88 - Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

    The IMF team finds itself without support, and trying to prevent a war resulting from a bombing of the Kremlin.

    I had such mixed feelings about M:I 3.  I was really enthusiastic about certain sequences, but then I was a little annoyed about some of the others.  Then with this one, I didn't have quite the same sense of enthusiasm, but I pretty solidly enjoyed it.
    There's a stronger M:I feel to many of the sequences, even if they don't end up playing out perfectly.  Something always goes wrong.  Their infiltration of the Kremlin is handled wonderfully, with some excellent gadgetry, combined with a certain amount of manipulation.  They actually pull off this sequence in perfect M:I style, exiting without being noticed.  Then Cruise gets captured after he gets out.
    There's another sequence, where the team attempts to pull off two simultaneous meetings, making each party think they're meeting with the other party.  This was an excellent sequence, but it was hurt by making both of the meetings fall apart at the last minute.  They would have still had some work to do if that step had gone flawlessly, so it seemed to just be an excuse to run an action sequence.
    There are plenty of things that I did like - I enjoyed the sandstorm, the briefcase printer…. Simon Pegg was excellent.

    There were a few things I didn't care for.  The entire subplot dealing with Cruise's wife from the 3rd movie.  And it was strange to see Vhing Rhames show up for a cameo at the end.

    And one trivial note; Tom Cruise looks much more aged in this movie than he does elsewhere.  The lines on his face are more distinct.

87 - The Night of the Hunter

    A pair of young kids are hiding a stash of $10,000 that their father stole.  A preacher marries their mother in his effort to recover the money.

    I watched Criterion's Blu-ray of this release, and the film quality hasn't aged too well, but I suppose that's to be expected of a movie from 1955.

    There are easy things to evaluate; it's a technically very well done movie.  There are plenty of very memorable shots that look fantastic.  The performances are uniformly great.  The story itself is fairly unpredictable.

    On the back of the box, Criterion described the movie as being like a Grimm story.  That is remarkably accurate.  There's death, a compelling villain, who sometimes appears normal, and other times, monstrous.  We have orphaned children, who find a safe haven.

    The religious tones of the movie are fascinating.  It would be hard to portray a villain as being a legitimate minister, and the script is careful to dodge that.  Early on, there's this exchange;

    "What religion do you profess, preacher?"
    "The religion the Almighty and I worked out betwixt us."

    We hear him praying to God, and he makes it clear that he believes that God condones his actions, that his murders are validated by his beliefs, and that killing people for money is also acceptable.  But the preacher's instincts aren't a condemnation of religion.  We see another character in particular, Icey Spoon.  She's an older lady, who thoroughly buys into the preacher.  She's convinced of his perfection.  She delivers a few comic relief lines earlier in the movie;

    "…I've been married to Walt that long, and I swear in all that time, I just lie there thinking about my canning."

    By the end of the movie, when the preacher has been arrested, she's involved in leading a lynch mob.  While many in the mob are holding torches, she's carrying an axe.

    These ideas of religious hypocrisy are balanced out with the grandmotherly character, who seems to embody the best of religious fervor.  She takes in whatever children she can.  She's generally forgiving for their transgressions (although we do see her spank one of the boys) and she does what she can to protect them.
    The movie ends on a peculiar note, as the grandmotherly character breaks the fourth wall, and addresses the viewer praising the resilience of children.

    It's worth watching, and I wonder how it would feel seeing it as a child.

    This was one of my favorite shots in the movie, especially the dollhouse-like way the camera moves beyond the walls.

86 - Rampage

    A 23-year-old white male goes on a rampage, with the goal to kill as many people as possible indiscriminately.

    When the trailer for God Bless America was released, I read some discussion about it.  This movie came up as a comparison.  While I haven't seen God Bless America, I somehow feel like this one is pretty similar, just not as nice about it.

    So I added this movie to my queue.  And it's directed by Uwe Boll.  Not just directed, written by him too.  And I can honestly say that this is the best Uwe Boll movie I've seen.
    The direction is so-so.  It's entirely competent, I didn't find myself needlessly confused by the way shots were put together, and most of the time, I didn't notice the camera at all.  That's a pretty good sign.  However, it also didn't stand out as being noteworthy.
    The story itself is more interesting that the description implies.  We get the character, and his life, summarized in a pleasant, compact way.  He gets along with his parents, although they are pressuring him to move out, or go to college.  He doesn't tolerate poor service, or rudeness, very well.  He has a friend, who seems to be prone to longwinded rants.  He isn't appreciated at his job as a mechanic.
    What's interesting is that none of these things seems to be the source for setting him off.  His rampage isn't passionate in the way that we would expect.  It's more calculated, and less bloodthirsty than most spree killers seem to be.

    To start with, he uses a remote-controlled van, packed with explosives, to blow up the police station.  Starting off this way spells out that he isn't looking on this as a suicide mission.  From there, he goes around location to location, killing people indiscriminately in the streets.  He kills a barista that slighted him.  He eventually stops into a bank, robbing it.
    The whole thing winds down to him killing his friend, and framing him for the rampage.  This endgame changes the perspective on most of what he's done.  It implies that he valued his own life enough to not die for his idea, but it was the prospect of being able to get away with the rampage that made him want to do it.

