Movie Review: Die My Love


The problem with a movie as horrible as “Die My Love” is that too many will be fooled into seeing it because the cast includes two Academy Award winners, Jennifer Lawrence and Sissy Spacek, and three-time Oscar nominee Nick Nolte. Well-known actor Robert Pattinson is also in this disaster for reasons unknown. Most moviegoers will probably think that a movie cannot be bad if so many experienced, rich, and famous actors are in it. Of course, they all read the script and wanted to make this film for their own growth as actors, the message, or some other important reason that did not include money, because this was a low-budget movie. Unfortunately for those who go to this horrific mess, they will be tortured for two hours with scenes that include loud noises of a dog constantly barking, loud arguments and foul language, a baby crying, and even Jennifer Lawrence crawling around barking like a dog in several scenes. What is the point of all this? Perhaps to make the audience nauseous. Too bad there is no movie award for the highest number of people throwing up in theaters.

The plot of his terrible movie is about a young couple, Grace and Jackson, who live in a depressing old house in the middle of nowhere. Despite their mostly bad marriage, they decide to have a baby, resulting in Grace, played by Jennifer Lawrence, staying home all day with the child and her husband Jackson, played by Pattinson, at his job all day and having affairs with other women. They later stupidly decide to get a dog, which does nothing but bark nonstop in every scene and later becomes very sick – perhaps because the dog read the screenplay. The early scenes of Grace with her newborn baby are some of the worst in these nightmare two hours, as she becomes understandably extremely depressed and acts more and more insane at a level that becomes unbearable to watch. Of course, Grace has postpartum depression, made worse by the dump of a house she is living in all alone, in the middle of nowhere, without even a television to distract her from her horrible existence. Grace was formerly a writer, and once pregnant, she gave up on her profession, another reason for her depression.

There are occasional visits to Jackson’s parents, and his mother, Pam, played by Sissy Spacek, in an effort to add more depth to this bad script and give Grace more excuses to act insane in front of Jackson’s parents and Pam’s neighbors. There is one scene with Nick Nolte, Jackson’s father, probably to make this of movie torture hit the two hour length. Jennifer Lawrence has several nude scenes, perhaps to trick more people into seeing this movie, a marketing tactic that, in my experience, almost always backfires with bad movies.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this horrific film is an insanely innacurate 78% with the audience consensus a more accurate 46%. My rating is 0% and a recommendation to set fire to this nightmare before it’s released to any streaming service. One of the worst movies I have ever seen.

Movie Review: No Hard Feelings


Jennifer Lawrence won 3 Golden Globe awards and one Oscar for best actress in “Silver Linings Playbook” in 2013. Lawrence is one of the very few actors who have won several major acting awards at a very young age. Jennifer’s last two high-quality acting roles were “Joy” in 2015 and “American Hustle” in 2013. Unfortunately getting the next high-quality movie role requires a great script, written by a great screenwriter – a few-and-far-between miracle that does not come around that often.

As far as deciding to take the role of a bad comedy called “No Hard Feelings”, it is very hard to believe that Lawrence could have read this script, and then decided to actually act in this movie. This film is at best below average, in terms of both the story and any appearance of something that is actually funny. The acid test for any comedy – nobody laughed in the theater I was in.

Once again, Lawrence felt the need to stay relevant, more than her desire to only act in high-quality productions. We can only hope that Jennifer will not be going the Robert De Niro route of making a string of bad comedies, that are well below her standards.

The story of No Hard Feelings is about the parents of a young college-bound boy, Alison and Laird Becker, played by Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick and Andrew Barth Feldman, who plays their son Percy. Alison and Laird are concerned about Percy’s shy introverted personality before he goes off to college, so they hire Maddie, played by Jennifer Lawrence as a kind of sex surrogate for their son, which creates incidents of attempted comedy that mostly do no work throughout this story. If Maddie can pull off significantly changing their son, then she will get their used car. It is hard to believe that this idea was greenlighted as a mainstream movie. The most insane thing about this movie is Lawrence agreeing to do a nude-fight scene on a beach at night while 3 teenagers are trying to steal her clothes. What was she thinking there?

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film is a correctly low 67%, with my rating at 50% for a solid miss this movie opinion.

Netflix Movie Review: Don’t Look Up


What is most unusual about the movie “Don’t Look Up” is the large number of #1 stars who appear in this film and its rapid decent from theaters despite this star power. As of today Don’t Look Up is on Netflix and I can only guess at its early popularity. Directed by Adam McKay and starring Merrill Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Jennifer Lawrence, Timothée Chalamet, Tyler Perry, Jonah Hill, Ron Perlman and Ariana Grande.

This story is a parody of Global Warming in the form of a huge asteroid that is discovered to destroy the Earth in 6 months. What follows is two scientists played by DiCaprio and Lawrence who make the rounds to the President, the press and even morning talk shows about the immanent end of the world, only to be laughed at, disbelieved and ridiculed in the press. Just like the early days of The Global Warming warnings that started decades ago.

Adam McKay, who also wrote this screenplay does a great job at tying the ironies of Global Warming to the ironies and stupidity within this story and how even when facing the end of the human race a few billionaires come up with a plan to crash land the comet on the planet in pieces because it is comprised of valuable earth metals needed for cell phones and other electronics. We can make trillions of dollars against the total end of all humanity. Where this movie fails as a parody is that most of the attempted humor fails – probably accounting for the low 56% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. I thought the acting was good, especially within a few scenes where DiCaprio goes off the deep end due to his frustration with all the insane people around him, who “just don’t seem to get it’.

I rank this movie a solid 75% for the star power and acting and the very unusual idea behind all of this. This is also one of those movies (and I personally hate this) that is not over when you think its supposed to be over – well into the end of the credits. Why is this a new trend in movies? Who wants to sit through credits just in case there is something extra at the very very end? Also for those who may have heard that Merrill Streep has a nude scene at the end, I read that this is a body double. Despite this, I thought this nude scene idea was too over the top.