102 - The Signal

    In the city of Terminus, a signal goes out on TV, radio, and all phones, which messes with everyone's brains.  A couple having an affair, and her husband, make their way to the train station, hoping to put everything in order.
    That summary doesn't make the story clear.
    This movie is directed, and written by, the same three people.  Each of them got to write and direct a third of the movie.  Despite this, there's still a certain fluidity to the movie.  Each section has a slightly different tone, but the direction is similar.
    The first section sets up the characters, and covers the time just as the signal has started to affect people.  At first, it seems like everyone is just aimlessly violent, and looking to kill whoever is near.  As the story develops, and moves into the second part, it's made clear that things aren't as direct as that.  People aren't just violent, but they are paranoid, and they get easily confused.  This is also a hard thing to explain without seeing how things are directed.  People get confused about identity, not just who other people are, but they get confused about who they are.  People imagine things happening that can't happen - like a decapitated head being jump-started, requesting a cigarette, and providing information.
    The last act isn't as strong, but it's needed.  It brings some sense of closure to the movie.

    I've seen this movie three times now, and I'm always struck by how well it works.  It's confusing, and many things aren't answered, but it always feels like I'm getting the experience I should be getting.  Some people would be disappointed by the ambiguity of the story, or the obviousness of naming the city Terminus.  But I like how fun it is.  It's confusing without feeling like they just slapped it together.  The middle act is surprisingly violent.  And the whole thing remains in my head better than many modern horror movies.

101 - The Limey

    A recently released British criminal takes a trip to LA to investigate the circumstances of his daughter's death.  He uncovers some gang activity, leading him toward a record producer.
    Honestly, I don't have much to say about this.  it's not bad… but for some reason, I found it more difficult to focus on.  It ended well, but the character building leading up to that point just seemed a little too quiet.
    The direction was modestly interesting, with some odd layering of sound and footage.  Steven Soderbergh directed this, and I've been impressed with his other work.  The cast is also excellent.  It's always a pleasure to see Luis Guzman, and Terrance Stamp is fantastic.  Lesley Ann Warren is in here, and she's only improved with age.

100 - The Girl Next Door

    A documentary on Stacy Valentine, a retired porn star.
    This movie shares a title with two other recent movies - the 2004 movie about a guy who has a porn star move in next door, and a 2007 horror movie that I started watching, but was too difficult to watch.
     So this kept showing up in a lot of my horror and teen comedy searches.

    Like many documentaries, it's actually kind of depressing.  But it does paint a picture that isn't as dramatic as Boogie Nights, but is more personally sad.

    Stacy Valentine never got past most of her insecurities.  But she has also learned to split her life into separate areas, and let certain things roll off her.
    She has a good relationship with her parents.  She wasn't mistreated as a child, but her ex-husband was a jerk… but it isn't too specific.  She indicates that she was scared of him.
    She has tricky difficulties with her personal relationships.  These aren't easy to explain, since try to address these problems early, and claim that they ignore them.  And then it turns out that they can't.
    We get to see how her self-image issues affect her.  She goes in for surgery twice during this movie, the first time involves mostly having a breast reduction done.  The second time has her getting liposuction, and getting her lips done.  Both of these scenes are exactly as clinical as you would expect.
    Close to the end, there are two really dark moments right before she wins a French award.  First, as she's taking photos with some fans, one guy tries to grab her.  It flies by really quickly, but you can see the annoyance on her face, and she lifts her arms up and walks away.  The other one is that she does some 'escorting' work while she's in France.  It appears to be a single job, and she clearly is well paid for it, but seeing her talking afterward, it clearly is kind of distressing.  She frames it as being upset that she has effectively cheated on her boyfriend, but something else seems off about it.
    There's a lot of nudity, but it doesn't feel like it.  It feels more like she's walking around in a costume most of the time.

99 - Meatballs

    Summer fun at a camp, starring Bill Murray.