    There are some weaknesses.  I felt like most of the family scenes didn't ring true to me.  Something about the dialogue for the mother especially felt very off.  Almost like she was a parody of herself.  The dialogue for the first 20 minutes feels a bit forced.  There's a lot of crosstalk, which was supposed to make things feel more realistic.  That might work, except that people were uncharacteristically jerks.
    There's also a problem with the ending.  I was impressed with how well the script dealt with all of the tracks being covered.  Except for one thing that I thought of; the money he stole from the bank.  I was reminded of D. B. Cooper, and how the money he had acquired was recorded.

    There's an odd documentary-like detachment in the movie.  I think we're actually supposed to like the lead, but it's very hard to tell.  We are clearly supposed to find a sense of humor to his revenge on the barista, but it hardly feels justified.
    Then it occurred to me that this movie would feel much more "right" to the version of me watching it between high school and college.  And that's probably where Uwe Boll is.  The philosophy that the lead and his friend talk about is an overly simplistic thought process.  It's the sort of thing most people realize when they're in high school, and they talk about a lot, as if they have insights that no one has thought of before.
    I didn't feel like this was nearly as powerful a movie as it could have been, but it was a big step up from Boll's other work.

85 - There Will Be Blood

    A long, character-study driven epic about a misanthrope oilman's purchase of land, and his dealings with the community, his family, and his church/preacher.

    I watched this once before, about three or four years ago.  I enjoyed it, and recognized it as an exceptionally well-done movie.  I suggested to my Dad that he might like it.  I believe he did.  But it's been a hard movie to muster the same enthusiasm for as P.T. Anderson's other movies.  With Boogie Nights and Magnolia, despite their length, they cut between scenes very quickly, so the pacing always feels really exciting.  With this one, Anderson went with longer shots, a more luxurious pacing.

    I felt like the characters were much more complex this time through.  Despite the oilman (Plainview) behaving in ways that we would normally consider to be unethical, it's hard to feel like he's actually that bad.  It's established that he seriously loves his adopted son, and that the presence of that boy helps to keep him more in-line than he would normally be.
    There are a few scenes that establish his motivations more clearly.  Plainview states

"I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.  I hate most people."

and a little later…

"I see the worst in people.  I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need.  I've built my hatreds up over the years, little by little…"

    He articulates that his goal is to make enough money that he won't have to deal with people again.

    The part of the story that deals with the preacher is completely fascinating.  While Eli Sunday is supposed to be morally superior to the greed that Plainview fixates on, Sunday comes off as just as unethical, if not worse.
    When Plainview is baptized, Sunday uses the opportunity to shame him.  Plainview goes along with it, although he clearly resents his treatment.  The sequence is mirrored at the end, when Plainview uses Sunday's desperation to get Sunday to proclaim

"I am a false prophet and God is a superstition."

    While his actions are entirely selfish, they feel like an appropriate revenge for Sunday exploiting his advantage during the baptism.

    I can talk about these ideas for a while, but my point is mostly that the movie was more complex than I remember.  If it were a bit shorter, I'd be more interested in re-watching it more often.

84 - Aliens vs Predator: Requiem

    A Predator is dispatched to Earth to clean up an Alien that was left behind.  A small town becomes the battleground.

    I was remarkably bored when I watched this.  I mostly felt pretty indifferent.  Then I felt annoyed.

    We get some characters set up in the town.  This sequence reminded me of a similar setup used in 8-Legged Freaks.  Then we establish that some facegrabbers have managed to latch onto two people.  From those two Aliens, who go on to hide in the sewers, we gradually accumulate a few more Aliens.
    Then by around the halfway point, it turns into pretty solid action.  People around the town running into either the Aliens or the Predator, and dying.  Yawn.

    The things that bothered me more were the convenient changes made to the rules that governed how Aliens work.  It seems that it now only takes a few minutes from facehugger to chestburster.  This is a completely dumb idea.  I understand why they did it - the whole movie is supposed to take place over the course of a day or so.  Then there's an Alien (who is supposed to be some variation of a queen) who can somehow inject baby Aliens into a captive human, leading to that captive birthing them almost right away.
    Who did this makes sense to?

    There was another aspect of the story that bothered me more afterwards.  This movie takes place in the present day.  While that fits with the Predator movies, it doesn't make sense for the Alien franchise.  Most of what made the Alien movies work is that they were set in a unique vision of the future. 

83 - Memento

    I remember being thrilled with Memento the first time I saw it.  I was a little less thrilled the second time.  So I didn't watch it for a long time.  And I was a little reluctant to watch it again.
    Memento is a noir-ish mystery that focuses on a main character who is unable to form new memories.  While they don't get too specific, at certain points, his brain resets, and he forgets everything that has just happened.
    The gimmick of Memento is that the whole story is told backward, scene by scene.  Except for sequences in black & white, which are told sequentially.  This sounds confusing because it is.  While it feels easier to track at first, the longer it goes on, the harder it is to put everything into the proper place.

