76 - The Student Nurses

    Four student nurses have a personal adventures, learning about life, love, and so forth.
    Not a great movie.  It’s a cheap 1970 production.  Lots of shortcuts are taken, including some really peculiar editing.  Even with all the shortcomings it has, there are a few interesting points.
    The direction is actually pretty interesting.  It’s not great all the time, but it’s got some very nice tricks played with depth, even as the camera is moving on a road.  Think of the Vertigo shot, but happening while the camera’s moving on a road with the focal point.
    The movie feels like pure 60s.  There’s a free love story, some talk about drugs, reference to organic produce, there’s a drum circle, having sex on a beach.  One of the stories has a character coming to terms with the ghetto population, and their inability to access healthcare through the hospital.
    The importance put on most of these issues is interesting.  It comes across like the director knew that the nudity and seeing girls hanging around in their bras was what brought the audience in, but that the director also knew that once they were in, there was an opportunity to push a good lesson home.
    By the end of the movie though, it’s fairly forgettable.  Each of their stories is at least a little interesting, but it doesn’t break any ground that hasn’t already been well-worn already.
    My favorite bit: one of the nurses and a drug dealer ride off somewhere and are hanging around a meadow.  For some reason, a dog is playing with them.  They rode there on a motorcycle.  This was the only scene where the dog was shown.

75 - Valley Girl

    A preppy girl living in the valley falls in love with a vaguely punk guy from Hollywood.  Their worlds clash.
    One of the lesser 80s teen classics.  I’m sad to say that it’s not worthwhile.  Part of the reason that I watched this was that Sparks shows up in the soundtrack, with Angst in My Pants and Eaten By The Monster of Love.
    This is a romance, and to a lesser extent, a comedy.  I think it barely qualifies as a comedy.  There isn’t much that’s funny about it.  Most of the humor seems to be “they talk different!” and “they dress funny!”  But these don’t make a comedy.  It can work, but it requires that the performances sell it.
    While the cast is capable, most of them don’t stand out.  Even Nicholas Cage doesn’t seem remarkable.  The one person who caught my eye was Elizabeth Daily, who I mostly know from her appearance as Dottie in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.  Besides being cute, she had the most interesting story in the movie.
    The funniest thing that the movie has to offer is at a party scene.  I know that most of the time, actors just have to move around like they’re dancing to music, but usually nothing is being piped in for them to dance to.  In this case, it looks more obvious that they’ve each chosen a movement, and they’re just repeating it.
    The central conflict of the movie is shallow enough that it’s not believable.  It’s supposed to have a Romeo & Juliet angle to it, but it just doesn’t work.
    I occasionally thought about Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and how Cathy doesn’t view that as being an interesting movie.  I wonder if this one would be more interesting if I grew up with it.  As it is, I found it remarkably dull.
    After reading some of the background for the movie, it’s much more interesting.  The budget was really low - around 350K.  The clothes are mostly what people had around.  I can’t remember where I read it, but I know I heard that the script was written in about ten days.  For a production put together under these terms, they did pretty well.

74 - Daddy's Girl

    An adopted girl is obsessed with her relationship to her father, and is willing to kill anyone who threatens the stability of that relationship.
    This enjoys a healthy 4.5 on IMDB.  I’m a little surprised to see it that high.  The movie is possibly one of the silliest of the “evil child” genre.  Some of them can be very good, and much more interesting, probing into the difficulties of dealing with kids who want to do bad things.  I’ve enjoyed The Bad Seed, and I liked The Good Son.  There are a few other ones like Twisted or Don’t Go to Sleep, that reach into a level of campiness.
    But this is a weak script.  It’s hard for me to say that, since I think they actually did a good job structuring the story, even if it was predictable and fairly dumb.
    If this movie were released in the 80s, I’d think it was fantastic.  But it was released in 1996, and even as a straight-to-video release, it’s pretty silly.
    First, the dialogue is strained.  The girl is concerned that her school principal doesn’t like her.  Daddy suggest volunteering to do book reports during the summer to show the principal she’s serious about getting better.  I’ve never heard of this approach.  Why would the principal be interested in doing this?  Isn’t this something you’d do with a teacher?  It’s weird, and it’s a real stretch of imagination to accomplish something minimal - giving the girl an excuse to go to visit the principal.
    Second, the acting is weak.  I’m not a great judge of acting.  I’ve come to admire acting skills in pretty much everything I watch now.  A good actor can take passable dialogue, and turn it into a goldmine.  So much of the movie was centered on this girl, who overacts in every possible scene, and this may have given the impression that the rest of the cast wasn’t doing well either.  Who knows?  It could be an issue of the director making bad calls.
    There’s this fantastically terrible thing happening in the movie.  The little girl doing the killing gives punchlines to her kills!  They aren’t especially clever, but they are completely ridiculous.  She kills a guy with a meat tenderizer, and then tells him “you’re dead meat.”

