Somehow I managed to squeeze in a respectable number of movies this weekend. Turns out they were all pretty decent, too!
Red Notice – This Netflix action film had great promise with three amazing leads in Ryan Reynolds, The Rock, and Gal Gadot. However, that’s sort of where the awesomeness stops. This was about as generic of an action film as I’ve ever seen. It almost made me more sad to learn that it’s Netflix’s highest budgeted film. Yikes. Anyways, Reynolds plays a top art thief who ends up teaming up with a federal agent to beat the ultimate art thief, The Bishop, in a heist to steal Cleopatra’s third egg. Gal Gadot represents The Bishop and she is a badass, as we know Gadot can be. Luckily, Reynolds and the Rock’s charms and comedic turns save this from being a complete waste of time. I will say, there is a twist at the end that I personally did not see coming, but it wasn’t even enough to make me like this more. Not a total waste of time, but it will certainly not be getting any more of mine.
Belfast – I was eagerly awaiting the release of this film near me mainly because it seems like at this point it’s going to take home the statue for Best Picture at next year’s Oscars ceremony. Things can change from now to then, but I can definitely understand why this one is at the top of the list. First and foremost, it’s a brief film compared to everything else that is in the running so far. To me, that means writer/director Kenneth Branagh is putting the most important content in his film. Which, this happens to be a bit of a biographical film for Branagh. In the film, kid Buddy is meant to represent Branagh in his youth and what he experienced in Northern Ireland as “the Troubles ” started taking place. Honestly, I had no clue what that historical event was, even though it was a conflict that lasted 30 years between the Catholics and the Protestants. Really moving stuff, and I imagine we’ll see plenty of other nominations to celebrate this film.
Bergman Island – Truth be told, I solely rented this movie based off of Film Twitter’s reaction to this film. What an odd thing it turned out to be. Having recently watched the remake of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage, it came as a bit of a shock to me that Bergman Island is in fact an island dedicated to where the film director lived and shot some of his most famous works. If I had ever watched more of his films this would actually be a really beautiful and seriously cool place to visit! Anyways, in the movie, filmmaking couple Chris and Tony head to the island to work on new projects, as well as for Tony to do several presentations of his latest film. They both explore the island in an isolated fashion from each other, but seem to have a deep understanding of why they need to do this. Chris meets lots of characters with her time on the island, and eventually narrates her most recent work to Tony. The last twenty minutes of this movie confused the heck out of me because it seemed her real life was melding with her fictional story, and it was hard to tell if it was real or just a hallucination. Meh. For a very specific audience I’d say.
Love Hard – It’s early November, and in my mind, too early for Christmas movies, but since it snowed yesterday and I was looking for lighter fair, I decided to give this Netflix rom-com a go. Natalie is a writer shown going on a series of failed dates after her online matches never turn out to be what she expects. That is until she meets Josh who lives across the country in New York. He’s everything she’s been searching for, so in a very crazy move decides to surprise him by showing up at his house the week leading up to Christmas. What?! Who in their right mind would do this – who? Turns out, Josh was catfishing Natalie, but the images he uses belongs to his grade school friend Tag. In order to make up for his lies, he offers to help Natalie win Tag over. Obviously, we’ve all seen a movie like this before, but it doesn’t make the outcome any less cute. Definitely watch it this holiday season.