89 - The Mirror

    A trio of roommates buy a haunted mirror off Ebay, hoping to win James Randi’s million dollar prize for proof of the supernatural.  Weird stuff starts happening.
    Another found-footage movie.  I was willing to stick with this one, since it was at least well-lit, and wasn’t focusing on breathing in the dark.
    It’s not really worth the time.  The mirror idea is perfectly fine.  I was pretty happy with how they handled the idea in Oculus.  But in this, the mirror seems mostly irrelevant.  For a big stretch of time, the characters seem to forget about it.  I suppose that actually makes it more believable, in a way.  I’m glad to see they didn’t immediately suspect that the mirror was responsible for the strange things happening.
    Where the movie makes the biggest mistake is in giving a lack of explanation for the mirror, or for what’s happening to the characters.  Once the horror starts (the last 20 minutes or so) it doesn’t seem to matter much.  Their actions seem kind of randomly chosen.  “Here’s something horrible that someone could do to themselves.”  Is it in service of the mirror?  Does it matter?
    None of the characters are likable.  The tiny cast (three people, plus one or two extras) becomes very obvious once there are injuries.  Even after sustaining some pretty serious cuts, they just patch it up at home and try to forget it.  No visit to a doctor.  We don’t hear any of their neighbors, even though they’re living in an apartment.
    While the movie is competently made, which is an achievement for a low-budget found-footage story, that’s really all it has going for it.

88 - Love Sick Love

    A businessman goes away for a weekend with a girl who turns out to be crazy.  He’s held captive by her as part of her search for an ideal man.
    I was pretty well entertained by this.  I watched it in one sitting, and it kept me wondering what was going to happen next.  In spite of this, there are plenty of problems with this movie, mostly from a script standpoint.
    Both the protagonist and antagonist are entirely unlikable.  The one person who seems slightly moral is an idiot.  Normally this isn’t a problem for me, especially if the story is strong.  But there’s a lot of space in this story to stretch things, to make every perspective reasonable and easy to empathize with.  It also creates a problem because the protagonist is in danger, and we know that there are two ways the story can end.  He’ll either win or lose - live or die.  There’s no chance they’ll go for an ending where the two of them manage to work things out and fall in love.  Even if they did, that might make it more of a disturbing movie.
    The thing that seems off to me is the rest of the family being in on this method of finding a husband.  Everyone plays being disturbed pretty well, but it isn’t the same as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where the whole family has a benefit that comes from their craziness.  Here, the craziness is centralized on benefiting one person.  This doesn’t ring true.
    The script does do a nice job in one scene in particular.  The protagonist has an opportunity to escape, and his reason for sabotaging himself makes perfect sense.  Of course, this is in contrast to the ending, where he chooses to make a ridiculous mistake.

87 - Dawn of the Dead

    After a zombie epidemic sweeps the country, a group of survivors hole up in a mall.
    I’ve enjoyed the Dawn of the Dead remake since I saw it in theaters.  It’s got a punchier sense of excitement to it that the original doesn’t have.  The fast-moving dead suggest a more insurmountable threat, something much more urgently deadly than the slow burn of the slow-moving dead.  The situation isn’t just bleak - it’s hopeless.
    I noticed a few other things this time through.  First, the direction was a bit worse than I remember.  There are a few memorable shots mixed into the movie, but I realized that Snyder pads out the running time with a lot of slow-motion shots.  He likes inserting shots of bullet casings falling to the floor at the feet of the shooter.  In the past, these shots were exactly the kind of filler that they are, and I didn’t pay much attention to them.  Now that I’ve noticed them, I probably won’t be able to stop noticing it.
    The other thing is that the original played on a sense of isolation.  The larger cast in this one stops that from being an issue.  But there’s a tighter pacing to this one, and that changes the sense of the passage of time.  Sometimes I was convinced it was taking place over the space of a week or two.  There’s only a brief sequence of boredom, and even that is played pretty tightly.

86 - Thor: The Dark World

    Jane Foster is infected with the Aether, a substance that an evil villain wants to reclaim in order to take over Asgard.  Thor devises a plan to save Jane and defeat the villain.
    I have this weird affinity for the lesser movies in a series.  One of the reasons I like Iron Man 2 is that I forget sequences in it, and that makes them more effective when I see it again.  I’ve never felt like watching the first Thor a second time, mostly because I remember it being kind of boring.  But this one has a strong ending battle, some really clever plotting between Thor and Loki, and it feels like the plot seems to bring Asgard and Earth closer together.  By making the worlds co-exist more cleanly, that helps things feel reasonable.  I remember when I saw Thor, I felt like the grounding of the stuff happening on Earth was too stark a contrast to the Asgardian stuff.
    I still really like the opening battle sequence.  It’s nice to see Thor doing work around Asgard.
    The one thing I really don’t like is the way that the funeral scene starts.  The overhead shot is way to close to the shot of Padme’s funeral in Episode 3.

