111 - Conan the Barbarian

    After his family and village is destroyed as a child, Conan grows up and pursues revenge on the man that orphaned him.
    It’s remarkable that I’ve gone this long without seeing this.  Swordplay was pretty exciting for me as a kid.  I still enjoy a well-choreographed sword fight.  And Arnold is pretty famous for this role.
    It’s a pretty silly movie.  It takes itself seriously, and that’s pretty good.  Otherwise it might wind up like Masters of the Universe.  But it also doesn’t do a good job of making the characters likable.  Conan’s quest for revenge seems strange, partly because we don’t know why his village was raided, and partly because Conan doesn’t seem very likable.  This is made even more puzzling by the strange passivity that the villain has.  He runs a cult (or something) and it’s hard to say that they’re evil.  They seem to keep to themselves.
    The funniest thing is the amount of sexual content in the movie.  There’s a bit of nudity, but there are a few sex scenes, and they’re overly dramatic.
    At a certain point, I realized that this movie was almost exactly like a comic book… just a really shoddy comic.  No real development.  Plenty of action and sex.  Lots of women in weird, skimpy outfits.  It plays out as a male adolescent fantasy, with Arnold taking the women he wants as they purr over him, then using his sword to dispatch a variety of bad guys.
    I noticed one sex scene in particular, where the girl straddles Arnold.  He grasps one of her breasts.  She lays on top of him, he reaches down to grab her butt, they roll over.  The seduction is complete.
    It is what it is.  I think I might have liked it more if I saw it as a kid.  Now it seems laughably dated.  It’s under-written.
    But I do have to say that the set design and props are really well done.

110 - Bulworth

    A senator up for re-election suffers a peculiar breakdown, leading to him hiring a hitman to kill him, along with speaking his mind in public.
    I saw this back about ten years ago.  I liked it then, although not as much as some other political comedies of the period.  Now, this one doesn’t hold up nearly as well.
    The novelty of the story comes from seeing Warren Beatty playing an awkward white senator, deciding to rap things, as well as speak his mind in a blunt way about political issues.  There’s a humor to that.  But the movie has a serious problem with indulging in stereotypes.  Just about every black person in the movie is a stereotype.  There are a few rare moments where they break those molds, but they usually reinforce them.
    There is a strong core to the message, mostly about the negative role that money plays in politics.  This is fine, but it gets muddied by the focus on his behavior.
    This belongs in a family of other political movies - Bob Roberts, Wag the Dog, Primary Colors, all of which use some pretty bleak messages to make a point.  I’ve grown out of these movies, in a strange way.  I still enjoy them, but I don’t think they’re achieving much.  They draw attention to problems, but they don’t actually offer any solutions.  If anything, they reinforce how hopeless real political change is.

109 - Amber Alert

    A few friends are out filming a reality show audition tape, when they happen to notice a car identified in an Amber Alert.  They follow the car, hoping to help the abducted child.
    Ehhhhh… this is hard to explain.  It’s a found-footage, although the setup makes it much more reasonable.  And the nature of their efforts do figure into the story.  Mostly - the gear associated with their setup actually is used in moving the story forward.
    As a movie, this isn’t especially good.  There isn’t much plot, there’s a lot of cross-talk, and everyone is mostly annoying.  But this poor handling actually lends to the authenticity of the picture.  The characters mostly bicker and reiterate the same arguments back and forth for most of the movie.  In some ways, this feels a little like a poor improvisation effort.  In other ways, it seems roughly as bull-headed as people can be.
    While the male lead is fairly cautious and not as interested in getting directly involved in this adventure, the female lead is absurd in how gung-ho she is.  She isn’t just enthusiastic about getting involved… she’s cavalier about doing ridiculously dangerous things.  She grabs the steering wheel from her companion driver.  She exits the car without planning and runs into danger.  These don’t come across as brave or considered actions.  They aren’t urgent situations either.  They would probably have run smoother if she actually explained what she planned to do.
    The result is that the movie comes out feeling kind of sexist, which is an odd thing, since it was directed by a woman, and a man and woman share the writing credit (although the nature of the dialogue suggests that very little was scripted).  This isn’t something I should feel bad about, but I do.  It actually makes me a little uncomfortable when we see stereotypes adhered to, since I know I shouldn’t be thinking this female lead is an idiot.  But she is!  It’s made worse by me finding her a bit attractive - but that might just be the glasses.

