GROWING UP IS HARD TO DO: Movie Reviews of Don’t Think Twice and Indignation by Howard Casner

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rev 1Don’t Think Twice, the new movie about improvers from writer/director/actor Mike Birbiglia (his second feature after Sleepwalk With Me, also about comedians), has one of the best analyses of Saturday Night Live (called Weekend Live here) I’ve come across, encapsulating what has gone wrong with the show for who knows how many years now. The main characters have gathered together to watch one of their group who has been cast in the series. The skit is terrible, as so many SNL skits are. They scrunch up their faces and basically say: you can tell it’s supposed to be funny, you can understand why it’s supposed to be funny, but it just isn’t funny.

The basic through line of Don’t Think Twice is, in many ways, very universal. It’s happened to all of us. We’re progressing when suddenly we find ourselves in a rut, but we don’t realize it. We know we need to do something to achieve our longtime goals, but we’ve grown comfortable, without realizing that’s how we feel, and so we drift along the way we are.

Then something happens that forces us to do something to change the status quo. We actually think this event is, in many ways, the apocalypse, but in working through it, we actually realize it’s the best thing that could have happened, because we were forced to do something, anything, to make us so uncomfortable that we had to start reaching for that goal again (or redefine it). Read the rest of this entry »


PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE INTENSE: Movie reviews of Good Kill and Tomorrowland by Howard Casner

First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r

 

and check out my Script Consultation Services: http://ow.ly/HPxKE

 

Warning: SPOILERS

good killI have recently seen a movie that, for my money, is more intense, suspenseful and edge of your seat than Mad Max: Fury Road, Furious 7, The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Tomorrowland put together.

But it’s also a much smaller film than any of those; smaller in budget, in size, in CGI.

It’s more than all of those adverbs, I suspect, because it is about a real person put into a real situation, a situation of profound psychological and moral conflict. In the above movies, all the characters had to worry about was the end of their existence.

In the movie I am referring to, Good Kill, our central character has something far greater at stake: the end of his soul.

The basic story line revolves around one Major Thomas Egan, just about the best drone pilot there is. And his job, day in, day out, is to locate the bad guys in the Middle East and blow them up from thousands of miles away. His bliss is basically the same as Chris Kyle in American Sniper, but he gets to do it from the comfort of a chair in an air conditioned unit on a base in Nevada, not far from the R&R resort of Las Vegas. Read the rest of this entry »