    This time, my viewing was split into two chunks - the first 1:20 in one sitting, and the remainder in the second.  Somehow, this actually helped me straighten my feelings about the movie out.
    It's a good movie.  It's very compelling, especially the first viewing.  It's shot very well, and it remains remarkably clever.  However, it has a specific problem with it, and it's that the gimmick overcomes the plot.
    With Inception, Nolan did a fantastic job of creating a plot device, then letting that be used to create the story.  This is usually a focus of really good sci-fi.  Once the rules are set down, the story comes about naturally from those directives.  With this movie, the plot is nearly irrelevant, the gimmick overcomes our understanding, our caring, and our focus about the plot.

    Now that I've got a firm grasp on exactly how things played out, I'm actually a little disappointed.  Even after understanding the movie, we are left with too little information.  Everyone in the movie is unreliable.
    Cathy found the ending much more sad.  And I suppose it is.  There's something horrible about being manipulated, and not being able to do anything about it.  But on the other hand, the guy also never has to live with that knowledge, except for the few minutes he remains aware of it.

82 - Headspace

    I have some strongly mixed feelings about this movie.  It's a bit low-budget, but they did a great job with the limited resources.
    The opening shot of the movie is really nicely done.  Then we jump back in time to an idyllic family birthday party for a kid.  The mother gets an unexpected nosebleed.  Then that evening, she's found having killed and possibly eaten part of their dog.  During the night, the father comes in, wakes up the boys, and has them pack up to leave.  Their mother poses a risk to them.  As they are set to leave, the father shoots the mother.
    We jump forward about 10 years, if not a little more.
    At this point, the plot deals with one of the sons having a strange existence.  He seems to have unpredictable headaches.  His brain doesn't work the same as other people.  It's all very mysterious, until around the half hour mark, and then there's a massive change in the tone of the movie.
    It turns into a monster movie.  We get to see people killed off by monsters that look pretty cheap (actually, I kept thinking that the monster costume looked like something from Tales From the Darkside).  Despite this change to the movie, it remains pretty interesting.  There's a lot of overly dramatic yelling, but it doesn't feel too bad, since everyone seems to be confused and a bit disturbed.
    There was a pretty long sex scene, which felt very out-of-place.  I'm not sure why it was there, either.  The main character spends the whole thing peeking in on his friend, so it has a creepiness that also didn't feel fitting.
    Then came the ending.  The ending never felt like it was earned.  The setup, and the nice sense of mystery didn't deserve this sort of ending.  It wasn't a horrible decision or anything, it just wasn't up to the level it should have reached.  I think a quality ending could have really made the whole thing hang together nicely.

    The movie also has a lot of familiar faces in it - Olivia Hussey, who played Audra in IT.  William Atherton, who I know best as the bad guy in Real Genius.  Sean Young has a brief part.  The memorable Udo Kier shows up as a reverend.  I always remember his appearance in the Masters of Horror episode Cigarette Burns.

81 - Off The Charts

    I've heard about song-poems for awhile, and I love the idea of them.
    There was a post on Boingboing a short time ago about someone sending some bad lyrics in to one of the song poem houses, and posted the performance they got back.  That person linked to this documentary, which is available on youtube, on PBS's official account.

    Song-poems are described as a scam, but I have a hard time thinking of them that way.  They're a business that solicits people to send in their poems, and have them set to music, for a fee.  The reason it gets described as a scam is a problem with how the organizations advertised the service.  Ads tend to imply the prospect of making money from your recording.  Earning royalty checks and so forth.  Since that is nearly impossible, it is deceptive to suggest that as the reason one would do it.  But otherwise, the pleasure of hearing your own lyrics interpreted should be enough to make the service worthwhile.
    This documentary examines a broad perspective of the industry.  The musicians that record the songs.  The people who send in the lyrics - both seriously and non-seriously.  We hear lyrics that are close to nonsense, words that are hilariously dumb, all performed with complete sincerity.
    There's a lot of fun in this documentary.  Caglar Juan Singletary is just spectacular.  It's hard for me to explain it, but his lyrics are bizarre, but with the fantastic singing appearing on his recording, the song feels incredible.

    We get to see an argument break out in the studio.  We get a condensed version of how the guy at Magic Keys Productions goes from reading the lyrics to a completed recording in about 40 minutes.

    While things get a little uncomfortable near the end, when we see a guy make his way through a live performance that he can't handle, it's hard to think of anyone I wouldn't want to share this with.

80 - Gothika

    Halle Berry plays a psychiatrist who winds up imprisoned in her own hospital after her husband is found murdered.

    Again, my comments probably will include some spoilers, since the quality of the movie demands it.

