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Reviews
The Flight Before Christmas (2015)
Bad enough for me to shut it off about ten minutes from the end
The Hallmark and Lifetime formula seems to be predicated on giving actors wooden lines to say, so they will say them woodenly. Of course we are told how to feel about each scene by the melodramatic music; I suppose this makes the script and the acting less important.
Mayim Bialik seems a strange choice for the female romantic lead, given her homespun look, which clashes terribly with Ryan McPartlin's hard-body physique. From the beginning it seems like a serious mismatch, rendering the story rather hard to believe. It doesn't help any that neither of them are particularly good at their craft. If formulaic, improbable romance is what you are after, then this one is a veritable motherlode.
But if you are looking for a well-formed film with a reasonably convincing plot, something that will not make you cringe regularly, The Flight Before Christmas is not it.
Girl U Want (2009)
High-school play on video
I had a hard time with the opening, some pretty lame past-tense first-person narration, the lead character looking into the camera and talking about what has happened to bring things to the start of the movie . . .
I probably should have shut it off then, but I wanted to give this turkey a fair chance. Unfortunately, what I encountered was some very poor writing delivered by amateur actors. Even so, I might have watched a bit more, but the unbelievable reactions of characters to fairly straightforward situations was too much for me.
Don't waste your time.
The Other Wife (2016)
Not worth watching
The plot and dialogue don't make much sense. The acting is wooden and amateurish.
This movie opens with wife #1 gazing sadly at a flier for a fertility clinic, which is a shabby way to set up that part of the story. Home alone, she hears a noise downstairs. Oh no! Cue the scary music. She goes completely unarmed to check it out, and is interrupted by a bleeping cell phone on the bed. Cue the obligatory horror-flick startle.
She checks the phone, finds a message from hubby that he will be late getting home. Undeterred, she tiptoes onward, to the background sounds of some off-tempo Foley artist making more loud clomping noises than the number of footsteps she takes.
Downstairs, she does not peek cautiously into the office where a burglar is apparently trying to open a safe with a pry-bar. Instead she darts past the doorway, attracting his attention, then plasters herself in terror backward against the wall on the far side.
The burglar standing five feet away is amazingly slow, so she has plenty of time to run upstairs and lock herself in to call 911 on the cell phone. Police arrive very quickly and promptly arrest the AWOL husband on his way inside, right after just having texted his wife that he would be very late getting home.
This dog of a movie carries on in the same inept fashion, actors spouting lame lines with uninspired delivery. As the story unfolds, wife #1 goes to find wife #2. They have a contentious chat that breaks off with wife #1 saying as an exit, "I came for what I needed," when she should have said "I got what I came for," . . . at this point it was just intolerably bad and I finally turned the movie off.
Not Since You (2009)
I couldn't force myself to watch through to the end
This is a positively dreadful rehashing of the "Big Chill" motif. Some of the characters are positively uninteresting and rank downward into gratingly obnoxious. The few who do manage to attract my attention quickly repel me with their poor acting or horridly written dialogue. In keeping with the modern trend of trying to intertwine a multiplicity of different stories in order to avoid having to come up with a real plot is brought to new heights of dullness in this insipid production.
Jeff Stephenson has directed some good works in the past, but with this one I think he must have been just as unenthusiastic as I am. Or possibly drunk. Looking through the cast of characters I see only one actor who turned out a good performance, veteran Barry Corbin of Northern Exposure fame. His depiction of colorful Uncle Dennis provides the only bright spots in this unfortunate hodgepodge of trite stereotypes.
If you are a student of writing, directing or acting, study this movie as a splendid example of what not to do. Otherwise, don't waste your time.
April's Shower (2003)
Not as bad as you might think at first
This movie tells an amusing if somewhat muddled story, and the acting really is pretty bad -- compared to the usual slick Hollywood stuff. But let's face it, lesbian-oriented films seem to range from low-mediocre to atrocious, so put in the context of the existing art, April's Shower starts to seem a lot better than low-end.
I don't think there was a single polished actor in the bunch. They all over-dramatized or used fakey facial expressions or just plain got things wrong at times.
There were so many relationship twists and flip-flop couplings/decouplings of lesbians and heteros and bisexuals alike that I found myself a bit confused at the end, but I did have fun watching all the mating dances unfold. Be prepared for some plot turns that seem precipitous; either the author left out bits of bridging text here and there or too many scenes ended up on the cutting room floor.
If you want to watch this one, try a little experiment: Pretend you are at an amateur production of a play, perhaps put on by your local junior college. It does make the performances feel a lot more plausible.
The Right Kind of Wrong (2013)
Surprisingly satisfying
This story is a good one. The only reason I don't give it a ten is the rough spots here and there. Yes, it is Rom-Com formulaic, but it does not have the smarmy Hollywood quality that taints so many similar movies. I found the the lack of super-slick production rather charming, actually.
It feels like a good first effort from a talented director, played out by actors that, while not at all novices, have not yet perfected their craft. It could have benefited from some more stringent cutting; several inessential scenes hit me as sophomoric or hackneyed and made me stop watching . . . but I kept coming back to the DVD for a bit more. A good thing -- not viewing all of this movie would have been a mistake, a disservice to myself.
How to Break Up with Your Mother (2011)
A good first effort with a poor ending.
The story line here is simple yet powerful. An adult man falls in love with a woman but cannot cut his close adolescent ties with his intrusive mother. The woman delivers an ultimatum: break up with your mom or else. The mother is persuasive, and the man takes what seems to be the only route left to him -- offing the mother.
The film is executed well, with good performances from the three key actors and some fairly expert direction. It is strong on lead-in and sets everything up very nicely, then unfortunately does a "Nine months later ..." cut to the ending.
The love-interest woman is shown walking away with packed bags to join another fellow outside, and the man is left alone - a fairly obvious plot, but with some work this short could be turned into a decent full-length movie by fleshing out the interpersonal decline that leads to the breakup.
Of course it would never fly in Hollywood. This plot would be much better suited to French cinema.
Mi casa, su casa (2003)
Don't Waste Your Time
Even an extended cameo role by Barbara Eden cannot pull this turkey out of the fire. It is badly written, poorly directed, and the actors seem to be reading their lines from a teleprompter. The plot is loosely taken from Taming of the Shrew, rewritten into a long string of painfully caricaturish stereotypes, ranging from rich fat-cats to the iconic Beverly Hills lawn-mowing Hispanic gardener. Some of them were actually amusing in their laughable crudeness, especially the spell-casting witch of a mother in law. The leading lady is not convincingly Hispanic and rarely speaks any Spanish, although the rest of her supposed family seem genuine enough. Maybe she was adopted. I cannot say that the movie was excruciatingly awful, since I did manage to watch it through to the end, but I certainly don't recommend doing so. I have seen better quality of production in amateur theater.
Jenna Loves Pain (2005)
U.S.A. Version is Much Better
Apparently many of the more explicit BDSM scenes were edited out for the U.K. version. The film does perhaps make too much use of video editing/mixing/effects in the post-processing, but all in all is a very nice movie, tastefully done and well performed. The SM is on the lightweight side and the bondage is fairly elaborate. It is definitely worth watching. The plot is (as is usual in this gender) essentially meaningless; the major (submissive) character is apparently reliving memories of past fantasies with the help of a written diary that is illogically being read by a dominant female who performs the various punishments involved. But, we are used to the various plot ploys employed by makers of this genre of film, and most of them have less logic involved. In any case, it is beautifully filmed and worth watching just to admire the cinematography, if nothing else.