So, this weekend I streamed a couple movies to do a single review. The first is an action flick, but the second I did because it’s the holidays and I was looking for a decent Christmas movie. Unfortunately, I still haven’t found that diamond in the rough. Most Christmas movies these days are just kind of bland and terribly acted or the stories are just cheesy.
I know those of you that read the movie reviews are waiting for Spider-Man No Way Home, and don’t say that you aren’t.
I live in a highly conservative state where the only thing that’s left-wing blue is the capital city which also happens to be the worst place to live. Anyhow, the point is, even in my conservative state which rejects woke-ism in almost all forms of entertainment, movie tickets for opening weekend are impossible to find!
In other words, the movie’s gonna be a hit and the only reason anyone will read reviews will be to argue, discuss, and trash each other (and the writer) in the comments sections. (Bet you’re starting to catch on to why we don’t have comments under our articles, aren’t you?)
Wind River
This one has been out for a while; it came out in 2017. However it has been uploaded to Netflix and the movie has been in their top ten multiple times.
The movie is based on a woman who dies running barefoot in the snow out on Wyoming Indian reservation called Wind River. There was a lot of whining when the movie first came out because despite all the bad guys being white men, despite a large cast of Native American actors, and despite it trying to cast light on the fact that missing women are all but ignored on reservations, the two leads are white.
How dare they!
Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen, who you may know as Hawkeye and Scarlett Witch from the MCU, play the lead roles. Renner is a US Fish and Wildlife officer named Corey Lambert, and Olsen is FBI agent Jane Banner, who is assigned to the case when a woman shows up dead under suspicious circumstances.
All in all, it’s not the worst movie you could watch and definitely has that modern cowboy-movie feel, but it is very graphic. It earns an R rating for themes alone, let alone what they choose to show the audience in both rape and murder. While it’s not a movie I can watch all the time I was glad I saw it.
Grade: C+
My Dad’s Christmas Date
What to say about a movie that came out in 2020 and was meant to be something of a comedy for Christamas. The biggest problem with the London-based movie wasn’t that it was dramatic, but that it tried to be funny in all the wrong ways. I don’t think it got a single laugh out of me. Maybe my humor just isn’t dry enough? (Or maybe, the left still can’t meme even if they’re from across the pond.)
Or maybe, it’s that the daughter is so absolutely horrible to her widower father that I nearly turned it off within the first five minutes?
Truth be told, if you give it a full chance, it’s mostly just about a sixteen-year-old girl and her father grieving the loss of the mother and wife from a car accident two years prior. The performances were great, but it truly cast the young lady in a terrible light.
She fights with her father at every turn, pulls woke talking points out of thin air when her father tries to learn more about her life, and she is mostly a spoiled-rotten child for the majority of the film. At one point while the father is simply trying to learn about the boy she likes and is dating, she picks a huge fight with him and rather than show any kind of resolve, the movie goes off a on weird tangent about doing what you love for a living and never giving up on your dreams.
The film’s crescendo was truly touching once it got to the point, but I am not sure if the film was worth watching just to get to it. There are a lot of other films that speak to the sadness of grief or the stresses of raising teenage girls.
As for Christmas, other than the holiday going on in the background and the girl singing a Christmas hymn at the end, this movie has nothing to do with it. Despite talking about church and the girl going to someone kind of private Christian school, there’s nothing moral or religious about the film. I think they put Christmas in the title to get sucks like me to watch it.
Grade: C-
This story syndicated with permission from For the Love of News