Posts

Showing posts with the label margot robbie

I, Tonya (2017)

Image
Biopics typically err in one big way: they don’t feel true to the characters they portray and have that typical “Oscar-bait” tone. Films like The Imitation Game , The Theory of Everything , and even Hacksaw Ridge have all fallen into this mold; it’s not that they’re bad films, but they just don’t try to do anything but tell a positive story about their main character’s life. They are bland, plain and simple. Thankfully, I, Tonya doesn’t fit this mold at all. It follows more in the vein of The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short in how it treats its subjects: there’s a lot of witty dark humor, and the tone is very much snarky sometimes but then gets a lot more serious as the story does. My problems with those two films I mention is that they can’t find the balance between the comedy and the drama, Wolf of Wall Street erring towards comedy and Big Short towards drama. I, Tonya has a smoother transition between those two tones, but it still does feel a bit abrupt, and ...

Suicide Squad (2016)

Image
What do you do when you want to like a movie so much, but you walk out of the theater bored and wanting to just sleep away your problems? I've never had to ask this question until last night. I made the always-tragic mistake of putting my hope in some amazingly well-crafted trailers and expected the world with Suicide Squad . Instead, I got a movie that bored me. A movie with some of the greatest comic book villains of all time, and it bored me. I legitimately yawned several times towards the end and was just waiting to get out of the theater so I could do something far more interesting. I also want to put a bit of a disclaimer before the rest of my thoughts: this is no way because I want to align myself with the critics. If you remember my Batman v Superman  review (if you don't, just  click here ), you'll remember that, despite the negativity critics hurled at it, I quite enjoyed it. It was something far different tonally than anything else any comic book film had g...