123 - The Happy House

    A young couple goes away for the weekend to a bed & breakfast in the middle of nowhere.  The owner is a peculiar woman.
    Oy, this movie is a mess.  I’m not saying it’s bad, because I can imagine this playing really well.  But it’s almost as if the story and script are being played in the wrong medium.
    There are loads of problems.  The cast is mostly unremarkable.  No one does a notable job with their material.  The pacing is terrible.  The script is making an effort to be a bit campy and tongue-in-cheek.  But it never works.  The biggest problem is the ending.  There’s a lack of one.  It doesn’t feel cathartic, which I suppose is intentional.  It’s an effort to subvert the normal tropes of a horror movie, but instead, it just feels like there was no reason to watch it.
    However… I could imagine this working as a stage play.  With a strong cast, and some extra polish on the script, it could be a whole lot of fun in that context.
    I can’t say that I would ever bother to watch this again, or even suggest it to anyone to watch, but it’s an interesting curiosity.

122 - Jug Face

    A backwoods community lives in a relationship with a mysterious force called The Pit.  A girl in the community conceals the Pit’s message that it has chosen her as the next sacrifice, stirring up a variety of problems.
    The cover art for this movie, along with the summary, makes it a hard movie to get excited about.  Plus, it’s made worse by having a lower rating than it deserves.  I understand why, but those people are wrong.
    The story is remarkably simple, but the way it’s handled is what makes it special.  It would be easy to tell this story in a different style, like most religious cult stories, where there’s no reason to believe that the cult has valid beliefs.  In this story, we start off with that impression, but then the story incorporates plenty of evidence that the Pit is actually a legitimate force.  This changes everything.
    Suddenly, the lead’s desire for survival becomes understandable, but ultimately a selfish endeavor.  This doesn’t make her any less likable, either.  There does seem to be a certain unfairness to their situation.  She was born into this community, and she’s helpless against it.  She’s also fighting against the instinct for self-preservation.  If anything, she’s likable because she recognizes the role that she’s played in making things worse for everyone.
    That’s where the movie has made some people unhappy.  The ending is unsatisfying if you started the story with the impression that it should end with the destruction of the cult, or that she should somehow defeat The Pit.  But as the story develops, it becomes clear that that ending doesn’t make sense in this situation.  It’s a little sad, but it accomplishes two things.  First, it twists audience expectations in a different direction.  Second, it communicates an idea about community responsibility for the greater good.
    I’m not saying this is a great movie, but it’s interesting, and I would suggest it for anyone who liked things like The Wicker Man.  It’s an interesting variation on a classic idea.

121 - Dark Touch

    A young girl is moved to another family, and then another, as mysterious forces kill the families she stays with.
    I can’t tell if I should attempt to evaluate this movie.  It’s interesting enough that I was able to keep watching it.  But it’s a frustrating experience.  I was able to piece together the direction the story was going, but there are so many details that are left vague.  It’s hard to feel confident in understanding what the story actually was.
    This probably spoils things a little.  As the story develops, it becomes clear that the girl is telekinetic.  She is responsible for the death of her family, plus a second family.  It’s implied that she has a variety of issues because she was being molested by her original family.  Her killing of the second family is because specific things reminded her of her original family.
    Then we get to her relationship with a bunch of other kids.  I have no idea if she’s actually persuaded them to join her, or if she’s able to hypnotize them or something.  All of this leads to an evocative, but very strange ending.  I can sort of understand her interest in killing the third family, but I have no idea why the other children are involved.
    There are some interesting ideas mixed into the process, but I can’t help but feel like I missed some big, important material.

120 - Welcome to Me

    A woman with some personality disorder issues wins the lottery, and uses those winnings to produce a live talk show starring herself.
    I heard a review of this movie on the Movie Date podcast, and it was mildly interesting.  Netflix picked the movie up, and I decided to give it a try.
    It’s great.  It’s strange, and it’s not entirely predictable.  But it’s sort of beautiful.  The main character describes herself as being diagnosed as borderline personality disorder.  After reading about that, I don’t think she quite fits into that.  She has a variety of compulsive traits, but she doesn’t seem especially angry, except about things that seem reasonable to be angry about.  She’s impulsive in her relationships.
    What is much more compelling is the strange way that she manages to have short episodes of her life re-enacted on her show.  As hokey as the acting is, her reaction to these events shows a level of emotion that is hard to ignore.  It gets easier and easier to feel like she’s a really good person, she just doesn’t have it all together.
    There are comedic elements, but I don’t think I ever felt like it was intended to be a straight comedy.
     (According to some discussion on IMDB, this is actually a pretty good portrayal of borderline personality disorder.)

