Michael Berry, an actor and stage performer in a past life, comes out of nowhere with his directorial debut Frontera. A gripping drama, his passion project follows on the heels of just two short films, award winning though they may be. Frontera is an emotionally gripping narrative about a family in Mexico struggling to make it to America, by any means necessary, and it is as taut as it is sobering. Over the course of the film each of the characters deal with extreme hardships – the family of immigrants deal with problems crossing the border (difficulties finding a guide, coming up with the money, putting trust in someone they…
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G-S-T Review…Dom Hemingway
Richard Shepard’s brilliant character study Dom Hemingway is a down and dirty black comedy that’s equal parts bitter and delicious. Also, wasting no time giving credit where it’s due, this is his best film to date. But Shepard, a filmmaker not content to deliver just one kind of story, attempts to test out more than a few genres while chronicling this multifaceted former gangster. It’s crass and unapologetic and Dom himself is a walking calamity but he’s not completely without soul and that’s where Shepard attempts to establish a heartwarming through-line. That might make for a cumbersome story and, at times, Dom Hemingway has trouble finding its stride. Yet, as this all comes…
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G-S-T Review…Heaven Is For Real
In the film world, telling any story is going to have its difficulties and setbacks. Telling or, in this case rather, translating a true story to the big screen is another matter entirely. But when a film touts those five notoriously nebulous words “based on a true story” it’s unclear how much of said events actually happened. Why is that? Well that’s because studios, screenwriters and directors can use very broad strokes when painting a live action picture. They take liberties when and where they chose if they believe it makes the translation more appealing. Nothing new there. But more to the above point, when a religious movie is based…
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G-S-T Review…Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Marvel Studios continues their hit steak of their Avengers-based films with Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Following Chris Evans’s successful turn as Steve Rogers in Joe Johnston’s 2011, directors Anthony and Joe Russo trade old-fashioned heroics for a seemingly throwback ’70s themed spy film. This change in direction is refreshing and helps better align Cap with the other larger-than-life heroes in the Avengers line up – It’s also thrilling, suspenseful and action packed. Not just that but the film, with all the layers of depth (and secrecy!) to the story, and the execution of this very comic book styled plot are a fantastic second at bat for the character and the…
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G-S-T Review…Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel
Every great artist has a signature style or body of work that defines them. Like other great cineastes, Anderson has been approaching a masterwork such as The Grand Budapest Hotel for years. Life Aquatic, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Moonrise Kingdom were all exercises, just previews and the tip of the quirky iceberg that is Anderson’s talent. Anderson’s whole life has been leading up to this moment, this triumphant feature and The Grand Budapest Hotel is easily the best thing he’s ever done; it’s a Wes Anderson film on steroids. He takes everything he’s learned from his small but highly successful projects and channeled them into this gargantuan, and exceptionally detailed…
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G-S-T Review…Mr. Peabody & Sherman
Adaptations are always tricky animals because of the questions they raise: What are the rules? Who do you try to please? Is it possible to capture the magic and allure going from source material to another medium? Is there a sure-fire formula to successfully win fans and those new to the material? Many times filmmakers try to answer these questions and when it works, it works well. Other times however it’s an awful, awful mess. Well thankfully Rob Minkoff and DreamWorks, no stranger to adaptations or different mediums, know how to answer such questions. They have achieved the former and as such have another hit on their respective hands. But…
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G-S-T Review…Lone Survivor
Director Peter Berg sure does fancy his modern day war themed films. And why wouldn’t he? Barring Battleship, he has a knack for these heart-felt but hard-hitting and gritty stories. His true talent seems to be in these dense fish-out-of-water narratives focusing on a few key players set in a world they struggle to comprehend. With many parallels to his 2007 film The Kingdom, Lone Survivor, whether or not it was a true story (which it is), is a passion project for Berg and can almost be viewed as a companion piece. Lone Survivor, adapted from a novel of the same name (keeping the name of the book is a…
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G-S-T Review…Saving Mr. Banks
A spoonful of sugar, as they say, helps the medicine go down. In the case of Saving Mr. Banks, John Lee Hancock needn’t any help coaxing people to eat up his charming quasi-biopic. But still, that idea of needing something to sort of grease the rails to get a job done really captures the spirit and the idea of the entire film itself and does make the film so much more palatable. On the surface it’s fun to see the crotchety British writer thumb her nose at Disney’s candy-coated empire, but there’s so much more to it than that. Now Saving Mr. Banks, despite the appeal and allure of one Walt…
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G-S-T Review…Thor: The Dark World
The terms and ideas surrounding a character like Marvel’s Thor (Odinsleep, bifrost, Yggdrasil, etc.) whether based on Norse mythology or not, are admittedly strange. Yet Thor (Chris Hemsworth) was kind enough to put it ever so simply in his 2011 film, “Your ancestors called it magic but you call it science. I come from a land where they are one and the same“. Well if you found comfort in Kenneth Branagh’s Richard Donner-like origin story, Thor: The Dark World is like taking AP Calculus just when you think you’ve got the hang of your times tables. Not that Alan Taylor’s follow-up film is particularly smart (ambitious is more like it)…
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G-S-T Review…All Is Lost
Margin Call director, J.C. Chandor takes quite a different direction with this second film, All Is Lost, starring Robert Redford as a nameless man who is lost at sea and fighting for survival. Where as Margin Call was heavy with dialog, All Is Lost experiments with other forms of communication, from the sounds of nature to the thoughts inside the man’s head that we do not hear, but that we can imagine from the facial and physical queues Redford uses to portray them. At first this description might seem to recall the role of Tom Hanks in cast away Castaway, except Chandor’s and his crew faced the added challenge of…
