Category Archives: Film

Unknown (2011)

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My favorite show that you’ve never heard of[1] was called Nowhere Man. It aired on UPN in like 1996 or something? It was about a photographer who took the wrong picture, and in between entering and exiting the bathroom at a celebrity event, his entire history is erased. From the internet such as it was then, from public records, from the apparent memories of his family and friends. And the plot was pretty much him finding people who could help in one way or another, piecing together the whys and wherefores of his fate in an attempt to either undo it or at least get revenge by exposing whatever they so desperately wanted hidden. And, okay, the problem that conspiracies always have is how much easier it would be to just cap an ass, especially since it could be done at the same time as he’s being erased, right? But that doesn’t matter, because the concept is way way too cool to nitpick about.

Thusly Unknown, in which Liam Neeson has a four-day coma caused by a taxi wreck, only to discover that he has been completely replaced. Does the biotechnology conference he was scheduled to attend make this a corporate espionage story? Does the Saudi prince backing said conference make it a terrorism story? Does the seemingly airtight proof that both he and the man who has stepped into his shoes simultaneously have make it a psychological identity story? Does the fact that he’s Liam Neeson make it an explosive action story? These are questions with which I was largely uninterested, and that is because of Nowhere Man. Nobody knows who he is except him, and he has to find a way to prove it, right? Then yeah, those other questions don’t matter anymore; I’m in.

[1] There was also Profit on Fox, which aired for three(?) episodes, making it about equivalent to a full season on UPN’s first year of existence, in my estimation. But those two are definitely my favorites that fit the criteria.

I Am Number Four

MV5BMjI0NDI1MTMyM15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMDMzMTcyNA@@._V1__SX1859_SY847_Let me say off the bat, the CGI was a little bit terrible. I’m not sure how good expensive CGI can get, either because I haven’t seen it or don’t remember, but cheap CGI[1] just can’t do mammals at all. It can do reptiles okay, but fur is just a complete show-stopper. The reason for that disclaimer, as you may otherwise have been asking, is that I Am Number Four was mostly enjoyable, contrary to what expectations I had been given. And that’s always pretty cool, right?

Plus, it had what I believe is a unique premise in the annals of Hollywood history. Well, no, that’s not true at all, but I think this particular combination of two premises is unique[4]:  prince on the run from alien assassins combined with high school angst. It sounds a lot more like a TV show, right? But I think it would have been too angsty to work on TV; the forced speed of the movie format made up for a lot of what might otherwise have been annoying digressions, and it only barely gave me a chance to think about the worst, most teenaged part of the plot. And corollary to those improvements via limited screentime, I hope it doesn’t do well enough for people to pick up the pie-sized bread crumbs of sequel bait and start running with them.[5]

I won’t say much more about the plot beyond acknowledging the premise, both halves of which are visible within ten minutes of screen time anyway, but I should say a bit about the acting. Dianna Agron from Glee (who has a broader résumé than I’d have guessed) did a nice job as the outcast shutterbug love interest, and I suspect that someday soon she might be able to get herself a role that isn’t defined by another member of a cast. And Timothy Olyphant[6], easily the best of the bunch as the aforementioned prince’s guardian, manages to maintain the amusedly-detached-with-flashes-of-intensity hyper-competence I’m used to from his characters without ever giving the impression that he’s above either the cast or the angsty half of the plot, despite that he so clearly is.

Anyway, I dug it. Except for the mammalian CGI. Just saying, that was a bad idea, way worse than the angst or a sequel would be. (Probably not worse than a TV show, though.)

[1] My premise may be wrong, and all CGI has this problem? But I’m guessing not. (Or hoping not.)
[2][3] It must be a problem with all CGI, though, since obviously Michael Bay can afford the good shit.
[3] I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong. Consider it an easter egg hunt.
[4] Not the practice of mashing-up, clearly.
[5] I also hope I stop with the metaphors, because, wow. I am so, so sorry.
[6] If you are not familiar with his work in Deadwood and Justified, you’re doing it wrong.

