135 - Scream 2

    Sidney, the surviving protagonist of Scream, is off at college.  The story of the murders in Scream have been released as a book, which has been adapted into a movie, which a new killer is using as a prompt to start their own spree.
    I know that I saw this - and Scream 3 - in theaters.  Beyond the opening sequence, I didn’t remember anything about it.  The only thing I remember about Scream 3 is that Heather Matarazzo is in it.
    It’s just boring.  The opening sequence is the most enjoyable thing about it, and it doesn’t feel like it has much of anything to do with the rest of the movie.  The victims seem to be randomly selected.
    I suppose I can elaborate on the quality of the opening sequence.  We get to see a rowdy theater (I’ve seen The Room and Snakes on a Plane in theaters, and neither of them were as ridiculously rowdy as this) where a hip couple argue.  The guy loves horror movies, she seems to be annoyed by them (even though she seems to get really into them).  She leaves to go to get popcorn.  After she gets it, they meet by the door, and he says he’s going to the bathroom.  In the bathroom, he’s killed by a guy in the ghost mask.  He’s stabbed in the side of the head.  The knife manages to be thrust through a bathroom stall.  Seriously.  This isn’t a great way to start the movie, especially if you want to establish that this is taking place in the real world (which is what we’re supposed to get by seeing scenes from the first movie being re-staged in the theater).
    Then we go back to the girl, who’s getting really into the movie.  A guy in a ghost mask comes and sits next to her.  She eventually realizes that it isn’t her boyfriend.  She gets stabbed.
    This sequence feels very Hitchcock.  Someone in danger while they’re in a crowd.  The audience’s misunderstanding is part of the tension.  I like this.
    Then things fall apart.  We get a bunch of scenes bringing all of the surviving characters back.  We get more tongue-in-cheek dialogue referencing other movies.  Sigh.  And it seemed kind of obvious that they were telegraphing who the killer was.
    Of course, there’s a big twist ending, which is mostly impossible to see coming.

    Okay, a pair of people are killed at a movie theater.  For some reason, the police hold a press conference on the local college campus.  Why?  So that there’s a reason to have Sidney there!
    There’s a sequence that involves Jerry O’Connell getting up on a cafeteria table and singing “I Think I Love You” to Sidney.  I’m not sure why this sequence is in the movie, except that they thought it was a funny idea.  It’s dumb, and it’s kind of annoying.  The rest of the students react to this with clapping and cheers.  I'd have an easier time believing that reaction if they were in high school.  In college, most people tend to just ignore that kind of stuff.
    I wonder what the deal is with these movies.  These should be exactly my kind of thing.  I know virtually every reference they make, but I simply can’t make myself care.  Maybe I’d rather see something a little more original than a bunch of ground-up references.

134 - The Conspiracy

    A pair of low-budget documentary makers are focusing on a conspiracy theorist.  After that theorist disappears, they follow down his rabbit hole.
    I have unusually mixed feelings about this movie, even though I should probably give it a vaguely positive “it’s alright” kind of review.
    It starts off slow.  It plays as straight documentary, and it’s kind of dull.  The setups that are put in place are clunky and obvious.  After the theorist disappears, the story shifted a little.  It was still moving kind of slowly, but I found it a bit more funny.  I think that I find the idea of the lead getting more and more absorbed in this grand conspiracy.  Then there’s a development where they meet a guy who wrote an article about a club that supposedly coordinates all of these nefarious global shaping events.
    At this point, the movie actually raises the tension a little, because we finally have a real mystery to focus on.  (Shouldn’t I have cared about the disappearance of the theorist from the beginning?  Yes, but he was a jerk.)
    So the last act adds a touch of tension.  Then there’s an ending beyond the natural ending, which serves to tie up some loose ends, and make it so the existence of the movie makes sense.  This ending is a little less satisfying.
    The creepiest part of this movie is how effectively they sell many of these conspiratorial ideas.  By phrasing things right, and avoiding anything that suggests an alternative explanation, it’s hard to disagree with these things.
    In searching for the name of the club in the movie, I found a wiki article - List of Hoaxes on Wikipedia.  They tried to build legitimacy for the idea.  It’s some effective marketing, but…
    I have a lot of reservations when it comes to conspiracies.  I’m mostly just so annoyed at how willing people are to believe nearly anything, and this movie takes itself seriously enough that it might persuade some people to believe - at least some of the lesser material used in the setup.

