Brett Garten, Movie Extraordinare
Cinematic Sommelier
7.5
A surprisingly fun music documentary. Basically “behind the music: Nickelback” but with more personality and the fact that they had to address being one of the most inexplicably hated bands in music history… the price of infamy. Even if they really haven’t ever made a bad song. Rock on!
7.5
Since there’s no official trailer for this one, may my videos from Comerica Park Summer 2022 make do.
You may think this one is a little low, and you’d be right. As a TV special, it’s exactly what you expect. You can’t go wrong with Billy Joel in concert. But it’s NOTHING compared to seeing him LIVE. There’s nothing like it, and no TV special can truly capture that magic. So pull up a chair and a bottle of red (or white), and enjoy the master at work…
6.2
Doing this back to back with a movie about resurrecting a movie theater was a rough choice. This one just didn’t resonate as well as the other. But I think differences in structure and characterization didn’t help it. A cool story, but clunky in its execution. In the spirit of the “Action Park” documentaries, it almost took off. Sadly, it just never hooked me in the way I had hoped it would. The lady talking to the boat was one of the more interesting points. Her passing being foreshadowing I did not have on my bingo card.
7.8
Definitely one of the dorkier things I’ve done in a long time, but loved every frame of this one. Movies and Marquette – what’s not to love?
A tale of the rise, fall, and resurgence of independent film exhibition. The spirit of “Midwest nice.” The heartwarming story of a small town coming together to make dreams come true. For a movie geek such as myself, this was like home for an hour and a half. AND, I happened to be sitting behind someone who starred in the movie. AND was able to recognize one of the actors as one of the co-stars of “Quicksand,” another Northern Michigan original screened at the Vogue in Manistee.
As shared in the post-show Q&A, look for this one to be on PBS/Streaming in October!
6.1
The music’s great… The film? Not so much. It fell into the trap of the biopic overseen by the subject’s family. A middle of the road, safe, uninteresting tale that doesn’t portray the messiness that makes the subject interesting in the first place. And for some odd reason, the story skips huge chunks of Marley’s life and skips back and forth on the timeline like a Christopher Nolan film, but without the narrative clarity. Without a lot of Bob Marley background knowledge, it left me feeling like I barely knew anything more by the time the credits rolled, which left me feeling like a great deal of wasted potential was left on the cutting room floor on this one.
Brett Garten, Movie Extraordinare 