For the third week of October 2026, I chose a movie I had never heard of before, and a movie that wasn’t The Hunger Game: Mockinjay Part 1 so I could hopefully force Maxwell to have to watch that one… So I chose Trouble with the Curve (2012). Honestly, I wish I hadn’t.

This movie was beyond slow and boring and at almost every scene I was asking myself why this movie was made. It sets out to be a movie about a father who is distant and stuck in his ways, with a dead wife, and a daughter who is now an adult, independent, but still scarred from her messed up childhood where her mom dies and her dad “abandons” her for some time.

The movie’s plot is about an old man, who is about to be forcibly retired from his job as a baseball recruiter, Gus (Clint Eastwood) and his daughter, Mickey, (Amy Adams) who is beginning to go blind in his old age, but also belligerent as hell. Mickey is a semi-successful lawyer, about to become partner at her firm, but feels the need to take time off to go on a trip with her dad to take care of him.

As I said above, this movie is beyond boring. The pacing is aggritivatingly slow. It attempts to touch on some deeper topics, like the daughter, Mickey, being emotionally unavailable due to her mom dying at six years old, and her dad sending her off to live with her aunt and uncle for a stint. And then again sending her to boarding school at the age of thirteen. But at every turn, it feels like it falls short of what it’s trying to be. I could not find myself caring about the characters or the story that was given to me.

It’s such a poorly executed story and movie that I feel the need to cut my review short. Maxwell and I try to strive for hitting 1000 words for each review, and for a movie like this, I have almost nothing to say. It has a run time of 111 minutes, just shy of two hours, and I was groaning and annoyed at everything that was happening from the get go. This is a true test of paying attention to something one has no interest in. The story is uninteresting, even for someone that is a baseball fan. The dialogue is extremely bland. The characters are just whatever. I didn’t find myself caring about anything that happened to them, whatever the outcome for them was, I would have said “huh okay” and moved on with my life.

One thing that was egregious in this movie was Justin Timberlake’s character, (Johnny “The Flame” Flannigan). He is an opposing baseball recruiter working for another team. In the first interaction with him, Gus and Mickey are at a bar in North Carolina where they are staying while scouting a possible prospect for the Atlanta Braves, and Johnny happens to be at the same bar (presumably the only  bar in this small town)… Mickey is racking up a pool game, and a random man at the bar asks her for a game. Queue a “badass woman, I’m good at things” scene, where she proceeds to hit every ball into whatever pocket she calls until she wins without her opponent getting a single turn. (Super over the top the way this scene was done and also unbelievably cringe to be honest). After the “game” is over (if you can call it that) the opponent (random bar patron) says “Want to dance? You owe me one after that ass whooping” or something along those lines. He obviously gets too close, grabbing her arm, and pulling her close, while asking. Gus of course sees this from across the bar, and comes over, breaking a beer bottle, and threatening the man, attempting to protect his daughter. Johnny (Justin Timberlake’s character) comes over too to break up the fight between Gus and the random bar patron. The random bar patron of course is terrified, and the scene explodes, Johnny tries to quell the situation saying that Gus is his dad, and that Mickey is his sister. As he says this, he kisses her on the lips. Fucking weird. Then after the random bar patron leaves, Johnny says to Mickey “Sorry about the kiss. I’ve never had a sister that looks like you.” EW. EW. EW. WHY WAS THIS LINE IN THE MOVIE. Is this a not-thinly veiled fetish of the director a-la Tarantino? WHY IS THIS IN THE MOVIE. My fiancee and I each had an audible reaction of disgust at this line.

But of course, Johnny and Mickey end up spending more time together, including skinny dipping, and dancing at a bar together later. A bunch of other drama happens that I cannot be bothered to dissect or dive into with this review due to how boring and pointless it was. Seriously, nothing in this movie stands out, and practically nothing from this movie is memorable in any sort of fashion.

This movie somehow has a 6.8 on IMDB! I have rated almost everything I’ve watched this year for the blog that has a 6-7 as a 1 or 1.5 out of 5. I truly believe that the average movie reviewer on these websites is an idiot and a moron. Not to get pretentious but I find it baffling that we sat down and witnessed the same piece of “cinema” as it were. On the Tomatometer, Trouble with the Curve has a surprising 51% critic score and an even higher 66% critic score. This movie was beyond boring and felt so pointless at every turn. Even the so-called “feel good” parts of the film were lackluster to me due to how little I cared about the characters involved in the story.

Another issue I had with this movie that I’m going to add on to the end of my review quickly is that Clint Eastwood plays an old school character, a baseball recruiter that still does his research in person and by reading the newspaper etc. He shuns technology. Due to this aspect of his character, they make some of the most ridiculous and horrible “boomer-coded” anti-computer jokes I’ve heard in a long time, despite this movie releasing in 2012… Some of the so-called-humor in this movie sounds like things my grandma said in 1999. Not at all how anyone who is gainfully employed at a high level job in 2012 would speak or act.

I hopefully will never have to think about this movie again, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. This movie is a complete waste of two hours of your time. And, spoiler alert, of course, Amy Adams’ character and Justin Timberlake’s character end up together at the end, and that entire sequence felt so forced it wasn’t cute or feels-good in any manner of speaking. It seemed like after everything else that happened, the writers realized they forgot to resolve whatever the love story aspect of this movie was, and they had to force it within the last ten minutes of the film so the viewer could be satisfied. It was anything but.