133 - Children of the Corn 7: Revelation

    A lady goes looking into her grandmother’s disappearance, and finds a bunch of creepy kids hanging around a nearly vacant apartment building.
    I’ve seen nearly all of the Children of the Corn movies.  At least up to this point.  I’ve now discovered that there was a remake of the original, which I’m interested in seeing.  This is, without a doubt, the worst of them.
    I can’t remember much specific about other movies in the series, aside from the first one, which I’ve seen a handful of times.  But I feel like this entry is baffling in how much it got wrong.
    The original movie was partly about fear of children, but it was also about the effect that religious fundamentalism can have.  There’s no reasoning with the members of the cult.  The people near the cult feel drawn to participate, even if they don’t actually believe.  The cult is willing to turn on members.  Part of what made this religious angle work is that even though we disagree with their beliefs, it would be un-American to tell them so.
    In this movie, it’s hard to say that there’s anything like cult behavior.  The kids have magical powers.  They look spooky, and they occasionally do spooky things.  But they don’t have the religious fervor that made the first movie work.  The supernatural elements are strange.  They involve corn stalks sprouting from the ground spontaneously.
    The effects work is cheap.  This came out in 2001, so I’m probably being a bit harsh, but nearly every single effect was noticeable and awkward.
    There’s also a strange issue with the frame rate.  Occasional shots are slowed down, and I’m not positive why.
    The limited locations are conspicuous.  Normally I don’t notice this, but the primary setting for the movie is an apartment building.  We get to see the lobby, basement, elevator, hallway, and a few rooms.  This seems weird.  Most of these movies have been built on large outdoor vistas, mostly abandoned.  This seems like a different movie’s script was adapted to become a Children of the Corn franchise flick.
    About 3/4 of the way through the movie, a cop expresses some romantic interest in the lead.  (I just realized that he’s never shown in uniform.  No budget for that?)  He asks her to dinner.  She dithers, and he agrees to show up at nine to pick her up.  This is him effectively saying “I’ll come by during the last 10 minutes to save you.”  And of course, it comes to pass.
    The last thing that really bugged me is that the movie sets up the use of a heavy gas flow from a stove.  It’s obvious that this will be used as well.  The lead uses it to blow a plume of flame from the apartment, blocking the evil children from reaching her in the hallway.  Immediately after this sequence, there’s no more flame, but the gas is still running.  Then minutes later, when the time is right, the ticking gas winds up exploding, and setting things on fire.  (Of course, terrible, terrible CGI flames.  Really weak work.)
    I’m pretty positive that this whole thing with the gas didn’t make any sense.  When the gas is initially lit, I think a bunch of stuff in the room would have ignited.  Instead, it blew a fireball, which immediately went out.  Then somehow, the gas re-ignited.

132 - Black Rock

    Three girlfriends go on a little vacation to a small island where they used to vacation as children.  They run afoul of three former soldiers, who decide to hunt them.
    Variations on The Most Dangerous Game are usually pretty fun.  A smartly written version can be tense and engaging.  In this case, it’s passable, but it’s the kind of movie that I would forget in another day or two.
    To start with, I had a really strange sense of deja vu at the beginning.  There’s a brief bit where a character claims she has cancer.  She’s joking, but something about it seemed very familiar.  I wasn’t sure if I had seen this movie before.  I wonder if I’ve seen the same kind of sequence somewhere else.  Or maybe these setup scenes are just especially predictable.
    I had noticed during the credits that the story was written by a woman.  I assumed that the script was also done by a woman, and I felt terrible for feeling like these women were kind of insulting to women everywhere.  Luckily, during the closing credits, I noticed that the screenplay was done by a man.  This can explain a lot.  The women don’t seem especially bright.  They are aware of how serious their situation is, but they still aren’t able to control how loudly they’re talking.  They’re petty in their disputes.  There’s a remarkable amount of cursing, which doesn’t bother me much, but it doesn’t ring true to my ear.
    The story unfolds exactly as you expect.  In retrospect, I suppose they did make one interesting choice.  The first girl to die off isn’t who I would expect.  But the more I think about it, it was really the only viable choice, given how the setup was done.
    The villains are… poorly defined.  They’re typical, aggressive guys, out for vengeance.  But they don’t even need that motivation.  The story would work just as well if they were just looking for some thrill killing.
    Still, well shot, the sound was fine.  It held my attention acceptably.

