The Battle of Shaker Heights

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely awful
Review: This movie is terrible. The subplots are barely developed. The movie just kinda jumps around. There's no depth to any storyline. Worse than a made-for-tv movie. Don't watch this. It is that bad.

Rating:
Summary: If you watched Project Greenlight, this is great
Review: Under normal circumstances, one would not think much of this movie. It's a nice coming-of-age story about a 17-year-old boy (wonderfully played by Shia LaBeouf), but there's nothing spectacular about it. His relationships with his parents and his potential love interests are not fully developed, and the viewer doesn't necessarily buy into what they try to tell us. It's been done before, and it's been done better.

But, if you watched the Project Greenlight series on HBO, it's a must-see. It's fun to see how all the scenes turned out. The much-debated group hug no longer exists--if it did, you'd walk out of the theater or turn of the TV. A big thank you to producer Chris Moore for getting rid of that.

All in all, it's a "Sunday Afternoon Movie". It's the kind of movie you watch on a Sunday afternoon when it's raining outside and all you want to do is sit on the recliner and eat popcorn while someone tells you a story for an hour or so.

Rating:
Summary: Forget the TV show....
Review: Well, it was an interesting experiment. Most of the reviews of this film unfairly reviewed the TV series, rather than considering the film on it's own merits. Of course, one could quibble about the film given the nature of how it was made in the public eye. Erica Beeney's screenplay (available on the web for anyone to read) showed far more potential than this film demonstrates. Nonetheless, the cast of this film is is excellent and this film is never less than compelling and entertaining. There is much to recommend this film if you simply willing to consider it for what it was: a small film that tried it's damndest to win your heart. A good film, with a great film wanting to break out of it... give it a chance for once, without considering how it was made. It's witty, funny and endearing.