135 - Scream 2

    Sidney, the surviving protagonist of Scream, is off at college.  The story of the murders in Scream have been released as a book, which has been adapted into a movie, which a new killer is using as a prompt to start their own spree.
    I know that I saw this - and Scream 3 - in theaters.  Beyond the opening sequence, I didn’t remember anything about it.  The only thing I remember about Scream 3 is that Heather Matarazzo is in it.
    It’s just boring.  The opening sequence is the most enjoyable thing about it, and it doesn’t feel like it has much of anything to do with the rest of the movie.  The victims seem to be randomly selected.
    I suppose I can elaborate on the quality of the opening sequence.  We get to see a rowdy theater (I’ve seen The Room and Snakes on a Plane in theaters, and neither of them were as ridiculously rowdy as this) where a hip couple argue.  The guy loves horror movies, she seems to be annoyed by them (even though she seems to get really into them).  She leaves to go to get popcorn.  After she gets it, they meet by the door, and he says he’s going to the bathroom.  In the bathroom, he’s killed by a guy in the ghost mask.  He’s stabbed in the side of the head.  The knife manages to be thrust through a bathroom stall.  Seriously.  This isn’t a great way to start the movie, especially if you want to establish that this is taking place in the real world (which is what we’re supposed to get by seeing scenes from the first movie being re-staged in the theater).
    Then we go back to the girl, who’s getting really into the movie.  A guy in a ghost mask comes and sits next to her.  She eventually realizes that it isn’t her boyfriend.  She gets stabbed.
    This sequence feels very Hitchcock.  Someone in danger while they’re in a crowd.  The audience’s misunderstanding is part of the tension.  I like this.
    Then things fall apart.  We get a bunch of scenes bringing all of the surviving characters back.  We get more tongue-in-cheek dialogue referencing other movies.  Sigh.  And it seemed kind of obvious that they were telegraphing who the killer was.
    Of course, there’s a big twist ending, which is mostly impossible to see coming.

    Okay, a pair of people are killed at a movie theater.  For some reason, the police hold a press conference on the local college campus.  Why?  So that there’s a reason to have Sidney there!
    There’s a sequence that involves Jerry O’Connell getting up on a cafeteria table and singing “I Think I Love You” to Sidney.  I’m not sure why this sequence is in the movie, except that they thought it was a funny idea.  It’s dumb, and it’s kind of annoying.  The rest of the students react to this with clapping and cheers.  I'd have an easier time believing that reaction if they were in high school.  In college, most people tend to just ignore that kind of stuff.
    I wonder what the deal is with these movies.  These should be exactly my kind of thing.  I know virtually every reference they make, but I simply can’t make myself care.  Maybe I’d rather see something a little more original than a bunch of ground-up references.

134 - The Conspiracy

    A pair of low-budget documentary makers are focusing on a conspiracy theorist.  After that theorist disappears, they follow down his rabbit hole.
    I have unusually mixed feelings about this movie, even though I should probably give it a vaguely positive “it’s alright” kind of review.
    It starts off slow.  It plays as straight documentary, and it’s kind of dull.  The setups that are put in place are clunky and obvious.  After the theorist disappears, the story shifted a little.  It was still moving kind of slowly, but I found it a bit more funny.  I think that I find the idea of the lead getting more and more absorbed in this grand conspiracy.  Then there’s a development where they meet a guy who wrote an article about a club that supposedly coordinates all of these nefarious global shaping events.
    At this point, the movie actually raises the tension a little, because we finally have a real mystery to focus on.  (Shouldn’t I have cared about the disappearance of the theorist from the beginning?  Yes, but he was a jerk.)
    So the last act adds a touch of tension.  Then there’s an ending beyond the natural ending, which serves to tie up some loose ends, and make it so the existence of the movie makes sense.  This ending is a little less satisfying.
    The creepiest part of this movie is how effectively they sell many of these conspiratorial ideas.  By phrasing things right, and avoiding anything that suggests an alternative explanation, it’s hard to disagree with these things.
    In searching for the name of the club in the movie, I found a wiki article - List of Hoaxes on Wikipedia.  They tried to build legitimacy for the idea.  It’s some effective marketing, but…
    I have a lot of reservations when it comes to conspiracies.  I’m mostly just so annoyed at how willing people are to believe nearly anything, and this movie takes itself seriously enough that it might persuade some people to believe - at least some of the lesser material used in the setup.