131 - 13 Sins

    A man in financial dire straits is selected to participate in a game, where the rewards continue increasing, but his tasks get progressively darker.
    A riff on Saw.  But this plays pretty well, at least for the first 3/4 of it.  The last bit seemed to wrap things up too neatly.
    The tasks that the hero is required to do get increasingly more interesting, and it seems more and more unlikely that he’ll get out of it.  This is really effective.  Around the fifth or sixth task - the coffee shop - I realized I was much more interested in figuring out what direction the story was going to go in.  In a weird way, it reminded me of a cheaper version of Crank.  It’s not focused on action, but it does have a plot device that keeps on ratcheting things up and placing the hero in new situations.
    I’m not happy with the ending.  I understand why they went with it, since the hero needs to save his soul to win.  I don’t buy that.  I don’t even buy the warning he gets from his father.

130 - I Am Divine

    A documentary about Divine, an actor who utilized a transvestite persona and worked with John Waters quite a bit.
    I’ve never been a big fan of Divine.  I’ve heard two of the songs she’s recorded.  I’ve seen Desperate Living, Hairspray… I like John Waters though, and I think he fills a unique niche in movies.  But this movie gave me a better appreciation for the man behind Divine, for John Waters, and for the bizarre movies they made together.
    The movies were made around 1965-1970, and they were cheap, mostly no-budget movies.  Strange stories, outlandish behavior.  But it’s easier to appreciate them when you see some of the behind-the-scenes pictures of John Waters handling what looks like a Super-8 camera, shooting guerrilla-style on the street.
    The background for Divine is fascinating, and he comes across remarkably well.  He was gay, but it’s hard to say how aware of it he was.  He discovered drag balls as a way of getting attention, and it went from there.  His interest in getting attention seems to be his motivating force, but he doesn’t seem willing to step on other people to accomplish it.  He wants to outshine his competition.

129 - We Cause Scenes: The Rise of Improv Everywhere

    A documentary about Improv Everywhere, the NY-based performance art organization.
    I like Improv Everywhere, and I’ve been following them for a long time.  While this documentary is fun, it’s a bit dry.  There isn’t that much drama to be had.  The primary weakness is a reduced amount of footage of the actual events.  I would like to see a little more of the meat behind the process.  Coming up with ideas, figuring out how to go about executing them well.  Some more introspective information would be appreciated.
    Instead, I came out of this actually having less appreciation for the way the group is run.  Charlie is not presented as being especially thoughtful about the ethical side of some of his events.  To clarify, I don’t think he is unethical.  But I think his considerations should have gotten a bigger portion of the movie.
    I don’t like his unhappiness with how his appearance on This American Life went.  I haven’t watched his appearance on the TV show in a long time, but I remember his radio appearance very well, and I felt it was incredibly balanced.  It reinforced that the reaction to the event was negative at first, but it changed over time.

128 - Limitless

    A struggling novelist finds an experimental drug that unleashes his intellectual and creative abilities, along with the ability to focus on his tasks.  Along with the drug comes withdrawal, debts, and blackouts.
    In my mind, I pair this movie with The Adjustment Bureau.  I think I originally saw them back-to-back.
    This is a good movie.  It’s not exceptional, but it’s very good.  It holds my attention, it moves along quickly, and it makes me think.  There are a few weak points, but they aren’t terrible.  A few of the plot steps are a little off.  When he gets back together with his girlfriend, I wouldn’t expect her to be interested in him - he’s a different person.  He states as much.  But she doesn’t seem to care until she tries the drug.  The other thing that isn’t quite right is a third act plot point.  In order to give himself a dosage of the drug, he drinks the blood of a man who had injected himself with the drug.  This… it’s possible, but unlikely.  I don’t think there would be enough concentration of the drug.
    I noticed more of the filmmaking techniques this time through.  The same trick is used in a few different ways, but it’s an exhilarating effect.  It shows up early on, as the camera zooms down a sidewalk, splicing together multiple shots into a seamless near-infinite zoom.

