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Reviews
The Invitation (2015)
The director Karyn Kusama turns this into a D movie. Don't waste your time and money!
An undergrad student director could have done a better job with the material. Karyn Kusama understands neither the genre nor how to direct actors according to the standards of even a B movie. As I said in my review title, this ended up being a D movie, where the audience at the Arclight Hollywood Cinema (which draws some discerning viewers that are not of the popcorn variety) ended up laughing at climactic moments that should have induced silent shudders. I was really looking forward to seeing a female director do something very special with the genre, but this woman seemed determined to prove to herself that she could be even more "raw" than a male director, and ended up generating utterly CHEAP, ludicrous and risibly melodramatic scenes (particularly during the "grand" finale). I feel sorry for lead actress Tammy Blanchard, whom I've seen live on Broadway, to have found herself in the hands of a director who reduced what should have been her most touching monologue to the stuff that Lifetime movie villainesses are made of. You are actually better off watching a Lifetime 'thriller' than wasting 100 minutes on this drivel. The movie could have easily been cut down by a solid 10-15 minutes if the director didn't spend as much time as she did on pointless close-ups and ridiculously repetitive shots. She keeps hitting the audience on the head with the fact that the main character, Will, is uncomfortable and haunted - to the point where you just end up feeling alienated from him altogether, half way into the movie, which is the opposite effect one would want to achieve when it comes to the protagonist. People like her should not accept assignments that are clearly way beyond their scope. She was in over her head, and the actors and writers alike ended up having to take the fall, in the process.
'Merica, My Lovely (2015)
Don't waste your precious time!!
This film sucks the life force out of you. It's as if it were written by an 11 year old trying to play grown up.
You know that you're in for a disaster when you have to wait half a minute between each name during the 'title sequence', staring at a black screen, in the beginning. That alone screams 'hopeless amateur' to you, right from the get go, before the movie even begins.
Literally the only good thing about the movie is the opening shot of a house on a hill; it looks very iconic and as the camera pulls back, and makes you think just for a few precious moments that you're in for a really iconic 'Americana' story (which is what the film purports to be), but nope....the rest of the film, once again, makes it seem like an 11 year old was shown a picture of this house on the hill, and asked to write a "thriller" with that as the starting point. What ensues is so embarrassingly bad, that one is left thinking an 11 year old would have done a better job indeed.