186 - Livid (Livide)

    A girl starts training as an at-home nurse.  One of the patients she meets is comatose, and supposedly has a treasure hidden in her home.  The girl returns with two guys to search for the treasure.
    I don’t know what to think.  It started well.  It developed pretty well.  Then things got weird during the last act.  There are a few things that don’t make much sense.  However, this does actually remain one of the more interesting variations on the vampire mythology that I’ve seen in modern times.
    There are a few genuinely creepy bits.  The mechanical movements of the daughter are the real highlight of the movie, and the steampunk-ish surgical scene is really neat.
    The problem is that I had to look up the wiki article to figure out what the ending was supposed to be.  I’m still not sure if I understand it.
    Some of the smaller details seem a little annoying in retrospect.  There was a bit where the girl is annoyed to find that her father is dating again after her mother’s death.  Then she sees what I assume is the ghost of her mother.  While this was enjoyable at the time, it’s easy to assume that this information will be relevant later.  Instead, it seems that it was only there to spice up the first half of the movie.
    There were a few things that I liked about the movie though.  The flashback sequences were done very well, and I felt like they benefited from being set during the daytime.  The decoration of the house was well-done (although I’ve felt like use of taxidermy is a little cliche).
    It does feel like to does something unique for the vampire sub-genre.  I don’t know what it is, but it somehow feels a little more fresh.

185 - The Blob

    A meteor lands in a small town, releasing a gelatinous blob, which destroys/absorbs everyone it comes into contact with.
    I’ve never seen the original.  I really should.  The remake is much easier to find.
    The story is really predictable.  There are cliches peppering the whole thing.  The government crew gets involved, and it’s revealed that the government is behind this biological weapon, etc.  It’s truly a product of the time period.  This isn’t a bad thing.  I found myself enjoying the dated aspects of it.  The clothes, the hairstyles, the general appearance of the production is very firmly 80’s.  The effects work is at this wonderful level, where they do a lot of compositing of elements, and it’s done very well.  It looks a lot like some of the effects work from Little Shop of Horrors.  The Blob effects are usually really good.  There are miniatures used throughout, some great building miniatures too.
    This dated quality makes the whole thing feel like a campy drive-in movie.  It’s fun.  It moves pretty quick.  The dialogue is a bit silly, but that’s to be expected.

    What surprised me the most about this movie was that I thought that the Blob was an effective horror creation.  There aren’t too many creatures that don’t have a motivation, but even the ones that do are less motivated than this.  The Thing is an obvious comparison, but that hides in an individual at a time.  There’s a good comparison to be had with Horror Express.  The Blob never gives any indication of a personality, and those that are absorbed cease to be.  The Blob is a threat, but not a conscious one.  It’s almost the same as any medical thriller.

184 - V/H/S: Viral

    Third in the found-footage anthology horror series.
    The first is Dante the Great.  An amateur magician finds an enchanted cloak and becomes a superstar magician.  The cloak seems to have a wide range of supernatural abilities, acting as a portal sometimes, then granting the wearer a variety of telekinetic abilities.  This segment is really very fun, but it’s far too short.  This is a premise that could have easily been extended to feature length, although it would have to be recast.  The lead has just the right amount of slime for the role, but the female lead has a few one-liners that sound terrible coming out of her.  This segment also would have done a lot better if it wasn’t framed as a found-footage story.
    Parallel Monsters deals with a man who - along with his parallel universe counterpart - builds a doorway to connect the universes.  The two of them swap universes to look around for fifteen minutes.  In that time, things start pretty normal, and the differences between the universes become more pronounced, creepy, and eventually deadly.  This was really good.  There seems to be a single obvious difference between the universes at first, but the degree that reality has split only becomes clear much later.
    Bonestorm comes next, (“Buy me BoneStorm or go to hell!”) which has a group of skater kids that go to Mexico to finish filming a skate video.  They wind up in an area that seems to be used for some kind of ritual to raise a creature.  I don’t care about skate culture, but there’s a ridiculous aspect to this story.  It goes crazy, and it keeps on going longer than you expect it to.  There isn’t much of a payoff for it, but it remains fairly fun.
    The framing story is called Vicious Circles, and it’s better than the other framing stories have been.  It’s confusing, and it plays as a collection of disjointed scenes.  There are still weird things that are never explained, but by the end, you feel like you understand roughly what’s happened.
    This movie hasn’t gotten a great reception, but I think it’s actually better than the second.  There aren’t many high points, but there also aren’t any really low points.  I usually feel like this is more important.  It’s a solid level of quality, which is rare for an anthology movie.

