162 - Edge of Tomorrow

    An inept officer is swept into participating in a ground offensive against an invading alien force.  Through odd chance, he winds up in a situation where he repeats the battle over and over.
    I didn’t have high hopes for this.  I don’t think much of Tom Cruise.  Leading men rarely turn in the great performances that character actors do, and his style of action doesn’t appeal to me.  Still, this movie has an 8.1 on IMDB.  So… I finally watched it.
    It’s a really messy movie.  It takes a long time to get going.  His first death doesn’t happen until about 25 minutes into the movie.  Once he starts re-living the same day, it gets a bit more fun.  There’s some levity, and some of the deaths that happen are actually very pleasing, in a philosophical way.  There are enough deaths that seem completely avoidable, and it’s nice to see that not everything is an action sequence.
    Then, there’s a scene, about 45 minutes in, that just turned the whole thing into one long groan.  The movie attempts to give an explanation for the time rewind.  Not just that, but it attempts to turn it into a major plot device.  This shift is terrible.  I have a hard time articulating it, especially without giving huge spoilers, but effectively… the aliens have the ability to control time.  Or at least one variation of the aliens does.  The alien rewinds time in order to conquer planets (I think).  What triggers the alien rewinding time is when another variation of alien is killed.  Somehow, by being doused with the blood of one of those aliens when he’s first killed, our hero automatically rewinds time every time he dies.  He retains his knowledge and skills, but no one else does.
    I was talking with Cathy about this.  Part of what made Groundhog Day work was that the movie feels less like it takes place in the real world.  You aren’t certain if the protagonist is just living through a simulacrum of the real world - more of a religious experience.  In this movie, the protagonist has someone else to guide him through the experience.  This sets it in the real world.
    One of the rules I’ve read about screenwriting is about the limits on how many magical elements you can have in a movie.  You want to have a movie with vampires?  That’s fine.  If you introduce aliens in that vampire movie… you’re out of luck.  It gets too ridiculous too quickly.  That’s what I felt like this movie did.  It established aliens and some kind of time rewind.  Then it joined them together in a way that felt like a new piece of magic.
    The ending feels wrong.  Even if you buy into the rules that the movie lays out at the midpoint, it just doesn’t make sense to me.  The enemy brain is destroyed, and somehow, time resets, and the brain is no more?  Who triggered the time reset?  The protagonist, or the brain?  I lean toward the brain, since then it would carry the bombs back into the past (wait, even that doesn’t make sense).  Let me map this out.
Choice 1
    The brain triggers the time reset.
        This means that it carries the bombs back in time with itself, then explodes.  This doesn’t work.
        This would also mean that protagonist doesn’t get coated in blood, which means that he would         die permanently.
Choice 2
    Protagonist triggers the time reset
        This doesn’t make sense, since he would have died in the explosion caused by the bomb well         before he would get coated in blood.
Choice 3
    Protagonist never lost his ability to reset time
        This would work.  Except… there’s the line about how there was this surge of energy from the death of the enemy brain, which happens well in the past.  This simply doesn’t make sense.

    Most of these things would never bother me, except that the movie takes itself too seriously.
    The main character has a trivial arc.  It’s not something that he chooses, either.  He should have an arc where he chooses to be a hero, where he decides to be something greater than he was.  Instead, this comes across as a selfish journey, where he only decides to be heroic because it might get him out of this situation.
    I’m clearly in the minority on this movie.  I looked through pages of IMDB comments, and the lowest rating I found was a 7/10.

     To make this movie a little more messy... the title is terrible.  Edge of Tomorrow doesn't tell me anything about what I'm going to be watching.  So they've tried to change the title to the tagline - Live. Die. Repeat. I don't think much of that title either.  The manga it's based on is titled All You Need is Kill.  That's not a great title, but at least it's memorable.