85 - Soapdish

    The cast of a soap opera is thrown into a soap opera of their own as an effort is underway to eliminate a main character.
    I used to see the box for this at the video store, and it never called to me.  But it seemed so ridiculous looking that I’ve always had this mild curiosity about it.  It has a terrible title.  I don’t know what a better title would be, but this seems like one of the least interesting choices.
    This is… a work of genius.  But it is seriously flawed.  It’s a fantastic idea.  The story comes together really well.  The cast is exceptional.  But there’s something wrong.  I can’t tell what it is.  It’s almost like the direction was aiming to straddle a line between straight drama and straight comedy.  I can’t point to anything specific.
    What’s remarkable about this story is how gradually it weaves everything together.  You don’t see the big twist coming until it lands, and then you realize that the players are living in their own unintentional soap opera.
    It’s a hard movie to recommend, because it requires a particular sense of humor.  A lot of the jokes are just going to slip past most viewers.  But once you get it, there’s a very classic-comedy feeling it creates.

84 - Regarding Henry

    A hard-nosed lawyer suffers a brain injury, and has to re-learn to function.  He develops into a very different person.
    The premise of this story has been appropriated a few times.  It’s a pretty simple idea, and the variety of ways that it has been handled has tainted my perception of what this story should be like.  I expected something more manipulative.  Something that really pulled at the heartstrings and made it entirely clear that he is now a better man.  While there are touching moments, the direction and the acting is handled with class, and it doesn’t feel like the audience is being shepherded into a tearjerker of a movie.
    Harrison Ford does a very good job of handling a variety of mannerisms.  He stutters slightly.  He looks uncomfortable and vaguely confused.  But he doesn’t look like someone who is desperately trying to communicate those ideas.  He handles these situations realistically.  He can pick up that he’s supposed to know someone, and he knows he’s able to play along, just not very well.
    His relationships with his wife and daughter are at the core of the story.  In particular, his daughter winds up teaching him a variety of skills that he forgot.  His wife…
    His wife is the weak link in the movie.  She’s played perfectly fine, but it’s difficult to like her.  She lies to herself and to others, and she seems more concerned with keeping up appearances than a good person would.
    I have a hard time buying the idea that the firm would be willing to keep him even after he’s lost all of his legal knowledge.  I have no idea what he’s doing there, and I can’t imagine that goodwill would keep him there for very long.
    There’s a message to be understood from this movie… about the nature of identity, possibly how we can be shaped by events far in our past.  But that’s only hinted at after thinking for a long time.  As interesting as this movie is, I left it feeling like it had nothing to say.

83 - Kingsman: The Secret Service

    A clandestine British spy organization recruits the son of a deceased agent.  The agency deals with a villain intent on destroying mankind.
    I had heard some conflicted thoughts about this, but it sounded like it was fun.  The trailer was a little hit-and-miss.  I’m glad that I watched it though.  This is some really serious fun.
    First, the story simultaneously embraces and avoids cliche story beats.  We know that the main character is going to get into the service.  But it doesn’t come together the way you expect it to, and the movie does a great job of adjusting expectations as things develop.
    Second, there’s a very tricky thing to explain about the balance that the movie has.  It has a campy, almost Spy Kids-like atmosphere to things, which is occasionally obliterated by some very extreme violence.  That violence treads a line between laughable and shocking.  And it switches back and forth.  This can be confusing to some people, making people feel uncomfortable about how the movie makes them feel.  This is a signature of Mark Millar’s work.  Some people love it, some people hate it.  Personally, I lean toward liking it, but I always feel like Millar tends to shy away from making  concrete decisions about morality or messages.
    About halfway through the movie, I was sold on it.  I’m adding it to my wish list.  I looked up to see if a sequel is being made.
    The one choice that I didn’t care for was the lisp that Samuel L. Jackson used.  I understand why it was used, but somehow it just didn’t work for me.

