59 - Bad Boys

    Two cops are tasked with tracking down a substantial amount of heroin, stolen from the evidence locker at the precinct, as well as charged with protecting a witness.
    This movie is bad.  I’m reluctant to say that, because I generally look for the good in any movie I see.  There’s still some good in this movie.  The direction is actually pretty interesting.  This was Michael Bay’s first major credit, and he shows a certain amount of restraint.  During the dramatic sequences, he has a flair for some inventive camera work.  Unusual angles, smooth circling of characters.
    During the action sequences, his direction goes down.  The edits get fast, and seem more like filler shots than an effort to tell the story clearly.  He also has a weird tendency to use closer shots than seem right.  Still, these are things that I noticed, but they aren’t as bad as they can get now.
    The real failing that the movie has is the script.  The actual story isn’t bad.  A buddy cop movie, both characters have reasonable arcs.  The heist is an interesting angle as well.  But the script is just terrible.  It comes across tonally confused, behaving mostly like a comedy of mistaken identity, but switching up between action and police procedural.  Even this isn’t terrible.  What’s terrible is that every single thing that happens to advance the plot requires the characters to be complete morons.  No one communicates ideas with each other, everyone acts unreasonably, and the weirdest part is that they don’t seem to act like cops in any sense of the word.  They barely investigate anything.  When they find a dead body, they decide to just root through the room, move the body around a bit, pull papers from under him.  And as far as I can tell, they never let the rest of the police know that this body is out there.  I’m sure they probably do, but it would be nice to have a line where one of them calls them up and says so.
    They maintain ridiculous lies for the sake of sustaining a gag, which would be fine, except that it works against their personalities and the jobs.
    And this is more of a personal gripe.  I hate the dialogue.  Every scene is nonstop winking at the audience, extended jokes and innuendos.  There’s very rarely any actual substance being discussed, nothing that advances the story.
    Yet… this movie had a remarkable impact.  It defined Michael Bay’s style.  It redirected buddy comedies, action movies, and even the approach to “hip” dialogue.  it’s too bad that this didn’t come out in the 80s.  It would have been much more palatable if it didn’t come out as late as 1995.

58 - The Invoking

    Four friends travel to an isolated country property to look at some property that one of them has inherited.
    This is a rare movie for me.  It’s not good.  But I’m hesitant to call it bad.
    It’s got some decent production values.  The photography is generally good, even in some low-light situations.  The bright daytime shots are very nice.  The sound is good.  Usually sound is one of the first areas to suffer when a project is lower budget.  (This can’t be right - IMDB says that it was made for $11,000.
    The effects work is minimal.  Very, very minimal.  The editing is usually fine, but during faster-paced sequences, it’s not quite right.
    There are two points where the movie fell short.  First, the casting.  The dress and actions of the cast suggests that these people are probably college age.  But that conflicts with their appearance.  There were some points where cast members looked much older than I expected them to.
    The other point is that the script wasn’t right.  I don’t like criticizing scripts.  I usually like to speculate about the ways that the story might be adjusted to work better.  In this case, it’s a rare instance where the main idea of the story was pretty good, but the way that idea was supported is all wrong.
    The movie is 82 minutes long, per IMDB.  The first hour of the movie is conversation, wandering around, some character development, and setting up stuff.  Then, at roughly the 1-hour mark, something important happens.  I actually checked to see how long it took to get to this event.
    This event should have been, if not a starting point, at least happened at the 45-minute mark.  Ideally, the sooner to the beginning this event happened, the better the movie would have felt.
    As a result of this, the last 20 minutes of the movie are all that matters.  I won’t remember anything about the first hour of this movie.
    The dryness of the first hour is accentuated by the minimal use of music.  When there was music, I actually liked it a fair amount.  It was minimalist, but it was evocative.  Perfectly fine.  But there are long stretches of slow conversation with no music.  No taut editing to make these sequences interesting.
    Again, I reiterate that I didn’t hate this.  I’m impressed with the work they did with such a tiny budget.  But some more workshopping of the script might have made a big difference.

