Vera

I have tried to watch this one when it was nominated for Oscars, but I found it boring and turned it off after first 20 minutes. A couple years later, I DVR’d it and deleted a few weeks later. This week the film was leaving Netflix, so I had to give it another chance. It was still boring, I’m not sure why half of British films are. Action took place in exactly two rooms, and not in the good ‘Carnage’ way. It lacked a dramatic climax, she was performing illegal abortions, and then she got caught and was put in prison for 2.5 years, the end. The family was shocked, and one of her sons practically wanted to disown her, but it still lacked something. I’m not sure why the girl who got raped didn’t come to her, but some other guy. I waited for the connection between the two stories. I would not have seen it if it wasn’t an Academy Award nominee, and I’ll never watch it again. If you want to watch it solely for Imelda’s performance, then do it. But you won’t find anything else in there.

5/10

Jury Duty

Reminded me I need to rewatch 12 Angry Men. The first half is hilarious. Especially when he chooses the longest trial. He pretends he knows the first defendant, saying he used to prank people with him and cheat on tests in high school, then he pretended to be handicapped, when the trial was about some doctor’s malpractice , etc. In one of these jury try-outs, he quotes Al Pacino’s character from ‘And Justice for All’: ‘You’re out of order! You’re out of order! The whole trial is out of order! They’re out of order!’, and he is chosen for this trial after he says he doesn’t watch TV, cause it’s always biased, and he looks for the truth, which no one cares about anymore. My most favorite is when he fell asleep, fell out of the jury box, got up and said ‘All rise’ and the court guard called him a moron. How about when he wrote he wants to ‘Sauna’ and threw the note that ended up hitting the killer’s face? It was a funny film with awful ending. Bruce from Judging Amy is in it. If you liked him as Amy’s court assistant, watch this film. Stanley Tucci wasn’t that big in the 90s, so maybe the film did not scream ‘He’s guilty’ but when you watch it today, you know something isn’t right there. I am a little obsessed when it comes to details of crimes, as you’ll see in the review just below, and I have always dreamed I’d get a chance to be called in for jury duty. My face would look exactly as the main character’s. I would be laughing and enjoying sweet time off work, in a nice hotel with paid meals, and I would hope for a long trial, hopefully with lack of evidence, so It’d be even longer. I wish I could sign up for jury duty, but it just doesn’t work that way. My dad said life is too short to watch crappy films like this one. But he laughed through most of it, so maybe it isn’t that bad after all.

4/10

The Perfect Husband. The Laci Peterson Story

What I don’t get is how can you lie to the victim’s family and friends, and for months pretend you had nothing to do with their death? If I remember correctly, the child was separated from his mother by coffin birth, which means the acid from mother’s womb threw baby’s body out after mother’s death. They didn’t explain anything in the film. They just said they found the infant and then the mother. Why should we watch a crappy Lifetime film if they’re not gonna explain the details of someone’s death? The body of the mother was found 20 miles from the shore almost 4 months later. The pictures of the dead child have sadly leaked online. The woman’s head was never found. I don’t remember him having a lover, who didn’t know he was married. Did Lifetime just made her up? There’s lots of cases like this one and all the most media covered ones have their Lifetime movies. It reminded me of that Candace Cameron Bure ‘No One Would Tell’, another Lifetime real story film about a teenager Stacy Collins who was murdered by her boyfriend by the local lake. In the Laci Peterson case, her child’s body was found near her husband’s fishing place. Another resemblance is it’s also another case where the partner did it, and then stayed to hang out with the family. The actor who played Mr Paterson looked exactly like him, how did they find a person who looks exactly same?

3/10

Joy Divsion

What I absolutely love is that this is one of the very few films that actually showed the most tragic consequence of the end of World War II, the biggest mass rape in history, the gang rapes of women by the Red Army. The supporting female character is gang raped three times, and the main character is shown trying to cope with the loss of her decades after. It’s estimated that more than 2 million German women were raped, some of them up to 70 times during 1945. It is estimated that 100 000 women were raped just in Berlin, other than the 2 million German, 100 000 Polish, and even 100 000 Russian. Women were raped as they were leaving concentration camps too. It’s said that most of the woman aged 8 to 90 were raped by the Red Army. I was always angry during history class in high school, because we never covered this topic. Sure we were mostly stuck a couple periods before even World War I, but this is what should have been talked about in school. Most of war films focus on Jews being killed and no one shows what happened after, just that everyone was happy that the war was over. When in fact Red Army soldiers were told to take what’s theirs and rape women. Sorry for the long ‘history lesson’, It’s just one of the subjects I’m interested in, and fun fact, I was born in one of the Pomeranian cities. Now back to Joy Division. Obviously, flashbacks were the most important part of the film. They should have skipped the present, and just make it a war film.

7.5/10

Defiance

Woah, but Bielski brothers were not some heroes. Their group supported the Soviets and helped them in massacring 128 innocent Poles in Naliboki. How did over 1000 people sit unnoticed by the German in Poland/Belarus for 5 years? They joined the Soviets. It’s based on a true story, but half of the facts don’t match. I’m sure the film was easy to watch, if you didn’t know the truth. It would have been so much better, if truthful. I’m pretty sure the town they were occupying called Nowogródek was a Polish town at the time, but today it’s Belorussian. But of course they again, didn’t check the facts. And where on Earth were Polish people?  Polish town, not one Polish person? Nice airbrushing.

7/10

Conversations with Other Women

Pretty good, though left a little unresolved. Why would they choose to have an affair, if they knew they’d be back to their spouses the next day? The affair was not a very steamy one too, it was just a hook up, with no emotions, even though he started saying he loves her at the end. The conversation was on the whole film, but I don’t think enough was said, or that these were the right words. They came up with an alternative reality and hooked up pretending it was true.

6/10

A Case of You

Aren’t most relationships like that today? If you’re in your twenties or teens and you have never checked your crush’s Facebook page to see what they music they listen to and what films they like, then you’re lying. It doesn’t have to be a crush, it may be a person you wanted to be friends with. It’s like with favorite actors you’re currently obsessed with, you find out they like some song and you immediately download it. It’s all good when they upload their Twitter and Instagram often, if not, liking some celebrity can be painful. I am surprised the girl wasn’t a little grossed out that he spied her on social media. I also felt they tried to pull a ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ kind of ending, as it ended with a dance competition or recital too. The film started off nicely, and the nature trip into the woods ruined it all for me.

4/10

All Roads Lead to Rome

The writers tried to make another ‘Under the Tuscan’s Sun’ and failed miserably. The whole film is just Sarah Jessica Parker flirting with that Italian mommy’s boy. It wasn’t witty or funny, it just felt stupid. The scene where they fell off the rock? If you follow me on Snapchat, you may have seen I snapchated it adding ‘WTF’. Not something I would recommend to anyone else than a true SJP fan.

2/10