    I love camp movies.  I went to camp between 3rd or 4th grade, up through around Freshman year of high school.  The experience varied a lot, and some years were just great, but toward the end it wasn't that good.
    My favorite camp movie is Poison Ivy, a 1984 TV movie starring Michael J. Fox.  But I suppose Meatballs can be a close second.  It's been a long time since I saw it, and my impression has softened.  It's really a very clean comedy.  There are occasional moments of risqué humor, but it's all very appropriate to the age groups.
    While the movie stars Bill Murray, he's more restrained than he could be.  He's having a good time, but he seems very in control of his humor.  This actually an interesting distinction.  He uses his humor in a responsible way.  He doesn't pick on anyone in a cruel way, and the humor is often self-depreciating.  For a charismatic person, he's more likable than they usually are.

    The rest of the staff is where the movie really works for me.  The staff is… realistic.  There's an assortment of attractive and unattractive characters, but despite limited character development opportunities, I can believe who they are.

    There's a lot of humor, but most of it doesn't play like most comedies do.  The moments are played like they are real, and the direction doesn't push you to laugh at it.  The result is that the movie feels funny, but it has a sweetness to it, like it's stirred up the things that were wonderful about camp.

    Sadly, I kind of wish there were a bit more content involving the campers, rather than so much focus on the CITs.  But it remains summer camp fun.

98 - The Adjustment Bureau

    A promising young politician loses his Senate election, and shortly before delivering a concession speech, meets a woman who inspires him.  This leads to him discovering that an outside force is charged with manipulating people's lives in an effort to conform mankind into a pre-written plan.  The politician fights this, in an effort to keep his love.

    This is a very hard movie to write a summary for.  And despite a 7 on IMDB, it's actually better than that.  I'd probably put it up to 8.5 or so.
    I wish I could articulate the ideas in this more clearly.  There's a lot about free will, and how it applies to what the Bureau does.  Is it worse to know that your future is dictated?  At first, it's easy to think that it would be horrible.  But then it feels like it might be kind of reassuring, if you know that everything will turn out fine.  What's most comfortable is if we don't know the answer to that question.  If we don't know, we can claim that everything is predetermined, so we can wash our hands of our failures.  We can also believe that we can work our way out of our circumstances, and rise above our state.
    There are some issues, which aren't tackled as clearly as they should be, about the responsibility of the individual.  If the politician (David Norris, played by Matt Damon) opts to continue his relationship with his love, the side effects are made clear.  It will most likely prevent him from becoming President eventually, and he's willing to accept that, but it also will derail his love's future, turning her from a very famous dancer and choreographer to teaching ballet to 6-year-olds.  While her future changes his position, there didn't seem to be any consideration of the rest of the world.  If he isn't President, who would be?  And what kind of impact would that have?

    At the heart of this movie, it's a romance, and it's a strangely appropriate one.  I believe in their relationship.  While I didn't like her style of flirting when they meet on the bus, she becomes a more likable person throughout the movie.

    I think that I understand why there's an audience that didn't like this movie though, and I think it has to do with the means by which the Bureau works.  They use hats as an identifier, allowing them to use doorways around the city as shortcuts between locations.  This never bothered me.  The  nature of the Bureau is supernatural, and vaguely religious.  We aren't supposed to understand how the hats work.
    While this is only the second time I've watched it, I think I'll keep coming back to it every now and then.

97 - The Bourne Supremacy

    Jason Bourne is pulled out of hiding when he's framed for the murder of two government operatives at a buy.  An agent kills Bourne's girlfriend, and Bourne goes after Treadstone in an effort to find out why they came after him.

    Supremacy is actually my least favorite Bourne movie.  The other two have a little more heart to them, and this one feels just a little bleaker than the others.  There's less time spent with Bourne searching who he is, and a little more time with Bourne being a bit out of control.
    The good stuff; the villain is much more suitably evil.  Brian Cox plays a Cheney-esque guy named Ward Abbott, and there's nothing that seems redeeming about him.  He's convinced he's more aware of the situation than anyone else (partly with good reason, but he's sure he can outsmart Bourne).  He's condescending to Pamela Landy, who seems to be the only person focusing on actually completing her mission.  The movie takes an interesting turn, by having this guy get his hands dirty, killing someone.  While the character was villainous enough already, this may just be a sign that he's losing control of his situation.
    The car chase is a sticking point.  While it's much more ambitious than the chase in the first movie, it also lost some of the appeal.  During the first movie's chase, Bourne was actually very careful.  I just checked it again to make sure, and he's very precise.  He handles the car perfectly, and doesn't hit anyone.  He scrapes the underside a bit.  All of the car accidents that happen are the police following him.  And even when those happen, they don't look like especially brutal accidents.  One van tips over, but it doesn't look like the sort of thing that would kill someone.
    In a certain way, I feel like the actual plot of the movie is centered around Landy and Abbott's story.
    But Bourne also gets some absolution with a small plot that has him trying to move on.

