dmartincannon Reviews

Annette (2021)

Don't be ashamed of hating this movie

[1/10 · 20 August 2021]

The critical reception for this movie has been overwhelmingly positive. The only explanation I can come up for that is that Leo Carax has a reputation for being cool and ultra hip. To critique this movie honestly would put the critic outside that club of those "in the know." This is a painfully boring film. Almost all of the dialogue is sung and much of the time, it's garbled and incomprehensible. And the music is dull, generic, almost all of it in the same tempo and style. The "love theme" has the incredibly banal title "We Love Each Other So Much", a phrase sung ad nauseam in a scene lasting probably ten minutes but which seemed more like an hour.

Poor Adam Driver .... I felt embarrassed for him and what he was forced to do. His stand up "comedy" routine is cringingly unfunny. How could this guy ever be a worldwide comic sensation?

Marion Cotillard is barely a presence in this movie; she "disappears" half way through and then re-appears as a kind of specter from the deep, a way of giving her a little more screen time but without any purpose.

In summary: a boring, amateurish mess. Don't waste your time.

The Mountain (II) (2018)

Lobotomized . . . .

[2/10 · 1 August 2019]

As most reviewers here and in other media have noted, no one can say for certain what this movie is trying to achieve. Andy (Tye Sheridan), the main character, performs with such minimal expressiveness that there is very little difference between his character before and after he's lobotomized. All of his lines might fill half a page. Jack is the father of Andy's love interest, a speechless young woman who's been administered electroconvulsive therapy (with no significant change). Jack, who really should be in an asylum but lives in a mid-century modern house in the woods, delivers one of the most unbearable monologues I can recall seeing in a movie, Although it is complete nonsense, it is the only moment in the movie when anyone speaks with some passion. The director, Rick Alverson, may have felt that he was producing an ultra-hip, beyond cool, anti-movie. The result is a mess of a film, grueling to sit through.

Liverpool (2008)

Dreadful!!

[1/10 · 1 July 2015]

This "film" has about 5 minutes of material, and even that is pretty uninteresting. Loneliness, bleakness, alienation, alcoholism, all have done before a thousand times better than this. Endless scenes of minimal content, virtually no dialogue, opaque characters, all add up to a movie that can be watched at triple speed with no loss, because, despite claims for it as a bleak masterpiece, there is no THERE there. How many times do we have to watch this man trudge through the snow, put on his coat, take off his coat, eat a meal? How did such a film ever get financed? Perhaps a state grant? Maybe some leftover funds to be distributed before the end of the fiscal year? There is no other explanation. Don't waste your time.