86 melrose avenue movie review in tamil

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86 Melrose Avenue

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86 melrose avenue - movie review.

BANG! BANG! Shots ARE fired!

Travis ( Dade Elza ) is having a bad, bad, very bad night. And it is about to get worse. He blindly runs and stumbles down the busy Los Angeles boulevard. Something has happened. He’s BLOODY and sirens are non-stop in the background. His world has been torn asunder just like the t-shirt he’s wearing. The night around him is full of passing cars and flashing sirens. The only thing he seems to have left is the gun he is trying to hide in his shirt.

And ALREADY we are nervous. There is something unhinged about his very nature. What is he going to do?

Because when that gun is pulled out, he’s at 86 Melrose Avenue and looking at an unsuspecting group of people he will now refer to as his HOSTAGES . Gulp.

86 Melrose Avenue is an art gallery and, more than that, it is where this ex-Marine, suffering from PTSD, is going to take a diverse group of people hostage. These people, as we soon find out, aren’t what you would call angels and, truthfully, everyone here is a victim of some sort. They all have their demons - whether it be from drug addiction, PTSD, or stark cultural differences - and here, inside 86 Melrose Avenue, is where they ALL will face their own mortality.

But, first, we have to step back and set up the dramatic chess pieces as Madeline ( Kambra Potter ) and Dallas ( Jake Red ) break bed with Travis. This pause to develop the backstory gives us a chance to meet and greet all the guests and the workers within the art gallery as their stories are introduced and REFINED . There is a reason for it all and, truly, 86 Melrose Avenue delivers on multiple fronts as (a) the audience will actually like the people at the center of the drama and (b) the gun violence has a point.

Co-starring Anastasia Antonia, Gregory Zarian, Terri Ivens, Langstone Fishburne, Michael Polak, Andy Evans, Richard Sabine, Helen Kennedy , and Gary Sturm , Matta ’s film - while not perfect - is ON POINT in its delivery of a cautionary tale concerning mental health and gun violence here in America. We have issues addressing both . . . something that this flick has NO PROBLEM dealing with.

86 Melrose Avenue is now streaming courtesy of October Coast and, honestly, we are the TARGETS .

MPAA Rating: Unrated. Runtime: 94 mins Director : Lili Matta Writer: Lili Matta Cast: Dade Elza, Anastasia Antonia, Gregory Zarian Genre : Drama | Thriller Tagline: A Lili Matta Film Memorable Movie Quote: Distributor: Gravitas Ventures Official Site: Release Date: April 20, 2021 (Streaming) DVD/Blu-ray Release Date: Synopsis : A diverse group of people at a gallery opening is taken hostage by an ex-Marine suffering with PTSD and forced to confront their cultural differences, their pasts, and their looming mortality as time ticks away.

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86 Melrose Avenue (2021)

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Movie Review: ’86 Melrose Avenue’

Litzy Tamariz

[READ FULL BIO]

86 Melrose Avenue

By Kate Beacom | August 20, 2021

86 Melrose Avenue is a film about trauma packaged as a hostage thriller. Written and directed by Lili Matta, the film opens on Travis (Dade Elza), covered in blood, running from the police. Radio chatter warns that he is “armed and dangerous.” Then we flashback to an hour earlier when Travis and his wife Madeline (Kambra Potter) were entertaining a guest. The guest, Dallas (Jake Red), brings up Travis’s time in the military. He pushes the host with his opinions about military occupation and sacrifice. He asks to hear some “crazy stories” Travis has from his time in the armed forces. Travis snaps and shoots Dallas.

At the same time, several people congregate at the titular address. It is an art gallery, opened now as the owners wish to show art critics, attendees, and press photographer Nadia’s (Anastasia Antonia) latest exhibit. Now, back in the present, Travis is on the run and ducks into the gallery and holds all the patrons hostage. The police eventually show up and attempt to talk him down.

The most compelling part of 86 Melrose Avenue is its focus on each character’s history. For example, in the moments when Travis was screaming at his hostages about how they don’t understand his pain, Matta includes flashbacks to illustrate how each of us carries some kind of unbearable pain. This focus on everyone’s trauma gives the proceedings a certain gravity that would be missing otherwise.

“… Travis is on the run and ducks into the gallery, and holds all the patrons hostage .”

The film poses a lot more questions than it answers, but not in a good way. Matta’s script introduces so many possible themes that it’s hard to know which to focus on, especially because very little ever comes back around. The location of the art gallery is arbitrary, which poses the unfortunate question, “why is this even happening?” The characters often stop to discuss the photographs and their meaning, but the critiques and observations about art and expression never line up with anything else the filmmaker seems to be trying to say.