    After I finished watching this, I initially had a mixed feeling about it.  There is some good stuff in this.  Robert Downy Jr is a pleasure to watch.  The movie is photographed well, and there are some memorable sequences, mostly the shower room and the pool.  There's a good atmosphere built up, mostly through the heavy blue-and-grey colors of the picture, combined with most of the action taking place in the same collection of rooms.
    The problem is that the movie doesn't stand up to scrutiny well.  My specific complaint was not addressed (which I will get to later) but there are many smaller holes throughout the picture.  I wasn't aware of them since I wasn't taking the movie too seriously.  But if you take a look at the discussions on IMDB, it's clear that defenders of these problems need to bend over backwards to create explanations.

    Here's a spoiler-full version of the story.  Halle Berry is a psychiatrist.  One rainy night, after leaving work, she almost hits a naked lady standing in the middle of the road.  She talks to the lady, who bursts into flames.  Then Halle Berry wakes up in her institution, as an inmate.
    It turns out that the lady she saw was some sort of spirit that took possession of her.  Thus, Halle Berry went home and killed her husband.  This revelation takes about half the movie to become clear (although it is strongly spelled out to the audience ahead of time).
    The rest of the movie is taken up with explaining why this spirit did this.
    After escaping from the institution, Halle Berry discovers that her husband was into raping, possibly torturing, and eventually killing young girls.  He kept this going on at a vacation house he kept.  After uncovering the room dedicated to this, and turning it into a new police investigation, she is kept in police custody, where we get a reveal that the sheriff was also involved in this rape/torture/murder thing.
    Of course, the moment that we figure out that the deceased husband was involved, we already know that the sheriff is too.  But for some reason, Halle Berry's mind doesn't work that fast.  So she spends plenty of time explaining exactly what she suspects to him.

    That was the biggest head-against-the-wall moment of the movie.  We had plenty of foreshadowing, it was made obvious that the two guys would go to that vacation house together.  She knew it.  She'd have to be a moron to not have known the sheriff was involved as soon as she found their playroom.

    I had two key complaints.
    First, Halle Berry acts crazy.  Perhaps this is supposed to leave open the interpretation that "maybe she actually is crazy, and wasn't possessed by a spirit!"  Except that we see that spirit possession happening.  There's nothing else in the movie to suggest that she's anything other than a normal person.  This results in a lot of scenes where it's hard to stand watching her, because she's acting like a lunatic for no good reason.
    Second, there's a fundamental problem with the story.  The instigating event of the movie is that she killed her husband.  Unless the US legal system recognizes the existence of ghosts - and agrees that she was possessed by that ghost - she's still on the hook for having killed her husband!
    There's no way around that!
    At the time she killed him, she had no idea that he was a murderer, and she had no reason to fear for her life.

    But the movie just ignores it.  We get a scene at the end of Halle Berry walking around a city.  Unless she somehow served her time, or unless getting discharged from a mental institution somehow absolves her of the crime, there's simply no way to feel good about this ending.


    I also have chosen to ignore other problems with the plausibility of the movie - like the idea that she would be added as an inmate in an institution where both the other prisoners and the staff all know her already.

79 - Truth or Dare

    In perusing IMDB's horror tag, I found this one.  I hadn't heard of it.  Of course, it sounded like my sort of thing, and I gave it a watch.

    The popular teen party game is now a horror movie!

    A variety of guests are called to a party in an effort to reveal who should be held responsible for the suicide of a mutual acquaintance.  After writing that sentence, I immediately thought this should be a gothic, slow-moving, accusation-based drama.
    It's good, but it's also something I have a hard time coming up with too many thoughts on.  The horror, and the tension of it, are not too strong.  But the story is compelling.  I found myself more curious about how things would play out, and what would be revealed, rather than who would die.
    It turns into a captivity drama, with the captor questioning the captives and trying to get them to inform on each other.  It's hard to feel bad for the victims, since they've all been established as pretty bad people.
    This is a UK production, and the accents can be a little puzzling to my ear, but I got used to it pretty quickly.  But I also wonder how much this story had to do with class issues in the UK.  That seems like an idea that would be universal, but it's hard to tell if there was something unique that I wasn't getting.

    To be honest, even though I liked it, I found the ending a little confusing.  I had to read some comments to ensure that I understood it properly.  I probably should have watched it a little more closely.

    Nearly no gore, but a fair amount of blood.

78 - Mission: Impossible 3

    This time, I watched it on Blu-ray with my wife.  I mostly wanted to show the middle segment, when the mission goes off the way the TV show does, but she wanted to see the whole thing.  My feelings on the movie didn't change much though.  I was more aware of Abrams using lens flares.
    Two other things that stuck out were the awkward effort at character development between the two agents in the car while they're in Shanghai, (not to mention the fact that he can't get a cell phone signal in downtown Shanghai) and the cliche way that Ving Rhames is written.  I would love to see a return to the way that Greg and Phil Morris were treated on the show.

77 - Dirty Harry

    I had never felt much of an incentive to see this.  I had a certain impression of what it would be like, and the story was never very compelling.
    Harry Callahan is a cop, who is more focused on getting the bad guy than he is on following procedure.  He deals with a serial killer sniper, who is trying to extort money from the city in exchange for not killing further victims.

