Replicas is a 2019 futuristic science fiction thriller film, directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, starring Keanu Reeves, Alice Eve, Thomas Middleditch and John Ortiz. On this movie, Reeves plays William Foster, a neuroscientist and employee of a biomedical conglomerate called Bionyne, that works to improve the technology to clone human beings, as a means to avoid death and perpetuate life, and transform this into a lucrative business. 

The movie is a relatively decent thriller, if you are willing to ignore the fact that has a storyline saturated with obvious and rude predictabilities. The movie begins with William Foster trying to transplant the conscience of an individual into an android machinery, but the procedure fails miserably, as the conscience rejects its unnatural cyborg body, despite the fact that Foster frankly believes he is really close to make the procedure a success. When he arrives home, he and his family – his wife Mona (Eve), his son Matt and his two daughters, Sophie and Zoe – are completely prepared to enjoy a well-deserved vacation.

They embark in their huge family van, but after a few minutes into the road, they suffer a terrible accident, where everybody dies, except for William (see where I want to get?); exceedingly desperate, he has the means to bring his family back to life, and asks for the help of his work colleague and best friend, Ed (Middleditch), who collaborates extensively.

They misappropriate the necessary equipment clandestinely from the Bionyne facilities. Unfortunately, William gets desperate when he sees that the company had only three containers, instead of four. So he would not be able to bring all of his four family members back to life. He inscribes in different papers the name of them all, and asks Ed to pick them up, but Ed refuses. Facing a hard choice – since, by force of circumstance, he has to exclude one family member –, William decides to exclude his youngest daughter Zoe. 

So, eventually, he initiates the procedures, taking all the necessary measures to do an impeccable work. Nevertheless, the procedures takes time, and – meanwhile – people from the social circles of his family starts to miss them. His wife, a doctor, is missed at work, the same way his children’s absence at school draws attention. So, William elaborates several excuses, saying that his family is sick. A high school principal visits them at home, and William receives the woman, telling her a similar excuse. He even engages in social midia activity posing as each one of his family members, to give the impression that everything is normal, and they are communicating online frequently. Inevitably, he is so absorbed by his personal endeavor that he became reckless and uninterested in his work at Bionyne. He even asks Ed to elaborate an excuse to justify his absence, so Ed says to Jones (Ortiz), their superior at Bionyne, that William became sick with pneumonia.   

Sad for not being able to bring up Zoe to life, William tries to erase her from their lives, collecting all her belongings – as well as all pictures they had of her in the walls – and throws them into the garbage. After one hour into the film, his wife wakes up, followed by Matt and Sophie. William is exhilarated to find that he is able to replicate human beings, and his best friend Ed celebrates his success with him. 

Initially, all things go well, but the illusion lasts only for a few days. Eventually, Mona has severe memory lapses, that exasperates her. William, disturbed by the hard demands that Jones constantly requests, asking him for immediate results, begins to succumb to pressure. Subsequently, Mona, hardly dealing with her mental and physical distresses, demands from William an explanation, and – feeling he has no alternative –, is obliged to tell her the truth about the accident: except for him, all of them died in a car crash. She is a replica, as well as her two children. When Sophie finds the name Zoe written on her locker, she asks William who Zoe is, and Mona gets disturbed, as she had in her memories glimpses of a child and precisely this same name, that she could not explain properly. So William is forced to reveal to Mona that Zoe was their youngest daughter, that he was unable to bring back to life, due to insufficient equipment.  

One night, Jones appears at the Foster’s residence, and confronts William. He reveals that he had known all from the beginning, having acknowledged that his family died in a car crash. He purposefully let William and Ed stole the equipment from Bionyne for the necessary cloning procedures, knowing that – with his family life at stake – William will have enough motivations to succeed. So Jones implies that the replicas of Mona, Matt and Sophie in fact belong to Bionyne.

Realizing the danger they are in, William manages to hurt Jones badly, and tells his family they have to escape. They embark on their automobile, and William manages to avoid Jone’s henchmen. Nevertheless, they are followed, and soon they suspect they are being monitored, as Mona, Matt and Sophie had tracker devices implanted in every single one of them, and they figure this out. Mona discovers that the electric pulses comes from their hearts, and asks William to drive to the clinic where she works. There – with a heart defibrillator – they destroy the device in all of them, so the signal stops, and the Bionyne mercenaries lose track of the Foster family.

Soon thereafter, William drives to a Marina, to pick up a vessel where he and his family will be able to escape. But when he is in the docs, Mona, Matt and Sophie are kidnapped by Jones’ bodyguards. Assuming that they are heading towards Bionyne, William go there as well, to rescue his family. This was a calculated move on Jones part, that was eager to attract William for a trap. 

Upon arriving there, William tries to negotiate. Displaying his rudeness and selfishness, Jones kills Ed in front of William and Mona. Then Jones demands that William succeeds in transplanting a human conscience into a cybernetic android, something William agrees to do. Unbeknownst to Jones, William had previously configured his own neurological pattern into a digital blueprint, having discovered that he could manipulate deliberately his own mental sequences in order to avoid the cyborg’s rejection of the conscience transplanted. So, while doing the procedures, William configures the android with a replica of his own conscience, ordering him subsequently to attack Jones and the Bionyne security agents. While Jones and his bodyguards are viciously attacked, Mona and the children escape. They are soon followed by William.  

Soon afterwards, we see William and Mona in a paradisiac beach with their children. William is holding hands with a now replicated Zoe. Apparently, everything ends up well for the Foster family. Then we see Jones receiving a man in a wheelchair, in a discreet hotel room, somewhere in the United Arab Emirates. He is driving the business of his dream: to transplant the mind of old and sick people into android machines, enabling them to live indefinitely. Helping him is the android who attacked him earlier, in the Bionyne facilities. The one who has a replica of William Foster’s conscience. 

While this movie is not a spectacularly good one, it’s not a bad one either. You will hardly be impressed, but will neither be disappointed. Overall, it’s a good and entertaining thriller. Definitely, it will make a decent, enjoyable summer flick. As a futuristic movie, Replicas rises important questions concerning human DNA and cloning technology, as well as the morality and ethics concerning these issues. The temptation that large corporations will have to make profit from it will probably dilacerate all the possibilities for this otherwise benign resource to be used for the common good. Beyond these questions, this story – whose screenplay was written and developed by Chad St. John – makes an extensive use of the possibilities allowed by this subject, exploring all that can go wrong when something that should have an altruistic purpose is mainly used for financial gain, and deceitful acquisition of corporate power.  

The desperation that William Foster has – and the moral dilemma he has to confront – is another important issue of the story. When he sees all his family members dead after the accident, he chooses to break his moral engagement to the company where he works, and uses the technology they provide to produce exact replicas of his loved ones. You can say he was not altruistic, or even maybe that a desperate man can resort to anything under certain circumstances to alleviate his pain. 
 

So, this movie has its share of decent qualities, but don’t expect anything too extraordinary. If you like this genre of movie, you will definitely have a satisfactory time watching it. It’s a pragmatic, dynamic and tense futuristic feature film, where survival requires constant diligence and distrust against the outside world. Nevertheless, Replicas wasn’t good enough to avoid exasperating clichés and limitations, that – at least for a few moments – will remind you of generic Prime Time melodramas of Hallmark Channel, or even some low budget, made for television Sci-Fi films. Especially in the family scenes.   

