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IMDb member since May 2020
    Lifetime Total
    5+
    IMDb Member
    4 years

Reviews

The Silencing
(2020)

Be for real
On your CCTV, you see a walking pile of grass chasing a barefoot girl through the woods right after another girl's dead body has been found. Do you call the police? Why, nooooo! You grab your rifle and don your red jacket and take off after him all by your lonesome. If I didn't pay $1.98 to rent it from Redbox, I'd stop watching now. Redbox needs to give refunds if you can't get past 30 minutes.

An hour later: I just finished watching it. All who gave it high ratings....you either worked on the movie or you were paid. At any rate, you owe me for listening to you in the first place. That has to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen. How the financiers were convinced to part with a dime to make it is beyond me.

Grand Army
(2020)

Good start but...
Too many things are contrived for no reason. And most of the teens (except the black ones for a change, thank God) seem to be overly preoccupied with sex. Maybe that's because they don't have anything else to worry about? Perhaps. Leila's zombie stuff totally got on my nerves, so I just fast forwarded through it. I also can't believe Owen and Jayson got suspended for that silly little prank. I can see if they stole the money from the wallet. But they didn't. And they worked hard to replace the money. In Compton, CA, where I teach, they'd probably only get a good talking to and would go right back to class (and wouldn't bother to replace a thing.) Especially in light of a bombing happening in such a close vicinity to the school only moments before. Grand Army must be in some upper income enclave (though it doesn't look like it from what I can see onscreen).

When you don't have but one bathroom, you don't use it as your study room. Does the apartment have no closets? No outside hallway? And, like Dom, you especially don't leave your textbooks right by the toilet as you run into the kitchen to check on something on the stove. I could see the toilet overflowing a mile away. She's portrayed as smart and mature on one hand yet does something so ridiculous. That scene did nothing to move the story forward so why include it? To gross the audience out?

Joey uses foul language to her parents, talks to them disrespectfully, flaunts her body constantly, disrespects the school's policies over a cause that isn't even worth fighting over, talks about sex a lot, dangles a vibrator in her male friends' faces, sits all on top of them in a dress, kisses on ALL of them (and I don't mean on the cheek). (Let's not even consider the movie theater scene where she and her so-called friends are cavorting and talking all throughout the film and no one says anything. Try that crap for real and see what happens.) And I don't recall her saying stop in any forceful manner as they rape her in a cab. I also don't understand why a cab driver would let that go on and then give her a "sorry" look when she pays him. Hell, all he had to do was hit the brakes really hard and that would have given them all whiplash. Yet another unnecessary contrivance.

This show seems like it was written by kids for kids. But if I read correctly, it wasn't. The same stories can be told without being so contrived.

Nigerian Prince
(2018)

Very good with teachable moments for kids
I really enjoyed this movie. I didn't find it to be too slow as one reviewer said (and I can be very impatient when it comes to books and movies). If I can find the time, I hope to make a study guide and use this film with my middle grades students who don't seem to realize the creature comforts they enjoy living in the US. It will also be good to teach them that as youngsters, they don't know everything and need to listen to their parents and other adults who have their best interests at heart.

Answers to Nothing
(2011)

How does she get her brother in and out of that chair alone?
That bothered me throughout the film. And the black woman who doesn't like being black? Her reasons were bizarre. Like her, I was one of two black writers on a tv show and the experience was quite tense. But it didn't make me dislike my race.

The movie would have been okay but like others have said, there was no focus. And the title was too prophetic. There weren't any answers. Yet there could have been.

Teacher
(2019)

Ridiculous
Maybe if this movie were set in the 1970s, I would buy the premise a little more. But even then, it still goes into campiness toward the end. It's a shame though because the basic scenario has a lot of possibilities. But Teacher went way too far off the deep end to make me do anything but laugh.

Signed by, A teacher

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