127 - Schindler's List

    Oskar Schindler ferrets Jewish people to safety in Nazi Germany, under the cover of being a manufacturer.
    This is one of those impossible-to-review movies.  I can’t say it’s excellent, because it isn’t.  It’s more interesting than I expected, since I’ve typically found Spielberg’s movies to be… technically well done, but without a strong personality.  I think I’ve talked about his work before.  He tends to make movies that are enjoyable exactly one time.  Even movies that I thought I would like several times over - Hook, Jurassic Park, E.T…. I felt like they were actually really dull on repeat viewings.
    (As always, the Indiana Jones movies are the exception.)
    I’m impressed with how brutal this movie is.  I watch lots of horror, and my tastes for it have left me a bit more aware of exactly how much death is shown.  This movie doesn’t flinch, which is a big step forward.  Strangely, it reminded me a lot of Man Bites Dog, in the unflinching approach, combined with black & white photography, combined with the fairly aimless killing that happens.
    What bothers me is that it just isn’t that effective on me.  I’m more likely to care about a character I know and appreciate when they suffer.  It’s hard for me to feel like this broad, general violence against a population is personally touching.
    (Obviously, this is not intended to trivialize the holocaust.  I simply think the movie would be more effective if they showed half as many victims and spent more time getting to know them.)
    The second half of the movie is a little less effective.  Schindler moves from being a more sleazy businessman to being too overtly moral, which takes some of the mystery out of his character.  Once he’s gotten his workforce back and saved from concentration camps, the story gets boring.  This is a weird problem.  The majority of the movie is taken up with getting Schindler in the position to save a bunch of people.  Once he does, it jumps over all of the time between that and the end of the war.  This is the time period that I think would have made the best story.  Schindler tries to keep his plant looking productive, while not actually producing anything that works.  He needs to keep paying off officials and looking like he’s working toward the Nazi ends.  That’s a much more interesting story - at least to my mind.
    I understand the effect that this has on a lot of viewers.  But it’s just not for me.  When it comes to atrocities, I think I prefer to see documentaries.

126 - Intolerable Cruelty

    A gold digger comes into conflict with an effective divorce attorney.
    A Coen brothers movie.  I saw this in the theater with my father… it’s actually one of the only movies my father and I saw in the theater together.
    There are a few small problems with this movie, but I’ve never minded them.  It’s a little bit longer than it should be, but it’s still time well spent.  For some reason, this movie has one of the weakest reputations of the Coen pictures.
    This time through, I paid a lot more attention to the writing than I usually have, especially since I’m working on writing a romance right now.
    Every character is tightly defined by specific traits.  That’s pretty normal.  But I’ve noticed that they actually focus on the character trait so strongly that the characters push that trait to the exclusion of everything else.  When Gus Petch is introduced, his conversation with Marylin is him not understanding her, and talking about what he wants to talk about.  We learn everything we need to, but the scene remains entertaining because of his cluelessness.  The same thing happens when Howard Doyle is introduced.  Even minor characters like Marge the waitress just hammer their traits in place, and focus on not understanding other characters.
    I think I’ve learned a lot about characters from this movie.  For comedic purposes, multifaceted characters are wasted.  Every scene should be a joke, and progression of the plot isn’t the primary purpose.  The goal is to keep people entertained, and to focus on the plot after they’ve been focused on the comedy.

125 - The Stepford Wives

    After their lucrative jobs fall apart, a couple moves to Stepford, CT, where they become ingrained in the community.  It seems that most of the wives in the community have been replaced with robots, or something.
    I haven’t seen the original.  From what I’ve heard, the original isn’t very good, but the idea, and the novel, were influential.  This is a better movie than I had heard, and I’m not positive why it seems to have such a terrible reception.
    I actually watched this twice today.  Cathy caught the end of it, and wanted to see it.
    The second time through, I recognized a few of the problems with the movie.  But I still think it’s pretty strong.  The humor is a little predictable, but it doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard.  Jon Lovitz gets to insert a few good lines that were most likely improvised.  There’s a nice twist at the end, which can’t be seen coming, but it doesn’t seem to matter.  The weirdest part of the movie is Christopher Walken, who seems to be hamming it up as hard as he can.  He has a few good lines, but he seems to be slipping into self-parody for most of his part.
    There’s a mildly amusing element to most of the movie.  I think this is the doing of Frank Oz, the director, since it reminds me a little of how I reacted to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels the first time I saw it.  I thought it would be more uproariously funny, like L.A. Story.  But I found that as I returned to the movie a few more times, I appreciated all of the smaller aspects of the comedy.  The nuances to the performances, the novelty of the music.
    I’ve read some of the complaints, and they are all things that I noticed.  I’m not sure why I’m so forgiving of them.  It’s unclear if the women are replaced with outright robots, or if they have just had implants put into their brains.  Both methods have their own plot problems.  The ATM scene is bizarre.  I’m not really positive why it’s in there.
     Maybe the main reason people didn't like this was that they expected it to be less comedy, and more thriller.