161 - Parker

    After a heist falls apart, Parker is left for dead.  He returns to exact his revenge on those who crossed him.
    Another Jason Statham thriller.  I didn’t really know what to expect.  It’s an odd movie, since it starts off very well, but as it moves into the core of the plot, it becomes more clear that the meat of the story just isn’t as interesting.
    Jennifer Lopez plays a down-on-her-luck real estate agent.  The amount of focus she gets feels especially strange, since she feels like an ornament on the primary plot.
    The best part of this movie is the save-the-cat moment.  Usually these moments make me cringe, even as I understand the necessity of them.  In this one, Statham is disguised as a priest at a state fair.  A little girl is sad because she isn’t able to win at a carnival game.  The barker tries to rope Statham into the game.  He reluctantly agrees.  He throws darts at balloons, doing three perfect hits.  He wins the stuffed animal for the girl, and got to demonstrate his skill.  A very well-done bit.
    I know it sounds like faint praise to focus on so trivial a moment, but was effective, it was short, and it accomplished two things for the price of one very short sequence.  I like this kind of efficiency.
    I can’t point to much that made this movie bad.  It wasn’t bad.  It was entirely competent.  I guess it just wasn’t as awesome as I had hoped.  The opening was very promising.
    I realized that I haven’t had much exposure to Jennifer Lopez.  She seemed… okay.  There was an awkward scene where she’s forced to strip down to prove she isn’t wearing a wire.  That seemed a little forced.

160 - I Survived B.T.K.

    A documentary following Charlie Otero, whose family was mostly slaughtered by Dennis Rader, the serial killer.
    I watched The Hunt for the BTK Killer earlier this year, and I remember being impressed by the performance of the lead.  Since this was a documentary, I expected it to actually be a little more tame than the fictionalized account.  Instead, it’s actually got some much darker material in it.  And despite dipping further into darkness, it’s mostly about a strong sense of positivity in the face of hard times.
    The subject, Charlie, seems like an interesting guy, but the documentary focuses so tightly on his feelings about the murders, and his efforts to stay in control of his life that the movie never feels like it gets all that intimate with the subject.
    Where the movie really shines in in the courtroom footage of Dennis Rader.  It turns out that the fictionalized account of the story was actually sanitized quite a bit.  Seeing the courtroom footage actually details more of how these murders happened.  In particular, the hanging death of the girl was glossed over.  This information makes some of the other little details of Rader’s acts and artwork make sense.
    So, as it is, this was better than I expected.  I thought it would be a straight retread of the same material, but this was much more informative.

    Oddly, this is also released under a few other titles, including a strange title card at the end - Feast of the Assumption. 

159 - Lizzie Borden Took An Axe

    A retelling of the Lizzie Borden murders, trial, and aftermath.
    A made-for-TV movie.  At least it stars Christina Ricci, although I don’t think she’s as cute as she used to be.
    My expectations for this kind of production are low.  Poor effects are excusable, weaknesses in the script are usually acceptable.
    But this movie has some unusual problems.
    First, it’s very clearly intended to be a true account of the crimes.  This is derailed at the end, when Lizzie tells her sister how she killed their parents.  There are a number of elements that don’t feel right… facts that just aren’t in the original case, information that was left out.
    The second problem is the really weird one.  The music.  There’s this hilarious generic rock music used as cues throughout the movie.  The music itself wasn’t objectionable, but it takes the viewer out of the time period.  Maybe there should be some rules for using modern rock as a soundtrack.  It’s okay to use it in a period movie, when there’s supposed to be a modern edge to it.  This is possible in things like… Wild Wild West.  In this movie, it feels really weird.
    Otherwise… there are some good gore effects, even though they aren’t complicated.  It’s a forgettable version of the story.

158 - The Birdcage

    The son of a gay couple has his fiancée and her family over to meet his family.  The fiancée’s family is centered around a conservative senator.
    I know this movie has gotten a good reception, and I know I saw it when I was in high school.  I remember enjoying it, but not too enthusiastically.  This time, I like it, but I have a lot more reservations than I expected.
    My complaints boil down to two core issues.  First, the movie relies on extreme stereotypes.  In some cases, a caricature of types is appropriate.  The problem is that nearly everyone fits this bill.  The second issue is that there’s no lesson learned.  The entire movie feels like the setup to a punchline, which is the last scene.  The senator - who should obviously have a lesson learned - doesn’t seem to learn anything.  He has plenty of opportunity for improvement, but he never takes it.  Even Nathan Lane’s character seems like he should have learned something, but he mostly just stops being whiny for a little while.
    Normally, these problems would be a death knell for a movie.  But this is a special case.  What this has going for it is… the cast.  Everyone is hamming it up, everyone is putting the most outrageous spin on everything.  It’s remarkable, it’s engrossing, it’s funny.  Even Robin Williams, who would normally push the part in a direction that I would find distasteful, plays his part a little restrained, and this gives a bit of an emotional core to the movie.  Not a big one, but it’s there, and it helps the movie work.
    The more I think about this, I kind of like that there’s no lesson learned.  People stay the same.  Political philosophies are not easily challenged.

