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billyzduke
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Mara (2018)
5 stars is far too generous
A film that takes its potentially great premise and lovely leading lady and flushes them down a generically scored funnel of half-assed jump scares, piss poor dialogue, and about the laziest plotting I've ever witnessed. Just watch Come True (or even the documentary The Nightmare) to see a movie that makes sleep paralysis intriguing and frightening... I mean, it's sleep paralysis, it's both of those things already by default in real life, you have to TRULY screw up your movie to neuter this premise. And that's pretty much all that Mara manages for its entire runtime.
Ghost in the Shell (2017)
Simply Abysmal
Uniformly terrible from the very beginning onward, right up until the end, when it gets ever so slightly even worse. The opening credits/cyborg creation sequence, despite the bulk of the film's budget clearly having gone toward CG animation, makes zero sense physically (even for imaginary future technology) and just doesn't manage to compare to numerous previous attempts at similar sequences, the superior opening of HBO's Westworld most fresh in mind.
The script is just a series of generic plot points spoken aloud (albeit including references to the aforementioned non-existent technology, but the tech complexity never even approaches Star Trek levels). Every single line is just declamatory, like each actor is reading from the outline for a script rather than dialog meant for any specific character. There are no honest emotional points of entry, no way to connect with any of the set pieces unfolding on screen. Even if it were not a complete disgrace to the classic source material, it would be a complete disgrace on its own.
Way too much Lucy, not nearly enough Under the Skin.
Livide (2011)
Wow... Astonishingly Bad.
Well I guess it's safe to say Inside was a fluke... There are a few promising ideas here, but the music box / creep show / pedantically telegraphed presentation pretty much annihilates any enjoyment one could expect to extract. Overscored, overstyled, tonally incoherent, devastatingly underwritten, and most often, just plain dumb. I just finished watching it, and I'm honestly still in shock that it was just so... abysmal.
As my review must be 10 lines long, I will attempt to say something positive about the film: I did like the very end, but man, the drudgery required to get there... From about the first time a taxidermied animal (sitting at a tea party, no less) inexplicably moves, I was on the verge of turning it off. Yeah, that's about as positive as it gets.
Transformers (2007)
Bay of Pixels
Much like having shards of metal ejaculated into your eyes for two hours.
Ready-made for drinking games: Drink every time the camera spins around one of the robots while it's transforming. Drink every time the little robot inexplicably makes the same noises as Stripe the Gremlin. Drink every time you see Megan Fox's cleavage.
Vastly expensive and eminently forgettable, a feature length commercial for a line of toys aimed at children too young to see the movie itself. Zero character development among either the human or computer-generated cast. Would have been far more entertaining as a playable video game, but I'm sure such cross-marketing has already been taken care of...
Saw (2004)
Positive Reviewers, Exactly What Movie Did You See? Because It Wasn't Saw.
Shamelessly derivative, sub-music-video level hogwash from start to finish. Even the gore is lame. Perhaps I've been desensitized by one too many serial killer films (and there have been way more than one too many already, Se7en and Silence of the Lambs serving as the most prominent inspirations for Saw's blatant imitation), but the only moment in this whole movie that provided any visceral impact was a beating with a toilet tank lid. And if the best your horror movie has to offer is a big, blunt object, you have categorically failed in your attempt to make a horror movie.
Besides the numerous logical inconsistencies I'm not going to bother to spoil (they'll do that for themselves if you are unlucky enough to find yourself sitting through it), Saw is chock full of wholly unnecessary flashbacks, often to scenes that happened less than 20 minutes before. No new information is revealed through this repetition, no previously innocuous details highlighted and made important, whole scenes are simply repeated, as if the director expects us to have forgotten we just watched them. If only.
The success of this film can only be attributed to external factors: effective marketing, a well-timed Halloween release date, and the continuously diminishing standards and memory spans of the movie-going public. Unsurprisingly, immediately following a tally of the opening weekend receipts, a sequel was greenlit, which begins filming in January. You get what you pay for, people, over and over again.
The Grudge (2004)
Shimizu's Greatest Hits
Over the course of the past month, I happen to have seen all four Japanese Ju-On films, and last night I saw the American remake: The Grudge, all directed by Takashi Shimizu. I would have to say that the four Japanese films gradually decrease in quality from the inspired, economical original TV-movie to the just-about-average theatrical sequel, and the American film is basically a greatest hits compilation of the best scares from the Japanese films.
