Dakota Johnson | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

The new film”Cha Cha Real Smooth” is almost as unusual as its title. This film is available on Apple+ and in some theaters. Cha Cha Real Smooth is a coming of age story, with the main character Andrew, played by newcomer Cooper Raiff, coming to grips with his life after college and starting to pay the price that most of us pay when we are young. What do you do with our lives? How the hell are we going to be able to make a living? What about my student loan debt, that for anyone graduating college in recent years can be a life long nightmare.

Andrew thinks he is still in love with a much older woman he knew when he was a young teenager, who is now living in Spain. Andrew is a DJ, lives with his mother and also works in a bad fast food restaurant. Along the way Andrew runs into an older woman who is about to get married and is the mother to a genius Autistic daughter who is able to solve Rubik’s cubes that are 13×13. Much of the story and dialog is both very unusual and at times brilliant, with Dakota Johnson playing Domino, as the mother of the Autistic child, showing that she is an extremely accomplished actress. Others in the cast include Brad Garret’s as Andrew’s stepfather and Leslie Mann as Andrew’s very worried mother. The acting is very good by all, making this one of the better coming of age stories I have seen in a long time.

The ratings on Rotten Tomatoes are a very high 86%, with my rating in the 80% range and a solid recommendation.

The new Netflix movie “The Lost Daughter” is highly unusual on a number of levels. A woman, Leda, played by Olivia Coleman, is along on a beach, obviously depressed about something. She is riveted on The new Netflix movie “The Lost Daughter” is highly unusual on a number of levels. A woman, Leda, played by Olivia Coleman, is along on a beach, obviously depressed about something. She is riveted on another woman Nina, played by Dakota Johnson, who has a 6 year old daughter and she is having problems with this child. At one point the child is lost on the beach and Leda finds her. The rest of this film is a series of flashbacks that slowly tells a story that I did not expect about Leda’s own daughters, her life as a professor and her marriage. The acting is very good in this film, but the overall story and payoff I did not think was strong enough for a recommendation.

The Lost Daughter is another one of this art-type-too-unusual-movies where the critics give it high marks, in this case 96% on Rotten Tomatoes – and the audience gives it low ratings, only 45%. My rating is around 60% because of the strange series of events and the way the depressing story was told. Despite the good acting, I cannot recommend this movie.