I've seen two movies (that I’d previously never seen) since we last convened for MOVIE MONDAY.
Songcatcher - This is a period drama about a woman in the early 20th century who, frustrated with her progress in music academia in the city, goes to visit her sister in Appalachia and discovers a tradition of folk music that has been alive and preserved by that community for hundreds of years. Overall, the drama is okay, with some colorful characters and a love story and whatnot, but the real star here is the music, which to me was quite wonderful (if you liked the music in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, this is very much in the same vein. There’s some aspects of the attitudes the characters have that feel a little anachronistic, and maybe it deals with one or two too many subplots, but it was a pleasing enough story about the relationship between culture and class.
The Wolf of Snow Hollow - I liked everything about the idea of this movie - the wintry setting, the premise, and the mixture of horror, mystery, and comedy. But I was ultimately perplexed and mostly turned off by the execution. The star of the film is also the writer and director, a guy named Jim Cummings (not the famous voice actor), and his handling of this material felt like a sloppy high school movie with a better budget. The acting is mostly quite poor, the tone is indistinct, the main character is laughably disjointed, the comedy is flat, and the structure is haphazard and squanders what could have been a really tight little movie. It does nothing interesting with any of its ideas, including a really creaky and kind of insultingly facile look at alcoholism.I was flabbergasted to see that it got mostly positive reviews from critics and audiences alike. I think it’s among the worst movies of 2020 that I’ve seen.
And, the usual MOVIE MONDAY thing:
1. Name a movie. Any movie. If I've seen it, I'll briefly tell you what I think about it. I'm sure you're dying to know.
2. If you want, we can then dig deeper in our agreement/disagreement about said movie.
