Category: Home Video

Not long ago I reviewed the Jeff Nichols film The Midnight Special, but his latest film Loving couldn’t be more different.  While The Midnight Special was a Sci-Fi road trip movie, Loving is based on the true story of the Lovings who fought for their right to be married in Virginia as an interracial couple all the way to the Supreme Court.  What is the same however, is that the movie is very good (and it has a lot of the same actors).

There is not a lot to the Lovings’ story that you couldn’t have guessed or just remembered from US history.  They were a young couple that loved each other, got married, and then Virginia arrested them then kicked them out of the state.  If they came back to Virginia together they could be thrown in jail for five to twenty-five years.  Now if someone hated me that much, I would probably would want to leave and never go back, but Virginia was home and it was where the Lovings’ family lived, so with the help of the ACLU they fought for their right to move back.

What I loved about this movie is that it didn’t amp up the drama to nth degree by having tense moment after tense moment.  That is not to say there isn’t tension in this movie, but just that it is not artificially created.  Loving tells the sweet and gentle story about the Lovings, and that is more than enough to carry this movie.  It is enough that two people who loved each other deeply just wanted to live together by their family in the county they grew up in.  It was wise to not raise the stakes unnecessarily.

All good character dramas need good characters brought to life by good actors, and Loving has that covered.  Jeff Nichols has collected a great group of actors to be in his films, and they make this movie seem effortless.  You will believe that these are the same people that defied Virginia’s terrible marriage laws and won.  Ruth Negga who played Mildred Loving was the standout with her amazing performance, so it is no wonder that she has been nominated for an Academy Award.

You should watch Loving.  It is sweet and stirring, and the good guys win in the end.  Jeff Nichols is making quite the name for himself, and I will be very interested in what he does next.  If you are looking for a movie about love this Valentines season, Loving is a great choice.

Some movies deserve long reviews to talk about their significance, acting, storytelling, or to get to the root of the movie’s message.  Gods of Egypt is not such a movie.  It is all bad:  the acting is bad, the special effects are bad, the story is bad, the cinematography is bad, and to top it all off it is racist and sexist, which is bad.  Granted it is so bad that if you know what you are in for you may have a good time trashing it with your buddies.  To some up, it is the opposite of good.

What is baffling about all of this is that it was greenlit in the first place!  And not just greenlit but given a $140 Million budget, so it was a major movie for Lionsgate.  With some insiders even saying that executives hoped that Gods of Egypt would be the franchise to replace Hunger Games.  What?!  I can’t believe so many people had so much faith in this movie.  Had Wrath of the Titans been a success, maybe, but it was a failure.

Now I could see making a fun little sword and sandals movie based on Egyptian culture instead of the usual Greek based tale, and then amp up the cheese, give it a small to medium budget, and I am sure it would have played well enough.  It probably also would have been wise to cast at least a few Egyptians to be in the movie, but $140 Million with almost a completely white cast?  Surely someone must have told them that this was a bad idea.

In the end Gods of Egypt got the box office result and critical lashing it deserved, but if you are looking for a movie for Bad Movie Night, they don’t come much worse than this, and from a major studio to boot.  However, that is the only circumstance where Gods of Egypt gets any sort of recommendation.  I wish I could have been in the meeting where Lionsgate’s executive group agreed that Gods of Egypt deserved their full support.

Have you been thinking there have not been enough 80ish Spielbergian movies made recently?  Well apparently Jeff Nichols felt that way so he made Midnight Special.  While Midnight Special has nothing to do with a southern midnight prison train, it is very good, and it seems right at home in today’s media climate with shows like Stranger Things on the air.

I don’t wish to give away any of the plot, but it revolves around a man (Michael Shannon) trying to get his son (Jaeden Lieberher) to Tallahassee with the help of his friend (Joel Edgerton), and his son is not quite normal.  Intrigued? I hope so.

Even though Midnight Special is Sci-Fi, it is really a road trip drama, so special effects are used sparingly, but when effects are used they create more awe than if they were used all the time like in other films.  The writing is what makes this all work.  You can tell they are a family on the run, and they are doing whatever they can to get to where they are going for the sake of their son.

Dramas fall flat if the actors don’t hold up.  Thankfully this is a talented cast, and they keep this movie running.  I never doubted any of their performances for a minute.  I guess there is a reason Jeff Nichols uses the same actors over and over.

I didn’t know what to expect when I started watching Midnight Special.  I had just heard that it was good and Steven Spielberg kept being mentioned a lot.  Though to be fair this is not a straight up Spielberg copy.  It is more like someone watched a lot of Spielberg growing up, and then made their own version of something in his family Sci-Fi genre.  Anyway, what I am trying to say is that Midnight Special is a great movie, and you should watch it (even if you don’t like 80’s Spielberg movies).