Another problem is the quality of Keanu Reeves acting, that has been declining, and is becoming more and more generic, as the years pass by. Doesn’t matter the movies he’s in, his characters are basically all the same. Don’t get me wrong. Keanu Reeves is a fantastic actor, one of my favorites. But for more than ten years now, he has been involved mostly in unnecessary and even precarious flicks, being too distant from his glorious times of Point Break, Speed, The Matrix and The Devil’s Advocate. His last fantastic movie was 2008 Street Kings, and even then he became involved in questionable films. From then on, he has been involved mostly in low budget and independent productions. His last blockbuster was the deceptive 2013 47 Ronin – after ten years without being cast in one –, a movie with an enormous budget of $175 million, that was one of the biggest box office bombs of the century.  

Another problem is that is very difficult seeing Reeves as a husband, and a father figure (I already have mentioned this some years before, on my review of Knock Knock, as you can read here, and my feelings concerning this roles for him hasn’t changed). He is hardly convincing. To watch him kiss a child, and call him his son, if it is a boy, or his daughter, if it is a girl, is so over the edge. It’s too artificial and implausible; becomes evident that it is just mechanical acting.  

But, if you press the button of your suspension of disbelief, make a blind eye to all the acting deficiencies, the soap opera clichés, and occasionally precarious loopholes into the history – that lacks cohesiveness sometimes –, Replicas still make a good movie. Like I’ve written above, the movie is not bad. It’s a somewhat decent thriller film, despite being regular and ordinary, for the most part. Keep your expectations low, and you will be not disappointed. Or at least, too disappointed. In the end, you will definitely have a moderately reasonable entertainment.   


Wagner

Mandy is a 2018 action-horror movie, directed by Panos Cosmatos, starring Nicolas Cage, 
Andrea Riseborough, Bill Duke, Ned Dennehy, Linus Roache and Richard Brake. With its vintage visual style reminiscent of old school cinema, the movie has a colorful, but at the same time nostalgic mood, that certainly adds a dense element to its intricate and elaborate visual artistry.    

On this film, Nicolas Cage plays Red Miller, a woodman that is happily married with Mandy (Andrea Riseborough), a cashier in a shop on their nearby neighborhood, and a talented artist on her free time. They live a simple lifestyle in relative isolation in the Shadows Mountain region of California, where peace and quietness are part of daily life. On a certain occasion, Mandy crosses the road when an eccentric group of people in a van is passing by. They are members of a bizarre cult, called Children of the New Dawn. Unbeknownst to her, the leader of the cult, a man named Jeremiah (Linus Roache) asks his right-hand man, Brother Swan (Ned Dennehy) to capture her, as he wants to have her. 

Brother Swan, then, goes along with other cult member to fulfil his task. On arriving in a secret place, he makes a devilish arrangement with a nefarious horde of demonic motorcycle maniacs to kidnap Mandy. The group arrives when Mandy and Miller are sleeping, so Miller is easily subdued, and Mandy is successfully captured. On her captivity, she recognizes an old woman from before, who had earlier bought something on her work place, asking her something about the book she was reading. Mandy is then drugged with the venom of a giant wasp, and afterwards, completely hallucinating, is introduced to Jeremiah. In a delirious journey provoked by the substance administered to her, she begins to laugh hysterically, to Jeremiah’s disappointment.   

Miller is also held captive by the malevolent sect, tough outdoor. After her time with Mandy, Jeremiah goes outside with Brother Swan and one of his female servants, and begins to torment Miller psychologically, eventually stabbing him with a dagger. Then they excruciatingly torture him, by burning Mandy alive in front of him, tough she was involved in a giant fabric bag. On watching Mandy completely burn to death, Miller becomes severely distressed, and an irrepressible fury against the members of the sect strongly resonates on him. 

Strangely, after the event, the group goes away, leaving Miller alive. Completely tied in barbed wire, Miller frees himself with extreme difficulty, injuring himself deeply in the process. He then goes to the place where the ashes of Mindy are, and contemplates its remnants, as what has left of her is rapidly dispersed by the wind. Then he goes home, and sees the TV is still on. Miller goes to bed, and collapses on extreme fatigue. He then dreams of Mandy, shown in an animated sequence completely disfigured by the burns. 

He then wakes up, completely disrupted. He goes to the bathroom, and drinks an alcoholic beverage from a bottle he had hidden. He also starts to overflow all his fury. After recovering a little, Miller decides to visit a friend, Caruthers (Bill Duke), to pick up a weapon. He initially says he will go hunting, and tries to disguise his pain, but eventually he crumbles, and tell his friend what happened. Caruthers then tells him that a criminal gang called Black Skulls are the probable culprits behind the atrocity Miller and his wife have suffered, as they have terrorizing some nearby regions of the country for some time. They drive black motorcycles and can be seen only at night. Their main fuel is a very potent form of LSD they used to deliver, as a service to an independent drug lord. Caruthers tells Miller that he saw the gang once, at safe distance, and informs him the location they are most likely to be. 

Miller then displays all his ability as an ironsmith, to create a giant combat axe to fight his nemesis, and afterwards, drives along in search of the gang. In one occasion, Miller manages to shoot one of them with an arrow, after precisely capturing him through the lens of his gun. Rapidly, he stepped into his van, and drove on where his victim had felt on the road to run over him. Nevertheless, the assailant has managed to stay on his knees in the middle of the pavement, and with a gun shot Miller’s van several times, before a fatal collision between the two took place.  

Miller loses his conscience. When he wakes up, he finds himself imprisoned in a very claustrophobic deposit. His right hand is handcuffed to a pipe, while his left hand is nailed to the ground. Soon, he realizes he is being held captive by one of the Black Skulls. His assailant starts to beat him, talking to him in a very grotesque voice. But Miller manages to subdue his aggressor, breaking the pipe that was indeed a little loose, freeing his right hand, and spanking his antagonist with the pipe until he falls into a lateral pit.  

Miller then starts to explore the place where he is, and suddenly realizes it’s a very underground hideout. He sees an assassinated couple in a bed, and then confronts one of the Black Skulls, that was consuming large quantities of drug in a very dark living room. Miller is able to subdue him, but with great difficulty, as this Black Skull in particular is thoroughly truculent, aggressive and bestial. But Miller kills him by slashing his throat with a razor. The TV then is destroyed by a fire shoot, and Miller confronts again the assailant from before, the one he had thrown into the pit. But once again, Miller is successful in subjugating his attacker. Miller then “celebrates” his victory by consuming a large amount of cocaine that was over a table in the living room.  

On further exploration of the place, Miller encounters his axe. He also accidentally experiments the degraded version of LSD the Black Skulls are addicted to, and have a voraciously and intense delusional acid trip. When he leaves to proceed on his vengeance hunting, he shoots another Black Skull with one arrow, in front of a burning car. The Black Skull doesn’t die, though, and the two begin to fight. After some moments, this member of the gang tells Miller that his wife is still burning. This infuriates Miller, who throws his antagonist directly into the flames and then, in a vicious rampage, decapitates him with his axe. Miller then lights a cigar with the fire in the burning head of the assailant. 

He then drives in the dead of night to continue with his revenge plan, until he sees a tower. He then enters a vast laboratory, where a drug lord (Richard Brake) works. He threatens to catch a Luger pistol to defend himself, but hesitates. There is also in the precinct an enormous tiger named Lizzie in a cage. The drug lord pushes up a button, that opens the gate of the cage where Lizzie is confined, and the animal leaves. With his large pupils dilated, the drug lord also seems to be having a drug-related trip. Anticipating the feeling that Miller is desperate to get information about the Children of the New Dawn, the drug lord tells Miller that they may have gone towards the north. 

Miller then leaves his motor vehicle in a cave, and decides to sleep a little. He then have another dream with Mandy, which is a brief animated sequence, where she is naked, and pulling of the heart of a dead monster. Miller then finds the mountainous region that serves as the new headquarters for the members of the Children of the New Dawn.