124 - Curtains

    A director holds extended auditions for six women at his mansion.  A masked killer is picking people off.
    An early 80’s slasher, it’s probably one of the more charming ones.  The premise is good, the set pieces used to knock people off are fun.
    The biggest problem is that there are too many characters to keep track of, and most of them are hard to care about.  I also felt like the ending was telegraphed pretty well in advance, although some people seemed to be surprised by the switch up.  But now that I think of it, the ending is a bit clever.  Not wildly clever, but just enough for it to be worthwhile.   

123 - A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge

    A new family moves into the Elm Street house from the first movie, and the boy starts being stalked in his dreams by Freddy, who is interested in possessing the boy as a gateway into the real world.
    After watching that documentary about the Elm Street franchise, I was interested in rewatching this one, which is notable for the remarkable gay subtext.  That is one of the most fascinating aspects of it, but the structure of the script is much more interesting.
    We focus on Jesse, the boy, as the protagonist.  But he doesn’t really behave as a protagonist does.  He doesn’t seem all that interested in researching his situation, he denies it for a long time, then when he finally comes to terms with it, he’s helpless.  At that point, the focus shifts to his girlfriend, Lisa.  Lisa becomes the protagonist.  This all happens really late in the movie like the last 15-20 minutes or so.  It’s a structural shift that I don’t think I’ve seen in any other movie.  It’s very strange, and I think I kind of like it.  It turned an ending that would otherwise be pretty predictable (something like “the power of love defeats Freddy”) into an ending that plays more fresh than it would otherwise.
    The rest of the movie is a little strange.  It seems less plot driven, and more set-piece driven.  A collection of scare scenes with a minimal thread of plot holding it together.

122 - The Making of '...And God Spoke'

    A pseudo-documentary on the making of a movie of the Bible.
    This isn’t quite as smart or low-key as This is Spinal Tap.  But my affection for it has grown over time.  There are a lot of gags that I really like - Eve having a massive tattoo covering part of her body - the awkward fight between Cain and Abel.  That no one on set seems to know some of the basic facts of the Bible.  Even with the good moments, there are a handful of gags that are much more forced.  When they go to raise more money from the relative, and he’s showing a variety of things they spend money on, then he announces that he doesn’t have any money to invest.  These aren’t bad jokes, they just feel like too much time is being dedicated for a low-level payoff.
    I suppose I’ve got one primary problem with the movie, but it’s not a big one.  One of the things that sells Bowfinger is that it’s about the need to create, the love of movies.  This doesn’t have the same feeling.  It’s not a big deal, but I think if it were there, I’d really feel like it was a fantastic movie.
    Still, very fun, and really worth the viewing.

121 - Haunt

    A family moves into a house where a bunch of people died.  Then the son and a girl he meets start finding a bunch of creepy stuff going on.
    I’m sorry I can’t say much about this.  This is watchable, but it’s so predictable, dull, and derivative.  It seems to borrow heavily from the more recent haunted house movies, but it does it in a way that feel like they couldn’t have been bothered to come up with anything worthwhile.
     Honestly, I'm surprised I finished watching it.  Lord knows, I forgot everything about it almost immediately.

120 - Headhunters

    A recruiter, who finances his lifestyle by stealing artwork, runs afoul of a businessman, and becomes hunted by him.
    Surprisingly interesting.  The pacing is off, but there’s a unique feel to the movie, probably because of the foreign settings.  The business lifestyle portrayed reminded me of American Psycho, even as it is completely detached from the 80s.
    What bothered me most about it was how long it took to reach the event that the movie turns on.  Everything for the first 45 minutes is setup, leading to a much more exciting second half.  There’s also something peculiar about the actions of the villain.  He seems more enigmatic than he should.

