That was an excellent one.

So much average

A different way of telling a story

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

I just saw an extremely unpleasant "comedy": The Bronze. It's about this Bronze gymnast turned coach who is constantly angry and mean to everyone including her father and her father manipulates her to train this fan of her's to get the gold in a gymnastics competition. I have not seen a movie this unfunny and mean-spirited in a long time. I hated it.

In some ways, "The Bronze" is so entertaining because Melissa Rauch is playing someone in diametric opposition to her mousy character on "The Big Bang Theory". Hope Gregory is the sort of Olympics washout that's fun to laugh at; a foul-mouthed brat who trades in her local celebrity for free stuff at the mall. Rauch really plays the Midwestern accent to the hilt, and it pairs very nicely with the coarse dialogue.Somewhere in all of this is a sports movie, but that's not where it excels. This character ends up right back where she started, and it works great as an exaggerated portrait of a has-been in a no-name town. This flew completely under my radar, and I was surprised (happily) by how enjoyable it was.She's very funny.7/10

Contrary to the negativity of the title of my review, I found The Bronze to be both moving at times, and at other times funny. Not hilarious, but just funny in a surreal, this could never actually happen way. I give it 9 out of 10 at a time when interesting characters are just AWOL from the big screen.Not so with Hope. She is genuinely interesting in a kind of "hate her but can't stop thinking about her" way.The theme of this film has been done before many times. I prefer to liken it to The Wrestler than Blades of Glory. The film is definitely satirical, but not comic satire. It is much too gritty. Particularly for anyone who lives in small town Ohio (or any part of the country today) looking at the ghosts of their one-time dreams on the wall. Unlike a film like The Natural, where the washed up "wunderkind" comes riding in with a halo over his head to bail out the home town underdogs, in this film Hope rides in via the plush leather bucket seats of a "vintage" Buick, and clearly she has horns instead of a halo. That villainous exterior is what essentially makes her character so interesting.The problem is that in an attempt to sell this film to millennials, it has to transport this interesting, complex character to an episode of Family Guy, piling raunchy joke on top of raunchy joke. And as a result, for all it's brilliance, this is not the kind of R rated film you can every sit down and watch with even your teenage children. The sex scene is funny, but far to graphic (and needlessly). As are the many gratuitous sexual reference throughout the film and the non-nonchalant glorification of drugs.For a family comedy about a female protagonist trying desperately to hang on to some existential validation through past victory, and behaving badly in the process, I would recommend Butter. For a film you want to watch late at night when the kids are asleep, for the experience of periodically picking your jaw up off the ground, The Bronze delivers.

I knew i wanted to see this film the minute i saw the previews. Like the title states, this is a pretty low budget film which is very similar to two Jon Heder films we've already seen, Napolean Dynamite and Blades of Glory. BUT this is very raunchy. I hadn't seen nor heard bad language like this since Hot tub Time Machine 2. But the film is fun to watch, and we see the dehabilitating effects drugs has on individuals.So as the story goes, there is a gymnast who had competed in the Olympics...not the 2002 Salt lake City ones, but 2004 if I remember correctly. This girl, the gymnast ends up winning a Bronze medal..hence what the title of this film is. Well, her coach dies and influences her in a letter to take the protégé that she had been training onto and into a compettitive level as good as she herself had once been.And thats where the film becomes even more interesting, not to mention that some of the stars are virtual unknowns...one of the top billings is an actor that stars in HBO's Silicon Valley.