For It Is Man's Number: kylie rogers

Showing posts with label kylie rogers. Show all posts

Sunday, 26 July 2026

Netflix And Chill: Fathers & Daughters (2015)

I am not surprised that Fathers & Daughters was written by someone, Brad Desch, who has no other screenplay credits to his name. It feels very basic in the way the predictable storyline is plotted, and ultimately relies on the talent of the two main stars. What is more surprising is the fact that director Gabriele Muccino is no newcomer. He's done a number of movies in a very similar vein, and a number of his previous films are much better than this one.

Russell Crowe plays Jake Davis, a writer and a loving father who loses his wife in a car crash that also leaves him with some health issues that impact his everyday life. He's also now the single parent of young Katie (Kylie Rogers), but there are other people who don't think that is the best situation for both of them. In the here and now, viewers get to see Katie (now played by Amanda Seyfried) making her way through life, her father absent for reasons to become clear before the end credits roll, and making her way through a number of one-night stands. Until she meets Cameron (Aaron Paul). Happiness may be belatedly coming back into her life, but will she be able to deal with it?

If you like Seyfried and Paul then this movie should work for you. They both try hard to compensate for the weak material with performances that deserve a better movie around them. Crowe, on the other hand, settles into a performance that makes use of far too many familiar "ACTOR" tricks, whether he's angrily defending his ability to look after his young daughter or dealing with the problematic tremors afflicting him post-accident. Diane Kruger is disappointingly underused, but Bruce Greenwood excels as her partner, and the man who has the money and willingness to be diplomatic in offering to welcome young Katie as a permanent resident of their home, and it's good to have Octavia Spencer, Quvenzhané Wallis, and Jane Fonda doing well enough with their limited screentime to make it easier to enjoy things in between moments that have Crowe overdoing things.

Things are quite jarring when you move between watching scenes with a main character as an innocent young girl and then scenes in which she's a woman using sex as some band-aid for a deep well of pain, but the rest of the film is very standard and manipulative stuff. Desch seems to have spent less time writing a full screenplay and more time stringing together a whole load of dialogue and moments he's picked from many superior movies, Muccino thinks that he can rely on his cast to lift everything out of the doldrums, and the cast are too restricted by the material. There are intermittent highlights for fans of the supporting players, but not enough to make this more worthy of your time ahead of at least a hundred other melodramas that people could recommend to you.

4/10

If you have enjoyed this, or any other, review on the blog then do consider the following ways to show your appreciation. A subscription/follow costs nothing. All links are HERE.
It also costs nothing to like/subscribe to the YouTube channel attached to the podcast I am part of - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCErkxBO0xds5qd_rhjFgDmA
Or you may have a couple of quid to throw at me, in Ko-fi form - https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews

Wednesday, 15 April 2026

Prime Time: Mercy (2026)

The film may be called Mercy, but the easiest way to let you know my opinion on it is to clarify that no mercy is shown to any viewers who manage to sit through this absolute dross. I've seen some movie mis-steps, and I've already sat through more films trying to make AI a main plot element than I ever wanted to, but this is easily one of the worst star vehicles I've seen in quite some time.

Set in the near future, Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) wakes up to find himself in the Mercy court. He's a detective, but he's accused of murdering his wife. All of the evidence points to him doing it, but the AI Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson) still allows him 90 minutes "trial" to attempt to prove enough reasonable doubt. The clock is ticking. Chris cannot move, but he can access all of the phones and recordings available to the AI system, and he can try to maintain communication with his partner (Kali Reis), his sponsor (Chris Sullivan), and his daughter (Kylie Rogers) while following the slimmest of leads that he hopes will lead to proving his innocence.

It looks as if director Timur Bekmambetov, once an interesting and impressive talent, has been seduced by the dark side. Translation = he seems to have become obsessed with films about tech or plots that can be played out in the "screenlife" form. I won't blame him entirely for this mess though. The majority of the blame needs to be put at the feet of writer Marco van Belle. This is only his second produced screenplay, the first belonging to a film that he also directed back in 2015, but I already believe that people should do their utmost to stop him from writing a third.