The King’s Speech

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Days ago now, I saw The King’s Speech, a lightly fictionalized account of King George VI’s unlikely ascension to the throne of England at the dawn of World War II and the debilitating speech impediment he had to overcome due to the rise of radio broadcasting, against the thematic backdrop of unlikely cross-class friendships. And I would occasionally think to myself, “Dude. Review,” and then immediately forget again. Until now, I guess?

And the problem is, I just have nothing to say. I can review bad things, and either explain why they’re better than you think or complain about their many flaws. I can review good things and highlight the ways that they are especially powerful and unexpectedly even better, or else explain how they’re overrated lumps of crap that people need to stop talking about. (Although I’m kind of an overly positive person when it comes to movies, so that last bit doesn’t perhaps come up very often.) But in this particular case? The movie is compelling, filled with talented actors giving moving and powerful performances, and all of it just as expected. What am I supposed to do with that?

It’s really good. Go see it if you like that kind of thing, I guess?

Fertile Ground

MV5BNTM4MzM1NTg5Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMzMzNjM1NA@@._V1__SX1859_SY847_And, right, the last movie on the docket? My hopes were dashed, it was not a sex- and drug-fueled teen massacre. Still, there at least was nudity; only once out of five different films in the genre is a little hard to believe. Not as hard as zero out of five would have been, though! Fertile Ground is a good old-fashioned possession ghost story, with a bit of a pregnancy twist. It rated really well on the tension scale, and decently well on the creepiness scale, and I was actually relieved that the lead actor who looked like Nathan Fillion wasn’t actually him; he would have been entirely too frightening[1], compared to this guy who was merely competent. But it had the same problem that most haunting stories have in modernity, which is that the characters stay in the range of the haunting past the point of all reason. Even though our heroine had an excuse in this particular case, it was only enough to carry her through the first two thirds of the movie. I cannot think of anyone I know in a similar circumstance who would have stayed for that last week or so.

Still, if Accepting the Premise were really a big problem, I could not enjoy this entire genre, so, y’know, no big. Plus, it had a valuable life lesson, which is that you should not turn around a blind corner while leading with a butcher knife. I just wish the ending had been as strong as the lesson.

[1] If you think I’m wrong, it’s because you maybe didn’t see his turn in the last season of Buffy, or have forgotten just how intense Malcom Reynolds is when angry. And he’s still a good guy then!

Seconds Apart

MV5BMTYyNzUwMDg4MF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMjMzNjM1NA@@._V1__SX1859_SY847_A thing I am forced to admit I didn’t care for in The Task is that it marked the continuation of a trend that remains unbroken by my viewing of the night’s other movie, Seconds Apart. Despite being 75% teenager-centric, not one of these movies has yet been filmed in the traditional slasher vein, full of stock characters who exist only to have pre-marital sex, drink illicit alcohol and/or consume still more illicit drugs and therefore demonstrate to some killer, supernatural or otherwise, that they deserve gruesome death over the course of a single, probably stormy, night.

And I feel a little guilty about that, because most of these movies have had something pretty compelling in them, and if there’s anything I should be happy about, it’s when people are making good horror movies. For instance, in this movie, they examined a truth that I feel is usually ignored in all the annals of cinema, and also in real life for that matter: identical twins are damned creepy. Sure, they can function in society and all, and many of them are probably quite nice, but all the same: creepy! They’re, like, nature’s clones and shit, am I right? And this is just the regular ones, much less ones that seem to be able to force other people into committing suicide as part of a personal, ongoing film project.

This would have been the best film of the weekend, if not for the fact that Orlando Jones'[1] investigating police detective spent so much time on his own (uninteresting) issues and backstory, instead of just acting as a stand-in for the audience. As it is, most of the movies have been about equivalent, and at fairly high quality water mark. Which is all well and good, but I still feel like I deserve a deliciously, hilariously bad horror movie in which the budget for gore outpaces the budget paid to the actors and the scriptwriter combined. Maybe tonight?

[1] You may, and by that I mean I did, remember him from his Sprite (or Seven-Up?) commercials in the ’90s. You do not remember him from his androgynous turn in the Jackson Lord of the Rings movies; that was someone else.

