patchworkworld Reviews

Fringe (2008)

Utterly terrifying

[10/10 · 12 September 2010]

One of the few ultrashorts I have seen on IMDb that's truly worth watching. There are no schlitzy gimmicks, no stupid overly done makeup jobs, no addicts sucking down or shooting up licit or illicit drugs, no buckets of blood splashed across the screen, nothing whatsoever unrealistic --and by "unrealistic" I don't mean total lack of any need to suspend disbelief on some point but a running series of idiotic or sheer "that's won't happen anywhere but in some schlock writer's mind" events. I like movies and books requiring a reasonable suspension of disbelief --Tolkien's other races are not of the real world, but they hold up in consistency; vampires and werewolves don't exist in this world, but any story using such characters in a modern setting can be very good if the writer avoids also using (for sheer convenience or as part of the equally incapable artist's pantheon of "no limits") unrealistic stupidity like "Oh, they use sunscreen so they can walk around in daylight with no trouble"....

This 6 minute film, however, doesn't even require a reasonable suspension of disbelief. I'd recommend NOT watching it if you have young children and lose sleep over real world horrors getting them. Without showing more than a shoe and a pair of hands, without recording more than a couple of gasp and a closing door or two over the entire course of the movie, the writer follows the oldest and best rule in the book: Let their imagination fill it in, because NOT seeing it leaves room for everything that's more horrific than anything you can show them. The old movie makers knew this well, with so much that was awful occurring off screen or perhaps in silhouette at most. The modern convention of extreme explicit gore, violence, sex, etc, merely results in the increasing desensitization of a totally jaded audience.

I would like to see more of Tate Lown's work, but not for a little while. I have to recover from the impact of this really frightening little gem first!

Oprosti za kung fu (2004)

Would be far better as a short

[2/10 · 1 August 2010]

It's difficult to come up with positive commentary for this film; I find myself wondering if I saw the same flick as the other people writing reviews. The plot and character development are so extremely basic that the entire story can be well told in perhaps 15 minutes at the VERY longest. That it runs for nearly 5 times that creates total boredom long before the finale, a growing internal question of whether anything is going to happen at the end worth waiting through all that nothingness. And in fact, nothing worth waiting for does happen, leaving the viewer with that I-sure-wasted-my-money feeling.

None of this is helped by the cover design and description if you get the film via DVD or online rental or purchase. They both give the impression that the majority of the story is about the trials and problems of raising a half-Asian child in an intolerant society. The actual story told only touches on that lightly at the end; choosing instead to stretch out what should essentially have been the 10 minute background to the real story into a full length movie.

The production values are good --no ridiculous shaky cam where it is not appropriate, no screen so dark it's impossible to see what is going on, etc-- and the fact that the characters are played by either mostly unattractive people or people made up so as to look mostly unattractive is a plus --too much of Hollywood and its imitators portrays every human on the planet as a perfect(ly unbelievable) "ten" to be taken seriously in any supposedly realistic setting. There is a certain amount of humor in the film, though it's of a kind that is more saddening than really funny, and may be offensive to some --the sort of chuckle produced by a (supposedly) more sophisticated society viewing the silliness of a backward one that practices oppression of its own and intolerance of anyone different while engaging in the same practice itself in a less visible manner.

If one decides to watch it knowing about its flaws the film can be a better experience. As a commentary on social practices (and a few other things, like the dearth of realistic husbands after a war) it isn't a bad flick. It can also be seen as a gentle poking of fun at the society the filmmaker is part of, and as that is not bad either. Just don't see it expecting what marketing promises.

Séance (2000 TV Movie)

Not Akira Kurosawa. And ultimately poisoned by plot gaps.

[2/10 · 18 July 2010]

Kiyoshi, not Akira. Elements of the cinematography are indeed reminiscent of A. Kurosawa's great films, and the plot could be a good one, but the gaping plot holes completely spoil any possibility of its being seen as a good movie. And I can't figure out why no one else has commented on THAT here.

As mentioned in another review, a girl is kidnapped and escapes her kidnapper, then while running away through the forest jumps into an empty trunk to hide from him. The trunk belongs to a sound engineer recording some "tree creaking" as per an earlier scene. When the sound engineer packs up to leave, he locks down the lid of the trunk; we know the girl is still inside because --behind his back while he is packing the car several feet away-- it starts rocking back and forth. So far, so good. Then everything falls apart as far as plot goes, because we are supposed to believe that the sound engineer just loads the trunk into his car and goes home, unloading it leaving it there locked on the garage floor.

