Being the Ricardos

 Being the Ricardos (2021)

Starring Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, J.K. Simmons, Nina Arianda, Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat, and Jake Lacy

Directed by Aaron Sorkin

Written by Aaron Sorkin

Click here for my Letterboxd review

The RyMickey Rating:  C

Movie Review - Green Room

Green Room (2016)

Starring Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, Callum Turner, Mark Webber, Eric Edelstein, Macon Blair, Kai Lennox, and Patrick Stewart

Directed by Jeremy Saulnier

***This film is currently streaming via Amazon Prime***

Through a friend of a friend, a punk rock band gets a gig at a slummy Neo-Nazi bar in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Northwest.  Following the show, Pat (Anton Yelchin) returns to the green room to get a phone left behind only to discover a stabbed dead body on the floor.  Privy to this murder, the leaders of the Neo-Nazi group refuse to let Pat and his bandmates (Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, Callum Turner) leave and the quartet is forced to figure out a way to try and save themselves before they end up with the same murdered fate.

Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier has crafted an incredibly tense and utterly frightening film in Green Room, a fantastic follow-up and improvement upon his successful prior film Blue Ruin.  In his two films I've seen thus far, Saulnier is admirably successful in creating a gritty atmosphere and then adding some less-than-kind characters to the mix.  Fully realized and feeling quite lived in, Green Room pulls the viewer into the claustrophobic atmosphere from which we beg to escape much like the trapped bandmates.

The cast -- including the late Anton Yelchin as a band member and a terrifyingly calm Patrick Stewart as the Neo-Nazi leader -- gamely accepts the roles of either the terrorizers or the terrorized, helping to strengthen the intensity of the horrific situation unfolding on the screen.  Green Room isn't an easy sit -- it's quite violent and things don't always turn out well for the protagonists.  However, auteur Jeremy Saulnier has proven once again that he is quite adept and capable of making a film that puts uneasiness and intensity on the front burner.

The RyMickey Rating:  B+

Movie Review - Whip It (2009)

Starring Ellen Page, Marcia Gay Harden, Kristin Wiig, Drew Barrymore, Alia Shawkat, Eve, Juliette Lewis, Jimmy Fallon, and Daniel Stern
Directed by Drew Barrymore

Sure, roller derby isn't something you see often in film, but that's the only thing that's remotely original in Drew Barrymore's directorial debut. We get the same old movie clichés we've seen seemingly hundreds of times before (although this time it's a double whammy because we get sports movie and teenage movie angst clichés...two for one!).

Ellen Page is Bliss, an edgy gal (we know she's edgy because she likes boots and wears cool 80s band t-shirts) whose mom (Marcia Gay Harden) makes her compete in local town beauty pageants. [Side Note: why are southern/midwest towns always depicted as being caught in the past? It always seems like they're stuck in a time warp.] One night, Bliss decides to head to a roller derby and falls in love with the sport. She manages to join one of the roller derby teams and continues to sneak off for the matches. Do you think that there's gonna be some conflict between the roller derby and her home life? Do you think there's gonna be a big "final match?" Do you think everything will be hunky-dory in the end? Have you seen any movie before ever in your life? If the answer to that last question is yes, then you know the answer to the previous three questions.

It's not that the film itself is bad, it's just that there's nothing really new or interesting here. Barrymore proves to be an adequate director and it's an acceptable debut, but she brings nothing new to the table here. The derby scenes were very repetitive and Barrymore, at times, went for some really odd shots (the last shot of the movie is a perfect example of this). The worst thing about Barrymore is that she gave herself a role in the film...she was pretty awful acting-wise here.

Ellen Page is fine...a little too "soft" and "quiet" to ever really be believable as an edgy derby gal. Kristin Wiig should have been given more to do (I'd watch her in anything). The two shining stars were Alia Shawkat (of Arrested Development fame) as Bliss's best friend Pash and Juliette Lewis as Iron Maven, a roller derby competitor. If the movie was about these gals, it would've been infinitely better...they really brought some life to the screen whenever they became the focus.

It's not that Whip It is a bad movie, it's just that it's a movie that has been seen before.

The RyMickey Rating: C