Review – Page 75 – Movie Meister Reviews

February 5, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Palmer (2021) – Surprisingly Touching

Released: 29th January
Seen: 4th Febuary

So, stop me if you’ve heard this one. A man is living on his own with no real desire to be around other people, especially kids. One day out of the blue a kid ends up on his doorstep and he’s obliged to take care of the youth because something has happened to their parents. His disdain for raising children ends up slowly changing now that he finally met one and just as he turns a corner and becomes a fully functioning member of society, the parent comes back and there’s an emotional scene where everyone realises that this mysterious man is a better parent than the parent, roll credits. Yeah, that’s the basic plot of Palmer and at least a dozen other films that you can probably name (why not name them in the comments, engagement is king!) and it takes an interesting twist to make the story interesting. Palmer has such a twist and it’s pretty impressive.

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February 4, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

The Marksman (2021) – You’re Taken The Piss

Released: 21st January
Seen: 4th February

Can we, as a society, just admit that Liam Neeson action films have become repetitive and stale? Is that a thing that we can collectively do? Hell, let’s be honest, they were getting stale roughly around the third time he played a character who had a member of his family taken. It’s now to the point where you could write a Liam Neeson action film using a madlib form, they all have the same basic plot and only change the minor superficial details. It’s always the same and every time it gets a little bit less interesting and The Marksman is just another one for the pile.

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January 22, 2021 leebutler Uncategorized

Ammonite (2021) – Ammono

Released: 14th January
Seen: 20th January

You know, normally when I write one of these things, I like to think my feelings match the quality of a film. I like good films, I don’t like bad films and I can usually explain what they did wrong that I didn’t like. Even films that I’m in the middle about, the 2.5-star films that have no effect on me are ones I can express why it’s in the middle. Ammonite is different though, a first for me on this blog because it’s a film that I can look at and admit that it’s well made and well acted with an interesting story and a lot of elements that I have actively begged for in movies… but I just didn’t like it one bit.

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January 21, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Hunted (2021) – Little Blood-Red Riding Hood

Released: 14th January
Seen: 19th January

If you were to make a list of locations that horror movies take place in, The Woods would probably be somewhere near the top of that list. Something about being in the great outdoors, surrounded by trees and being far away from modern civilisation lends itself well to a horror scenario. Films like Cabin in the Woods, Evil Dead and Friday the 13th have all shown that surrounding a bunch of young people by a seemingly endless amount of trees and leaving them to deal with some form of serial killer can create a terrifying ordeal… you can also have films like Hunted, that work on some level but not as many as it should.

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January 20, 2021January 25, 2021 leebutler Uncategorized

Outside the Wire (2021) – Wireless

Released: 15th January
Seen: 17th January

This year Netflix announced that it plans on releasing one brand new narrative film every single week, a proposal clearly borne out of a need to build up a catalogue of films that can’t be taken away when another movie studio decides to try and make its own streaming service. On the one hand, this is a smart idea, with enough of a catalogue of its own Netflix can justify continuing as a service even if every studio pulls their film.

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January 19, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Music (2021) – Tone Deaf

Released: 14th January
Seen: 18th January

The list of musicians that decided to try their hand at directing a film isn’t exactly large, especially in comparison to musicians who’ve acted in a film. People like Rob Zombie and Barbra Streisand proved that you could make big waves in music and be a respected director… then there are people like Madonna and Fred Durst who proved that sometimes you should probably stick to music. So, where does Sia fall in this- second. She’s in the second group, she should just stay in the world of music because if this film is an indication of what she’ll offer to cinema, I’d rather she stuck to music.

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January 18, 2021 leebutler Uncategorized

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy (2021) – This Doc Is Wack

Released: 11th January
Seen: 12th January

In the 1980s, the decade of greed and excess, the drug of choice was cocaine. The white powder that filled the noses of everybody who was anybody was almost a status symbol, you can’t tell a story about the 80s without someone at some point saying “And then we did some coke” because it was that ubiquitous. Of course, like all things, there was inevitably a cheaper and more effective version available known as crack. Crack cocaine was instantly deemed the worst thing you could do, and this documentary points out the consequences of that.

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January 8, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Pieces Of A Woman (2020) – Once, Twice, Three Piece a Lady

Released: 7th January
Seen: 7th January

Some topics are difficult to work into a movie, not because of taste or anything but because they are so loaded and intense that unless you nail every element of that topic your entire film could suffer because of it. Pieces of a Woman tackles possibly one of the heaviest topics, the death of a child, and for the most part, it nails it but some parts aren’t exactly the best.

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January 7, 2021 leebutler Uncategorized

The Dry (2020) – Aussie Cinema Goodness

Released: 1st January
Seen: 6th January

I hate to take you back there but at this point in 2020 my country was in… well, I’d say we were in hot water but actually we were in the literal opposite of water. The bushfires of late 2019 to early 2020 were some of the worst I’ve ever seen. Sure, we have bushfires here a lot (Comes with having lots of bush and not as much water as we should have) but it was nothing like last year. Part of the reason we have such bad bushfires here is that we are a dry country, known for lengthy periods of drought. Droughts that lengthy can do some serious damage on little towns like Kiewarra, which is the setting for the Australian crime movie The Dry.

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January 6, 2021July 22, 2022 leebutler Uncategorized

Steve McQueen: The Lost Movie (2021) – Fascinating Piece Of Forgotten Cinema

Released: 2nd January
Seen: 2nd January

In the 1960s, one of the coolest movie stars on the planet was Steve McQueen. Star of classics like The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven, he was an icon who combined his love of acting with his other passion, F1 Racing. One of the things he was most known for was that love of driving, often doing his own stunt driving in any film he was permitted to. His love of driving was so great that he pushed to make one of the biggest racing movies of all time, a film that would become one of the most legendary unfinished films in history.

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