Oh really? So, let's get this straight...the guy habitually takes an EMPTY trunk out to wherever he is recording and is utterly incapable of feeling the difference between 2# and 60# (yeah, riiiight)...or...the guy habitually takes a trunk with equipment in it out to wherever he is recording and for no reason at all with absolutely nothing distracting him THIS TIME after using it forgets to pack up his equipment and just leaves it there (yeaaaah, riiiight). How else is he going to have a trunk big enough for an 8 year old to curl up in it lying about completely empty when he goes to record something and load it without noticing it's become substantially heavier? Right there, POOF, the entire credibility of the movie vanishes in an instant. We're never given the slightest reason why this could have happened at all. It's not stupidity on the character's part...it's impossible --not in the way of a fantasy or sci fi or horror plot needing one suspension of disbelief (eg vampires exist)but in the real world everyday way of 'ain't happening', so it comes across as filmmaker expecting audience to have an IQ of 10.

The girl's subsequent discovery and killing by the couple is another problem. After more than enough time to make it believable that she has died trapped inside the trunk, they find her, ,begin to call police, and see her crawling after them. More on that in the next paragraph. The movie has two more scenes of the live girl after they put her to bed. In both the sound engineer is trying to keep her quiet. In the first he shoves her flat on the bed with his hand (and a fold of blanket) over her mouth and straddles her to hold her down. In the second, he wraps the blanket or comforter around her and holds her in it while she kicks and struggles. Both times he then exits the bedroom to tell his wife the girl is now "asleep". Okay, let's see. So...she doesn't suffocate inside the locked trunk for an extended period of time.....and she doesn't croak when a full grown adult slams her backward and holds her down with a blanket over her face until she "falls asleep", but she dies suddenly wrapped in a blanket and kicking fit to beat the band. yeah, riiiight. This on again off again dead girl stuff is patently ridiculous. Of the three incidents, it would, frankly, have been believable only if the trunk death had come last. The one that was supposed to have killed her was the least likely to, and the man acting exactly as he had previously when we thought she was dead but she was not makes us wonder if the filmmaker had the slightest idea the girl was supposed to be dead that time or just filmed a ton of 'ooooopps, not yet scenes' and didn't check the editing to see which was in there as the final one.

BTW, the crawling girl scene is straight out of Ringu --she moves precisely the same way with precisely the same sort of tangled long hair approach etc. The scene of her crawling could have been directly lifted out of the other movie. To me that sort of exactness belongs in a parody, not in a separate serious movie. The way in which this and the next scenes are filmed are mildly confusing --the audience initially wonders why on earth the two haven't called the police before tumbling to the thought that the couple are worried about being charged with the kidnapping.

As a last comment, for those confused about why a doppleganger would appear when the guy who saw it didn't die...I believe the implication is supposed to be that the guy is going to be executed for murdering the girl. I haven't the faintest idea how Japanese law views such crimes so I can't be sure, but if that is it, of course the Japanese audiences would have a better chance of figuring it out. Besides that, the doppleganger scenes were in no way in the original story either, they are added because K. Kurosawa likes them. Unfortunately they don't do what he wants them to --there is really no reason in the film for an audience member to "get" that the sound engineer burns his doppleganger as a finger up against fate/an assertion he will choose his own fate. That idea comes out when you listen to the K Kurosawa interview!

Mutant Chronicles (2008)

One of the 10 worst movies ever

[1/10 · 12 June 2010]

Perhaps it's simply that I knew a filmmaker and heard enough about the process to snore through this one...but I don't think so. I doubt this silly thing merits "B movie"; it's more "Z" grade. There's a short flick running around the net from Brazil about robots attacking a city which looks MUCH more professional than this and tells a much better story (and apparently attracted the attention of a major name in movies as well, hurrah!) By contrast, Mutant Chronicles seems to be based on the premises that 1) we are all idiots 2) filming with a brown/grey filter makes it cool and 3) throw in some clearly fake-painted on the already filmed scene (ie photoshopped or cgi'd) red now and then in the most disgusting manner possible.