    I was surprised with this movie.  It's really very well done.  The script doesn't take an easy path, and the movie is packed with moral ambiguity.  It's easy to get a slight cringing sensation when we see Harry do things that are not properly handled, but are clearly intended for the greater good.  I wonder how the movie would play to a person with less of an education about how the law works.  It's hard to muster up an outrage at "the system" when it feels clear to me that Harry was just a sloppy detective.  He should also know that his habit of trying to tempt criminals into threatening him is not just cruel, it jeopardizes his effectiveness.

    This sense of Harry being almost an antihero is something that I associate with Taxi Driver, which followed about four years later.  I suppose these Vietnam-era inspired stories like leaving things a little uncomfortable.

    Regardless, Eastwood plays the part perfectly.  The music is fascinating.  Fairly early, I noticed a passage in Scorpio's theme that closely resembled Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song.  No idea if this was intentional or not.  Check it out around 1:40.

    I have one minor complaint, and it doesn't have to do with the movie itself.  Netflix offers a description that gives away the first 3/4 of the movie.

76 - Detention

    When I started watching this, I thought I was watching Detention (2011).  It turns out, I was watching Detention (2010).  I spent most of the movie wondering how it could have nearly a 6 on IMDB.  At least I feel some validation.  This one is a 3.1, and that seems fitting.
    A bunch of high school students have detention.  A storm comes, and they wind up getting locked in the classroom without the supervisor.  They have to contend with the ghost of a student who died about 30 years prior. From there, it gets weirder.
    I think this review is going to have spoilers.  I usually avoid giving away plot points or key scenes, but this is so strange, and so badly written that I need to get more specific.

    We are introduced to a new teacher at the school, Ms. Cipher.  It is strongly implied that she is connected to the kid who died 30 years ago.  Honestly, this is the best twist in the movie - it turns out that despite the misleading age problem, she actually is the mother of the student.  The reason she hasn't aged is because she's actually a ghost as well.
    So a ghost got hired to be a teacher.

    The first thing that is established in this movie is the low budget.  The effects are bad.  Close to Birdemic bad, but not quite there.  Since the movie opens with a flashback, I assumed that most of the style was altered to make it clear it wasn't taking place in the present.  The picture was sort of dreamy looking: a very soft image.
    Then once the story moves into the present, it becomes clear that this weird, soft focus picture is the style for the entire movie.  I have no idea why they did this.  Part of this style includes some weird choices about the exposure.  The whites in the movie, every bit of sunlight, white shirts, all of those bright patches bleed white.  A truly bizarre choice.
    Once everything is set up, the script problems come to the forefront.  I'm not talking about the dialogue, although that's pretty dumb.  This movie has script problems that I've never seen anywhere else.  Characters jump to conclusions, then seem to forget that they are trying to escape being killed.
    At one point, two people jump to the conclusion that the ghost of the kid who died must be preventing them from leaving.

    "How do you know this?"
    "I don't know… I just do."

    This exchange sums up the movie perfectly.

    There's also a dumb kid.  I think he's supposed to be a surfer/stoner sort, but it's hard to tell.  No one is very well developed.  Despite that he knows he's in danger, he decides to go to a science lab, and mix a bunch of stuff to drink.  He says something to the effect that he would rather die on his own terms.

    I came out of this movie wondering how it came to be.  The story isn't too bad, it's a standard ghost/revenge/sins of the father sort of story.  But the dialogue feels awkward, and the characters don't seem to make much sense.  It's almost as if the story was outlined by someone, who assigned a bunch of different people to write separate sequences.  As a result, they cover the same ground in many different ways.  With a tighter script, I'd probably feel much better about this one.  As it is, it's a disappointment, but for reasons beyond the cheapness of the production.

    IMDB claims that the budget for this movie was 2.15M.  And that it grossed $190 at the theaters.

75 - The Innkeepers

    Damn, it's a creepy movie.
    Two hotel clerks are working the last weekend that the hotel will be open.  There are very few guests, and a whole lot of free time.  So they work on trying to document the haunted-ness of the hotel.
    This movie works well on many levels.  First, the characters are handled really well.  The two leads are very well defined.  They have a clear relationship with each other, and it's a relationship that's nuanced.  The hotel itself is very nicely done.  It's not as massive and forbidding as The Overlook is in The Shining, but this one has a quaint charm.  It doesn't have ostentatious decoration that calls attention to how weird the place is.  It's not packed with dark corners or eerie carvings.  It actually looks like a slightly older, independent hotel.  All of the creepiness of the location is an effect of the direction.
    The sound is great.  It's a lot like seeing something out of the corner of your eye; the sound design masks a variety of effects and elements that create this great sense of unease.  You aren't quite sure what you hear.

    When I saw Ti West's prior feature, The House of the Devil, I admired the faithful re-creation of the 70's.  While I enjoyed the movie, I felt like the tension and the development didn't pay off with the ending.  I've read similar complaints about this movie.  On the contrary, I felt like the ending was much more fitting.