The Task

MV5BNzUzMDExMDUzNV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDMzNjM1NA@@._V1__SX1859_SY893_Last night, as foretold in prophecy, I saw a couple more of the AfterDark Originals films. (Horrorfest really was a much better name.) The first of these was The Task, which documents the production of a reality show set in an abandoned, blood-soaked prison. The generally unlikeable contestants must spend a stay through the night while performing various tasks centered around their previously professed greatest fears, in exchange for valuable cash prizes. Despite this rather distasteful premise[1], it turns out to have had quite a lot going for it!

Things of which I approved, in no particular order, were 1) the right proper evil backstory of the place, complete with abusive warden and suicidal prisoners, 2) the unrelenting tension and creepiness, 3) the believability of the characters despite that I’ve complained about this elsewhere, and especially 4) the probably best moment in the movie when the show’s producers decide that the guy who unexpectedly shows up in the prison to start screwing with their contestants that looks just like that prison warden and none of them seem to remember hiring is probably just a plant by the network to create an added level of “reality show” to the proceedings, this time with themselves as the victims of the premise.

S’pretty good!

[1] I believe the main cause of my distaste is how very plausible it seems that this show could (or indeed, already has?) pop up on my television someday. Well, that and how well-drawn the contestants were. You know, on the scale of reprehensibility.

Husk

MV5BMTMwOTQ0NDgxM15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwOTQ3MjY4NA@@._V1__SX1859_SY893_Tonight’s second movie, Husk, had all the makings of an old-fashioned splatterfest: teens in a van (okay, it was a truck, but it had van-like qualities from the interior camera angles I saw) discussing how they will be finding the girls who played strip poker at last year’s lake house party as they drive past some creepy corn fields. Then, to my surprise, it immediately defied expectations by veering off into a spooky and atmospheric ghost story, one that managed to include a murderous scarecrow without being ridiculous.

So, and this clause constitutes a spoiler alert, one of the key plot elements is a Cain-and-Abel story. The reason I mention this is that there was a random crow hanging out on the porch of the creepy house (that inexplicably wasn’t the house from either incarnation of the Chainsaw series) throughout the second half of the movie. And whenever I would see him, I would try to find a way it would fit the story for him to somehow be Matthew the Raven. I never really managed it, but the fact that I was trying to see my way clear to it should indicate the relative quality of the film more easily than any more relevant positive I could toss out.

All in all, while I really had been looking for it to be a brain-numbingly horrible slasher pic punctuated throughout by gratuitousness of every flavor, you’ll never hear me complaining about a movie that is instead actually a little bit scary, and far less so about one that puts me in mind of The Sandman.

Prowl

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It’s been a long time since I made reference to the AfterDark Horrorfest; that’s because the fourth one didn’t have a theater in Dallas, so I missed it last year. And then there wasn’t ever a fifth one. Except, there kind of was after all? They renamed it, and it doesn’t have a number attached anymore, but it is nevertheless happening this weekend. Well, five of the eight movies are, anyway. In many ways, this is convenient for me, as eight would have been a lot harder to accomplish. Much less the marathon of reviewing I’d be doing. (Not that this will be nothing.)

The festival definitely started off right this year. I don’t necessarily mean because of the contents of the first entry, Prowl, so much as because of its first scene, which showed a blonde girl running in terror through a dark forest. You basically cannot describe a more iconic horror movie image than that, you know? The problems after that are hard to pin down. The premise certainly works: a girl with dreams of escape from her small town life enlists the aid of her friends on a road trip to the big city, until circumstances conspire to place them square in the middle of a horror movie. The acting was fine, although very few of the characters had a chance to do much acting.

I think I have to blame the pacing. After all the trouble the script went to to rapidly isolate lead character Amber and leave her free to live or die on her own strengths, it… just stopped doing anything interesting. There are no pivotal moments of strength, or cunning, or bravery. Okay, there’s a half-hearted swipe at revenge, but mostly there are just a lot more shots of her running through moonlit factoryscapes, and as well as that works for setting a mood, it rapidly loses its charms as a full-on plot and character element. By the time the admittedly cool third act turn occured, it didn’t seem like anyone in our theater had it in them to care anymore.

