Movie Review: Ready Or Not (2019)

Genre: Horror Comedy  

Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett  

Starring: Samara Weaving, Adam Brody, Andie MacDowell  

Running Time: 95 minutes  

Synopsis: The Le Domas family accumulated their wealth in the game industry, after their ancestor encountered a mysterious benefactor. As young boys, Daniel and Alex Le Domas are traumatized by a violent game of Hide and Seek at the family mansion. 30 years later, innocent outsider Grace (Samara Weaving) marries Alex (Mark O'Brien) despite warnings about his family's weirdness. Sure enough, her wedding night is interrupted by a potentially deadly tradition.

What Works Well: The combination of cheeky humour and outright horror redefines the unease of being the misfit within a wealthy family most interested in protecting secrets and traditions. A bride's leap of faith is transformed into a survival nightmare filled with close escapes, corpses, lots of blood, uncertainty about who to trust, and moments of acidic humour, all set in the traditional horror milieu of a spooky mansion. The Le Domas family is enlivened by Alex's mother Becky (Andie MacDowell), brother Daniel (Adam Brody), and unhinged aunt Helene (Nicky Guadagni).

What Does Not Work As Well: This is a pure romp, neither promising nor delivering any depth. Grace's friends and family are conspicuous by their complete absence, and the profanity is carried to excessive levels.

Key Quote:

Alex: So at midnight, you have to play a game.

Grace: Why?...

Alex: It's just something we do when someone new joins the family.

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Movie Review: Sex, Lies, And Videotape (1989)

Genre: Psychological Dramedy

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Starring: James Spader, Andie MacDowell, Peter Gallagher, Laura San Giacomo

Running Time: 100 minutes

Synopsis: In Baton Rouge, the sexually repressed Ann (Andie MacDowell) is married to lawyer John (Peter Gallagher), who is having an affair with her sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo). John's old high school friend Graham (James Spader) moves back into town. Ann is intrigued by her husband's ex-pal, and discovers his psychological ailment plus his hobby of videotaping women discussing their sexual desires. Cynthia is soon vying with her sister for Graham's attention.

What Works Well: Steven Soderbergh's grounded directorial debut overcomes a modest budget to deliver a jolt to adult-oriented dramas. Puncturing the facade of normalcy, the quietly potent narrative delves below the surface of decorum to reveal rarely disclosed social drivers and tumultuous emotions. The four characters all have secrets and talents, and are ironically united in innovating devious pathways around painful truths. The video camera is a mirror, a non-judgmental observer, and a hiding place, offering refuge from the discomforts of human to human discourse. James Spader, Andie MacDowell, Peter Gallagher, and Laura San Giacomo all achieve career highlights.

What Does Not Work As Well: Graham's essential back-story is tangentially described but never shown.

Conclusion: When the video camera is on, sex and lies have nowhere to hide.



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The Movies Of Andie MacDowell

All movies starring Andie MacDowell and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

St. Elmo's Fire (1985)

Sex, Lies, And Videotape (1989)

The Player (1992, cameo, as herself)

Groundhog Day (1993)

Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994)

Bad Girls (1994)

Only The Brave (2017)

Ready Or Not (2019)

Goodrich (2024)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994)

A romantic comedy poking fun at Britain's upper middle class, Four Weddings And A Funeral establishes a clever premise but focuses more on peripherals, neglecting the central romance.

In London, Charles (Hugh Grant) is the perpetually late best man at a series of weddings. In addition to his flatmate Scarlett (Charlotte Coleman), his confirmed single friends include Tom (James Fleet), Gareth (Simon Callow), Matthew (John Hannah) and Fiona (Kristin Scott Thomas), all of them invited to the same events on the social calendar.

At the first wedding Charles meets and falls in love at first sight with American guest Carrie (Andie MacDowell). After circling each other all day they eventually sleep together that night, but she immediately heads back to the United States. At the second wedding a few months later, they meet again and Carrie reveals she is engaged to be married to wealthy Scotsman Hamish (Corin Redgrave). Through two more weddings and one funeral, Charles and Carrie have to chart a complicated path to happiness.

Chronicling a rollercoaster of a romance through a succession of weddings and one funeral is an initially appealing structure for a rom-com. But Four Weddings And A Funeral does succumb to repetition, the choppy composition demanding five separate gatherings to start and stop, and not enough character evolution bridging the gaps in between.

However, some comic touches are undoubtedly sharp, including the nervous priest (Rowan Atkinson), the horrid best-man toasts, the awkward meetings with ex-girlfriends, and sexual repulsion turning to attraction as the night progresses with increasing drunkenness and desperation. But eventually both the humour and the romance downshift towards fair to middling, and long stretches are devoid of both.

In his breakout role, Hugh Grant works hard and keeps Four Weddings And A Funeral afloat. His take on Charles as a lovable, womanizing screw-up, combining hesitant confidence with a predictable ability to promise much and disappoint more, is roguishly likeable.