    My favorite moment in the movie is a tiny little thing.  After the girl pushes the grandma down the stairs, she has to sneak out of the house without being noticed.  She manages to do this.  She gets on her bike, and rides away, looking suspicious.  She rings her bell.

73 - G.I. Joe: Retaliation

    Cobra’s forces have infiltrated the US government and have successfully decimated the Joe’s forces.  Cobra continues in their plan for world domination, and the remnants of the Joes have to save the day.
    I remember being modestly entertained by the first movie, even as reviews were complaining about how bad it was.  I don’t remember anything about that movie, and I don’t think I’ll remember much about this one.  In spite of that, I actually enjoyed this.  It held my attention fairly well.
    There’s an absurdity to the movie, but it’s actually something that I like.  It plays very much like a cartoon aimed at kids.  The first line of the movie is an absurdly expositional one - “Hustle up, guys.  You’ve got to get that defector and get the hell out of there.  No delays.”  A well-written movie, aimed at adults, would not use a line like that.  Shortly after that line, Roadblock puts on some specialized gloves that allow him to heat-cut his way through a chain-link fence.  This item is just… ridiculous.  First, wouldn’t it burn up his hands?  Even if it’s well-protected, handling metal that’s been heated that much is going to cause some problems.  How is this method better than just using some clippers?  The fact that this item exists, and is shown so prominently at this point in the movie establishes a certain tone.  This movie is ridiculous, and it knows it.
    The core of the plot - Cobra replacing the president and instituting a plan that results in the destruction of all nuclear arms - is pretty fun.  I like the idea of it, and it plays right for kids who like the show.
    That might be the problem with this movie and the first.  I think the audiences out there don’t know what they want, and the property hasn’t grown up since the 80s.  The result is that the core audience for this movie wants something that doesn’t insult their intelligence, but still makes them feel like a kid in the 80s.  Marvel has accomplished this by balancing their movies carefully.  But here, they managed to make a movie that is written with kids in mind, but has violence for the adults, rather than the other way around.

72 - The Changeling

    A composer’s daughter and wife are killed in an accident.  He moves into a massive house while he teaches a class.  The house turns out to be haunted.
    I hadn’t heard of this until I saw it listed on the Buzzfeed list of horror movies.  It’s an interesting movie, partly because of the fairly strong production values and George C. Scott starring in it, but also because i think it might be the source of a few haunted house tropes.
    It’s handled very well.  The mystery ramps up steadily, and it’s actually one of the more interesting backstories in a horror movie.  The clever element of this goes a long way to making the whole thing work.  Otherwise, it would fall into the same category as many other haunted house stories.
    There are elements of the story that may have influenced The Ring, but I can’t say that with any certainty. 
    It’s a nice change of pace to have a ghost story that doesn’t use a vengeful spirit.  I think it gets a bit dull.
    I had one primary gripe about the story, and it’s an odd one.  I don’t like that the house burns down.  It didn’t seem necessary.  It seemed like an attempt to up the tension.  I wouldn’t mind if the house had burned inside, but the complete destruction didn’t feel right.  Maybe it’s just that I’d feel like they would blame George C. Scott for it.

