Set It Up Is A Delightful Romantic Comedy With Two Awesome Lead Performances

Netflix is coming up on the third year anniversary of their big push into creating original films, an initiative that began with Beasts of No Nation. In that time, Netflix has gotten a whole bunch of movie stars like Brad Pitt and Will Smith to headline their various high-profile motion pictures, but aside from Bright (which really became more of a cosplay staple and internet punching bag than anything else), none of these movies have really garnered all that much attention, a pity for gems like Blue Jay, Mudbound or 6 Balloons. But two weeks ago today, Netflix released their first original film to really take the public by storm and it was one not based on exceptionally well-known source material or starring big names or even carrying a bunch of splashy visual effects.

Mute Silences All of It's Potential

In their 28 month long period of doing feature films, Netflix has released a bunch of high-quality smaller-scale films like The 13th, Blue Jay and Mudbound that show the streaming service is quite capable of putting out some top-notch cinema. If only such quality extended to their attempts to release more high-profile blockbuster fare, as those (admittedly few) attempts have fared quite poorly. Bright was, of course, a disaster and now comes another subpar bigger-budgeted effort from the studio in the form of Mute, which hails from director Duncan Jones, a man responsible for two of the best science-fiction films (Moon and Source Code) of the last decade.

Mudbound Is Compelling Character-Driven Fare That Knows The Power of Well-Written Dialogue

 

The individual characters in Mudbound have their own stories to tell and their own personalities to convey but there are threads that do tie certain characters together. Some of these individuals find themselves connected by the fact that they're a family while a pair of characters find themselves intertwined to one another due to both of them being soldiers returning home from World War II with intense trauma impacting their psyches. But what unites them all, whether they realize it or not, is the soil, the mud on the land they all share. In this harsh environment of rural 1940's Mississippi, you're at the mercy of the very land you live on, a land that entails all kinds of fascinating human beings that populate the new Dee Rees motion picture Mudbound.