92 - Daddy's Girl

    Adopted Jody is willing to kill anyone who gets between her and her father.
    My second time watching this.  I had to show this to Cathy.
    It’s so charmingly terrible.  The biggest problem is that the movie can’t sustain the badness that it starts off with, and the last act gets kind of dull.
    The evil girl has a few modes that she switches between, and I can’t tell if it’s that the actress wasn’t skilled enough yet, or if the script was that explicit in calling for obvious acting.
    This time, I noticed another funny element.  If you keep the captions on, there are a dozen or more instances of the caption [DOGS BARKING IN DISTANCE].  It happens on nearly every establishing shot.  In a few cases, it shows up more than once in a scene.
    I wonder what my perception of this movie would be if I saw it when I was younger.  As a made-for-TV movie, it might be just about the right level of horror/violence.  But as a straight-to-video feature, it’s not exactly up to that level of quality.

91 - Goldfinger

    Bond investigates a man who uses gold as his path to wealth, and thwarts his plot to corner the gold market.
    I used to frequent a Blu-ray forum, and this movie often got mentioned as being the definitive Bond movie.  It’s nice to see that Netflix had it.
    It’s… better than From Russia With Love.  But it’s nowhere near the standards set by the modern Bond movies.
    Bond isn’t much of a character.  He delivers witty remarks and punchlines periodically, but they never feel like anything other than a line.  His interactions with other characters seem too smooth, too rehearsed.  He always know exactly what to say or do, and always keeps his cool.  I don’t think I would care much about this - I like characters that are smart enough to always be on top of the game - but I think I would like seeing more worry in his face.  His incredible confidence makes him less likable.
    The movie moves along regularly, but it feels a bit too slow.  The action is mostly laughable by today’s standards.  Odd Job throwing his hat as a weapon seems even more ridiculous than ever, and not just because of Austin Powers.  The hat doesn’t move especially fast, and the damage it does is incongruous.
    As a villain, Goldfinger is pretty funny.  He reminds me of Rob Ford, in a weird way.  Big, red-faced.  Short-cropped hair.  He gets a few good lines, but most of the time, he doesn’t seem especially evil.

90 - Pompeii

    A gladiator and a royal daughter fall in love, set against the destruction of Pompeii.
    I wasn’t expecting much, and I got about as much as I expected.  This is directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who also directed some of the Resident Evil movies.  The best thing he’s handled was Event Horizon.  This movie feels like one of the Resident Evil movies.  The effects are similar, the action is similar, some of the direction is similar.  It’s silly stuff.  Highly stylized, some of it very glossy, but also very cheap looking.
    The story is actually pretty dumb.  A standard romance, one that was reminding me of Titanic for some reason.  Making a story around the destruction of Pompeii might have been better served by a political story; or maybe a slice-of-life exploration of a handful of stories resulting in existing statues in the town.  By turning it into a romance, there’s less tension in the story than there should be.  We know that they’re going to die - the movie starts off with their statues - so why should we care?
    The combat is silly, especially the use of the chain in the arena.  Seemed awfully long!
    I don’t know if I’d recommend the movie to anyone in particular.  But I suppose it’s distracting enough.
    One other thing.  The movie seriously exaggerates what happens with the eruption.  Massive flaming boulders raining on the town?  Huge destruction?  Portions of the land sinking into the sea?  None of it is accurate.  I don’t even have specialized knowledge of volcanoes or Pompeii, and I could tell it was way off.

