10s Movie Review - Table 19

Director: Jeffrey Blitz
Genre: Drama/ Comedy/ Romance
Runtime: 84 minutes
Year: 2017
Starring: Anna Kendrick, June Squibb, Lisa Kudrow, Craig Robinson, Tony Revolori, Stephen Merchant, Wyatt Russell

Description: Eloise (Anna Kendrick), having been relieved of maid of honor duties after being unceremoniously dumped by the best man via text, decides to attend the wedding anyway, only to find herself seated with five fellow unwanted guests at the dreaded Table 19.

Review: Weddings aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. It’s the most beautiful day of someone’s life, so when you are a part of it, you must be a special person. But not when you’re placed at the titular table 19.
“Table 19” deals with the social conventions of attending weddings. You can not NOT go, but you’d rather do a million other things.
Eloise McGarry is invited to the wedding of her oldest friend. She once was supposed to be the maid of honor at that wedding, but she broke up with the brides brother and now she has been placed at table 19. Which is far away from all the festivities. She is accompanied by random guests, who all don’t really understand why they are there.
Eloise is actually the only character we really get to know and she has depth. The rest stay rather flat and we don’t get to know much about them. But the cast is good and makes sure that it’s not a bad movie. It eventually is a mediocre drama/ comedy.
It’s an okay movie, but it will not be remembered long.

Rating: 3 / 5

10s Movie Review - Atomic Blonde

Director: David Leitch
Genre: Action/ Thriller
Runtime: 115 minutes
Year: 2017
Starring: Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, Eddie Marsan, John Goodman, Toby Jones, Sofia Boutella, Bill Skarsgård, Til Schweiger

Description: An undercover MI6 agent (Charlize Theron) is sent to Berlin during the Cold War to investigate the murder of a fellow agent and recover a missing list of double agents.

Review: The adaptation of the graphic novel seems pretentious and forced, but is a great rollercoaster ride with a great cast. And an awesome soundtrack! It’s a straight to the point story without any array.
Director David Leitch has to proof that movies like “Atomic Blonde”, with exaggerating plots and unbelievable characters, can actually be good.
Broughton is a relentless agent for the MI6. She is very driven and a skilled fighter. We see Broughton being interrogated by the CIA en she is telling her story.
Star of the show is off course Charlize Theron, who often proved that she is a very versatile actress. Her character is strong and self-assured and she easily manages in a man’s world.
“Atomic Blonde” is not too complicated, the entire thing is fairly simple. Yet it’s a great explosion of action and fun, with a killer soundtrack filled with amazing 80s songs.

Rating: 3,5/ 5

Movies to Look Forward to - May 2018

The month of May has some great movies to look forward to. Let's see what they are.

May 17th – Deadpool 2
Director: David Leitch
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Morena Baccarin, Bill Skarsgård, T.J. Miller, Eddie Marsan, Terry Crews
Description: After surviving a near fatal bovine attack, disfigured cafeteria chef Wade Wilson struggles to fulfill his dream of becoming Mayberry's hottest bartender while also learning to cope with his lost sense of taste. Searching to regain his spice for life, as well as a flux capacitor, Wade must battle ninjas, the Yakuza, and a pack of sexually aggressive canines, as he journeys around the world to discover the importance of family, friendship, and flavor - finding a new taste for adventure and earning the coveted coffee mug title of World's Best Lover.

May 23rd – Solo: A Star Wars Story
Director: Ron Howard
Starring: Alden Ehrenreich, Emilia Clarke, Thandie Newton, Donald Glover, Paul Bettany, Woody Harrelson, Jon Favreau, Warwick Davis Description: During an adventure into a dark criminal underworld, Han Solo meets his future copilot Chewbacca and encounters Lando Calrissian years before joining the Rebellion.

May 31st – 7 Days in Entebbe
Director: José Padilha
Starring: Rosemund Pike, Daniel Brühl, Eddie Marsan
Description: Inspired by the true events of the 1976 hijacking of an Air France flight en route from Tel Aviv to Paris, and the most daring rescue mission ever attempted.

