168 - Frank

    A struggling musician runs into a band that has just lost a keyboard player.  He is folded into the band, which is fronted by a strangely charismatic, skilled musician named Frank, who always wears an oversized head.
    Wow, I didn’t have any sense of what this would be like, but I found it… bizarre, but very enjoyable.  I haven’t been able to fully digest the story or make sense of the ideas in it, but I did find the whole thing remarkably touching.
    The music is very strange, but it has something to offer.  There are a lot of strange sounds involved, and textures, but it doesn’t feel like typical music.  That’s where there’s a conflict in the story - the lead, Jon, admires this adventurous music, but finds himself drawn to something of a more traditional approach to pop music.  I find myself in the same situation most of the time.
    The story drags a little during the second half, but it set a very high bar, and the story shifts to a very different one.  I don’t know if I can say that the second half is bad, because the script sets up everything it has to during the first half.
    Very good, but in a strange way.  A little uncomfortable.

     I noticed a reference that I haven't found any other reference to online.  There's a character that has been treated because he was into fucking mannequins.  At one point, Frank mentions that one of his mannequins is named "Caroline Cuntley."  This is a direct reference to The Real Frank Zappa Book, in which Zappa is talking about a friend of his who lived with a guy named Wild Bill... who would do the exact same thing.  His little girl mannequin had the same name.  It's nice to see this reference.  It's obscure, but knowing that the author read the same book is pretty meaningful.

167 - Hider in the House

    A disturbed man builds a false wall in the attic of a new house.  He becomes obsessed with the family  that moves in, and manipulates events to bring himself into their lives.
    I grew up in a small town with an independent video store.  While I grew up fascinated with the box art for horror movies, I didn’t watch many until high school.  This was one of the movies that I never rented, but it was a real in-joke among my friends.  One of the guys had the last name Heider.  Now that I’ve actually seen this movie, it’s probably good that we never rented it.
    As I was watching it, I kept feeling like every step of the story was a cliche.  But I can’t remember where I’ve seen it before.  I’ve seen Bad Ronald, Crawlspace, and a variety of other movies that have a similar premise.  But I can’t point to any of them that use the same elements.
    The one thing that this movie has going for it is Gary Busey.  I don’t like the guy, I generally don’t care for his acting, but he is legitimately creepy in this movie.  I don’t know how intentional it is.
    The script has a variety of problems.  There’s some awkward writing when the couple needs to get into an argument.  There’s a sequence where Busey is supposed to overheard the hotel and room number where he plans on cheating on his wife… but for some reason, the husband is telling this kind of detail to one of his friends (possibly a co-worker?).  Because of how awkward that piece of information is, we actually don’t hear it said, but it’s clear that Busey gathers that information from their conversation.  When I try to imagine that scene unfolding in reality, it’s kind of impossible.
    After laying a trap that involves luring the wife to a lunch with her husband, leaving a note for her, somehow getting the hotel lobby to give her a key to a hotel room, the wife catches her husband in bed with another woman.  Both she and her husband never question the chain of events that brought her there.
    Busey kills off the family dog.  After the dog disappears, no one seems to be broken up about it.  There’s barely any mention of it, even after the buried dog is found in the backyard.  Hell, they never address what he does with the body of the woman he kills.
    Even the basic setup that Busey uses during the movie lacks a certain common sense.  He builds a false wall in the attic (which is a fantastic, huge attic).  He builds it at one end.  He installs a door to it, and a vent, for some reason.  But he builds it so that it blocks a substantial window.  Wouldn’t people notice that?  From the outside, there’s a window.  From the inside - there’s just a wall!
    There are a few minor upsides.  I love seeing Michael McKean play his usual slimy businessman character.  I love that this came out in 1987, and there are great touches of 80s fashion throughout.  There are a few great mullet haircuts.

    Watching this movie did give me an idea.  In these movies, we typically see that the voyeur becomes more and more unhinged as they become more obsessed with their focus.  I would like to see a movie that uses an unhinged voyeur that develops a comprehensive plan that turns them into an important part of the life of their target.  And that the longer they work at it, they become more and more normal.  By the end, they are fully engrained, and they eliminate all clues about their voyeuristic start.

