Movies
Black Widow feels like cheapish TV filler, the kind of thriller you might catch on a TV station in the 90s that had some open movie slots and didn't want to spend too much money on filling them. It's unremarkable in every way, no twists, no class, just a straight-up plot that takes you from A to B. Catherine is a young woman who seeks out rich old men, marries them and runs off with the inheritance. She's very good at covering her tracks, until Alex, an eager cop, starts connecting the dots. Nobody believes her though, so she has to find a different way to bring the truth to the surface. Black Widow is little more than a simple plot coupled with functional direction. The performances are mediocre, the cinematography is bland, the soundtrack a real snoozefest. The killer is pretty boring, the police investigation is formulaic, and the plot is a lazy copy/paste job. At least the pacing is decent, and the runtime is short, other than that this was forgettable genre filler.Read all
I didn't really know what to expect from this film, it turned out to be a basic regular road movie. A film that probably stands or falls by the likability of its characters. Personally, I didn't care for any of them, finding most of them either obnoxious or one-dimensional, both the leads and the secondary cast. Bobby was raised a classical pianist, but now acts as a blue-collar worker. He hangs around with his girlfriend Rayette and his best friend Elton. When Elton gets arrested and Rayette turns out to be pregnant, Bobby quits his job and moves to Los Angeles to visit his sister. She tells him their dead suffered two strokes, urging Bobby to reconnect with him. It's not that Nicholson does a bad job here, it's just that his character isn't very interesting. The direction is decent, but unremarkable and even though I generally like a good road trip flick, the film just doesn't do anything special with it. I just didn't care much for the drama, and since there's not much else here, the film wasn't a big success.Read all