CONVICTION (2010) – Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell star in the real-life story of a sister who saves her brother from a wrongful conviction!

Posted on January 14, 2025 by Bradley Crain

My wife and I love movies based on real-life stories. We were looking for something to watch this afternoon on the MAX app and came across their “Real Life Dramas” section. One of the movies we saw listed was CONVICTION (2010) starring 2-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank. My wife loves Hilary Swank so we decided to give it a spin.

Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank) watches as her brother Kenny (Sam Rockwell) is convicted of the murder of Katherine Brow on May 21st, 1980 in Ayer, Massachusetts and sentenced to life in prison. Even though she knows he’s a troublemaker, Betty Anne is convinced that he’s not a murderer, so she gives up everything in her life to try to prove his innocence, especially after she learns that he tried to kill himself while in custody. Her husband (Loren Dean) divorces her and takes their kids with him. This doesn’t stop her. She goes back to school, eventually making her way to law school for the sole purpose of helping to exonerate her brother. In a positive turn of events, Betty Anne realizes that the new field of DNA testing could be the key to overturning her brother’s conviction. She contacts attorney Barry Scheck (Peter Gallagher) from the “Innocence Project” who assists those who believe DNA testing can help overturn previous convictions. Will Betty Anne finally be able to prove Kenny’s innocence, or will he have to spend the rest of his life in jail for a crime she doesn’t think he’s capable of committing?

Movies like CONVICTION are such an interesting watch for me, especially since we can know how these stories play out with a simple google search. When I see a movie is based on a real story, I purposefully avoid the facts of the actual events so I can see the events depicted on screen without my own internal bias taking front and center. I enjoyed watching how the events unfolded in CONVICTION. Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell are such good actors, and I appreciate the work they put in here. I don’t pretend that everything depicted on screen is exactly how it was in real life, but I do believe that the actors portray the essence of truth, and I must admit to a tear in my eye when that truth is finally acknowledged for Kenny Waters at the end of the film. I also enjoyed telling my wife that the director of CONVICTION is Tony Goldwyn, the bad guy in the blockbuster film, GHOST. I just thought that was kind of cool, and so did she.

The real truth of Betty Anne Waters and Kenny Waters is ultimately bittersweet, but their story is both a testament to, and an indictment of, the American judicial system. As a person who truly loves our country, I think it’s important to realize that things aren’t always perfect, even in the United States of America!

See the trailer for CONVICTION below:

Spring Breakdown: Jaws: The Revenge (dir by Joseph Sargent)

Posted on March 19, 2021 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1987 film, Jaws: The Revenge, opens with Amity Island (last seen in Jaws 2) preparing to celebrate Christmas. Longtime police chief and veteran shark hunter Martin Brody has died but his widow, Ellen (Lorraine Gary), still lives on the island. Also living on the island is Ellen’s youngest son, Sean (Mitchell Anderson). Sean is now a deputy and he spends a lot of time patrolling the ocean. This worries Ellen because the Brodys don’t exactly have the best luck when it come to the water….

Or continuity for that matter! Anyone who has seen Jaws 3-D knows that Sean Brody moves down to Florida, became a cowboy, hooked up with Lea Thompson, and worked with his older brother at Sea World. And yet, as Jaws: The Revenge opens, Sean is suddenly back in Amity, he’s not a cowboy, and he’s engaged to someone who is not Lea Thompson. Throughout the film, no mention is made of Sean having ever gone to Florida or going through a cowboy phase. Basically, this film ignores the entire existence of Jaws 3-D. That would be okay if Jaws: The Revenge was actually a better film than Jaws 3-D but it’s not. That’s right, Jaws The Revenge fails to even improve on Jaws 3-D.

Anyway, Sean goes out on patrol and promptly gets eaten by a shark. Ellen loses her mind at the funeral and announces that she doesn’t want her oldest son, Michael (Lance Guest), going anywhere near the water. Unfortunately, Michael is working in the Bahamas as a marine biologist so …. well, sorry, grandma.

