The new small movie “Hearts Beat Loud” has very big ratings on Rotten Tomatoes of 91% and I agree with those numbers. The story here is simple and that is why it is a very good film because most of the time, the simple small stories about real life are always the best.

This story is about the grief of a widower Frank Fisher played by Nick Offerman and the difficulties of running a small record store and raising a teenage daughter,played extremely well by the actress Kiersey Clemons by himself. They have almost no money, the business is failing and Frank’s daughter is about to go to college to become a doctor. One line that stood out for me is that the tuition for one year of medical school is 62,000 a year but if you have no money at all, its 12,000. How completely insane is this? Somewhere along the line the amount of money that the vast majority of people make in this country became completely disconnected to what things cost and this movie depicts this harsh reality very well. This problem is at its absolute worst when it comes to the cost of college, law school and medical school.

This movie also stars Toni Collette who plays the landlord of the failing record store and Collette was also in the recent and very good movie Heredity – recently reviewed in this blog. One problem in this movie was the chain smoking of Nick Offerman’s character – a problem I still see in almost all movies today.

I thought the singing and music in this movie, especially at the end was very well done and adds even more to like to this very good film.

I highly recommend Hearts Beat Loud.

The reason why big budget computer generated movies like “The Incredibles” and “Incredibles 2” are always either good or great is because so much money is at stake and failure is not an option. One cannot help but admire the huge number of many hours of computer work that it takes to create all of these animated characters, worlds and action scenes. Also, unlike so many non-animated movies made today, the story is the #1 priority and like the original Incredibles that was released a long 14 years ago in 2004 this second installment also has a very good story.

This is the first cartoon that I have reviewed on this blog and because I saw the original Incredibles and admired the quality I decided to see the second one knowing that I would be impressed with this film and I was not disappointed.

The story is as good as the first movie and it stars the same voices as the original starting with Holly Hunter and Craig T. Nelson as the main characters and super heroes and both of them were outstanding in their voice-over roles.

I recommend this film for both adults and children and it is one of the best animated feature films I have seen in a long time.

There is no way funding would have happened for the new movie “Tag” were it not for that fact that it is about a true story about a bunch of men in their 50’s who have been playing a game of tag for 30 years. The challenge with a movie like this is to turn the true story into something interesting by adding some Hollywood fluff that we know didn’t happen in real life – but is interesting enough to hold and audiences attention for 2 hours and add enough humor to make it funny. Unfortunately this movie failed in both of these areas in a big way and the result was a pretty boring two hours with several well known actors like John Hamm and Jeremy Renner in a bad movie.

This one should be missed and is another good idea lost.