119 - The Dark Knight Rises

    After Bane takes over Gotham and isolates it from the rest of the country, Batman has to come out of retirement to save the city.
    I’m conflicted about this movie, and that might be what has made it more interesting.  The Dark Knight is generally pretty great, and it’s easy to remember a lot of what happens in it.  My memories of The Dark Knight Rises are more scattered.  I remember shots, certain scenes.  But I have a harder time remembering how the story fits together.  Combined with some of the weaknesses, I find myself much more drawn to watching it more often.
    I still can’t get past the things that bothered me the first time - most particularly, the logistics of a helicopter needing to fly about six miles away in a minute and a half.  It just doesn’t work!
    I think I like some of the quieter elements to the movie.  Catwoman (autocorrect just changed that to “cattleman”) has a fairly quiet arc, but it feels believable, and there’s a sense of dignity to it.  She doesn’t drastically change because of Batman’s actions; she’s more influenced by seeing the destruction that Bane brought.
    I know it’s technically inferior to The Dark Knight, but the flaws are part of what keeps me coming back to it.  Bane actually improves as a villain the more I see it.  He’s got a great balance between the comic book elements and the real-life elements.

118 - The Wrecking Crew

    A documentary about a variety of sessions musicians working during the late 50’s through the mid 70’s.
    I can’t remember when I first heard about the Wrecking Crew, but I’ve been pretty aware of Hal Blaine for some time.  Then I heard about Carol Kaye.
    It isn’t just Phil Spector’s production that made the sound of the era.  There was a quality to the performance that was going on.  These people played on nearly everything, and they did it perfectly.  There’s something unique going on in all of the hits, and they brought a certain amount of personality to the recording.
    As a documentary, it’s not especially good.  There isn’t too much to learn.  It’s interesting to a musician and a fan, but there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of a deeper analysis going on.  Regardless, it’s good to see a more public acknowledgment of these musicians.

117 - Mr. Mom

    After being laid off, a man stays at home while his wife gets a high-paying, demanding job, and he struggles to take care of their kids.
    This was released in 1983, too early for me to remember it if I saw it back then.  But I always remember the poster for it, since it was a pretty big hit, and it stayed at the video store for a long time.  I never wanted to see it.  It seemed like a comedy focusing on “look at this guy struggling to be a homemaker!”  It didn’t seem like that clever a premise.
    So now that I’ve seen it, I have no idea why it was a hit.  There are a few amusing bits, but most of it is pretty bland and predictable.  Michael Keaton doesn’t get much of an opportunity to shine.  The story is a little unbalanced.  It starts off like it will have a stronger focus on the wife’s time at work, then it abandons that for watching Keaton doing a bunch of chores.
    It was written by John Hughes, and his sense of humor shines through.  In particular, the sequence at the supermarket.  There was an unusual scene, which I liked for the creative elements.  The movie seamlessly moves into a fantasy sequence.  It reminded me of The Seven Year Itch.
    There was one joke I actually laughed at.  Keaton is on the phone talking about a soap opera to someone else, and there’s a line about “he had a vasectomy, but it didn’t take.”
    The real weakness of the movie is that it feels very dated, even for the 80s.  If this were a movie from the 50s or 60s, it would probably be pretty brilliantly handled.  It seems antiquated for the 80s.  The fun of flipping gender roles doesn’t seem all that remarkable for that time period.

116 - Ant-Man

    Recently-released convict Scott Lang is recruited by Dr. Henry Pym to help prevent the release of the doctor’s technology, a suit that allows the user to shrink down.
    Like most people, I’ve been a bit skeptical of the viability of Ant-Man as a hero capable of carrying a movie.  After seeing how well Marvel handled Guardians, I think I relaxed a bit.  If anything, I think I like the idea more than seeing another well-known property get a big-budget treatment.
    There’s something nice about this movie, and it’s that I didn’t feel like it needs a sequel.  I’d rather that it didn’t.  It’s fun, it adds more to the Marvel Cinematic mythos, and it’s an enjoyable movie.  It doesn’t have anything special to say, but it did tell an enjoyable story well.
    There is a strange aspect, something that will slip past most viewers, but it might be clear to anyone who has heard of the troubled history this movie had.  There’s a strange imbalance to the movie.  You can tell which aspects were added in at Marvel’s request.  You can tell what elements are Edgar Wrights’.  These tonal shifts are strange, but they actually help keep the movie interesting.  Instead of simply hitting all the beats you expect, it hits those beats in an accent pattern you didn’t expect.
    Despite being a mostly self-contained plot, I found the ties into the larger universe simultaneously a little awkward, but also very rewarding.  The Avengers mansion gets to be used, which makes the ending of Age of Ultron feel more meaningful.  It’s nice to see the Falcon get a little more attention.  Even the wedged-in reference to Spider-Man was pleasing.
    It’s good.  It hit the right spot, it was new enough, but it also did everything I expected it to do well enough.  Personally, I probably liked it a bit better than Guardians.  Probably better than Iron Man 3 and Thor 2.  Given the character, this is a really impressive job.
    On an unrelated note, there was the trailer for Fantastic Four.  It’s hard to express how little enthusiasm I have for that project.