Since almost all of these scenes are re-produced from the other films, down to the same camera angles in many cases, and the third Japanese film (the first theatrical version) was released stateside earlier this year, I didn't really see the point of this remake, other than to fill the Japanese horror gap between the American version of The Ring and its upcoming sequel. My biggest problem with the film itself was the use of the usual generic horror movie violin music, which gets exponentially louder and louder as the next jump scare approaches. The soundtracks of the original films are much less cluttered, so the minimal sound effects (the croaking, the meowing) are rendered more effective.
In any case, five films drawn from a paragraph-long premise is more than enough. It's time for Shimizu to move on and prove there is more to Japanese horror than pale children and damp, stringy hair.
For reference, the Japanese films are as follows:
1. Ju-On: The Curse (2000)(TV) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0330500/ (featuring Chiaki Kuriyama, Kill Bill's Go-Go Yubari)
2. Ju-On: The Curse 2 (2000) (TV) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0330501/ (the first half of this film is the last half of the first, so really these first two should be combined into one film)
3. Ju-On: The Grudge (2003) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364385/ (theatrical remake of the first two films, but also functions as a sequel)
4. Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (2003) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367913/
The Village (2004)
Shyamalan is the Most Overrated Director Working Today
When I first saw the Sixth Sense, my date and I almost walked out because we were so bored. It was clumsy, not scary, and although partially redeemed by the now famous twist ending, it boggles my mind that it remains so highly regarded, and is often included on "best of" lists aside films far more deserving of the superlative.
With his subsequent movies, Shyamalan has done little but prove that he is indeed a one-trick pony (and it's not even his trick, but Rod Serling's). With the failed Unbreakable, he at least attempted to break new ground, but Signs and The Village both seem desperately designed as crowd-pleasing machines, offering up more of the same slow, creepy atmosphere that seemed to appeal to so many who saw his first blockbuster, with increasingly arbitrary plot twists.
This is an unfortunate situation for any director. The best thing about the Sixth Sense was that it took the audience by surprise, but since it made him so famous, he can never pull off that kind of surprise again. When the viewers expect surprise, how can they possibly be surprised? The fact that he has gone for some kind of "big twist" every time out is, by the fourth time, simply wearying, and ultimately distracting from the gifts he does possess as a director.
Here, his cast suffers as well from his single-mindedness. Where his other films focused primarily on a brooding male protagonist (Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson, respectively), The Village plays as more of an ensemble piece, at least in the beginning, and when the focus does narrow, it does so on a young blind girl. There are a truckload of excellent actors on board, including Ron Howard's talented daughter as the blind Ivy Walker, but the considerable time spent on characterization goes up in smoke the closer we get to the end, which, in Shyamalan's eyes, all things must serve.
I will remember The Village as the only film to which I guessed the ending after seeing only the trailer. And it was my first guess. If he's going to keep making movies, Shyamalan literally needs to give up the ghost. And his self-injected cameos are almost as annoying as Tarantino's. Mark my words: This will tank quickly after opening weekend.
Best in Show (2000)
Waiting For Guffaws
Reading some of the other user comments here almost made me wish I had finished watching the movie. As it stands, I didn't even make it to the dog show. I loved both Spinal Tap and Waiting for Guffman, but what I saw of this was trite, mean-spirited, slow, and just plain unfunny. (Okay, the dog on the shrink's couch was funny, but that happens in the first two minutes, and if you sat down to watch it in the first place, you damn well knew it was going to be a dog.)
Pretty as a Picture: The Art of David Lynch (1997)
Piecemeal Look Behind the Scenes
Using mostly interview and set footage culled from the production of Lost Highway, this documentary takes a look at Lynch so broad and unfocused that it will provide few revelations for the die-hard fan (like myself) who is obviously the target audience. Sure, it's moderately amusing to see Lynch and company (including the late Jack Nance) revisit the Eraserhead set years later, and neat to watch him work on his paintings (one containing the corpses of a rat and a bird, as well as a large slab of meat being devoured by ants), but the overall feel is of leftover footage cobbled together, which never inspires or disturbs anywhere near the degree achieved by his actual works.
Why this has been released on DVD before Eraserhead and Lost Highway is a mystery to me. The book Lynch on Lynch covers everything this does and in much greater detail.
Bats (1999)
Who Paid For This?
I saw this for free, and I feel like they owe me money. Not one original or even interesting point in this senseless mess (except for the presence of Dina Meyer and Bob Gunton, both of whom, like everyone else involved, should have known better). Lots of swinging camera blurs to mask crappy special effects and rubber bats that even Roger Corman would reject.
The Sixth Sense (1999)
Better Off Renting Angel Heart Again... or 12 Monkeys!