So we have for 3) such things as the totally unnecessary gross-out stuff (eg a moving-like-a-fake-effect round heading for the back of a guy's head and then coming out one of his eyes with fake-Painting of the color red in a gout flying away from his face and surrounding the socket area) and the monk's red robe somehow showing up in a scene filmed to suggest everything is bleached grey or brown by bad lighting. Rather than appearing artistic or making some point relevant to the plot, this messy coloring ploy seems to essentially make the statement "Look how cool I think I am". Or maybe just, look how well I can copy something that seemed to attract viewers in some other movie.

I would say, maybe that's being harsh, except for 1). There are many examples of 1). 700 years in the future, but war games look and sound like a cross between those old WWI and WWII movies, just made in the modern age so as to use several kinds of filthy language. 700 years in the future, but people suck cigarettes recognizably from our time --or did anyone forget that in just a couple hundred years tobacco use as a recreational drug went from pipes to cigars to cigarettes? 700 years in the future, however, doesn't mean either futuristic vehicles or modern ones. Military wheels look like they did in WWII flicks. Airships on the other hand (which are actually both airplanes and space ships) look like they came out of a bad Jules Vernesque movie, and run on....yes I am serious... coal shoveled into furnaces by a couple of guys. I hate to have to point this out, but even a humanity fallen into the stone age could not crawl back up by making COAL fired Jules Vern looking spaceships! Or did someone making this turkey also not bother to find out why such fuel didn't work in aircraft in the first place? But the very best example of 1) is the ending of the movie. The safe-guarders of the "chronicles" --which supposedly prophesize all this muck and how to fix it-- who kept the "bomb" and the "timer" supposedly to be used to do that all this time somehow manged not to realize OR remember even though they read the chronicles regularly that the "Key" was one of their own ten swords kept to arm the band of saviors who would place the "bomb". You know, the "bomb" that was carried alllllllllll the way from the mountains of eastern Europe where the old savior had stuck it and written the chronicles and founded the order of monk safe-guarders to the spot where 7000 years or however many centuries ago the bomb was sealed up underground. The "bomb" that turns out to be nothing more than an ignition switch which causes the original meteor part of the machine that has directed and powered all the rest of it to blow its jets and fly out of earth into space and go on its merry way....which of course begs the question of why this was not done before. Oh that's right...then we wouldn't have had the chance to see this moronically senseless turkey bouncer of a movie.

The Parallax Parallel (2009)

Good production value, but too over the top on attempt to create weirdness.

[4/10 · 26 February 2010]

It's difficult to critique this short given the inconsistency between plot and production value. The filming is well done, the staging such that the short can be done in one room without the viewer getting the feeling something is being left out. Atmosphere, lighting, sound, everything nicely put together, with the possible exception of initial character entry through what looks like blankets tacked up overhead --something not very believable as a doorway to a bar, even an outlandish one.

Other than the staging, the plot line is "too" --too much, too little, too silly, too left up in the air, too freaky, too inexplicable, too just about any descriptive term that might come to mind. In essence, a man most people might describe as ordinary or normal walks into an ill-lighted bar and (while trying to phone his wife to pick him up) interacts with the only two people in the place, the bartender and his friend. The bartender, wearing badly done drag and speaking with an Irish accent while smoking and drinking with Normal Guy, tells the story of his decision to come to the States --a tale of parental child molestation containing so many repetitions of the phrase "put his big fat c*** in my mouth" that it becomes an unrealistically jarring note, annoyingly laughable like listening to a child deliberately repeating 'bad words' in an attempt to get a rise out of the adults in the room. The bartender's friend, a silent woman wearing a painted mask completely concealing her face, eventually touches Normal Guy's hand and poofs him into a bizarre scene (only in his mind) in which, now maskless, she climbs and crawls all over him in a sickly sexually suggestive manner while drawing a butcher knife across his throat from all sorts of angles and blithers about how she could have killed him but didn't. The effect is the same sort of "Oh, come ON!" impression given by the way the bartender tells his story --unrealistically jarring as if done simply to get a rise out of someone, rather than unrealistic in a way to raise the hair on your nape.

The semi-plot might have worked as a chapter in some kind of serial story, but as a standalone it's pretty weak. Given the good production values, and the impression that this is an early piece in the writer/producer's repertoire future efforts may be much better if the urge to go over the top with bizarreness changes.

Oh, yes...the title is the name of the drink the bartender makes for Normal Guy. Parallax being the apparent change in location of an object caused by shifting perspective and Parallel ... well, you might want to look up the original Twilight Zone episode of that name, though I'm not sure that's what the writer here had in mind...and just think about that one for awhile. The title may be the best part of this short.