There is something missing too about the different ways conflict in the Middle East runs through 86 Melrose Avenue . Matta is Lebanese, as is Nadia. At the opening, Nadia meets Avi (Gregory Zarian), an Israeli who calls her “neighbor” and tries flirting with her. They talk briefly about Israel’s attack on Lebanon, and we later see a flashback where Avi’s father beats him for refusing to serve in the IDF. These themes come up enough to feel like it is meant to be building to something, but we never get there. It feels more than coincidental that Travis would be a veteran of US wars in the Middle East and that there is friction between Nadia and Avi about their home countries. However, Matta never materializes these connections, nor the shared trauma of these characters, in a meaningful way.

The film’s resolution is a long sequence of police questioning that begs the audience to have many questions. Why are these hostages being grilled about their relationships with each other? Why are the cops bringing up the art gallery owners’ drug use? Why does any of this matter?

I can see that Matta had a vision, but the filmmaker never decides on a message. For example, 86 Melrose Avenue ends with a statistic about gun violence in America which was confusing because the themes throughout seemed to be PTSD in veterans or the impact of trauma, especially in people like Nadia, who grew up in warzones. I spent most of the movie wondering what the writer/director’s intention was, and the inclusion of the statistic hammered home for me that Matta had a lot she wanted to say but wasn’t able to make it coherent.

86 Melrose Avenue (2021)

Directed and Written:

Starring: Dade Elza, Kambra Potter, Anastasia Antonia, Gregory Zarian, Jake Red, etc.

Movie score: 5.5/10

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86 Melrose Avenue – Review

86 melrose avenue.

84 Minutes, Not Rated

Written and Directed by Lili Matta

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A diverse group of people at a gallery opening is taken hostage by an ex-Marine suffering with PTSD and forced to confront their cultural differences, their pasts, and their looming mortality as time ticks away.

It’s not easy to pull off a veteran story if you’re not a vet. It’s even harder to pull off a combat veteran’s PTSD story.

Now, writer/director Lili Matta shares a cultural background with the photographer whose exhibit opening is the setting for our little hostage situation, which gives her a grounding in the trauma of a war-torn society, which, if anything, sets the bar a bit higher for the execution of said emotionally-based story.

As expected, each of the hostages bears the scars of some past emotional trauma, some more severs than others. Some violent, some personal, some societal.

There is an old feel-good adage that says, basically, “Always remember that everyone is going through something you don’t know about. Treat them accordingly.”

This film is a cinematic version of that.

The Lebanese photographer (and former ER nurse) doesn’t like the Israeli attendee because of their cultural history. The Israeli whose wife was shot and killed by a 17-year-old kid. The art critic whose depressed son shot himself in from of him.

And the list goes on.

All of who find themselves at the mercy of Travis, the veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, who witnessed not only the run-of-the-mill trauma of war, but who witnessed a horrific act by his Commanding Officer during an “enhanced interrogation” of a local.

Everyone has a story.

By the end of the film, the police have breached the gallery, taken everyone into custody, but seem more concerned with the interpersonal dynamics of the attendees rather than the hostage crisis itself.

Out-of-context comments, ridiculous leaps of logic (illogic?), most of the PTSD clichés, along with some not-great dialogue (“He witnessed the violence of war”), and the most memorable thing about the film becomes the seemingly boundless ineptitude of law-enforcement.

After the cops are done with their inane lines of questioning, the film kind of meanders its way to its conclusion, where our heroine rethinks her explicit distrust of her Israeli co-hostage, whose overtures of acceptance and romance are blatant and predictable, as is her ultimate choice.

Finally, after preaching PTSD throughout its run-time, the film fades to black with the following end card: “Every day in America, 100 people are killed and hundreds are injured as a result of gun violence.”

So the now clearly stated message of the film is not PTSD, but gun violence. And while there has been a seeming uptick in the United States of late with regards to gun violence, this sudden shift in messaging undercuts the entirety of the film’s mostly ham-handed treatment of those who suffer from PTSD.

In the end, while the film tries to make some truly valuable points, it ultimately collapses under the weight of its own pretension.

86 Melrose Avenue will be available On Demand beginning April 20.

86 Melrose Avenue stars Dade Elza, Jim O’Heir, Anastasia Antonia, Gregory Zarian, Terri Ivens, Langstone Fishburne, Michael Polak, Andy Evans, Richard Sabine, Helen Kennedy, and Gary Sturm.

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