Andrew Garfield – Spinning Platters

Film Review: “We Live in Time”

We Live in Time rides out a thin, scattered story on the backs of its two leads

Somewhere between the time-jumping emotional cuteness of About Time and the grounded indieness of Like Crazy lives the new romantic drama We Live in Time from director John Crowley (Brooklyn). Many of the films within this genre tend to live or die according to the chemistry between their two leads. Whereas everything around the two leads – the jokes, the sub-plots, the meet-cute setups, the best friends – are truly secondary, unable to sway whether a film is considered effective. The chemistry between Florence Pugh (Little Women) and Andrew Garfield (The Social Network) in We Live in Time is the movie’s biggest strength, and raises the film’s level of emotional effectiveness. However, the secondary factors fail by comparison, leaving the film fizzling in its search for more laughs and more profound meaning within its vignette structure. Continue reading “Film Review: “We Live in Time””

Film Review: “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”

The eyes have it: Chastain shines in Bakker biopic

Andrew Garfield is Jim Bakker and Jessica Chastain is Tammy Faye Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

“If you follow blindly, in the end all you are is blind,” Tammy Faye Bakker’s mother Rachel tells her daughter in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. As directed by Michael Showalter (The Big Sick; Hello My Name is Doris), the film, while heavy on the eye imagery, largely glosses over just how blind Tammy Faye actually was to her husband Jim’s defrauding of the couple’s vast televangelist ministry. Nevertheless, the picture is still a lot of fun, and features a showstopping turn from a nearly unrecognizable Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye.

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Film Review: Silence

Scorsese has, at long last, delivered his faithful long-lasting delivery on faith

Bless me Andrew Garfield, for I have sinned.

I’m not opposed to a film with a 160+ minute running time. What I do mind is when that movie doesn’t utilize its extended running time properly. It’s hard to fault Martin Scorsese for ensuring that his new film, Silence, runs a simmering 160 minutes. After all, he had wanted to film this story for nearly thirty years. If you were to finally fulfill a 28 year journey to make a film, it’s likely you wouldn’t want to sacrifice one bit of your efforts onto the cutting room floor, either. There is an arguable purpose to Silence‘s slow pace and narrative repetition, which I’ll get to, but it’s ultimately not enough to warrant the length of the final cut. That being said, the film is more of a cinematic triumph than a failed attempt. Yes, it is a historical religious epic, fraught with troubling but effectively choreographed depictions of religious persecution, but Silence is also much more invested (to the point of fallible self-indulgence) in exploring our contentious personal connections to human nature, faith, and spirituality.

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Film Review: Amazing Spider-Man 2

The attempt to add meaning to a meaningless story drags down what could have been a fun movie.

The Amazing Spider-Man explains to Jamie Foxx that his character is a one-note waste of time.

When you make a summer movie, the one thing you don’t want to do is find the middle ground between mindless popcorn flick and a well-scripted quality film. This is what Mark Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man 2 does, and because of this, it’s a complete bore with a couple of good bits thrown in.

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