Forget-Me-Yes (2008)

Interesting but ultimately disappointing little dilly

[5/10 · 29 January 2010]

I tried to put in a synopsis, only to find that the site requires my privileged info, so this review will have to do --I have enough 1984-esque Big Brother in my life as it is.

Forget-Me-Yes is an ultrashort with a nasty prejudicial cliché' twist for an ending. A reasonably attractive fella wakes up in someone's bedroom (fully clothed, it isn't THAT sort of flick) with a bottle blond mouth-breather in thick f-m red lipstick asking him "How do you feel?" I am not kidding about her, every time she's on scene her lips are parted enough to plainly show her teeth even when she isn't speaking. The effect is surrealistic, as if she's trying to be menacing though she's clearly just an insensitive voyeur type. After bottle blond tells the guy he's taken a drug that produces temporary amnesia an attractive girl pops out from under a coat on the bed and both start asking him how it feels, explaining that the effect wears off very quickly and they want to know before he gets his memory back. The fella starts having black-and-white flashes of memory and getting scared for an unknown reason, which turns up in the last seconds of the film when his wife or girlfriend (it goes by too fast to be sure what the paper we see with their names on it actually is) walks in and says she's ready to go home. Y'see, the second modelesque gal pretended to be his girlfriend, and the one who actually is looks like a real person rather than a leading lady or model type. You could say we have all three types of women allowed in a 2-D society...the model, the overly made-up and fixed up with an OK bod, and the real person who doesn't fit film expectations. Nasty little cliché, whether we tale it as a comment on men who can't handle real women, women who aren't gorgeous bods and how they handle that, or the filmmaker who would make such am observation. The filming itself is professionally done, the actors very good at portraying their characters, and the set is realistic. I gave it a 5 on the strength of that, but no higher mark simply because the plot is so very unimaginative, unoriginal, and perpetrates such a stupidly cliché'd view.

Lost Holiday: The Jim & Suzanne Shemwell Story (2007 TV Movie)

Excuse me, where did you go to survival school?

[24 December 2009]

After the first few minutes I had to wonder how the people this movie was based on managed to get out of their situation. He's a dowhateverIfeellike regardlessoftheconsequences idiot, and she's the ultraplanmaking and makesureitallworksperfectly person --clearly in reaction to his lacks constantly creating messes he blows off and she has to clean up for the kids' sakes. Typically, when they go off snowmobiling and run into trouble, the two start having clashes over their different approaches to problems...in which, frankly, Mr Happygolucky keeps turning out a complete freaking idiot who constantly makes bad choices based on following utter impulse full speed ahead. At one point they have an argument because she's exhausted from staying up all night keeping the fire going while he fell asleep regardlessoftheconsequences as usual. His view? "I didn't ask you to do that! You did it because you didn't trust me to do it!" And she was right on, wasn't she? A real eye roller of a moment. They keep happening...and what can you say about a moron so into FREEEEDDDDDDUUUMMMMM that he feeds his kids cold formula rather than take the time to warm it up? She must have dealt with colic every day!! Other awesomely stupid moments...1) "when lost in the mountains, go UP, not down." (Uuuuhmmmmmm.....follow rivers if you can, and go down because down is where people are, I was taught. The only reason I can see for going up at all in the mountains in the winter is if you expect to get above the treeline to be spotted by searchers SOON. If not soon, going up can be fatal when you freeze outside of shelter in the snowstorm...) 2) Sitting around a fire, no shelter in sight, in a snowstorm...without gloves or mittens On the other hand, 1A) When NOT lost, abandon your snowmobile when the snow you went over an hour ago is now too soft to support it and you are within waking distance of your car. DON'T go down to some unknown area on the off change you'll connect up with a road. 3) Idiot boy chomping down ALL of the food they had with them (described as "plenty" by one of the searchers) in one day because "I figured we'd be found by now". (His next comment was that her thinking ahead was bad because it was really eliminating freedom...) 4)Screeching "We're here!!!!" while search craft fly overhead (for those who don't know, no one in the plane or helo can hear you...you MUST make a visual signal large enough to be seen against the background) 5) "Wen you fall asleep in the snow, you don;t wake up" PLEASE DON"T Believe THIS! It could kill you. The reality is that if you drive yourself to exhaustion because you're afraid of not waking up, when you finally do fall asleep it WILL kill you, but if you rest when you need to the cold will wake you before too long if you do nod off. 6) When searching on the ground for amateurs, turn off your engines now and then and yell...and LISTEN. Sound carries much farther than you can see.

