What we have here is a movie that breaks two rules even before you’ve walked into the theater. 1) It’s a movie based on a video game, but the video game doesn’t exist. (Which is a pity, because we could build it. We have the technology.) 2) The title is instructive rather than descriptive. Well, okay, maybe that’s not actually a rule, but it seems like it should be. Horror movie titles mostly tend to tell you either when you’re going to die or what is going to kill you, or every now and then why you’re going to die. Telling you to Stay Alive is both unprecedented and really quite redundant. Although I suppose Scream was kind of the same way.

Unfortunately, all similarities to Scream that I will be able to include in this review have come and gone. Basically, someone without a talent for tying up stray plots or thinking up particularly scary (or even gruesome) death scenes watched The Ring, and decided that if watching a tape can kill you, then by God, playing a video game can too. So, some gamer geeks play the video game, and then die. (Shocking!) Inevitably, the game was far better than the movie. The problem is, unlike the standard for this formula, I can’t even comfort myself by going back and playing the game.

And then, because apparently I was having a busy day, I saw Adaptation. It’s… it’s quite a movie. It’s a movie about the screenwriter’s struggle to write the screenplay adaptation of a book about flowers, which is really a loosely connected set of essays and personal thoughts. His goal is to not impose any Hollywood crap onto his adaptation, but instead remain as true to it as possible. The problem he discovers is that it’s impossible to write a movie without a plot, or themes, or events, or characters that grow and change. And… it’s almost impossible to talk about it in more depth without spoiling things. I shall say now that I really enjoyed it a lot, that I was laughing almost constantly, but that it probably isn’t the kind of movie that I’d want to watch over and over again.
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My dad wanted to see the action movie du jour, and I am rarely averse to such an enterprise. Thusly, Ultraviolet. I feel like there’s something sloppy to the mindset that allows you to preface your movie with a voiceover claiming that you may not understand the heroine’s world. It’s not that I couldn’t understand it. You have your basic class warfare, only the classes are separated not by money, skin, religion, or nationality, but by disease status. (Although it rankles my sensibilities that the disease provides exceptional reflexes and healing powers, without any negative side-effects. Well, it rankles my sensibilities that people are terrified of this so-called disease.) So, yeah, pretty comprehensible. But the principle of the thing annoys me.

It’s a story we’ve seen a thousand times. Woman loses child. Woman finds surrogate child while battling the oppressive system. Woman sacrifices everything to protect surrogate child, while taking revenge on oppressive system. But have we seen it with the inevitably naked Milla Jovovich? Granted the lack of a kid in the Resident Evil movies, I think not.

Lots of comic-style violence reminiscent of Sky Captain or Sin City plus hip cityscape designs helped to distract me from the slow plot. It was decent, and all, but if you insist on seeing this movie, you should probably see the version from a couple of months ago, when they were calling it Aeon Flux.

I feel both sheepish and not a little bit dumb admitting it, but: I have no idea what Syriana was about, and only a little more about what happened in it. Okay, yeah, it was about oil. More specifically, it was about the intersections of four storylines: a thinly veiled reference to the Exxon Mobil merger and the struggles of certain people to get the merger approved by the SEC, Pakistani immigrant workers in Saudi Arabia losing their jobs because of the merger and struggling to retain visas and identity in the aftermath, a CIA agent of long standing in the region, and an energy analyst’s ties to the Saudi royal family in the midst of the succession. (At least, I think the country was Saudi Arabia both times, although quite a bit of time is spent in or discussing the liberation of Iran.)

It made a good story, and I think I’m glad I watched it. I’m pretty sure on the whole the message is that our government hasn’t been handling the region well since time out of mind, and also that oil is mostly bad for us. (My favorite single moment was the awards ceremony for Oil Man of the Year, because the award was presented by the Moneybags guy in the Monopoly boardgame. No lie, I swear it was him.) Still, though, I’d be more comfortable knowing to what extent it was non-fiction and, well, having a better idea of what actually occurred in the plot. Oh, and what if anything Syriana actually refers to.

What do you get if you take a leukemia patient, a couple of female Mexican masked wrestlers, a police detective, an unscrupulous chief surgeon, and an ape that isn’t a guy in a gorilla suit, honest, and put them in a movie full of stock heart transplant footage and naked screamers?

A very, very long time ago I saw a 60s era Argentinian import with the improbable (and certainly not plot-relevant) title of Feast of Flesh. Long enough ago that it was the very first thing I reviewed here. The reason this is relevant is that the disc had a second movie on it, which leaves me to wonder if Netflix has a list of the discs that have been out the longest. (This one was a year and a half, apparently.)

In fact, yes, I have finally watched Night of the Bloody Apes, the movie that dares to ask the question, ‘What do you get if you take a leukemia patient, etc.?’ The answer, then? You get a surgeon whose son’s imminent death prompts him to first kidnap a gorilla from the zoo via the well-thought-out plan of entering the zoo, shooting it with a dart, and then leaving with it, and then transplant the gorilla’s blood into his son’s body to defeat the leukemia. This plan would have worked earlier, but now the son is too weak, so the heart must also be transplanted. This all, obviously, because the beast’s more powerful blood will be able to defeat the disease. You also get a masked wrestler chick who is ready to retire now that she’s accidentally dropped her coworker/friend out of the ring and into a coma, but who also has time to argue with her cop boyfriend about how he values his job more than dinners out with her.

Inevitably, though, the now-healed leukemia patient sporadically transforms partially into a gorilla-headed beast whose goal seems to be assaulting random women by ripping their shirts off and then killing them. Sometimes men get killed as well, but without the shirt-ripping and only because they’re in the way. Soon, all of these characters (including the coma girl) collide in a spectacular… amazing… semi-adequate? climax of blood, angst, and bad driving. Seriously, though? A little bit funny. I’d watch it again with other people, if I knew people who were reliably available and willing. (I actually know a few willing people. I really do.)