57 - Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones

    A pair of friends in a latino community deal with one of them being marked for possession by a demon.
    This is interesting, because it directly ties into the Paranormal Activity movies, but it plays quite a bit differently.
    Most of the Paranormal Activity movies use a structure that focuses heavily on a single location - usually at least one house, and occasional other areas.  This movie has action happening all over a neighborhood, even if it centers in a few locations.  The camera is handheld through almost the entire movie, which is a big difference.  There’s less time spent building tension, and more time spent on action.  I think that’s where the picture has a failing.
    The things that I’ve liked about the other movies has been a sense of mystery.  We get very gradual clues about what is happening, even if we know that they’re dealing with a demon.  The movie functioned almost like a Where’s Waldo image, where we were trained to keep an eye on everything possible to pick up on even the slightest movements and changes.  This one downplays that tend in exchange for bigger things jumping in front of the camera.  Not something that I hate, just something that doesn’t have as much flavor as the alternative.
    The story isn’t too bad.  It’s nice that it connects into the rest of the series, and it adds just about the right amount to the overarching story.
    The one element that I actually liked a lot was the amount of cultural information we get.  I found myself enjoying the community for the most part.
    Still, not as fun as the other ones, but useful for mythology purposes.

56 - The Producers

    A down-on-his-luck producer recruits an accountant in a scheme to oversell shares of a surefire flop.
    It’s been a long time, but the movie is remarkably indelible.  I still remembered specific shots, a lot of the dialogue, and a lot of the music.
    First, both Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder are perfect.  I’ve been a big fan of Zero Mostel because of his spectacular performance in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.  Gene Wilder has always been solidly great, but he reminds me a little of Kevin Kline, in that he’s a nearly perfect comedic actor who disappears so completely into his roles that it’s hard to notice that it’s him doing that work.
    Second, the script is really good.  I have a few reservations about it, but they’re minimal.  The problem is that the first scene is so great that it’s hard to keep that quality flowing through the whole thing.
    I actually found myself thinking of Blazing Saddles during this, and the way that Mel Brooks has changed over time.  I think that this and Blazing Saddles are actually the pinnacle of his work.  Many of the other movies have some great moments, but most of them lack the heart that this one does.  The theatrical sequences in this movie actually look like a dry run for the big musical number in Blazing Saddles (which could be viewed as a dry run for The Inquisition number in History of the World.)
    I think I should seek out some of Zero Mostel’s other work.  I think I would be a little more disappointed by his dramatic work, since I love his comedic work so much.
    Also note - the artwork for the Blu-ray release of this is fantastic.  I wish I could have used it here, but it's hard to find a good image of it online.

55 - Do You Like My Basement?

    A filmmaker attempts to make a horror movie showcasing genuine fear.
    A low, low budget movie.  From my light research, it was less than fifty thousand.  This isn’t a bad thing.  The project is best served by ultra-low-budget work, and it’s pleasing to see that the project didn’t aim too high.  It’s a shaky-cam production, but it seems to be kept to a minimum.
    I do feel a little conflicted about the quality of the script.  It’s not terrible, but it seems to be a little light on plot progression.  The vast majority of the movie is spent accumulating victims in preparation for a very brief finale.  There isn’t much tension, since we never get any feeling like the main character has any risk of being caught.
    In this sense, the movie reminds me a lot of some of the grand guignol horror movies of the seventies.  (Checking wiki for an article on this, that redirects to Psycho-Biddy.  That isn’t what I mean.  I think I’m looking for stuff like Bloodsucking Freaks.)  As much as it seems to avoid plot development by just focusing on characters in dangerous situations, it’s actually very tame.  Next to no gore, and most of it is saved for an ending sequence.
    This movie isn’t for everyone.  But it’s a very good effort for limited budget and limited sets.

54 - Cabin Fever: Patient Zero

    Three guys and a girl travel to an isolated island to camp out overnight as a bachelor party.  Shortly after arriving, they fall victim to a terrible virus, and find a research facility that was working on curing the virus.
    It’s sad to say that I was pretty bored by this.  It’s hard for me to point to anything in particular that was wrong with the project.  The photography during the first half was really very nice.  Very well lit, some nice vivid colors.  Once the story reaches the outbreak portion, it starts going downhill.
    I kept finding myself wondering what exactly was wrong with the movie.
    When I think back to what worked about the original Cabin Fever, I think the primary strength it has is the misdirection.  That movie misdirects the audience into thinking that it’s a teen slasher, but betrays every audience expectation by turning it into a viral outbreak movie.  Crossing that with some heavier gore sensibilities, and a bit of paranoia, it was a very fun and unpredictable movie.
    This one seems to mostly focus on characters turning into very gory versions of themselves, and then fighting.  There are two bits in particular that stood out as being especially weird and fairly dumb.
    First, a guy who is very far along with the disease attempts to fire a gun, and the kickback of the gun tears his hand off, and flips the gun so that it embeds in his face.  Strangely, they don’t address what happens to the bullet that he fired.
    Second, two female characters are half-rotted.  Lots of skin missing.  I think we see one of them showing exposed organs.  They decide to have a fight on a beach.  They tumble around, punching and choking each other.  All the while I’m wondering how they have the energy for this.  I think that flesh rotting off you would really take some of the fight out of your spirits.
    By the end, the story is just a prequel to the first two Cabin Fever movies, but it doesn't actually provide any insight into them.