89 - Mischief Night

    A blind girl is home alone on mischief night as a home invasion happens.
    I’m getting a little tired of home invasion movies.  They can be very effective, but the trend toward making the intruders masked makes all of the stories feel a little predictable.  It’s nice that there’s a touch of variation in this one by making the lead blind, but even that seems like a homage to Wait Until Dark, which felt like more of a Hitchcock thriller.
    I didn’t mind this movie.  I actually felt like they handled her blindness reasonably well, except for one trivial detail.  She uses braille.  My mom is blind, so I’ve been exposed to the blind world a good amount.  Braille has become less popular, as the tools to have text read aloud have become more accessible.  It isn’t clear how long the girl has been blind (if I checked the start of the movie again, they may have referenced it) but I don’t think she would have picked up braille that quickly.
    There were two things that bothered me, and both of them were late in the movie.  First, there’s a reveal where it turns out that the masked person in a raincoat that we’ve been seeing is actually three different people dressed the same.  For anyone watching the movie, this is not a revelation.  It’s obvious.  The second is actually a plot point.  The girl is hiding in the garage.  Above the garage is a room where the invaders are planning to kill her father.  She uses a chainsaw from the garage, and manages to lift it up, and stab it through the ceiling, cutting into an invader.
    First, pushing a chainsaw through a wall, especially a lower power, electric one like she was using, would be nearly impossible to do as smoothly as she does.
    Second, the ceiling of the garage is probably at least eight feet high, based on the way it’s photographed during the movie.  Some simple math makes it clear that there’s no way she could raise the chainsaw above her head and push it through the floor, and have enough sticking through the floor to impale the guy.  Honestly, I’d be surprised if she was able to touch the ceiling with the saw.
    One other thing that bothered me.  We get an obligatory scene where someone gets killed when they’re dressed up like one of the bad guys.  It’s bad enough that we get to see this cliche in action again, but what makes it worse is how obvious it is.  The guy is squirming around, his hands bound behind his back.  He’s desperately trying to talk.  I could forgive using this cliche to raise the body count if the scenario was a little different.  If the guy was shot a greater distance.  Instead, he’s shot close range, and the father has plenty of time to see that this is not a threat to him.
    Given how old Wait Until Dark is, I guess it’s alright to appropriate it.

    Even though I’ve just spent time running down the ways that the movie bothered me, it’s actually not bad.  It’s predictable, but it’s fairly well-made, and she’s reasonably convincing as a blind girl.

88 - Kingdom of Heaven

    A blacksmith is brought into participating in the crusades.  He attempts to foster an uneasy peace.
    I picked this Blu-ray up from a church rummage sale.  For $5, I could fill up a grocery bag with as much stuff as I wanted from a room.  This was the only Blu-ray, and I saw it was directed by Ridley Scott, so how bad could it be?
    This movie runs a grinding three hours, and it varies greatly in pacing.  The first hour and a half is a strange mix, mostly being slow, atmospheric material, punctuated by violence that seems almost comical in intensity.  After that, the movie slides into more battle sequences.
    First, the good stuff.  It’s photographed well.  The locations are spectacular, the costumes, all of that stuff - it’s great.  It’s nice to see these large-scale historical epics filmed like this.  The fighting is good, but feels a little too fancy for their roles, and for the weight of their weapons and armor.
    The bad stuff.  The story.  I actually think that the central story is a decent one, but it was not handled well by the script.  It took until around 40 minutes in before we hit an event that made me care about the protagonist.  He says very little in the movie, and it’s hard to think highly of him.  It’s also hard to think badly of him.  He simply seems impossible to read.  The script is a pain.  Most of the dialogue seems overly broad, with dull characterization, or alternately, just vague mystery.
    I know this is a poor description.  For people who like historical epics, and those more interested in the crusades, this might be a great movie.
    My biggest problem is that no one seems to know that they’re all being idiots.  They’re fighting for religious causes that don’t make sense.  Whenever the reasoning is switched over to focus on the land and power aspect, even that doesn’t hold up very well.  No one seems to realize that it’s not worth participating in any of this stuff.  Even the hero, with his interest in maintaining a peace, seems to be entirely sucked into proclaiming religious values instead of humanitarian ones.  Historically correct?  Probably.  But it still makes him an idiot.  This turns the movie into one that I have a hard time identifying with.

87- The Machine

    An AI researcher uses the brain of his new partner as the basis for a new AI located in a fancy body.  Competing interests in the project lead to difficulties.
    I’m being intentionally vague about the plot, partly because much of the plot doesn’t actually come together very smoothly.  A lot of time is dedicated to developing the behavior of the AI.  That’s a fairly interesting portion of the story.  By the end, it turns into a Terminator sort of story; the implanted AI’s revolt and escape the military.
    The opening is a bit slow, and the personal stories actually seem to detract from what could have been a much more interesting exploration of the role that AI can have.
    But it’s a bit sad to see yet another claim that somehow developing a nearly perfect AI will result in the downfall of mankind.