Miller begins his irrational fury by viciously attacking Brother Swan, who was leaving his vehicle. Upon the aggression he brutally receives, he manages to say that Mandy has “burned brightly”, scorning Miller by asking him “don’t you think?” – Miller then introduces the sharp lower tip of his axe into the mouth of Brother Swan, breaking his jaw. He then pushes his axe more profoundly, brutally injuring and killing him. The younger woman, a member of the cult, was there, accompanying Brother Swan in the van. She silently cries, but Miller does nothing to her.    

Miller then proceeds to kill other members of the cult. He kills the next by throwing his axe directly into his head. Another one was fought in a battle of chainsaws, although Miller’s antagonist had one whose blade was much longer. Miller manages to inflict a profound wound in his opponent, but this fight proves to him thoroughly difficult to be won. Miller then picks up a chain, and manages to throw it out around the neck of his enemy, pushing it and forcing him to fall over one of the chainsaws – who was on –, that completely eviscerates Miller’s antagonist in the process. 

Miller then finally arrives at the satanic pyramid of the cult, and picks up out of curiosity their “holy” scripture. He then walks through the underground tunnels, finally arriving in an antechamber, where he meets the old matriarch of the cult. She begins to talk to him about Jeremiah. Miller’s only reaction is to stare at her coldly. 

Jeremiah is naked, alone with his egocentric godly delusions in a closed room, when the decapitated head of the matriarch is thrown at his direction. Jeremiah says to Miller that he can’t hurt him, as he continues to proclaim that he is a type of god. When Miller attacks him, Jeremiah starts to beg for his life. But after just a few moments, Jeremiah has a change of heart, and begins to insult Miller, saying that it’s him that should knee, and not the contrary. But Miller says to Jeremiah “I am your god now”, and starts to crush his head, until his eyes pops out, and his skull is brutally smashed. Miller then, feeling at least a little redeemed, sets the place on fire.  

Feeling at least partially relieved, Miller let the good memories related to Mandy flow back. He then drives away, with the sensation of mission accomplished. 

While this movie is good entertainment, it’s not a fantastic, exhilarating nor a superb work of art. More or less, it’s basically a typical revenge for love type of story.

The psychedelic features and the more exotic vibe present in the visual elements are an interesting feature, that certainly adds a genuine and interesting quality into the atmosphere of the movie. They are well developed, and used correctly, not overtly exaggerated throughout the whole production, but applied in precise and effective moments, to increase the effect and to transmit to the audience a correspondent sensation about what a specific character was feeling in a precise given moment. But this component, despite it’s cohesive usefulness on various passages of the movie, does not serve as a guarantee concerning the artistic efficiency of the film.  

Don’t get me wrong. Here there is beautiful cinematography, exceedingly dense and poetic visual scenes, artistic elegance, a consistent narrative, but in the end, Mandy is just a little above the average action flick. Like I wrote some lines above, it’s a very good entertainment. If you like generally reasonable action movies with somewhat generic storylines, you will certainly be pleased with this one. Just keep your expectations low. Don’t expect too much out of it. Yes, you will be thrilled by some really amazing, genuine and colorful exotic scenes. This will be your main reward for risking your time to see this really cool hipster piece. The scenes where Jeremiah delivers an esoteric monologue while his face is entirely red, and his facial features constantly shift to look like Mandy’s are certainly a good exemplar of the colorful unusual imagery that sets the tone of this somewhat relatively audacious vengeance story.

In the end, Mandy is not a bad movie. On the contrary, it’s a very good action flick. It serves to prove that, in the end, Hollywood still manages to do some decently good conventional action sequences. But don’t expect too much out of it. Despite decent visuals, and a plausible conjuncture of good ideas, Mandy will hardly exceed your expectations. In just a few weeks, it will be just another Nicolas Cage movie.           


Wagner

 The film begins with a woman receiving a call from the police, informing her that her home is being invaded, but the law officers will do their best to control the situation. ​She grabs a gun for defense, and gets worried for her infant daughter. Then, it is revealed that this call was a prank from the aforementioned group of young pranksters, one of many they do to upload on their successful website. 

​One afternoon, Sam and Brady reunite in Sam’s home. They are both alone, since Sam’s parents are away for the weekend. Sam is a little frustrated by virtue of his situation with his girlfriend, Peyton. So Brady decides they should grab the phone, and do some prank calls, to improve Sam’s mood. 

One of their first pranks is to a neighbor. They call to a pizza-delivery service, where their friend, Jeff Mosley, works, as well as Peyton. Pretending to be Sam’s neighbor, they ask the pizza to be delivered in his address. When Mosley appears to deliver the pizza, the boys call Sam’s neighbor, telling him that several robberies have been taking place in the neighborhood, most of them by an assailant dressed as a pizza delivery guy. When the neighbor sees Mosley, he assumes him to be a criminal, and persecutes him. Mosley, suspecting the prank, crosses the street and confronts Sam and Brady. To appease their friend, they buy the pizza from him. 

After doing several more prank calls for their personal amusement, a stranger calls them. Despite telling both very bizarre things, Sam and Brady decide to shut off the call, dismissing it as an ordinary joke. Nevertheless, the stranger calls a few more times, and finally succeeds to attract the boys’ attentions, after telling them their complete names, and the addresses of their homes, to their total dismay.    

At first assuming their friend Mosley is behind the prank, in Brady’s mobile phone he receives a message saying it’s not Mosley. Both get surprised to discover that the prankster has Brady’s mobile number, and for rapidly assuming their suspicions concerning their friend. Suddenly, Brady realizes that a picture was also sent to him. In the picture, it is possible to see two persons tied to chairs. Brady soon recognizes them as his parents. 

Realizing they are in great danger, the two friends are progressively strained in a labyrinth of despair. Eventually, they dial 911, and hysterically tell to the attendant everything that is happening to them. Unfortunately, for their astonishment and unpleasant surprise, the person talking to them in the other side of the line reveals itself to be the mysterious prankster, who is effectively exerting control over every communicating device inside the house, including the television, by which he starts to send images of Brady’s parents. Sam also realizes that Peyton’s car is outside the house, which is strong evidence that she was probably captured by their mysterious aggressor. She had visited the two briefly in the beginning of the afternoon just after Mosley had left.      

The mysterious assailant – who attends by the alias of “Mr. Lee” – soon reveals itself to be in complete control of the situation, and succeeds in viciously putting the two friends against each other. The mysterious prankster tries hard, in different occasions, to stimulate disagreement between them, even engaging in an effort to make the boys resort to murder each other in a secretive deal, first offering redemption to Brady if he kills Sam, and then to Sam, for killing Brady, but he fails both times. Nonetheless, he manages to increase the terror generated by his constant menaces, affirming that he is disposed to kill the boys’ loved ones, for he has nothing to lose. When analyzing, though, the images in the screen, Sam sees a clock behind Brady’s parents, with a two hour gap, indicating that they were seeing recorded, and not live images. As they were practically receiving calls from the mysterious prankster all the time, their communication was constant through the speakerphone, and Sam demands to see proof that Mosley and Peyton are still alive. In the meantime, Brady begins to suspect that his parents are no longer alive. Soon thereafter, the mysterious assailant talks to both Brady and Sam onscreen. When he leaves, it is possible to see Brady’s parents dead, both having their throats slit, much to the complete horror of both.  

In several occasions, Brady has threatened to leave the house, and call the police, despite severe warnings given by their antagonist that they shouldn’t, under the menace of drastic consequences. Discording over this matter, Sam and Brady begins an argument, that escalates to a physical altercation. Managing to subdue Brady, Sam handcuffs him with a nylon strip to the handrail, limiting his movements, and preventing him from leaving the house. The assailant, nevertheless, manages to put Sam against Brady one more time when he uploads a video of Brady having sex with Peyton. When Sam sees the video, he gets terribly disturbed, and another serious fight, more aggressive this time, ensues between the two.     

