All posts tagged: films

‘Beautiful Boy’: A true story of addiction and hope

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Looking for your teenage son on the streets when he doesn’t come home can be an excruciating experience. It’s a recurring one for David Sheff (Steve Carell). His son, Nic Sheff (Timothée Chalamet), tends to disappear when he is high.   The movie “Beautiful Boy” is the story of father and son, David and Nic Sheff, and their ongoing battle with Nic’s drug dependency. The script is based on two memoirs: “Beautiful Boy,” by David Sheff and “Tweak,” by Nic Sheff.   The movie tries to blend two perspectives of addiction: one from a father who is constantly trying to help his addicted son and the other from the son, who tries to stay sober only to relapse. The story is a reminder that when someone is addicted to a substance it affects their entire family.   From the first scene, David is trying to help Nic, who is doing crystal meth. He wants to know more about his son’s drug addiction, in an attempt to help him. We go back to the previous year …

‘All About Nina’: the movie that echoes a movement

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“All About Nina,” featured in the Spotlight Screening at the Boston Women’s Film Festival at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge during the last week of September, is the dramedy that reiterates the current #MeToo climate. The festival’s main goal is to highlight female-centric stories directed by women. This year, it offered 16 films made in 2017 and 2018 from China, New Zealand, Indonesia and the U.S. with two venues at the Boston Museum of Modern Arts and The Brattle Theatre. They also added two previously released films to the festival’s schedule. “All About Nina” tells the story of stand-up comedian Nina Geld, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Nina writes her set around her own bad decisions and performs it with coarse jokes. The director, Eva Vives, who also wrote the screenplay, based Nina’s struggles on her own life experience. Vives was not a stand-up comedian, but she was a regular audience member in New York stand-up shows when she was younger. She has previously said that attending these shows helped her come to grips to what happened to …

‘Blaze’: The Forgotten Troubadour

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Country music’s best kept secret might just be Blaze Foley. The singer-songwriter who died at 39 from a gunshot wound in 1989 is the topic of Ethan Hawke’s latest directorial cinematic work, Blaze. The movie is based on Blaze’s partner and muse Sybil Rosen’s memoir “Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley.” Hawke and Rosen co-wrote the screenplay. The movie diverges from the usual chronological structure of a biopic. Hawke took a chance in showing specific periods of Foley’s life that let the audience see a complex character. The narrative is divided in the past when Rosen, played by Alia Shawkat, and Foley, interpreted by newcomer Ben Dickey, lived in a tree house. The warm colors and idyllic montages show a dreamer in the cusp of looking for something bigger. When Blaze and Sybil leave their home to look for better opportunities, Blaze says to Sybil, “I don’t want to be a star, I want to be a legend.” The movie goes back and forth with Blaze’s performing his repertoire to an indifferent …