183 - The Blue Lagoon

    A pair of 7-year-olds grow up on a secluded island, and eventually fall in love.
    In Top Secret! there’s a fantastic parody of this movie, and for most of my life, this is all I knew of it.  Now that Netflix finally has it, I’ve watched it.
    It has a terrible reputation, and I understand why.  Because the kids are marooned when they’re so young, they never really develop beyond that.  They develop their sexuality, and their priorities shift, but they remain roughly as annoying as they ever were.  It’s difficult to treat this as anything other than a bad script or bad acting.  But it’s neither.  It’s accurate… but that doesn’t mean that it’s pleasant.
    There is some beautiful photography.  I think there might be a touch of stock footage used for some of the sea life shots.
    What is much more pleasant is how frankly sexuality is portrayed.  There’s plenty of nudity, none of it erotic.  The approach to this probably would be difficult to get away with now, but it’s kind of refreshing.  It brings a sense of realism to a movie that really needs it.
    The realism is weird.  The movie plays fast and loose with some basic ideas - like the stone fish that the girl steps on would have killed her.  There seem to be no problems with illness.  For some reason, their clothes stay freshly white most of the time.  They don’t get sunburned.  (Some tanning happens later in the movie)
    There’s something that I don’t like about the ending.  I don’t know exactly what it is.
    The last half hour of the movie is mostly taken up with family bliss, after they have a baby, they spend their time goofing off, teaching the baby things, and having a good time.
    Maybe that’s the problem.  There isn’t much focus on the difficulty.  When I read an adaptation of Robinson Crusoe as a kid, I remember there being a long time spent on establishing a routine, as well as methods of getting everything he needed to survive.  Here, the island just seems to provide everything without much work.
    It’s actually a good story, and well photographed, but it’s so annoying to listen to characters that never learned how to talk like adults.  I doubt I’d watch this again.

182 - Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort

    A guy inherits a resort in the middle of nowhere, and brings his friends out to look at the property.  The inheritor finds his long-lost extended family.
    I don’t know why I keep watching the Wrong Turn movies.  I don’t think I’ve ever found them interesting… or scary… or funny… or entertaining.
    This one is a step above the last one, which had the hillbillies attacking a town during Halloween (I think.  I have a hard time remembering them).  This is better, and weirder, because it feels like it was a different script that was adapted into the Wrong Turn universe.  It seems like it would be easy to make some alterations to the story, and completely eliminate the hillbillies from the story.  The result is that this plays like a Shining-influenced story, focused on the lead’s spooky relationship with the resort.  The inclusion of the hillbillies seems like an afterthought, incorporated into the story out of desperation.
    There’s one thing that has bothered me more about the Wrong Turn movies over time, and that’s the gore.  I’m all in favor of gore in certain contexts.  When the characters get ripped apart at the end of Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, that’s cathartic.  When minor characters are killed off in these movies, it feels gratuitous.  This shouldn’t bother me, but it does.
    The effects work is a bit cheap.  There are ridiculous bits, like a guy’s stomach exploding after being force-fed water.  What stood out as being terrible was horrible masks that the three hillbillies wear.  These masks have been bothering me for awhile now, but with this movie, there was a sequence in a well-lit room that showed exactly how bad these masks are.  You can see the real skin under the eye holes, and around the mouth.
    There’s a lot of sex in this movie, and none of it is anywhere near erotic.  Was I really expecting anything of this?
    Meh.  I’m sure I’ll forget about the movie in another hour or so.

