Universal/Courtesy photo
‘Reminders of Him’ (in theaters)
Some movies don’t care about anything but their target audience, and that’s okay.
“Reminders of Him” is one of those movies. It’s perfectly designed for fans of weepy romantic dramas, with acting calibrated for maximum angsty staring and clutching. Those not interested in the genre won’t be able to stand more than 15 minutes at one go before fleeing the theater, but the movie has no time for those people. It only cares about people who want to cry, swoon and achieve emotional catharsis, and it’s there to make them happy. Things like nuance and realism have no place here.
The movie starts with a happy young couple whose lives are ruined when she crashes the car and kills him. She goes to prison for seven years, and when she gets out her boyfriend’s parents won’t let her see the daughter she gave birth to in prison. She finds work at a bar when she tries to figure out how to see the girl, developing a relationship with the bartender that makes things infinitely more complicated.
It’s based on a novel by “It Ends With Us” and “Regretting You” author Colleen Hoover, which tells you everything else you need to know about the story. It’s on the darker side of her work, being heavily about grief and how much effect it can have on our lives, but teary romance is still the overwhelming genre. Everyone has their very carefully assigned roles in the melodrama, all designed to provide maximum emotional catharsis to the fans watching, and the cast members all check their boxes fully.
Support Local Journalism
So if you think you might like this movie, rest assured it was made for you.
Grade: Two and a half stars
‘The Bride!’ (in theaters)
Writer-directors desperately need good editors looking over their shoulder. They may have a ton of great ideas, but those ideas won’t make a good movie unless someone sometimes take their toys out of their hands.
Proof of that is “The Bride!,” a chaotic free-for-all of a movie that proves writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal had no one looking over her shoulder. There are stretches where it’s surprisingly fun, infused with a zany 1920s mall goth energy, but there’s like six different movies trying to fit themselves onto the same screen. Some of them are pointless — Mary Shelley’s ghost shows up for absolutely no reason — while others feel like being hit over the head with a socially relevant bat. There’s good stuff here, but it’s a lot more work to dig for it than it should be.
After a nonsensical framing device featuring Shelley, a young hooker (Jessie Buckley) in the 1920s gets killed after running afoul of the mob. Thankfully for her, Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) is lonely and has a doctor resurrect her so they can be together. Buckley’s bride is all for it, and the two start a revenge-fueled crime spree that constantly threatens to become a musical.
Buckley is absolutely manic in the role, which I’m sure is exactly what Gyllenhaal wanted. Subtlety is nowhere to be found, naturally, but she manages to be one of the most consistently interesting things onscreen. Bale wisely chooses a quieter, gentler route, anchoring the movie and giving his monster an odd appeal. Annette Bening is solidly fun as the mad scientist, though she might have been even more fun if she’d been wackier.
Grade: Two stars
Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Denver Film Critics Society and the Utah Film Critics Association. Drop her a line at themovieguruslc@gmail.com.
Source link