May 31st – Loving Pablo
Director: Fernando Leon de Aranoa
Starring: Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard
Description: A journalist strikes up a romantic relationship with notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar.

May 31st – Only the Brave
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Starring: Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Connelly, James Badge Dale, Taylor Kitsch, Andy McDowell
Description: Based on the true story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a group of elite firefighters who risk everything to protect a town from a historic wildfire.

Movie Reviews - A Quiet Place

Director: John Krasinski
Genre: Drama/ Horror/ Thriller
Runtime: 90 minutes
Year: 2018
Starring: John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, Cade Woodward, Leon Russom, Doris McCarthy

Description: A family is forced to live in silence while hiding from creatures that hunt by sound.

Review: With “A Quiet Place”, director John Krasinski found fear in the everyday.
In “A Quiet Place”, an American family is forced to live in silence, while hiding from creatures that hunt by sound. It doesn’t sound like much, it is so much more than your standard horror film.
Director, screenplay writer and leading man John Krasinski is definitely one step ahead in this genre. Nowadays horror films are filled with clichés, loud jump scares, dumb people and gore. Krasinski knows exactly what really scares us: silence. And it’s what you don’t see and know that is scariest. He shows us how people can feel, knowing they can’t make a sound, and that making one can kill you. And how we depend on something as simple as sound. “A Quiet Place” makes clear how loud mankind actually is.
Krasinski pictures a post-apocalyptic world: a fallen down traffic light, an abandoned supermarket, weed in the streets. It’s day 89 since the monsters have first appeared. A family who walks barefoot, getting what they need from the supermarket. The mother seeks through medicine bottles. We know, if one bottle falls over, things will go wrong.
Post-apocalyptic films mostly start with the first day, finding out what happened and trying to adapt to the situation. Here, we go further into that situation and that is our starting point. We learn that the family already learned to adapt to the new situation, which is a fresh take on the genre.
The film is filled with intense, scary moments. Moments where you hold your breath and are so intense your knuckles turn white. And the opening scene alone goes against all the rules of the horror genre.
John Kraskinski doesn’t only direct, he also stars in his own film. And he does it very well. As for Emily Blunt, who is Krasinki’s wife in real life. Both are perfect for the role and perform solidly. And Millicent Simmonds, who plays the couple’s deaf daughter, is an excellent discovery.
“A Quiet Place” is a rare find, a breath of fresh air in the horror genre.

Rating: 4,5 / 5

Five to Watch - Movies Starring Real-Life Couples

“A Quiet Place” is taking over theaters at the moment, I’m going to see it myself tonight. Directed by and starring John Krasinski, together with his real life wife Emily Blunt. And there is a history of real life couples working together. I decided to create a list of five films worth watching, that starred two actors that are dating or where dating at the time the film was made.

Eyes Wide Shut
“Eyes Wide Shut” was actually the third film to feature both Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but it’s the one most people remember. This movie was a big deal when it came out. Not only was it Stanley Kubrick’s first movie in over a decade, the legendarily long shoot only helped to raise expectations regarding what he and his leads were working on. It was the named the sexiest movie of that year. The film is about a New York doctor, who is married to an art curator. He is pushing himself on a harrowing and dangerous night-long odyssey of sexual and moral discovery after his wife admits that she once almost cheated on him. The movie would normally never speak to me, but it blew my mind. It’s that good!

Flesh and Bone
Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, who had met on the set of “Innerspace” in 1987, had been married for a few years by the time they made this underrated drama. They play a mismatched pair of lonely Texans who begin a tentative romance, only to run up against the gosts of their unwittingly shared past. Quaid and Ryan have very different approaches, of course, yet they’re utterly comfortable together. I haven’t seen this film in a LONG time.