181 - Masters of the Universe

    He-Man and other heroes from Eternia wind up on Earth, and need to get back to Eternia to retake Castle Greyskull from Skeletor and his forces.
    I think I was the target demographic when this movie came out.  I think I would have been 7 years old, depending on what time of year it was released.  I was really, really accepting of movies.  I think I liked every movie I saw.  And yet, I never saw this.  I know I had heard some disappointed grumbling, but that was about it.
    I liked a lot of the He-Man toys, but I never felt like there was a fantastic mythology behind them.  This movie actually establishes most of that mythology!  This movie could have been the start of something big!
    It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what went wrong with the movie, since it seems like there’s something wrong with nearly everything, but that isn’t entirely fair.  There are aspects to everything that are great, but then the movie gets bogged down by things that distract.
    The Eternia sets are pretty good.  They’re dated by modern standards, but for the time, they’re good.  They reflect a comic-book atmosphere well, and they’re engaging.  Then the movie abandons them for about 3/4 of the running time.
    Many of the characters are created for the movie, and few of the characters are actually He-Man characters.  This instills a sense of disappointment.  We kind of wish we could see Orko… instead we get a weird inventor character.  The henchmen villains we get ar Evil-Lyn and Beast Man… then we get three new henchmen, Saurod, Blade, and Karg.  Who cares about these?  I would love to get to see Mer-Man, Trap Jaw… Tri-Klops… Clawful… just about any of them would be more interesting.
    Character design is the same.  Skeletor is the most entertaining design, and Man-At-Arms is pretty decent, but then Teela and Evil-Lyn seem kind of dull.  He-Man’s design is mostly accurate, but is surprisingly uninspiring.
    The story is weird.  It’s hard to feel like the plot aspects that take place on Earth are actually relevant.  The vast majority of the plot is dedicated to the heroes running away and being chased, so it’s a little hard to view them as heroes.
    I kept thinking that this movie could have been really good… with enough of a budget, and with less interference from production.  But that isn’t the only problem.  The script aims so firmly at kids without knowing what they want, that I can imagine kids watching it, and periodically getting bored, only to be excited by the few moments of inspiration that hit the screen.

180 - The Purge: Anarchy

    A year after the first movie, another Purge event happens.  Set in a city, a collection of unconnected people band together to get to safety across town.
    This is one of the oddest sequels I’ve seen, because it broadens the focus, but actually comes out presenting a clearer vision of the themes connected to the premise.  It’s better than the first movie, and the message is much better.
    More time is devoted to the government’s role in perpetuating the Purge, and not just in the big ways.  More than one person, prior to killing someone, announces that the government has granted them this right.  There is also a substantial plot that involves the government sending out trucks with armed soldiers with the purpose of wiping out the people in specific buildings.
    What’s more important is that we get a vision of the response to this sort of thing… eventually, people realize that this event just exists so that the poor can be wiped out en masse, and that the only way it’s going to be corrected is if the wealthy die instead.
    I still find the premise of this movie more disturbing than I would expect.  I’m not sure why that is.  I guess it might be the message that nearly everyone wants to kill others, but that the illegality of it holds them back.  I have a hard time stomaching that.

179 - The Purge

    On the one night a year that murder is legalized, a family is faced with an ethical question when a gang arrives, demanding that the family turn over a man who is hiding in their house.
    It’s remarkable how effective this premise is.  It’s a completely ridiculous idea, but these ideas are so easy to grasp that it captures the imagination.  For all of the flaws in the idea, it forces the viewer to keep thinking about the idea.  For every hole, you keep on coming up with another idea to balance it out.
    The movie is a little better than I expected.  It starts well enough, and it ends well enough.  It’s the middle act that gets a bit muddy.  There’s a subplot with the daughter’s boyfriend, which plays as almost a mini-plot for the first act, but it becomes irrelevant to the story immediately afterward.  It’s mostly a ridiculously convoluted way to get another gun into the house.
    There are a few issues with the premise that are addressed in the story, but in some cases, aren’t given enough time to thicken up.  With stories like Battle Royale, (or even The Hunger Games) it’s clear that the participants aren’t willing.  (This was something I took issue with in The Hunger Games.  I would expect some of the districts to spend their time training volunteers.)  The problem with The Purge is in the lack of borders, the lack of defined participants.  People can decline to participate, and that’s as far as that goes.  The fact of the matter is… this kind of idea could never work.  Even supposing that the idea got off the ground once, there would be a massive backlash afterward.  It would perpetuate a revenge cycle similar to most gang violence.  The main difference is the idea that it would be spread out and confined to one night each year.  Still not good enough.
    Is the idea that this would encourage good behavior from everyone, since they might die if someone gets annoyed?  I doubt it.
    What would make sense is the use of disguises.

    When I’ve shown people the original Dawn of the Dead, there isn’t a reaction of awe to it.  I often wind up telling them that it’s not that the movie is scary, it’s about placing yourself in the situation and deciding how you would deal with the situation.  This was able to convince my father that the movie was worthwhile.

