Joy Reviews Movies

Unfriended (2015)

13/03/2016 · by Joy

Yesterday I drove all the way down the street a ways to the Movie Network (which still exists!! I know, I’m excited too) to return the movies we had previously taken out (which were The Woman in Gold and The Equalizer and for which I had late fees, also… remember late fees?) I strolled around the store and when I got to the letter ‘U’, I saw it. I saw the film I’d laughed at so many times in trailers at the movie theatre or online… Unfriended, as directed by Levan Gabriadze. I felt something strange come over me and suddenly I was doing it, I was lifting it off of the shelf, I was holding it in my hand, I was paying to rent it for a week, I was taking it home. I put it into my Playstation 4. I pressed play.

I was really intrigued by the premise and the style – how they pulled the story off, really. The whole film is told from one girl’s computer screen. The other 5 characters are only seen via their “webcams” on Skype. I think that’s really innovative and it’s not something I would have come up with or been able to pull off!

Anyway, these 6 teenagers are all friends, I guess. The main character, Blaire (Shelley Hennig), is the innocent do-gooder who has never sinned and CERTAINLY never had sex. Her boyfriend, Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm), is the bad boy with a sensitive side. Then you have Mitch’s best friend, Adam (William Peltz), who’s just a bad boy (no sensitive side here). There’s Ken (Jacob Wysocki) who’s just there and really has no personality, except possibly he’s supposed to be the “tech geek.” There’s Jess (Renee Olstead) who is supposed to be the slutty one, but there’s also a second slutty one, Val (Courtney Halverson).

So they’re just Skyping like teenagers do on a weekend evening, when they notice an unauthorized presence in their group chat who introduces themselves as a girl who committed suicide a year to the day. As the film goes on, in true horror fashion, the characters get picked off and secrets come out.

I mean, it’s nothing that hasn’t been done or seen before plot-wise, but it was an entertaining watch at the very least. It was no Spielberg, but it genuinely kept me interested the whole time. There were a couple jump scares, but it wasn’t overly hokey either.

If you’re a horror junkie like I am, it’s worth a viewing… maybe with the lights off, some friends, and some popcorn. Happy viewing!

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015)

13/03/2016 · by Joy

So this year I’m doing a “reading challenge” which consists of basically just 40 categories of novels and you have to read them all in the span of 2016. One of those categories was “A YA bestseller,” so I chose Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews. I went in not expecting too much because I’m apparently one of those people who judges books by their cover and I figured since it was a young adult novel, it was probably an immature, poorly written story. But I didn’t really find it that way. I mean, it was definitely a novel geared towards young adults or even teenagers. But on the other hand, I thought it was very well written. It was written by a 30-year-old man, so it actually does say something good about the novel that it really felt like it was written by a(n extremely awkward) 17-year-old guy named Greg Gaines.

Anyway, this review is not of the novel… it’s of the film directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. To be 100% honest with you, my faithful reader(s) (but probably singular), I found the film to be better than the novel.

The story follows Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann), a high school senior at Schenley High School, who does everything he can not to befriend anyone in any clique and simultaneously make the acquaintance of everyone in every clique at school. Sound complicated? Good, because it is. He and his good friend/coworker, Earl Jackson (RJ Cyler) spend their time making parody films that aren’t very good to anyone except Greg’s parents. His mother comes into his room one day and informs him that his “friend” (read: they haven’t spoken since kindergarten) Rachel Kushner (Olivia Cooke) has been diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia and then subsequently forces him to spend time with her. So basically the film is Greg and Earl spending time with a girl dying of leukemia as we learn about the chronicles of their films and they get to know Rachel, whose light is quickly fading.

The acting was really good (I wasn’t expecting it to be). The story is mostly intriguing even though it focuses on the least interesting of the three characters. Despite its flaws, it starts out as two people forced to spend their time together and by the end, turns into something much more profound. The camera work is fantastic and is really what made the film for me.

I mean, the characters could have been more fleshed out but the writing was good, the dialogue was witty and there was an honesty in the narration. It is no The Fault in Our Stars, but maybe that’s a good thing. It’s less melodrama and cigarette metaphors and more honesty and vulnerable than anyone probably expected of it.

All in all, it’s definitely worth a watch.

Here we go again…

13/03/2016 · by Joy

So I had almost 100 posts on this website about various movies, good and bad, but I really felt like it wasn’t what I wanted it to be. After almost 5 years, I am revamping my website – more like recreating, really, than revamping, actually.

I don’t have a ton of time to sit and actually write movie reviews, but when I do, I genuinely enjoy doing it! So I really want to start again and give it another shot… a better shot, too.

So hopefully I’ll be able to actually, you know, review some actual movies now and then and actually create some content. I’m thinking of maybe updating each week once a week. That way I have a schedule to adhere to so it won’t be lost in the wayside of my life and then I have some accountability. I can’t just come back and see that the last time I posted was 4 months ago!

So… here we go again: action!