86 - The Roost

    A group of people on their way to a wedding wind up running off the road in a rural area.  They hide out in a barn while waiting for help.  There are a bunch of bats that turn victims into zombies.
    The first feature made by Ti West.  I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but I’m a little disappointed.  It’s low budget, but I can’t figure out how low the budget actually was.  Limited locations, small cast… in this case, I would rely on a stronger script to carry the project, but it came out as one of the b-movies of a drive-in double feature.  To be fair, it’s not terrible.  But it’s unbalanced.  It moves slowly, there isn’t enough story to drive it along.
    Now that I’ve found an interview, it was made for about $50,000, and West wrote the script in three days.  Yeah, it’s not bad for that kind of a background.  I’d be very interested in what he could have done if he spent some time polishing the script.
    I’ve found that Ti West is only about a month older than me.  I’m impressed with how quickly he’s managed to establish himself.  I identify with his enthusiasm, and I think I’m more forgiving of his learning curve.  I still need to rewatch House of the Devil, but he’s really developed a lot over time.
    This movie… it’s a curiosity.  I didn’t find it as tense as some people have, but I think the direction showed a lot of promise.

85 - Evilspeak

    A bullied kid at a military academy discovers relics of a satanist that was buried in the catacombs beneath the chapel.
    The normal summary for the movie includes that he goes through the ritual to raise some power or something, but the problem is… that takes up 80 minutes of the running time!
    Yes, everything important happens in the last 10 minutes.  Everything else is just setup.  Scene after scene of the protagonist being bullied, the protagonist discovering things, the protagonist slowly taking steps toward achieving satanic power.  It’s structured all wrong.
    This came out in 1981, when computer visuals were still fairly new.  They like using them, and I think they thought they were especially clever or interesting.  They come across as especially dated, and a little strange in their understanding of how computers work.
    There are weird things.  One of the only exciting things to happen during the first 80 minutes is the death of the receptionist.  She’s attacked by a bunch of pigs, and torn apart in her bathtub.  But… no one seems to notice.  It happens the night before the big finale, so maybe there wouldn’t have been time for it to get wedged into the story before the big finish.
    There are two notable people in this.  First, the lead is Clint Howard.  He rarely gets leads, and he’s pretty young here.  The other is Charles Tyner, playing the military headmaster.  But I know him as Lyman Vunk from Hamburger: The Motion Picture.
    I think the pigs are supposed to be boars, but they substitute pigs depending on the shots needed.

84 - Phone Booth

    A moderately sleazy publicist finds himself trapped in a phone booth by a sniper, who dictates instructions to him over the phone.
    This is one of those movies that I’ve heard about for awhile, and never been able to get myself to watch.  It’s good.  For a premise that doesn’t seem like it should be sustainable, the story moves along very briskly.  It’s well-written, and even though it stays in the same place for most of the movie, it never feels stale.
    The direction is good.  I have no idea how much planning went into it, but it never feels like the movie repeats itself.  There are a variety of visual tricks that keep it from feeling like you’re seeing the same thing.
    I guess the only thing that might bother some people is the lack of motivation that we get for the villain.  It doesn’t bother me though.  The guy is just playing a game.