    I wonder if this movie fits the same mold.  There are more interesting ideas that are presented by the scenario, but this movie doesn’t explore them as well as they should.

    There are political aspects to the movie.  I kept thinking that there were two opposed ideas being explored.  First, a very conservative fantasy of blowing away home invaders, and second, the fairly liberal idea that those in privilege have an obligation to do what’s right, even if it puts them at risk.

    One last little thing.  About 2/3rds of the way through the movie, in the space of a single scene, every character switches their positions.  I think this would play better if they weren’t all done at once.

178 - ABCs of Death 2

    Another 26-short horror film anthology.
    As with the first movie, this is a wildly mixed bag.  The good news is that there is less of a wild fluctuation.  There were “stories” in the first movie that barely qualified as anything other than someone messing around with a camera.  Here, the highs aren’t quite as high, but the floor has been raised enough that it’s hard to say that there are any segments that are completely wasted.
    The Good
        A is for Amateur
            An assassin fantasizes about how his hit will be pulled off.
        B is for Badger
            A nature host finds that extinct badgers are still alive.
        C is for Capital Punishment
            A mob decides to execute a man.
        E is for Equilibrium
            Two guys are stranded on an island, and tension rise when a girl arrives.
        F is for Falling
            A soldier is caught by her parachute on a tree.  An opposing soldier finds her.
        G is for Grandad
            A pest of a grandson is confronted by his bizarre grandfather.
        I is for Invincible
            A family attempts to kill their matriarch, who seems to be invincible.
        J is for Jesus
            An effort to torture homosexuality out of a person falls apart.
        M is for Masticate
            Fat guy goes nutso.  (I'm aware that there is a movie with that title)
        N is for Nexus
            On Halloween, a series of people are brought together by an accident.
        Q is for Questionnaire
            An intelligence quest is juxtaposed with the results of that test.
        S is for Split
            Talking on the phone, a wife is attacked by a masked assailant.
        U is for Utopia
            A man that doesn’t measure up to societal expectations is removed from society.
        V is for Vacation
            A video-chat phone call witnesses violence and murder when a guy calls his girlfriend from vacation.
        W is for Wish
            Two boys with to participate in the fantasy world that their toys represent.
        X is for Xylophone
            A babysitter goes crazy from a kid playing a toy xylophone.
        Y is for Youth
            A girl fantasizes about suiting punishment for her parents.
        Z is for Zygote
            A pregnant lady delays giving birth for a very long time.

    I can’t say that these are all universally good, but the stories are at least complete and understandable.  Some of them are technically very well done or written, others are less so.  I’m a little on the fence about Invincible, since that has a great premise, and it’s executed well, but it leaves with an ending that is mostly impossible to understand.  Some of them push a few boundaries very well - in particular, Xylophone and Zygote.  Split was very well directed, and the twist was not what I was expecting.

    The Bad
        K is for Knell
            Some inky black orb floats over a building and makes people kill each other.
        L is for Legacy
            A tribe is attacked by a supernatural being, in retaliation for not honoring certain commands.
        O is for Olocracy (Mob Rule)
            A woman is put on trial by a court of zombies, for her actions killing zombies.
        R is for Roulette
            A game of Russian Roulette.
        T is for Torture Porn
            A girl is being pushed around in a test shoot for some porn, then weird stuff happens.

    Knell was the one that I was really bothered by.  It started well.  The middle was good.  Then at the end of it, I have no idea what was intended to be expressed.  This changed my perception, and it’s hard for me to feel like it was acceptable.  The same thing happened with Roulette.  I liked everything up until the end, which was implying an interesting twist, and then ended before anything was explained.

    The Ugly
        D is for Deloused
        H is for Head Games
        P is for P-P-P-P-Scary

    These are the ones that I didn’t feel like I could really evaluate.  The first two are animated, and they were interesting, but they don’t really offer a story, just… weirdness.  The last one is probably the strangest story in the movie, and it’s weird, but it didn’t feel like it had anything to offer.

    Still, this is a big improvement over the first one.  I don’t know if I can say that I would want to own these movies, but I think this is a great showcase format, and I hope they keep making these.