    I've also just noticed that I've seen Brian Cox appear in a lot of movies, but I never notice him.  Rushmore, Super Troopers, The Ring, X-Men 2, Trick 'r Treat… and a few more.

96 - Magnum Force

    Further adventures of Detective Callahan.  This time, the primary plot involves someone posing as a traffic cop who is killing criminals.
    I felt a little conflicted about the first movie, since I thought it seemed silly that a cop wouldn't know that he has to follow certain protocol in order to get a conviction.  This time, Harry's role is reversed.
    I'm sure there will be some spoilers.
    While Harry remains flip, and can be casually rude to authority figures, he behaves much more appropriately.  We see him not just catch criminals, but we also see him doing some more serious investigation - some ballistics comparisons.  Throughout the movie, he remains measured, even a bit cautious.
    We also get more character development as well.  The estranged wife of another cop tries to seduce him.  A girl who lives in his apartment building also has some sort of relationship with him.  These plots mostly just serve to make him come across as being a desirable guy.  But it also shows that his aloofness applies to his personal life as well.

    There were a few technical issues.  Occasionally, the film seemed be out of focus.  I have a suspicion that they were trying to work with some auto-focus tool, since it seemed to be always in shots over someone's shoulder, as they talk to another person.
    But there were some very good choices made in handling the production.  During the last fifteen minutes or so, I noticed that, despite an intense chase, and a cat-and-mouse sequence, there was very little music.  This was exactly the right choice.  You can hear exactly what he hears, and the tension is raised perfectly.  Callahan also isn't a fantastic fighter.  He's an excellent shot, but in hand-to-hand, he seems tough, but not especially skilled.

    There were a few other things of note - they toned down some of the less admirable qualities, including some implied racism from the first movie.  And I don't think anyone actually calls him Dirty Harry in this one.

95 - Don Juan DeMarco

    A young man, claiming to be the legendary Don Juan, is placed in a mental institution after a suicidal act.  He shares his story with his psychiatrist, who is influenced to liven up his marriage.

    This movie never got the praise I think it deserved.  The script is excellent, the direction is solid, and the photography is fantastic, especially during the fantasy sequences in Mexico.  There are a few awkward edits, but they aren't horrible, just minor continuity things.
    To be honest, I've never cared for Brando.  I've seen him in On The Waterfront, Superman, and The Island of Dr. Moreau.  He's never stood out to me.  He mumbles a lot.  He's not especially convincing.
    There's a massive dose of charm supporting this movie.  It's hard to feel anything bad about Depp's lead, and his influence on Brando's psychiatrist is wonderful.

    The message of the movie is primarily that love is the most important thing, and that there's no good reason to settle into a routine.  The idolatry of women is also a recurring theme, which is covered nicely.
    I'm curious about how the ideas in this resonate with women.

94 - The Ring

    Watching a cursed video leads to a phone call warning that the viewer will die in 7 days.  A journalist, her estranged boyfriend, and her son all investigate the origin of this curse in a race to save themselves before the 7 days are up.

    That summary made it sound much more silly than it is.
    When I first saw The Ring in theaters, I don't remember how much I knew about the premise.  I know that I saw it in a fairly crowded theater with Cathy, and it was really scary.  While I was a bit creeped out when I saw The Haunting the first time, this really stayed with me.  It was hard to get to sleep that night, and for most of the next week.

    Nearly ever horror movie starts with a kill to set up what it is that we should be scared of.  This sequence has such a massive amount of tension that it easily sets up the horror for the rest of the movie.
    The direction is fantastic.  The angles are chosen carefully, the focus is shifted perfectly, and we get these tiny things to make us jump just a little.  We can see a slight reflection of the room while we're in the kitchen.  When the TV turns on in the next room, we can see that light in the reflection.  It's a tiny change, but it's very effective.
    Not just the small things, but the large things are handled really well.  Once the opening sequence reaches a climax, the movie gets going on the core plot.  We're still curious about exactly what happened at the end of that opening.  We get a few hints, and then when we least expect it, we get a flashback shot that shows what happened.  This sort of sucker-punch keeps us terrified.