82 - The Fly

    After a woman admits to killing her husband in an industrial press, the police investigate.  She recounts the story of his scientific experiments.
    The most striking thing about the original version of The Fly is how much the movie focuses on the romance between the scientist and his wife.  Their happiness is a major point, and it has a separate theme.  There’s surprisingly little horror for much of the running time.
    Almost the entire story is framed as a flashback.  This allows them to set up the mystery that keeps the audience curious, but it also feels strangely dated.  Maybe I’m just getting accustomed to the idea that flashbacks are a bit of a cheat.
    There was one misstep that bothered me, and it’s a thematic one.  There’s a message about there being certain things man isn’t supposed to mess with, and that somehow this experiment crossed some ethical line.  But it doesn’t feel like that.  It’s not like The Island of Dr. Moreau, where you can easily regard the experiments as a crime against nature.  This is simply an experiment with the goal of instantaneous transportation.  Really, no real ethical problems to consider.  You can make the argument that the human/fly hybrid is an abomination, but that seems to frame the problem in religious terms.  It’s just a mistake, and more of tragedy than anything else.
    There are a few affecting moments in the story.  The reveal of the fly-head on his body is really wonderfully done.  I love the mask, and the movements that the mouth makes.  The fly-arm isn’t as big a deal, but it’s still kind of nicely done.  The ending, with the human head on the fly crying out as the spider comes for him is surprisingly chilling.  I didn’t expect it to be as powerful as it was.

81 - Ghoulies Go to College (Ghoulies III)

    Two frats are in a prank war, and a professor winds up summoning a trio of strange demons that are under his control.
    I haven’t seen any of the other Ghoulies movies.  I’ve seen the covers for the first two, but I just never cared to see them.  I don’t think I’m missing anything I need to see to appreciate this.
    The first thing I noticed is that it’s weird.  The tone is mostly cartoonish, with only the slightest amount of horror mixed in.  There’s a sitcom-like feel to a lot of the jokes - particularly the stuff with the campus security guard.  The music is cheap and dated.  I think there was an effort to sound like Danny Elfman, but instead, it sounds more like a cartoon.
    The plot is the biggest problem.  Kevin McCarthy is a real pleasure to watch, but I always felt kind of confused about his motivation.  The fight between the frats isn’t that interesting.  The ghoulies are dumb.  It’s a collection of dumb punchlines, and crass behavior.  Where Gremlins did a good job of making their evil creatures compelling and dangerous, in this… they’re annoying and not especially dangerous.  This is made more obvious by the few deaths they’re involved in.  None of them have any blood.  They involve cartoonish - literally cartoonish - methods of death.  Pulling a tongue out like a rubber band.
    The one area that I didn’t feel like I understood was the role that the toilet plays in this mythos.  Do these creatures come from the sewer?  Or are they supposed to be somehow summoned from hell?  The inclusion of the toilet as a source of horror seems especially childish.  I don’t mind this, but I wonder if that’s the target audience.  Maybe this is supposed to be like a beginner horror movie.
     I wonder if this started out as a straight college comedy, and the ghoulies were inserted later.

80 - The War of the Worlds

    An unstoppable alien invasion happens.
    Netflix has a hilarious summary for this movie.
    “When a scorching meteor-like object crashes to Earth, a scientist waits three ill-fated days for the object - a Martian-filled spaceship - to cool.”
    What a bizarre summary.
    The story is pretty well-worn territory at this point.  Most people know the ending, they know about the idea of the martian tripods, and so on.  I didn’t expect any surprises.  The Day the Earth Stood Still came out two years prior, and that played a little better, but this follows suit by upping the action and effects.
    The effects work is interesting.  A lot of miniatures, and some of them are really well done, like the buildings during the last act.  The color effects seem kind of silly.
    The one spot where the movie really suffers is the reliance on stock footage.  It’s sprinkled throughout, and for such a globe-spanning movie, it almost feels like a newsreel.  I couldn’t help but think of Ed Wood’s enthusiasm for using stock footage.  Almost all of the movie is shot on a soundstage.  There are fake trees peppered here and there.  At one point, a pair of characters run across some ground, and you can hear the wooden floor rattling.
    The one thing that surprised me about the movie was the religious elements.  These aren’t focused on now, but an early victim of the aliens is a priest that approaches the tripods, hoping to initiate peaceful overtures.  The movie ends at a cathedral, where a group of people have refused to evacuate the city, and are praying that God will deliver them from the aliens.  I would be able to disregard this ending, since it seems kind of silly, except that the ending voiceover specifies that God is responsible for the defeat of the aliens because he created the microbes that killed the aliens.  I guess I was interpreting the writing of the religious characters are being purposefully naive.