It would be bad enough if it just went through the standard motions of an unimaginative thriller, lacking any proper tension and almost entirely predictable from the first minute to the last. It gets so much worse though. Van Belle seems to have lost focus of his own writing, and instead decided to throw in awful dialogue and clichés that make no sense in the context established onscreen. That's the only explanation I can think of for a film that turns a knowledgeable and smart AI entity into something more akin to an alien or clumsy robot learning about the human race. I wasn't exactly invested in the thing at any point, but I struggled to keep myself from checking out entirely when Pratt says that he's working on a hunch and Ferguson has to keep a straight face while asking "what is a hunch?". I can neither confirm nor deny the rumour that I stood up and yelled "you're an AI entity, you can just find out the definition of what a hunch is in a fraction of a second!" before slamming my face repeatedly into the nearest wall. And that's before the unfeeling and impartial judge starts becoming surprisingly . . . partial, working hard to help our hero get the answers that he needs before the timer runs out/film ends.

It was always going to be difficult to impress people with a film that required Pratt to be the emotional character and Ferguson to be an impassive avatar, and the end result plays out as expected. Both are miscast, and both suffer, but it's Pratt who does more to unbalance the whole film, unconvincing for almost every minute that he's onscreen (and, sadly, he's onscreen for the majority of the runtime). A few supporting cast members do better, but that's not hard.

I'm not sure how much it cost to make Mercy, online sources put it at about $60M, but I can guarantee you that giving that money to ten different film-makers could have given us ten much more interesting slices of science fiction. And any of them might have featured a leading man capable of some proper emoting.

2/10

If you have enjoyed this, or any other, review on the blog then do consider the following ways to show your appreciation. A subscription/follow costs nothing.
It also costs nothing to like/subscribe to the YouTube channel attached to the podcast I am part of - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCErkxBO0xds5qd_rhjFgDmA
Or you may have a couple of quid to throw at me, in Ko-fi form - https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews

Tuesday, 9 January 2024

Beau Is Afraid (2023)

It is easy to see why some would despise Beau Is Afraid. Not only is it an indulgent and very odd film, it also has a vein of humour running throughout that many people won’t find funny.

Written and directed by Ari Aster, what you have here is essentially an anxiety nightmare that shows us the journey of the titular Beau (mainly played by Joaquin Phoenix) as he leaves his home to visit his mother. Whether that visit is a good idea or not . . . well, it’s nothing compared to the trip that Beau is taking through his own psyche. And you could easily argue that what we see is entirely within Beau’s psyche. Basically, feel free to read this review as coming from someone who is trying to keep all interpretations available to other people who have yet to experience the film.

Although I wasn’t as immediately impressed with Aster’s earlier works as many others were, he is impossible to dismiss due to his commitment to a particular brand of stylish visuals bolted to a sense of growing dread, helped along once again by a score from Bobby Klric AKA The Haxan Cloak. I loved Midsommar (despite it so unabashedly riffing on a legendary horror genre title) and I went into this with cautious optimism. Although very different from his previous film, this is a dark comedy that fits perfectly in his filmography. No surprise really, especially when you consider that it is an expansion of a short film he made years ago.

Phoenix is as superb as you would expect in the central role, always taking his anxiety and awkwardness as far as he can, and the film easily rests on his shoulders for most of the runtime. It’s not a solo show though, and he’s given great support from Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Kylie Rogers, Patti LuPone and Zoe Lister-Jones (playing two incarnations of one character), Parker Posey, and, as a younger Beau, Armen Nahapetian. Picking out one highlight is impossible, and there are other notable names here that I am failing to mention, but everyone is pitch-perfect and in line with Aster’s vision, even as it stumbles from sharp humour to outright horror, and from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The best thing about the film, however, is the truth at the heart of it. There are laughs and scares here that many of us have experienced at least once in life, pulsating cysts that grew from unattended childhood wounds, and Aster successfully grounds those identifiable elements in a moving collage of guilt, remorse, and extreme self-loathing, the kind that makes you see your own reflection as a grotesque puppet hung from the strings of every one of your perceived inadequacies.

Much like the central character, this is hard to love. But much like a parent of a child I have irreparably damaged with my own projected angst and insecurities, I still managed to love it anyway.

8/10