Willie's View Movie Reviews

   It's that time again, where we look back on the movies that had the most impact and impression on me. Getting right to it, we'll start at 10  and work our way down to my favorite film of 2017. 10 . Victoria & Abdul   A film about an unlikely friendship superbly acted and beautifully told. I'm almost certain very few people reading this have neither heard of this lovely film or seen it. Check it out now available on most streaming platforms. 9. The Greatest Showman  In my eyes, this is the biggest surprise of the year. If you had told me back in March, when Jackman's film performance as Logan came out, that he has a movie musical coming out where he plays P.T. Barnum, singing, and dancing, and that it would be an incredible movie musical, I'd say that you were crazy. Turns out that it's true. If you haven't seen it yet, what are you waiting for? It's playing now at a theater near you. 8. IT-  The film version of Stephen...

  Disney/Pixar's Animated Film COCO is easily one of the best films I've seen in 2017. It has more heart, passion, and emotion than any other film that I've seen this year. Without getting into great detail, COCO tells the story of a boy named Miguel. He has to keep his passion for music a secret from his family due to his family's shame toward his Great, Great Grandfather, who abandoned his family for a life as a musician and was never heard from again. The story is centered around the Hispanic Holiday The Day of The Dead which honors the dead. All Miguel wants to do his freely play his music. On The Day of The Dead, Miguel magically journeys to The Land of The Dead in search of his Great Great Grandfather Ernesto de la Cruz, a legendary musician. What unfolds is a funny, endearing musical journey of self-discovery and family heritage. If you don't get goosebumps and a tear in your eye watching this film, I think you belong in the Land of the Dead.     COCO is ...

 JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE is the sequel/reboot to the 1995 film starring Robin Williams. The story picks one year later from the original film, where a man finds the mysterious board game on a beach and brings it back home to his teenager son who is obsessed with playing video games. That is pretty much every teenage boy. The boy discards the game in favor of his video game console. While the boy sleeps, the board game magically transforms itself into a video game cartridge. See the film. It makes more sense than my description. Trust me. Long story short, the boy disappears, never to be seen again. Twenty years later 4 teenagers are sent to high school detention and find the discarded video game console, complete with the Jumanji video game. Before they know it, the four teenagers are whisked into the video game and become characters of the video game. My description of the premise sounds outlandish, but thankfully this works surprisingly well.   The second installm...

   MOTHER, written and directed by film auteur Darren Aronofsky is a confusing story and hard to describe. Plain and simple. Question is, was it meant to be confusing and hard to describe? I will do my best in this review to answer that question. The important thing to take away from viewing MOTHER is this. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That is the case with MOTHER. But how does one see it? A good movie or garbage? For me, I see MOTHER as somewhere in the middle.   MOTHER tells the tale of a young woman married to a tortured writer (aren't all writers tortured souls to one degree or the other?). The couple lives in a beautiful house that is under renovation entirely by the young woman (played well by Jennifer Lawrence). Javier Bardem plays the tortured writer who ventures outdoors when he's not writing, leaving the young woman alone in the house. She seems to like it that way. Let me point out that this house appears to be in the middle of nowhere. Thi...

   It seems that every Christmas season, a cinematic debate ensues over whether the original DIE HARD is a Christmas movie or not. Which side do I lean towards in this debate? DIE HARD IS a Christmas movie. Allow me to lay out my case.    DIE HARD takes place on Christmas Eve, at an after-hours  Office Christmas PartyThe Setting is in place. The plot centers around high stakes heist to be attempted on Christmas Eve when the police have their guard down and people have their attention diverted elsewhere. The subplot is even crucial to the Christmas Holiday, where we are introduced to John and Holly McClane, an estranged married couple who have been separated since July. John is a Cop in New York City and Holly is a business executive for a Japanese Corporation in Los Angeles, California. They have two children that live with Holly and their nanny. John is invited to the Office Christmas Party, that is about to be hijacked by German terroris...

   NATIONAL LAMPOON'S CHRISTMAS VACATION is a holiday staple in my household. It's a film that we are certain to watch at Christmas time no matter what is going on in the world around us. CHRISTMAS VACATION is one of the rare comedies that is consistently funny all the way through. There is a laugh or two (or three) to be found in every scene. Most comedies today fail to be consistently funny or even funny at all, resorting to profanity-laced and crude, gross-out gimmicks to get a laugh. Let's focus on the movie in question.  Check out the cast. Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo reprise their roles as Clark and Ellen Griswald. You will be hard-pressed to find another comedy duo that captures the chaos of married couples raising a family. The children, Audrey (Juliette Lewis) and Rusty (Johnny Galecki), capture perfectly the embarrassment of having a father who will go the edge of insanity to provide a perfect life for his family. In this case, Clark doe...

   What is the significance of BRIGHT? It is NETFLIX'S BIG, BIG budget action movie (with an expensive price tag of $90 Million Dollars) starring Will Smith. It is a major gamble for the streaming service. Normally, a movie like this would go to the theaters. NETFLIX is once again trying to change the game of filmmaking by offering it's subscribers a BIG Hollywood Movie in the comfort of their own home. Maybe that is the reason film critics are hating on this movie.  Is BRIGHT really deserving of the 30% score it has received on Rotten Tomatoes? My opinion? No.   At first glance, BRIGHT is a formula buddy cop movie that we have seen hundreds of times over. EWe've seen everything before that is presented in this movie. An angry, misunderstood cop that is disliked by his fellow police-officers partnered with a rookie cop who happens to be an Orc (say what?), who is misunderstood and disliked by his fellow police officers to the point of hazing and raci...