166 - Absentia

    Seven years earlier, a man goes missing.  His wife is now able to declare him dead in absentia.  Creepy stuff happens.
    That summary avoids anything that could be considered a spoiler.
    This movie is a mixed bag.  There are a lot of cliche sequences, especially closer to the start of the story.  There are loads of “the spooky ghost shows up unexpected and threatens someone” moments.  I’m very tired of seeing those.  They can be done well, but it seems to get harder to do that.  But there are a few things that I liked about this.  First, the story plays with a few perspectives.  We see the supernatural version of the story, but we occasionally get a few scenes of people speculating about alternate sequences.  This is done early on, when the wife talks about ideas she had for what happened to her husband.  These flights of fancy have an interesting effect of making the whole story seem less like a definitive picture is being painted.
    This idea continues at the end, when the police are speculating about what a reasonable accounting for their story would be.  It’s one thing if we see characters talk about these ideas.  It’s another to show them to the audience.  When the audience sees them, they become a credible idea.
    The second thing that the movie does well is that it explores an idea of mythology that I don’t see represented in horror movies often.  The story is loosely tied together with the Billy Goat’s Gruff.  The antagonist is only glimpsed, and what it does is never clearly stated.  There is an implied mythology, but not an explicit one.
    Until I wrote that sentence, I hadn’t considered it, but this could easily have been condensed into an episode of The X-Files.

165 - Back to the Future

    After his mad-scientist friend builds a time machine, Marty winds up in 1955, and inadvertently causes his parents to not meet.  He needs to get them to meet, fall in love, and then return back to 1985.
    It’s been a long time.  This is the first time I’ve watched through the movie on Blu-ray, and I’m really very happy with the transfer.  There are a few details that I hadn’t noticed before.
    This time through, I’ve realized that it’s a very charming movie… but it has some serious weaknesses.
    It’s a remarkably tight script.  Everything in it is either a setup or a payoff.  There are callbacks to nearly every single detail.  This does make it a very satisfying movie to watch.  But there’s a conspicuous lack of character development.  Especially with Marty, who gets a very small, and very understated arc for himself.  (Mostly, he sees his own weaknesses in his father, and realizes it.  This aspect is not played up.)
    Because everything is setup and payoff, the movie feels like one giant in-joke.  The cast is mostly winking at the audience through the whole thing.  This is where Michael J. Fox pays off - he knows how to deliver those lines in a way that doesn’t feel wrong.  It’s a little more grating when Lorraine delivers these lines.  It might be because she seems to be kind of vacuous.
    I found myself wonder how I would feel about the movie if I hadn’t seen it as a kid.  I know that my dad didn’t like this movie, and couldn’t stand it.

164 - Coherence

    A collection of friends gather for a dinner party on the night of a comet passing Earth.  The power goes out, and things get strange.
    A very strange movie.  It holds attention well, but it seems strangely vague in the way that it ends.  As I read about how the movie was made, both the strengths and weaknesses make sense.
    The biggest strength the movie has going for it is the banter, the very casual crosstalk that happens throughout most of the dinner scenes.  This is really remarkable.  There are a lot of tiny jokes, but they don’t feel scripted.  These scenes sound and feel completely natural.
    The biggest weakness is also born of the same problem.  The cast doesn’t know the plot.  The plot is being made up as it goes along.  If there was some stronger planning done in putting the story aspect together, this could have been a real kick-ass sci-fi movie, like Primer or something like that.  Instead, it gets interesting, then it gets strange, then it kind of falls apart near the end.
    There’s one big problem, and that’s the weakness of character motivations.  The characters - as a group - make bad decisions.  There’s an irrational belief that their doppelgangers are going to attack.  Since they seem to have a grasp on the situation, and they know that the others are exactly the same as themselves, there’s no reason to feel like they pose a threat.
    This was actually something that was great about Triangle - they made it so every step of the movie developed her motivation.  Here, it’s mostly nonsensical fear.
    (Wait, the movie may have said something about the comet inducing paranoia.  But I can’t remember)
    It’s an interesting movie, worth a watch, but hardly worth a repeat watch.