83 - Little Shop of Horrors

    Shlub Seymour encounters a peculiar plant that he raises, even after finding that it grows by consuming human blood.
    I got heavily into Little Shop of Horrors around the time I was in 4th grade.  The melodies are very catchy, the performances are solid.  Eventually, I burned out on the music.  Then the show came back into my life - during high school, I played in the pit for the show.
    This is the first time that I’ve watched the director’s cut.  After I heard about the recalled DVD, I really wanted to see this alternate ending.
    Seeing the movie now, for the first time in probably ten years or so, it’s a remarkably strange movie.  I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it.  Everything is clearly a set.  This makes the whole thing feel like a fancy version of a stage production.  I kind of like it, but it’s very strange to see a movie embracing unrealistic sets.
    Rick Moranis does a great job.  The cameos - John Candy, Bill Murray - are great.  Bill Murray’s scene is probably the funniest thing in the movie.  Steve Martin is great, as always.  I’ve never cared for Audrey.  I like some of her performance, and I like her more gentle singing.  But when she really plows into a song (see the second half of Suddenly Seymour) I have an impossible time understanding her.
    There’s a strange shift that happens with the show.  It starts off with a very Phil Spector/girl group feel to much of the music, even as the styles shift around a little.  At the end, there’s a song specific to the movie - Mean Green Mother from Outer Space - and this one never feels like it fits.  It feels like it’s not in the same style.
    I have another weird issue with this movie.  There’s an innocent quality to most of the story.  Even with the bleaker elements, there’s an almost child-like feel for most of it.  This atmosphere goes away when the plant starts getting rude.  When he says “tough titty” and “no shit, sherlock,” these feel like a break in the style.  I could be wrong about this, but it’s been a detail that’s always bothered me.
    I noticed some very strange music edits.  Tiny bits where they would subtract a beat to make the music fit with the editing, and sequences where an awkward vamp would be used to fill in space.  The vamping is pretty standard in musicals.  The subtracted beats are really puzzling to me.  The difference is minimal to the editing, and it would have smoothed things out without adding much to the running time.

82 - Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

    Music legend Dewey Cox reflects on his life, in this satire of musical biopics.
    My feelings on this haven’t changed.  I still really like this movie, even as I recognize the excesses that drag it down, and the reason why some people don’t like it.
    First problem: there are certain excesses.  These are most apparent with things like Nate being cut in half.  Following that, Dewey being able to perfectly imitate the old bluesmen at the store.  The oddities of these kinds of things don’t bother me much now, but they still create a ridiculous feeling.
    Second problem: the script follows the same format throughout it.  This gives a peculiar impression of the movie being a one-note joke.  Most of the script is premised on being extraordinarily specific.  Characters are explicitly named, exposition details are dropped non-stop, and everyone says exactly what they think.
    If you like this sense of humor, it’s great.  Some people might find it grating.
    I still feel like his rehab sequence feels a little long.  The father’s punchline - “the wrong kid died!” - is wrong.  It’s not terrible, it’s just not funny.

81 - The Player

    A producer is getting threatening postcards.  In an effort to locate the source, he confronts a screenwriter, and winds up killing him.
    A very strange movie.  It’s masterful, and well handled, but there’s something that’s hard to lay a finger on.  There are loads of characters, and it’s difficult to tell what their relationships are.  The core of the story is pretty straightforward.  The direction is remarkably well done.  The opening shot is a masterpiece.  The cast is spectacular.
    What makes it difficult to evaluate is how peculiar so much of the dialogue is.  There’s a lot of talk that seems to be only distantly related to the story, or even the side story.  I felt like I was left in a constant state of not being sure what I was supposed to take away from a scene.  And then, when the movie ended, I felt like I fully understood what happened.
    There’s a lot of novelty to the movie.  Loads of cameos scattered throughout, a general sense of world-building, and a particular sense of humor that’s difficult to explain.
    It’s good, but it requires a certain mindset to appreciate it.  And probably some patience.

80 - The Sacrament

    A trio of indie journalists go to a religious cult’s camp as part of an effort to see a relative, and to report on the secretive society.  Things get weird and bad.
    Frankly, I had higher hopes for this one.  I really love The Innkeepers.  I need to re-watch House of the Devil.  And I plan on watching Roost soon.  There’s generally a lot of fertile ground to be covered when it comes to cults.  And I’ve never seen a movie based on the Jim Jones stuff.
    There are two primary failings that this has.  First, the format just doesn’t feel right.  I don’t mind found-footage stuff if it’s done well.  Here, it would actually be better if the movie wasn’t handled as found-footage.  Most of the framing and photography is actually too good, and it becomes a weird sticking point; why do we get this great steady shot for some sequences, then we get a hand-held shaky-cam for another?  The other failing is that the story follows the Jim Jones massacre too closely.
    There’s a very slow wind-up to the story.  It takes about half an hour before things start to fall into place.  Even as we know what’s about to happen, what makes the movie effective is how unflinching it is in documenting it.  It does a good job of putting a more concrete face on the Jim Jones stuff.