    I'm very curious about how this movie will age.  While the tension is incredible, I wonder how well that will stand up to repeated viewings.
    There's one movie that came to mind during this viewing, and after it - the original The Haunting.  I had a similar sense of being creeped out after that movie, but repeated viewings changed my perspective.  Plus, no matter what people might say, the pacing on this movie is lightning fast compared to The Haunting.

    I have one complaint, and that regards the last shot.  I had to do some research before I found someone explaining what happens in the last shot.  The problem is that it's subtle, too subtle to be seen without altering the speed a bit.  And even then, it's barely perceptible.  I understand that is probably the point, but it's not much fun it you can't share the scare with others.

    I also really loved the opening theme for the movie.  I wish I could find a link, but I can't.

74 - The Avengers

    How can I begin?  The Avengers was really an overwhelming movie.  It's packed with action, but it takes appropriate breaks for character development, and plenty of brief stops for humor.
    The Cosmic Cube (here, called the Tesseract) has been stolen by Loki, who wants to trade it for use of an alien army to conquer the world.  Nick Fury of SHIELD has called together a variety of super powered and non-super powered heroes to counter this threat.  We get a team of Black Widow, Hawkeye, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, and to a lesser extent, Fury himself.

    Throughout the viewing, I kept thinking how difficult this movie must have been.  Not just the logistics of the photography, the action, the stunts, or anything like that, just that it's a large cast that required so much attention to balancing the movie.  And it was handled expertly.
    When I saw Thor, I wasn't terribly impressed.  It was passable, but it didn't speak to me.  This time, I felt like Thor was a better defined character.  I still liked Edward Norton's Hulk, but Mark Ruffalo did just fine.  I was a bit disappointed with Hawkeye, but that was for a few other reasons; he had a laser sight mounted on his bow, and I kept imagining that Daniel Craig should be playing that part.

    The real star of the movie was Black Widow.  I didn't care about her role in Iron Man 2, but here she was just amazing.  She gets excellent fight scenes.  She proves useful, she teams up well, and she winds up saving the day.

    One of the difficulties that many of the superhero movies have is that when people team up, it comes across more like two people having a fight in the same room.  This movie had a sequence that showcased the characters working with each other.  And that feels good.

    I'm looking forward to more Marvel movies.  I haven't been disappointed with many of them.  Even the ones that didn't work too well - like Fantastic Four or Ghost Rider, aren't horrible.  But the studios are getting better about managing these stories carefully, and I hope that gradually, the movies will feel like a huge a universe as the comics.

    There was also a scene during the credits that I'm incredibly enthused about.

    You see, I really like comics.  I've got a stack of collections under my desk that I haven't started on, and I'm usually working on at least two different collections at a time.  I started reading comics in the early 90s, and abandoned it around 94 or so.  I've since fallen back into reading collections.
    I've never been too much of a fan of cosmic stories, but I really enjoyed Infinity Gauntlet, and to a lesser extent, Infinity War and Infinity Crusade.  All of these stories helped to define Thanos.
    And that's who was shown during the scene in the credits.  I'm thrilled.

73 - Murder Set Pieces

    Murder Set Pieces focuses on an independent photographer who is a serial killer.  There's only a little more plot than that, detailing his relationship with a girl who has a daughter.  The daughter suspects that there's something wrong with him.
    I watched this three days ago, and I've been struggling to think of anything to say about it.  When I first heard of it, I think it showed up on some list of the best horror of the year.  I'm pretty forgiving when it comes to horror, so I put it in my queue.  I was anticipating a horror movie I would have a hard time stomaching.
    But that movie never materialized.  I came out of the movie feeling only mildly confused, and mostly disinterested.  The movie is really tame.  It's much more tame than other R-rated horror movies.  There is a whole lot of blood, but almost all of the serious stuff takes place off-screen.
    There was a strange technical problem, and I'm unsure where the problem lay.  At a certain point, I started noticing that the sound was dropping out.  It was obvious especially during these shots of the photographer driving along.  Then I started to notice it happening elsewhere.  There was a moment of dialogue where the last word of a sentence was removed by this.  I replayed that sequence, and the same drop in sound happened at exactly the same point.  I ejected the disc, checked it out, and it was in pristine condition.  I put it back in, and the same thing happened.  I haven't had any problems like this with any other disc.  I did find one review that referred to something that might be what I heard.  If this was intentional, it's a really bad choice to make viewers think the sound is messed up.

    So the killer goes through his process of bringing strippers and prostitutes back to his place, taking pictures, then eventually killing them.  There's a lot of mixing of sex and murder and photography (although the photography doesn't seem to be too important to him).  These sequences are cut in with strange flashbacks and fantasy sequences that involve the killer (either in past or present) in some surreal sexual or violent settings.
    We get a touch of character development in the killer being a neo-nazi, but not enough development to make it sensible.

    There was a single sequence that I might remember, and that's when the photographer goes to an "adult bookstore" called "Talk of the Town."  The scene plays out a tiny bit like the donut shop in Boogie Nights.