    One other thing I was a little disappointed with.  I was hoping that the two stories being told in parallel would have a different relationship to each other.  I was hoping that the research lab story would turn out to be the backstory to the other story.  That would be a much cooler structure.

53 - "Crocodile" Dundee II

    Mick Dundee and his girl wind up getting mixed up with a drug lord, who tracks them to Australia and confronts Mick on his own territory.
    I remember that I saw this in theaters, but I didn’t remember anything other than that the plot involved drugs, and I remember seeing Dundee sneaking around outside the mansion.  And I remembered the opening scene, of him fishing with dynamite.
    I was really surprised at this one.  It’s actually a pleasant movie.  It’s not great, and it doesn’t have anything important to say, but the performances are dialed to exactly the right level.  When they have a terrible joke to work with, they don’t try to sell it as a better joke.  The effect that this has is that I never felt annoyed at the movie.
    The biggest weakness is the villain.  He’s not terribly done, but he’s just a little too cartoonish.
    The structure is a little strange.  The first half of the movie is firmly in NY, and the second half relocates to Australia.  Normally I have some issues with this kind of a structure, but it plays out pretty well here.  There was a small amount of dead weight during the first half, but it’s trivial stuff.  It’s all played for fun, and it’s interesting enough that the lack of contribution to the plot is forgivable.
    I really thought I would be more disappointed with this, but it held up better than my memories of it.

52 - Captain America: The First Avenger

    Captain America is created, then serves his country in pursuit of the Red Skull, an evil mastermind running a Nazi research division, Hydra.
    You know I love this one.
    Captain America is developed perfectly.  He’s actually more likable than he is in the comics.  If there are any failings, it’s that he’s too perfect.  It probably would be useful if he made some kind of mistake.  Maybe his guilt over Bucky’s death?
    I did realize one issue that bugs me.  It’s the logical problems of the last act.  Cap takes a plane that the Red Skull is planning on using to attack NY.  The problem of him being frozen in the Arctic doesn’t make much sense.  Where did he leave from?  What made it unsafe to attempt to land?  Some extra script police could have addressed this issue.

51 - The Descent

    A group of girlfriends go spelunking, led by their friend, who has put them into an uncharted cave.
    I remember this movie being incredibly tense when I saw it in theaters.  It’s a strange thing, that watching a confined space on a large screen works remarkably well, possibly better than the same picture on a smaller screen.
    I like this movie, but I always feel like there’s something a little off about it.  It was easy to dismiss the creatures in the movie as being too silly, almost like a rip-off of Golum.
    The first time you see this movie, it’s easy for the mid-movie twist to seem way too strange.  It’s actually easier to accept the movie the second time through.
    There’s a main failing to the movie, and it’s a shame to say it.  I feel like I can’t identify many of the characters.  A few of them stand out and are easy to recognize and keep in my mind.  But then there are a few of them that I just can’t recognize.  I have no idea what they’ve done during the movie.  This makes it a bit harder to care about their predicament, and harder to feel invested in their interactions.
    One thing that really stood out this time was the fantastic sound design of the movie.  I mean… it’s damn good.  I was listening on headphones, and I kept on having to take one ear off to check if I was hearing rain picking up.  There are a lot more foreshadowing nuances that I hadn’t noticed, and I’m not even sure if I noticed them in the theater.
    I’m also amazed to find out that they shot all of the cave material on a soundstage.  I had been blown away by how spectacular that stuff looked in the theaters, and it still looks very real to my eyes.  Amazing.
    I recommend this movie to a lot of horror fans, but I think it’s gotten a mixed reception.  Some people just don’t understand it at the end, some people are turned off by the slip between a very real horror story into a more fantasy horror.  There’s something to be learned there, about the effects that audience expectation have on reception.

