Movie Review: Sound Of Freedom (2023)

Genre: Drama Thriller  

Director: Alejandro Monteverde  

Starring: Jim Caviezel, Bill Camp, Mira Sorvino  

Running Time: 131 minutes  

Synopsis: In Honduras, child siblings Miguel and Rocio are abducted by ex-beauty queen Giselle on behalf of an international sex trafficking ring. Months later in southern California, US Homeland Security Agent Tim Ballard (Jim Caviezel) extracts information from a captured child porn distributor, leading to Miguel's rescue. Determined to also find Rocio, Tim travels to Colombia and contacts local ex-con Vampiro (Bill Camp), who now specializes in rescuing children. When Homeland Security pull their support, Tim's elaborate sting operation is jeopardized.

What Works Well: Based on actual events, this drama is built upon the painful realities of child exploitation for sex slavery. With the material inherently powerful, director Alejandro Monteverde sidesteps horrific imagery to avoid sensationalism, and allows Ballard's story to convey devastating impacts through families torn apart and enforcement agents exposed to atrocities. Although more of a drama than a thriller, momentum is maintained thanks to straightforward storytelling, settings full of local colour, and arty cinematography. Bill Camp gets the best scene and adds knowing gruffness to the memorable Vampiro role.

What Does Not Work As Well: With most of the acting at basic levels, the characters fail to rise above stock representations. Mira Sorvino's role as Tim's wife Katherine is truncated towards irrelevance, and the final act in the Colombian jungle exposes the creaky joints holding together an episodic structure.

Conclusion: A harrowing exposition of an underreported tragedy.



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Movie Review: Romy And Michele's High School Reunion (1997)

An unfunny comedy, Romy And Michele's High School Reunion celebrates dumbness with predictably vacuous results.

Originally from Tucson, dumb blondes Romy (Mira Sorvino) and Michele (Lisa Kudrow) are best friends now living as roommates in Los Angeles. Ten years out of high school, Romy is a lowly receptionist at an auto dealership, Michel is unemployed, and neither have a boyfriend. Romy bumps into former classmate Heather (Janeane Garofalo) and learns that the 10 year class reunion is coming up.

Romy and Michele take a trip down memory lane and recall that they were outcasts at high school, not belonging to any group, shunned by the pretty girl clique commanded by Christie Masters (Julia Campbell), and ignored by the hunky Billy Christensen (Vincent Ventresca). However the nerdy Sandy Frink (Alan Cumming) did have a crush on Michele. Romy and Michele decide to attend the reunion despite what they now perceive as a post-school sad life, and invent an unlikely story of career success to cover-up their shortcomings, resulting in unexpected consequences.

Slumming near the bottom of the comedy barrel, director David Mirkin and writer Robin Schiff choose the easiest possible stereotypical targets in the clueless blondes with mush for brains. Romy and Michele are all blank stares and stilted monosyllabic dialogue. Credit to Sorvino and Kudrow for bringing these two women to life, but for what purpose?

The jokes are bland, the situations contrived, the argument between the lifelong friends artificial. The set-up seems to take forever and includes a detour to a fantasy scene designed to artificially prolong the running time to cinematic length. When the real big reunion finally arrives a solid hour into the 90 minute film, there is no payoff. The laughs are forced, the humour barely above schoolyard level and exactly one character appears to have matured in 10 years, a pretty depressing collective achievement. The "be yourself" message is comprehensively dead on arrival.

In the absence of a single person worth catching up with, Romy And Michele's High School Reunion is a dull yawner.

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Movie Review: Beautiful Girls (1996)

A character-rich study with a focus on growing up and finding the right relationship, Beautiful Girls is a winsome slice of small-town life.

Sensitive piano player Willie (Timothy Hutton), now based in New York City, return to his snowy small hometown of Knights Ridge, Massachusetts, for a high school reunion. Willie reconnects with his old school buddies who never left town, and are now all in their late twenties: Tommy (Matt Dillon), Mo (Noah Emmerich), Paul (Michael Rapaport), Kev (Max Perlich), and Stanley (Pruitt Taylor Vince).

Tommy ("Birdman") was the school football star, and he never grew up. Now running a small snowplow company, Tommy is seeing Sharon (Mira Sorvino), but carrying on an affair with his married high school sweetheart Derian (Lauren Holly). Mo is happily married to Sarah (Anne Bobby), and is the most settled of the group. Paul is also a snowplower and has not moved beyond the supermodel pin-up phase nor learned to deal with real women. He is having trouble letting go of former girlfriend Jan (Martha Plimpton), who is now dating someone else. Kev is Tommy's sidekick, while hardworking Stanley ("Stinky") is operating his own restaurant.

As Willie catches up with the lives and loves of his buddies, he meets and befriends his neighbours' daughter, precocious 13 year old Marty (Natalie Portman), and contemplates his future with long-term New York girlfriend Tracy (Annabeth Gish). The town's wisemouth hairdresser Gina (Rosie O'Donnell) dishes out advice to anyone who listens, while Stinky's stunningly beautiful cousin Andera (Uma Thurman) arrives in town, and causes a stir among the guys.

A film with no heroes, villains, central romance, irony or glib humour, Beautiful Girls is simply about people trying to assemble the puzzle of adulthood. With echoes of Mystic Pizza (1988), Beautiful Girls excels at creating rounded, flawed characters worth caring about. Director Ted Demme, working from a fine script by Scott Rosenberg, quickly establishes the guys, the girls and the complex dynamics between them, bringing the tapestry of life to the quiet streets of Knights Ridge.

The film glides easily between the no less than 16 friends and relatives who make up Willie's ecosystem, and just as Willie drops into the lives-in-progress of his friends, the film catches all the relevant stories mid-stream. Paul is struggling to cope with Jan leaving him behind, Tommy is caught between the devoted Sharon and the lusty Derian, while Mo and Stinky are just getting on with lives that have traded glamour for maturity.

The catalysts are the outsiders and newcomers. Young Marty brings an inquisitive mind and an open heart into Willie's life, their chats developing into a credible crush that is intellectually impossible but emotionally real. Andera, with her big-city outlook and no nostalgic attachments to Knights Ridge, sees things for what they are, piercing through Paul's amateur attempts at making Jan jealous, immediately reading Tommy's immaturity, and finding in Willie the one man worth nudging towards the right side of the commitment fence.

To drive the narrative forward, Rosenberg does allow the members of Willie's circle to quickly open up and talk through their issues. Guys like Tommy and Paul may be stuck in teenage mode and unable to grapple with what it means to be men, but they are nevertheless not shy about talking through their thoughts, emotions and viewpoints. This ability to share is at odds with the often emotionally stilted reality of relatively immature guys.

The performances from the ensemble cast strike a perfect tone, the characters all translated into real people navigating the choppy waters of small town living and mismanaged expectations. Hutton, Dillon, and Rapaport form the strongest bond at the heart of the many friendships, but Natalie Portman, all of 14 during filming, steals the movie with a stunning performance, finding the thin edge between child and adult, smart but not sassy, sensitive but not sentimental. Her relationship with Willie becomes a trigger for a better future: he sees himself through her eyes as a man worth living up to the name. The most beautiful girl, as it turns out, is also the youngest, and her beauty radiates through her belief in tomorrow's possibilities.

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