186 - The Trouble With Angels

    A troublemaker and her accomplice run through their share of shenanigans while attending St. Francis, a school for girls.
    I'm very familiar with Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows, which is sort-of the sequel to this.  I had it backwards, thinking that this was the sequel.  This is nowhere near as much fun, mostly because it's so much more realistic.
    Hayley Mills plays the poorly-behaving student, who tends to lead her friend into trouble with her pranks.  The problem that the movie runs into is that these pranks aren't especially special.  Most of the trouble she gets in is for run-of-the-mill bad behavior.  Smoking in the bathroom, smoking in a cellar, leading to the fire department being called.  The wackier things that they do are a little off.  One of them involves putting bubble soap into the tea of the nuns, which somehow leads to a whole bunch of bubbles floating around the room.  No mention that drinking that stuff would be kind of sickening.  There's a prank that involves trying to make a cast of another girl's face, then being unable to remove the cast.  But since we never learn what her plan was, it seems like a distraction.
    All of this makes it hard to sympathize with the lead.  It's also difficult to sympathize with the Mother Superior, since she tries to alternate between being mysterious and being angry.  If anything, from a modern perspective, the nuns are trying to be strict, but they remain ignorant of how to actually shape the student behavior, other than just repeating what they want.
    It doesn't sound like it, but I actually did like this movie.  I didn't love it, but it was still pretty good.
    The biggest weakness is that there isn't much of an overarching plot.  I think the friendship between the two girls, as well as their relationship to the Mother Superior, is supposed to be the focus, but it doesn't have much material to go on.
    Plus, it doesn't have an awesome song like Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows.

185 - The Creature From the Black Lagoon

    Investigating an odd fossil, a team of researchers look to the bottom of the Black Lagoon, where they encounter an unusual fish-man creature.
    The last of the core Universal monster movies, I had a feeling that I would like this one more than the others.  I've always liked the design of the Creature more than the other characters, even if the Creature was never very well defined.  What does it do?  It mostly just exists.  I suppose it's unusually strong.  But it's also pretty slow, and not especially invulnerable.
    The monster isn't especially frightening.  They try to ramp things up a little, but the Creature just seems to be a bit shy.  This is a strange problem that the movie has.  The Creature is both shy, then he's unusually violent.  On the boat, the two male leads have opposing views about how to deal with the Creature.  One wants to kill it, the other is only interesting in getting proof, but isn't interested in killing the Creature if they can avoid it.  You would think that the peaceable approach would be the winning one, but it isn't.
    What makes the movie is all of the underwater photography.  For the most part, it looks great.  It's a little vague, since it's in black and white, and it isn't as clear as the above-ground photography.  The sequences shot around the Creature are remarkable.  The logistics that went into the suit, the person in the suit, planning out each shot, and the limitation set by breathing requirements.  They did a fantastic job.  However, by modern standards, the Creature doesn't really make much sense.  I would think he would be well-adapted to living in water, but he doesn't seem to swim very well.  Not much speed, no real agility.  I'd like to see how these shots would be handled in a modern studio.  I wouldn't expect a modern approach to have good taste, but it would still be interesting.
    In the end, it's an interesting piece of film history, and it's a nice feature, but it's not a remarkable movie.

184 - Angel

    Fifteen-year-old Molly goes to school during the day, and keeps her life as a prostitute Angel a secret.  The problem is that a serial killer is going around killing her prostitute friends.
    I had no idea this movie existed until I saw a picture of the poster for it.  The fantastic tagline of "High School Honor Student by Day.  Hollywood Hooker by Night."  The poster projects exactly what kind of movie this is.
    It's a bit of a disappointment, but only a little bit.  The movie runs a little slowly.  There's a lot of time spent developing the supporting cast, which is kind of nice, but it slows things down.  The villain isn't well defined.  We get so little about exactly what he does, and we don't have a sense of the ritual element to his murders.  These things would help make him seem like less of a nebulous evil force.
    Even with this kind of trashy premise, it's got some genuinely nice scenes.  When the school finds out what she does, we actually feel bad for her.  We get plenty of background to establish why she's a prostitute, which I guess was kind of needed.
    There isn't much else that can be said about this movie that the poster doesn't already communicate.  It was followed by three sequels, which seems amazing.