50 - Urban Legends: Final Cut

    At a film school, a student attempts to make a movie based on a serial killer knocking off victims according to urban legends.  Gradually, people around her start dying.
    This is exactly what I’ve been looking for.  It’s not a great movie at all.  It’s kind of ridiculous, but there’s a charm to this.  It bounces along at a good pace, the dialogue is just campy enough to make it work.
    Since it’s set at a film school, as they’re making their projects, there’s obviously going to be a whole lot of scene-with-a-scene sequences.  Even when you know they’re going to be doing them, it’s pretty enjoyable being able to spend the time focusing on when you first figure it out.
    There’s a level of silliness to the movie too.  There are bizarre absurdities, the 911 operator who won’t believe a fairly reasonable complaint, some goofy guys who are into doing effects work, and the most egregious idea of all - after a character dies, his twin brother shows up.
    Even as this silly stuff swirls all over the place, it’s easy to overlook it because the tone of the movie was done right.  Even though the movie is framed as a horror movie, it doesn’t play like one.  It plays like a self-aware horror-comedy.  There’s very little effort at creating genuine tension, and that seems like the right choice.  Taking this story too seriously would just make it worse.
    By the end, it felt like the director and screenwriter were having fun with this movie, even if the cast wasn’t in on the joke.

49 - The Wall

    A woman finds herself imprisoned on a bucolic tract of land by some kind of an invisible wall.
    I can’t remember how this was categorized, but it was probably because of my interest in horror movies.  It’s not really a horror movie, and it’s not really sci-fi.  It’s a drama.  The horror of being isolated is not a focus, and neither is the nature of the wall keeping her apart.  We never get anything that suggests an explanation.
    It’s still an interesting exploration of the role that mankind plays in nature.  There are peculiar weaknesses to the story.  Namely, I occasionally would realize that I didn’t feel like I had an understand of the main character’s personality.  I know what she does.  I know what she cares about.  But with the absence of everything else, it doesn’t seem like it defines her personality any more.
    For example, let’s say that there is one song in the world.  No new music will ever be recorded, performed, anything at all.  Liking that song suddenly is no longer an element that builds personality.
    There are other strange qualities to her behavior.  I would think she would be more desperate for contact, and I think the dog would be invited to sleep in her bed.  She doesn’t actually seem to be on especially friendly terms with the dog.  They get along, but she doesn’t pay much attention to it.  There are very few moments where she seems to care about it in a way that is more than passive.

48 - 28 Days Later

    After a rage virus destroys most of the population of England, a few survivors seek out refuge at a military camp.
    A perennial favorite.  Every time I watch it, I find certain sequences remarkable.  I forget about how powerful certain visuals - and certain sequences - are.  As a result, I start watching it for the remarkable scene where Jim wakes up and wanders a deserted city.  Then I forget about how amazing the battle at the castle is.
    My wife found this movie more distressing when she first saw it.  I didn’t find the ending as powerful, but on repeat viewings, I pay closer attention to the performances during the entire military sequence.  As I get better at distinguishing all the soldier and their personalities, I find this part of the movie much more eerie.
    I still feel a little conflicted about how the movie is shot.  I don’t mind the kind of grainy, low-resolution photography, and I think it works well for this movie.  When frustrates me more is the heavy use of weird angles and incredibly fast cuts.  Again - if I can’t tell what’s happening, I don’t get scared.  I used to be more annoyed by how the last act seems especially difficult to follow because of the lower light.  Now, I think it could be better, but it’s not as bad.
    The strangest weakness that the movie has is how there’s a stretch of calm, safe living during a stretch in the middle.  It’s an effective tool to make the last act a bit more powerful, but I wonder what the experience of the movie would be like if there were more tension leading up to it.

47 - The Haunting of Helena

    A young girl is haunted by a ghost, who demands that the girl find the ghost’s missing teeth.
    An Italian production, and that’s a good thing.  If this were a strictly American movie, it wouldn’t have as much flavor to it.  Transplanting the action helps to make the story feel slightly more original than it is.
    This isn’t a bad movie.  For a ghost story, it’s actually pretty good.  But The problem is that it doesn’t feel original for a long time.  This made me wonder about the tropes that ghost stories fall into.  I felt like this was a pretty standard story.  Kid is haunted by a spooky ghost, who wants something.  (The Golden Arm)  The mother gets involved and investigates person who died.  Everything comes together.
    Substantial spoilers.

