89 - The Mirror

    A trio of roommates buy a haunted mirror off Ebay, hoping to win James Randi’s million dollar prize for proof of the supernatural.  Weird stuff starts happening.
    Another found-footage movie.  I was willing to stick with this one, since it was at least well-lit, and wasn’t focusing on breathing in the dark.
    It’s not really worth the time.  The mirror idea is perfectly fine.  I was pretty happy with how they handled the idea in Oculus.  But in this, the mirror seems mostly irrelevant.  For a big stretch of time, the characters seem to forget about it.  I suppose that actually makes it more believable, in a way.  I’m glad to see they didn’t immediately suspect that the mirror was responsible for the strange things happening.
    Where the movie makes the biggest mistake is in giving a lack of explanation for the mirror, or for what’s happening to the characters.  Once the horror starts (the last 20 minutes or so) it doesn’t seem to matter much.  Their actions seem kind of randomly chosen.  “Here’s something horrible that someone could do to themselves.”  Is it in service of the mirror?  Does it matter?
    None of the characters are likable.  The tiny cast (three people, plus one or two extras) becomes very obvious once there are injuries.  Even after sustaining some pretty serious cuts, they just patch it up at home and try to forget it.  No visit to a doctor.  We don’t hear any of their neighbors, even though they’re living in an apartment.
    While the movie is competently made, which is an achievement for a low-budget found-footage story, that’s really all it has going for it.

88 - Love Sick Love

    A businessman goes away for a weekend with a girl who turns out to be crazy.  He’s held captive by her as part of her search for an ideal man.
    I was pretty well entertained by this.  I watched it in one sitting, and it kept me wondering what was going to happen next.  In spite of this, there are plenty of problems with this movie, mostly from a script standpoint.
    Both the protagonist and antagonist are entirely unlikable.  The one person who seems slightly moral is an idiot.  Normally this isn’t a problem for me, especially if the story is strong.  But there’s a lot of space in this story to stretch things, to make every perspective reasonable and easy to empathize with.  It also creates a problem because the protagonist is in danger, and we know that there are two ways the story can end.  He’ll either win or lose - live or die.  There’s no chance they’ll go for an ending where the two of them manage to work things out and fall in love.  Even if they did, that might make it more of a disturbing movie.
    The thing that seems off to me is the rest of the family being in on this method of finding a husband.  Everyone plays being disturbed pretty well, but it isn’t the same as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where the whole family has a benefit that comes from their craziness.  Here, the craziness is centralized on benefiting one person.  This doesn’t ring true.
    The script does do a nice job in one scene in particular.  The protagonist has an opportunity to escape, and his reason for sabotaging himself makes perfect sense.  Of course, this is in contrast to the ending, where he chooses to make a ridiculous mistake.

87 - Dawn of the Dead

    After a zombie epidemic sweeps the country, a group of survivors hole up in a mall.
    I’ve enjoyed the Dawn of the Dead remake since I saw it in theaters.  It’s got a punchier sense of excitement to it that the original doesn’t have.  The fast-moving dead suggest a more insurmountable threat, something much more urgently deadly than the slow burn of the slow-moving dead.  The situation isn’t just bleak - it’s hopeless.
    I noticed a few other things this time through.  First, the direction was a bit worse than I remember.  There are a few memorable shots mixed into the movie, but I realized that Snyder pads out the running time with a lot of slow-motion shots.  He likes inserting shots of bullet casings falling to the floor at the feet of the shooter.  In the past, these shots were exactly the kind of filler that they are, and I didn’t pay much attention to them.  Now that I’ve noticed them, I probably won’t be able to stop noticing it.
    The other thing is that the original played on a sense of isolation.  The larger cast in this one stops that from being an issue.  But there’s a tighter pacing to this one, and that changes the sense of the passage of time.  Sometimes I was convinced it was taking place over the space of a week or two.  There’s only a brief sequence of boredom, and even that is played pretty tightly.

