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.

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.

99 - It's Such a Beautiful Day

    The animated story of Bill, a man who is losing his mind.
    Weird stuff.  It’s good, but it’s very strange.  It takes a little while to get into the sense of how this sort of story works.  There isn’t much of a narrative.  It’s more like a series of strange anecdotes centered around a person.  These anecdotes vary from very simple stories to completely absurd ones.
    The main point is that Bill is sick, but we don’t know what it is.  We hear a few potential side effects, but he seems to have lost a lot of his memory, but he can’t tell what has been lost, what has been retained, and what is just being made up.
    There are explorations of man’s role in the universe, life and death… it’s all there.  It’s just such a strange trip.
    Entirely worth the one-hour watch, at least for most people.

93 - A Trip to the Moon

    A silent film covering a trip to the moon.
    This is mostly interesting for historical purposes.  The production is interesting, especially for the time period.  There are plenty of effects, and most of them are interesting.  The iconic image of the moon with a rocket in the eye is a peculiar one.
    I don’t feel like I can say much about this movie, since the historical context, and even the ability to interpret silent films, is very different now.

91 - Troll 2

    A family vacations at the small town of Nilbog, unaware that it is populated by goblins.
    I’ve intended to watch this for a long time, but somehow it never seemed to be important enough to bump it up to the top of my queue.  Sure, it’s a bad movie, but I can’t really say that it’s the Best Worst Movie.
    The Room is far more notable, far more interesting, and worse on more levels.  This is bad, silly, cheap, but also more technically competent.  It’s also a foreign production, even if it was made in the US.  It brought Italian sensibilities to the direction.  This is pretty obvious for anyone who has seen Italian horror.
    It’s hard to pick on the acting, since everyone involved seems to be at roughly the same level.  No one stands out as being too good for the production.  And since I’ve seen Best Worst Movie, I know that most of the cast was pretty new to acting.
    What crowns the weird badness of this movie is the story.  It starts off with a certain ridiculousness, then it just gets worse from there.  Nearly every step on the way gets progressively worse.  We’ve got goblins that are vegetarians.  They want to eat people, so they get the people to eat weird, green-tainted food, which turns the people into plant matter.  Then the goblins eat them.  This has so many problems with it, it’s hard to ignore.  Why do the goblins want to eat people?  It seems like more effort than just eating vegetables.  The food is obviously tainted.  Cake with green icing makes sense.  The weird green spread on every other food is so bizarre that it makes you question why the actors aren’t reacting to it.
    There’s a plot point later in the movie where someone makes himself inedible to the goblins by eating a “double decker bologna sandwich.”  Was everyone else a vegetarian before they came to town?
    There are a handful of sequences that are wonderful in their badness.  Most of them are up on youtube.  My personal favorite was the weird corn-on-the-cob seduction.  I’m a sucker for a terrible soundalike recording of “You Can Keep Your Hat On.”

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.

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.

57 - Clockstoppers

    A scientist’s son gets ahold of an experimental watch that allows the user (and anyone he touches) to enter hypertime - an equivalent of freezing time.
    It’s a bad sign that there are four people credited as writing the story, and three of them credited with writing the screenplay.  That, and it’s a Nickelodeon production.  It’s directed by Jonathan Frakes, who has done some good work, and his direction here is completely fine.
    I guess I’m just not the right audience for this.
    It’s a story that should be really enjoyable.  The premise is something that everyone thinks of in their youth, and it’s a wildly tempting superpower to fantasize about.  There’s a portion of the movie dedicated to that fantasy, and that works.  But it’s the plot that gets in the way.  Some organization wants to get the technology… I have no idea what’s happening with that plot.  Even when it resolves, it doesn’t seem like it makes sense.
    There are two things that hurt this movie.  The first is the casting of Jesse Bradford as a teenager in this movie.  He was roughly 23 when he shot this movie.  His jaw is too well-formed, and he has a hint of facial hair, making him look like a college kid throughout the movie.  This is remarkable, since the girl that plays his love interest is five years older than him, and she looks younger!
    Anyway, the other problem is that it breaks some of the cardinal rules of sci-fi premises.  Once you establish the rules, you obey them.  The rules are what make a story work.  The idea of hypertime is established, but then there are a bunch of scenes that break the rules they establish.  In particular, there’s a scene where they use their time-freezing power to help a friend of theirs win a DJ competition (which seems to be less about music, and more about scratching records).  They use this power to somehow help him do some funky-fresh dancing to impress the audience.
    We see that the kids are in hypertime, manipulating his body, making him dance.
    This makes no sense.  If they were doing this, he would be moving inhumanly fast.  If they were moving him slowly enough, they would have spent an absurd amount of time on this project (no numbers are available, but I would guess… maybe a few days).

