It’s not often indie dramas can compel and pull off a story so steeped in melodrama without being a cloying sickening glorified TV movie. Thankfully, Martin Papazian’s drama about two mentally unstable outcasts finding one another in the sadness manages to be a fantastic bittersweet drama filled with rich performances all around. Director Papazian manages to bring the film down to a level that doesn’t try for sap and sugary sweet, and keeps its characters grounded enough to where their conflicts and dilemmas feel realistic and warrant audiences empathies.
Guilt is a complex anomaly in the human psyche. It’s remorseless, it’s unbiased, it lingers for decades, and many times it takes on different forms. It can take on the form of blame, and it can form into blame of the most unlikely people, just to make sense of the senseless in our lives. In the face of tragedy some people just need to point fingers and blame the innocent just to help us cope with a horrible trauma, and the same can be said for the characters featured in one of my favorite dramas of all time.
I really can’t imagine a film like “The Land Before Time” being released today. As a kids film it teaches about strength, courage, and the willingness to look for hope in darkness. But as a film in general, director Don Bluth offers a story drenched in sadness, terror, and an almost endless amount of sadness. “The Land Before Time,” like much of Bluth’s work, has held up monumentally well over the year with a beautiful eye for detail, painting a massive world on the threshold of evolving in to something new, while also losing much of its own species to death and turmoil.
What does “Hunchback” teach the audience? Whether you’re gorgeous or ugly, if the hot girl says you’re cool, you’ll become the hero. Also, the nice guy always finishes last. Surely Quasimodo rides off in to the sunset with his crowd of supporters in the end, but who is Esmerelda going home with later that night? “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” is a bastardization from Walt Disney, where they take the tragic and brilliant tale of Quasimodo and water it down so much it’s barely an adaptation when we see it in animated force.
Like the original film it stems from, “Come Out and Play” offers the question “Who Can Kil a Child?” If your seven year old cherubic daughter was trying to murder you with a hammer, could you kill her? Laugh all you want, but if it comes down to me, and an evil eight year old intent on hacking me to death with an axe, I’ll gladly bring the child down and any other evil children trying to murder me with a machine gun.
That’s more like it. After the first “The Guyver” managed to draw up some profit and interest, New Line released a sequel to “The Guyver” directly to VHS. It wasn’t until 1995 where I was finally able to see it on the Science Fiction Channel in American cable television. I wasn’t even aware there was a sequel at the time. For folks who hated the camp and comedy of the first film, prepare for a jolt of pure action packed entertainment.
It’s no big secret that I love “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” The 2012 drama is a film I ignored for a long time until finally sitting down to see what it was capable of offering. It ended up being my favorite film of 2012, and I’ve had a hard time getting it out of my head ever since re-watching it again in 2013. “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” is a drama I suggest to just about everyone, and it’s still a film I consider a masterpiece. After re-watching it and thinking it over, I thought about Nine things I picked up on after the third viewing.