Film Round-Up: Vice, A Dog’s Way Home and Welcome to Marwen
Time to talk about some movies that I watched recently!
Vice
Adam McKay follows up The Big Short with a biopic about Dick Cheney. This could be very interesting and even though Cheney is universally unpopular, this feels incredibly nasty. It feels like one of those American attack adverts stretched from 30 seconds to over two hours. And that basically means you can’t trust anything it says. It’s such a harsh attack on Cheney that even though there’s a lot of truth in there, I feel like a lot of it is made up just so McKay can have a go. There are some great performances here which means there’s something worth watching but other than that, this is quite a nasty movie.
A Dog’s Way Home
Yep, it’s a movie where a dog gets lost and tries to get back home. It is as you expect for the most part, incredibly cutesy and annoying unless you are the biggest dog lover in the world, but even then it might be a bit much. It’s incredibly emotional manipulative and things get incredibly bad when they decide to pair the dog, called Bella, up with a terrible CGI mountain lion. And if you think it can’t get any worse, they get attacked by terrible CGI wolves in one of the worst ‘action’ scenes of all time. This is just awful dreck that surely even the people who wear faces of their dog on their jumper will turn their nose up at.
Welcome to Marwen
Steve Carrell is Mark, a guy who deals with his PTSD by making stories with his dolls and taking pictures of them. It’s certainly interesting as the doll’s stories are told through animation, so you have this odd WW2 comic style story being told alongside a guy having a lot of trouble adjusting to life after a vicious attack on him. For the most part the movie is fine other than Mark being rather creepy at times and no one really addressing that, but then the ending happens. The apparent cure to Mark’s PTSD is to stop taking his pills, which is an incredibly dangerous message to send to those who suffer from mental health issues. Because of that, this movie should be forgotten and hope that no one takes that ending to be true to life.