79 - High Tension

    A pair of girls go to visit one of their families on a country farm.  As they settle in for bed, a deranged trucker comes to the door, and slaughters most of the family, and kidnaps one of the girls.
    I think I’m up to about three viewings of this so far.  I like it, but my feelings about it have evolved a little.  I don’t mind the slow setup as much.  I still have some issues with conflating sexuality and violence.  It’s a cheap way of drawing a parallel that I have a hard time making sense of.
    Regardless, now I feel like there’s a gradual slip that happens during the movie, moving it from feeling like realistic tension, to being campy tension, and finally ending on ridiculous tension.  This doesn’t make it less enjoyable, but it depends on your preferences.
    Around the time that she leaves the gas station, the movie slips from the fairly real tension that has brought the story to that point, and moves into a campy tension.  She takes control, and she’s making an effort not just to save her friend, but to destroy the villain.  It’s a decent development.  Once the big reveal happens, the tension actually dissipates, and it turns into a straightforward slasher.  I don’t feel like there’s much tension, but it remains entertaining as it heads for a big finish.
    But that’s the problem.  The ending seems too easy to laugh at, and hard to take seriously.  This undermines the tension that was built over the rest of the movie.
    There are lots of complaints about the ending.  I honestly don’t care about it.  It does create a lot of issues that would require resolution, but I just don’t feel like it matters.
    I’d love to see this in a theater.  I think that would sell the tension much more.

78 - The Phone Call

    A young man is generally paralyzed and awkward when he attempts to talk to his dream girl.  He works with another girl who tries to help him overcome his problems.
    A short film - a shade under a half hour - produced by the Mormon church.  It’s a very clean story, nothing objectionable at all, but it has a certain charm.  For a short, it moves along well, and it’s written pretty well.  The only problem is the open ending, which was probably intentional.  I imagine that the church used this as a way of stimulating discussion with the teens they would screen it for.
    The awkwardness on display here is palpable.  It’s funny, but it’s really pretty intense.
    A lot of the comments compare it to Napoleon Dynamite, and there are a few similarities.  His awkward phrasing, a subplot involving him sending away for a kit to learn karate in order to build confidence… it’s easy to feel like this was an influence.  But there’s a difference at the core.  Napoleon never seems embarrassed by his awkwardness.  He remains confident in it.  In this, the lead is aware of his awkwardness and feels helpless against it.
    Not bad, and certainly worth the half hour.

77 - RoboCop

    Officer Alex Murphy is horrifically wounded, but is brought back as a cybernetic police officer.
    Paul Verhoven’s original is an acquired taste.  Some of his humor is difficult for audiences to appreciate, and his violence is hard for others.  While this movie is more broadly accessible, it lacks the heart that makes for a classic movie.
    This isn’t to say that it’s a bad movie.  They did far better than I expected.  They made a few strong points about the relationship that the US has with robotic military and police applications.  The area where the movie felt especially lacking was the villain.  While we already know the Omnicorp is evil, I was expecting a little more from the lower-level villain of the piece.  Without this guy in place, most of the focus is shifted to developing Robocop as a character.  That’s nice, but…
    I never felt the same sense of heroics that I got from the original.  This new Robocop apprehends criminals, but his actions always seem disproportionate.  He breaks up a drug deal.  He doesn’t do this because it’s the right thing to do, he does it because one of the people has information he wants.  He doesn’t approach the scene with any nuance.  He rushes into it, and immediately starts threatening to get what he wants.
    The result is that this Robocop doesn’t seem like he’s worth rooting for.  He’s worth examining, at a distance, but even the “good” Robocop seems brutal and terrible.  Even the way he gets injured is less heroic.  He’s the victim of a car bomb.  In the original, he’s blown away as he attempts to arrest a high-ranking criminal.

    All of these changes are less effective, but what would have been even less effective is if they had kept these elements the same.  It’s interesting, but only in a passive way.