Perhaps to try to help Ellen get over her fear of water, Michael brings Ellen back to the Bahamas with him. Ellen gets a chance to spend some time with her daughter-in-law, Carla (Karen Young) and her granddaughter, Thea (Judith Barsi). Ellen also pursues a tentative romance with the local pilot, Hoagie (Michael Caine, who gives a likable performance but who also has absolutely zero romantic chemistry with Lorraine Gary). However, Ellen still has nightmares about the ocean and she suspects that the shark that killed Sean might be on its way to the Bahamas. Why? Because this time it’s personal!

Actually, as crazy as that sounds, it turns out that Ellen’s right. Unfortunately, it takes the shark a while to get down there and, as such, the audience spends a lot of time watching Ellen, who was always the least interesting character in all of the Jaws films, wander around the Bahamas. The island scenery is lovely but when you’re watching a Jaws movie, you’re watching for the shark action. Jaws: The Revenge is only a 90-minute film and the shark doesn’t make its second appearance until the 50 minute mark.

Once the shark does show up, of course, it gets right down business. It eats a swimmer. It eats an airplane. It sinks a boat. At one point the shark bites someone in half and someone off-screen is heard to shout, “Get a doctor!” as if a doctor is going to be able to do much in that situation. Ellen sets out to get some revenge of her own, which would be a thrilling moment if Ellen was as iconic a character as Jaws: The Revenge seems to think that she is. My favorite moment is when Michael Caine reveals that, despite the odds, he somehow managed to avoid getting eaten by the shark. When someone asks him how he did it, he replies, “It wasn’t easy …. bloody Hell,” and that’s pretty much all that’s said about it.

Ultimately, though, this is the least of the four Jaws films, duplicating neither the suspense of the first two films nor the camp silliness of the third film. Fortunately, though this film may have been the last official sequel to Jaws, the legacy of the classic original will live forever.

An Offer You Can Take or Leave #13: Hoffa (dir by Danny DeVito)

Posted on June 16, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1992 film, Hoffa, opens in 1975, with two men sitting in the backseat of a station wagon. One of the men is the controversial labor leader, Jimmy Hoffa (Jack Nicholson). The other is his longtime best friend and second-in-command, Bobby Ciaro (Danny DeVito). The two men are parked outside of a roadside diner. They’re waiting for someone who is late. Jimmy complains about being treated with such disrespect and comments that this would have never happened earlier. Jimmy asks Bobby if he has his gun. Bobby reveals that he does. Jimmy asks him if he’s sure that there’s a loaded gun in the diner, as well. Bobby goes to check.

Jimmy Hoffa, of course, was a real person. (Al Pacino just received an Oscar nomination for playing him in The Irishman.) He was a trucker who became a labor leader and who was eventually elected president of the Teamsters Union. He was a prominent opponent of the Kennedys and that infamous footage of him being interrogated by Bobby Kennedy at a Senate hearing seems to sneak its way into almost every documentary ever made about organized crime in the 50s. Hoffa was linked to the Mafia and was eventually sent to prison. He was freed by the Nixon administration, under the condition that he not have anything to do with Teamster business. When he disappeared in 1975, he was 62 years old and it was rumored that he was planning on trying to take over his old union. Everyone from the mob to the CIA has been accused of having had Hoffa killed.

Bobby Ciaro, however, was not a real person. Apparently, he was a composite character who was created by Hoffa’s screenwriter, David Mamet, as a way for the audience to get to know the enigmatic Jimmy Hoffa. Bobby is presented as being Hoffa’s best friend and, for the most part, we experience Jimmy Hoffa through his eyes. We get to know Jimmy as Bobby gets to know him but we still never really feel as if we know the film’s version of Jimmy Hoffa. He yells a lot and he tells Bobby Kennedy (a snarling Kevin Anderson) to go to Hell and he talks a lot about how everything he’s doing is for the working man but we’re never really sure whether he’s being sincere or if he’s just a demagogue who is mostly interested in increasing his own power. Bobby Ciaro is certainly loyal to him and since Bobby is played by the film’s director, it’s hard not to feel that the film expects us to share Bobby’s admiration. But, as a character, Hoffa never really seems to earn anyone’s loyalty. We’re never sure what’s going on inside of Hoffa’s head. Jack Nicholson is always entertaining to watch and it’s interesting to see him play a real person as opposed to just another version of his own persona but his performance in Hoffa is almost totally on the surface. With the exception of a few scenes early in the film, there’s doesn’t seem to be anything going on underneath all of the shouting.