    The biggest problem is that there’s a scene that is supposed to fulfill the promise of the premise.  We see the couple going around, having fun with their newfound powers.  But it’s boring.  It’s a lot of dumb trickery, and nothing that interesting.  This might be able to engage a young kid, like pre-teen.  But the rest of the movie is so dull that it might be hard to keep their attention that long.
    It’s hard for me to judge this too harshly though.  I got a clear feeling that I wasn’t the intended audience.

    One other thing - the soundtrack for this is hilariously a relic of the times.  Blink 182.  The Cranberries.  Nickel back, New Found Glory, Third Eye Blind, Lit, Sugar Ray, Uncle Kracker covering Time After Time, and over the credits… Smash Mouth.

49 - X-Men: Days of Future Past

    In a dystopian future, the surviving X-Men attempt a last-ditch effort to send Wolverine’s consciousness back to the past, hoping to change the future.
    I know that I liked this when I saw it in theaters, and I’ve been looking forward to watching it again.  I’ve still got some mixed feelings.  If anything, I feel a little more conflicted than I did about First Class.
    There are fun moments, there are some clever writing bits.  The action is generally good.  I love the period costuming.  There’s still some very good use of powers, which is something I really love.  When the characters in Avengers use their abilities in tandem with others, it’s very satisfying.  The first instance I can think of that used this was actually Spider-Man 3, near the end.  But there’s something that doesn’t work when it happens in this movie.  I don’t know if it’s how poorly defined some of the powers are (it doesn’t help that this is the first time we’ve seen some of these characters) or how these sequences are shot in mostly dark settings.
    The inclusion of the new characters doesn’t seem exciting, either.  Blink, Bishop, Warpath, Sunspot… and Ink (who I just had to look up.  Introduced in 2008?  Please, classic characters first.)  It almost comes across like there was an effort to include unique looking characters for toy purposes.  I even preferred the massive number of characters in The Last Stand, since that at least made sense.
    The plot isn’t bad at all, and it plays better the second time through.  I felt like Magneto’s plan and motivation was more clearly executed.  But I also realized that Wolverine doesn’t even have to be there for most of the story.  He kicks it off, and he gets Professor X over his weakness, but near the end, he’s incapacitated, and the remainder of the story plays out without his involvement.

43 - John Dies at the End

    A guy and his friend have a problem with psychic powers, trans-dimensional demons and bugs, and a possible end to the world.
    I can’t describe this movie, and I shouldn’t try to summarize it.  None of the descriptions I’ve seen have been anywhere near intelligible.  The movie is difficult to like, mostly because it’s easy to spend the first half of it wondering what’s happening.  There’s a recurring sense that something happened that you missed, and that something would explain everything.  I kept on looking up a summary just to make sure that I didn’t miss anything important.
    I’ll say this - the writing is entertaining.  Every scene is clever, unexpected, weird, and wild.  But there’s only so much that I can take of this sort of thing.  The constant weirdness is a problem, and I’ve encountered it in a few other movies before.  Even a staple like Brazil, which revels in weirdness, still has, at the core, a recognizable humanity in the romantic story.  I never feel like any of the characters are human in this movie.
    There’s a certain type of person that this movie is right for.  I know at least one person who would love it.  But the appeal is not broad, and I can imagine most people really disliking it.
    Personally, I respect it.  But I wouldn’t want to return to it.