    I never felt scared in this.  There isn't any sense of tension.  There weren't any characters to enjoy.  It mostly just felt boring.

72 - Shakespeare in Love

    It's been a long time since I saw this.  It's a very charming movie.  Excellent performances throughout.  The timing is great, secondary characters are well drawn.

    If I have any complaints, it is only this: Joseph Fiennes is too attractive.  I think I'd rather that he were a little more "warts and all," like almost everyone else in the picture.

    There are two spectacular casting decisions.  I'm amazed that Lord Wessex was played by Colin Firth.  While he looked familiar, I was certain it wasn't him.  And while I could hear it in the Queen's voice, Judi Dench looks nothing like herself.

71 - Kick-Ass

    Kick-Ass deals with the reality of what it would involve to be a superhero.  There are a lot of issues being explored in this story, and it pushes certain storytelling boundaries that tend to make some people uncomfortable.
    I should clarify that.  It does make me uncomfortable as well, but not in the same ways as some viewers do.

    I have no problem at all with the character of Hit-Girl.  I think she's wildly implausible, but that's part of the point.  Her dialogue, her violence, violence against her, it's all entirely fine.  This is intended to be contrasted to the dialogue and violence with Kick-Ass.
    I felt myself getting a bit teary when Kick-Ass first successfully fights the thugs beating the guy in front of the convenience store.  He doesn't really win, but it feels like a Rocky moment, of the underdog refusing to give up.
    There were two things that I didn't care for.  During the ending, in the last 10 minutes, Kick-Ass is responsible for a few deaths (I think three of them).  He never seems to acknowledge them, or feel surprise at his ability to have killed.  The other thing I didn't care for was the amount of rock music in the score.  They did transplant a very Batman-like theme into the movie, but it was overshadowed by the electric work.

    Also, this Blu-ray is unpredictable.  The clarity is fantastic during several sections.  Then some shots have a huge amount of grain.
    As I revisit this movie, my feelings about it will evolve.  I wonder if they'll make a sequel.  The second series of comics would be much more difficult to film.  But even this one was a triumph over the ratings board.

70 - Zombieland

    We follow a nervous, careful guy as he travels in a zombie-decimated America with a tough guy, played by Woody Harrelson.  They join up with a pair of girls, and make their way to the West coast.
    I saw this in the theaters, and I remember feeling a bit conflicted about it at the time.  It's fun.  It's shot very well - the sets, the effects, everything is a first rate job.  But the tone of the movie is actually too fun, and there are too many efforts to look cool.
    It reminds me of Scott Pilgrim V The World, which suffered from the same problem, but had separate issues, specifically that no one was really likable.  In this case, the characters are more charming, but the situation doesn't feel bleak enough.  Imagine the original Dawn of the Dead if you cut out the first 20 minutes, and cut off the last 20 minutes.  You'd be left with a movie that had no sense of menace, and beyond a minor inconvenience of clearing out the mall, no conflict at all.
    It's still very enjoyable.  But it doesn't have that stretch for greatness.

69 - Summer School

    This movie was mentioned on Psych recently, and as a fan of '80s teen movies, I felt obligated to watch it.  Plus it had Kirstie Alley!

    A gym teacher (played by Mark Harmon, who looks like a cross between Sam Neill and Billy Bob Thornton) gets roped into teaching remedial English to a group of kids during the summer.  As he learns to teach, he helps the students with a variety of their interests and issues.

    I was impressed with this movie.  I can't say that it's especially noteworthy, but I will say that it's much more classy than other teen movies of the era.  This one approaches some serious issues, but remains playful, and carefully written.

    The teacher doesn't know how to teach, so he spends some time going on "field trips" with the students to amusement parks and the like.  Once that is stopped, in order to save his job, he strikes a deal with the students, that they will work, in exchange for a favor to each of them.
    This integrates him into their lives.  He works with a pregnant student in Lamaze class, (although this is not explored much) he works on teaching one of them to drive.  He allows a screening of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in class.  He allows them to have a 4th of July party at his house.
    Most of these things seem wildly inappropriate to us, but the approach taken in the movie is actually very kind.  He views his role in these events as being for the greater good, and he's treating them as equals.  There is a subplot that actually made me uncomfortable, as a student has a crush on him, and he seems to be aware of it, but tries not to address it.  The girl ends up sleeping on his couch.

    There is a romantic subplot, between the teacher and another teacher, played by Kirstie Alley.  It's a peculiar romance, since it never feels very important or meaningful.  It does lead to a nice ending shot of them on the beach, kissing, with his dog licking their faces.

    There's one other thing that I really liked about it, and it had to do with the way it was scripted and performed.  There are a lot of gags that don't feel as in-your-face as modern comedies do.  The joke is delivered, but it doesn't get that extra-hammy performance to sell the joke harder than it needed to be.  I love this approach.  It feels more natural, and much more realistic than the alternative.

    Ultimately, this movie has much more heart to it than would be expected from the cover, or the name.