71 - The Returned

    Zombies exist, but medical treatment allows the infected to live normal lives, as long as they continue to have an injection each day.  A medical professional deals with a shortage of the injection.
    This was a letdown, but not as I expected it to be.  After starting the movie, I was actually impressed with how well the story was being handled.  It was treating the problem a lot like the AIDS epidemic movies would.  Then at a certain point, the story derails a bit.  The wife doesn’t seem to keep in character.  The story makes an effort to get darker, but it all seems a bit more predictable than it should be.
    There are two main things that bug me.  First, it’s the title.  It does evoke zombies, and that’s an easier way to sell the story.  But it’s a misleading approach, and it sounds like a dull title that’s trying to be mysterious.  I can’t think of a better title, but this one is just going to inspire yawns.
    The second thing that bothers me is the ending.  There’s an effort to give it an ending like The Mist that’s just a nasty gut punch.  What made the ending work in The Mist was that their situation seemed entirely impossible.  The audience had no reason to expect otherwise.  (Although, my wife disagreed on this point, but to go in further would have unrelated spoilers.)  In this movie, the surprise is telegraphed well in advance.  To make it worse, the main character isn’t misinformed or anything.  She’s just an impulsive idiot.  An impulsive idiot who works as a doctor.
    The result is an ending that should have been heart-wrenching.  Instead, it feels like a cop-out.

    For about seven years, I’ve wanted to write a zombie script.  When I finally started writing screenplays, I had started outlining a zombie story.  But I gave up on it very quickly.  The zombie genre is getting saturated.

70 - 12:01

    A research facility accidentally creates a time loop.  A low-level employee preserves his memory as each day loops.  He discovers the cause of his predicament and uncovers a mystery at his work.
    Obviously, this will be compared with Groundhog Day.  It’s not worth saying that one ripped the other off, since this went into production first, but they were both released very close to each other.  But it’s worth exploring the differences of how these stories approached the premise.
    In this case, our hero focuses on solving a mystery, and getting his girl.  There’s a specific cause to his loop, and he knows what it is.  This contrasts with Groundhog Day, where the hero doesn’t know the cause, never learns what it is, and the only problem to solve is more of a personal growth one.
    I had one particular problem with this movie, and it was mostly the lead.  The main character is a bit of a goofball.  But he’s actually a bit too much of a jerk to make him worthwhile.  I would be fine with him being a jerk, except that he remains too much of a jerk throughout the movie.  By the end, his improvement is entirely superficial.  He gets his girl, but he gets his girl in a way that seems more like cheating than improvement.
    On the other hand, I actually like the approach of solving a mystery in this fashion.  There’s the structure of the workday to drive things forward.  It’s nice that he takes notes and figures out when and where to do things.  But this is counterbalanced by him not learning to repeat actions that worked in the past.
    There’s one thing that especially bothered me about this movie, and that’s the title.  A short way through it, I realized that there was a better title; The Bounce.
    The story degenerates from being amusing and clever into being a bit of a hammy whodunnit.  But there’s not much I can complain about.  This was a made-for-TV production.

69 - Last Night

    The world is coming to an end, and mankind has known about it for at least several months.  It’s down to the last six hours, and a variety of characters intersect with their plans about how they plan to go out.
    I remembered hearing something about this movie years back, probably about five or six years ago.  I thought it was supposed to be a recent movie.  Instead, it turns out that this was from 1998.  Older than I expected.
    It’s good.  There’s a dose of low-level humor to many of the proceedings, but there’s something almost nostalgic to the story.  That doesn’t make much sense, but I guess that comes about from the very un-extraordinary things that people do.
    An employee of a gas company methodically calls all of the customers, thanking them, and telling them that they will work to keep the gas running until the very end.  One guy wants to put on a concert.  One guy methodically plans on working through a variety of sexual conquests.  Some people are out partying in the streets.  People overturn cars for the fun of it.
    What makes this movie effective is same thing that makes Romero’s Living Dead movies effective - placing yourself in the same situation and thinking about it.  What came out of this was a strange mix of both banality and the special qualities of life.  With the number of people who want to be doing something special at the moment that they go, I realized that the things that make our deaths important is a sense of symbolism that is left for survivors to focus on.  If everyone goes at once, all of these ideas seem silly.
    In talking about it with Cathy, I think I’d probably treat it like any other night.  I’d want to stay in, eat, probably watch a movie.  Would it be a particular movie?  Nope, just whatever I felt like.  Of course, I’d probably want to talk to a variety of people before going, but that’s about it.
    The performances are good.  It’s nice to see Callum Rennie, who played one of the Cylons on Battlestar Galactica, in a good part.  What surprises me is actually how much I enjoyed Sandra Oh’s part.
    Good stuff, and probably one of the most enjoyable depictions of the apocalypse I’ve seen.

