Hesher Movie Review [Rating:5.4/10]
Movie Review by nj.com
It’s easy for an actor to fall in love with a character. But it’s one of the worst things a writer can do. In “Hesher,” for example, it’s clear that Joseph Gordon-Levitt loves embodying this protagonist. He’s a long-haired, hard-bodied, heavy-metal headbanger who tends to enter a scene cursing, and exit it only after he’s broken a few things. He’s fun to play, and Gordon-Levitt plays the hell out of him.
Except extreme characters are best used sparingly; put them in every scene and they eat up the oxygen. And that’s the mistake filmmaker Spencer Susser makes. He lets Hesher be so constantly here — and so consistently over-the-top — that everything else fades away.
Hesher enters the young TJ’s life at a critical juncture — the tween’s mother has just died, his father is clinically depressed and the two of them are basically sleepwalking through life at his grandmother’s.
Movie Review by The Wall Street Journal
If this is only a chick flick, then call me a chick. Witty, raunchy and affecting, “Bridesmaids” crosses boundaries by blithely ignoring them. At one moment it’s a broad-gauge farce that examines sex from a woman’s point of view. (The findings are mixed at best.) At another it’s a sophisticated comedy of manners, and class, that pits two bridesmaids against each other for control of the wedding, if not the bride’s destiny. Through it all—the free-form conversations, the brilliant set pieces, the preposterous gross-outs, the flawless performances—Kristen Wiig’s forlorn maid of honor, Annie, seeks her own destiny with a wrenchingly cockeyed passion.
A woman’s point of view is one of the film’s great distinctions. The screenplay was written by Ms. Wiig and Annie Mumolo—both women are wise in the ways of improv, as well as TV—and directed with extraordinary finesse by Paul Feig, who created the TV series “Freaks and Geeks.” As a man, though, I’d say its greatest distinction is its inclusiveness, and I’m not using that sticky term to be PC. The filmmakers and their producer, Judd Apatow, see the comedy genre as including all sorts of quirks and qualities that make us human—effusiveness, obtuseness, tenderness, fury, delicacy, idiocy, eloquence. Their characters cannot stop talking. A bad thing? No, a great thing, because the talk is so smart. They’ve staged the best highway sobriety test since “The Man With Two Brains,” turned baked goods to the best romantic advantage since “Waitress.” And the movie’s Mr. Right couldn’t be odder, or righter.
Movie Review TwinCities.com
When Hesher blasts into the lives of the Forney family, it isn’t clear if he’s there to save them or murder them in their sleep.
On the one hand, Hesher is a wandering, profane stoner/arsonist/thief with a tattoo of a middle finger on his chest and another of a suicide on his back. On the other hand, he seems to instinctively know how to get through to grieving preteen T.J Forney, his dad (Rainn Wilson) and his grandma (Piper Laurie who, despite being “Carrie’s” mom, is the gentlest person in this film). It’s even possible Hesher is meant to be the second coming of Christ – he tells an awful lot of parables, and he certainly has the hairdo for it.
“Hesher” the film is as raw, surprising and dangerous as its title character, played by a ferocious Joseph Gordon Levitt. The idea of a drifter who alters the lives of the strangers he meets is not new to the movies, but director Spencer Susser tells the story with a fresh eye and gets inventive performances from his actors. Like Levitt, Wilson’s subdued work doesn’t resemble anything we’ve seen him do. Same goes for Natalie Portman in the supporting role of a discombobulated grocery-store clerk. And Devin Brochu, as young T.J., is a real find in a role that presents about a dozen technical challenges, all of which he finesses.
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