108 - A Thousand Cuts

    A horror director is held hostage by a man whose daughter was killed by someone influenced by the director’s movies.
    For a low-budget horror movie, this is pretty well done.  It moves along quickly.  It’s a little shorter than most movies.  It’s mostly in one location (albeit both inside and outside).  Two primary characters, a variety of supporting character that have minimal participation.  Very little effects work.  It’s just a generally well-done cheapie.
    There’s one problem, and it’s a strange one.  There are a few script problems.  They aren’t obvious to most people, and they probably wouldn’t come out while reading it.  The problem is that the main characters repeat certain dialogue.  The lead re-uses a few phrases, and it has a strange effect of feeling like the story is re-treading the same ground it already covered.
    Given the shortness of the movie, it’s hard to feel like this is a big problem.

107 - Les Miserables

    Set against the French Revolution, a convict creates a new life for himself and tries to avoid the hand of the law catching him.
    Cathy’s been a fan of this.  She’s seen it on stage a few times, she listens to the soundtrack.  Getting the Blu-ray was for her.
    I’ve been exposed to a few of the songs.  None of them ever really stuck with me.  The hook for Master of the House is pretty strong, but I’ve always been disappointed with the whole thing.
    The movie is a weird experience.  It’s well shot.  It’s dramatic, great sets, great period look… but it’s hard to get past the singing.  For a story that takes place in the real world, it’s strangely hilarious to see people singing all over the place.
    As a musical, I hate it.  Very few good melodies.  It’s made even worse by the fact that everything is sung.  It isn’t a musical - it’s an opera.  The result is that the material that should be treated as dialogue is instead sung, using terrible, aimless phrases.  This is only drawn into focus more harshly when we get to a decent song.
    The story is, sadly, not much better.  The conflict between the leads seems strangely personal for something that shouldn’t be.  There are romances and minor characters fit into the story, and all of them seem to be given greater weight than they should have.  All of this is set against the revolution, which seems kind of silly.  It would help if the poor uprising seemed to have a reason for standing up, but they just talk.  It might be nice if there was a clearer example of oppression.
    But I think I can see what the appeal is.  It doesn’t work for me, but I think I see a romantic appeal to it.  It’s aimed at girls.  I also wonder how much my distaste for it is since I didn’t grow up with it.

106 - Max Max: Fury Road

    Furiosa and Max team up to escape from a warlord and find another safe haven.
    I had heard great things about this for a long time, and I finally went to see it.  I knew it was going to be a certain way.  I had heard that it was mostly Furiosa as the main character.  I knew that the whole movie was mostly a long chase.
    It’s a remarkable movie.  There isn’t anything else like it.  It isn’t just that it’s almost non-stop action, but it’s almost a different form of storytelling.  It still follows a three-act structure, but it’s being told in a very different way.  We’re dropped into this world without much background.  We have to piece together the information we get, and we still don’t get a clear explanation on exactly what has happened, or why different customs have come to be.  It’s a bit confusing at first, but it I think this must be what it was like to see Star Wars back in ’77.  It’s a massive new world to explore.  There is so much new, and every little bit of detail is arranged to flesh it out.
    While much of the movie is a chase scene, there are a variety of other scenes sprinkled in that move the character development along.
    One of the strangest things I can say about the script is that it doesn’t have a main character.  Neither Max nor Furiosa get that much dialogue.  They both get developed roughly the same amount.  Both are heroic, although I think the argument can be made that Furiosa is more a hero than Max is.  The plot is the more important thing.
    The action is remarkable.  It’s a spectacular of choreography, and not even simple fight choreography.  It’s a multiple-car-and-truck spectacular.  Everything is moving around, there are loads of people on these cars, moving around, throwing things.  It’s a massively confusing battle.  Even more impressive is that it doesn’t get boring.  There are regular new developments, and the same situations rarely happen.  It’s endlessly creative.
    I have great admiration for this movie.  I don’t know how well it will play on repeat viewings, but it’s probably one of the more impressive movies I’ve seen this year.

