Movie Review Winchester The House that Ghosts Built

Winchester The House That Ghosts Built (2018) 

Directed by The Spierig Brothers 

Written by Tom Vaughn, The Spierig Brothers 

Starring Helen Mirren, Jason Clarke, Sarah Snook 

Release Date February 2nd, 2018 

Winchester is yet another silly ghost movie. Despite a cast headed by Helen Mirren, Winchester—subtitled as The House that Ghosts Built—skulks about re-enacting ghost tropes with bad lighting and cinematography, all building toward the same jump scares we’ve seen in every other ghost movie. How predictable are the jump scares in Winchester? All you have to do is remember the rule of three and you will not be surprised.

The Winchester family started the Winchester Repeating Arms company in the mid-1800s to remarkable success. Success, however, is not the word that Sarah Winchester (Mirren) would associate with her husband’s creation. The Winchester Rifle is an instrument of death, arguably the best ever invented, but you would have to be of an odd mind to consider that successful.

Though Sarah and her family enjoy the spoils of their family creation, she has the good taste to feel bad about it. However, when it seems that her grief is manifesting as a belief in ghosts and haunted goings on, executives at the rifle company decide that she is perhaps not well enough to continue as the head of the company. In order to assess Sarah’s mental health, they employ Dr. Eric Pierce (Jason Clarke).

Like any protagonist in a ghost movie, Dr. Pierce has a tragic backstory. Several years prior to the setting of our story, Dr. Pierce died…only briefly. Dr. Pierce was shot and nearly killed by his mentally ill wife, and this association with death is why Sarah Winchester allowed him to be the doctor to assess her well-being. Dr. Pierce travels to California and to Sarah’s bizarre mansion, which has remained under constant, 24-hours-a-day construction since the day it was built.

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Movie Review The Glass Castle

The Glass Castle (2017) 

Director Destin Daniel Cretton

Written by Destin Daniel Cretton, Andrew Lanham, Marti Noxon 

Starring Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Max Greenfield, Sarah Snook, Naomi Watts

Release Date August 11th, 2017 

When I was an up and coming young radio talk show host, I had the privilege of interviewing author Jeanette Walls about her remarkable memoir The Glass Castle. Normally, in prepping for an interview in talk radio, you don’t have time to read entire books, you’re forced to skim and pick and choose important portions to discuss in the brief time you have with your subject. In the case of The Glass Castle however, I was lucky enough to have a full weekend and in that weekend, I read the entire book because I simply could not stop myself.

The adage has it that you should never meet your heroes because they never live up to your idealized version of them. Jeanette Walls defied that adage in every way in my brief interview. Just as in her book she was charming, erudite, earthy, and fascinating. She had the kind of wit that comes from combining the mountains of West Virginia with the privilege of Park Avenue. In short, she was as delightful in voice, it was a phone interview, as she was in written form.

Given how harrowing that written form was, the human result is that much more remarkable. It is this version of Jeanette Walls that I took with me into the film adaptation of her remarkable memoir The Glass Castle. The film version stars Academy Award Winner Brie Larson and thank heaven for her, she resembled the Jeanette Walls of my brief but exciting memory.

The Glass Castle stars Larson as Jeanette Walls in 1989 when her career as a gossip columnist for New York Magazine has brought her the kind of fame and security she could never have imagined while growing up in poverty on a West Virginia mountainside. This Jeanette Walls is perfectly coiffed, stylishly dressed, and on the arm of a handsome, nebbishy financial adviser, played by New Girl star Max Greenfield, giving her even more of the fiscal security she never knew as a girl.

We also meet that young, insecure version of Jeanette, played by a pair of young actresses, Chandler Head and Ella Anderson, whose brilliant but damaged father Rex (Woody Harrelson) and scatterbrained artist mother Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) shuttle her from one place to the next always outrunning some bill collector or agent of law enforcement. When she was very young, alongside her three siblings, these changes in scenery seemed like an adventure with her father as part ringmaster and part wizard. As Jeanette comes of age however, the magic begins to wear off and the stench of her father’s alcoholism and emotional abuse becomes unbearable.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media