163 - Invasion of the Body Snatchers

    A doctor finds that his his small town is gradually being replaced by alien duplicates.
    I’m not sure why I never saw this.  The story never seemed that appealing to me, probably because it’s been done several times with a wide variety of variants.  But Netflix was carrying it, and it seemed like enough of a horror classic that I should probably watch it.
    It’s better than I expected.  There are variations on the story that I’ve seen on TV, but this is impressive.  The story moves along more quickly than I expected.  There’s less padding.  Kevin McCarthy plays the lead, someone who I mostly know from his roles in UHF and Innerspace.  It’s strange to see him as a leading man, but he does well.
    It’s hard to point to any sequences that are especially notable, except that there’s this very gradual ramping up.  Things are normal, and they get progressively weirder.  During the last act, we get a scene where a bunch of citizens wander to a town square.  Three trucks pull up with pods, and they get instructions for who is supposed to take some pods to distribute to relatives in nearby towns.  Most of this sequence is show with wide shots, which is fantastic.  Keeping distance from the subjects reduces their humanity, and without the sound of them moving, it seems much more alien.
    As the town starts chasing our hero and his girl, there seems to be less and less hope.  This makes the ending especially awkward, since they tack on an ending that is hopeful, at least.  It’s actually a little disappointing, since it doesn’t address how they would handle the invasion.
    It was also nice to see Richard Deacon playing a doctor.  I know him mostly for playing Mel on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and he’s very charming.

162 - Edge of Tomorrow

    An inept officer is swept into participating in a ground offensive against an invading alien force.  Through odd chance, he winds up in a situation where he repeats the battle over and over.
    I didn’t have high hopes for this.  I don’t think much of Tom Cruise.  Leading men rarely turn in the great performances that character actors do, and his style of action doesn’t appeal to me.  Still, this movie has an 8.1 on IMDB.  So… I finally watched it.
    It’s a really messy movie.  It takes a long time to get going.  His first death doesn’t happen until about 25 minutes into the movie.  Once he starts re-living the same day, it gets a bit more fun.  There’s some levity, and some of the deaths that happen are actually very pleasing, in a philosophical way.  There are enough deaths that seem completely avoidable, and it’s nice to see that not everything is an action sequence.
    Then, there’s a scene, about 45 minutes in, that just turned the whole thing into one long groan.  The movie attempts to give an explanation for the time rewind.  Not just that, but it attempts to turn it into a major plot device.  This shift is terrible.  I have a hard time articulating it, especially without giving huge spoilers, but effectively… the aliens have the ability to control time.  Or at least one variation of the aliens does.  The alien rewinds time in order to conquer planets (I think).  What triggers the alien rewinding time is when another variation of alien is killed.  Somehow, by being doused with the blood of one of those aliens when he’s first killed, our hero automatically rewinds time every time he dies.  He retains his knowledge and skills, but no one else does.
    I was talking with Cathy about this.  Part of what made Groundhog Day work was that the movie feels less like it takes place in the real world.  You aren’t certain if the protagonist is just living through a simulacrum of the real world - more of a religious experience.  In this movie, the protagonist has someone else to guide him through the experience.  This sets it in the real world.
    One of the rules I’ve read about screenwriting is about the limits on how many magical elements you can have in a movie.  You want to have a movie with vampires?  That’s fine.  If you introduce aliens in that vampire movie… you’re out of luck.  It gets too ridiculous too quickly.  That’s what I felt like this movie did.  It established aliens and some kind of time rewind.  Then it joined them together in a way that felt like a new piece of magic.
    The ending feels wrong.  Even if you buy into the rules that the movie lays out at the midpoint, it just doesn’t make sense to me.  The enemy brain is destroyed, and somehow, time resets, and the brain is no more?  Who triggered the time reset?  The protagonist, or the brain?  I lean toward the brain, since then it would carry the bombs back into the past (wait, even that doesn’t make sense).  Let me map this out.
Choice 1
    The brain triggers the time reset.
        This means that it carries the bombs back in time with itself, then explodes.  This doesn’t work.
        This would also mean that protagonist doesn’t get coated in blood, which means that he would         die permanently.
Choice 2
    Protagonist triggers the time reset
        This doesn’t make sense, since he would have died in the explosion caused by the bomb well         before he would get coated in blood.
Choice 3
    Protagonist never lost his ability to reset time
        This would work.  Except… there’s the line about how there was this surge of energy from the death of the enemy brain, which happens well in the past.  This simply doesn’t make sense.

    Most of these things would never bother me, except that the movie takes itself too seriously.
    The main character has a trivial arc.  It’s not something that he chooses, either.  He should have an arc where he chooses to be a hero, where he decides to be something greater than he was.  Instead, this comes across as a selfish journey, where he only decides to be heroic because it might get him out of this situation.
    I’m clearly in the minority on this movie.  I looked through pages of IMDB comments, and the lowest rating I found was a 7/10.

     To make this movie a little more messy... the title is terrible.  Edge of Tomorrow doesn't tell me anything about what I'm going to be watching.  So they've tried to change the title to the tagline - Live. Die. Repeat. I don't think much of that title either.  The manga it's based on is titled All You Need is Kill.  That's not a great title, but at least it's memorable.