177 - Night of the Creeps

    An alien organism/parasite/weapon is accidentally dropped on Earth.  The infestation of creatures turns a bunch of people into zombies that spread via large slugs.
    There’s a good reason I’ve put off watching this for so long, and it’s made obvious by that summary.  It’s a weird story.  It’s so weird that I don’t feel like I can explain how the story works, but it does.  It’s fairly ridiculous, but it develops in the right way, making it feel like the logical continuation of the events that preceded it.
    It’s packed with little references to horror and other movies, but they are all very small things - a lot of the names are borrowed from other directors, there are a few references to Plan 9 From Outer Space, which the movie shares some plot elements with.
    More importantly though, the movie is funny.  It’s campy, it’s silly, but it seems to be aware of it.
    The director went on to direct The Monster Squad the following year, which I really loved.  I still think that The Monster Squad fills a very important gap in semi-serious horror aimed at kids and young teens.  This doesn’t feel like he was aiming at kids though.  I think he was aiming at aficionados.
    Still, a fun movie, and I wonder what I would have thought if I rented it as a kid.

176 - Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie

    The Nerd travels to a legendary landfill as part of a promotion sponsored by a company looking to exploit negative game reviews to spur sales.
    I sponsored this movie.  That was a long time ago, and I’ve followed James Rolfe’s progress as he worked on this.  I especially liked one update he did where he discussed some of the more technical aspects of working on the movie - color correction, etc.
    I didn’t have many expectations going into this.  I thought it seemed odd that he felt that he had enough of a story to spread out to a feature-length project, but… he knows what he’s got.
    I can’t say it’s a great movie.  But it’s completely competent.  He’s done a good job with his budget.  Very, very good.  But the problems that the movie has are actually unrelated to that.
    There are a lot of complaints I see on IMDB about the poor quality of the script.  There are a few script issues, but they aren’t nearly as bad as the reviewers think.  The problem is that the cast isn’t quite comedically skilled enough to pull off the material.  There seems to be some confusion about if the script is bad, and that’s what made it fall flat.  No… the jokes are no better or worse than would be expected.
    The story winds through a variety of odd places, and the normal AVGN sense of humor shows up throughout.  James pays tribute to his usual influences (most obviously, Japanese monster movies).  I get the sense that there wasn’t much thought put into tightening things up and editing things down a little.
    There are two larger problems, and I completely understand why they happened.
    1.  The Nerd has no arc.  The argument could be made that the Nerd reviewing E. T. at the end was his big character development moment.  But that was a foregone conclusion.  For a story centering on the Nerd, he doesn’t really do much.  He’s a passive protagonist, and those are normally pretty boring to watch.
    2.  The movie portrays the Nerd as a reluctant voice for his fans.  In the strangest way, the movie tends to treat his fans as pests.  They’re annoying, they’re weird, and he doesn’t seem to enjoy interacting with them at all.  This would be compensated for if the fans saved the day in some way, but… nope.

    I actually think that James Rolfe has much more potential.  He handles some of his shorter subjects much more carefully, and I think he could probably do an excellent horror movie, with a few caveats.  First, he would need to either work with a forceful personality that really knows a lot about writing.  Second, he would need to move away from paying tribute and making references, and focus on developing his own style.

    All this is to say that James did a good job with this movie… but it’s easy to see the parts that would have done better.

    Music was very good.  I’m pleased, since I feel like Bear McCreary has been on auto-pilot since Battlestar Galactica wrapped.  Sound… effects work… all the technical elements were generally great.  (Although during the first car scene with rear-screen projection, I kept thinking that the color balance was off on the inside of the car.)

175 - The Town That Dreaded Sundown

    In 1946 Arkansas, a serial killer kills a handful of victims.  The police investigate, and the town gets nervous.
    I’ve seen reference to this movie in several books I have about horror movies, but I’ve always had a hard time locating a copy of it.  I’ve never seen a VHS copy.  It was recently released on Blu-ray, and a very good transfer has shown up on Netflix.
    It’s a weird movie, because it wants to be a horror movie, but it takes a lot of detours.  There’s a certain amount of time spent on police investigation, and there a lot of comedy.  It’s not very good comedy, it’s only mildly amusing.  There’s usually a balance between horror and comedy, and the sense of humor is carefully monitored so that it doesn’t feel like it takes away from the horror.  This movie doesn’t consider that.
    The result is that this movie has some very good, and very interesting material, but it also shoots itself in the foot.
    The notably good stuff first.
    The sense of atmosphere is really good.  Everything seems accurately period-specific.  There’s a lot of footage of people around town, and this builds the neighborhood very well.  There’s a sequence where the killer is stalking/attacking a young couple that have parked in the darkness for awhile.  I was really pleased with how most of this sequence was shot.  Lengthy shots, small actions aren’t removed.  It feels like this section is done in real-time, and that helps make a sense of dread work.
    This leads me to the bad things.  That same sequence ends with the weirdest, least-explicit murder.  The killer somehow kills the girl with her trombone, by jabbing it into her back.  For reasons I won’t get into here… that doesn’t seem like it would work.  In addition to this bit, there are some broader problems.  The acting is amateurish for the most part.  The comedic elements don’t have a payoff, and they take some of the gravity away from the situation.
    Part of what made this movie effective for some viewers was the lack of an ending.  The killer gets away… the killings stop.  And they never found out who was behind them.
    One of the comedic bits seemed like it might be an effort to reference The Dukes of Hazzard… except that show started airing three years later!