79 - After

    A guy and a girl wake up from a bus accident as the only occupants of their town.  A giant storm is closing around the borders, and a monster is stalking them.
    I’ve been in a real slump with movies lately.  I’ve seen a few movies that I like this year, and a few that I’m planning on buying.  But I don’t think I’ve been actually impressed with the overall quality of a movie yet this year.  And I watch so much stuff that isn’t good, looking for the little bits of quality that shine through.
    This is one of the first times this year that I’ve found a movie on Netflix that I’m actually impressed with.  It’s a good movie.  It’s solid.  It moves forward, it keeps the audience guessing about what exactly is going on, and as problems are introduced, it isn’t clear how they can go about solving them.  Even the ending is vague, and it doesn’t provide a lot of answers.
    Most interestingly, the movie is primarily two characters.  They don’t get along, but it isn’t played in an Odd Couple way.  It’s played like a pair of people that just don’t have much in common.  They’re mostly just a little annoyed with each other.  The result of this writing is that it’s easy to feel like there’s no real way these two can fall in love.  A romantic subplot is not going to be in the cards.  The handling of this is very fresh, and it’s really a pleasure to see this sort of writing.
    The one thing that I felt was a bit of a letdown was a scene early on.  The female lead is looking around the deserted town.  It’s set to some intense music.  This really felt like an effort to repeat the similar sequence from 28 Days Later.  But I passed that pretty quickly.
    I’m not entirely thrilled with everything that happens, but its really pretty well done.  The first quality surprise of the year.

78 - Teen Spirit

    After a popular girl is electrocuted at prom, she’s left in purgatory, where, as a ghost, she has to help the least popular girl in school become prom queen at the makeup prom.
    I can’t explain why I put this in my queue.  It’s an ABC Family movie, so it’s especially clean, it’s aimed at pre-teen girls, and the odds of it having any redeeming characteristics are pretty slim.
    Somehow, this movie pulled off being non-offensive.  There wasn’t anything painfully dumb, and it managed to use an ending that I didn’t see coming.  Even more remarkable was that I thought the script was unaware of what it was doing until it corrected things close to the end.  The good girl takes too much influence from the popular girl, and she starts being a jerk.  I thought that the script was more accepting of this, and was treating it just as harmless fun, and it was nice to see it addressed by the ending.
    I’d like to talk a little about the music in these movies.  Not this one in particular, but also things like Camp Rock.  Stuff that’s supposed to appeal to pre-teen girls.  There’s a rock edge to these songs, but the singing is annoying.  It’s a style, but it’s a very strange one, since it doesn’t seem to be represented in popular music.  The music seems to function as a gateway between typical Disney fare and pop charts music.

77 - A Fantastic Fear of Everything

    A writer develops agoraphobia and some paranoid behavior while researching a project.  He has to fight his fears in order to meet a prospective buyer.
    It’s so sad, the idea of this movie seemed like it could be really interesting.  I like Simon Pegg, even when he isn’t doing his own script.  But this wasn’t the right movie.  It has three distinct acts, but they feel like they’re different movies.  The first act is dedicated to setting up the main character and his problems.  There’s a bit of wackiness that sets up a development in the second act.
    But this is where the movie drags the most.  I realized that it was spending way too much time establishing his paranoid behavior.  I realized that I thought of What About Bob?, in which Bob’s character is established within probably a half a minute.  The rest of his behavior in the movie is a logical extension of this idea.  Here, the main character’s behavior is established over a much longer time, but it also just evaporates when it needs to.
    The comedy is weird.  When I think about the way this was written, there are strong odds that it was a really funny read.  But when I see it, something went wrong.  The direction doesn’t play up the comedic angle.
    The direction is pretty solid, but it seems like it was an effort to make a different movie than it wound up being.

