MOVIE REVIEW: Miss Juneteenth

Willed by Beharie’s solid lead, this small film is a gratifying drama fit for the holiday of its namesake. This feature writing and directing debut of Channing Godfrey Peoples (TV’s Queen Sugar) is an absorbing and honorable celebration of traditions, futures, culture, and family free of harsh judgment and wrongly-placed stereotypes that would have come from disingenuous sources. Miss Juneteenth has as much sincerity as it has struggle. The worthy themes ring true for a positive and willing audience that can pause looking down on pageants and see the bigger preparatory importance.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Departure

There is an almost teenage-level of absurdity to it all by the time the finger-pointing sparks conflict. Too much torrid steam in The Departure is off-screen and too little rancor coalesces and festers to truly shock. Within its establishing transitions, the film drops a suggestive cover of “Where Did you Sleep Last Night?” but the whole movie is more Leadbelly than Nirvana with dramatic edge and execution.

2020, ADVANCE MOVIE REVIEW, Independent Film, Home Media, MOVIE REVIEW, SHORT FILMS, Streaming, Video on Demand, 1 STARDon ShanahanJune 12, 2020Comment

MOVIE REVIEW: Da 5 Bloods

In the same way this website touts “every movie has a lesson,” every movie also has its politics. Academy Award winner (damn, that sounds great to read) Spike Lee is never shy about his level of challenging civics, nor should he be. His movies are his earned and rightful rostrums. Stitched with the electrified barbed wire of echoed history, Da 5 Bloods is infused with warranted politics that make it more than its retirement adventure and war movie ingredients. With stern strength in this Netflix release, the rants of old men give way to the treatises of ghosts.

MOVIE REVIEW: The King of Staten Island

The “semi” in front of the “semi-autobiographical” label for Pete Davidson’s quarter-life crisis movie memoir The King of Staten Island is both ambiguous and chancy. Formally, the prefix is meant to signify “half” while it often means “partially,” “incompletely,” and “somewhat.” The adjunct is fitting. At its fullest and best, Judd Apatow’s newest comedy coming to VOD on June 12th is a collection of half-hearted beats and half-witted mischief. That’s it. Just half.

MOVIE REVIEW: Becky

The tale-of-the-tape of Becky is as preposterous as the promised twisted violence that follows. In one corner, you have the middle-aged comedian Kevin James taking a dare for his first “dramatic role” as the escaped Neo-Nazi criminal Dominick. He’s hulking, tatted-up, bearded, and armed with stern rhetoric and an itchy trigger finger. In the other corner, you have the titular Millennial 13-year-old played by Lulu Wilson of The Haunting of Hill House. She’s angry, mournful over the passing of her mother, and, due to the home invasion circumstances than transpire, motivated for every hell-raising level of vindication possible. Before Bruce Buffer screams into a microphone, who do you got in this cutthroat clash that hits VOD June 5th?

MOVIE REVIEW: The High Note

Each time Maggie’s employers, the fictional world-renowned recording artist Grace Davis played by Blackish’s Tracee Ellis Ross and her manager Jack Robertson played by Ice Cube, summarily dismiss her to stay in her lane or fetch some inconsequential thing, The High Note gets better because the real talent is allowed to emerge. To love underdog moxie, or any moxie for that matter, you have to have it. The flimsy Dakota Johnson doesn’t. She, and the movie, would be better served by her getting out of the way just like her shunned Maggie.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Lovebirds

Here’s the rub though. For “hi-jinks ensue” to work and live up to its promise, you need strong and effective events to come before and after when that phrase is planted. Have a weak setup and the absurdity of hi-jinks after can feel like a jolting improvement or tail-spinning crash. Have a great setup and the hi-jinks that follow can either evolve or devolve the auspicious start. This “one wild night” romp of The Lovebirds has about half of each measure in that balance.

2020, 3 STARS, ADVANCE MOVIE REVIEW, Home Media, MOVIE REVIEW, Streaming, Video on DemandDon ShanahanMay 21, 2020The LovebirdsComment

MOVIE REVIEW: True History of the Kelly Gang

In true western, or in this case, bushranger movie fashion, the edgiest and most intense moments in Justin Kurzel’s True History of the Kelly Gang come in the moments when someone is being held at gunpoint. Drama properly peaks with the potential power released by one little curved metal lever hinging a mechanism of murder and mayhem. The action itself to squeeze that trigger is easy. The decision and ramifications, as we well know, are not.

MOVIE REVIEW: Endings, Beginnings

Granted, messy people and their messy lives make for messy stories, especially here in the medium of narrative film. Not everyone can hold their noses to other peoples’ messes on display. Their pity or empathy levels have limits. Tolerance comes from the talent and the trueness coming together for the given story. Filmmaker Drake Doremus presents another striking, bare, and brave movie in the form of Endings, Beginnings. If you have the capacity to wallow along, you will be impressed. Plenty won’t and that’s too bad.

2020, 2019, 4 STARS, ADVANCE MOVIE REVIEW, Film Festival, Independent Film, Streaming, Video on DemandDon ShanahanApril 16, 2020Comment

MOVIE REVIEW: Love Wedding Repeat

I am starting to become convinced that there will never be a movie wedding that goes off without a hitch, as they say. It’s cinematically impossible not to have something, anything, or everything go wrong. But, that’s the fun of all those movies, including the new Netflix film Love Wedding Repeat. There is always comedy to be had when a springboard event of enduring love can survive in every cringe, surprise, fumble, flub, and fail executed by the doting newlyweds on down to the drunk ne'er-do-wells.

MOVIE REVIEW: Coffee & Kareem

Those posters clearly catch the eye, but once Coffee & Kareem attempts to evoke the promotional notion that it is worthy of standing next to classic giants like those three films as a homage or even as an lesser riff, it’s asking to bomb. When you fail, even intentionally, you become one more shitty cop movie from a generation ago. Does someone get an award somewhere from some lofty agency of aficionados when you make a shitty cop movie precisely as shitty as the old shitty cop movies this shitty cop movie emulates and remembers? Is that a Razzie or something else?

SHORT FILM REVIEW: A Missed Connection

For a moment, think on the last bad day you experienced when the things you juggle in your life continued to collapse. What sort of “wit’s end” did you find yourself arriving at? Jog the memory of how you reacted to that ugly day. Did you lash out harmfully or did a figurative life preserver pull you out of the doldrums or stresses? Chicago filmmaker Matthew Weinstein’s newest short film A Missed Connection thrusts a character to such a breaking point and exquisitely presents a chance scenario likely dreamt of by many, yet afforded by few. This film plays on February 21st and 22nd as a selection of the Beloit International Film Festival.