133 - Children of the Corn 7: Revelation

    A lady goes looking into her grandmother’s disappearance, and finds a bunch of creepy kids hanging around a nearly vacant apartment building.
    I’ve seen nearly all of the Children of the Corn movies.  At least up to this point.  I’ve now discovered that there was a remake of the original, which I’m interested in seeing.  This is, without a doubt, the worst of them.
    I can’t remember much specific about other movies in the series, aside from the first one, which I’ve seen a handful of times.  But I feel like this entry is baffling in how much it got wrong.
    The original movie was partly about fear of children, but it was also about the effect that religious fundamentalism can have.  There’s no reasoning with the members of the cult.  The people near the cult feel drawn to participate, even if they don’t actually believe.  The cult is willing to turn on members.  Part of what made this religious angle work is that even though we disagree with their beliefs, it would be un-American to tell them so.
    In this movie, it’s hard to say that there’s anything like cult behavior.  The kids have magical powers.  They look spooky, and they occasionally do spooky things.  But they don’t have the religious fervor that made the first movie work.  The supernatural elements are strange.  They involve corn stalks sprouting from the ground spontaneously.
    The effects work is cheap.  This came out in 2001, so I’m probably being a bit harsh, but nearly every single effect was noticeable and awkward.
    There’s also a strange issue with the frame rate.  Occasional shots are slowed down, and I’m not positive why.
    The limited locations are conspicuous.  Normally I don’t notice this, but the primary setting for the movie is an apartment building.  We get to see the lobby, basement, elevator, hallway, and a few rooms.  This seems weird.  Most of these movies have been built on large outdoor vistas, mostly abandoned.  This seems like a different movie’s script was adapted to become a Children of the Corn franchise flick.
    About 3/4 of the way through the movie, a cop expresses some romantic interest in the lead.  (I just realized that he’s never shown in uniform.  No budget for that?)  He asks her to dinner.  She dithers, and he agrees to show up at nine to pick her up.  This is him effectively saying “I’ll come by during the last 10 minutes to save you.”  And of course, it comes to pass.
    The last thing that really bugged me is that the movie sets up the use of a heavy gas flow from a stove.  It’s obvious that this will be used as well.  The lead uses it to blow a plume of flame from the apartment, blocking the evil children from reaching her in the hallway.  Immediately after this sequence, there’s no more flame, but the gas is still running.  Then minutes later, when the time is right, the ticking gas winds up exploding, and setting things on fire.  (Of course, terrible, terrible CGI flames.  Really weak work.)
    I’m pretty positive that this whole thing with the gas didn’t make any sense.  When the gas is initially lit, I think a bunch of stuff in the room would have ignited.  Instead, it blew a fireball, which immediately went out.  Then somehow, the gas re-ignited.