The attacker then shows them that he has, in fact, their friend Mosley in his power, and suffocates him with a plastic bag, for Brady and Sam’s complete shock. Suddenly, Sam sees in the screen the picture of a little girl, which was the profile picture of a person who requested his friendship in a social network earlier. Upon searching the personal page of this individual, he sees on the profile several pictures of him and Brady, as well as Peyton, Mosley, and a lot of their friends, several of them going as far as a year ago. Terrified, they conclude that they had been watched for months, or possibly, more than a year. 

The two friends begin to suspect the mysterious assailant to be inside the house, or nearby, and they decide to check it out. Sam frees Brady, they arm themselves with a baseball bat and a knife, respectively, and decide to confront the maniac that is harassing them.   

For his shock and horror, Sam discovers Mosley’s body in the back door, with a plastic bag all over his face. Mosley’s body falls when Sam opens the door, but the corpse is tied with a rope to the door frame. Desperate, thinking there is a chance of Mosley being alive, Sam rips off the plastic bag from the face of Mosley, and pulls it off from his head, just to discover, in horror, that his throat has been slit, and the tape around his neck securing the plastic bag was also preventing him from bleeding. In a matter of seconds, Mosley bleeds profusely and dies, to Sam’s complete affliction. Brady, by this point, gets exceedingly traumatized as well.

Brady demands Sam to leave the house and call the police. With the prerogative of verifying the vicinities, pretending to go with him, Brady manages to lock Sam out of the house, and insist for Sam to save his life and to ask for the help of authorities. Sam initially is angered, and hits the door furiously, pleading for Brady to open the door. Since Brady ignores his pleas, Sam, despite the heavy rain, decides to inspect the neighborhood, and sees a suspected van parked outside his house. Checking the van, he sees Peyton bound and tied up, and frees her. Suddenly, both hear a scream, and decide to go check it out what was happening, supposing that Brady was attacked.  

Returning to the backyard, Sam and Peyton see a masked assailant going their direction with a knife, trying to attack them. Sam manages to counterattack their aggressor, and stabs him with his own knife, killing him. Suddenly, he recognizes a tattoo in the arm of the assailant, the same tattoo Brady had shown him when he recently had arrived at his house. Desperate, he removes the mask of the attacker, and sees Brady, with a duct tape on his mouth. Realizing that he has killed his own friend, Sam cries in desperation.  

Suddenly, the true attacker arrives, and reveals himself. When Sam asks the motive for all that aggression he has been inflicting on them, the mysterious assailant reveals the reason behind his actions. He was married to the woman victim of the prank shown in the beginning of the movie. When they called her, with the prank that their house has been invaded, she grabbed a gun in order to protect herself and their daughter. By the orders of the pranksters – that she thought was the police – she moved a balcony in front of the bedroom door, to protect her from the supposed invaders, since she hasn’t a key to lock the door. She put her cell phone above the balcony, but it fell off to the ground underneath the bed, when she moved the furniture again, to clear her way to her daughter’s bedroom, since she became desperate to check upon her child. No longer holding her cell phone, she hasn’t heard when the pranksters announced that everything was a joke. Unbeknownst to them, she wasn’t aware that she was the victim of a prank. Truly believing that her house was being invaded, she grabbed her gun, and decided to check upon her daughter. Seeing that she wasn’t in her bedroom, she panicked. When she heard the door next to her opening, she became frightened and gave a shot directly through the door. To her desperation, she shot her own daughter – who had only gone to the bathroom –, who died instantly. Profoundly disturbed by the tragedy, the woman put the gun against her chest and committed suicide. So the aggressor, identified as “Mr. Lee”, was the man taking vengeance upon his wife and daughter. 

Sam cried in desperation, saying that it was never their intention to hurt anyone. Then the man stepped over Sam’s face, and a gunshot was heard. Suddenly, its morning, and we see Sam alive, waking up. He has a knife on his hand, and a gun on the other. Next to him, he sees the body of Brady, and going outside, the body of Peyton, who had been shot in the head. He doesn’t release neither the knife, nor the gun, suggesting that they might be stuck in his hands. In the living room, the video of Brady having sex with Peyton plays nonstop. Suddenly the police arrive in the scene, and the news is already noticing the terrible manslaughter that took place. Apparently, as the footage suggest, the massacre was executed by a sadistic young man, jealous of discovering that his best friend had cheated him with his girlfriend. 

In the end, we see the photo of the little girl, used as picture for the profile “Mr. Lee” uses on the social network, making a friend request to another member of the group of pranksters, suggesting that he will continue his journey of vengeance.         

Although this is not exactly a masterful movie, Don’t Hang Up has audacities and qualities that deserve to be praised. The movie has a cohesive story line, a plausible expectation of possibilities, credible plot scenarios and evaluations, good acting and a very genuine approach in what concerns the main elements of fear and tension.

Undoubtedly, while this movie can be considered, at least, in a more broad analysis, just one more flick, it is unquestionable the fact that there is a creative level and a consistent element of mordacious originality here. Although the central theme of an individual getting revenge from an inconsequential adolescent prank gone wrong has been explored in movies before, certainly this is one of the best exemplars released so far. Despite the conciseness of the story, the whole concept is intriguing, works out very well, is definitely coherent, and doesn’t disappoint, although there are some predictable aspects in the story as a whole.   

Don’t Hang Up is not an extremely fascinating movie, and will not change your life. Nevertheless, certainly can be regarded as a minor gem precisely executed, and a marvelously good work of art. On this movie, we see two young adults having to deal with the consequences of a catastrophic wrongdoing, and gradually discovering the result of a tragedy for which they were the major responsible agents, but totally ignore the level of malevolence for what they have done.

With splendorous moments of tension, an inquisitive demand for affliction and wonderful components of dreadful expectation, Don’t Hang Up certainly will delight you with an amazing time of entertaining exhilaration. You can’t afford to miss this interesting thriller.         


Wagner Hertzog

After seducing a beautiful girl in a local bar – being himself a charming and seductive individual –, they go to her place using a Ryde driver. There, pretending that they will have sex, he coldly and violently kills her, stabbing the girl in the bathtub. After cleaning up the scene, the killer starts the Ryde app, and the same driver that drove them before appears to pick him up. 

Pretending to be just a regular customer, the killer tells the driver to leave him at his house, asking the driver to wait for him. After changing clothes and collecting weapons, he returns. The ride continues and both engage in interesting conversation. After some minutes, the killer request the driver to stop for him to smoke, and invites the driver to join him. 

When they return, the killer murders the driver, puts his body on the back of the car, and takes his place. Attending by the fake name of Karl, at the course of the night, the killer went to reclaim several more victims: unwary passengers that mistakenly think the killer is just a regular Ryde driver. As the night begins for the killer, he deliberately engages in a vicious and cruel rampage. 

In one of his drives, the killer is stopped by a police officer, demanding to see his license and registration. Asking why he was being checked out, the officer tells him that he has parked in a forbidden zone. Suddenly three girls enter the vehicle, and demand the officer to be gentle with the driver, saying they were to blame for his fault, as he was waiting for them. When the driver is ready to leave the scene, the officer demands him one more time to stop, and to open the trunk, saying that the back lights of the vehicle were irregularly blinking. He offers himself to fix it up the cables, as a favor to the driver, preventing him from being pulled over by the police for a second time in the same night. Since the body of the real driver was there, the killer faced the danger of being caught. So he discreetly lowers himself down to pull a knife he has on a sheath attached to his foot, when suddenly the officer tells him that the verification is no longer needed, as the lights were slowly stopping to blink. 

