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FILM REVIEW: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

SS: 7/10 A heartwarming story, could be better without experimental tries.

© Sony Pictures Entertainment

I wanted to watch this film for a long time, the rate of screening of this film where I am living is pitifully low. After all, it’s quite reasonable, I doubt anyone here has ever heard this legendary American TV host Fred Rogers, not to mention want to saw a film about him. It’s a nice film, with fine directing and writing, the performance, given by Tom Hanks who portrays Fred is wonderful.

I don’t think I need to use too many words on how good Tom is, but I do need words to praise the experimental touch that this film wants to manage. The whole film’s main conflict is the relationship between Lloyd and Jerry, with the interview goes deeper, Fred’s interfere solved the problem in Vogel’s family. What I said is very experimental is that audience not only witness the journey of Lloyd’s interview but also join in this journey. Fred’s therapy not only on Lloyd, but the film also broke the fourth wall, when Fred’s eyes look directly into the camera with the one minute pause. It is like hypnotist’s final snap, finalised the treatment.

© Sony Pictures Entertainment

But this might be too experimental, and the storytelling does not cooperate with it too well. Until the middle of the film, we finally found out the reason caused the conflict. So from the beginning till then, the audience is hard to let them in this story, to understand the inner thought on both sides. This weakens the motivation behind characters and leaving us in confusion for a quite long time.

Then there is something I don’t understand, why when Lloyd showed up in the studio is exactly as Fred’s expected. Well, hope someone could help me out on this one.

FILM REVIEW: WONDER WOMAN 1984

SS: 5/10 Not bad building up with a terrible ending, but consider what happened in the U.S. today, turns out this film is a prediction and reflection to our real world.

© 2019 – Warner Bros.

As the director promised that she will give us a perfect way to bring back Steve Trevor ( played by Chris Pine), I’ve never expected is putting Steve’s soul into another man’s body. But it kinda works, in another way to prove Wonder Woman’s love to Steve is pure and true ( this totally not works with me).

But back to the movie itself, the way to introduce character is not our director’s best thing. Consider the first movie, except Diana Steve and the villain, I doubt you can remember other characters’ faces, not to mention their names. In this one, with two new characters joined, maybe Patty Jenkins can only tell a story with three characters, in this one the story with Dinna, Steve and again the final villain aka the 1984 Trump. The story behind Cheetah(played by Kristen Wiig) is terrible. The entrance of her is quite a sudden but okay, adding an incident in the park to make her envy Diana’s power is a good one. But her reason for envying Diana’s popularity is the beginning of this story writing going downward. Then, making Diana rudely interrupts Cheetah’s conversation with the 1984 Trump to show Diana is more popular than her, that makes me think Diana is a total biatch. After that how the Cheetah becomes Cheetah? There is a huge part missing. All I know is a person, God knows why she became a cheetah, and have a fighting scene with Diana.

Speak of which, the fighting scene is a disaster. I thought watching superman crash his villain into the air is bad enough, but this one is even worse. There’s not tense and beauty of violence, especially in the final fight. So Cheetah’s story is missing, but the story behind Diana’s new suit is not. However, using precious time to tell a background story, the director failed to show us what’s good about it, and it only shows up in the movie for a little while. The new suit is nothing better than the old one, and there is quite a lot of time to tell you how good is the old one with the hair-thing can be used as a boomerang.

The ends of this movie just down to a steep. Diana defeats the final villain by a speech. The whole 2 hours is building up the final villain, the 1984 Trump, and he is defeated by a speech which is not rememberable at all. It’s nothing wrong to end the story peacefully, what can that speech equal to hours building up? If that speech is so good like that, then it will work. Otherwise, just like this film, not gonna work at all.

At last, today is a totally dark day, with democracy defiled by people like the 1984 Trump in this movie and the realDonaldTrump with his allies. Promising fake wishes all around, building up walls physically and psychologically, planting hates and conflicts in the democracy system. The damage once has done, it takes years to recover. But remember, even we don’t have superheroes, we have each other, people with hope and love, people with faith in democracy.