Sean Patrick
Bio
Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.
Stories (1971)
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Movie Review: 'Flatliners'
Flatliners is a remarkably bad movie. I love Eliot Page, he is a very compelling and charismatic actor. Why has he been marginalized so much that he felt he needed to make this bizarrely dumb movie? What compelled him and the very talented director Niels Arden Oplev, director of the Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to think this movie was a good idea? Why did anyone think that remaking a movie as bad as the original Flatliners was a good idea? The Joel Schumaker directed 1990 Flatliners is a terrible movie and somehow this version manages to be worse than that. I’m baffled.
By Sean Patrick8 years ago in Geeks
Movie Re-Review: 'Logan'
When I first saw Logan, the latest spin-off of the X-Men franchise, I was not impressed. There was so much hype, so much discussion about how the R-Rating would finally allow Wolverine to be Wolverine. Then I saw the film and found it to be as conventional as any of the other X-Men movies with a little bit of gore tacked on for fan service. So what’s changed for me since March of this year? Why was watching Logan at home on a DVD screener from the studio so different from watching the film in theaters earlier this year?
By Sean Patrick8 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: 'American Made'
American Made stars Tom Cruise as Barry Seal, a real life character who was at the center of the drug, guns, and South American contras controversies of the late 70s and 80s. Barry was just an airline pilot for TWA until the CIA caught wind of his trafficking in Cuban cigars. Sensing that Barry has just the kind of moral flexibility that the CIA needs, Agent Shaffer (Domnhall Gleeson) recruits him to run reconnaissance missions in South America, spying on supposed communist outposts.
By Sean Patrick8 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: 'Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer'
As a critic, it’s hard not to get tired of seeing the same kind of movie over and over again. Conventional three-act stories with stock heroes and predictable villains or simple romances with happy endings get tiresome after a while. It’s really nice to experience a movie with a different style, even if that movie isn’t entirely satisfying. The new movie Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer is, at the very least, a nice departure from the norm.
By Sean Patrick8 years ago in Geeks
Classic Movie Review: 'House of Games'
That David Mamet is one of the greatest writers for the stage and film we’ve seen in the past 30 years is well known. But, in 1987, he was a playwright who dabbled in screenwriting and no one had seen him direct anything not on the stage. Thankfully, Mamet was so in demand that he could make a demand to direct his first film, which debuted 30 years ago this weekend. The movie is called House of Games and Mamet proved that not only was he a master of words, but he could direct the hell out of a movie.
By Sean Patrick8 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: 'Maudie'
I’ve never been a fan of the heartstring tuggers. I find such things cloying and manipulative and I am far too cynical such things. And yet, even I am not immune to having my heartstrings tugged. The recently released biopic Maudie, starring the lovely Sally Hawkins, plucked every string like a classic string quartet. The story of real life Nova Scotia-based artist Maude Lewi,s who achieved minor fame in the 1950s for her homespun paintings, is the rare tear-jerker with the cinematic skill to back up the uplift.
By Sean Patrick8 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: 'Stronger'
Stronger stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Jeff Bauman, a man who lost his legs to the bombing at the 2013 Boston Marathon. Before the marathon, Jeff was just an anonymous Costco employee who loved the Red Sox and wanted to reconcile with his girlfriend Erin (Tatiana Maslany) who dumped him because he rarely showed up when he was supposed to. On April 15, 2013, Jeff finally showed up at the Boston Marathon in the hope that his homemade sign cheering Erin on to the finish line might win her back.
By Sean Patrick8 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: 'Friend Request' . Top Story - September 2017.
Friend Request is yet another failed attempt to combine social media and horror. It really shouldn’t be that hard to combine the two when you consider the daily horrors that social media enacts upon us when we simply pick up our phones, but filmmakers have thus far made the combination look impossible. Social media has numerous innate existential horrors that could be exploited by a smart filmmaker but the question seems to come back to how you can exploit that for a body count and so far no one has been able to pull that off.
By Sean Patrick8 years ago in Geeks
Classic Movie Review: 'When Harry Met Sally'
The classic on this week’s Everyone is a Critic podcast is When Harry Met Sally, director Rob Reiner’s 1989 romantic comedy that arguably set the template for every romantic comedy that came after it. Reiner, whose The Princess Bride turns 30 this weekend and inspired our podcast to focus on Reiner’s work, directed When Harry Met Sally from a script by Nora Ephron who would go on to take the mantel of the leading voice in romantic comedies in Hollywood throughout the 90’s and early 2000’s.
By Sean Patrick8 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: 'Lego Ninjago'
Lego Ninjago has not one single laugh. It has amusing moments but not a single instance of induced laughter. And I am not just speaking for myself here. The audience I watched Lego Ninjago with was really ready to laugh and you could hear some forced attempts at trying to laugh but as the movie went on even those that kept smiling and trying to find what was happening in Lego Ninjago funny weren’t laughing. It was strange; there was no outward disdain for Lego Ninjago but there weren’t any laughs.
By Sean Patrick8 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: 'Kingsman: The Golden Circle'
Kingsman: The Secret Service was a not particularly inventive rehash of Mark Millar’s previously adapted work, Kick-Ass. The derivative spy take on the same tropes of the super-hero send-up bored me endlessly with its nihilistic approach to James Bond minus the strange wit of Kick-Ass, which shared not just creator Millar but also director Matthew Vaughn, who couldn’t help but seem to rip off his own work in a lazy rehash.
By Sean Patrick8 years ago in Geeks
Movie Review: 'Happy Hunting'
Happy Hunting is one of the better horror movies of 2017. This Most Dangerous Game knock off takes the premise of hunting humans and puts a redneck, Mexican border setting to it and lets loose with a serious amount of blood and guts. The film reminded me a little of 2016’s brilliant horror-thriller Green Room which used a backwoods milieu to similar effect. That film is far better than Happy Hunting but that this film brings that one to mind says something about how good Happy Hunting really is.
By Sean Patrick8 years ago in Geeks