161 - Parker

    After a heist falls apart, Parker is left for dead.  He returns to exact his revenge on those who crossed him.
    Another Jason Statham thriller.  I didn’t really know what to expect.  It’s an odd movie, since it starts off very well, but as it moves into the core of the plot, it becomes more clear that the meat of the story just isn’t as interesting.
    Jennifer Lopez plays a down-on-her-luck real estate agent.  The amount of focus she gets feels especially strange, since she feels like an ornament on the primary plot.
    The best part of this movie is the save-the-cat moment.  Usually these moments make me cringe, even as I understand the necessity of them.  In this one, Statham is disguised as a priest at a state fair.  A little girl is sad because she isn’t able to win at a carnival game.  The barker tries to rope Statham into the game.  He reluctantly agrees.  He throws darts at balloons, doing three perfect hits.  He wins the stuffed animal for the girl, and got to demonstrate his skill.  A very well-done bit.
    I know it sounds like faint praise to focus on so trivial a moment, but was effective, it was short, and it accomplished two things for the price of one very short sequence.  I like this kind of efficiency.
    I can’t point to much that made this movie bad.  It wasn’t bad.  It was entirely competent.  I guess it just wasn’t as awesome as I had hoped.  The opening was very promising.
    I realized that I haven’t had much exposure to Jennifer Lopez.  She seemed… okay.  There was an awkward scene where she’s forced to strip down to prove she isn’t wearing a wire.  That seemed a little forced.

160 - I Survived B.T.K.

    A documentary following Charlie Otero, whose family was mostly slaughtered by Dennis Rader, the serial killer.
    I watched The Hunt for the BTK Killer earlier this year, and I remember being impressed by the performance of the lead.  Since this was a documentary, I expected it to actually be a little more tame than the fictionalized account.  Instead, it’s actually got some much darker material in it.  And despite dipping further into darkness, it’s mostly about a strong sense of positivity in the face of hard times.
    The subject, Charlie, seems like an interesting guy, but the documentary focuses so tightly on his feelings about the murders, and his efforts to stay in control of his life that the movie never feels like it gets all that intimate with the subject.
    Where the movie really shines in in the courtroom footage of Dennis Rader.  It turns out that the fictionalized account of the story was actually sanitized quite a bit.  Seeing the courtroom footage actually details more of how these murders happened.  In particular, the hanging death of the girl was glossed over.  This information makes some of the other little details of Rader’s acts and artwork make sense.
    So, as it is, this was better than I expected.  I thought it would be a straight retread of the same material, but this was much more informative.

    Oddly, this is also released under a few other titles, including a strange title card at the end - Feast of the Assumption. 

159 - Lizzie Borden Took An Axe

    A retelling of the Lizzie Borden murders, trial, and aftermath.
    A made-for-TV movie.  At least it stars Christina Ricci, although I don’t think she’s as cute as she used to be.
    My expectations for this kind of production are low.  Poor effects are excusable, weaknesses in the script are usually acceptable.
    But this movie has some unusual problems.
    First, it’s very clearly intended to be a true account of the crimes.  This is derailed at the end, when Lizzie tells her sister how she killed their parents.  There are a number of elements that don’t feel right… facts that just aren’t in the original case, information that was left out.
    The second problem is the really weird one.  The music.  There’s this hilarious generic rock music used as cues throughout the movie.  The music itself wasn’t objectionable, but it takes the viewer out of the time period.  Maybe there should be some rules for using modern rock as a soundtrack.  It’s okay to use it in a period movie, when there’s supposed to be a modern edge to it.  This is possible in things like… Wild Wild West.  In this movie, it feels really weird.
    Otherwise… there are some good gore effects, even though they aren’t complicated.  It’s a forgettable version of the story.

158 - The Birdcage

    The son of a gay couple has his fiancée and her family over to meet his family.  The fiancée’s family is centered around a conservative senator.
    I know this movie has gotten a good reception, and I know I saw it when I was in high school.  I remember enjoying it, but not too enthusiastically.  This time, I like it, but I have a lot more reservations than I expected.
    My complaints boil down to two core issues.  First, the movie relies on extreme stereotypes.  In some cases, a caricature of types is appropriate.  The problem is that nearly everyone fits this bill.  The second issue is that there’s no lesson learned.  The entire movie feels like the setup to a punchline, which is the last scene.  The senator - who should obviously have a lesson learned - doesn’t seem to learn anything.  He has plenty of opportunity for improvement, but he never takes it.  Even Nathan Lane’s character seems like he should have learned something, but he mostly just stops being whiny for a little while.
    Normally, these problems would be a death knell for a movie.  But this is a special case.  What this has going for it is… the cast.  Everyone is hamming it up, everyone is putting the most outrageous spin on everything.  It’s remarkable, it’s engrossing, it’s funny.  Even Robin Williams, who would normally push the part in a direction that I would find distasteful, plays his part a little restrained, and this gives a bit of an emotional core to the movie.  Not a big one, but it’s there, and it helps the movie work.
    The more I think about this, I kind of like that there’s no lesson learned.  People stay the same.  Political philosophies are not easily challenged.

