If Henry Ford ever got into the movie business he would have thought of the idea behind a movie like Mothers Day and for that matter Valentines Day and New Years Eve which were all directed by Gary Marshall. The idea behind this seems to be: what does it matter that we have scheduling conflicts with big stars who we know in advance would have an automatic draw at the box office? We can hire big box office stars for a few weeks and hand them a big payday for a short period of time. Why wait for a year or more to write a great script when in a few weeks we can write about 5 or 6 small stories and over the period of 2 hours try and connect some of the stories together later. The real point of this project is to bring in the audience because we have several big stars that come with their own fans who will pay to see them. What sense is the quality of a great story against a big box office? This strategy has spawned three movies of this type by Gary Marshall since 2010 that have been mostly panned by the critics and should for the most part never been made.



In the new film “Mothers Day”, Jennifer Anniston, Kate Hudson, Jason Sudeikis and Julia Roberts are all in 4 completely different and in some cases loosely connected stories which all in some ways involve mothers or Mothers Day which is the last day in the movie. None of these stories by themselves would be engaging enough to warrant a 2 hour movie, but the producers thought that if all 4 of the stories were in the same movie and at times connected then we can get away with 4 weak stories and produce a money making movie faster and cheaper than we could have otherwise. This is clearly what Henry Ford had in mind when he invented the concept of the assembly line to make cars. Create things in small pieces and then put it all together later. This works tremendously for making cars, but not so well for making a high-quality movie with a great story.



At the end of this two-hour experience and researching this movie I came to two realizations: #1 was despite the cookie-cutter assembly line idea in “Mothers Day” it was not that bad overall and #2 was that for some reason the actor Hector Elizondo is in almost all of the movies Gary Marshall has ever made. Due to the lack of a real movie here I cannot recommend Mothers Day, but you may want to see it if you are a big fan of the 4 stars involved, which was the exact point of making this movie in the first place.

Key and Peele is a comedy act that has been popular on the Comedy Central network for a number of years. Finally, after years of producing a small comedy show on cable, an opportunity comes along to make their first movie, entitled “Keanu”, which is about a very cute cat that gets kidnapped by drug dealers.

I am sure the process of coming up with this idea and producing the script took a while, perhaps a year and during this period, many meetings took place and eventually the realization that this is “our shot, we sure better make this movie funny and great because we may never get a shot like this again” came up. Considering all of this, I was surprised that this movie was not that good or funny at all. Most of the comedy falls flat, the overuse of the N word was disturbing and the best part of the entire story, the cute cat, was barely in this movie nearly enough. There is a long scene with Anna Faris playing truth or dare during a drug deal that ran way too long and was never funny and a following shootout that seemed way out of place for a movie about a kidnapped kitten.

While I thought the premise of this movie was a good one and the story should be funny because kittens are both cute and funny, but after all of that, there really has to be a good story or something funny to hold it all together and this movie has none of this.

This movie is 100% definitely not for kids due to the very cute kitten,  because there are many scenes of extreme violence and murder throughout.  This movie should be missed mainly because it’s a comedy and it was not nearly funny enough.

Keanu – IMDB

It rarely gets better than “The Sixth Sense” which came out in 1999. In my movie going experience, there has never been a better surprise ending than this movie, with the possible exception of the ending of Seven, 1995 which was more shocking than it was unexpected.

One of the most fascinating things about the difficult process of making a great movie, is that in so many cases a writer or director has only one great one in them during their entire creative working life. This is definitely true of writer/director M. Night Shyamalan who never got close to hitting a home run as good as this movie again in his career. I thought that the movie Unbreakable was very good when it came out in 2000 but this is a distant second to the Sixth Sense which had a level of quality that Shyamalan has never reached since.

If you have never seen The Sixth Sense, you owe it to yourself to see it. The ending is one of the best in movie history.

The Sixth Sense – IMDB