86 - Thor: The Dark World

    Jane Foster is infected with the Aether, a substance that an evil villain wants to reclaim in order to take over Asgard.  Thor devises a plan to save Jane and defeat the villain.
    I have this weird affinity for the lesser movies in a series.  One of the reasons I like Iron Man 2 is that I forget sequences in it, and that makes them more effective when I see it again.  I’ve never felt like watching the first Thor a second time, mostly because I remember it being kind of boring.  But this one has a strong ending battle, some really clever plotting between Thor and Loki, and it feels like the plot seems to bring Asgard and Earth closer together.  By making the worlds co-exist more cleanly, that helps things feel reasonable.  I remember when I saw Thor, I felt like the grounding of the stuff happening on Earth was too stark a contrast to the Asgardian stuff.
    I still really like the opening battle sequence.  It’s nice to see Thor doing work around Asgard.
    The one thing I really don’t like is the way that the funeral scene starts.  The overhead shot is way to close to the shot of Padme’s funeral in Episode 3.

85 - Soapdish

    The cast of a soap opera is thrown into a soap opera of their own as an effort is underway to eliminate a main character.
    I used to see the box for this at the video store, and it never called to me.  But it seemed so ridiculous looking that I’ve always had this mild curiosity about it.  It has a terrible title.  I don’t know what a better title would be, but this seems like one of the least interesting choices.
    This is… a work of genius.  But it is seriously flawed.  It’s a fantastic idea.  The story comes together really well.  The cast is exceptional.  But there’s something wrong.  I can’t tell what it is.  It’s almost like the direction was aiming to straddle a line between straight drama and straight comedy.  I can’t point to anything specific.
    What’s remarkable about this story is how gradually it weaves everything together.  You don’t see the big twist coming until it lands, and then you realize that the players are living in their own unintentional soap opera.
    It’s a hard movie to recommend, because it requires a particular sense of humor.  A lot of the jokes are just going to slip past most viewers.  But once you get it, there’s a very classic-comedy feeling it creates.

84 - Regarding Henry

    A hard-nosed lawyer suffers a brain injury, and has to re-learn to function.  He develops into a very different person.
    The premise of this story has been appropriated a few times.  It’s a pretty simple idea, and the variety of ways that it has been handled has tainted my perception of what this story should be like.  I expected something more manipulative.  Something that really pulled at the heartstrings and made it entirely clear that he is now a better man.  While there are touching moments, the direction and the acting is handled with class, and it doesn’t feel like the audience is being shepherded into a tearjerker of a movie.
    Harrison Ford does a very good job of handling a variety of mannerisms.  He stutters slightly.  He looks uncomfortable and vaguely confused.  But he doesn’t look like someone who is desperately trying to communicate those ideas.  He handles these situations realistically.  He can pick up that he’s supposed to know someone, and he knows he’s able to play along, just not very well.
    His relationships with his wife and daughter are at the core of the story.  In particular, his daughter winds up teaching him a variety of skills that he forgot.  His wife…
    His wife is the weak link in the movie.  She’s played perfectly fine, but it’s difficult to like her.  She lies to herself and to others, and she seems more concerned with keeping up appearances than a good person would.
    I have a hard time buying the idea that the firm would be willing to keep him even after he’s lost all of his legal knowledge.  I have no idea what he’s doing there, and I can’t imagine that goodwill would keep him there for very long.
    There’s a message to be understood from this movie… about the nature of identity, possibly how we can be shaped by events far in our past.  But that’s only hinted at after thinking for a long time.  As interesting as this movie is, I left it feeling like it had nothing to say.

83 - Kingsman: The Secret Service

    A clandestine British spy organization recruits the son of a deceased agent.  The agency deals with a villain intent on destroying mankind.
    I had heard some conflicted thoughts about this, but it sounded like it was fun.  The trailer was a little hit-and-miss.  I’m glad that I watched it though.  This is some really serious fun.
    First, the story simultaneously embraces and avoids cliche story beats.  We know that the main character is going to get into the service.  But it doesn’t come together the way you expect it to, and the movie does a great job of adjusting expectations as things develop.
    Second, there’s a very tricky thing to explain about the balance that the movie has.  It has a campy, almost Spy Kids-like atmosphere to things, which is occasionally obliterated by some very extreme violence.  That violence treads a line between laughable and shocking.  And it switches back and forth.  This can be confusing to some people, making people feel uncomfortable about how the movie makes them feel.  This is a signature of Mark Millar’s work.  Some people love it, some people hate it.  Personally, I lean toward liking it, but I always feel like Millar tends to shy away from making  concrete decisions about morality or messages.
    About halfway through the movie, I was sold on it.  I’m adding it to my wish list.  I looked up to see if a sequel is being made.
    The one choice that I didn’t care for was the lisp that Samuel L. Jackson used.  I understand why it was used, but somehow it just didn’t work for me.