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jenniferny
Reviews
Cries Unheard: The Donna Yaklich Story (1994)
Excellent movie
This was an excellent movie that tells TWO important stories: Story One is the story of the true life of a battered woman, Story Two is the story of how cops and the cities that employ them cover up the wrong doing and illegal activities of one of their own. Each story is unique unto itself and both are excellent examples of why Donna Yaklich should have been found not guilty of an wrong doing. She tried to leave and her husband used his credentials as a police officer to locate the shelter, remove her from the shelter against her will only to take her back to his house, hold her prisoner there against her will and continue to abuse her at will, something she tried to but was powerless to stop or to protect herself from it or to leave. She did the only thing she could do to stop the abuse and if he had been anything other than a police officer he would have been unable to even find the location of the shelter and even if he did find the location if he were anything but a police officer HE would have been the one arrested. The entire production and direction staff along with the cast and deserve the credit for an excellent movie and for telling a story that needed to be told. Both the direction and the acting were well above average. Its a movie that you can watch over and over and enjoy it every time.
Inferno (2002)
Terrible acting, even worse directing
I saw this movie on LMN and it was titled "California Firestorm". They usually run high quality movies that deal with prominent social issues, many of which are true stories. Unfortunately this time they really chose badly. Two of the lead characters were a mother and daughter. Normally when you watch a movie there are actors that play the part of a person and do so very well to the point that you cannot tell that they are actors because they play the part so well. That is not the case with this movie. It is so obvious that these are actors trying to play two real-life people and they do it very badly. It is like watching a high school play and the actors sound like they are over-dramatizing the lines. The mother plays a chief of a fire jumping crew in California during a fire. Much of her dialog is so unnatural sounding that I wanted to switch channels after the first ten minutes, but there was nothing else on so rather than turn off the TV I kept watching hoping that it would get better, but it never did. For example, while they are playing a scene where they are in the forest fighting the fire there is CONSTANT dialog between the actors much of which is everyone telling everybody else what a good job they are doing. The way it was done sounded very unnatural and "staged", like they were saying it for the benefit of the camera. Even the scenes portraying the typical conflicts between a mother and teenage daughter are over-acted and when the confrontation is over it seems like there is something missing, like they cut out a part of the scene that should have been left in. LMN is probably the channel that I watch the most so I was really disappointed that they ever ran this movie. Do yourself a favor and if it is ever run again watch something else, ANYTHING else. It was so bad that I went right to IMDb and posted this review, something that I very rarely do.