So the killer drives the three girls to the luxurious home of one of them. As they find him attractive, two of them try to seduce the driver, and invite him for a private party in the pool, where, initially pretending to engage in sexual activity with them, he murders them both. A third girl, too drunk to understand what has happening, was spared by the killer, that carries her to bed.    

Everything gets more exciting when the killer drives a couple, arguing for the fact that they have to attend two parties that same night. He clearly gets an interest in the girl. After leaving the couple in the place of their destination, the killer continues his night rides and his murder spree. Nevertheless, after some hours he encounters the same girl in a street food tent, pretending to find her coincidentally. After she recognizes him, they engage in mutual conversation, and the killer offers to drive her to her place, and she accepts. Guessing that she would be alone, her boyfriend, leaving the club upon which they were attending the party earlier, which was near, suddenly appears. Their discussion is intensified, but he decides to go in the ride with her.        

Surprisingly, when the same girl needs a ride again, the driver appears one more time to collect her. Visibly upset by virtue of the discussion with her boyfriend, she stays more silent than in the occasion before. The driver, being exceedingly charming and sympathetic towards her, offers her an opportunity to talk about her problems, and encourages her to see him as a kind of “therapist”, to which she politely denies. Nevertheless, he is persistent, and after he compliments her good looks, she starts to feel threatened. At first, she demands him to return, affirming that she may have forgotten something at the party, and then she asks the driver to stop, saying that she is feeling sick and wants fresh air.

When he stops, he gets close to her, and tries to kiss her. She rejects his advances, and a fight ensues. After a hideous physical altercation, the killer subdues and ties her, and they continue the ride. Inside the car, the girl attacks him, and the killer loses control of the vehicle, colliding with an abandoned car in a stretch of deserted area. 

The girl awakens in the hospital. Her boyfriend and her best friend are there. The physician tells her that she is pregnant, and her boyfriend apologizes to her. As they reconcile, an LAPD detective approaches her, and tells her that she needs to identify the body of her assailant in the morgue. As they go to the mortuary, the girl sees a badly burned and disfigured corpse, but affirms positively that the body is not that of her attacker. As the camera gets close to the body, the spectator can see that the body is, in fact, of the real driver, murdered by the killer, and put in the trunk of the car.     

This movie deserves a very good and sincere evaluation. Although Ryde is not exactly a fantastic or splendorous movie, it is, indeed, a very good one, with tense moments, an afflictive story line, and a very cohesive plot. Good interpretations and dense character impersonations guarantee a dramatic, intense and exceedingly realistic approach. Some very profound and poetic moments – like a majestic and very cinematic scene when the main character is in a nearly empty cafeteria in the dead of night, with a perceptive look in his eyes that transmits his cold void feelings looking anywhere in his singular universe of mortifying nothingness, with a very beautiful woman that strongly and romantically flirts with him getting disappointed after he ignores her and unexpectedly leaves –, emphatically exhibits a glimpse of the character’s disturbed mind, as well as his personal world of destitute desolation, violence and bestiality.

Despite the fact that Ryde, for the most part, can be seriously defined as a very regular movie, it is a majestically effective, masterful regular movie. There are no flaws and no mediocrity in this production. From the technical devices to the acting to the whole concept of the story, everything was greatly executed. If you want to see a good thriller film, Ryde certainly is highly recommended. I can personally assure you will be thrilled with this movie.               


Wagner Hertzog 

Exposed (originally titled Daughter of God) is a 2016 American crime drama thriller film, starring Keanu Reeves, Ana de Armas, Mira Sorvino and Christopher McDonald. Directed by Gee Malik Linton (under the pseudonym of Declan Dale), the plot concerns a detective, Scott Galban (Reeves) who is assigned to investigate the mysterious murder of his partner, New York City cop Joey Cullen (Danny Hoch). 

When his partner is stabbed and murdered in the New York City subway, experienced detective Scott Galban is assigned to the case. Unbeknownst to him, the case would reveal itself to be far more complicated than what appearances may suggest. When is uncovered the fact that Joey Cullen was corrupt, the rottenness inside the NYPD is threatened to be exposed, in an environment of illicit ordeals where literally everyone can be compromised. Even Scott Galban, who is having an illicit affair with Cullen’s wife, Janine (Sorvino) reveals himself to be an ambiguous person. Nonetheless, Galban is not as corrupt as the others, and is exceedingly determined to discover what really happened to his former partner, willing to go to excruciating extremes, no matter how compromising this can be for the New York City Police Department. 

Galban eventually discovers a potential witness to the case, a young Hispanic girl, Isabel de La Cruz (Ana de Armas). As the movie follows two apparently unrelated plot devices, one is showing Scott Galban on his extensive investigation to find the truth, while the other shows the Hispanic girl apparently losing her quest on sanity. She begins to have strange visions, and all of a sudden, discovers that she is pregnant. Meanwhile, what we see is the picture of a very quiet and seemingly normal girl. Isabel is a teacher, that loves all the children in her class, and her family life seems to be happy, satisfying and fulfilling. Her soon to be husband is far away, apparently serving in the army somewhere in the Middle East, but he communicates regularly with the entire family via webcam. Her family is a very religious one. Isabel herself is an ardent catholic believer. Nonetheless, her family is terrifyingly shocked when she tells them that she is pregnant. Knowing that her fiancé cannot be the father, given the fact that he has been far away for too long, all of them become extremely disappointed with her. And when she says that she had been impregnated by the Holy Spirit, like Mary, mother of Jesus, they become even more distressed and disdainful. But the surprise seems to be the fact that Isabel herself deeply believes what she is telling to her family.   

Nonetheless, as Galban deepens into the underworld, unraveling the mystery that revolves around his former partner, his path and Isabel’s eventually converges. Dwelling deeper into the mystery, he eventually finds the terrible and excruciating truth about Joey Cullen and Isabel de La Cruz.

This is a very good movie, but you have to be patient to be contemplated by the good and exponentially pervasive nature of the story. I had to see the movie two times, to be fully aware of this, as you have to submerge yourself completely into the narrative, to be delighted by the subtle prerogatives of its plot. At first, the movie seems to be very tedious, and since Exposed it’s not the typical police procedural story, you don’t have a lot of action. Focusing on human drama and police bureaucracy – although one of the plot devices really has detective Scott Galban investigating the mystery behind his partner’s death –, if you really want an action movie, this is not the case. With a slower pace, a dark and drastic storyline, and a cohesive plot centered in an urban setting that unravels towards the idiosyncrasies of human behavior and the alienation of police corruption, Exposed is far more about the exhilaration of human malevolent impulses, and how this affects a person that becomes victim of the evil present in the human nature.   

While this is not a marvelous movie, it’s a very good one. But like I wrote some lines above, you have to be very attentive to the storyline, otherwise you will be definitely bored. As the length and the calmness upon which the story is told, fulfilled by sideline details and a non-conventional style of storytelling, that implicates a more humanistic approach – opposed as being just another investigative story backed by a fully police guided crime thriller – Exposed can be considered an interesting and refreshing cinematic experience, full of intriguing nuances, perspectives and expectations. And I really mean this: I thought the movie was pretty mediocre the first time I saw it, but the second time, as I dwelled deeper into the story, I really understood better the grievances of the characters, the reflexive hardline of the story and the poetic, sometimes hazy and melancholic appeal of its plot. And I am seriously considering watching this movie a third time.

The end of the movie can be surprising as well, but this seriously depends on the spectator, and the capacity one has to judge and imagine or consider what is really happening. While it’s not something too difficult to decipher, on the other hand, it is not that obvious either.

Exposed had some problems in the post-production. Apparently, executives of the studio diverged on several questions. The original plot was, accordingly, far more complex than the final product, but movie executives wanted to highlight Reeves presence in the movie, since his character, at first, was just one tool for the story frame, and not the epicenter of it. Since the studio made significant changes in the editing process, director Gee Malik Linton asked his name to be completely erased from the project, so a pseudonym, Declan Dale, features in the directing credits.  