Love and Other Drugs

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The sad part of the whole story is that I really only went to see Love and Other Drugs because I’ve had a crush on Anne Hathaway since Ella Enchanted, and she was reported to be extremely hot in this film[1]. Instead of the romantic comedy I expected, I ended up watching a heartfelt, romantic struggle against the odds set against the backdrop of the late ’90s pharmaceutical boom. If it happened to be funny now and again, so is every movie and every real life situation, for that matter; this doesn’t make them comedies! Enough with the pigeonholing, Hollywood advertisers. But, anyway, where was I? Oh, right, the movie: Jake Gyllenhall plays a young rising star pharmaceutical representative, in the heady days of Prozac, Zoloft, and of course, Viagra. If you’ve ever seen one of these people out in the wild, you know they’re all sexy, driven young professionals who haves sales in their blood, and the only things that like more than money are alcohol and intercourse. So, he’s like that, and then he meets an early-onset Parkinson’s patient, Anne Hathaway, who sees right through him. They clash, and then they, um, clash, and then, you know, the romance part of the movie kicks off. And from there, all the characters worth paying attention to[2] evolve in relatable ways while telling a story that left me jealous, introspective, and a little moody, instead of riding on the high of naked Anne Hathaway. Which, seriously.

Probably, this is no more than I deserved.

[1] Well. That’s just not true. She’s extremely hot in every film, but she was reported to be naked in this one. Plus, the previews looked interesting; I mean, I have the internet if that was really my only goal.
[2] You might think I mean both of them, but I consistently enjoyed Hank Azaria and Oliver Platt, too. Good supporting cast, really!

Saw 3D

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Saw 3D is, they say, the last Saw movie. It is important to note here that lots of horror franchises have made this claim before, and it is almost never true. But I am forced to judge the movie as though it is true, since that has importance in considering not just it for itself but the franchise as a whole. I say that last part because Saw is as far as I’m aware unique among horror series for having maintained a single coherent narrative throughout its run, a feat which has always caused me to give it a goodly amount of respect. There was this guy, and he got cancer. And it made him angry, because he was going to lose his life, while people that he interacted with were so careless with their own lives. So he got the idea to put these people into situations that forced them to make painful, committed choices in order to live. Most such people died, but some survived, and were usually a lot stronger for it.

The last movie is explicitly about that, although Jigsaw’s survivors have always been important to the story as a whole. But in this instance, they have formed support groups, one of them has written a book and gone on tour, it’s really a whole theme. Quite a bit more compelling than last year’s indictment of the American healthcare industry, if only for being so much less hamfisted. So, there’s an interesting narrative. The devices, for a change, did not really impress me that much. They were every bit as squirmily uncomfortable to watch, don’t get me wrong, but they just didn’t feel as inventive as previous such deathtraps have been. But like I said earlier, the most important question is this: did the series as a whole come to a satisfactory conclusion?

Well, that’s a tricky question to answer. If you are looking for some kind of overarching lesson, or a note that neatly closes the theme that was played so heavily for the events of this specific movie and that loomed so large over the series as a whole, the one about being mentally strong enough to choose life? I don’t think it managed that.[1] If you are looking for narrative closure, that I think was achieved, and I’m glad to have seen it done. If you’re looking for a slight crack in the closed door, some light allowing for another sequel after all? Well, of course there was. It’s a horror movie. Duh.

On a technical note, the 3D right at the beginning of the movie had some severe issues, and the fact that they cleared up so fast makes me think this might be a limitation of the format, not the people processing this particular film. The opening scene involves one of the iconic traps, in a glass-enclosed room, in the middle of a public space where passersby can observe what is about to happen. As a result, there are a large amount of reflections as the camera looks in one direction or the other through the glass. And the reflections cast onto the glass really screw up the 3D effect badly. I think it is because the reflections have some amount of depth that they would not have in a real world situation, and then my eyes freak out because it looks so wrong? I’m not sure that’s what it was, only that my eyes were freaking out over whatever cause existed. So, 3D film-makers? Fix that, or avoid the situation. That is all.

[1] More to the point, I don’t think it tried. I wonder if they saw no way to do it, or if it didn’t cross their minds that they should have? Because if that had happened, I would have to be singing some praises right now.