37 - Big Hero 6

    A young genius’s brother dies in a fire, leaving behind a medical assistant robot.  The robot is adapted to help the young genius investigate the story behind his brother’s death.
    As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more and more annoyed with Disney movies, and with the effect that Pixar animation has had on most animated features.  The character design has gotten really dull - especially the girls.  The animation has reached into an uncomfortable place.  Some of the characters look almost photo-realistic during certain sequences (particularly the villain).  This creates a problem of the movie feeling like it switches between cartoonish animation and a realistic approach.
    There are a few enjoyable bits, mostly with the voice acting for Baymax.  Aside from that, I didn’t have much of a sense of wonder from this.  I found most of the story kind of predictable, most of the humor pretty dull.  It wasn’t offensive, but it seemed like something was lacking.  I don’t know what it was.

34 - Rapture-Palooza

    After the rapture, a girl becomes the focus of the antichrist’s affections, spurring her and her boyfriend to hatch a scheme to imprison him.
    This seemed like a lighthearted comedy, but I found myself much more confused than I expected to be.  It’s actually a really fun premise, and there was a lot of effort put into world building.  Some of the jokes were pretty clever.  But… somehow, the movie fell flat.  There was something wrong with the performances, the direction, or the editing… something was working against the comedic elements, making this into a massive exercise in frustration.  I could see a lot of funny material, but it never came together right.
    There’s a lot of sleazy material in this, and that seems kind of strange.  It’s at odds with the fun tone that the rest of the movie has.
    Even with all of this, the movie held my attention very well.

209 - The Uninvited

    A man and his sister buy a house on a cliff by the sea.  It turns out to be haunted.  With the help of the prior owner’s daughter, they unravel the mystery behind the ghost.
    I saw this listed as one of the few Criterion horror releases.  I hadn’t heard of it, but it must be worthwhile…
    It’s from 1944.  This means that I have a hard time telling if my expectations are reasonable or not.  It’s dated.  The conventions regarding the handling of supernatural stories hadn’t been fleshed out.  One of the things that the wiki article mentions is that it was the first Hollywood film to play a haunting as a supernatural event, rather than a comedic one.  This is implied by the score, which is remarkably upbeat and lighthearted for most of the movie.
    There are other things… like the premise involving a man and his sister buying a house together.  The man being interested in the daughter of the seller is a little odd, because the ages seem very different.  Later, it’s announced that the daughter is 20, so I suppose that’s alright.  I thought she was supposed to be somewhere between 16-18, but that may have been because of how the grandfather was treating her.
    I can see the influence this movie had, particularly on movies like The Innocents and The Haunting.  The story unfolds in a similar way to most of the other haunted house movies I’ve seen.  Even the trope about animals being aware of ghosts.
    There are some strong points here.  The house, the location, is great.  The layout of the house is great, and the main haunted room is really neat.  The script is fun, if a little slow by modern standards.  The effects work is really good for the time period.
    It’s interesting, at least from a cinematic historical perspective.  I can’t imagine watching it again.  I really wish Criterion would do a nice treatment for The Haunting though.

    Also notable is the fact that the piece Stella By Starlight first appeared in this film.

207 - The Babadook

    A widowed lady struggles with raising her son, and has to fight being possessed by a sinister spirit.
    The AV Club gave this a very good review, and it’s rare to see a horror movie get substantial critical praise.
    I’m impressed.  It’s very well-made.  The direction is clever, efficient, and evocative.  The script and performances are great, although it is an uncomfortable story.
    There’s one thing that usually drags horror movies down, and that’s predictability.  A twist is able to hold interest, but there are normally a set of rules that most movies are governed by; children in peril is usually a bad idea.  Certain acts take place off-camera.  Usually, it’s a matter of fulfilling the expectations created by the script.  Good movies usually are able to subvert some of these expectations.
    This is why there’s an unusual sequence, probably about halfway through, when the remainder of the story is spelled out for us.  It explicitly creates a new set of expectations, and messes with the audience by starting to fulfill those expectations, then derails them.  This is really smart.  It’s very effective, too.
    There’s an uncomfortable feel that dominates a lot of the first half, and it’s because we are exposed to erratic child behavior.  I know I don’t want kids, and the strangeness of this child’s behavior is a good explanation.  He seems pretty bright sometimes, and then his behavior switches drastically.  It does make us empathize with his mother.
    This is another thing - the movie does a great job of capturing being tired, and barely being able to hold on.
    I suppose my only criticism is that I don’t feel like I fully understand the ending.  I don’t think I understand the nature of the creature, what it wants, or why it remains.  I don’t know if I should be wondering about it, either.

