While watching this too long 2 hour and 37 minute movie – I kept thinking about better titles other than “House of Gucci”. How about “House of Chain Smokers”, “House Full of Matches”, “How To Get Lung Cancer”. In all my years of going to the movies as a hobby, I have never seen more smoking in a film than this one. Not even close. Either a character was constantly smoking, or lighting up a cigarette, or grabbing for a cigarette – non stop in about 95% of every scene. My only explanation is that the producers realized that getting funding for this soap opera about the Gucci family was going to be difficult – mainly because the script was not any good. So, they lobbied every cigarette company in the world and begged them to send them money, promising non stop smoking in almost every scene in return. Smoking can kill you, in about 100 different ways, so why is the movie industry allowing this level of money over not promoting a huge human health hazard?
What is most hard to understand about this mostly bad movie is how they got Al Pacino, Lady Gaga, Jared Leto (unrecognizable in his role Paolo Gucci – with some pretty bad acting), Jeremy Irons and Adam Driver to agree to make this film, after they read the script? Then add the extremely respected Ridley Scott who directed this film. This story also commits the ultimate cardinal sin – its way too boring to keep anyone’s attention for any length of time. There are good signs that Lady Gaga can be a very good actress and some of her scenes with Adam Driver were good – but unfortunately the screenplay is just not good enough for anyone to care about the acting.
As far as I could tell, the only message within this story is that even if you are super rich and super lucky, you will still have problems. Just problems of a different proportion and different level of importance. One of the problems of being rich is that other people will be gunning for you – trying to your steal money in so many different ways. Being rich and famous can involve constantly looking over your shoulder to see who is coming around the corner.
The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for House of Gucci is a very low 61% for many reasons. I agree with this rating and do not recommend this film.
Author Archives: jjcwn
Movie Review: King Richard
While watching the new movie “King Richard” I wondered what it must feel like to be either Venus or Serena Williams, with their many titles, huge wealth and fame and realize every moment that were it not for their father Richard Williams, played by Will Smith in this film, none of what they have would have been remotely possible.
Richard Williams was not a perfect husband and father(he actually had other children with several other women), but as parent raising hugely successful daughters, its impossible to imagine anyone doing a better job than he did. You cannot help but be impressed by this story of a poor man holding onto a bad security job at night and spending his entire life devoted to making sure his 5 daughters were extremely successful. Richard Williams was beaten up several times in this story by thugs and criminals in the neighborhood, most of the time trying to protect and defend either Serena or Venus when they played Tennis on run down Tennis courts in dangerous neighborhoods in Compton California.
Most of this story has to do with the early successful Tennis career of Venus Williams who is one year older than Serena. Richard’s obsession with protecting Venus from the vultures and coaches in the Tennis world is the center storyline throughout this film. At times it seemed that his obsession was helping his daughter at other times it seemed that he was hurting her career. There are many Tennis scenes in this film that showed the rise of Venus Tennis career and the two young girls in this movie Demi Singleton and Aunjanue Ellis both do an excellent job protraying Serena and Venus.
In 2015 the movie “Concussion” with Will Smith playing the doctor who discovered the rampant brain injuries of so many NFL players was released. What followed was a huge controversy when Smith was not even nominated for an Oscar after his outstanding performance. This time around, Will Smith just might win his first Oscar as his performance in this movie is the best of his career, even surpassing his role in “The Pursuit of Happyness” released in 2006.
The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for King Richard are an accurate and extremely high 92% and I view this movie as one of the best of 2021.
Movie Review: Ghostbusters: Afterlife
Just like all movie franchises, its all about the money and not screwing up what made the original movies as good as they were. Ghostbusters was released in 1984, Ghostbusters 2 was released in 1989. One of the best things about these two movies was their humor, mostly from the deadpan comments and subtle comedy of Bill Murray. Unfortunately, the new “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” is almost bereft of all humor, once again in favor of special effects, mostly at the end. I was surprised at how slow and boring this movie was in too many areas, aside from missing the most important comedy ingredient. In 2016 a new idea in the Ghostbusters franchise was attempted with an all female cast starring Kate McKinnon and Melissa McCarthy. At least this movie did not forget to at least try to continue the comedy tradition, but was only at best an average film.
This story starts in the present day, with Callie, the daughter of Dr. Egon Spengler, played by the late Harold Ramis, broke and evicted from her home with her 2 kids, Phoebe and Trevor. Spengler’s daughter Callie then inherits the about to-fall down-farm of her late father, starting the story of a scientist who for over 30 years was still trying to trap ghosts rather than being a farmer.
One possible source of humor that was missed in this story was Paul Rudd, who plays the science teacher of Phoebe played by Mckenna Grace. Rudd has no funny scenes in this movie, none. Considering Rudd has always been funny in just about all his movies, it must have taken some doing to squelch out any sign of humor in all of his scenes. We all know that the science behind this Ghostbusters idea is ridiculous, so in order to make this all work, the audience needs comedy to make fun of the whole insane idea of trapping dangerous ghosts into tiny boxes using laser guns.
The other idea here was to use young kids to continue this franchise, with one of the actors from the Netflix “Stranger Things” series, Finn Wolfhard along with Mckenna Grace and newcomer
Logan Kim – who calls himself podcast, for reasons that make no sense and not really funny. This idea of this new young cast, might save this franchise but only if the next one in the series is much better than this installment. The original Ghostbuster cast, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd and Ernie Hudson does make an appearance at the end of this movie, along with a visage of Harold Ramis – but this is not nearly enough to save what is a below average film.
The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Ghostbusters: Afterlife are a low 61% and this time around I agree with the critics and cannot recommend this movie.
A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies. 