The majority of Hoffa is told via flashback. Scenes of Hoffa and Bobby in the film’s present are mixed with scenes of Hoffa and Bobby first meeting and taking over the Teamsters. Sometimes, the structure of the film is a bit cumbersome but there are a few scenes — especially during the film’s first thirty minutes — that achieve a certain visual poetry. There’s a scene where Hoffa helps to change a man’s flat tire while selling him on the union and the combination of falling snow, the dark city street, and Hoffa talking about the working man makes the scene undeniably effective. The scenes where Hoffa spars with Bobby Kennedy are also effective, with Nicholson projecting an intriguing blue collar arrogance as he belittles the abrasively ivy league Bobby. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie doesn’t live up to those scenes. By the time Hoffa becomes a rich and influential man, you realize that the film isn’t really sure what it wants to say about Jimmy Hoffa. Does it want to condemn Hoffa for getting seduced by power or does it want to excuse Hoffa’s shady dealings as just being what he had to do to protect the men in his union? The film truly doesn’t seem to know.

Hoffa is definitely not an offer that you shouldn’t refuse but, at the same time, it’s occasionally effective. A few of the scenes are visually appealing and the cast is full of character actors like John C. Reilly, J.T. Walsh, Frank Whaley, and Nicholas Pryor. It’s not a disaster like The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Hoffa is an offer that you can take or leave.

Previous Offers You Can’t (or Can) Refuse:

Criminal Law (1988, directed by Matin Campbell)

Posted on March 22, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Gary Oldman is Ben Chase, a hotshot defense attorney who graduated from Harvard and now practices law in Boston. That means that he gets to have a Boston accent and you know how much Gary Oldman loves playing a role with an accent. Ben also has a pompadour because Gary Oldman always has something weird going on with his hair in almost every film he appears in.

Ben’s latest client is Martin Thiel (Kevin Bacon), a sociopathic rich kid who has been accused of murder. Even though Ben thinks that Martin is probably guilty, he still gets Martin off the hook. As soon as Martin get his acquittal, he starts murdering again. Ben feels responsible so he decides that what he needs to do is trick Martin into implicating himself. However, Martin knows what Ben is planning so, instead, he decides to frame Ben for the murders. Somehow, it all links back to Martin’s feelings about abortion. I guess Martin is against abortion or maybe he’s for it. It was hard to keep track. I watched the movie and I’m still not sure I followed everything that I saw. It’s not that the plot is diabolically clever. It’s just that it’s so incoherent that not a single plot point logically follows from another.

The film experiments with suggesting that there’s some sort of deeper connection between Martin and Ben. Martin is obsessed with Ben and when Ben is in bed with his girlfriend, he briefly imagines that she’s turned into Martin and has a good old-fashioned freak out as a result. It doesn’t make any sense. First off, you have to believe that Ben can’t tell the difference between Kevin Bacon and his girlfriend. Secondly, you have to then accept that Ben — a HARVARD GRADUATE — is so stupid that he would actually believe that his girlfriend had suddenly transformed into Kevin Bacon and must now be strangled.

Criminal Law is a film that you may be tempted to watch because of the pairing of Kevin Bacon and Gary Oldman but you’d be better off just watching JFK again. They’re both great actors and and it’s always interesting to see them cast against type but neither one of them is particularly good in Criminal Law. They’re let down by a script that doesn’t allow either one to create a consistent character. Sometimes, Martin is a soulless attorney and other times, he’s a panicky social justice crusader. Sometimes, Kevin Bacon is a clever sociopath and, other times, he’s just your typical mindless movie slasher.

