Rambling Film

I wanna be where the people are. A mermaid named Silver (Marta Mazurek) is drawn to the singing of a man, Mietek (Jakub Gierszal) one night. She and her sister, Gold (Michalina Olszanska) come on land and follow he and his family to a club where their lovely voices and fins that appear in the water land them a part in a cabaret act. But while Silver starts to fall in love, all Gold wants to do is what mermaids do best: eat humans. It's probably not shocking to anyone who knows me that I'm 100% for a film marketed as a "mermaid musical horror movie." You can't make this up. And a film with that description has no right being as good as The Lure is. They balance it, if you can believe it.  They essentially take the love plot of The Little Mermaid and spice it up with Europop and gore. The songs are infectious. The blood and guts isn't until later on, which I expected a bit more of, but it's used in a unique way. Mzurek and Olszanska are p...

This week's theme from Wandering Through The Shelves is about those people that are up all night, trying to get that rich working hard. I'm really excited about this theme because three of my favorite shows qualify for it. Here are three TV shows I love about work places. 1) The Newsroom I hate that Aaron Sorkin let his ego go out of control and this only went three seasons. (The rumor is he walked away because it was not getting the same ratings/recognition his previous shows got on HBO) It's an excellent fast paced show about life in the newsroom at a major TV station. The characters were right, the dialogue smart, I loved all of it.  2) Rescue Me Denis Leary and his crew made me fall in love with these fire fighters we followed in post 9/11 New York City. Sure, this show had its issues. Most of the female characters were awful and they were under huge scrutiny for the way they handled serious topics at times, but overall, I really liked this series. It was...

The Midwest of California Christine aka Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) wants to leave her home town of Sacramento to go to college on the East Coast, but her practical mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) doesn't think it's reasonable. They clash frequently as Lady Bird comes into her own.  Saoirse Ronan is one of my favorite working actresses right now, but despite that I wasn't initially sold on Lady Bird . Director/Writer Greta Gerwig has a type and I was worried I'd just see Ronan trying to play, well....Greta Gerwig. Luckily that's not the case at all and what I ended up with has been my favorite movie of the year so far.  Lady Bird is all of us at one point or another during our teens. She's moody, insecure, confident, angry, awkward, in love, a dreamer, a downer, and has two very different relationships with her parents. Her passive father (Tracy Letts) encourages her as best he can but its the relationship with her mother that takes center stage. I f...

All in. In the wake of Superman's (Henry Cavill) death, Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) has to form a team of gifted individuals alongside Diana (Gal Gadot) when a creature from another planet, Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds) returns to Earth looking for "mother boxes" and plans to destroy everything. They call in The Flash,(Ezra Miller) Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) for help, but of course it's not simple. It's a shame this film is currently getting Tomb Raider'd at the box office, but maybe this is what Warner Bros needs to push the DCEU in the right direction. Yes, Justice League is a far better film than its official predecessor; Batman v Superman .  But knowing all this box office drama in advance did change the way I looked at this film. I'll get to that in a second. I went in expecting to have a bit of fun, and I did. When Justice League is good, it's very good. Its strength of course is our core heroes. I loved their chem...

Praise she. I can't think of a better indie gem to wrap up my posts for  Dell's Girls Week    In Saudi Arabi, a young girl named Wadjda (Waad Mohammed) wants to buy a bicycle so she can race her neighbor boy, Abdullah. (Abdullrahman Al Gohani) But she's continuously told that girls cannot have bikes. After she's caught in various schemes at school to earn money, she enters a Quran reading competition in order to raise her remaining funds. Sometimes you just need to watch a PG movie where you know how the end is going to go, and Wadjda is that. It's predictable, but that's okay. You're immediately drawn to her and you want her to have that bike. I wanted to reach through the screen and buy it for her. It's hard watching a child being told they cannot have something that seems to trivial to you if you grew up in a different culture.  The film handles the religious aspect of this well. It could easily only show you the ugly side that doesn...

This week's theme from Wandering Through The Shelves wants us to go back to the beginning. I wanted to alter this post to go along with Girls Week but I kind of screwed myself over by already using Wonder Woman, Alien, and Star Wars. Aside from the Hunger Games I couldn't think of any other female led origin movies I really loved. So in rebellion, I'm going to vent in a completely mature and appropriate fashion...by talking some shit on my blog.  So here are three origin movies that completely failed.  1) Halloween (2007) You know who should never be allowed to write a screenplay? Rob Zombie. As a horror director, I have no problem with him. He has a eye for gore, but did we really need Michael Myer's trailer trash origin story? No. We didn't. The only good thing to come out of this was Scout Taylor Compton. She's great. 2) Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning This one is so bad it's offensive. I have to admit I was somewhat curious about Le...

What daycare? It's summer in Florida, and six year old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) runs around the shady motel that she and her mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite) currently reside. Halley loves her, but she doesn't have a steady job nor does she put much of an effort in looking after her. Moonee spends her days playing with her friends, destroying things and occasionally bothering the hotel manager Bobby (Willem DaFoe) It's almost impossible to watch this movie and not get judgy if you're a parent. My child is also six, and the thought of letting him run around the way Moonee and her friends do with zero supervision is baffling to me. Watching Halley not putting in a huge effort to have a steady job is hard to watch too. That aside, seeing everything through Moonee's eyes is a perspective we don't get very often in film. When you first see her, she looks like a precious child. Then she goes off to spit on someone's car window and call the owner a "r...