Drama – Page 10 – Movie Meister Reviews

August 18, 2022 leebutler Drama, Music, Romance

Purple Hearts (2022) – Dishonourable Discharge

Released: 29th July
Seen: 17th August

Recently one of the big discourses around cinema has been the idea that superhero movies are destroying cinema. The idea is that they’re all the same and overwhelming the market, every movie nowadays wants to be just like them so we don’t get anything new or exciting. Respectfully, that feels like a case of hating the popular thing just because it’s popular. As someone who sits through hundreds of films a year for this blog, maybe half a dozen of them are superhero films and if anything, they’re a nice respite because they’re usually at least entertaining enough that it’s a few hours enjoyably spent.

No, you want to know what the real death of cinema looks like? It looks like yet another bland boring romance movie starring a pair of attractive people who can just barely get lines of dialogue out playing boring cliche characters with minimal chemistry (if any) who regurgitate the exact same romance plot we’ve seen a thousand times over… anyway, let’s talk about Purple Hearts

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August 8, 2022 leebutler Action, Drama, Horror, Review

Prey (2022) – Out Of This World Amazing

Released: 5th August
Seen: 7th August

In 2018, the film The Predator was released to cinemas. It was the 4th entry in the badly named franchise (previous entries being Predator, Predator 2 and Predators… so not confusing in the slightest) and it was probably the worst of the bunch. It almost felt like it was going to put the final nail in the coffin for this franchise which has been kind of coasting on fond memories of the 1987 original. So when there was news of another entry coming out that would take the actually unique film title Prey, it’s fair to say that there was some trepidation about how good the film would be… turns out it might be the best in the whole damn franchise.

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July 13, 2022August 15, 2022 leebutler Review

Elvis (2022) – Set My Soul On Fire

Released: 23rd June
Seen: 12th July

For years now there has been a conspiracy theory that Elvis Presley isn’t dead. The story goes that Elvis grew tired of fame and of his exhausting schedule and so he faked his own death and went off to live as a normal person. People claim to see him in coffee shops, he works in a little cafe in the middle of the desert, people just see Elvis all the time. I have never subscribed to this theory, I firmly believed for years that Elvis Aaron Presley died on August 16,1977 in his home in Memphis… now I might have to question that because Austin Butler might just be the pseudonym that Elvis chose to perform under one last time.

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July 4, 2022July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Spiderhead (2022) – I Have Some Complaints

Released: 17th June
Seen: 3rd July

Netflix has been having what can generously be described as “A shitty year that’s been very shitty”. Their numbers of subscribers have been dropping, their revenue is dropping and they keep just landing in controversy after controversy. They also keep spending exorbitant amounts of money on absolute garbage films that have little to sell themselves on beyond the star power of the lead actor. To be absolutely blunt, Spiderhead looked like it was going to fall into that category but good news, it’s not absolute garbage… it’s just not very good.

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June 15, 2022June 15, 2022 leebutler Review

Please Baby Please (2022) – STELLA-R!

Seen at the Sydney Film Festival

Sometimes a film is targeted to such a specific audience that once someone comes up with the perfect one-line description of the plot it almost renders the job of reviewing the film pointless, if the single-line description sounds like a great film to you then you’re going to like it and if not then you’ll probably hate it. Please Baby Please is part of this year’s roster of films that are part of the Sydney Film Festival and in the film festival program this film was described with the sentence “A Streetcar Named Desire by way of John Waters”… so that’s my job rendered useless, if that phrase doesn’t immediately make you go “I HAVE TO SEE THAT” then this film isn’t for you, review effectively over.

But screw it, we’re here, let’s bump up the word count a little bit

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May 19, 2022July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

Firestarter (2022) – Fizzles

Released: 12th May
Seen: 17th May

In 1980, Stephen King released his eighth book, Firestarter, which did what most King books tend to do and became a major hit. As is also inevitable with all King books, it was adapted into a film back in 1984… this would be an adaptation that Stephen King hates, only unlike his hatred for The Shining he wouldn’t be alone in his dislike of 1984’s Firestarter.

That film was fairly universally panned by both critics and audiences and remains one of the lesser adaptations of Kings work, which means it’s one of the few works of his that probably warrants a second attempt at adapting since they clearly didn’t get it right the first time… so, see you all in about 40 years when they try again because they didn’t get it right this time either.

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April 29, 2022July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

365 Days: This Day (2022) – It Still Hurts

Released: 27th April
Seen: 28th April

The year was 2020, we were deep into the horrors of the pandemic and thus desperate for things to keep us entertained since everything was shutting down, which is how a film like 365 Days was able to get dropped on Netflix and become a massive hit on the service… now, granted, everyone could readily admit that the film was a giant piece of shit and was openly mocking how awful it was every chance possible but that didn’t change the fact that it was a monster hit.

It was critically savaged and called out for being a romanticisation of rape that was a poorly filmed/acted/written/scored piece of garbage… and that’s just from my own personal description of it when I gave it the top spot on my worst of 2020 list.

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April 28, 2022July 22, 2022 leebutler Review

The Northman (2022) – For The North!

Released: 21st April
Seen: 26th April

Robert Eggers is quickly turning into one of the most fascinating directors in modern cinema. His directorial debut, The Witch, set the horror world alight and introduced us to Anya Taylor-Joy who is becoming one of the most sought after actors in Hollywood. It was the kind of first film that you could only dream of making, garnering critical and financial praise while establishing Eggers as the kind of artist who was able to make an intense period horror that people couldn’t get enough of… something he would prove again with The Lighthouse, a gloriously bonkers piece that proved that Eggers had some wild ideas that he wanted to test out. His first two films proved what Eggers could do on a small scale. The Northman shows what Eggers can do when he’s tasked with an epic and god damn it, it turns out he can do magic.

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