My Own Little World

What a ride. What a dark, depressing, riveting ride. I had very few expectations going into You Were Never Really Here . The story, characters, and aim – all were mysteries to me. After seeing it, I have never been happier that that has been the case. This film is shocking, brutal, and just an overall rough emotional experience. It also tells a story of sex trafficking that is too real to be ignored, and my guess is that is the main point this movie tries to get across. You Were Never Really Here mirrors themes of and comments on some recent events in the news like the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, focusing on how the rich and powerful can do anything they want to just about anybody – (horrifyingly) including 13-year-old girls. I was almost brought to tears several times in this hour and twenty-five-minute film because I realized how unfortunately realistic this story might be. The film has a great voice behind it in Lynne Ramsay’s direction. She often takes a slower han...

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 ...