Yet another great script idea blurred and ultimately mangled by p**s-poor direction. I was thrust into skepticism even during the initial shooting sequence. Was I being too cynical or overly probing when I balked at the New Kid On The Block in the bathroom? Who sought vengeance on Bruce Willis, the child shrink who "failed" him by managing to convince him that the dead people he saw walking around all the time were merely outgrowths of stress sprouting from issues surrounding his parents' divorce? Who happened, after X years of torment by these wandering spirits, to break into Bruce Willis's house on the very night he was commended by the city for his work with children? Commended with a plaque shiny enough to have filmed the scene prior almost entirely in its reflective surface?
Maybe I was. But after numerous scenes in which every line uttered by every character (and I use the term loosely) was so clearly meant to advance the plot (used even more loosely) that a kindly old narrator such as Burl Ives (or his claymation counterpart) might as well have been reading the whole movie off a clipboard, I found it difficult to sustain my disbelief. Or interest, for that matter. Yes, there were a few effective (but cheap) scares, and the ending was quite cool. But hardly a payoff worthy of having to endure a child actor as insistently bad as any I've ever seen, a mother who seemed to be peering at cue cards over her son's shoulder, and the incomprehensible stoicism of poor Bruce Willis, way out of his (fifth) element, rolling out every stupid child psychology trick save pulling a coin from behind the kid's ear (there is a coin trick, though), all of which are inexplicably and immediately effective. If only it were that easy to pull one over on the audience... oh, wait, it is. That this film has received so many positive reviews is baffling.
Olivia Williams is very easy on the eyes (but has nothing to work with as obligatory wife-person), and there were some lovely ironies available, notably in the mutual confession scene in the hospital after the kid has his pseudo-seizure, but the film attempts to drive home its points like a careless carpenter with a throbbing thumb. I'm extremely weary of films that collapse when I pay too much attention to them, and likewise wary of those who suggest that in order to enjoy these films I should not pay so much attention.
3 out of 10.
Paperhouse (1988)
Burn It Down... Please
An intriguing premise of hand-drawn fantasy come to life in a child's fever dreams. However, I imagine the average nonfictional child is far more adept at scaring themselves than Bernard Rose is at riveting the viewer. The duel between Anna's two realities drags on far too long to sustain interest, especially considering that the little girl playing her is the most abrasive child actor I've ever seen.
Use only for kindling.
Charly (1968)
Shamelessly Butchers The Book
A hack job through and through. Robertson drools for a while, smartens up, makes a clumsy pass at his teacher, then rides his crotch rocket off into a needlessly psychedelic montage, supposedly presented to explain his acquisition of sudden worldly wisdom and Buddha calm. The mouse does a fine job, though.
Completely misses the point of an excellent novel.
Pi (1998)
When All Else Fails, Destroy The Set
A promising start which takes far too much of itself to dwindle away. I enjoyed the first few "attacks" (suitably impressed with Max's medical gear), but Aronofsky's ever-expanding spiral could not effectively suspend my disbelief. Gullette's hyperbolic performance tears up all possible tension, and the proto-symbolism tires (mashed brains... I see...). Secondary characters are poorly drawn, badly made-up, and have no qualms with shouting their base motivations just as Max repeatedly states his experimental assumptions ("I don't care about YOU! I just want what's in your HEAD!"). Even the worthy shock exit is weakened by the lingering denouement.
If only his mother had told him something else. Anything else.
Tetsuo (1989)
A Must See, But Avoid The Sequel
Nowhere else have I seen live action that feels so much like authentic anime. Erratic, shocking, and effective enough to make most viewers feel like they are undergoing transformations similar to the characters'.
A word of warning: The sequel [Body Hammer] is an incredibly lame remake. In color, the cheap special effects just look cheap, and rather than frenetic confusion, the obfuscated plotline produces only boredom.
Cruel Intentions (1999)
An Utter Waste Of Time And Young Talent
Given the combination of a sure-fire story (filmed to variously fantastic effect twice before in Dangerous Liaisons and Valmont) and two of the most vivacious young actresses around (Gellar, Witherspoon), how could this movie have been made so crude, boring, and pointless? Posturing rather than conniving, our supposedly savvy characters spend most of their time trying to squeeze their motivations into the needlessly updated NY setting.
Blair plays Cecile as village idiot rather than innocent, marring most of her scenes with stringless puppet pratfalls. Phillippe keeps getting cast for his looks, and continually proves that they are certainly all he has going for him. Gellar's wickedness is way overcooked, and Witherspoon barely escapes unscathed, if only because direction is lacking to such an extent that anyone could have stood in Annette Hargrove's shoes.
Better to bite into tinfoil for an hour and a half.