​Wagner

Meat is an infamous YouTube Channel, which has attracted a lot of controversy and attention in recent times. It was a mysterious channel, with a lot of disturbing, dark and distressing videos, seemingly random and purposeless. Inhospitable landscapes, women caught alone in desert places and disturbing repetitive imagery were some of the things captured on the videos. To this day, nobody knows who managed the account, and a lot of speculations could be read on the section comments for every video downloaded on the channel, with the opinions going to both extremes: while some people wrote that this was only a person with a lot of time available doing some videos to please himself – while laughing a lot when reading the absurd comments people wrote on his channel –, others speculated that this was a vicious, insane and highly intelligent serial killer, that was actually recording on camera desolate places to dispose bodies, registering landscapes with highly disturbing resonant sounds in the background, shooting images of dark and sinister interiors and recording people in the open, whilst he was hidden behind trees or bushes, possibly preparing himself to attack. Scary, isn’t it? But who knows the truth, besides the owner of the controversial channel? Probably, nobody else. 

Well, there is, undoubtedly, several channels a lot scarier than Meat, but while some of the videos were a lot softer than the urban legends created behind every single one of them, what used to be even scarier than what the videos were showing, was the things not appearing on the screen: if you really paid attention to the ambience, the sound, the background images, the landscape and all the adjacent information in every single video, you would certainly guess the person recording this certainly was doing a lot of things one is supposed not to do. But this was just the beginning of a wide range of speculations, not just on my part, but on the behalf of every single person that saw the videos, drowning deeply into the dark side of the mind behind the recorded images. Okay, perhaps it was just my imagination, taking too seriously the things I saw.

While doing some research myself (yes, I like playing the detective sometimes, probably the result of reading too much Arthur Conan Doyle in the past), I’ve collected enough evidence, which says that this individual is probably Canadian. Well, I have never been into Canada, so how could I know, right?   

Well, a lot of the landscapes, buildings and sites in his videos are typically Canadian, with some residents correctly identifying at least some of those places and sites in the video comments. One viewer correctly identified one of these as the Victory Soya Mills Silos, an abandoned facility in the vicinity of Toronto. Another loose set of references points out Canada as his area of activity as well, but you have to be very attentive to find this out. In one of these videos, it was possible to see a sign written in two languages, French and English, which are the two main languages of Canada.     

Well certainly, a lot of the things we write and think about this individual and the videos uploaded on the channel were a matter of pure speculation, and a lot of these same speculations helped a lot to inflate the internet urban legend on which the Meat Channel built its reputation. Probably this is nothing more than a work of a bored individual, that doesn’t know what to do in his spare time. At least, I hope this is the case.  

As my desire to show you this grew, unexpectedly, for no apparent reason,   unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you see) the owner of the channel deleted all videos some months ago, except one, a video upon which he explains – in a written message – why he decided to erase all the videos. Also, we may be talking not of a male person, but a female one. If you take a look into the Facebook and Twitter account of Meat – yes, he (or she), had both [if it was not deleted as well], the name given in the context possibly points out to a female person, not a male one. But of course, this person – whatever the sex gender may be – can be deliberately trying to fool us. It can be a prank, like a lot of the things we see on the internet these days. 

In the end, I think Meat probably would remain being one of those dark internet mysteries to remain unsolved. I can only hope seriously that this is just a dark prank, from a bored – and very smart – aristocratic student, with a penchant for dark humor, from a very expensive college in nearby Toronto, with a lot of time in his hands, than the more dramatic rumors that the more drastic Meat fans have speculated about. Well, unfortunately, there are a lot of demented maniacs and serial killers out there, and some of them are cleverer, more than what we could possibly like to admit… and maybe one of these insane individuals was the mastermind behind Meat, recording and uploading his videos on YouTube until recently, while laughing hysterically about how he was easily getting away with murder, while showing through his YouTube channel little pieces and fragments of his illicit activities. Very dark and psychotic, right? Sincerely, I don’t even like to think about it, but let’s face it… there is always the possibility! Well, while his videos were ambiguous enough to let us point out innumerous interpretations – from the most terrible and sadistic ones to the more plausible and naïve probabilities –, one thing is certain: it doesn’t matter trying to speculate. Whatever the truth may be, we will simply never know.    


​Wagner

Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is a 2015 British/ Dutch co-production, in the crime thriller genre, based on a real life event. With an ensemble cast that stars Anthony Hopkins as Freddy Heineken, the billionaire of the beer industry, the movie has Jim Sturgess, Sam Worthington and Ryan Kwanten portraying the criminals that masterminded the plan to held captive one of the most notorious man of Europe, in a high profile case that took authorities and government officials by storm. 

Everything started with five friends, completely frustrated with the way their life goes – Cor van Hout, Martin Erkamps, Willem Holleeder, Frans Meijer and Jan Boellard – that together devise a curious, but functional plan to capture Freddy Heineken, and demand 35 million Dutch guilders as the price for his rescue, which was the highest value to be given for a kidnapped person at the time. Initially, everything goes along very well, and their meticulous plan is taken as exceedingly elaborated. Even the way they conceived the money to be given to them was perfectly wise and intelligent, preventing the police on following them. But as soon as they put their hands on the money, their friendship and collaboration starts to disintegrate. Unable to endure the hardships as a group, eventually they split, their lives breaks loose, and everything begins to fall apart. As the police investigators can’t be fooled for too long, the five friends rapidly disperse, and some of them soon understand that is only a matter of time until they are all captured, and sent to jail, to serve long sentences.  

An astonishing and amazing movie, centered on one of the most high-profile cases of kidnapping in recent European history, this movie is simply amazing. All four main actors, besides giving the performances of their lives, follows a decent plot and a very wise script, that makes you stick your eyes into the screen, from the very beginning, until the movie is over. Amazingly conceived and superbly elaborated, Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is one of those movies that you don’t regret seeing it. On the contrary: you soon wish to see a second time.    

With an impeccable direction, plot devices, performances and a very cohesive script, there is nothing wrong or bad about this movie. With a cohesive story, a curious unraveling of events – that really ties together all plot devices happening in the movie – Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is amazingly excellent, beyond all scores. With no negative aspects to be taken into consideration, this is a compelling thriller, that shows, all the way through, how obtaining easy money can put an individual in a whole uninterrupted set of problems, in a major scale. 


​Wagner

Sweet Home is a 2015 bilingual Spanish horror/ thriller film, directed by Rafa Martínez, and starring Ingrid García Jonsson and Bruno Sevilla. The story follows a couple, imprisoned in an abandoned derelict building, fighting for their lives against a group of brutal criminals, looking to kill them both.

The movie tells the story of a night in the life of Alicia (García Jonsson), a civil inspector, responsible for the state of preservation of home buildings in urban areas. One afternoon, after one routine inspection, she accidentally grabs the keys of an abandoned apartment, and decides to keep it for the weekend, as she sees the location as the perfect place for a surprise party, to celebrate her boyfriend’s birthday. 

After blindfolding her boyfriend Simon (Sevilla), she leads both to the unsuspected location for a romantic night, as a couple, in the abandoned apartment. After a good start, they discuss, and after separating just for a little while, Alicia notices there are more people in the place, which – with the possible exception of one old man who refuses to leave, whose apartment was inspected by her earlier that day – should be empty. 