76 - Extraterrestrial

    A bunch of college kids go to a cabin in the woods, where they deal with angry aliens.
    I can’t say this is a good movie, but it has been able to stir some conflicted feelings in me.  Mostly, because I can say two things that it has going for it.  I don’t think I’ve seen an alien movie like this.  It plays like a big-budget X-Files approach to the subject, and that’s something pretty fun.  The direction is also fairly good.  There are some inventive shots, and some memorable bits here and there.
    But the bad things just keep getting in the way of the positive things.  The music is intrusive.  I can’t place where I’ve heard these giant booming chords before, but they don’t make things tense.  They just make things annoying.  They might be more effective in a theater though.
    The script is pretty bad.  The dialogue is cliched, and the characters are terrible caricatures.  I’ve seen these kids everywhere else, and they don’t bring anything enjoyable to the show.  In particular, one of the girls looked like she was probably about 10 years older than she should have been to play the part.
    The story isn’t all that interesting.  It amounts to kids dealing with aliens.  Some of them die, eventually a few of them are abducted.  It ends with a “the government is covering things up” angle, which isn’t a terrible direction, except that we just sat through an hour and a half.  I’d like something more original for that much of a time investment.
    The direction did get annoying later in the movie, especially after the alien abduction happens.  A lot of the material there is shot with odd effects and lenses.
    I also found myself wishing that there would be some alien abduction movie that actually explains a sense of purpose behind the alien actions.  I can understand a certain amount of medical curiosity, but what about the social and cultural understanding?  There should be more going on than just probing.
    The one thing that really bothered me was the use of the Magnetic Fields song The Book of Love.  It didn’t fit the moment, the mixing of it seemed weird, and it felt like the director just really liked the song and wanted to shoehorn it in.

75 - Santa Claus Conquers The Martians

    Martian children are fascinated with Santa Claus.  Martians come to Earth and kidnap Santa and two children, hoping to change martian society.
    One of these weird movies that I’ve had on my queue for more than a year.  It’s a strange movie, and not just because of the weird plot.  The acting is strange.  The script is really weird.  There are a lot of comic moments, but it never feels clear if they intend them to be legitimately funny, or if they’re supposed to be unfunny.
    The most interesting thing about this is that it comes across like a “let’s put on a show” kind of production.  Cheap costumes, ridiculous dialogue, weird, poorly decorated sets.  There’s something charming about it, as if a bunch of people got together to put this movie together, and weren’t looking to be successful, just to have a good time.

74 - The Exorcist

    A young girl is possessed by a demon, and undergoes an exorcism.
    This is a staple of classic horror, and yet, this is the first time I’ve seen it.  I saw a small bit of it on TV once, but it never called to me.
    During my senior year of high school, I took a brief film class.  It was terrible, and the teacher wasn’t especially knowledgeable.  But she did say that she thought this movie was completely terrifying.  It seems that the effectiveness of it depends on how religious you are.
    I don’t think that’s entirely true.  I found myself wondering how effective some of these scenes would be if I hadn’t seen them parodied before.  There is an unpredictable element to the movie, in that the demon’s behavior is designed to put others ill at ease.  That erratic behavior was kind of interesting.
    The biggest surprise is how slowly the movie is put together.  The introduction is very nice.  Good location, there’s a great atmosphere to it, but then once it moves into the main plot, it feels like so much time is spent padding things out.  The exorcism only starts during the last act, and it seems surprisingly short.  Of course, we don’t know how long the entire procedure would take.
    That brings me to the ending.  I honestly didn’t see it coming.  I like it.  It was quick, a bit brutal, and it tied the story up neatly.

73 - Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck

    A documentary about the life of Kurt Cobain.
    In 1994, when Cobain died, I was 13.  This is right around the point that music becomes really important to a kid.  And yet, I just didn’t care about Nirvana.  Sure, I liked the opening for Smells Like Teen Spirit.  There were usually some little things that I liked, part of a riff, or some part of the melody.  But Nirvana never resonated with me the way it did with some other people.  If anything, I thought they were a fairly sloppy band, and his writing was oblique and poorly done.
    I never identified with his suicide, either, which is a little odd.  It was a little surprising, but nothing more.

    I don’t know what I expected to find from this documentary.  I didn’t leave this thinking more highly of his work.  He reminds me a lot of Lennon, attempting to make artistic statements by noodling all over whatever canvas he feels like working on.  When he gets down to it, he can do some good work, but there is a lot of work that doesn’t have much merit.
    His background is explored more thoroughly than I expected.  He isn’t a very sympathetic person.  He mostly behaved poorly, bothered his parents, and got passed around a lot.  His ex-girlfriend Tracy actually seems to come off the best.  Their relationship fell apart, but she seemed to be remarkably supportive.
    No one comes across as especially bad, except Kurt.  I find myself a little more receptive to his unhappiness, and the things that pushed his mind around, but he made himself helpless against his demons.  It’s hard to feel that much sympathy for that.

