Change Your Image
bjn-413-866420
Reviews
The Goldfinch (2019)
Appears this was a victim of bad editing
Watching this film, I couldn't escape the thought that much of what would have made it wonderful was probably left on the cutting room floor. Great acting, beautiful cinematography, excellent story. But alas, like happens so often, two and-a-half hours is simply not long enough to do justice to a story that took a lot of pages to write. My best guess is that all of the story was probably filmed, but then attempting to get it into a manageable time frame just couldn't happen. So there is this weird and abrupt shifting between all the time frames the different parts of the story was telling. If one has read the book, I recommend watching the film. You will understand what happened between these scenes, and it will make sense. But for anyone who has not read it, I imagine this must be a very frustrating film to watch and make sense of.
Men's Group (2008)
How running from life is the opposite of control
This is an intriguing movie. It is not a plot-driven movie, but is rather a movie of ideas. And the main idea it explores is how do men deal with their emotions? It demonstrates how we often deal with life feeling like we are doing a good job managing things and hiding the things that bother us, when in reality our character becomes formed by the very acts that we use as a cover. In this sense, our lives become not something we control, but that control us as we run to avoid the issues. We use humor, crudity, self-involvement, alcohol, and on and on and on, pretending that is what we care about and all the while using it to shield us from having to deal with the discomfort is being honest with ourselves. There are significant things going on in each character's life, yet none of them is able to figure out what to do about them, and cannot find it within them to be honest enough with others to find help for their problems. Another user complains that the movie is disjointed, but I found the editing to be done artfully, moving in an out of each character's dilemmas interspersed with the men's group meetings to provide some explication of the daily events.