119 - The Big Lewbowski

    A case of mistaken identity gets a slacker dragged into a world of intrigue.
    A very hard movie to explain, my feelings about it have evolved a bit over time.  It’s hard to say that there’s a real meaning behind the story.  It’s almost like a lighthearted film noir, but it’s not quite that.  It’s fun, mostly because the Coen brothers are just fantastic with their scripts.  They create a heightened reality to everything, and define their characters in broad strokes, but they develop those characters within those traits so effectively.  It makes the scripts pop, in a way that doesn’t bother me.
    I think I used to like this more, but now I feel like there are some weaknesses.  It’s a bit longer than it should be, and it bugs me in the exact same spot.  There’s a point around the 1:20 mark that feels like the trigger to start wrapping things up… and the movie goes for another 40 minutes.
    I don’t mind running time, but this is an issue with something script related.  It could be a directorial choice.
    I do like the movie, but I think I prefer a few other Coen brothers movies over it.  I really like Intolerable Cruelty… and I think I like Burn After Reading more than this.  It’’s trippy, but in a non-threatening way.  And the Dude is so enjoyable that it’s a pleasure to listen to him.

118 - The Simpsons Movie

    After Springfield’s lake reaches new levels of pollution, the town is sealed under a large dome.
    It’s remarkable that it took so long to develop a Simpsons movie.  On the other hand, they did it right, by keeping their own writing staff on the project instead of spinning it off to another group.  What’s interesting about this is that it doesn’t feel like an extended episode.  It probably would be much more exhausting if it was.
    The movie is paced correctly, but when you think back on it, it’s far less dense than a Simpsons episode usually is.  There are jokes, and most of them are good.  But there aren’t as many brief gags being packed in.  They spend more time focusing on developing the story and keeping the plot moving along.  This is good - the episodic approach only makes for a nice movie for fans of the series.  This works out much better.
    There’s one thing that bugs me about the movie, and it’s a fanboy kind of issue.  I wish they had done it sooner.  One of the core elements of the plot is the threat to Homer and Marge’s relationship.  This has been done over and over in the show, and it feels like a generic go-to plot device.

117 - Monsters

    Aliens have shown up on Earth, and they occupy a piece of land between Mexico and the US.  A photographer is tasked with returning a powerful businessman’s daughter from Mexico to the US.  Limitations in travel make it so they have to make their way through the contaminated zone.
    I had heard good things about this, but I somehow had a very different idea of what it would be like.    Now that I look into it, I was confusing it with District 9, which I still haven’t seen.
    This isn’t terrible, but it’s not quite there.  It’s shot well, the budget was clearly enough for what they were doing.  It develops a great landscape.  It reminds me of Apocalypse Now.  But…
    It took a long time to grab my attention, and what did it was the image of the new map of this continent.  Even after that sucked me in, the movie feels like it does everything it can to let the viewer go again.  We get lots of compelling images, but very little information to give meaning to those images.
    There are a few bits and pieces given about the nature of the aliens.  But we never really learn what the military does to them.  We don’t learn much of anything about why the aliens are here, or why they remain.  These are the ideas that would draw me in, and make me a bigger fan of this.  As it is, it’s a a sci-fi premise in search of a purpose.
    I just took a look at Ebert’s review.  He gave it a very positive review, but I really don’t see the insight that he feels the movie had.  The reveal at the end seemed like an obvious thing.
    Spoilers!
    The aliens aren’t exactly antagonistic.  They just kind of move around, interact with each other, glow, and don’t care much about humans.  This is not a surprise to me.  Even though the movie tries to push the idea that the aliens are dangerous or evil or something, there was never any reason to believe it.  The military has been attacking them, but without much information given, there’s no real reason to have any feelings about that.  We don’t know if they are simply there to prevent the aliens from tainting the rest of Earth’s ecosystem.

116 - The Initiation

    A college girl pledges a sorority as she also deals with a recurring nightmare connected to a family tragedy.
    Pretty dull.  I remember bits and pieces of it, mostly that the last act is shot at a mall at nighttime, which is kind of nice to see.  But the vast, vast majority of it is really, really boring.
    On the positive side, I actually didn’t expect the twist at the end.  On the other hand, I don’t think it was possible to predict it.

