The Wedding Ringer Short Review

I knew in my hearts of hearts that Kevin Hart's brand of humor wasn't really my thing, but when I overheard someone saying that it was one of the funniest movie that she had seen in a long time and when I read online that the whole audience was in stitches throughout the entire movie at a screening someone else was in, I thought why not?

And that was a terrible idea because it led me to waste 2 hours of my life watching a terribly unfunny movie. At no point did I feel like walking out of the screening (I was tempted to at the Need For Speed screening that Pamela Moore dragged me into) but I have to say I really regretted going to see it and came out of the movie theater feeling rather angry that I wasted my time on a movie that was not worth any of my time at all.

2 out of 5 stars for me.

Selma Short Review

Deeply moving, Selma director Ava DuVernay manages to avoid the many pitfalls that tend to plague most biographical movies (turning it into a hagiography or trying to cram a person's entire life into a movie's running time and thereby not doing it justice). She manages to achieve this by humanizing and giving us a blood-and-flesh Martin Luther King Jr. and also by choosing to focus on just a short time period in his life.

My only quibbles are that President LBJ's is historically inaccurate portrayal as King's adversary rather than ally, that Tim Roth's portrayal of George Wallace that at times runs into caricature mode, and that Oprah WInfrey is too starry to play Annie Lee Cooper in the film; seeing her in the movie jolts me out of the movie the same way Brad Pitt's role in 12 Years A Slave did.

4 and a half out of 5 stars for me. An uncannily timely must-see film.