The Eagle and the Albatross

I rented this movie on a whim. I wasn't expecting much (because 2020 has been a hell of a year), but honestly I was blown away by this movie. Sure, it's kinda corny. But it was corny in the best way possible. You don't have to be a golfer to fall in love with this movie. The cast pulled off something amazing. Hats off the fine ladies and gentlemen who made this movie possible.

"Let's write a star-making vehicle for a wooden K-Pop star centered around... golf." Luckily, they also included a sub-plot involving wirelessly controlled sex toys, or this may have ended up being one of the oddest films ever conceived.

I was looking for an interesting and entertaining movie to watch before bedtime and came across this one on FreeVee, meaning I had to endure a few commercials. The theme is golf and, being a golfer for 60+ years, I have a hard time turning away from movies with a golf theme, even a rather simplistic movie like this.

The star is Amber Liu, born in 1992 in Los Angeles, but went to Korea in 2008 to be in the K-Pop entertainment. So, while she is probably 27 or 28 during the making of this movie, she plays teenager Ji-min Kurt, or just "Jim", now an orphan after both her dad and mom died. She now travels to Pennsylvania to officially live with her aunt, the sister of her military dad. She is very good in this role.

The movie is a very mixed bad which to me lowers its rating quite a bit. While the meat of the movie is the young girl befriending an older die-hard golfer, and learning from him, there are additional stories involving her aunt selling sex toys and vibrators to the local country club women, and both the men and women in the country club lounge making frequent off-color jokes about shafts, balls, holes, all obvious sophomoric sexual references. That did not fit the tone of the golfing part of the movie and dragged it down.

All the golf here is bad golf, no one has a decent golf swing, but that doesn't really matter. The core story is about relationships and how you can find your new family if you look for the good in people.

I watched Eagle and the Albatross with my daughter as she is a huge fan of the lead actress. My verdict of this movie a fun watch when you want to feel good and have a laugh at crude humor. My personal opinion is that the cinematography was really well done, the dialogue and overall script needed a bit more improvement, and the score and editing where both were a hit or miss- sometimes really well done, sometimes lacking. Overall, I feel like the acting was probably the highlight of the film. There is one scene particularly between the two lead cast members that solidifies this belief. With a bit of script adjustments I feel like Eagle and the Albatross would've excelled even more. However, for a relatively amateur film I feel like it delivered exactly what it intended. For that I'll happily give it praise.

To be honest, the only good part of the movie that I liked was Ji-min and Dan's relationship throughout the movie. That's was the part I was expecting and everything really caught me WAY off guard. I was expecting something like Seven Days in Utopia, but I was hit with a level of maturity like from the movie Sausage Party. I appreciate that they were putting in representation for the LGBTQ community, but all they did was fetishize it. Everything was cliche as hell. EVERYTHING. I was expecting something wholesome and I got this. I just wanted a nice golf movie. That's all I was expecting.