The rest of the cast members share the screen time and remain firmly in secondary roles, and this unfortunately extends to Andie MacDowell as Carrie. Charles simply melts in her presence, and Richard Curtis' script confines Carrie to an image of the sophisticated American muse, barely existing as a person separate from Charles' infatuation.

With the central romance avoiding materiality in favour of jumping into bed at every opportunity, director Mike Newell turns his focus to the margins in search of substance and poignancy in the colourful lives of Tom, Gareth, Matthew, Fiona and others. Here unrequited love, secret relationships and quiet frustrations are hidden behind a jovial British facade, waiting for opportunities to emerge between the pews, at the reception tables and during the drunken parties.

Four Weddings And A Funeral is a packed agenda, but the trimmings overshadow the essence.



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Movie Review: Bad Girls (1994)

A western with four cowgirls as the main protagonists, Bad Girls has a potentially intriguing gender-bending concept but nothing else to offer.

In the wild west, Cody (Madeleine Stowe), Anita (Mary Stuart Masterson), Eileen (Andie MacDowell) and Lily (Drew Barrymore) are friends and whores with hearts of gold having fallen on hard times through no fault of their own. When Cody kills a rough customer, the other three girls rescue her from a hanging and all four go on the run with Pinkerton detectives giving chase. Anita believes she may have a land claim in Oregon, and Cody offers to invest her life savings to help start a sawmill business on the property.

But the cash withdrawal transaction is interrupted by a hold-up committed by the outlaw Kid Jarrett (James Russo) and his gang, and he takes off with Cody's money while Eileen is jailed in the ensuing chaos. Cody and Jarrett share a history, and she is intent on tracking him down and reclaiming her money. Stranger Josh McCoy (Dermot Mulroney) is also interested in finding Jarrett for revenge reasons, while Eileen establishes a relationship with land owner William Tucker (James LeGros).

Bad Girls is an obvious attempt to recreate the appeal of 1988's Young Guns, this time with four photogenic women in the lead roles. Whatever the original intent, the production quickly ran into trouble. Original director Tamra Davis was fired a few days into the shoot and replaced by Jonathan Kaplan, the script was rewritten on the fly, and the lack of cohesion is painfully evident on the screen.

Stuck somewhere between a women's buddy movie and misplaced aspirations to mimic The Wild Bunch complete with a Gatling gun making a late appearance, Bad Girls gallops in quicksand: the harder the film tries to be meaningful, the quicker it sinks. The women are plastic characters provided with one-line backstories, and then left alone to look pouty pretty. The villain is straight out of those bad Spaghetti Westerns where the baddie laughs maniacally at...nothing in particular.

The plot has enough holes to make that Gatling gun proud, and the screenwriters are almost visible to the side of the action frantically dreaming up next morning's scene -- which of the woman shall we place in peril next?!

Given the creative carnage around them the four actresses do their best, but they are further handicapped by flawless hair, perfect make-up, flattering clothes and an apparent abundance of soap throughout: they are made to look gorgeous no matter what trouble they are in, undermining any pretensions of realism.

The energetic climactic shootout injects a sudden dose of adrenaline, but it's too late: by then the film's corpse is well and truly cold.

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Movie Review: St. Elmo's Fire (1985)

A post-graduation coming-of-age drama and one of the essential Brat Pack movies, St. Elmo's Fire is crowded with stereotypes but nevertheless captures the angst of transitioning from the campus to the real world.

Seven friends in their early twenties are facing life soon after graduating from Georgetown University. Alec (Judd Nelson) and Leslie (Ally Sheedy) are living together, and while he is working as a political aid and ready to get married, she wants to wait. Kevin (Andrew McCarthy) is an aspiring writer and frequently hangs out with Alec and Leslie. Kevin's roommate is Kirby (Emilio Estevez), who has ambitions to study law but currently works as a waiter at St. Elmo's Bar, the group's favourite hang-out.

Billy (Rob Lowe) is the bad boy, a saxophone player with no career path, already estranged from his wife and infant child. Nevertheless, Wendy (Mare Winningham), a social worker, is deeply in love with him. Finally, Jules (Demi Moore) is a party girl and already sucked into a materialistic life she can't afford.

Alec can't help but cheat on Leslie as he waits for her to agree to get married, while Kevin harbours a secret crush on another member of the group. Kirby openly lusts after Dale (Andie MacDowell), a doctor who graduated a few years earlier, and starts stalking her. Billy and Wendy have a falling out, and she comes under pressure from her father (Martin Balsam) to marry a boring man and get into her family's greeting card franchise business. Jules seeks a short-cut to financial stability by starting an affair with her married boss. As the seven struggle to deal with the responsibilities of adulthood, their friendships are stretched to the breaking point.

