Although I've read other Jane Austen novels, I tried TWICE to get through Emma and couldn't. It was boring!
The movie was better but still wasn't great, very slow-moving. The main character is very self-centered and couldn't see that she was causing difficulties in other people she knew.
I Still Believe is a biography of contemporary Christian singer Jeremy Camp and the death of his first wife, Melissa. I was unfamiliar with his story or his music and was quite touched by the film, although it didn't make me cry. The first half of the film moves very quickly, but it slows down in the second half. At almost two hours, I Still Believe is just a tad bit too long.
Although this was a theatrical film, most of the cast is from television: AJ Apu, Melissa Roxburgh, Terry Serpico and Gary Sinise (who does both).
The tale is a true-life version of Love Story or The Fault in Our Stars.
Mom and I both enjoyed the new production of Fatima, about Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco and their visions of the Virgin Mary in 1917 in Portugal. We saw the movie in a privately-owned one-screen theater, and we were surprised at how many came to see the movie.
It's not slow at all, although some of the dialogue, even though in English, is a little muddled and hard to understand. The movie was actually made in Portugal and that made it look more authentic.
It's been decades since I've seen the 1952 movie, The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, on TV, and all I really remembered of it was the scene at the end where it is pouring rain and hundreds of people are holding up black umbrellas. That scene is of course in the new Fatima as well.
Switched is a cross between Mean Girls and Freaky Friday. It's about a nerdy girl who wishes she could be the popular girl, and so the next morning the two wake up and their minds are in the other girl's body.
The movie is better than it should be, although a little too long. There are several laugh-out-loud moments. The popular girl says, videotapes and writes about some very cruel things on her blog, but the nerdy girl does nothing to defend herself or even confide in anyone.
The movie was filmed in Louisville, KY, and is a pleasant counterpoint to the bad news that's been coming out of that city for weeks.
Hillbilly Elegy is an excellent but very depressing movie about an Ohio woman suffering from heroin addiction. The entire family is dysfunctional, and even the main character, JD, is not a saint.
I've not read JD Vance's autobiography on which this movie is based, so I can't give you a comparison to the book. The movie takes place in Middletown, Ohio, and was actually filmed there, which makes the setting very authentic.
The only person in the film whom I recognized was Glenn Close, who played JD's grandmother Bonnie, and as the movie goes on you feel less and less sympathy for her, and none at all for Beverly, JD's mother, played by Amy Adams.
A warning, this movie is rated R because the cursing is non-stop. It has had a brief release in some theaters and will be shown on Netflix beginning Nov. 24.
I am officially an old person. I recognized the senior cast members of The War with Grandpa immediately, but no one else in the movie. They were Robert DeNiro, Cheech Marin, Jane Seymour and Christopher Walken. Grandpa is the family movie tale of a grandfather (DeNiro) who moves in with his daughter's family after he is arrested at a grocery store. He takes over his grandson Peter's bedroom, and Peter is unhappy about being relegated to the attic. So Peter sends a semi-threatening note to him. The pranks escalate and become mean-spirited, ending in a disastrous birthday party.
Although there were other times that I laughed out loud, the little battles were uncomfortable to watch after a while.
On a related note, I will not explain why, but if you see this movie yourself, you will have to decide whether or not it is considered a Christmas movie.
An unlikely subject for a Western is someone going around reading all the newspapers, but that's the plot of News of the World. Tom Hanks stars as Capt. Jefferson Kidd, a former Confederate soldier now driving his horse-drawn cart through small towns in Texas with newspapers. It is never explained where he got the newspapers from, since some are from other countries such as India.
Along the way he discovers an orphaned German girl who had been raised by the Kiowa and speaks no English and remembers very little German. The movie is very episodic. It felt like watching several episodes of an old TV show. In fact, the plot could very easily translate to television.
I enjoyed the movie very much and the cinematography is amazing.
Normally I avoid remakes, but since I have never seen Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit either on the stage or in one of its movie adaptations, I decided to see the new version.
Unfortunately it was very slow and not very funny, although I did like the ending. Perhaps it is funnier on stage?
The characters seemed, pardon the pun, a bit mean-spirited. I looked up the new movie after I got home and found a review that used the same term!
The only cast member I recognized was Judy Dench. She played a medium who conjures up the late wife of a crime author who is suffering from writer's block. The new wife thinks her husband is nuts, until she starts seeing items moving around the house and then believes.
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