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Movie Review: Belfast

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The most important standout of the new movie “Belfast”, both written and directed by Kenneth Branagh, is seeing how outstanding the black and white cinematography is – about as good as any black and white film I have ever seen.

This story is about Belfast Ireland in 1969, during a 4 day period of riots from August 12-16 that marked the beginning of an almost 30 year conflict known as “The Trouble” , with conflicts and violence between Catholics and Irish Nationalists. This story was created from Kenneth Branagh’s own experiences with his family during this period in Ireland. The problem I had with this film is that there was too much concentration with the main characters in the family, that played too much like a soap opera and not enough attention given to the important history of this 30 year conflict.

This film stars Jude Hill, as the 10 year old boy, Caitriona Balfe as his mother and Jamie Dornan as the boys father and Judi Dench as his grandmother. The acting is very good, and due to the history this film represents and the great cinematography, this film might just get a best picture nomination.

For me, I thought that the extremely high 88% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes for this movie are too high, with my rating around 78% and a solid recommendation.



Netflix Movie Review: Red Notice

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When the movie “Red Notice” was released only in theaters last week, I wondered why it was only appearing in one theater out of many in my area. The reason is, that this movie is more of a cookie cutter, hashed together story based on about 10-15 movies that have already been made several times before.

I recognized “Midnight Run”, several “Mummy” movies, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and about 3 James Bond movies. Once again this is another example of a bad script that was made, for reasons unknown, and then somehow fell into production either by accident or total blunder. Then when it was too late – the thinking was, “lets throw 3 well known actors into this bad movie, and try to get our money back”. What is most unusual about Ryan Reynold’s acting career is that he seems to be the exact same soft talking sarcastic person in every role within movies like this. It will be interesting to realize when this finally gets too old and boring to continue.

Unfortunately due to the few theaters this film is playing in, and now after only a week its already on Netflix, the odds are high that this is a going to be a losing investment, even with Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot, in the starring roles. The other thing I noticed this time around, was that the 3 stars are all making huge efforts by going on all the late night talk shows to promote to try and save this mostly bad 2 hours.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Red Notice are an extremely low 40% and I agree with this assessment and do not recommend this movie.

Movie Review: Eternals

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Anyone who is not a bankable actor or star in the movie industry, has to wonder at times what it must feel like to accept a role in a Marvel movie, or any movie that requires you to dress up in ridiculous costumes and recite what at times can be equally ridiculous dialogue. There are actors out there, that regardless of their relative success, probably refuse to make movies like “Eternals”, thinking they would hate looking so ridiculous or might laugh when it was time for their speaking parts.

The first and most important part of the new and anemic Eternals movie is that at 2 hours and 37 minutes, it is way too long. There is no reason that a movie like this, about aliens called eternals who arrive 5000 years ago to protect the planet earth and fight killer aliens called the Deviants, should be this annoyingly long. We did not need to see what happened 1000, 2000 and 5000 years ago, so often during this mostly boring and bad movie. It seemed at times that the screenwriter and director thought that the way to make this movie better or more relevant was to pad it another 45 minutes, causing most of the people in the audience I was in, to constantly check their watches. Enough already.

Some critics have said that Eternals is the worst movie in the entire Marvel series and unfortunately I do agree with this opinion. This film as a number of well known actors including Angelina Jolie (who has a surprisingly small part), Salma Hayek, Kit Harington, Brian Tyree Henry, Harry Styles, Salma Hayek, Kumail Nanjiani and Richard Madden. The obvious plan here was, we have a weak script about another Marvel comic book series, lets throw many big named stars at it, to get people in the theaters. We have all seen this idea fail many times in the past, this movie will have the same result because a bad screenplay will always result in a bad film. Some of the special effects were very good, including the creation of incredible looking Deviant creatures, but there were too many boring and dead areas in this story, and I was surprised I did not doze off during some of these unnecessary long drawn out parts.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Eternals is an understandably and correctly low 48%, my rating is about the same, and I cannot recommend this long and mostly boring Marvel movie.