After being noticed, Alicia is successful in escaping the criminals, but her boyfriend doesn’t have the same luck. After a fight ensues, he manages to escape, just to be caught and stabbed by one of the assailants. When Alicia by chance locates her boyfriend, she manages to help him, and he successfully kills his offender. When both reduce the entire gang to simply one man, they think that escaping alive would be easy, but when reinforcement arrives in the person of one professional sadistic killer, things become really terrifying for the couple, especially when she uncovers the fact that this men were probably all hired by the real state agency, to kill the few remaining residents of the building – mostly aged and solitary people – to demolish the structure, and build a whole new set of luxury and expensive flats. 

The end, painstakingly aggressive and exceedingly surprising, will simply make you jump from the couch. And you will certainly have the desire to see this movie again.   

With great moments from the very beginning to the last final seconds, Sweet Home is a terrific movie, with absolutely no faults at all! Great acting, dramatic moments, agonizing tensions, fearful scenes, afflictive downturns and an amazing soundtrack are all greatly combined, working splendidly altogether, with the final result being this fantastic and superb masterpiece.
The script, decent, cohesive, well-structured, realistic and abrasive, it is beyond convincing: its dark undertones are extremely grounded in real possibilities, with the timing and the correct unrolling of events being a major highlight, completely favorable to the plot, having an almost perfect mathematical set of sequences.   

There are no complaints about this movie. With excellent actors doing their best, an impeccable set of technical proficiency – with special mentions to its refined cinematography and a very lucid photography, responsible for its bright artistic visuals – terrifying scenario, correct timing and pace, everything possible in this movie is beyond compliment; in fact, all compliments in the world still wouldn’t do justice to the professional level of artistic excellence this movie easily achieves.  

With a great history of filmmaking, Spain rarely gives us bad movies. Fortunately for us, this artistic legacy continues to this day. With such a groundbreaking excellence, having executed brightly such a common concept, Sweet Home is a first class movie that certainly deserves one hundred stars, or more, but since I can give to it only five, it is five stars indeed. But it remains being just a few, since it deserves a lot more.   



​Wagner

The Girl in the Book is a 2015 American drama film, directed by Marya Cohn, and stars Emily VanCamp as Alice Harvey, a literary assistant editor, that is constantly harassed by an old writer, Milan Daneker, portrayed by Michael Nyqvist, with whom she had a brief, but turbulent illicit relationship, as she was under age when the two got involved.  

Alice is a competent, but very unhappy woman, that fulfills her empty life with alcohol, and a succession of afflictive and regretful one night stands. When her senior editor asks her to take charge of a new edition of the book Waking Eyes, by author Milan Daneker, her life suddenly becomes more inhospitable and chaotic. Trough flashbacks, we learn that her parents were literary agents, and her father was the sole responsible for the successful bestselling career of author Milan Daneker. From then on, the story is intertwined with present day events, and recurrent flashbacks, upon which we understand that Alice, in her teenage years, being always surrounded by writers and intellectuals, developed very early her own writing skills, and started to nurture the possibility of a literary career. When the soon-to-be-notorious author Milan Daneker is introduced to the young Alice, he is instantly attracted to her, and using literature as a pretext, he tells her that he wishes to read her manuscripts, but in fact he is looking for an excuse to get close to her. Becoming a literary mentor to the young Alice, both soon began a teacher and pupil relationship, seeing each other almost every day. Daneker starts to give literary advices to the young Alice, and not long after that, he starts abusing her physically, turning her mind into a whole new set of confused feelings. After some encounters, Alice tells everything to her parents, that confronts Daneker. Giving a sordid excuse, he dismisses all that she told them as a lie, saying that she is probably too impressed with him, a much older and fascinating man. When her parents choose not to believe her, Alice becomes very distressed and traumatized. 

In the present day, Alice fights hard to endure the difficulties presented by having Daneker one more time in her life. Being forced to meet him several times by virtue of the book’s rereleasing process, she has no other choice, but to confront demons of the past and scars of the present. Being somewhat thoughtful, and always addressing her properly, showing a decent degree of affection towards her, Daneker’s attitudes sets Alice into a downward spiral of emotional trauma and turmoil, not knowing exactly how to react to his advances, as he acts as if nothing bad had happened in the past. Not being able to deal with the situation properly, her relationship with friends and family are deeply affected by her desperation, and everything in her life starts to fall apart. Going through hard times, when she is finally stable enough to have a decent and constant relationship, on one particular occasion, she becomes so distressed with her current confrontation with ghosts from the past, that she cheats her boyfriend, finding difficult to resist to her old habit of engaging on empty and painful one night stands, as a form of temporary relief for her grief. 

Through another flashback, we learn that Milan Daneker not just abused her, but plagiarized her literary works as well, incorporating some of her texts into his most famous novel, Waking Eyes. When Milan Daneker gives his first reading session to a crowd in a bookshop, she becomes terrifyingly disturbed when she listens her own work in his book, being excruciatingly hurt by his lack of ethics and morals, struck hard by the brutal feeling of having her own words painfully stolen. More shocking indeed, comes the fact that Alice was incorporated as a character in the book, hence the title of the movie, The Girl in the Book. 

In the present day, when Alice’s boyfriend finally forgives her for cheating him, Alice decides to take her life back on track, and the only way she finds appropriate for doing this is finally confronting Milan Daneker. One day, when she comes to his house, she clarifies everything that was disturbing her, and spits it out on his face all the wrongdoings that he did to her in the past, finally being able to set herself free from his invisible chains, severing ties with Daneker for good. The audience also learns that Daneker was possibly a mediocre author and a literary fraud all the time, lacking real talent as a writer, as the books that he published after Waking Eyes were all commercial failures. The success of his most famous novel was probably all inspired by Alice herself, as a character, and also by her plagiarized text. In the end, her boyfriend gives her a hug, and, coming up with the correct conclusion, finally understands what she has been going through, saying “You’re the girl in the book”, to which she replies “not anymore”. 

Well, The Girl in the Book, although it is a little slow sometimes, is a great and terrific movie. The intense drama, and the high sensibility of the characters – especially Alice, the main character – are developed really well all the way through, and the audience does not get tired of the story in any moment, as the plot unfolds in a very interesting and dramatic manner. The bridges built by the characters’ emotions towards one another, and the fact that all of their feelings are perfectly interconnected by a major link of profound humanity is also a major achievement of the movie, giving to all individuals a deep sense of real life drama, sense of morality (or in some cases lack of it), perception and failure, and a drastic element of individual sensibility towards life.

The partial linearity of the story, always featuring the constant interchangeable connection of the present day with the flashbacks can be tiresome at times, as you may easily lose your patience with so many roads going back. Nonetheless, this artifice serves very well to the plot, as you can accompany Alice’s journey through her ordeals in life without hard waste.  

Although The Girl in the Book is really a very good movie, you will had, inevitably, several times throughout the story, the feeling that you have seen this same exact plot in a lot of other movies, a hundred times before. A little exhausting and obvious in some points, The Girl in the Book is a good movie, that escapes the drama clichés easily, with a little degree of originality. Nevertheless, you will have that sensation in some moments that the movie seems exactly like another chapter of the boring and old soap opera that you used to see with your grandmother, when you were a teenager. It is a good movie, but it is far from being great. Although it is compelling, dramatic and profound, at some point you realize that this is just another movie that complies with the regular standards of the genre, showing a decent level of technical proficiency, which is no hard task for the most professional companies of the movie industry. But the picture per se will hardly achieve a remarkable score in the personal evaluation of anyone that chooses to see it, since it is filled with a lot of the sticky elements that fulfills the plot of a large amount of boring and ridiculous afternoon TV shows. Okay, here, it is portrayed in a much more decent manner, with a high level of  competent skills, but anyway, in the end, all the good story flows in a common ground floor, giving you the impression that you are watching a very predictable and lengthy melodrama, hardly worthwhile remembering it. Regardless, it is a good and very well done drama movie, that unfortunately fails to be more than that. My rate for The Girl in the Book is three and a half stars.        


