135 - Face/Off

    An FBI agent captures his terrorist nemesis, and finds that he has to impersonate him in order to get information about a bomb.  Once Castor Troy comes to, he no longer has his face, and he takes the agent's face, and impersonates him.
    I'm counting this as a first viewing, because I think I may have seen part of it on a bus trip during high school.  I only remembered the premise, but nothing else.  Didn't remember the bomb, or any of the set pieces.
    This is directed by John Woo, and it's got all his staples.  Unfortunately, most of these characteristics are only novel the first time you see them.  With a modern eye, these tricks are kind of silly.  Slow-motion gun fights, jumping around with explosions, and lots of birds.  At least Woo restrained the usage of birds to the last big sequence.  The slow-motion stuff got incredibly annoying.  A well-shot sequence doesn't need slow-motion to get the beauty of a composition.
    The story is pretty high-concept stuff.  It's a great story, and Travolta and Cage are an excellent pairing.  They both get to flex some acting muscles, and even the sequence of the story is pleasing.  But the direction just stands in the way of what could have been an action classic, turning it into a mildly annoying failure.
    Woo also really likes to drench music over some of these action sequences.  I don't think I mind that, but somehow, the volume on it was much higher than it should be.
    I might return to this again, but I don't think it will be any time soon.

134 - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

    Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a small band from Heartland, USA, which is recruited by a large record label.  Greed gets involved, and there's a villain, Mr. Mustard, and robots…
    One of those movies that usually is cited as being incredibly terrible.  It's easy to understand why.  It's campy, it's silly, the plot is not engaging, it uses Beatles music in a way that doesn't seem entirely respectful…
    Yes, even though this has nearly everything wrong with it, I somehow found it modestly enjoyable.  It's way too long, at about 2 hours, but it's pretty engaging, at least for the first half of it or so.
    The music is mostly pretty faithful to the original arrangements, but sometimes the songs get extended to work better with the film, and some of the songs gravitate toward a disco-like arrangement.
    The strange silliness in force is really puzzling.  For some reason, some of the songs are sung by robots, or at least partially by robots.  She's Leaving Home is a strange choice to do that with.
    As the movie wore on, I kept thinking of Across the Universe.  Some people seriously hate that movie, but I think that one is far less offensive than this weirdly sanitized, bizarre version of a Beatles universe.  If anything, this movie seemed more like a cross between Across the Universe mixed with the Star Wars Holiday Special.

133 - Saturday Night Fever

    A 19-year-old spends his days working at a hardware store, and his nights running with his friends, and occasionally going out to a disco.  He decides to participate in a dance competition.
    It's hard to say that there's much plot to this movie, since it's more like a character study of these young people, and a certain sense of inevitability they feel.  It's a very bleak movie.
    The role that disco plays in the story is a strange message that somehow, being a good dancer is enough to give a sense of hope.  What makes that message strange is how the disco itself comes off.  Like most things in the movie, it's shot realistically, even though they let some of backing lights bleed, in an effort to look a bit more glamorous.  As I saw these shots of the disco, it looked kind of scummy.  Not especially clean, a little gaudy.  And these are supposed to be the sequences that give us a sense of the hope that Travolta feels.
    Hope is really hard to hold out.  No one in this movie acts reasonably.  In fact, the only person I can think of that behaves well is probably the owner of the hardware store.  Travolta's character is brash, aggressive, mean, violent, kind of abusive.
    The hopelessness that permeates the movie is palpable.  Travolta has a sense of doom that he will be working at the hardware store for his life.  He knows that he hasn't made his parents happy, since he isn't as successful as his priest brother.  A friend of his has gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and she is very religious, so he can't persuade her to have an abortion.  (Spoiler) He chooses suicide rather than deal with the situation.  Girls seem to base their self-worth on how much attention guys will pay to them.
    While this was more interesting than I expected, it's hard to picture this movie being a hit.  In fact, I could see the same subject matter being treated as a documentary much more compelling.
    One thing that really came out was the use of Stayin' Alive.  It's written to the film, and part of it describes Travolta's popularity while dancing, but the song ends with repeating "Life goin' nowhere/Somebody help me."

    Also, the wiki article is interesting.  There's a PG, and a PG-13 version of this movie.  The original was R.  There's a massive amount of cursing, plus a bit of nudity, a gang rape, some assorted other sex, some gang violence…. I can't imagine what kind of movie would result when that material is taken out.

132 - From Within

    In a small, religious town, an epidemic of suicides starts.  Some people believe that they are caused by an outcast family that does not believe.  A girl investigates.
    I was looking for a fun, dark horror movie.  I've been a little disappointed with how slow most of them tend to be, and I wanted something lively.  I've actually been thinking about re-watching Dawn of the Dead, but I've resisted, in favor of watching something new.
    So, this still disappoints in the sense that it doesn't move along as fast as I wanted.  But it's still reasonably paced.  The lighting is a bit subdued.  Otherwise, there's a very Twilight Zone feel to a lot of the movie.  The strangeness of how much religion runs the town is interesting.  It's not over-the-top, like a Children of the Corn scenario.  It's not as overdone as the lady in The Mist.  There's a casual community acceptance of over religious behavior, as well as a community acceptance of using religion as a blunt instrument.
    Things remain fairly slow as the pieces come together.  While much of the middle of the movie is spent setting things up, it still ends pretty well.  And the ending actually does have a Twilight Zone-like angle to it.  Very pleasing.
    There's one element that actually makes this movie stand out, and it's montage that we see over the credits.  We get a bleak ending, and it doesn't just leave us with the knowledge that things are going to get worse.  We get to see things get worse.  It's very satisfying.