68 - The Quiet Earth

    A man wakes to find himself alone on Earth.  After spending some time alone, he gradually starts to lose his mind.  Eventually he finds another survivor, then a third.
    It’s hard to give a sense of this movie without giving more of the story away.  It reminded me heavily of Dawn of the Dead, with a long sequence of a character exploiting the emptiness around him.
    These kinds of stories are always interesting, because there’s only so much that can happen with an individual in isolation.  When there’s a lack of conflict, stories tend to fall apart.  This story is handled differently, in that there’s an effort to explain what happened.  There’s no twist to the ending, or completely outlandish explanation.  We get clues dropped periodically about what they think has happened.
    It’s also nice that there’s an obvious setup for a love triangle, but the story resists playing that for obvious tension.  It gets handled realistically.  The characters accept their situation.
    There’s another big point that I love.  After spending a long time alone, when the characters meet each other, they’re genuinely happy to see another person.  This has been something that’s been bugging me in Walking Dead; when there are fewer people, there should be more interest in accepting more of them.

67 - The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

    The showman, Dr. Caligari, uses a man in a trance state to commit murders.
    This is one of the most unique movies I’ve seen, and it isn’t in a way that comes across muddled, like Keyhole.
    The story is interesting.  There’s a framing device, and the whole story is being told from one person to another.  Inside this flashback, the story is linear, although we get a story about Dr. Caligari being the administrator of an asylum, who is fascinated with the story of the real Dr. Caligari, and seeks to attempt to replicate his exploits.
    The way this story is told is actually still in practice.  It moves through phases of revealing information, developments, investigation.  It’s a very standard structure.  This makes it much more watchable than some other early movies.
    The direction itself is nothing special.  But the sets are what sell the movie.  Nightmarish designs of angles that are all wrong, weird shadows, unusual makeup.  All of it rolls together to make an atmosphere that is unique, but also strangely familiar.  These tools have been reused regularly, but seeing this movie in black & white (also tints of yellow, blue, and I think green) has a very unusual effect.
    I’m not surprised that the story has been remade and expanded on.  It has stood up very well.

66 - Stage Fright

    A musical theater camp plans on putting on a production of The Haunting of the Opera.  Their cast is terrorized by a slasher stalking the camp.
    I’m really conflicted about this.  As it started, I liked it a lot.  The setup was perfunctory, but the opening musical number was great.  It was actually making me think of Wet Hot American Summer, which is a good sign.  After that, things calm down a bit.  The humor is much more in the stereotypes of how theater people compete with each other.  I think this is a pretty rich vein for humor, but the movie struggles with finding the right tone.
    It reaches a tipping point during the third act.  At a certain point, it moves into straight-slasher territory.  I wouldn’t mind this if it were balanced out a little better, but somehow, I just can’t get behind how this was handled.  I guess the issue might be that I came to like the movie for the comedic aspects, and the switch to horror seemed so complete that it’s hard to feel anything but betrayed.  You don’t end with the movie you started with.
    But I can’t recommend the opening musical number enough.  It’s just the right mix of musical theater and camp, and summer camp.