105 - Dead End

    A family is driving in the wilderness on Christmas Eve.  Weird stuff happens, and just about everyone dies.
    I had a hard time watching this, but I still kept on returning to it.  The script is generally pretty bad, the characters are poorly drawn, the story is derivative of many Twilight Zone-type stories.  But somehow, I kept wanting to finish it, at least to make sure I was understanding the story correctly.  There was always hope that it might correct itself with a last-minute twist.
    First, we start off the story with some exposition.  The characters are ridiculous.  Everyone is remarkably annoying.  The spooky event is that they pick up a strange woman in a white dress, who carries a dead baby.  It’s obvious that this is not a normal thing.
    The story progresses, with a few characters getting killed off.  Strange things happen.  Most distinctly, they seem to be stuck on the same road.  They see the same landmarks.  And somehow, the reaction to this isn’t that they figure out that they’re stuck in a loop.  Their reaction is that “someone is playing a trick on us.”
    The ending - spoilers of course - is that they actually died in a car accident back at the beginning of the movie.  The car they hit has the woman in the white dress and her baby.  Yawn.
    There isn’t anything interesting about watching a bunch of dumb characters take an hour to figure out what the audience already knows.
    The general poor quality of this movie made me think that this actually could be a good movie… if it came out during the early 80s, and if it had a better cast, maybe some better direction.

    I have one thing to praise about this, and it's specific to my interests.  There's a visual of a guy trapped in a car that's being driven away.  He's struggling against the back window.  This reminds me of one of the first horror movies I can remember seeing, but I don't know what it was.  I remember a car being pushed into water with a woman in a white dress in the back of it.  I saw it on VHS during the mid-80s.

104 - Enter the Dangerous Mind (Snap)

    A guy struggles with psychological issues, and eventually his demons get the better of him.
    As I was watching this, I was reminded of the vaguely psychological horror movies made recently.  In particular, 2010’s Maniac.  There’s something a little disappointing about it.  As this story progressed, it kept my attention, but it was mostly because I was trying to piece together what the backstory was supposed to be.
    After looking up some information about it online, I found that there was a negative review that called attention to the problem that the movie perpetuates an idea that the mentally ill are violent.  It’s hard for me to feel like that’s a real problem; these are some insurmountable problems in storytelling.  The character is defined by being mentally ill.  There’s no story if the character doesn’t get violent.
    But at the end of the movie, I felt like this was a valid criticism.  His decent into violence seemed unearned.  His motivators were mostly trivial.  The worst part was the very end.
    After he is killed, his killer acquires a voice in her head, advising her to kill.
    This ending implies that mental illness is communicable, and that violent aspects are a part of it.
    At least there’s one notable thing about the movie.  This is the first time that I’ve seen a dubstep-centric movie.  It’s weird.  It did make me appreciate the ambient characteristics of the music.

103 - Here Comes the Devil

    After a pair of children return from being lost on a mountain overnight, they seem changed.  Their parents investigate.
    I was really impressed with this movie.  I’m not especially into movies focusing on the devil, as religious overtones tend to become a problem.  (Although I enjoy The Ninth Gate.  I’m not sure why.)  There isn’t much religious material in this, and instead of striving for an internal-logic solution, it keeps the audience trying to piece together what they’ve learned.
    The pace is a little slow, but just mysterious and deliberate enough to keep things interesting.  There’s a moderately long sex scene early on that is remarkably erotic.  It could have easily been trimmed for length, but there’s something kind of nice about it.  It’s not a type of scene you see in many movies.
    We never get many answers, and there’s no reveal explaining what the goal of the evil force is.  There’s a small hint.  Does it matter?  Not really.  It’s a collection of characters stumbling into something larger than they are, which they have no chance of understanding.
    This type of story might bother some people.  I liked it though.  It’s unlike any other horror movie I’ve seen, it does a good job, and it should stick in my memory nicely.
    The one little quibble - and it’s not something that bothered me, it’s just something unusual.  The direction is mostly really well done, except that there are a lot of instances where the camera will suddenly zoom in on a person’s face for dramatic tension.  It’s a little dated.  It’s kind of nice to see it brought back though.