174 - Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam

    Another summer at Camp Rock, the same cast returns, but this time, there’s an evil competing camp that has opened across the lake.
    My intention was to outline this movie the way I outlined the first movie.  I got about 20 minutes into that process before I gave up.  This movie isn’t worth outlining.
    I found myself cringing a lot more than I did during the first movie.  Both of them have a similar obviousness that informs the structure, but this one fails in a few regards.  I know that most sequels need to ramp up the stakes.  And they do that, but at the same time, it means that they spend less time on the more personal elements of the story.  So the lesson that the lead learns is trivial, and she doesn’t really have to suffer to learn it.
    They try to compensate for this by giving most of the supporting cast miniature lessons to learn.  Some of these are charming, but mostly because they aren’t being taken as seriously.
    There’s the usual Disney schmaltz that drips off of everything.
    The music is actually a big step down.  There’s more of a hip-hop element that takes over a few songs.  The production is bigger and less organic sounding.  There were a few songs that were notable in different ways.  The writing for one of them was fairly tricky, balancing two perspectives into a single song.  The one that stood out was Introducing Me, which has a strong melody (even if it borrows from another song) and some much more clever wordplay.
    The thing that really bothered me was how much more effort was put into choreographing elaborate dance sequences for songs.  Some of these got really distracting, because it was shot more like a music video - the lead was singing in more than one place at a time.
    Which brings me back to her voice.  I still don’t like it.  There’s a push toward outrageously “soulful” singing, which doesn’t have any soulfulness in it.
    The shift that happened with this movie - moving the plot toward something bigger, and away from personal development - hurt the emotional impact the movie could have had.  While we all know that there was going to be a happy ending, I found myself disappointed, since about 20 minutes in, I thought of an ending that would have been much more satisfying.  Why don’t the camps join forces?  Maybe since it would require the adults to be more responsible.  This could be addressed by making it so that the campers inspire the adults, and that’s what brings everyone together.

173 - The Final Member

    A documentary about the Icelandic Phallological Museum, and the quest to complete their collection with the donation of a human penis.
    This is good.  It’s not as great a documentary as some, but it had a much more interesting core than I expected.
    The museum collects donations of penises from nearly everything.  Everything is well preserved, there are plenty of different displays.  The curator is an interesting guy, but he seems serious and driven to make his museum as comprehensive as possible.  There is a single specimen missing - a human penis.  The problem is that people need to legally make the donation before they die, since human remains are typically treated specially.
    An Icelandic icon in his 90s agrees to donate his.  A younger American agrees to make his.  To sweeten the deal, the American is interested in actually donating his before he dies.
    From there, the story gets more interesting.  There are issues with both donors.  There’s a minimum of five inches required to be the human specimen.  The old man is having some issues, because he’s shrinking as he ages.  The American is enthusiastic about the process, but… the longer we spend with him, he’s a very peculiar guy.  He corresponds with the curator constantly, and seems overly focused on talking about his penis.  He takes pictures of it in costumes.  He has this elaborate plan for how it should be displayed.  He decides that he wants it to be a patriotic kind of thing, so he actually has the head of his penis tattooed with a variation of the American flag.
    The ending to the story isn’t quite as fulfilling, but it’s still an interesting story, and I think it treats the subject matter appropriately.