    There are a lot of things I really like about this movie, but I have some complaints, but they are common to most Japanese horror.  How much a story makes sense is less important than the effects it has.  As a result, there are many Japanese horror movies I've seen that have some really effective scares, but the story is mostly nonsensical.  This, being the American version, is much more straightforward, but we still have a strange reliance on symbols.  Things that appear in the video also appear in the 'real world,' but the meaning of those things seems to rely too heavily on just being creepy, rather than being a more functional part of the story.

    This was my first time watching this on Blu-ray, and it's great.  The tint of the movie leans heavily toward a greenish and bluish look, and some of the colors have been washed out.
    There's another thing that's bugging me about the movie.  Most of it distinctly takes place near Seattle, WA.  But there are a few things that imply it's taking place near the Boston area.  Characters refer to other students going to Revere.  And a news report talks about a student being from the Back Bay area.  I considered that these might also have locations near Seattle.  And they don't.  At least not that I can find by Google maps.

93 - Prometheus

    A spaceship crew goes on a mission to find the origin of life on Earth, hopefully.

    I enjoy the Alien movies quite a bit.  I wasn't too thrilled when I heard that Ridley Scott was planning on revisiting the movies though.  I guess I just didn't expect that he would be able to pull it off.  He's too big a name, and the budget was too big to prevent studio interference.

    And then Scott goes off into pushing how this isn't going to be an Alien prequel.  And it isn't, but it has so many ties to the Alien franchise that it's dumb to say it isn't a prequel.  It has a massive amount of connections, but they aren't written to connect to the other movies.

    I'm not angry at this movie for failing to meet up to my expectations of being another Alien movie.  I'm really disappointed.  The story has a whole lot of promise, but the execution wasn't handled properly.  The universe is nicely developed, and the movie holds interest very well, but there are so many massive questions raised, and not answered, and those issues turn it from a movie that showed promise into a movie that spits in your eye with indifference to wanting explanations.

92 - Three Amigos

    Three silent-era movie stars answer a distress telegram from Mexico, and wind up inadvertently facing off against a real outlaw and his gang.

    I'm a pretty huge fan of Steve Martin, but I never had any interest in seeing this one.  I didn't even know what the premise was.  I knew that it was a fairly popular comedy when it came out.
    I'm happy to say that Steve Martin did fine.  Chevy Chase did too, and Martin Short.  In fact, everyone did a great job.  But the problem was that the script just wasn't strong enough.  It's got some great gags, and a good number of pleasantly amusing sequences.  But it seems very timid, a neutered kind of humor.  And the laughs don't come as steadily as they should.  The western feel of the movie kept making me think of Blazing Saddles, except it wasn't nearly as risqué as that one is.

    That isn't to say that it isn't fun.  It's entirely worth watching.  I have one technical complaint.  During certain sequences, the camera has a slight panning to it.  The frame is supposed to be steady, but the camera slowly moves left and right, just a tiny bit.  I tried to find information about if this was intentional online, but I couldn't find anything.

91 - Carhops

    Here's the description used by Netflix-

    "Kitty (Kitty Carl) has had it with her nagging mother, so she heads out on her own. But this slinky sex kitten doesn't have grand hopes or dreams -- she just wants to make it with a handsome stud. There are plenty of willing guys to choose from, but can poor Kitty find the kind of heavy petting she needs to be satisfied? Notorious erotic film star Uschi Digard co-stars in this erotic cult classic."

    So you get the idea.  It's a solo, reverse American Pie.

    This movie came out in 1975, but it's easily one of the most dated movies I've seen.  Technical problems abound, and not easily forgivable ones.  The print looks pretty bad, and I don't care much about that.  But the sound and the lighting is bad.  Usually, this isn't too much of a problem, since the dialogue isn't too important.  But the one reveal in the movie, during the last shot, is completely destroyed because we can't see who the guy is.
    The sense of humor is hard to evaluate.  I think there is some funny stuff here, but it's hurt because of the poor sound quality.

