Documentary Review Filmmakers for the Prosecution

Filmmakers for the Prosecution (2023) 

Directed by Jean-Christophe Klotz 

Written by Documentary 

Release Date January 27th, 2023 

Published January 28th, 2023 

Filmmakers for the Prosecution is a riveting and necessary documentary. The doc captures the remarkable role that filmmakers played in the prosecution of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg in 1945-46. The legendary filmmaking family, the Schulberg's were on the front line of the final days of World War 2 as Americans and Russians made their way into the heart of Berlin and the end of the Nazi regime. Along the way, those filmmakers captured images that have lasted for decades, seered into the collective memory that is world history. 

Filmmakers for the Prosecution begins on Bud Schulberg, a stalwart of the studio system whose family was deeply affected by the holocaust. Schulberg committed his vast resources and influence in Hollywood to helping the war effort. It was the Schulberg family who recruited director John Ford to be in Europe helping to oversee the effort of filming and cataloguing the Nazi atrocities. Those films would go on to be essential to prosecuting Nazi War criminals including Rudolf Hess and Herman Goering. 

Act 2 of Filmmakers for the Prosecution then turns to the efforts of recovering the films made by the Nazis themselves. For reasons that can only be attributed to insane hubris, the Nazis filmed their horrific crimes. Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's own film director enters the story briefly as she helps the Americans find some of the most shocking footage in world history. This footage, which you will see in Filmmakers for the Prosecution, shows Nazi soldiers bulldozing the bodies of Jewish prisoners into improvised graves. 

Find my review at Swamp.Media linked here. 

Movie Review Maybe I Do

Maybe I Do (2023) 

Directed by Michael Jacobs 

Written by Michael Jacobs 

Starring Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, William H. Macy, Susan Sarandon, Emma Roberts 

Release Date January 27th, 2023

Published January 28th, 2023

Somewhere there is a dusty shelf that someone cleaning that hadn't been cleaned since 1994. On that shelf was a script for a truly awful romantic comedy called Maybe I Do. To whomever failed to leave this script on that dusty, forgotten shelf is a truly cruel human being. The script for Maybe I Do belongs on an ash heap, not on a big screen. This insipid throwback to awful boomer politics of the time when their opinion of popular culture mattered, is a relic of a time when men made jokes about hating their wives and wives joked about their husband's inability to satisfy them sexually. Ugh! 

That this insipid film stars Diane Keaton is seemingly inevitable. The once great actress has an uncanny ability to find the absolute worst movies that play to her worst instincts as an actress. How a woman with this much talent manages to choose the worst movies is some kind of cosmic joke. Keaton's last 20 plus years include some of the worst movies of this young century and Maybe I Do belongs to that epic, awful canon of the worst of the worst. 

In Maybe I Do, Diane Keaton plays a married woman whose idea of lying to her husband, Richard Gere, is going to the movies by herself. Meanwhile, her terrible husband is off having sex with his sort of mistress played by Susan Sarandon. Gere hates Sarandon and lets her know that in no uncertain terms. She still wants to have sex with him. When he finally decides to end things with her, basically stating how much he hates her, Sarandon says she will kill him if she sees him again. Plot point! 

Meanwhile, while at her elicit movie, Keaton meets a sadsack played by an actor who embodies that term all too well, Wiilliam H. Macy. Seeing Macy crying his eyes out over whatever movie they were watching; Keaton takes pity to comfort him. This leads them to spend the evening together but not in the way you think. They do go and get a hotel but it's only so that they can watch TV, eat fried chicken, and talk about the misery of their loves with their miserable spouses. 

You get no points for guessing that Keaton's spouse is Gere and that Macy's spouse is Sarandon. Making this convoluted nonsense even more convoluted is the other plot of Maybe I Do. At a wedding between their closest friends, Emma Roberts and Luke Bracey appear to be a very happy couple. Then, Bracey sees Roberts about to catch the bouquet and he loses his ever-loving mind. Racing across the room, he leaps off of a table and catches the bouquet right out of his girlfriend's hands. 

Find my full length review linked here at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Ghosts of Monday

Ghosts of Monday (2023) 

Directed by Francesco Cinquemani 

Written by Francesco Cinquemani

Starring Mark Huberman, Julian Sands, Elva Trill, Joanna Fyllidou 

Release Date January 23rd, 2023 

Published 

A television producer travels to Cypress to make a reality show about a supposedly haunted hotel in the new horror thriller Ghosts of Monday. Julian Sands stars as the host of the documentary, a man desperate to see an actual ghost after years of documenting non-haunted hauntings. Mark Huberman is the documentarian, the man charged with keeping his host in line while also investigating any potential haunting. Naturally, this being a horror thriller, ghosts do start showing up. 

In the 80s and early 90s, Julian Sands was a much-respected leading man with international acclaim. It's been years since Sands has stood at the center of a film and Ghosts of Monday is a strong demonstration as to why. Sands is hammy and completely checked out throughout his short stint on screen. Early on, his character is shown to be a bit of a drinker and it's hard not to imagine that the actor was getting a tad bit method in his performance. That's one thing that might explain Sands' rather bad performance. 

Ghosts of Monday relies heavily on a creepy soundtrack filled with atonal shrieks and symphonic flourishes. It's not a great soundtrack but at least it's trying harder than the rest of the movie to be creepy. Most of Ghosts of Monday is stultifyingly mundane. Clues are given as to the nature of the haunting at the hotel, and the link one of the main characters has to the haunting, but these clues aren't particularly intriguing. The film employs some of the tricks of reality TV ghost hunting shows and that only serves to show how low rent the whole movie is.

When your movie has to borrow from YouTube ghost hunting channels to create even a notion of tension, it's not a good sign. The film's best asset is being only a few minutes longer than your average episode of a ghost hunting reality show on YouTube. At a slight 75 minutes with credits, Ghosts of Monday doesn't linger. That's the nicest thing I can say about the movie however as nothing about film ever rises to being more than passably, professional. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media