72 - Graduation Day

    A high school senior dies of a blood clot at a track meet, kicking off a series of deaths of people connected to the track team, all leading up to the high school graduation.
    This movie shows up on lists of notable 80s slashers, and it’s also one of the only references in Scream that I wasn’t aware of.  It’s mentioned by name.  If the video store near me had it, I would have already rented it, but it was a real slog to track it down.
    It has a mixed reputation.  It’s not especially good.  But it’s one of the rare unique 80s horror movies.  It makes some really unusual choices, and it has a more distinct look and feel to it than most anonymous slashers.  There are peculiar editing cuts, which seem more laughable at first, but gradually become part of the language that the movie establishes.
    There’s an atmosphere to the whole thing, something that seems simultaneously more and less like high school than expected.  There are a few sequences that use large numbers of extras, and many of them look legitimately young.  There’s a scene where a pair of guys are playing music in what looks like an emptied cafeteria, surrounded by a bunch of other people.  Some of those girls look like they might be around 16 years old.  This lends an authenticity to the movie that I didn’t expect.  But then there are a few people who look just a bit too old to be in high school.
    There’s a very peculiar sequence where a band is playing at a roller rink, which is intercut with the killer stalking and killing a few people.  This isn’t a brilliant scene, but it’s memorable.
    I don’t buy the killer’s motivation, but by the end, the movie doesn’t require that you accept it.  It is what it is, and it’s at least an interesting slasher.

     One really weird thing.  I think they appropriated some music from Vertigo.  I'd have to look into it.

71 - Leap of Faith

    A faith healer and his road show are stranded in a small rural town, along with a sheriff that doesn’t appreciate their efforts to fundraise off the community.
    I’ve seen this a few times, and I’ve always enjoyed it.  But there’s something missing.  I forget about the movie pretty quickly, and I have a hard time remembering many of the plot points.  I enjoy Steve Martin’s performance.  I noticed a number of notable people in the cast.  Everyone does a good job, and the structure is actually pretty good.
    I think where the movie fails is that the message seems a little unclear.  Martin doesn’t have a strong arc, and it’s hard to feel like learns anything.  The event that really twists things around is when a miracle occurs that Martin knows he didn’t perform.  This is the catalyst that would have made for a much more effective story.  Instead, it’s the event that ends things.
    Another problem is that Martin isn’t exactly villainous enough.  He’s a sleazy guy, but he makes a reasonable justification for his actions.  He’s an entertainer.  The fact that people seem to regard “faith healers” as something other than entertainment is a problem, but I wouldn’t expect the argument for restriction of religious freedom to have much weight.
    As it is, the movie seems more like a backstory to a more interesting story that takes place afterward.

70 - The Blues Brothers

    Jake and Elwood get their band back together, hoping to raise enough money to keep an orphanage open.  They run afoul of the police, Nazis, and a disgruntled ex.
    I saw this for the first time during high school.  It was amusing, but it didn’t feel right.  There were some good jokes, but there was also a lot of time spent that just seemed to pad things out.  I’ve known a few people that really love this movie, so I decided I should give it another try.
    I had a greater appreciation for it, but it still isn’t right.
    What it reminded me of was It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, but without the fantastic performances to hold it together.  There’s a similar level of madcap destruction, but something about the direction slows the pace down, making most of the jokes fall flat.  There are still some great lines sprinkled throughout, and plenty of good ideas.  But the one gag that felt timed just right was really close to the end, when their car falls apart.
    A skilled editor could probably trim this movie down and turn it into a really solid comedy, but as it is, it doesn’t feel like a comedy to me.  Even the stuff I should be loving, like the cars piling up and crashing into one another, leaves me wondering if it was intended to be funny.
    I appreciated the music more than I did before.  But the performances seem a little too polished.  The mix is very clear, and the bass playing really felt like it cut right through.  I did find myself enjoying Aretha Franklin’s performance much more than I expected.  Stevie Wonder does well.  I didn’t care for James Brown.
    I wonder if this is just a time period thing, or if I’m actually right about this.

69 - High School U.S.A.

    A unpopular student gets interested in a girl who is dating the most popular guy in school, leading to a car race between the two of them.
    This movie is notable for one reason - at least to me.  It stars Michael J. Fox and Nancy McKeon.  Those were also the leads in my favorite camp movie, Poison Ivy.  Some kind person has uploaded the whole movie on youtube.
    Aside from the two leads, there are plenty of familiar faces in the movie, in particular, Anthony Edwards, who starred in Revenge of the Nerds as Gilbert, as well as a young Crispin Glover.  Glover delivers a remarkably strange performance.  It’s hard to explain it, but even the least interesting lines come out in the least expected way.
    The main story isn’t that interesting.  The fun of it is in the weird subplots - like a robot that the local genius (interestingly, played by a black guy) has built.  There is a pair of girls looking to take a picture of the popular guy’s butt.
    The best thing about this movie is how ridiculously far the dialogue goes.  While Anthony Edwards starts off cocky and unlikable, he gets worse and worse as the movie progresses.  His last couple stretches of dialogue are really out there.
    There’s something I like about this movie, but it’s hard for me to put my finger on it.  I wouldn’t be interested in owning this one, but I might like it as a double-disc with Poison Ivy.  Of course, that would require Poison Ivy getting a release outside of VHS.