132 - Black Rock

    Three girlfriends go on a little vacation to a small island where they used to vacation as children.  They run afoul of three former soldiers, who decide to hunt them.
    Variations on The Most Dangerous Game are usually pretty fun.  A smartly written version can be tense and engaging.  In this case, it’s passable, but it’s the kind of movie that I would forget in another day or two.
    To start with, I had a really strange sense of deja vu at the beginning.  There’s a brief bit where a character claims she has cancer.  She’s joking, but something about it seemed very familiar.  I wasn’t sure if I had seen this movie before.  I wonder if I’ve seen the same kind of sequence somewhere else.  Or maybe these setup scenes are just especially predictable.
    I had noticed during the credits that the story was written by a woman.  I assumed that the script was also done by a woman, and I felt terrible for feeling like these women were kind of insulting to women everywhere.  Luckily, during the closing credits, I noticed that the screenplay was done by a man.  This can explain a lot.  The women don’t seem especially bright.  They are aware of how serious their situation is, but they still aren’t able to control how loudly they’re talking.  They’re petty in their disputes.  There’s a remarkable amount of cursing, which doesn’t bother me much, but it doesn’t ring true to my ear.
    The story unfolds exactly as you expect.  In retrospect, I suppose they did make one interesting choice.  The first girl to die off isn’t who I would expect.  But the more I think about it, it was really the only viable choice, given how the setup was done.
    The villains are… poorly defined.  They’re typical, aggressive guys, out for vengeance.  But they don’t even need that motivation.  The story would work just as well if they were just looking for some thrill killing.
    Still, well shot, the sound was fine.  It held my attention acceptably.

131 - 13 Sins

    A man in financial dire straits is selected to participate in a game, where the rewards continue increasing, but his tasks get progressively darker.
    A riff on Saw.  But this plays pretty well, at least for the first 3/4 of it.  The last bit seemed to wrap things up too neatly.
    The tasks that the hero is required to do get increasingly more interesting, and it seems more and more unlikely that he’ll get out of it.  This is really effective.  Around the fifth or sixth task - the coffee shop - I realized I was much more interested in figuring out what direction the story was going to go in.  In a weird way, it reminded me of a cheaper version of Crank.  It’s not focused on action, but it does have a plot device that keeps on ratcheting things up and placing the hero in new situations.
    I’m not happy with the ending.  I understand why they went with it, since the hero needs to save his soul to win.  I don’t buy that.  I don’t even buy the warning he gets from his father.

130 - I Am Divine

    A documentary about Divine, an actor who utilized a transvestite persona and worked with John Waters quite a bit.
    I’ve never been a big fan of Divine.  I’ve heard two of the songs she’s recorded.  I’ve seen Desperate Living, Hairspray… I like John Waters though, and I think he fills a unique niche in movies.  But this movie gave me a better appreciation for the man behind Divine, for John Waters, and for the bizarre movies they made together.
    The movies were made around 1965-1970, and they were cheap, mostly no-budget movies.  Strange stories, outlandish behavior.  But it’s easier to appreciate them when you see some of the behind-the-scenes pictures of John Waters handling what looks like a Super-8 camera, shooting guerrilla-style on the street.
    The background for Divine is fascinating, and he comes across remarkably well.  He was gay, but it’s hard to say how aware of it he was.  He discovered drag balls as a way of getting attention, and it went from there.  His interest in getting attention seems to be his motivating force, but he doesn’t seem willing to step on other people to accomplish it.  He wants to outshine his competition.

129 - We Cause Scenes: The Rise of Improv Everywhere

    A documentary about Improv Everywhere, the NY-based performance art organization.
    I like Improv Everywhere, and I’ve been following them for a long time.  While this documentary is fun, it’s a bit dry.  There isn’t that much drama to be had.  The primary weakness is a reduced amount of footage of the actual events.  I would like to see a little more of the meat behind the process.  Coming up with ideas, figuring out how to go about executing them well.  Some more introspective information would be appreciated.
    Instead, I came out of this actually having less appreciation for the way the group is run.  Charlie is not presented as being especially thoughtful about the ethical side of some of his events.  To clarify, I don’t think he is unethical.  But I think his considerations should have gotten a bigger portion of the movie.
    I don’t like his unhappiness with how his appearance on This American Life went.  I haven’t watched his appearance on the TV show in a long time, but I remember his radio appearance very well, and I felt it was incredibly balanced.  It reinforced that the reaction to the event was negative at first, but it changed over time.