The seven characters of St. Elmo's Fire are undoubtedly self-centred, over-dramatic, and generally quite irritating. Not one of them appears to have charted a logical emotional or career path, and their behaviour is more suitable to snotty high schoolers than university graduates. Allowing for the film's tilt towards the dysfunctionally exaggerated, St. Elmo's Fire does deliver some succulent drama. There is enough romance, lust, and irresponsibility going on to fill a few seasons' worth of guilty pleasure television, and director Joel Schumacher packages his movie with glossy wrapping paper and the nostalgia of early adulthood, when every little independent decision seemed like a monumental moment.

The script, by Schumacher and Carl Kurlander, creates characters that are vivid and memorable rather than unique. Each of the seven represents a broad societal pie slice, and there is no holding back on the amount of filling. Billy's rebel without a cause is all long haired, ear-ringed, unfocused imprudence, Wendy's goody two-shoes dresses like the Mayflower pilgrims, and Jules' slutty material girl lives life according to a Madonna soundtrack. Kirby's infatuation with Dale would qualify as a crime outside a movie script, but here is played for laughs, Kevin's dreamy-eyed long-haired aspiring writer drips idealistic romanticism, and Alec's out of control libido would condemn him as a sex addict. Leslie just barely qualifies as closest to rational, but even she quickly hops into a bed with a new lover at the first hint of a fight with Alec.

With the subtleties being pummeled, there is no need for textured acting, and no one ever accused the Brat Packers of excellence in the performing arts. Fulfilling the function of pretty faces representing their generation's excesses rather than intense dramatists, the seven actors dive into their strictly defined roles and embody them energetically, without ever moving beyond the obvious. Nelson, Lowe and Moore get to stretch the most, but even they are confined to stock displays of anger generated by hormones adjusting from the campus cocoon to the cold real world. Estevez, as a little boy lost in a horrible role, suffers the most.

The theme song St. Elmo's Fire (Man in Motion) is quite outstanding. Written by David Foster and performed by John Parr, it is overused throughout the film, but does capture the energetic anguish of responsibility. In St. Elmo's Fire growing up is hard to do, but at least it looks and sounds good.

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Movie Review: Groundhog Day (1993)

An updated but nevertheless old-fashioned morality tale, Groundhog Day strikes a balance between attractively quiet charm and bright lessons in life. It also features some of Bill Murray's best work, a career landmark as he transitioned from mindless comedy to serious acting.

Pittsburgh television weatherman Phil Connors (Murray) does not hide the fact that he is cynical, egocentric and utterly self-centred: there is not much in life that makes Phil happy. His mood is not served when the station sends him for the fourth year in a row to the small town of Punxsutawney in February, to cover the Groudhog Day festivities, when the remaining duration of winter is predicted by a giant groundhog. Phil deems the whole event to be trivial and well beneath him, and is rude and less than sociable towards his travelling companions, producer Rita (Andie MacDowell) and camerman Larry (Chris Elliott).

Phil gets through the day as quickly as possible, films his segment, and heads home, but a blizzard prevents him from getting back to Pittsburgh. He wakes up the next morning and it is the start of Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney all over again: the events of the previous day will re-live themselves. Phil is caught in a loop, doomed to repeat Groundhog Day over and over.

After getting over the shock, Phil takes advantage of his situation. He uses the information that he learns from each walk-through to charm and sleep with Nancy, an attractive local woman, and then tries the same tactic with Rita. After days of mechanically memorizing her likes and dislikes and using them to his advantage, Phil thinks he is close to seducing her but she rebuffs him. Increasingly depressed and unable to find a way out of the endless repeating cycle, Phil attempts to kill himself in all possible ways, but no matter what gory ending he plans for himself, he always wakes up the next morning at the start of the same Groundhog Day. With not even death offering a way out, Phil has to delve deep into his approach to life and his interaction with others to try and find the right path out of Punxsutawney.

Groundhog Day is structured like a maze,with all paths but one looping back to 6am on the morning of the same day. Phil's challenge is first to know that he is in this maze, and then to find the only way out. Bill Murray has rarely been better, the personality of Phil perfectly fitting his grown-up screen persona of a man who has seen everything, has a snide comment for everyone, and is dismissive of the value of all things. Equally engaging is Andy MacDowell, who quickly gives Rita a combination of depth and smarts. She is first the victim of Phil's insensitivity, then the target of his childish lechery, and finally the path to his salvation, and MacDowell makes Rita believable in all three roles without compromising the fundamentals of the character.

The message behind the movie is both straightforward and textured, and includes lessons about the futility of life's apparent short-cuts and the grim cul-de-sac of dark mentalities. Ultimately, Phil only starts to make progress when he pays attention to the needs of the people surrounding him and to his own need to grow as a person. Lack of self-improvement, at any age, is condemnation to life at a stand-still.

Whether a metaphor for a mid-life crisis or a call to greater societal re-engagement with more human sensitivity, Groundhog Day delivers the good news. It's a day worth living, and a movie to be treasured.

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