Movie Review: The Books of John

If you’re any kind of storyteller, you have to be careful of starting your story with the end, because your audience has not developed any emotional connections with the characters. It can be done, but it has to be done carefully, artfully and with grace. The Books of John has none of these qualities. This film starts with the death of John, the eponymous title character. Co-directors and co-creators L. W. Smith and David Schweiger either don’t know how to involve the audience or didn’t bother. I’d like to think it was the former. An interesting premise wasted on bad storytelling, terrible acting and horrific audio. It’s better than most of it’s Ariztical brethren but that’s not saying much. Continuing my quest to find an Ariztical movie that doesn’t suck.

One Star out of Five

Movie Review: Blue Citrus Hearts

There are tons of coming out/coming of age films and with good reason; almost everyone has a coming out tale and most of us have a coming of age story. It’s our basic universal story. But this one misses the mark by a long shot. The audio is as bad as other reviewers have mentioned; in many scenes the music drowns out the dialog. Other reviewers have mentioned that they liked the music because it spoke to them or it was their kind of music. That’s fine, but that still doesn’t make it a good movie. That’s like saying the movie Xanadu is a great movie because you like the music. Look, if you want to feature your kind of music so prominently, make a music video. Then there’s the bad acting, the nausea-inducing shaky hand-held camera shots, and the paper-thin plot. I couldn’t finish watching it. If you want a good coming out/coming of age film, rent Beautiful Thing, Edge of Seventeen or Get Real. Yet another sucky Ariztical movie.

Bottom line: For Gen Y only, and probably not even then.

Zero stars out of 5