Movie Review: Anyone But You


The good news about the new movie “Anyone But You” is that it covers an important area of relationships that I have rarely seen addressed in any film. From the beginning this story is about the fear of getting hurt, previous relationship dissapointment and painful breakups. What human beings do to avoid getting hurt to save their ego and most importantly, how relationship misunderstandings (that are very often easily fixed) can ruin a rare chance in our lifetimes, in finding true love.

Anyone But You stars Sydney Sweeney as Bea and Glen Powell as Ben, who meet at a Starbucks and almost immediately find out that they are extremely attracted to each other. Unfortunately after a one night stand, life steps in, as it often does, and things to do not progress as it should have – due to the fear that Bea experiences due to a previous breakup and subsequent misunderstandings that could have been avoided. How often in life is something as great as true love destroyed due to something that is overheard, or misunderstood that prevents two people from finding love in their lifetimes.

The rest of this story is more about a typical romantic comedy where too many of the comedic events and dialogue fall flat. Through a series of unlikely coincidences, Ben and Bea find themselves attending a wedding in Austrailia with common friend. While in Austrailia a series of crazy events start, and Ben and Bea try to fool all their friends and family members trying to convince them that they are in fact a couple, when they are at odds with each other. They do this to try and stop their friends from interfering in their lives. Most of this fails to be funny or even entertaining too much of the time.

What does work is the chemistry between Ben and Bea with Sydney Sweeney stealing this movie with her rare and exceptional movie star looks that might just make her a major and in demand movie actress in the future.

There is a scene that involves a spider and nudity with Glen Powell’s character that was an all too obvious attempt at bringing in more movie goers with a gratutious nude scene, and an attempt at crude humor that fails miserably. This spider scene was all about saving the box office that is most likely to be a failure with the main reason being once again, the bad screenplay. The idea with this scene is to add it to the movie trailer to “trick the wrong people” into attending a movie that could have been much better had a good screenplay been written.

I also thought that the ending was rather ridiculous, invoving a helicopter to try and avoid anything that might have been thought of as “seen this before”. Understandably for all of these obvious reasons, the Rotten Tomatoes rating for this movie is a low 58% with my rating at 70% and a recommendation, only because of Sydney Sweeny who just might have found her inroad into becomming a significant movie actress.

Movie Review: Maestro


The new movie “Maestro” is one of those end-of-year movies that you know as soon as the film starts will have a great chance to win the best picture Oscar. For this movie, the quality of the cinematography and especially the amazing makeup making actor Bradley Cooper look exactly like the subject of this good biography – Leonard Bernstein are both huge standouts. The first half of this movie is in black and white and looks a great deal like movies that were made in the 1930s and 40s. The second half of this film is in color, and this reminded me of the famous movie “The Wizard of Oz”, which was released in 1939, that also started out in black and white and finished in color.

The acting is also outstanding throughout, including Bradley Cooper who both co-wrote and directed this movie as well as starring Leonard Bernstein and Carey Mulligan who plays Bernstein’s long-suffering wife Felicia Montealegre. Throughout the relationship between Montealegre and Bernstein, Bernstein was constantly cheating on her with numerous other men. Over a long period and so many affairs, this story does a good job of showing how much all of this cheating was affecting Felicia. Standup comedian Sarah Silverman has a short but very good cameo as Bernstein’s sister Shirley Bernstein.

The only problem with this film is that there is really no sequential story, just a series of scenes, some connected but most not connected. This lack of a sequential story might have been by design, along with the black and white then color idea, but for any film to hit a home run, there always must be a contiguous story. Otherwise, for some important reasons, the story becomes more of a documentary than a movie biography of Leonard Bernstein. I also thought there should have been many more scenes of Bernstein’s musical genius and conducting and less of the soap opera aspects of Bernstein’s life.

I agree with the only good rating of 81% on Rotten Tomatoes, mainly due to the screenplay and the lack of a sequential story that ultimately might prevent this film from winning the Best Picture Oscar. I do recommend this movie, mainly for the outstanding acting and the great makeup work on Bradley Cooper, which has to be a 100% guarantee for an Oscar.

Netflix Movie Review: Leave the World Behind


The new Netflix movie “Leave the World Behind” has several very impressive visual effects. At the start, there is a huge oil tanker slowly running aground while many people on the beach watch. This looked like they really commissioned a huge tanker and ran it into a beach for real – not computer-generated effects. There is another scene where there is a log jam of driverless Tesla cars all crashing into each other on a highway, due to some kind of ongoing electrical attack from a source that was never fully defined in this story. There is a scene where many deer outside of a log cabin seem to be insane. They are standing in front of a young woman who looks like she is in a trance, and does not move. This is one scene that did look like it was computer generated. This is one of those films where all of the loose ends are never fully resolved and I have never been a fan of a movie like this.

Leave the World Behind stars Julia Roberts as Amanda Sandford and Ethan Hawke as Clay Sandford who are a husband and wife with two children who decide to rent a house for a week. Very shortly after moving in, several strange things start happening, starting with electrical problems in the house, a big New York City blackout and then news of commercial airplanes dropping out of the sky. Very soon after moving in the owner of the house G. H. Scott played by Mahershala Ali and his daughter Ruth, played by Myha’la show up and want to move back into their house because of a blackout in New York City. Understandable conflicts arise from their request to move into the house, mostly between Amanda and G.H.’s very hostile daughter Ruth. Ruth’s rude hostility I thought was way too much considering the extreme circumstances.

Later in the story, Rose, the daughter of Amanda and Clay runs off and cannot be found. Considering the insane circumstances of imminent worldwide doom, this 10 year old girl running off on her own makes very little sense – as does the ending that involves this 10 year old girl and the final episode of the TV series “Friends”. The problem with this movie is that there are way too many loose ends that ruin what started out as an interesting idea for an end of the world story.

I do not understand why the Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this movie are as high as 75%, with my rating about 65% and a pass on this movie – mainly because of the weirdness throughout.