172 - Ocean's 13

    After a crooked casino owner swindles their elderly friend, Danny Ocean assembles his team to get revenge by ruining the casino owner’s opening night.
    I’ve come to really enjoy the Ocean’s movies, since they play on two powerful elements.  First, they carefully control how much information the audience has.  We get clues, but rarely enough to piece together much of their plan.  Second, the scenes are short and punchy.  The humor is slathered on.
    This time, I noticed how much time was devoted to character development.  Matt Damon’s Linus gets more time to become himself.  The gag of George Clooney sitting around watching Oprah by himself is a nice joke, but it develops him enough.  There’s a slightly more playful edge to this one, as opposed to the first one.  The second feels like a departure, even though I like it.
    One other thing… I finally realized that I actually never understood the ending of this movie until this time through.  I didn’t realize that the guy who shows up near the end was the opposition from the second movie.  Wow, I feel dumb.

171 - Three Days of the Condor

    A CIA researcher returns from picking up lunch for the office to find his entire group killed.  Suspicions flare, and he tries to figure out who had his group killed, and why.
    I think this movie used to be on Conservapedia’s list of Greatest Conservative Movies.  I’ve heard a lot of talk about how much this movie influenced The Winter Soldier, so I’ve been intending to watch it.
    First, I will make it clear.  This is not a conservative movie.  It’s not a liberal movie either.  In fact, there’s nothing political about it, even though it does involve the CIA.  I’m sure that Andy Schlafly would be able to make a political observation about it though.
    It’s a strong movie.  It’s structured really well, and it works very well as a mystery.  The amount of information the audience gets is so carefully parceled out that you keep feeling like you must be missing something important.  The action is spaced out, just enough to keep things bumping along.
    I had one complaint, but it seemed like it was needed once I reached the third act.  I didn’t like the romantic subplot.  It does figure into the plot, but as it unfolds, it seemed a little too unbelievable.
    The strange thing is that I don’t see many parallels to The Winter Soldier here.  There’s a flip about halfway through the movie, where the hero is on the run for the first half, then reverses course and brings the fight to his antagonist.  But that’s where the similarities seem to end.  What it actually reminded me of was Chinatown.

170 - Iron Man 3

    Tony Stark deals with his PTSD, his relationship with Pepper, and a terrorist called The Mandarin.
    This is my second time through this movie, and I didn’t know what to expect.  I know that I enjoyed the movie the first time, but I had a few reservations.  This time through, I’ve been able to more firmly identify what it is that I like, and what I don’t like.
    First, the bad stuff.  The third act is hard to care about, and this is because of a problem with the plot.  I understand that the villain has a personal grudge against Stark.  But I have no idea what the villain’s ultimate goal is.  I can piece together a plan, but I have a hard time understanding why he wants to do this.  The villain wants to take over the country… but I’m not sure why.  Power?  Money?  Neither of them seem relevant.  This lack of focus makes it hard to care about the last act.
    But the good stuff is very interesting.  I think this one will go down as one of the more touching Marvel movies, because so much of the first half is devoted to Stark dealing with his personal problems.  These scenes are great.  Most of the earlier action is great, too.  In fact, it’s only that last big blowout that isn’t worthwhile.  After the airplane rescue, it just sort of fizzles.
    I hope that they bring Iron Man back for a fourth movie.  This isn’t a bad effort, but I think they can do better.
     One complaint... I hate the cover for this movie.

169 - 22 Jump Street

    The same two guys return to pose as college students to find the source of another synthetic drug.
    It’s remarkable that a movie that makes a specific point about how they aren’t going to do anything different from the first time does a better job than the first outing.  It’s actually better!  The gags are funny, the plot is roughly the same, but the writing is better.  The pacing is better.  One of the biggest weaknesses with the first movie was that there was a lull around 3/4 of the way through.  The pacing slowed down and it was harder to get back into the laughing spirit after that.  There’s still a small lull here, but it’s much shorter, and they still pack it with jokes.
    Most notably, they did a better job with Channing Tatum.  He’s funnier in this, because they played to his skills and his appearance.  The humor shifts a little as well.  The most memorable and funny elements of the first movie were when the jokes stretched into the surreal.  This movie plays those elements up more as well.
    It’s more self-aware than the first one was, as well.  During the first movie, a lot of the self-aware elements were packed in early on.  In this one, they pack those in early, but they bring them back before the third act as well, in a reminder to keep their budget low.
    There are still a few weaknesses.  Some of the gags aren’t as enjoyable, but that’s probably because they were aiming for a high school audience.