68 - Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me

    A documentary about Big Star, a short-lived, but very influential, band.
    I discovered Big Star over the last year or so, and it’s hard to explain how important they feel.
    Most music requires a certain amount of time for me to fully appreciate it.  I have to get used to hearing certain chord changes, certain vocal approaches.  Most of my favorite songs aren’t things that I fully loved when I first heard them.  They had to work their way into that position.  Big Star fits into a completely different category.  I don’t even know if I’ve completed listening to any of their albums.  But everything I’ve heard is incredible.
    It’s almost like I want to avoid listening to it, because they have a mystical characteristic to their music.
    This is a decent documentary, but it isn’t that great.  It might be that it was put together too late, since a lot of time is filled with very tangential players.
    The one thing that I got out of this was that I don’t actually care for Alex Chilton that much.  I think he had a role to play, but his disinterest with Big Star seems like a lack of self-reflection.  It’s hard to fault Chris Bell, but that may be because he died in 1977.  He didn’t have much time to mess up.
    Still, not a very great documentary.  But it’s nice to see Big Star getting more recognition.

67 - Avengers: Age of Ultron

    The Avengers face off against an extraordinarily powerful robot bent on destroying human life.
    I’ve been waiting for this.  I was thrilled at the end of The Avengers, with the implication that Thanos would be the next villain.  I was a little worried though, because jumping to Thanos seemed like too much of a jump - there wouldn’t be any larger threats to face.  Instead, I was surprised when Marvel announced that the second movie would be Age of Ultron.
    I’ve liked Ultron in the comics.  He’s got strong ties to the team, his motivations are brought out of a certain logic that is misguided, but understandable.  He’s mostly invulnerable.  He’s a really strong foe to use in a movie.  A step up from the threat posed in the first movie, but not big enough that there’s nowhere to go but down.
    And I did follow most of the spoilers available.  Surprisingly, it didn’t ruin anything.  I know Ultron’s motivation, but I had no sense of what his plan actually entailed.
    The story is more complicated than I expected.  We have memories and fantasy sequences woven into events.  There’s a lot more down time than I expected, plenty of time for the characters to talk and develop.  There are new characters, all of whom are developed just enough to make things interesting, but not enough that we don’t feel like they can go anywhere.
    The action is good, but not great.  The action in Winter Soldier was better choreographed and shot, but it wasn’t on the same scale as this one.  The biggest weakness is that one of the fun fights - Iron Man and Hulk fighting - is ultimately forgettable.  It didn’t advance the story, and it served as a distraction.
    There are a number of comic-book moments in this movie.  These are bits that seem completely absurd.  They involve an incongruous visual.  There’s a bit where Iron Man saves a few people riding in a bath tub.  There’s a bit where Ultron makes the trailer on a truck fly.  It’s silly, but it fits into the movie well.  In a strange way, they’re endearing moments.  They remind me of some of the things I like about comics.
    I have one problem, and it’s a strange one.  It’s the Scarlet Witch.  She’s just… too powerful.  Her ability to get inside a person’s mind and force them into a fantasy is perfectly balanced against Ultron - he isn’t susceptible to it.  But what about next movie?  How do we deal with a human enemy?
    This might be one of these rare movies that is actually worse than the first, but because of the failings, is more interesting and compelling.