203 - Swiss Family Robinson

    A family is shipwrecked, and left marooned on an island.  The family builds a house, tames a variety of animals, and enjoys an idealistic existence.
    A Disney movie, so my expectations were low.  It’s a strange movie, especially by modern standards.  I think it would play better to kids, but as an adult, so many things seem laughable.  The island somehow has at least one tiger, an anaconda, elephants, ostriches, zebras, hyenas.  Somehow, the family is able to build an absurdly fancy house using salvaged scrap from the shipwreck.  The absurdity of this is compounded by the way that the movie avoids giving a sense of passage of time.  As far as I can tell, it took about a day or so for the house to be built.
    There are a few interesting things going on.  One of the primary plots involves a love triangle between the two brothers and a girl they rescue from pirates.  The tension is interesting, and it doesn’t play like normal Disney material.  The boys actually fight.  There’s a big finish battle at the end, during which the family kills a good number of pirates.  While the violence is kept in check, near the end, pirates are shot, and some of them fall off the side of a cliff.
    A lot of the running time is devoted to the family having fun, playing at a swimming hole, playing with animals.  There are a few sequences that have family members riding an ostrich, which seems cruel, but it seems to be something you can do nowadays.
    There was also a scene where the two Great Dane dogs they have fight with a tiger.  They seem to legitimately fight, which was really puzzling.  Neither of them seemed to be injured, but I really wonder how they did it.
    But the most important thing about this movie is how the imagery and ideas shaped the fantasies of children for a long time.  I see elements of this movie present occasionally in The Simpsons and Life in Hell.  The image of the fancy jungle house is silly, but it’s charming, and it captures the imagination very effectively.
    My biggest complaint about this movie is that there’s no indication that there was any struggle.  They never address how they get food, or clean drinking water.  I don’t mind that they have a good time… but it just seems like they should have had to earn it.  They don't even seem to be worried when the ship is wrecked!

198 - Scrooged

    A misanthropic TV executive goes through his own version of A Christmas Carol.
    I like Bill Murray.  I should have had more interest in seeing this, but something about the box art always put me off.  But I wanted to watch something, and I wasn’t in the mood for horror, so…
    It’s good.  It’s really good.  But it’s not something I would return to for the holidays.  This is a peculiar problem, since it should be some really solid holiday fare.  Bill Murray is as good as ever.  He even gets some of his trademark singing in at the end.
    What makes it hard to handle as a holiday movie is that it’s probably one of the darkest adaptations of A Christmas Carol that I’ve ever seen.  Part of this might be because the story has been transplanted into modern times (yes, most adaptations of the story made for TV have transplanted it, but they also usually play it as a straight comedy.  This is mostly played as a comedy, but there are some really dark things - like a frozen dead guy in the sewer.).
    Carol Kane, who I usually really love, is in a very manic part, and she mostly spends her time on screen pushing Bill Murray around.  It’s entertaining, but it feels like they could have gotten nearly anyone for that part.
    Even though most of the movie is so much more potent than the other adaptations I’ve seen, Murray’s transformation at the end isn’t handled quite right.  He’s scared straight by the vision of his corpse being burned up, but he doesn’t seem to be distressed by his legacy.  The result is that he jumps a little too quickly into being a good person.
    However, he does deliver a nice talk at the end that expresses a good philosophy of positivity.  I’m also really impressed with how well the handled the equivalent part for Tiny Tim.  It was obvious from the start, but it still paid out really well.