115 - These Final Hours

    As the world is about to end, a guy finds some meaning in his life by helping a young girl locate her family.
    I’m struggling with what to think about this movie.  It held my attention.  There were a few decent ideas.  It’s hard to knock apocalyptic scenarios.  But this one wound up making me feel a little disappointed.  They did a good job with the setting.  There are lots of deserted areas, lots of fires.  Lots of general damage and mayhem.  I particularly liked a long shot of a suburban street where a hanged man is visible dangling from a streetlight.
    But where the movie fails is in making an emotional or philosophical point about the end of the world.  It’s hard to avoid comparing this to Last Night, which made a much more interesting point by showing a variety of reactions, including plenty of people who accepted the end of the world in a quiet resignation.  People who didn’t stop working.  With this one, most of the people fit into two camps - people who want to destroy and commit all the crimes they wanted to, and people who choose to die before being killed.  Then there’s everyone at a huge party.
    I’m not sure what I wanted, but this comes across as a louder, bigger version of Last Night, but also, much more shallow.
    One of the primary differences between them is that this is a violent end to mankind.  A meteorite has hit, and a wave of destruction is taking about twelve hours to make it around to Australia.  Last Night never explains anything about the end, but it does have a firm, specific end point.  We don’t know if it’s violent or just a blinking out, or what.

114 - Creep

    A freelance videographer goes to a job, meeting a peculiar man at an isolated location.  Things start weird, and get weirder.
    I thought that I had read some positive review of this somewhere, but I can’t remember where.  It enjoys a pretty positive reception on Netflix, at least.
    This is remarkably cheap.  I believe it’s mostly shot with a single camera.  There are two cast members, both credited as writers, one of them credited as director as well.  It’s an unusual movie, even as the story is pretty simple.
    I’m not sure what I think about it.  There aren’t many story developments until the second half, and even then, it spins in a circle until the last scene.  The last scene is an effective payoff.
    I guess there is an aspect that makes this movie work well.  We don’t have a clear picture of what one of the characters intends to do.  He’s got strange behavior, and it’s hard to tell what he intends to do.  It’s easy to spend your entire time trying to figure out what he will eventually do.

113 - Dark Summer

    A teenager under house arrest is haunted.  His friends help him try to help him.
    First, I’d like to say a little something about the title of this movie.  It sucks.  It’s a terrible title.  In another month, if you asked me if I’d ever seen a movie called Dark Summer, I would have to consult my records.  I poor title makes is harder to associate the story with it.
    The story is fairly simple.  The guy is haunted.  Weird stuff happens.  The friends help him investigate.  Everything ties up.  I do admire that the movie sticks to mostly a single location and keeps to a very limited cast.  But it also suffers from a few directorial problems.  Notably, the pacing is really slow.  There are lots of long shots that attempt to build tension, but instead just made me bored and allowed my mind to wander.
    There’s a decent twist to the story at the end, but the sluggish buildup made it harder to care about the unexpected reveal.

112 - Advantageous

    In the future, a woman struggles to make opportunity available to her daughter, partly by agreeing to participate in a new procedure, involving moving her consciousness into a new body.
    The is a very low-key, artful, and very interesting sci-fi movie.  It’s cheap, but it hides the budget well.  There are effects shots as needed, and the absence of extras just adds to the feeling of something we don’t quite understand about the future.
    There’s quiet, subtle world-building going on.  There are a lot of details we need to infer from the dialogue.
    The creepiest thing about the movie is that it portrays a pretty realistic scenario.  We are heading toward an existence where jobs - or at least, gainful jobs - will be scarce.  Especially in the US, we are stubborn about the idea of spreading job availability around.  The result is that we wind up with these jobs where even the lowest-skill jobs are going to be filled with wildly over-qualified people.
    While I can’t identify with one of the central relationships - the mother and her daughter - I can identify with the despair that is explored.
    Another really fascinating thing about this is the plethora of female characters.  There are very few male characters.  Most of the primary and secondary characters are female, and even the supporting parts.

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.