Reign Over Me

Reign Over Me
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10 
Meets Expectations: -1
Apparent Rating: 5/10

There is a gap between what this movie could have been, what it should have been, and what we ended up with. The story could have been a very powerful exploration of friendship, tragedy, mental illness, pain, family, dealing with loss. Instead what the movie was is an almost tongue-in-cheek approach to agony.

Sometimes, in the midst of tragedy, the perspective or language or even just a nugget of what’s written into the script will be intellectually amusing. Shakespeare was a master of this. The people responsible for Reign Over Me are not.

It was very hard for me to believe Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler were dentists. There was no hope of me thinking Liv Tyler was a psychologist. I won’t say that these actors were playing themselves or that they did not give really acting a good try, but it wasn’t enough. It was clearly Adam Sandler in the role of the crazy dude. It was clearly Liv Tyler playing Arwen playing a therapist. I don’t know that I’ve seen anything else with Don Cheadle, but he doesn’t look like a dentist in this movie.

The premise of the movie is that a NYC man loses his wife and three daughters during the plane crashes on that fateful day in 2001. The movie is about how his college roommate sees him at random on the street a few years later and tries to pull him out of the morass he’s in without being pulled under himself.

This could really have been a powerful movie if it had been played straight up as a drama that happened to have humorous moments. It never pulled that off.

I am unfamiliar with the song used for the title of the movie, so I cannot say whether it stayed true to the theme, but if external knowledge is required for a movie to work for the audience, then I think it needs to be part of the common culture.

This movie was about a heart-rending tragedy and it made fun of that throughout, until the very end when we’re supposed to believe that the main character does all these things to drive out the constant reminders of his old life. It wasn’t a big enough problem to justify the vehicle they used and I was offended. Aside from that, it was vaguely okay as a movie.

Tadpole

Tadpole
(no links will be provided because I didn’t like it.)
Overall Rating: 4/10
Met expectations: -3
Apparent rating: 1/10

Tadpole was touted as a comedy about a really smart young man who happens to have a crush on his stepmother. I could see that crushing on an unrelated family member could be comedic and would be something only a really smart person would do.

However, the movie was about this average-seeming kid who crushes on his stepmother to the point that he has (apparently unprotected) sex with her best friend.

In the meantime, we see the kid talking to his best friend. There might have been some comedic elements there, “Stick to your own mom.” But the whole thing was overshadowed. The kid says his stepmother is not a biological relation. This is true. There shouldn’t be an inherent taboo there. The kid’s friend is appalled because in his own mind the taboo doesn’t bind via incest but via familial relationship. Both boys go to the same private school, so on one hand we’re supposed to believe the main kid is totally smart, but we’re supposed to see the kid’s friend as a dumb loser. It doesn’t work like that.

There was a lot of New York in this movie. Not in terms of scenery, but in terms of attitude. No one questions how an underage kid could end up having sex with his parents’ consent. Even when they find out it was with a 40+ age woman, no one seems upset about it. He’s barely 15. The father and stepmother are completely hands-off in terms of raising the child, even though he’s only there on holidays. It’s like they didn’t want a kid at all, so they expected him to parent himself. But even though this is completely obvious at the party, none of the other adults seem surprised. This movie made it easy to negatively stereotype New Yorkers and wonder why contraception wasn’t more universally practiced.

John Ritter was in this movie as the father who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about his offspring. Sigorney Weaver was in this as the stepmother. The kid was some no-name with a retro 50s geek hairstyle.

Humor value was zero. It was very dramatic, but since all the characters were horrible people, it was not something I would recommend to anyone.