    At the end, roughly the last ten minutes or so, we get a more complete version of what happened.  The person who died after having her teeth ripped out was actually an evil person; she killed and ate several children in the neighborhood.  After her husband finds out, he rips her teeth out, and leaves her in a closet to die.  The ghost is still desperately searching for her teeth.  Once we learn that the lady was evil, there’s a great reversal.  Suddenly, we realize that the main characters have been pulling in the wrong direction.
    This is a very pleasing ending, especially since it doesn’t have the resolution that The Ring does.  The Ring just makes it clear that the main characters are done with the curse, but that they’re passing it on.  In this case, they have let this evil force free, and there’s really no way to re-contain her.  It’s a bleak ending.  I’m glad they went with it.  Too often, horror movies, and ghost stories in particular, rely on a sense of paranormal logic, something that makes intrinsic sense, but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

    Watching this made me realize that it’s really hard to tell a good ghost story.  I should examine the cliches of ghost stories and see if there’s something a little more original to tell.

46 - Batman Returns

    Batman takes on Max Shreck, an evil businessman who has allied himself with the Penguin, a deformed gang leader.  Catwoman shows up to take revenge on Max as well.
    Back when I first saw Batman Returns, I was disappointed.  I remember feeling like this story wasn’t as well paced.  The sense of surprise was lessened.  The action wasn’t as remarkable.  Of course, my impression of the movie has changed, especially when I compare it to the first Batman.
    I think that last time I saw this, I was more impressed.  I liked how manic things seemed.  The fantastic costumes, the holiday aspect combined with the gothic mayhem.  It was impressive.  I think I’ve reached a happy medium with this one.
    It’s a supremely uneven movie.  It takes characteristics of the first Batman, and stretches those ideas further in both directions.  I reached this conclusion late in this viewing, like in the last 15 minutes or so.  I was focused on some of the script elements, and how I would have a difficult time writing something like this.
    (Side explanation.  I was thinking of a scene where the Penguin appears on the surface, having “rescued” a baby from an acrobatic criminal clown.  The clown grabs the baby, and flips down into an open manhole.  Even though this scene is a set-up, I find this really difficult to believe.  Not the flipping around, even if he’s carrying a baby.  What I find hard to believe is the idea that people would be crowded around an open manhole.  The escape route into an open manhole is just too difficult for me to fathom writing something like that.)
    I realized that this movie has a wide range of very comic-book moments.  The Penguin’s gang bringing out a massive present, and all of the gang exploding out of it?  The entire army of penguins?  The car that Penguin uses to control the Batmobile?  It’s campy, almost like the Adam West Batman, but it has a layer of grime on all of these elements, which helps to identify it as Tim Burton’s work.
    The other direction is also pulled in.  The darkness of the movie gets a bit darker.  The Penguin is much more grotesque than the Joker was in the first one.  Not just by virtue of being an uglier character, but his plan seems much more evil.  The inky stuff pouring from his mouth is a fantastic touch.  The style of fat that they made him is remarkable; he’s a very lumpy type of fat, which is much less endearing than the Burgess Meredith-type of rotund design.
    There’s a higher body count.  Batman does kill people, but he does it with a type of detachment that makes it easy to ignore that he’s doing it.
    The plot is more tricky to follow than most kids would be able to enjoy - Shreck building an unnecessary power plant as part of a scheme to bilk money from Gotham.
    The biggest failing that the movie has is a lack of focus on Batman.  Keaton does a fine job, but there’s just not that much to work with.  Most of the movie is taken up with all of the other characters.  Batman isn’t a focus so much, he’s used as a mirror for Penguin and Catwoman, and to a lesser extent, Shreck.  It’s a bit of a disappointment that he doesn’t play a bigger part.

45 - The Lego Movie

    An every-Lego-man finds himself in possession of a foretold mystical piece, which puts him on a wild adventure to prevent President Business from gluing the Lego world in place.
    I had read some wildly positive reviews of this.  It’s damn good.  It moves really fast, there are gags flying everywhere.  The camera work is inventive.  It’s not predictable at all.  And despite this madcap unpredictability, at the core, there’s a very simple, predictable formula.  This isn’t a bad thing.  It’s just an oddity.
    What’s more remarkable about the movie is how much they actually captured the childhood joy of Legos.  Now and then I lament the inability to craft stories that just jump from one event to the next without much rhyme or reason.  I found that this movie was able to capture that type of nonsensical storytelling and marry it to a standard adventure storyline.
    At its heart, the movie is about the fun of creativity.  There’s a place for regimented play that uses instructions, but that the real joy comes from breaking the plans apart, and making your own toys.
    If I have any complaints about the movie, they’re limited.  I felt like it suffered from the same problem that Hook had - action sequences with way too much stuff happening.  This might change with repeat viewings.
    Still, a damn good movie.