Rating: 
Summary: "Remember Me"
Review: Others have already given comprehensive reviews of this, so I won't retread, but I just had to recommend this amazing little movie. It was obviously a labor of love in the making, and is much closer to the reality of relationships and human problems than most of the Hollywood junk that folks have grown accustomed to being spoon-fed. "The only thing you know is what goes on inside your head", and that existential posit is true enough.
I'll never forget that image of the boxcar slowly trailing away.Surreal and touching, funny as it is harrowing and desperate, these characters seek renewal and escape...if that's possible.
Or are they, like all of us, prisoner's of their own lives and subject to the winds of fate?
Rating:
Summary: Big Bad Love is it.
Review: This movie breaks my heart. It's well shot and well cast, and the actors do a good job. It's based on the stories and novellas of Larry Brown, who is one of my favorite writers. I've also always liked Arliss Howard, ever since I saw him in "Full Metal Jacket," and he gets behind the camera for this one, and stars; somehow he manages to make himself look a great deal like (what I imagine) a Brown hero would look like. And the music on the soundtrack is fantastic. But the movie totally misses the mark. It probably looked good on paper -- a Southern "Barfly" with broad, surreal touches -- but on screen it just doesn't work. The key element to Larry Brown's writing has always been simplicity. He sketches scenes with precise characterizations, short concise images and lines of dialogue that read like a breeze. "Big Bad Love" (the movie) trades all that in for flashy nonsense and makes the whole thing seem phony. The stories whisper short sentences but the movie shouts through a bullhorn and repeats lines over and over. The film is largely based on the short novel "92 Days," which is about a beer-thirsty, frustrated author who cranks out stories and gets into a whole lot of trouble without really trying to. But where the book had, say, a moving scene with two brothers, the movie has a scene with twins... identical twins... who also dress exactly alike in nerdy shirts. Everything in the movie is underlined, everything is QUIRKY. By the time three characters picnic on a football field while an oblivious marching band stomps past, you'll feel you're watching one of those early 70s flicks made by straight people trying to recapture the spirit of "Easy Rider" with liberal amounts of inexplicable wackiness. This movie is to Brown's work what "Where the Buffalo Roam" is to the writings of Hunter Thompson -- they got the right ingredients, they just didn't put in the right amounts. I suspect the filmmakers' hearts are in the right place but they misjudged the source material and amplified all the wrong things. Admission: there's one scene where a man scrapes Alpo out of a can onto a cinderblock for his dog. The scene is a throwaway, taken from a fairly static section of the book "Joe," but it seemed to me to be the only true moment in the film. If only the rest were anywhere near as good as that. Read the books. Skip the movie.
Rating: 
Summary: "Almost meaning"
Review: This movie breaks my heart. It's well shot and well cast, and the actors do a good job. It's based on the stories and novellas of Larry Brown, who is one of my favorite writers. I've also always liked Arliss Howard, ever since I saw him in "Full Metal Jacket," and he gets behind the camera for this one, and stars; somehow he manages to make himself look a great deal like (what I imagine) a Brown hero would look like. And the music on the soundtrack is fantastic. But the movie totally misses the mark. It probably looked good on paper -- a Southern "Barfly" with broad, surreal touches -- but on screen it just doesn't work. The key element to Larry Brown's writing has always been simplicity. He sketches scenes with precise characterizations, short concise images and lines of dialogue that read like a breeze. "Big Bad Love" (the movie) trades all that in for flashy nonsense and makes the whole thing seem phony. The stories whisper short sentences but the movie shouts through a bullhorn and repeats lines over and over. The film is largely based on the short novel "92 Days," which is about a beer-thirsty, frustrated author who cranks out stories and gets into a whole lot of trouble without really trying to. But where the book had, say, a moving scene with two brothers, the movie has a scene with twins... identical twins... who also dress exactly alike in nerdy shirts. Everything in the movie is underlined, everything is QUIRKY. By the time three characters picnic on a football field while an oblivious marching band stomps past, you'll feel you're watching one of those early 70s flicks made by straight people trying to recapture the spirit of "Easy Rider" with liberal amounts of inexplicable wackiness. This movie is to Brown's work what "Where the Buffalo Roam" is to the writings of Hunter Thompson -- they got the right ingredients, they just didn't put in the right amounts. I suspect the filmmakers' hearts are in the right place but they misjudged the source material and amplified all the wrong things. Admission: there's one scene where a man scrapes Alpo out of a can onto a cinderblock for his dog. The scene is a throwaway, taken from a fairly static section of the book "Joe," but it seemed to me to be the only true moment in the film. If only the rest were anywhere near as good as that. Read the books. Skip the movie.
Rating:
Summary: Big Bad Love is it.
Review: We haven't seen a film like this for so many years. Innovative, serious, funny and all the while some of the greatest tracks on a film in some time. The direction, editing, acting and music appeal to a wide audience whose running grain is a brain with which to watch a film. Get it. The third and fourth time will make it worth the price.
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