65 - Black Sunday (The Mask of Satan)

    A witch curses her executioners.  A long time later, the witch and her servant attempt attempt to come back by possessing some descendants.
    This showed up on a list of classic horror.  I really thought I had already seen it, but I’m not sure what I was confusing it with.  This is a noteworthy movie.  The direction is remarkably compelling.  Fantastic shadows, remarkable effects, but the whole thing just looks incredible.  It looks like the whole thing was shot on a soundstage, and it actually looks spectacular for it.
    The effects work is remarkable, especially for the time period, and the fact that it’s an Italian production that may have been cheaply made.  The violence is toned down by modern standards, but if you consider how shocking Psycho was at the time, this would have been far more violent and gory.  But more importantly, the effects are remarkably smooth.  Some of the effects are just makeup jobs, but there are a few shots of both getting older and younger in front of the camera, and those are incredibly well done.
    The one area where this movie suffers is the script.  I wonder what the movie is like if it weren’t dubbed.  There’s an unusual flourish for the script, something that doesn’t play right to an English-speaking ear.
    I’m not surprised that this would get recognized as a notable horror achievement.  Along with Peeping Tom, this helped pave the way for a wide range of horror movies.

64 - Captain America: The Winter Soldier

    Captain America finds himself in a difficult situation as Nick Fury is killed, and SHIELD has been compromised.  Without anyone to trust, Captain America works to unravel a mystery of who is behind Fury’s death, and how to prevent their conspiracy from being implemented.
    A hard movie to summarize. The plot moves along with every step, and even the quieter sequences have plenty to say and do.
    I have a few complaints about this movie, but they are fairly minor.  First, I don’t like Scarlett Johansson’s hair flattened out like that.  In both Iron Man 2 and Avengers, her hair had a certain amount of fluff to it, which looked right to me.
    The second complaint is more substantial.  Several of the action sequences - but not all of them - are shot too close and edited too fast.  In some of these cases, it makes sense.  The elevator fight is a close-quarters kind of thing, and it makes sense.  But when they’re outside fighting, I prefer longer shots, both in terms of distance and duration.
    Neither of these complaints makes the movie bad at all.  It’s smart, and has something useful to say.  It’s tightly written, and everything in it contributes in some way.  The action isn’t quite as satisfying as some of the other movies, but they do a great job of showing Cap’s improvement with the shield.
    It’s a dark movie, thematically.  The villains don’t adhere to the same comic-book villainy of the first movie.  In the first movie, Hydra is a military force.  They use their uniforms, they move orderly, and their goal is to take over the world.  Here, the goal is far more specific, and that goes a long way to making the stakes feel more genuine.  There’s a big difference between announcing plans to rule the world, or to blow up the ocean.  When you specify a target (especially when you see the target process going on) it becomes less nebulous and more real.
    The music is really interesting.  They took a page from The Dark Knight, and the Winter Soldier actually has some very striking music cues, which parallels nicely with the cues that the Joker had.

    There was a less distinct weakness that the movie had, but I don’t feel like I can stick to it.  I didn’t have the same emotional response to this as I did to a few moments of heroic behavior in the first movie.  In that first one, I still get misty when Rogers jumps on the grenade, or when he says he doesn’t want to kill anyone; he just doesn’t like bullies.  I suppose those moments could have been re-created by having a few “saving civilians” moments.
    Still, another proud addition to the Marvel movie cannon. 

63 - Cat People

    A newly married couple has some difficulties.  She believes she’s under a curse that will cause her to turn into a panther if she sleeps with him.
    I remember this being mentioned last year in a horror documentary.  I’ve seen references to this before, and it’s been an intention of mine for a long time.  Finally, I got to it.  It’s interesting, and influential, but it’s too dated to be effective any more.
    The direction and photography is great.  Heavy shadows, very clever lighting.  It’s a beauty to watch.  The sound is actually very good, especially for the time period.  The script is a bit weak.  Mostly, the problem is that there isn’t much development throughout the story.  It’s not terrible, it’s just pretty slow.
    The influence that this movie had is much more important.  It established certain horror tools - building tension with music and sound, eventually leading to a false scare.  (In this case, it’s a bus.  In others, it’ll be a tea kettle whistling, a telephone ringing, etc.)  The way that shadows are used is very effective, and has had an influence in setting horror standards for a long time.  Even the dream sequence, while heavily dated now, seems to have set a certain standard.
    The story is a weak point though, reminding me of the hour-long episodes of Twilight Zone.  For historical purposes, it’s definitely worth a watch.