Cruel Intentions
After “Cruel Intentions”, the careers of both Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon took such different direction. They where married shortly after the premiere. This film is certainly the last time you would see Sarah Michelle Gellar as the charismatic one and Witherspoon as the mild one. And you definitely wouldn’t imagine Witherspoon and Phillippe married after this initially. The story focusses on two vicious step-siblings of an elite Manhattan prep school. The start a bet: he has to deflower the new headmaster’s daughter before the start of the term. And if he does, he can have his way with his step sister. Silly plot actually, but a really good film.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Penélope Cruz won an Oscar for her role in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”. Why? Because she both plays into the sterotypes Allen knowingly writes for her character and also explodes them. As María Elena, a suicidal photographer with a tempestuous streak, she’s as much self-aware romantic Spanish caricature as her ex-husband, the rascally free-love painter Juan Antonio Gonzalo, played by Javier Bardem. Where other real-life lovers seem drawn to playing dour characters whose relationship has run aground, Bardem and Cruz have a blast portraying these two incorrigible nut balls.

The Light Between Oceans
Hollywood power couple Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander fell in love while filming “The Light Between Oceans”. It’s the story of a lighthouse keeper and his wife, living off the coast of Western Australia. They raise a baby they rescued from a drifting rowing boat. Since they didn’t have the best of luck having their own, this baby girl comes like a gift from above.

00s Movie Review - 30 Days of Night

Director: David Slade
Genre: Horror/ Thriller
Runtime: 115 minutes
Year: 2007
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Ben Foster, Danny Huston, Manu Bennett, Mark Boone Junior

Description: After an Alaskan town is plunged into darkness for a month, it is attacked by a bloodthirsty gang of vampires.

Review: Comic books are perfect source material for film makers. Off course superhero movies, but films like “300” and “Sin City” were based on craphic novels. The dark comic “30 Days of Night” caught the interest of director David Slade and producer Sam Raimi. A story of vampires that haunt a Alaskan town that lives in total darkness for 30 days.
The town is called Barrow. Most citizens leave Barrow before the last sundown. But there are people left behind. On the evening before the 30 days of darkness begin, dog are brutally killed, cellphones are burned and computers are disconnected. The vampires know what to do to cut the people of from the rest of the world.
The vampire look not like your every day blood suckers. And they don’t just bite your neck to drink your blood, they rip their victims apart with their knife sharp teeth. And you can’t kill them, unless you cut off their head. And they speak a language we don’t understand. The leftover citizens, led by sheriff Eben, have to either avoid or beat the vampires to survive.
Although “30 Days of Night” is seen as a mediocre horror film and doesn’t get raving reviews, I always thought that it was an underrated film in the genre. The premise is really terrifying. A town in total darkness, being terrorized by creatures of the night. And it being a distant town makes it even scarier. This is a movie that genuinely scares me, what a horror movie should do.
Off course it has its flaws. The characters lack depth and the story overall is a bit thin. But there is enough to see and the film is visually very well done. And those flaws are easily forgotten. “30 Days of Night” is, in my eyes, an excellent film in the vampire horror genre.

Rating: 4 / 5

Movies to Look Forward to - April 2018

What does April have in store for us? Let's see what we can look forward to this month.

April 12th – A Quiet Place
Director: John Krasinski
Starring: John Krasinski, Emily Blunt
Description: A family is forced to live in silence while hiding from creatures that hunt by sound.

April 14th – Breathe
Director: Andy Serkis
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy, Tom Hollander
Description: The inspiring true love story of Robin and Diana Cavendish, an adventurous couple who refuse to give up in the face of a devastating disease. Their heartwarming celebration of human possibility marks the directorial debut of Andy Serkis.

April 24th – Avengers: Infinity War
Director: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Starring: Robert Downey Jr. Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Samuel L. Jackson, Vin Diesel, Dave Bautista, Josh Brolin, Paul Rudd, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, Tom Holland, Chadwick Boseman, Karen Gillan, Elizabeth Olsen, Sebastian Stan, Paul Bettany, Gwyneth Paltrow, Idris Elba, Benicio del Toro, Jon Favrau, Anthony Mackie, Don Cheadle
Description: The Avengers and their allies must be willing to sacrifice all in an attempt to defeat the powerful Thanos before his blitz of devastation and ruin puts an end to the universe.