On the plus side, Joe Don Baker is in this mess, playing a cop. Joe Don Baker has played so many cops in so many bad movies that I wonder if he’s ever been tempted to try to arrest someone in real life. In Criminal Law, he’s not given much to do but it doesn’t matter. He’s Joe Don Baker!

The TSL’s Grindhouse: Night Game (dir by Peter Masterson)

Posted on April 2, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Apparently, today is the opening day of the 2017 baseball season. The only reason that I know that is because of my sister Erin. I don’t know much about baseball, to be honest. I know that my city’s team is the Texas Rangers and they were once owned by George W. Bush. I know that Houston has a team called the Astros. But, really, the main thing that I know about baseball is that my sister absolutely loves it.

So, when Erin asked me to review a baseball movie today, how could I say no? I mean, I may know next to nothing about baseball but I certainly know something about movies!

For that reason, I’m going to take a few minutes to tell you about a 1989 film called Night Game. Night Game is many things. It’s a movies that features a lot of baseball, even though it’s not really a sports film per se. It’s a police procedural, though the film itself suggests that the police often don’t have the slightest idea what they’re actually doing. It’s a serial killer film, though its killer is never quite as loquacious as we’ve come to expect in this age of Hannibal Lecter and Dexter Morgan. At times, it’s a slasher film, though it’s never particularly graphic. Mostly, Night Game is a Texas film.

Directed by native Texan Peter Masterson, Night Game is like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre in that it is one of those rare films that not only takes place in Texas but was actually filmed on location. To be exact, Night Game was filmed in both Galveston and Houston. The entire film has a friendly and quirky Texas feel to it. Masterson may not have been a great visual director (If not for some language and nudity, Night Game could pass for a TV movie) but Night Game is a movie where the plot is less important than capturing the little details of a time. a location, and the people who lived there. Though Night Game is 28 years old, it’s portrait of my home state still seemed very contemporary to me. I guess Texas hasn’t really changed that much over the past few decades.

As for the film’s plot, someone is murdering young women in Galveston and leaving their bodies on the boardwalk. Obviously, that’s not going to be good for attracting Spring Break revelers. The film doesn’t make any effort to keep the murderer’s identity a secret. We see his face fairly early on. We also see that he has a hook for a hand. Eventually, we do learn the murderer’s motives. They’re pretty silly but then again, individual motives rarely make sense to anyone other than the guy with the hook for a hand.

Detective Mike Seaver (Roy Scheider) has been assigned to solve the case. One thing that I really liked about Night Game was that Mike was pretty much just a normal guy with a job to do. He wasn’t self-destructive. He wasn’t always drunk. He wasn’t suicidal. He wasn’t always lighting a cigarette and staring at the world through bloodshot eyes while the lighting reflected off of his artful stubble. He was just a detective trying to do his job and get home on time. After sitting through countless films about self-destructive cops and criminal profilers, the normalcy of Mike was a nice change of pace.

Mike does have a backstory. He used to play baseball and he still loves the game. He goes to every Astros home game in Houston. He’s in love with Roxy (Karen Young), who works at the stadium. Things are only slightly complicated by the fact that Mike had a previous relationship with Roxy’s mother (Carlin Glynn). Don’t worry, Mike’s not secretly Roxy’s father or anything like that. It’s not that type of movie.

Anyway, Mike is such a fan of baseball that he realizes something. The killer only strikes on nights that the Astros win a game. And he only strikes if a certain pitcher was throwing the ball. The obvious solution would be to shoot the pitcher in the arm and end his athletic career. However, Mike’s too nice a guy to do that. Instead, he just tries to track down the killer…

And, as I said, Night Game actually isn’t a bad little movie. Make no mistake, it’s a very slight movie. At no point are you going to say, “I’m going to remember that scene for the rest of my life!” That said, it’s a surprisingly good-natured film and Roy Scheider’s performance is likable and unexpectedly warm. With all that in mind, Night Game is an entertaining and (mildly) bloody valentine to my home state.

Plus, it’s a baseball movie! I don’t know much about baseball but, if my sister loves it, it has to be a good thing!