    The thing that really stands out is how peculiar the attitudes are.  There's a broad acceptance of all sorts of sexual harassment.  There's an outright approval of prostitution, even within the context of a relationship.  Then there's a sequence where the mother expresses her disapproval of blacks.  There are two instances where characters talk about "faggots."  For a movie that seemed to have a carefree atmosphere, these seem like odd areas to include oppressive messages.

    Overall, the movie isn't erotic at all.  There's not much of a reason to suggest this movie, except as an interestingly dated curio.

    And I was annoyed that the title was misleading.  Some girls work as carhops during the first five minutes.  Then we forget about their jobs.

90 - The Last Temptation of Christ

    Where do I begin?
    This is a retelling of Jesus's life, from his calling to divinity, to his death.  It is not based on the Bible, although that is used as a framework.

    I have watched this before, and I was very impressed.  I've had the Criterion DVD for awhile, and I moved up to the Criterion Blu-ray recently, so it was entirely worth another watch.

    I'm not a religious person at all.  I have a lot of contempt for the things that people do in the name of their religion, and I specifically believe that religion doesn't necessarily inspire doing good things, but it does inspire justification for not doing the right thing.

    So it seems only fitting that the people who felt wildly offended by Last Temptation were those who professed to be devoutly religious.  We see those people in the movie.  When Jesus finishes his sermon on the mount (which is roughly as aimless as possible, although he gets more focused on his point the longer he goes) he makes it a point that they need to love everything.  He makes his way to a point about how everyone's roles will be reversed, how the the hungry will be full, and so forth.  Then…

"…the rich will be poor forever!"

To which his audience reacts with

"Kill the rich!"

    Jesus is much more likable in this than he is in the Bible.  He's completely confused about what he's supposed to do.  He seems more human, and less mystical.

    The performances are generally great.  While Dafoe is noteworthy, I really feel like Harvey Keitel is the highlight.  His Judas is just perfect.
     There's another thing I don't care for - Peter Gabriel's music.  While the music itself is fine, the production and arrangement comes off sounding silly, almost like they were trying to draw parallels to Godspell.

89 - Resident Evil: Afterlife

    After an army of clones of Alice take their revenge on Umbrella in Japan, Alice tries to find a safe haven in a place called Arcadia in Alaska. Then Alice makes her way down to Los Angeles, finding a small group of survivors living in a prison.  Then she finds that there's an Arcadia off the coast nearby, a large ship.

    The fourth Resident Evil theatrical movie is roughly as much fun as the third one was.  And I feel similarly about both of them.
    I like them, and it's hard to justify why I do.  I own Resident Evil: Extinction, as well as this one.  I remember seeing the first two movies in the theater, and feeling disappointed, and sort of confused by them.  But when I saw these two, I was able to ignore the problems that having an incomprehensible plot brings.
    One thing that usually sticks out is that there are characters and creatures introduced without any work put in to identify them.  About halfway through this movie, we start to see the Axeman.  He's a massive guy, wearing an executioner's hood, dragging a giant sledgehammer/axe.  We see him approaching the jail.  Then we see him working on hammering down the gate outside the prison.  One of the characters shoots him in the head.  This doesn't seem to slow him down.  Then we get to have a fight between the two female leads and him.  Suddenly, he's vulnerable to gunfire.

    I did some research afterward, and found that the Axeman does exist in the games, but doesn't play a role anything near what this was.  But do I mind that they invented a unique character, they skipped over what it is, how it came to exist, what motivation is has… and instead made it into a conspicuous plot device to force them to leave the prison.
    There's also a massive gap in the story.  After leaving the prison by the sewers, the next we see the characters, they're on a boat on the way to the Arcadia.  There is a line of dialogue that sets this up, saying that they would follow the sewers to the coast.  But it's actually a little jarring.

    Seeing the movie on Blu-ray was interesting.  Some of the sequences look amazing.  There's a lot of slow-motion in this movie, and those sequences were shot originally at 200 frames per second, which comes off incredibly clear.  But there's also an absurd amount of CG work in the movie, and a lot of that looks very processed.  Is that a problem?  Actually, no.  I still feel just as good about this as I ever have.