Author Archives: jjcwn

Movie Review: Speak No Evil

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The movie “Speak No Evil” is one of those slow movie psychological horror movies that take a long time to develop. There are two married couples, each with one child who meet and decide to spend a weekend at a very old house in the country. Over dinner, conversations, and a series of discussions that even include parenting, the couple who lives in this old house are found at first to be annoying, inappropriate, and eventually dangerously insane.

The parts of the evil couple Paddy and Clara are played by James McAvoy and Aisling Franciosi, with McAvoy a standout at playing an extremely evil and sick person. The other couple in the wrong place at the wrong time are Louise and Ben, played by Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy – who last appeared together in the great TV series “Halt and Catch Fire” about the dawn of information technology in the 1980s.

As this story goes on, the reality of the evil couple’s situation and their son, who we are told was born with a tongue too small to speak become known to the other couple, resulting in an ending that involves an extremely violent series of action scenes and a satisfying conclusion, given the abuse suffered by the young boy in this story named Ant, played by Dan Hough.

The acting in this film is good throughout, although I thought that the wife of Paddy, seemed miscast because she looks too much like a normal woman to play someone so sick and evil. Most people will find many of the scenes of crazy and annoying insanity and child abuse hard to sit through. The other issue is that it seemed to take too long to get to the point of how dangerous and sick these two people who own the house are.

Too many of us will recognize personality traits in Paddy that we have seen in people throughout our working and personal lives. You realize that sometimes there can be no measurable limit as to just how dangerous the wrong people we encounter in life can be.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this movie is a very solid 85% and I agree with this rating and do recommend this film.

Movie Review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

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One small sign of imagination of the new movie “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is naming the sequel this way, which is also a reference to the fact that saying “Beetlejuice” three times, causes this living-dead-zombie creature played by Michael Keaton to appear. Hopefully, there will never be a third movie where they have this name repeated 3 times in the title – because what would happen then, the end of the world?

There is no sign of a movie here, just a series of disconnected scenes, showing dismembered dead bodies and a low number of appearances of the main character played by Keaton in any scenes, except for the end. There is nothing funny or entertaining and it is hard to understand why so many people like to see dead and dismembered zombies and think it’s funny or interesting. Disgusting is never funny. Never will be.

This film stars Catherine O’Hara as Delia, Jenna Ortega as Astrid, Willem Dafoe as Wolf, and Monica Bellucci as Delores, with actors Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis not appearing in this bad sequel, perhaps because they actually read this non-existent and very bad script.

Given that the original Beetlejuice came out in early 1989, it is impossible to believe that after so many years and ongoing discussions of a new film, that a screenplay this bad was written and then greenlighted. At the end of this very bad movie, there is an extremely weird and stupid musical number in a church performed by all of the main characters. This last scene made no sense, but nothing makes sense in this movie, starting with why they decided to produce it in the first place.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating of 77% for this mess is once again crazy and dead wrong, with my rating 10% only for some of the special effects. This movie would be better suited for training aspiring makeup artists. This level of horrible movie making should be skipped by everyone.

Movie Review: Slingshot

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The new movie “Slingshot” is about a spaceship – with technology at least 50-75 years into the future trying to use the gravity of Jupiter to “slingshot” around Jupiter, using its extreme gravity to travel to Saturn’s moon Titan, much faster.

This film stars Casey Affleck as John, Laurence Fishburne as Captain Franks, and Tomer Capone as Nash as 3 astronauts traveling to Jupiter for years with a mission to Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, with a mission that includes the hope of finding a new source of renewable energy that will save planet Earth. 

Fundamentally this entire story is about the need to put astronauts to sleep for months at a time for long-term space travel using drugs that cause nausea, and hallucinations. The many hallucinations in this story with all 3 of the main characters are too many, with several of them over the top insane with an absurd ending that does not have any logic given the story. There are many flashbacks in this story, with John dating and eventually falling in love with Zoe, played by Emily Beecham. Some of these flashbacks seem like they are real incidents that happened in the past, but too many are once again, hallucinations that John experiences because of the drugs that put the astronauts to sleep. The constant confusion about what is real and fake during this entire film gets old after about 40 minutes, making the entire premise of this film of nonstop fooling the audience more annoying than entertaining.

The other problem with this movie is that the technology to get humanity to Jupiter and Saturn is probably 50 years into the future at least, but the cell phones and laptops used in this story are all present-day. Obviously, this does not make any sense, but was probably necessary because there was not enough budget to create futuristic phones and computers.

The Rotten Tomatoes reviews are a correctly low 47% and I agree with this rating and do not recommend this film.