    What's odd is that, even with all these religious messages, it doesn't come across as a movie with a particular agenda.  Maybe the message is that any belief system can be dangerous if it's misused.  Not too bad.

131 - The Conversation

    A surveillance expert records a conversation between two people.  Since he still feels guilty about a prior job where someone killed his targets, he feels increasingly nervous about the results of this job.
    Another Coppola movie - that makes three so far this year.  I had never heard of this, but it seemed to be worth it.  A notable cast, including Harrison Ford, Gene Hackman, Teri Garr… it's an impressive lineup.
    It's not as ambitious in scale as Coppola's other movies.  There are some big shots and sequences, but much of the movie is taken up with smaller locations, smaller sets, and more intimate shots of his subjects.
    Despite this description, I think I prefer this to The Godfather or Apocalypse Now.  There's a nice development of character, and despite Harry Caul's oddities, it's easy for the audience to start identifying with him as his story moves along.  In fact, it would be easy to play the story with a stronger horror angle, but the direction doesn't feel manipulative.  It keeps things very firmly ambiguous, and we're left with an uneasy feeling, which is what I think we're supposed to get.
    This movie throws the viewer into a world of surveillance, which doesn't come across the way it does nowadays.  I've been pretty confident since 9/11 that effectively all computer, phone, and banking activities have been monitored.  I've found it a little puzzling that there's been surprise at the scope of these programs.  The difference is that most of us offer little that would be of interest to the government, local authorities, or anyone outside of our immediate circles.  And that's where this movie targets.  We don't know what the relationship is between the client and the targets, only that they have some kind of relationship.  The idea that a direct conversation, in a crowded place, with lots of ambient noise, could be recorded and cleaned up so effectively is a little chilling.  The world of these experts is strange, but it's mostly because there's no particular moral code among them.  It's all just a job.  There's an obvious parallel drawn here, between doing this work, and prostitution, which seems a little heavy-handed.  Regardless, it's an effective idea.
    I like it.  I don't know how likely it is that I'll revisit it, but it's one of these movies that will probably stick with me.

130 - Sleepover

    A group of less-popular 8th-grade graduates have a sleepover, during which they are challenged to a scavenger hunt by a more popular group of 8th graders.  The stakes are the prime location to eat lunch once they reach high school.
    I don't know why I put this on my Netflix queue.  I think I wanted a teen comedy, and I tend to have a soft spot for coming-of-age stories.  As I started watching this, I was much more aware of how terrible it was.
    And yet, I found myself feeling better about the movie as it went on.  I felt more forgiving of all of the corny jokes aimed at the younger crowd, and somehow, a sense of nostalgia set in.
    It made me think of the Mighty Ducks movies.

    When I was young, and there wasn't much to do during the summer, I would watch whatever movies we had around late at night.  This included the first two Mighty Ducks movies.  These movies worked for me.  The sense of humor, the camaraderie, and the implied romantic elements.  If I were a young girl, probably around 6th-7th grade, I would love this movie.  I would think it was hilarious, and I would think that it encapsulated what I wanted my relationships to be like.
    As an adult, it's not especially funny, and it seems like it tries a little too hard to be wacky.  There are still some overly sappy moments that feel too nakedly manipulative, but after being exposed to a bunch of them in a short time, it becomes easier to forgive it.
    I want to point out that they have a decent cast for this, including Steve Carell.  And I think that the lead, Alexa Vega (who is best known for playing Carmen in the Spy Kids movies) is cute.  But I think she looks far better with dark hair than she does with what seems to be her natural blonde.

129 - Kill List

    An unemployed ex-soldier does some work as a hit man with a friend of his.  Things get a little strange.
    This showed up on a few lists as one of the highlights of the horror movies available on Netflix.  It is an interesting find, and for a fairly unknown movie, it's pretty good.
    The pacing is fairly slow, but it's timed very well.  Odd little developments happen at just the right rate to keep you interested.  The strange elements ramp up gradually, until some really strange stuff happens about 3/4 of the way through the picture.
    And that's where things really shift.  The first half of the movie is solidly a personal exploration of this man's marriage and his relationship to his kid, and to his friend.  At a certain point, it moves into a cult-based sense of horror, a la The Wicker Man.
    What's unusual about this, and a bit frustrating, is how little we learn about what's going on.  We have to piece together what we can, but it doesn't seem to be quite enough.  There are no clear explanations.  Regardless, it still works pretty well because of the strange, compelling characterizations from earlier in the movie.
    Around halfway through, I realized that this reminded me of The Ninth Gate.  Things were a little more explicit in that, and the ending seemed very well managed as it came about, but there's a similar theme in this one, of a fairly normal, moderately evil man being seduced into being a more supremely evil person.