For my movie this week, I randomly took a stab in the dark and ended up with Otherhood (2019). I was really trying to avoid the movie that I am unfortunately stuck with for next week… But that’s something I’ll write about next week. Anyway, this is a movie that is so far from my wheelhouse it’s not even funny. As someone who isn’t a mother, who isn’t an ex-mother, and doesn’t even have a relationship with my own mother, I had practically nothing in this movie that I could find myself relating to. But I was still slightly surprised by the second half and final act of this one. 

Otherhood is a movie about three moms who are friends, and therefore their three sons are friends also. All of them have grown up and moved out, and now live in New York City. Come Mother’s Day this year, they barely get a text, let alone a phone call from any of their children. So they set out on a silly comedy filled mission to rekindle their relationship with their kids.

This movie is very basic in terms of its content, I have already set up the entire plot in a single paragraph for you. But that is not to say it wasn’t at least an enjoyable watch, come the second half.

The movie stars friend of the blog, Angela Bassett, Patricia Arquette, and Felicity Huffman (Carol Walker, Gillian Lieberman, Helen Halston, respectively) as the three moms. They each add their own flavor of fun to this one, but Angela Bassett honestly shines in her role.

One thing that slightly bothered me about this movie was how sharp it was filmed. Most of the scenes were extremely bright and almost photo-realistic to a point of annoyance. I’m not sure what the technical terms are for this, but the way it looked on my television was definitely jarring in some scenes. Too sharp, too vivid, too much all around.

As I said previously, the entire first of this movie with the three moms bemoaning about their relationships with their children, and the state of their lives, was a bit much for me. I know full well it’s not something I can relate to in the least, but it also felt like poor filmmaking. My girlfriend and I joked a few times throughout this movie if it was actually written by a woman, or if it was written by a man trying to understand women. A quick look on IMDB tells me this was written by Cindy Chupack, who appears to be a woman. So my next best guess is that she was trying to appeal to the average middle aged empty nester woman. Maybe that demographic thoroughly enjoys Otherhood. I did not, despite the second half being halfway decent. 

Each of the three moms goes through their trials and tribulations with their sons, some classic New York City shopping sprees take place, etc, etc. At this point I’m wondering where this movie is going. So far, nothing has really occurred that had any impact on me.

Then the second half comes into play, where the mothers make a real attempt to understand that their children are their own people, and they try to see them for what they are. This had a small impact on me, since a big part of the reason I don’t have a relationship with my own mother is that she never tried to understand me or meet me in the middle as I got older… Anyways, this isn’t a therapy session, it’s a movie review. 

Patrica Arquette’s character has a nice heart to heart with her son, delving into a story from their past with her husband, which helps him with his current situation with his girlfriend. It’s really rather cute and well done tbh, especially for a movie of this caliber. Angela Bassett has a good effect on her son as well, and their ending to their story is really cute. She ends up breaking through some emotional blockage she herself was carrying and moves on to the next part of her life, no longer feeling stagnant. Felicity Huffman has a solid resolution with her son as well. It’s all cute and ends with a big beautiful bow wrapped on everyone’s story. 

Overall, I would say this isn’t a great movie by any means. It starts out slow and awkward, and at some points, rather cringe. But it has some legs that find a way to stand up by the midpoint and ends in a way that you would expect a movie like this to end. Not that that’s a bad thing by any means, it’s just what movies in this genre do. This is I believe a Netflix original, but it could also have aired on Hallmark and no one would know the difference. 

All in all, there is only a certain type of audience I would recommend this movie to: moms, ex-moms, and people who enjoy Hallmark-esque movies. I am surprised to say that I didn’t hate this movie, despite thinking I wouldn’t be into it all when I first started it. 

-2 mallards/5

– Seann

Firewall (2006) is a movie that I didn’t know anything about before picking it this week. The poster makes it immediately obvious that Harrison Ford stars in it, so I quickly grasped what type of movie it was going to be, and that assumption was proven correct. This is a mid-2000’s thriller complete with all the hallmarks of that genre – there’s exploding cars, fistfights, violence against women, and a guy even gets stabbed in the back with a pickaxe. This one at least attempts to have something of a plot, though there are many issues with it, so it gets kudos for that.

