Julianne Moore | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

The new Apple TV movie “Echo Valley” is one of the few movies I have ever seen that explores the lengths a parent will go to protect and save their child. Echo Valley stars Sydney Sweeney as Claire Garretson and Julianne Moore as Kate Garretson in a story where Kate is desperately trying to save the life of Claire, who has fallen into drug use and is associating with dangerous criminals.

There are several well-played scenes of intense, high-emotion acting where Claire is begging Kate for money and lying about her reasons for needing the money, which is obviously to buy more drugs. Kate is divorced, lives on a horse farm, and has big money problems, even asking her ex-husband for money to fix the roof on her barn before it collapses.

The casting of two extreme criminal lowlifes for the parts of Jackie and Claire’s boyfriend Ryan was very well done, as these two actors both played and looked their parts perfectly. There is the standard movie trickery and sleight of hand in this story, which should be considered too outlandish to believe could ever happen. Far too often, it seems to be more important to fool the audience rather than come up with an original and coherent idea. I did like the ending, because it reminded me of one of the reasons we all go to the movies, because real life rarely has a satisfying ending where the evil people get what they deserve.

Due to reviews like this one on Rotten Tomatoes: “Strong performances are squandered on a sub-par script and characters who are too grating to feel a modicum of connection to.”, Dana Han-Klein, the average rating is only 51%. I am giving this film a mild recommendation with a 70% rating only because of the strong acting by both Sydney Sweeney and Julianne Moore.

The new movie “May December” from the movie poster gives a very misleading message about what this film might be about. This film is a fictional story about a “Mary Kay Letourneau” – like couple, played by Julianne Moore as Gracie and Charles Melton as Joe and a famous movie actress Elizabeth played by Natalie Portman who is doing research for a movie role about their life after Gracie is released from prison. What follows in this story is nothing more than a series of different vignettes and scenes that sometimes seem connected, other scenes not connected with several different characters, and a mostly disjointed story that can put any viewer into a deep coma inside of 45 minutes.

This is another example of trying to be so different at the expense of an enjoyable and understandable story. This entire film is so intent on being so different that, most of what happens is boring and has no satisfying conclusions anywhere, especially with the abrupt and strange ending.

At the end, I thought about why this movie was even made. What was the point of these two hours of an extremely forgettable story. Then while reading and seeing the 90%+ ratings on Rotten Tomatoes I wondered what movie these critics were watching? This movie is a big-time miss, with my rating around 50% only for some of the acting.