157 - Sky High

    The son of a pair of superheroes starts at a high school intended for super-powered people who want to be heroes.
    I had an idea for a movie, which is vaguely similar, but not quite the same as this.  In my research to find if there was anything similar, I found that this movie existed.  I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see it, or if I should avoid it.
    It’s actually pretty good.  It’s aimed at kids, and that hurts it a little.  But there’s a thick layer of comic sensibility coating the whole thing, which helps.  When a movie doesn’t take itself too seriously, that goes a long way to making it easier to accept weaknesses.
    The plot is largely forgettable.  It’s usual high-school drama fare.  There’s just a swirl of superpower set pieces mixed in.  Most of these are small things, which make for nice gags.  Now that I’ve finished the movie, I realized that I felt like the powers were actually irrelevant to the story.
    One of the little things that made Heavyweights work pretty well was that the central villain of it was focused on fat-shaming the kids.  The exploration of the issues that go along with weight lend a little depth to that story.  In this, there’s no real exploration of the importance of using powers responsibly.  When a character throws fireballs around, it’s kind of terrible that the danger of that isn’t explored.
    I’m also disappointed to see so few clever powers.  I know it’s really difficult to come up with powers, but it’s really disappointing to see them copying Multiple Man’s powers.

156 - The Tortured

    A couple decide to kidnap and torture a man who was convicted of kidnapping, torturing, and murdering their 6-year-old son.
    This movie moves from unintentionally hilarious, to boring, to kind of bad.
    I wasn’t expecting much.  It didn’t sound very good, but it sounded like they might be able to do some interesting stuff with the premise.  The movie kicks off immediately after the kid is kidnapped.  That’s okay.  Then we get a brief scene of the mother flipping out after she comes home and finds out that the police are looking into the kidnapping.  Her reaction is ridiculous.  It’s overly dramatic, and she doesn’t listen to the police.  Then we get the police finding the house, finding the kid, the parents going to the morgue to identify the body.  Then the movie goes back, and walks through the scene where the kid is kidnapped?  This is the weirdest step I’ve seen.  We didn’t learn anything new from the flashback.  The movie established that we shouldn’t be interested in that part of the story.  So this exists to fill time.
    Throughout the first act, the parents are hilarious.  They overact in response to everything.  There’s even a scene where they yell at their lawyer when the lawyer explains the sentencing available for the crimes.
    Which brings further, massive plot problems.  Not ones that I felt were reasonable, just things that reflected a lack of research.
    So, the villain is on trial.  We hear that there are two counts of most of the crimes… but the trial only focuses on his kidnapping, torture, and murder of this single child.  We get police testimony that there’s a mass grave.  Wouldn’t the police actually look into this?  If the state is bringing charges against this guy for murders, you don’t prosecute each one separately.  Then he gets a weaker sentence so that they can learn more about the remains?  They specifically say that their goal is to find where the other bodies are.  So either there’s more than one mass grave… or these are incompetent cops.
    There’s a jury in this case.  And somehow, the efforts at cooperation in exchange for lighter sentencing still applies?  Typically, that kind of trade-off happens when the state decides which charges will be brought against the defendant.
    The most interesting portion of the movie is the mid-section, and it’s because the parents decide to kidnap the killer.  The logistics of this operation are much more interesting than anything else the movie has to offer.
    Then we move into the torture stuff.  The characters change up.  They are conflicted about what they’re doing, and so forth.
    There’s a bit of twist ending, but it seems much more forced.  Who cares?

    The most interesting thing about this is how much it made me appreciate an episode of Masters of Horror - Family.  A vaguely similar story, but told in a far more interesting way, with much more comprehensive development.
    Maybe the shortest way to describe the problem with the movie is that the main characters never have a chance to be reasonable or clever.  They argue with everyone and each other, and never get a chance to improve.
    And the non-linear editing is like a kid with a new toy.