Review: BORDER (2018)

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Well… this is definitely different?

The best advice I’d give about BORDER is that you ought to watch it knowing as little about it as possible (that would probably include not watching the trailer, which doesn’t give away the game but does let slip that there is a game which is about as damning when it comes to material like this. The fact is, good or bad, I could probably sell the viewing of this one to a certain audience simply by describing it as the much grittier version of a certain TV series… but then you’d know a bit too much of what to expect. And one of the rare treats of micro-distribution outfits like Neon Pictures is that one can, on occasion, happen on a movie that hits them totally out of left field.

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Review: GREEN BOOK

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NOTE: This independent review, accompanying video and others like it are supported by the generosity of donors to The MovieBob Patreon. If you’d like to see more like it, please consider becoming a patron.

If nothing else, I can say that I didn’t dislike GREEN BOOK as much as I was expecting to based on the trailers and the general premise. You can put about 99% of that on the actors, I suspect, as what enjoyment there was to be derived was found in savoring two of our better actors doing the (extremely) heavy lifting of turning a pair of Hallmark-level middlebrow caricatures into three-dimensional persons without sacrificing the cartoonishly-broad conception of them that remains the point of the project. It’s the sort of softball Awards Season pablum where, in my circles at least, you mostly come away grateful that you won’t have to bite your tongue too hard when your relatives are telling you how much they loved it at Thanksgiving.

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