1 mallard /5

-Seann

The Watchers (2024) is another supernatural horror film, similar to what I watched last week (and complained about). While this movie could easily fall into the same plotholes of tropey-ness, groan-inducing dialogue, and complete misuse of atmospheric tension, it instead sidesteps all of those and discovers entirely new ways to disappoint and confuse. As a preface, this is the directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, the daughter of famed director M Night Shyamalan, who himself directed such horror classics as Signs (2002), The Sixth Sense (1999), as well as such horrible classics as The Last Airbender (2010) and Old (2021). As a small and fun piece of film trivia, he also co-wrote Stuart Little (1999).

To be fair to the Shyamalans, they didn’t try to hide this fact. It’s difficult to accuse Ishana of nepotism when they’ve fully admitted to the fact that it is indeed nepotism – whether that means we should judge the film more or less harshly is a matter of debate. What’s not a matter of debate is whether it was wise for Ishana to try to make a Shyamalan-esque supernatural thriller, complete with a rug-pull twist that any attentive viewer could have concluded halfway through the movie. It’s rather unfortunate that instead of branching off into some new territory or exploring a different genre or style of filmmaking, she instead decided to become a poor caricature of her father’s best work.

The film starts off rather excitingly – we’re introduced to the main character, played by Dakota Fanning, who has some vague personal issues that are hinted at, but come to light later on. There are some great establishing shots of the forests of Ireland, which is also where the film is set. Then things start to go south – Ishana has to get Fanning’s character into the forest so that she can be trapped by the watchers, but how can she do it? Well, it’s not particularly clear. She has to take a parrot to a zoo, and apparently the only way to do it is to drive through a forest that makes all electronics (including cars) come to a screeching halt. While she’s driving, the establishing shot of the road that leads into the forest has two lanes – one for entering the forest, and one for exiting. This poses a few interesting questions – if the forest prevents all cars from working, why is there a road that leads out of the forest? If there is a road at all then that means that there’s enough traffic to warrant paving the area – wouldn’t other people have experienced their cars stopping? Wouldn’t they, after a little while, start thinking ‘hmm that’s strange’ and the area be studied?

These plot holes aside, Fanning finds her way into something called ‘the coop’ which is a glass box that her and three other humans are trapped in, and to which the watchers come every night to observe them. This is a pretty cool idea, honestly, and harkens back to some classic episodes of The Twilight Zone. This idea is discarded almost as quickly as it arrives, and the film moves at a breakneck pace while Fanning tries desperately to find a way out of the forest, so she can return to her life outside of the forest, which we established earlier as being rather bleak and not really very hopeful. Another strange issue.

She’s in the coop with 3 other people, all of whom have been there for many many months and have learned about the flora and fauna of the forest, as well as the habitat of the watchers themselves, and the behavioral patterns of the watchers. Inside the coop is an old TV, a table, some beds, and chairs. There’s also a hidden hatch, which was under a rug and unlocked, that leads to an underground bunker where the scientist who built the coop explains all of his experiments and what the watchers are and how to escape. You’re telling me that these three people have been locked in this prison for months, hoping desperately to escape, and did not lift the rug in the center of the room to discover this bunker? I’m not buying it.

Many more strange things happen in rapid succession, we discover the watchers are actually fairies, and then the rug-pull, Shymalan-esque moment is revealed: one of the others in the coop was a watcher herself. This would be a shocking moment of revelation, except that it was one of the most obvious twists that could have possibly happened. I don’t want it to seem like I’m pounding my chest and boasting that I guessed the twist, but mere moments after meeting this character I said ‘oh she’s a watcher’. I feel like the majority of people who watched this movie would have some inkling of a suspicion that this was the case. They escape the coop and the final 30-ish minutes of the film is them realizing that they’ve released a half-human half-fairy hybrid upon the world. This fact is something about which they’re surprisingly nonchalant, and choose to continue going about their regular lives.

The ending is so myopically focused on Fanning’s character that it diminishes any weight of consequence for the world as a whole. They’ve released a shapeshifting demigod hybrid onto the world and their response is ‘oh man, I hope it leaves me alone.’ Shyamalan makes a lot of first-time filmmaker mistakes in this one, including the pacing being kind of all over the place. The film starts out very slow and plodding, as it should, but by the end it is just a whirlwind of events that the viewer has no time to sit with and ponder the consequences. There are themes that are brought up and then discarded just as quickly, such as Fanning’s character’s past, the idea of bringing a loved one back, being forgiven for past transgressions, and the inability to move on from mistakes. Each of these is given a short shift and it just makes the movie feel hollow and not scary.

The Watches (2024) has a rating of 5.7 out of 10 on IMDB, a Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer score of 32%, and a rating of 2.5 out of 5 on Letterboxd. I think giving this film a rating of average (to which a 2.5 corresponds) would be slightly generous. I think that while this movie looks good, it just lacks the substance and staying power that a movie of this budget and with this level of personnel should have.

2 mallards/5

-Maxwell