Tag: Naomi Watts

Cinema Dispatch: The Glass Castle

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Glass Castle and all the images you see in this review are owned by Lionsgate

Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton

Based… on a True Story.  Ugh… is there any other phrase in the English language (other than Starring Jai Courtney) that sends a bigger chill down my spine?  Trying to parse out which decisions a film makes that are due to the source material is not an easy task (especially when you don’t KNOW the true story to begin with) and it makes judging a movie with a well-rounded opinion THAT much harder to pull off since it works on different levels.  Sure, ANY adaptation is gonna have some changes when going from one medium to another, but adapting something that ACTUALLY happened by its very nature practically begs to be judged on merits that are different from any other movie.  So does this family drama manage to be enjoyable in its own right, or am I gonna have to read the book and do a whole bunch of research after the fact to TRULY understand what it’s going for?  Let’s find out!!

The movie is an adaptation of Jeannette Wall’s memoir of the same name and we follow her as an adult (Brie Larson) as well as a child (Ella Anderson and Chandler Head); discovering how the latter is informing the former and learning about the pleasant as well as not so pleasant aspects of growing up with an abusive alcoholic father Rex (Woody Harrelson) with big ideas but too many personal demons to follow through on any of them.  Along for the ride are her siblings Lori, Brian, and Bridgette (Sarah Snook, Olivia Kate Rice, Sadie Sink, Josh Caras, Iain Armitage, Charlie Stowell, Bridgette Lundy-Paine, Eden Grace Redfield, and Shree Crooks) as well as their mother Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) who all deal with their father in their own ways; though none of them come out of their life with him unscathed.  Still, they all turned out well enough I guess, especially Jeannette who’s working for a big New York magazine and is engaged to a super-rich guy!  Everything’s going great, right!?  Well… maybe not, especially when Mom and Dad show up in New York and start squatting in an abandoned building.  Will Jeannette be able to make peace with the way her father behaved when she was growing up?  What exactly are her parents even doing in New York in the first place?  Is Woody Harrelson able to NOT be likable, even when playing a total jerk!?  Heck, he managed to stay at least SOMEWHAT charming in Natural Born Killers!

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“The demon lives in here.  It feeds on your hate.”     “Oh daddy!  You’re so funny!!”

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Cinema Dispatch: Shut In

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

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Shut In and all the images you see in this review are owned by EuropaCorp

Directed by Farren Blackburn

So when did this movie get announced, because I didn’t know anything about it until I looked up the new releases for this week.  It’s not like Naomi Watts is an unknown actor, and horror movies are big business right now, so the fact that I didn’t even see a trailer for this at any of the horror films I saw this year is not a great sign of what’s to come.  Still, it’s not like movies that get a whole bunch of press are guaranteed to do any better, and a lot of great horror films don’t even get a theatrical release, so maybe they just didn’t know how to sell something like this.  Does this film deliver yet another fantastic horror experience in a year that has already had so many, or will this just get lost in the shuffle?  Let’s find out!!

The movie follows the Portman Family who at one point consisted of three able bodied and happy members, but after a car accident has been reduced to the mother Mary (Naomi Watts) and her son Steven (Charlie Heaton), the latter of whom has suffered severe brain damage and is pretty much unable to move or communicate.  After six months of this routine where she cares for her son and then goes to work as a childhood psychologist, things start to change when one of her patients Tom (Jacob Tremblay) is being moved to Boston so that he can get more specialized care.  The night after Mary finds this out however, Tom shows up at her doorstep… well technical he smashes the window to her car and crawls inside, and while Mary is trying to figure out what to do next, the boy disappears into the night.  So not only is she dealing with her son who is in need of constant care, she now has a possible dead boy on her conscious (they’re up in Maine so it’s snowing all the freaking time) and starts to hear things go bump in the night along with a series of night terrors that are making it hard for her to distinguish between fantasy and reality.  Are the things that Mary is hearing at night real and a possible threat to her and Steven?  Will Tom be found at some point, or is he really just a kid-cicle waiting to be uncovered once Spring rolls around?  Wait, didn’t I see this movie like a year ago!?

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“I wonder what The Babadook would be like if it didn’t have The Babadook in it.  Steven, get the camera.  Oh right… I’ll just get it.”

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