115 - Death Wish

    A well-behaved architect decides to take the law into his own hands after his wife and daughter are murdered/assaulted by a group of thugs.
    Charles Bronson’s Death Wish movies are a classic of 70’s culture.  But they’ve been difficult for me to find.  I never noticed them in my local video stores as I was growing up.  But I believe they were satirized in some of the MAD magazines I had.
    This is actually a pretty classy movie.  It’s not as complex as Ms. 45 was, but it’s a very delicate act.  There are lots of questions raised by this movie, and there aren’t any easy answers.  It’s easy to identify with the lead, but it’s also easy to feel like the police aren’t doing their job by letting him get away with it.
    What sells the movie is that he never seems out of control.  He decides what he has to do, and does it.  He doesn’t come across as premeditated, either.  He doesn’t plan out his kills, he just puts himself into the situation, and waits for the right moment.
    The most interesting element is that he never goes after the people who actually did him wrong.  He doesn’t know who they are, and he has no way of finding out.  The story would be very different if he knew, killed them, then decided to keep killing.
    There’s one hilarious detail in this movie.  After he kills his first mugger, we see a resulting front page headline on a newspaper:
EX CON KILLED
MOTIVE UNKNOWN

114 - Grand Piano

    A concert pianist plays his comeback show, but he performs under duress, as a sniper threatens to kill him and his wife unless he performs flawlessly.
    The premise sounds kind of ridiculous.  And the movie takes a few steps that stretch believability, but it’s actually a pretty good movie.  It reminds me of a modern Hitchcock premise.  The script is tight, and it moves much faster than I expected it to.  There are still some problems with the script, and they are probably there because of how fast it works.  There isn’t much time spent on exposition early in the movie.  When it finally comes time to find out more about the villain, his motivations seem forced.  It’s not terrible, but it’s the kind of clunky dialogue that it’s hard to keep from laughing at.
    There’s another problem that I’m not sure how I feel about.  The villain is only heard for most of the movie.  He’s finally revealed in the last ten minutes or so.  And when we see him, he doesn’t get much of a chance to act - it’s all action.  I’m not sure how I feel about this.  A faceless villain is interesting, but revealing him at the end is strange.  It isn’t a reveal - it’s not a person we’re supposed to recognize.

113 - Sleepwalk With Me

    Mike Birbiglia plays a fictionalized version of himself as he starts to find some success as a comedian, and his relationship with his girlfriend develops.
    This is an awkward movie, not just because so much of it focused on a main character who seems a little off, who doesn’t seem to be aware of how badly he performs on stage.
    (Honestly, I think that this aspect of the character has been ramped up for dramatic purposes.)
    No, what makes it awkward is that the structure of the movie feels off.  I’m not about to break the movie down, but even as the themes and focus came clearer, the movie improved, but it still couldn’t overcome the aimlessness that the first half seemed to have.
    I have a harder time believing that any comic could be that unaware of their own performance.  The early “bad set” of jokes isn’t actually as terrible as it’s made out to be.  It’s mostly a miserable performance because he doesn’t offer any delivery.  Being aware of delivery is something just about anyone knows about; unless you’re dealing with a 5th grader.
    What’s even weirder is that this material should have made for a much better movie.  I’ve heard this story on This American Life, and the story is exceptionally great there.  When we see the story performed for the camera, it doesn’t have the same impact.

112 - Sleepaway Camp

    A killer is picking off people at a summer camp.
    A classic of 80’s horror.  I actually bought the box set of the Sleepaway Camp movies back during college.  It was a great deal for all three movies, plus a disc of some of the footage they shot for a proposed fourth movie.  Surprisingly, I found that this box set got recalled, and the packaging was changed after the Red Cross complained.
    The movie is best known for the ending - specifically the last shot.  It’s a remarkably strange shot, since it actually plays almost like a dream.  The killer stands, brandishing a knife and the victim’s head.  Their mouth is open, and there’s a strange, guttural noise coming out.  The eyes are bright and unblinking.  It’s weird.  It’s really weird.  Because it’s so weird, it makes the movie memorable.
    It’s been a long time since I’ve watched this movie, and it’s an unusual experience.  I knew it would be dated.  But it’s a peculiar mix of good and bad work.  The script is campy, and some of the cast really hams up their work.  Some of the rest of the cast does a good job with the material they have.  Some of the direction is clever, and some of it is dull.
    I noticed an effects shot that I was impressed with - a character gets an arrow shot through his neck.  I watched it in slow motion, and I was able to figure out how they did it.  But it was still staged very well.
    What actually impresses me much more about this movie - especially in comparison with the two direct sequels - is that they actually have a pretty substantial cast for this movie.  There are plenty of kids wandering around, and it actually feels like a summer camp.