Wagner              

Anatomy of a Love Seen is an American drama film, starring Sharon Hinnendael and Jill Evyn. Written and directed by Marina Rice Bader, which also star in the movie, the plot deals with two lesbian actresses that reunite for a day, to reshoot sensual love scenes for a movie on which both starred some months earlier, after they had a brief, but intense relationship, having split recently in a very unfriendly manner.

Zoe Peterson (Sharon Hinnendael) and Mal Ford (Jill Evyn) met while working on a movie. In the movie, both play lesbian girls, that have a very torrid love affair, and shoot together very ardent and passionate love scenes in the bed. Nonetheless, both women are actually lesbians, and fall in love for each other while shooting their love scenes for the film. After the movie is finished, they begin a love affair, that abruptly ends after a few months, when Mal dumps Zoe for no apparent reason. Several months later, both are called again to do a reshoot of the love scene, and both actresses find very hard to endure the ordeal to meet each other again, after their horrendous breakup.

To deal with the situation, they have the movie director, Kara Voss (Marina Rice Bader) committed to help them, doing her best, trying to hold on the emotional turmoil that slowly begins to develop in the movie set. When soon became obvious that their meeting will be a very difficult one, Kara enlists the help of her assistant, Anne (Constance Brenneman), another very emotional woman, that tries to do everything in her power to deal with the situation in the best way possible. Kara even arranges for Zoe to have her own space on set, so she can deal with this stressful situation in an easy way. 

For Zoe and Mal, seeing each other one more time is a very hurtful process. Nonetheless, for the sake of the movie, they have to reshoot the love scene they had done together a few months prior, but the two women don’t seem capable to solve their differences, nor put their problems behind them for good. When the situation appears to cool off for some moments, horrible arguments and heated discussions reopens striking emotional turbulences, and Zoe and Mal find a hard time trying to understand each other, which provides a lot of setbacks and troubles for the movie crew and the shooting schedule. 

Despite the best efforts set up by Kara and Anne, Zoe and Mal discussions just get worse, and the two women seems incapable to forgive or understand each other. When they finally go to bed, and the shooting gives sign that may finally happen, both women, doing their best to appease themselves, and achieve a peaceful atmosphere of serenity for the sake of the movie, after a calm and easy interaction – that finally provides at least one good scene – had another severe falling out, and for a moment, everything seems definitely ruined.  

As the discussion between them progresses, we learn that Mal was a recovering addict when both women had a relationship. Insecure and afraid that Zoe could leave her, Mal broke up with Zoe before Zoe had the chance to break up with her. Resented and heartbroken, Zoe underwent a very difficult period on her life after the relationship ended, and now she finds hard to forgive Mal for what she had done. Acting as mediators, and trying to be bridges that communicate feelings of comprehension and reconciliation between the women, Kara and Anne do everything they can to provide for Zoe and Mal the possibility to achieve a platform of mutual understanding, which proves something very hard to realize.   

Obvious as it is, the emotional setbacks just gets worse, and Anne, a very frail woman, begins to be severely affected by the sentimental turmoil of the situation. As Kara tries to calm Zoe, Anne gets closer to Mal. Rigorously shaken by the difficulties of the situation, Anne confides to Mal that she have a lot of professional ambitions, but everybody appears to treat her as if she was invisible, and she doesn’t feel properly appreciated by anyone. Revealing to Mal that she wants to direct a movie with Kara, Anne displays a great fear of rejection, saying that she is afraid to ask Kara for a movie partnership. Sensitive to Anne’s insecurities, Mal deeply comforts Anne, listing the incredible and beautiful qualities of Anne’s personality, making her intensely emotional.  

After so much difficult and antagonistic situations, and seeing no better prospects for the trouble in question, Kara finally confesses to Zoe, Mal and Anne that a reshooting of the love scene was not necessary at all. She arranged the situation all by herself, in order to reunite Zoe and Mal, to finally give both women a chance to reconcile, heal their love and come back to each other. Shocked upon hearing this, the three women becomes deeply disturbed, and Zoe and Mal leave the set in their separate ways, both very distressed and deeply resented. Terrified by the revelation, Anne uses the moment to disclose all of her personal anxieties to Kara. As Kara listens to all of Anne’s afflictions, she comforts her by saying how much she is necessary and meaningful, and how deeply she appreciates everything Anne does. When all of her worries are finally relieved, Anne smiles, and kisses Kara in the mouth, upon which we learn that both Kara and Anne are probably undergoing a very similar situation to Zoe and Mal, although without going to severe detrimental extremes.

As the movie approaches the end, we see Mal coming up for Zoe, after seeing her seated in a street, next to a car. Both women look deeply at each other’s eyes, and suddenly, instead of the movie finishing with the typical “The End”, appears the sentence “The Beginning” onscreen, and subsequent scenes shows that both women have reconciled, and gave to each other another chance for their relationship. And from this point on, both women do very naturally in their real life the love scenes they had found difficult to follow for the reshoot procedure of the movie. 

Well, this movie is a very unconventional one, in almost every way possible. The entire film revolves around a movie set, with two women – the director and her assistant – trying to resolve the drama that involves the two main actresses. Surprisingly, the movie has a real and very expansive life of its own. With the obvious potential to be a boring movie, the drama and the intensity brought on to the screen with the great acting of the four main actresses is a very enthusiastic one, and the drama energy created by the characters of      Zoe Peterson and Mal Ford resulted in great remarkable performances, with the incredible potential to hold your attention for the whole movie. Despite all performances being astonishingly great, deeply artistic and superbly well driven, the character of Zoe Peterson, played by Sharon Hinnendael, outshines herself over the others. Zoe, being hurt by Mal with the breakup of the relationship, carry on her eyes all the painful drama that outstands and reverberates her grief for being rejected, and, as a result, Sharon Hinnendael gives a very convincing performance as a woman severely hurt by an insecure partner. Her eyes are drowning in grief all the time, even when she tries not to appear sad, and her profound, yet smooth facial expressions easily shows the tragedy of a heart broken as well as the sensitive nature of sorrow and disappointment in the human heart. Her subtle facial expressions create amazing dramatic devices even in soft moments, as she is able to drive her character’s presence throughout the hardest scenes of the movie only with her indefinite exhilarating eyes. Nonetheless, all the four main actresses are a great team that drives by the force of their acting abilities a simple, but well designed and perfectly arranged drama, whose final result impersonates a story brilliantly conceived, and amazingly told, settled  in the very uneventful journey of the scars of unresolved love.      

On the other hand, the direction, although it is not brilliant, it is also surprisingly well driven. One of the greatest pleasures of the movie is seeing the director (Marina Rice Bader) playing a director in her own movie! Despite the amazing performances, the good direction, and the fact that the movie is short (only 80 minutes long, which makes the story goes direct to the point), sometimes you get tired of being in a movie set all the way through. With very little exceptions, an entire movie set indoors is a little upsetting, and sometimes you feel the plot not going anywhere, as you get the impression that the movie is sometimes motionless, and lacking cinematic dynamic. The final plot device – the fact that Kara, the director, arranged the reshoot just as an excuse to give the women an opportunity of reconciliation, and a chance for them to go back to each other – also seems a little exaggerated, pushing too hard the boundaries of an acceptable and realistic plotline.    

Nonetheless, Anatomy of a Love Seen is a very good movie, that will hardly disappoint or dissatisfy its audience. Surprisingly well driven, filled with the sentimental bridges that extracts humanity from the characters, as well as the audience, in all of their senses, and identifying all the potential sensibilities that build human interactions, while also analyzing the stronger values of love itself, this interesting film manages to be above the average score of the genre, for a movie in this category, and certainly deserves three and half stars for its outstanding final result.     
       

Wagner