195 - Don't Blink

    A bunch of college kids go on a vacation, running out of gas as they reach their resort, which is mysteriously deserted.  People start disappearing.
    I think I like these mysterious types of horror movies.  I think I was pretty forgiving to Vanishing on 7th Street, which never explains itself to satisfaction.  But this movie is really pretty bad.  The script is ridiculous and unsatisfying.  It tries to offer some kind of philosophy, but it comes across as a desperate attempt to give the impression of depth without saying anything.  Do I need a serious message to the movies I watch?  Not at all!  But I can’t stand to be told I’m seeing something important when it’s obvious I’m not.
    Wow, I sound really angry about this movie.
    Okay, let me start off with the bad stuff.
    First, the movie kicks off by introducing the characters as they chat in their cars as they make a long trip.  There’s some silliness, some gags about urinating in a bottle.  (This gag should be pretty funny to me.  A friend of mine insisted that he really wanted to do the same thing during a drive we made.)  During this sequence, I realize that I’ve seen this setup happen.  It’s happened many, many times before.  Nearly every dead teenager movie since the 90’s has done this kind of setup.  It’s cliche, but I’m not too picky about this kind of thing.  We move on.
    Then they arrive at the mysterious luxury cabin.  They look around, and seem mildly wary of the fact that no one is around.  This is okay, but this also takes up about a half hour of running time.  In that time, they make mild incremental discoveries.  This would be okay of this was setup, but this is just developing atmosphere.
    This makes me wonder what the structure of this story is supposed to be.
    Eventually, people start to disappear.  They just blink out of existence.  This is a little puzzling, I suppose.  The other characters have the weirdest reactions to this.  I would expect the experience to just be creepy to them, but in this movie, half the time, characters start screaming in reaction to it.  Why?
    Mena Suvari got top billing.  She’s got a minimal part.  She’s the first person to disappear, and her disappearance happens off-camera.  It’s almost like her character was written out unexpectedly.
    Pretty early on, I noticed that there were references to the characters being in college.  One of them is specifically supposed to be 23.  (Maybe 22?  I’m not positive now)  I realized that they all looked a bit old to be playing college-age kids.  I looked it up on IMDB… and most of them are in their late 30s, some of them in their early to mid 40s.  I should also clarify; this isn’t the kind of thing that I normally complain about.  I don’t notice it in most movies.  In this, it seemed weird.
    The rest of the story doesn’t have much of any development.  It’s characters overreacting, people occasionally disappearing.  There doesn’t seem to me any real speculation about what is happening.  They go through a phase of that early on, but they never offer any ideas that seem worthwhile.
    Then, we reach an ending that doesn’t explain anything at all.  I feel ridiculous for complaining about this, since sometimes the absence of an explanation can be very effective.  In this case, the whole movie was built up around getting the audience to wonder what was happening.  When we end without any explanation or clues, it’s only natural that the audience will feel cheated.  No characters developed.  No mysteries were uncovered.  No deeper meaning was explored.


    Now that I’ve addressed the bad qualities, maybe I should talk about some of the good things.
    The movie is shot reasonably well.  There are a few notable sequences, including a fairly long scene of talking and argument, as the camera runs around in a circle.  Some of the decoration is effective and clever.
    There are occasionally a few nice moments in the script.  There’s an exchange where a guy says that he was concerned that a girl had melted.  This felt genuine, and probably one of the nicest bits in the story.

    I hate saying that it’s a bad movie, but it’s a pretty poor script.

192 - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

    Four mutated turtles and their mutated rat master fight a crime wave run by the mysterious Foot organization.
    I would have been nine years old when this came out, but I never cared that much about the turtles.  I was aware that the movies came out, but they weren’t even ones that I wanted to see, unlike Masters of the Universe.  That’s a long way of saying that this is the first time I’ve watched this movie.
    This movie is firmly aimed at kids.  There are very few lines that might appeal to adults, and the story seems focused on delivering what kids want to see - the turtles goofing off, and the turtles fighting.  For what it is, it’s fairly successful.  It moves along, it delivers enough laughs.  They don’t skimp on the action.
    That’s the most remarkable thing about the movie.  There’s action all over the place, and they aren’t shooting it poorly.  Most of the sequences are built from modest-length shots that show a clear action.  There aren’t these tight-closeup shots of a swinging arm and weapon, or a connecting hit.  These are choreographed fight sequences.  They’re made more impressive by knowing that these are four guys in layered costumes having to jump around.
    The story is pretty weak, but it seems appropriate for the audience.  There’s just about nothing for adults, maybe one or two jokes.  But I did find the costumes interesting.  Logistically, they were a difficult thing to pull off smoothly, but they managed to do it.
    The weirdest thing is how unbalanced the characters are.  Through most of the movie, Raphael is angry for some reason.  The other turtles aren’t developed in any meaningful way.  April and Casey Jones are developed more than the other turtles.  It isn’t a terrible thing, but it’s a little puzzling.  Seeing most of the turtles pal around, they came across more like Bill & Ted than anything else.