smoke non stop throughout this story.

This movie stars Marisa Abela as Amy, Lesley Manville as Amy’s mother Cynthia and Eddie Marsan as Amy’s father Mitch. Abela’s acting and singing in this movie is very good, making the overal quality of story, more unfortunate, wasting what otherwise would have been a more recognized acting performance.

The reason for the low critical score of only 36% for this film is that the screenplay was not worthy of Amy Winehouse’s life story. There were too many boring and unnecessary diversions and depressing scenes of Amy’s life and struggles and not enough on her singing career and musical performances. There were holes in the story, especially with the details on why her husband went to jail. A better screenplay should give equal time to a young woman who skyrocketed to fame and fortune so early in life along with the downsides that far too often follow the very few in the world to seem to be so lucky and have it all.

My rating is not as low as the very low critical ratings of only 36, with a 70% and a marginal recommendation.

Movie Review: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes


The latest installment of the 10-movie Planet of the Apes movies, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is another one in the series that seems more like a compilation of scenes with Apes and Humans, running for their lives, trying to kill each other with reminders of the first movie, “Planet of the Apes”, released in 1968. This new movie is supposed to be a prequel of the original movie and there are several references at the end of this movie, inside a cave that have many reminders of the original film.

There is nothing in these two hours that we all have not seen before, with a story that seemed to go nowhere and an ending that at best was illogical. From the original story, Apes are now the intelligent species with the implication that this was caused by a nuclear war. In this film, there is mention of a man-made virus that destroyed the intelligence and speaking skills of Humans and made Apes intelligent – not a nuclear war.

One of the main characters in this movie is named Nova, who can talk, but the Nova character in the original Planet of the Apes could not talk. So the woman in this film named Nova, is by coincidence not the woman named Nova in the original movie that is supposed to be the sequel to this movie? This is another example of this illogical screenplay.

This movie has mostly unknown actors, with the exception of William H. Macy who plays a human named Trevathan – who is part of a scene with Nova at the end of this story, that for me, made absolutely no sense.

This movie is also way too long at 2 hours and 25 minutes, and way too boring and slow in too many places.

As far as so many Planet of the Apes movies, there should be a documentary made about the life of any actor who has to endure hours of makeup application and removal, every day for 12+ hours a day, wearing an extremely hot costume for months. All of these movies have always been a bonanza for makeup artists for decades since the release of the original film. I would find a documentary about the making of these Ape movies more interesting than the majority of the movies themselves – including this one.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this movie are too high 80%, with my rating 70% and a marginal pass.

Netflix Movie Review: Unfrosted


The story of the new Netflix movie “Unfrosted” reminds any screenwriter or standup comedian that writing a screenplay is just about the most difficult art form, but writing a comedy screenplay is about twice as difficult as just writing a screenplay.

Unfrosted, which is a parody of the creation of Kellog’s Pop-Tarts, is the first movie Jerry Seinfeld has written, directed, and starred in. He is arguably one of the most successful and prolific standup comedians of all time – but writing jokes for a standup act is not the same as writing a comedy screenplay. In the history of movies, only one comedy, Annie Hall, released in 1977 has won best picture. In my opinion, in the last 50 years only two other movies can be considered outstanding comedies at the level of Annie Hall; “My Cousin Vinnie”, released in 1992 and “When Harry Met Sally” released in 1989. A great movie comedy is extremely rare and hard to write.

Seinfeld wrote Unfrosted with two other screenwriters Spike Feresten and Andy Robin and while watching this extremely bad movie, I was amazed considering 3 screenwriters and a very large list of known actors that nobody noticed how extremely unfunny this entire film is. It seemed that nobody dared to say, “This is not working, this is not funny”. The dialogue and situations seem to be more about an attempt to force bad jokes on the audience, and less about creating a creative, funny and interesting comedy movie. There is a scene where Jerry Seinfeld runs through a barn with flatulating cows on both sides of him. Why would someone like Jerry Seinfield think this is either funny or appropriate?

The best review of this film that I have read is from critic Richard Roper who wrote: “Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix movie “Unfrosted,” an astonishingly unfunny, deeply weird, live-action cartoon that is so clear-the-room dreadful it almost plays like a horror movie. “Unfrosted” is so consistently awful it makes the aforementioned “Flamin’ Hot” seem like “The Social Network.” If there was a thing called the IMDB Witness Protection Program whereby you could get your name taken off the credits of a particular project, this would be that project. “Unfrosted” is one of the worst films of the decade so far. Unfortunately I agree 100% with all of these comments.

This movie stars many former alumni of Saturday Night Live, Mikey Day, Kyle Mooney, Fred Armisen and Bobby Moynihan and a very large supporting case including Jim Gaffigan, Christian Slater, Sarah Cooper, Amy Schumer, Max Greenfield, Melissa McCarthy and Sebastian Maniscalco. I found this large and famous cast even more insane when you realize this many people agreed to make this movie, and nobody read the script?

I agree that the words “Pop Tart” sound funny, but to make a 2-hour movie parody about the invention of the Pop Tart in 1963 entirely because the words sound funny, makes no sense. Hopefully Jerry Seinfeld will get another chance at a new film and hopefully will co-write it with an experienced and great screenwriter like Aaron Sorkin or even his close friend Larry David. Unfrosted is one idea and screenplay that never should have been greenlighted in the first place and is one of the worst comedy movies of all time.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Unfrosted are a too high 43%, with my rating only 10% and a run for your life miss this waste of two hours.