Speaks Reviews: Spotlight

Enlightened

★★★★ out of ★★★★

A Speaks Movie Review

Director Tom McCarthy needed some redemption this year. He made an oddball comedy, released early in 2015, starring Adam Sandler, called The Cobbler. Everybody trashed it. I didn't even see it.

Now, here is his second film this year, your Best Picture frontrunner, Spotlight, a film of calm assuredness, free of frills and excesses, drawing a picture of an institution gone just plain wrong in the darkest of ways, made darker by a cover-up of maddening proportions.

Thursday Movie Picks: Movies Set in a Hotel

Thursday! Less than week and half until I'm off for Winter Break! 

I often joke with some of my colleagues about the long breaks we get every winter, what with the two week break that often extends, intermittently, into January and February with snow and ice. Cabin Fever is real, and we often liken it Stanley Kubrick's locked up wintry hotel in The Shining. It can get crazy. It looks something like this: 

Speaks Reviews: Room

When the Walls Come Down

★★★ 1/2 out of ★★★★

A Speaks Movie Review

There's a feeling that came over me at one point during director Lenny Abrahamson's Room that I don't often experience. I'm sure others felt it too. It is a feeling brought on by an acuteness of suspense, most often reserved for the loftiest of thrillers. Take the final moments of last year's Indie darling, the revenge thriller Blue Ruin, for example. But here, in a movie that is so tender, so loving of its characters, I can't imagine how it was executed so perfectly.

Thursday Movie Picks: Con Artists

My Thursday Movie Picking has been a bit intermittent of late. (I know. I know.) Stress from work begat a weakened immune system begat a fairly brutal case of bronchitis mixed in with the Thanksgiving Holiday, and I've barely had time to do any posting of any kind.

It is Thursday though. Maybe my favorite day, and I just can't say no to this week's theme on Wandering through the Shelves' Thursday Movie Picks. I mean...Con Artists! Easily some of the best movie characters have taken the grift as their lifestyle of choice. And I've always found myself drawn to the seedy ones, the ones who run true confidence tricks with a look at the big score, the long con.

Blind Spot 2016: Announcing My Selections

Last year about this time, I ran across some of my fellow bloggers offering up their lofty lists of unseen great ones, which of course led me to Ryan McNeil at The Matinee and the genesis of the Blind Spot Series. Being new to the movie blog world, I jumped in all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, making a list myself. I made it through August, then the wheels fell off. Football season started. I started back to work (I'm a teacher.). And I just had to let go, knowing the commitment it takes to really dive into a well-regarded film and do it justice. 

I'm trying again. My Mama didn't raise no quitter. 

Speaks Reviews - The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2

Two Much is Not Enough

★★ 1/2 out of ★★★★

A Speaks Movie Review

About this time two years ago, I walked out of my screening of Catching Fire, the second installment of The Hunger Games franchise, literally on fire. I had seen a sequel that was better than the original, by far. A movie so good it could stand alone as a sci-fi action masterpiece. I stand by that.

Then, last year about this time, I left Mockingjay, Part 1 fully unsatisfied. I had gotten a pretty much scene-by-scene adaptation of barely half of a book that I only sort of liked to begin with. In the days of movie studios splitting apart and dragging out and rebooting and remaking entertainment for cash, we, the audience, find ourselves repeatedly dragged into mediocre movies that don't have to be mediocre. 

They don't have to be mediocre because Catching Fire isn't.

In Movie Lines: November 1 - November 21

Movies I've Watched

(OR, How I watched a bunch of huge franchise movies and nearly nothing else)

November 1st - November 21st, 2015

Thursday Movie Picks: Movies about Making Music

I'm back. 

I hate to say it, but I just had to put down the Thursday Movie Picks for a few weeks. The Halloween themes just didn't happen for me. It's just not my holiday, not my conversation. 

I wanted to come back last week, but I chose to do my own post on spy movies, the most nostalgia-inducing spy movies, the spy movies I felt most timely, that being the James Bond Movies.  

So, it's Thursday, the leaves have fallen here in East Tennessee, and I'm back again (and from here on out) for a bit more of Wandering through the Shelves' Thursday Movie Picks. This week, it's Movies about Making Music. 

Speaks Reviews: Spectre

In with the Old

★★★ 1/2 out of ★★★★

A Speaks Movie Review

I'm appalled at some of the lukewarm reviews of the newest James Bond film, the 24th overall, Daniel Craig's fourth, and director Sam Mendes' second, Spectre. I mean, what do you people want? Here is a Bond film of the most classic form, easily the most classic Bond film featuring Daniel Craig. What do these movies have to do? What do they have to be?

10 Essential James Bond Movies

I think it's a combination of songs and Dad. Yes. That is what brought me to James Bond.

Of the many songs that stand out in the farthest reaches of my memory, two are Bond title tunes: Shirley Bassey's rendition of "Goldfinger" and Paul McCartney and Wings" "Live and Let Die." Fitting that those two would feature the most prominent. These are the ones my Dad suggested above any other when I started my James Bond quest so many years ago. Though, the my first Bond was Pierce Brosnan in Goldeneye. I watched it with Dad.