66 - Frozen

    New queen Elsa has Iceman-like powers.  She’s ashamed of them, and after losing control, sends the kingdom into a surprise winter.  She flees.  Her sister travels to find her and try to bring the kingdom back to the right season.
    Man, I hate Disney movies.  That isn’t entirely accurate.  What I don’t like is the level of polish that accompanies computer-animated features from Disney and Pixar.  Pixar manages to retain a certain level of character, but Disney tends to suck the character out of most of the proceedings.  While I understood the character arcs in this movie, the two main characters - Anna and Elsa - don’t have any unique performance elements.  There are plenty of calculated humor beats.
    The strangest thing about this movie is how it was received.  Elsa was the one that everyone was into.  But she’s not the main character.  She has the strongest arc, but she also doesn’t have the strongest character.  It’s easy to get caught up in her super powers, I guess.
    The songs are passable.  Some of them are well-written, particularly In Summer, and to a lesser extent, Love is an Open Door and Fixer Upper.  Let It Go has one of the strongest hooks, but… I find the vocal especially annoying.  Her approach to singing it is grating, and the animation during that segment lends a degree of sexuality to her character that seems strange.  She does a hip-wiggle as she walks toward the camera.  Very weird.
    In general, it seemed kind of boring.
    The one bright spot was the comic relief of Olaf, played by Josh Gad.  This was one of the rare spots where I felt like he was able to bring his own nuance to the character.  There were gags that were mostly unfinished, and this really helped to liven the movie up.  I didn’t care much about the comic animation for him, but the voice performance was really solid.
    Why do kids like this?  Cause it came out at the right time.  Sadly, I personally believe this is just as forgettable as most Disney movies.

65 - Witness

    A young Amish boy witnesses a murder, leading to a cop hiding out in an Amish community to protect him.
    I know that this was a big hit when it was released, but the only time I’ve seen anything having to do with it was during college.  One of my professors showed a clip of a bit near the end.
    I found myself more conflicted about this.  The idea is strong, and there’s a nice contrast and parallel drawn between the lives and their attitudes toward outsiders.  But there are a few things that distract from the strengths.
    The music really dated.  It’s mostly a synth-orchestrated score, and it’s very distracting.  I can’t help but feel like it isn’t a matter of the change of times, since there are plenty of dated scores I’ve heard, but they work well with the material (like, say, Dawn of the Dead).
    There’s a romantic subplot that feels terribly awkward.  I don’t think anything in particular was wrong about this plot, except that it took time away from what seemed to be a more important area - the relationship between the boy and the cop.
    (This reminds me… the boy doesn’t seem to be bothered by having witnessed a murder.)
    What the romantic subplot does do is create a conflict between the woman and the community.  This is probably the most interesting element, since it draws attention to the relationship between the size of a community and how exclusive it is.
    For as tight-knit as the Amish community is, it also means they are less tolerant of their own disobeying rules.  In contrast, the lack of tight community in the outside world makes them less close and less reliable, but also more inclusive.
    There’s also the message about the internal police corruption being a side effect of this insular community.  So there seems to be a confused message here, that all communities, big and small, are not ideal.  Something makes me think this was not an intentional message though.
    There’s a lack of focus on the child, and this isn’t a bad thing, but it changes the kid to just being a plot device.  He doesn’t have an arc, he doesn’t grow closer to the lead, and he doesn’t influence anyone’s thought process.
    It’s a good movie, but it’s a little confused.  And it’s a little dated.  But it is redeemed by some of the performances, and the photography.

64 - Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show

    A documentary about what showrunners do.
    A modestly pleasant documentary, but one without any real meat to it.  There is no conflict, very little exploration.  I think a “day in the life” approach might have served the material more effectively.  Instead, you learn everything you need to in the first ten minutes, and the rest just grinds the same information over and over.
    Mostly, being a showrunner is an exhausting job.  It’s satisfying, but it’s demanding.
    The one interesting bit is when they relate a few of the silly notes they get from the studio.  “Does Santa have to be old?”

63 - That Thing You Do!

    A garage band records a hit record and enjoys fast success.
    I’m counting this as a first viewing, because this is the first time I’ve seen this cut of the movie.  The original cut of the movie was 108 minutes.  The director’s cut is 149 minutes.  This feels like a completely different movie.
    If I had been more familiar with the original edit, I probably could have pointed out exactly which material was new.  Somehow, the whole thing felt new.  There were still a handful of scenes that I remembered being exactly the same, but there was so much more development of minor plots, little additional lines that fleshed out characters.
    I like the movie much more in this form.  I felt more firmly invested in the characters.  Their fandom for music seemed more completely developed.  I especially liked the addition of the relationship between the bass player and the girl in the girl group.
    I still have two problems with this movie, and they aren’t as serious as they might sound.  First, I don’t feel like there was enough of a development of the relationship between the drummer and Faye.  I don’t know what I expect, because I still pick up on the need for that relationship to happen, but they both seem completely willing to let it pass by.
    The second problem is that Jimmy, the cocky singer, has a happy ending.  He loses the girl, and he loses out on his record deal.  But neither of these things bother him.  Again, I’m not sure what I wanted, but it was something else.