183 - Would You Rather

    A wealthy philanthropist brings a group of needy people to a house for a game of Would You Rather, during which contestants are pitted against each other.  The winner gets all they need to solve their problems, while everyone else is most likely dead.
    The AV Club wrote a column about this movie recently, and I hadn't heard of it.  I'm pleased, because it has fairly good production values, and the script is solid enough that I never felt bored.  As much as I love horror movies, most of them don't hold me too well.
    There's a good sense of tension once the story has been set up.  The decisions the contestants have to make are difficult, but they also seem well balanced.  The approach to the game also varies by player, which helps make things more interesting.  The situation is a no-win scenario, where even the winner gets to walk away with feeling terrible for the rest of their life.
    There's one main plot hole, and it's the question of how it is that no one has reported this 'game' to authorities.  This could easily have been addressed, with a scene of a bribe being delivered or something like that.  We get one very slight hint at it, when the son of the host tells someone who attempts to escape that no one will believe her.  Given the delivery and the situation, it's hard to take that as an explanation.
    Other than that, for one of these Saw-themed movies, it's really pretty good.  At least, it's more memorable than the other ones I've seen.

182 - Robot & Frank

    An old man in a state of deterioration receives an assistive robot helper from his son.  He finds that he can incorporate the robot into his life of crime.
    Really pretty good.  Part of it is the odd couple type of story, with Frank disliking having the Robot around.  Once he finds the limits of the Robot's ethical behavior, he starts to like it.
    I found myself liking the Robot, as I'm sure I'm supposed to.  But it wasn't just that.  I also liked Frank.  He's a criminal, but he has a sense of reasoning that is charming and persuasive.
    There's a cheapness to the production, but it fits very well.  The Robot is clearly played by a person in a costume, but it fits very nicely.  The design sells the whole thing.
    There's a reveal, late in the movie, about the librarian.  It's a wonderfully handled twist, and it brought a certain amount of depth to the story.  It also brought much more humanity to Frank.
    I know how choppy this review is reading.  A series of two-sentence paragraphs doesn't read well.  There's something beautiful about this story, and it's wonderful to see a story about our relationship with technology that is hopeful.

181 - Shake, Rattle and Rock!

    A teen girl gets sucked into the rock lifestyle, rebelling against a group of stingy mothers.
    Stars a fairly young Renee Zellweger.  Her hair is remarkably red.
    I'm a bit conflicted.  The movie isn't really much good, but there's a silly enthusiasm that runs through it, and this is a little infectious.  It's easy to find yourself smiling broadly at nothing in particular, even as the jokes aren't worthwhile, the plot is predictable, and the music is unremarkable.
    Part of the appeal might be the fifties look of things.  It isn't colored quite the same, but some of the fashions are there.
    There's one thing that really stands out.  At least two people are too old for their parts.  One of them is less obvious, and that's one of the girls in The Sirens.  On some of the closeup shots,  the lines on her face are obvious, and they betray the fact that she isn't a teenager.  The other is John Doe, playing the biker Lucky.  He was 40 when he made this movie, and it shows.
    There's one unusual step with this movie, and it's the ending.  The last act is a goofy "rock and roll on trial" sequence.  Strangely, rock winds up being defeated, which leads to the lead girl running away from home.  Strangely dark for a made-for-TV movie.

180 - Life of Pi

    A recounting of the life of a young Indian man, mostly focusing on his time lost at sea with a Bengal tiger.
    Cathy wanted to watch this.  I was pretty indifferent.  In the end, it's a nicely photographed movie, but the story didn't captivate me.
    Everything up to the point that he gets lost at sea was considerably more interesting.  Once he's on the boat, it turns into an interesting survival story, but the problem is that it's still being treated as some kind of mystical journey story.  The result is that there isn't much tension there.  This is compounded by the fact that we know that he survives. since he's narrating the story.  Perhaps if the story were more about how the tiger helped him survive, that might be more interesting.  Nevertheless, for people who enjoy the photography and effects, there's lots to see.  But watching it for the story just didn't feel complete.  This probably works better in book form.
    I did want to say one thing about the effects.  There's a very comic-book look to the movie.  This isn't a problem, except that it's supposed to take place in the real world.  The result is something that doesn't feel balanced.  Colors are vivid, the water is clear blue.  Things glow.  Lots of things glow.  The effects work with the animals is mostly good, but not great.  There are some effects that are very well done.  The zebra's breathing is great.  But then there are other shots of animal movement that don't look right at all.
    I was thinking of a number of shots early on, where the tiger comes directly at the camera.  These are intended to be startling, (I wonder if they considered releasing the movie in 3D) but the perfection of the shot takes some of the believability out of it.  If they had made those shots a little rougher, possibly a little off-center, that would have made a big difference.
    I also consider it to be a failing of the story that I don't care about which version of the story is true.  The fantasy nature of the whole thing just means that I don't buy any aspect of the story.