68 - The Summer of the Massacre

    Not to be confused with The Summer of Massacre (2011).  This was a 2006 straight to video release.  You know, the cover for this movie is pretty good!  Sadly, this has a slightly lower rating on IMDB than Pool Party did.

    A group of teens get lost in the English countryside, and wind up being chased and killed by Hammer Head, a masked killer wielding a hammer.

    As this movie begins, there's an opening crawl.  All of this text is verbatim.

    Many films have been based
    on true-life crimes over as
    many decades as the crimes have
    been committed, such as Ted
    Bundy, Ed Gein: two of many
    famous killers.
    All films are truly harrowing
    piece's of film-making, able to
    terrify, unnerve and provoke
    emotions and thoughts that
    stay in the mind long after the
    tape has rewind, due to the
    true facts portrayed in the
    features.  But none as yet has
    been so near to the true horror's
    as The Summer of The Massacre's
    real life killer Hammer Head.
    Based on a real factual occurrences
    involving a malevolent monster
    called Hammer Head, whose form
    of life was cannibalism?
    This film is a true account of the
    savage and unabated blood lust,
    which befell four very young
    teenagers.  Four, who could nor
    would have expected such a mad &
    nightmarish events that day,
    which would scare the survivor for
    the rest of their living days…

    The scrolling speed of the text was actually a little too fast, considering how awkward the writing is.  I had to rewind and pause it in order to read.
    Then the movie starts up.
    And there's no budget.

    The movie seems to have been filmed with a handful of friends, I would estimate six of them (four on screen, one holding the camera, and one playing the killer).  There are no real sets.  The sound is entirely camera mounted.

    Let me go back to the beginning.  We open on a boy and girl walking in the woods.  She complains about how she doesn't want to go camping.  They gradually build up to an argument.  As he turns around to say something, a guy wearing a mask and holding a hammer jumps out of the woods and kills the guy.  The next five minutes or so is the girl running through the woods, screaming in almost every shot.  The characters seem to have a hard time navigating branches blocking the path.  At one point, the girl decides to stop screaming, and try hiding.  As soon as she sees the killer again, she resumes screaming.
    This was just the opening kill.

    The whole movie is like this.  Except that about the first half of it is setting things up, getting the main characters lost in the woods.  We have the crazy guy warning them to stay away.
    As I've mentioned, all of the sound seems to be from the camera microphone.  The sound doesn't reach the badness of Birdemic, but it's pretty fuzzy.  The cast all have heavy accents, and combined with the poor sound quality (and lack of subtitles) I had no idea what was being said most of the time.
    That didn't make any difference.

    This movie plays a lot like a cheap homage to Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  There isn't a particular plot, it's just about this event happening to a collection of people.  So all of that dialogue only existed to get a sense of these people being friends, and then argue about being lost.

    The second half of the movie is solidly just people running, screaming through the woods, being chased by the killer.  Some people get bound for a short time.  Whenever there's any combat between characters, it's clear that they don't touch each other.  At one point, a girl hits the killer with a severed limb.  You can hear the hilariously light slapping sound.

    Camera work is reasonable.  The lighting is passable.  For some reason, to show that the car is moving, they use close-ups on the tailpipe twice.

    This sounds like I really didn't like the movie.  While I wouldn't watch it again (except maybe the first 6 minutes) I actually felt like this was more of a high school project.  And as that, they did reasonably well.

67 - Shaun of the Dead (Blu-ray)

    I had been looking forward to seeing Shaun of the Dead back when it came out.  Cathy and I went to see it, and there were about four or five other people in the theater.  I don't know if anyone else seemed to get the number of references the movie made to other, classic zombie movies.

    The plot of the movie is simply that Shaun has been trying to get his life together, despite his slacker friend.  A zombie outbreak provides Shaun with an opportunity to sort out his relationships and take charge of his life.

    Much like with Hot Fuzz, I knew that I liked the movie the first time I saw it.  But I had no idea how much I liked it.  While I like the subject matter of Shaun of the Dead more than Hot Fuzz, I think Hot Fuzz is the superior movie.
    First, the script.  Edgar Wright, along with Simon Pegg (it's hard to tell how much work they each did) wrote a script filled with tiny, amusing moments.  When those moments get called back later on, they feel so much funnier than they were the first time.  The repetition of many of these small things ("Big dogs can't look up") really help to make the viewer feel closer to these guys.  There are also very surreal moments.  The sequence that stands out to me is when Shaun's cast runs into Yvonne's cast.  The bit has every character mirrored with a counterpart.  It's hard to tell if this means anything, but it's just wonderfully strange.
    Second, the editing is so massively crucial to the movie.  Everything lines up into these thrilling beats, where we get to see trivial sequences reduced down to some core shots.  We don't waste time.  It puts a rhythm to the movie that makes everything play perfectly.

    If I have any complaints about the movie, it's that the shift in tone for the last act feels a bit unusual.  This hasn't bothered me since the first time I saw it.

    It's also wonderful to see Lucy Davis and Martin Freeman, both from The Office, appearing in this.