62 - See No Evil, Hear No Evil

    A blind man and a deaf man witness a murder, and try to catch the real killer while being wrongfully accused by the police.
    Historically, my only knowledge of this movie comes from when I was very young, and there was a birthday party sleepover.  The host’s father rented this movie, and was encouraging us to watch it.
    It’s a little funny, in retrospect.  At that time, I was heavily into The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was really unusual for that time period.  No one had any interest in Rocky Horror at this party, and they didn’t care about this movie either.  And yet, this movie would have been much more risqué for our young minds.  It’s rated R.  There’s nudity, a fair amount of cursing, a good amount of raunchy humor.  It’s entirely inappropriate for kids.  This isn’t to say that Rocky Horror would be cleaner, but Rocky Horror is bizarre, and it doesn’t make sense to kids.
    Anyway, the movie is really much more fun than I expected.  I would like to think that I have a healthy relationship with disabilities, since my mom is blind, but I never felt like this movie made fun of the characters for their disabilities; there are very few gags that felt forced.  Most of the situations only required third parties to treat them with contempt.
    Gene Wilder is excellent, as usual.  I don’t care for Richard Pryor as much.  He seems to be pushing the role into broader ground, but he still has some great lines.
    There’s one weakness, and it’s that the movie needs a tiny bit of trimming.  I can’t point to the specific point though.
    It’s great to see Alan North again.  He’s great.

61 - Ghostbusters

    A team of disgraced academics open a business capturing ghosts, eventually leading them to foil an ancient god’s plan to invade our world.
    An 80s classic that I had never seen before.  I think I’ve seen tiny bits of it occasionally, but the vast majority of this was new to me.
    I’m sad to say that I was disappointed.  It’s a mildly fun movie.  It has a cast that is - for the most part - excellent.  But the problem is never the cast, it’s that the story is dull, in a weird way.  Every step of the story seems telegraphed.  There was never a sense of unpredictability to the jokes.  The only exception to this rule is Bill Murray’s work.  He does a fantastic job of keeping the story lively.  Everyone else handles their lines wonderfully, but none of them have that unpredictable quality.
    There’s a nonsense to the plot, and it’s very strange.  The movie starts by establishing a real ghost sighting in a library.  The scientists are thrilled by this.  The weird thing is that the movie never seems to consider it to be a strange thing.  The world doesn’t take notice of this sudden scientific evidence.
    The massive goodwill that this movie has is a big enough clue that this is clearly a movie that works best for kids.  There are a few scary moments, but they don’t make the tone of the movie change.

60 - Iron Man 2

    Tony Stark deals with the government wanting him to hand over the Iron Man technology, as he also struggles with a medical issue and a villain bent on personal revenge.
    This is widely regarded as the weakest of Marvel’s modern batch of movies.  I don’t understand why.  I actually think it’s pretty straightforward, the action isn’t annoyingly difficult to follow.
    I think there is one minor problem, but in the context of this movie, it’s fine.  The issue of the government wanting Stark’s technology doesn’t feel entirely resolved.  Rhodey takes the other suit of armor, but I don’t think that would be enough for the government.  They would want the technology, but they would also want to prevent Stark from using it for himself.
    There’s a good amount of time put into developing Stark’s relationship with Pepper, and it plays better this time through.  But where the story shines better is in the introduction and development of Black Widow.  Now that I’ve gotten used to seeing her in The Avengers and the bits from the forthcoming Captain America, going back to this introduction feels better than it did the first time.  I think it felt a little more shoehorned in the first time, but now, it somehow feels like an appropriate introduction to a character.  This is why the Marvel movies are coming together so much better.  They take their time introducing characters so that they work in the context of more than one movie.