157 - Sky High

    The son of a pair of superheroes starts at a high school intended for super-powered people who want to be heroes.
    I had an idea for a movie, which is vaguely similar, but not quite the same as this.  In my research to find if there was anything similar, I found that this movie existed.  I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see it, or if I should avoid it.
    It’s actually pretty good.  It’s aimed at kids, and that hurts it a little.  But there’s a thick layer of comic sensibility coating the whole thing, which helps.  When a movie doesn’t take itself too seriously, that goes a long way to making it easier to accept weaknesses.
    The plot is largely forgettable.  It’s usual high-school drama fare.  There’s just a swirl of superpower set pieces mixed in.  Most of these are small things, which make for nice gags.  Now that I’ve finished the movie, I realized that I felt like the powers were actually irrelevant to the story.
    One of the little things that made Heavyweights work pretty well was that the central villain of it was focused on fat-shaming the kids.  The exploration of the issues that go along with weight lend a little depth to that story.  In this, there’s no real exploration of the importance of using powers responsibly.  When a character throws fireballs around, it’s kind of terrible that the danger of that isn’t explored.
    I’m also disappointed to see so few clever powers.  I know it’s really difficult to come up with powers, but it’s really disappointing to see them copying Multiple Man’s powers.

156 - The Tortured

    A couple decide to kidnap and torture a man who was convicted of kidnapping, torturing, and murdering their 6-year-old son.
    This movie moves from unintentionally hilarious, to boring, to kind of bad.
    I wasn’t expecting much.  It didn’t sound very good, but it sounded like they might be able to do some interesting stuff with the premise.  The movie kicks off immediately after the kid is kidnapped.  That’s okay.  Then we get a brief scene of the mother flipping out after she comes home and finds out that the police are looking into the kidnapping.  Her reaction is ridiculous.  It’s overly dramatic, and she doesn’t listen to the police.  Then we get the police finding the house, finding the kid, the parents going to the morgue to identify the body.  Then the movie goes back, and walks through the scene where the kid is kidnapped?  This is the weirdest step I’ve seen.  We didn’t learn anything new from the flashback.  The movie established that we shouldn’t be interested in that part of the story.  So this exists to fill time.
    Throughout the first act, the parents are hilarious.  They overact in response to everything.  There’s even a scene where they yell at their lawyer when the lawyer explains the sentencing available for the crimes.
    Which brings further, massive plot problems.  Not ones that I felt were reasonable, just things that reflected a lack of research.
    So, the villain is on trial.  We hear that there are two counts of most of the crimes… but the trial only focuses on his kidnapping, torture, and murder of this single child.  We get police testimony that there’s a mass grave.  Wouldn’t the police actually look into this?  If the state is bringing charges against this guy for murders, you don’t prosecute each one separately.  Then he gets a weaker sentence so that they can learn more about the remains?  They specifically say that their goal is to find where the other bodies are.  So either there’s more than one mass grave… or these are incompetent cops.
    There’s a jury in this case.  And somehow, the efforts at cooperation in exchange for lighter sentencing still applies?  Typically, that kind of trade-off happens when the state decides which charges will be brought against the defendant.
    The most interesting portion of the movie is the mid-section, and it’s because the parents decide to kidnap the killer.  The logistics of this operation are much more interesting than anything else the movie has to offer.
    Then we move into the torture stuff.  The characters change up.  They are conflicted about what they’re doing, and so forth.
    There’s a bit of twist ending, but it seems much more forced.  Who cares?

    The most interesting thing about this is how much it made me appreciate an episode of Masters of Horror - Family.  A vaguely similar story, but told in a far more interesting way, with much more comprehensive development.
    Maybe the shortest way to describe the problem with the movie is that the main characters never have a chance to be reasonable or clever.  They argue with everyone and each other, and never get a chance to improve.
    And the non-linear editing is like a kid with a new toy.