As you might have noticed from that first paragraph (and past reviews, surely), ‘thriller’ or ‘action movie’ is not really my type of genre. It’s far from my least-favorite, and in fact sometimes I enjoy them for the campiness of them, as opposed to appreciating them as entertainment or art. There are a few exceptions to this, of course, like the classic James Bond films (if those fit into this category), as well as some others that usually involve automobiles. That being said, there’s not that much in these types of movies that holds my attention. People fighting, shooting guns, things exploding, and other general tomfoolery? Yawn.

If I can nerd about one of my other passions (besides film) for a moment, I’d like to comment positively on the house in which most of the action takes place. In the film, Jack Stanfield (Harrison Ford) is married to an architect, played by Virginia Madsen. The story in the movie is that she designed the house. In real life, the beautiful villa, known as “Tidewater,” exists in British Columbia and was designed by Brian Hemingway. This is a setting that was apparently picked out by Harrison Ford himself, so I must give him his flowers on having an eye for great design. The house features a very modern, Wright-inspired façade that blends in playfully with the surrounding rocks and beach of the Canadian coastline on which it’s built. Primarily glass and steel, this building in particular lends itself to the idea that the family is affluent and sophisticated (which they don’t turn out to be, really). I wish they had used the house in a more thoughtful way because any time it was on-screen I found myself enamored with the harmony of its design. I think it’s there moreso as an eye-catching tidbit for those in the know as opposed to a central part of the movie. Shame.

Back to the movie itself, I must echo some of the Letterboxd reviews here: it’s about what you would expect. They kidnap Harrison Ford’s family and try to extort him for money, but he doesn’t want that. Instead he wants to get his family back (he wants the kidnappers to release them) and he doesn’t want to comply with the kidnappers’ demands of giving them money (a princely sum of $10million, which seems shockingly low – they would get more money if they just blackmailed him into giving up the house). So he has to find a way to stop them from hurting his family, stop them from getting any money that isn’t rightfully theirs, and give them their comeuppance. And, get this, he has to do all of this while not alerting the local authorities, lest they maim his beloved family.

Despite how normal and pedestrian this movie is, there are some oddities. First of all, the casting of Harrison Ford as a cyber-security expert in the year 2006 (when he was 64 years old) is a bit suspect. There’s a lot of talk about breaking into mainframes, wire transfer terminals, account numbers, etc. that I have a strong suspicion has no factual basis behind it, and is just meant to sound techy for the audience. I’m not sure if most of this was necessary, but it is a bit unintentionally funny. What’s also strange is that there is a man shaking down Harrison Ford for a $95,000 gambling debt (an odd amount, for some reason) and this comes up really only very briefly at the end. This movie could have easily been made without this small tidbit, but I guess they needed more runtime? Anyway, the fake gambling debt is just a loose end at the end of the movie. They do somewhat use it to try to frame him for stealing the money, but when his debt is $95thousand and over $100million is stolen, that doesn’t really hold water.

I don’t have that much extra to add – it’s a Harrison Ford thriller from 2006. Some parts of it make you scratch your head a little bit, other parts of it are pretty formulaic. It’s nothing groundbreaking – If you’re reading this then that means you likely already know exactly what this movie is and the quality of it. If you like things like this, then you’ll like this as well. Firewall (2006) has an IMDB rating of 5.8 out of 10, a Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer score of 19% (pretty harsh, if you ask me) and a Letterboxd score of 2.7 out of 5.

I honestly would fluctuate on this film anywhere between a 2 and a 3 mallard rating depending on factors like what mood I’m in, how much time I have, how much attention I’m paying, etc. This movie does have a few other factors going for it, the biggest of which, Tidewater, we’ve touched on. The other, which I haven’t mentioned, is that it is set in Seattle, WA, which is my former home and the current home of Mr. Seann Abuann. I feel like I have to give this an extra half a mallard just for those two details alone, because otherwise this is a completely nondescript thriller.

-3 mallards/5

-Maxwell