Vampire Oclero (2006)

uh.....yeah.

[1/10 · 26 November 2009]

I dunno. Maybe it would appeal to some people. At least it's so short it doesn't steal much time from those it won't appeal to. But frankly I am left wondering if I saw the same 5 minute cartoon others saw...

The "animation" is grade Z, consisting almost exclusively of a series of extremely simplistically drawn little better than stick figure motionless VERY 2D creatures on equally simplistic flat background stills. The flat motionless things get moved slowly past each other now and then. The only actual animation? 1) flapping mouths on the two mosquitoes 2) slightly spreading blood spots on a neck 3) tiny "bumps" moving up the mosquitoes tubes (ie blood drops being pulled in) and 4) at the very end, a slight movement of the human vampire's face.

The plot would be reasonable if not for the problem mentioned by another reviewer...male mosquitoes (and immature females) do NOT suck blood --they live on flower nectar, like bees. The only reason adult female mosquitoes take in blood meals is to get a shot of protein to make eggs. Every blood meal results in a batch of mosquito eggs. And please, no "But it's a faaaaantaaaasyyyyyyy" as an excuse.

The ending is pretty predictable, going one of the two ways you'd instantly come up with without thinking about it much, given the plot. It could be seen as funny juxtaposed with the previous talk of purpose and meaning in life; sort of a microshot of a layperson's idea of philosophical heights laid next to the most extremely mundane. I just found it to be eye rolling. I've no idea where this cartoon came from; if it is an early effort all of the lacks in it are more understandable, and it's possible that with more experience output will get better on the part of those who made it. It could also have been deliberately drawn badly, but that's a practice I am not particularly fond of.

It would be nice if the cartoon were more accurately categorized. I am not sure why IMDb is listing 5 minute videos as "full length movies". They clearly are no such thing and perhaps the annoyance of low quality anime would be lessened if the site would correctly list them in a subcategory such as "short shorts" or "short cartoons" in which such lacks might be more expected. To qualify as belonging in a category with what are commonly called full length movies a piece needs to be no less than 80 minutes long if it is modern, or no less than 55 minutes long if it's from an earlier (non silent) era.

The Haunting of Molly Hartley (2008)

Lame Lame and once more Lame

[1/10 · 17 August 2009]

deserves a zero, but the same doesn't include one. First, it's not a horror movie. Not at all. Not even a tiny teeny little bit. The entire reason given for it to be called that is ... the second main character at the very very very very end supposedly is like, the daughter of Satan, basically...but we don't say it that explicitly. Just....she "belongs to THEM". Okay, so her mom didn't actually copulate with the big D himself....just she and dad bargained for 18 years with their baby-boo in return for baby-boo actually living through birth. (Mom had miscarried a buncha times...which brings up the practical question of why the morons were doing pregnancy instead of adoption btw.) Other than that? Nothing horror, even remotely. We got some rich chickie-poo going to a new school for rich types after mom tried to kill her. with predictable non-plot lines. We got the "have your cake and eat it too" school of writing employed by idiots who lack creativity or story ideas --first chickie-poo has hallucinations because there's a benign tumor growing in her nasal turbinates (although of course she thinks she's crazy like mom until they find the tumor on cat scan), then after its removed she starts having THE SAME KIND OF hallucinations again but SURPRISE they're now REAL cuz a sympathetic nurse let mom out to finish the job on her kid. Kid, in the last few moments of the flick, manages to kill mom, darned near kill dad, half kill the religious chick who she asked to save her so the big bad THEM didn't get her (religious chick promptly expires), and finally tries to off herself when THEM tell her to kill dad the rest of the way. Oi. Vey.

Do yourself a big favor...look up a movie called "The Devil's Daughter", 1973, Shelly Winters, Belinda Montgomery, Robert Fox worth, Jonathan Frid (yes, THAT Jonathan Frid, for those in the know). Same essential story, but there's a plot, and some spooky moments, and a twisty ending. And you don;t have to watch stereotypical lamebrain crud about lives of the rich and plastic teenage broads and hoods.

Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009)

Reminiscent of those teens yelping about "DAAAAHHHHKKKKNEEESSSSSS!!!!!"

[1/10 · 3 June 2009]

Hmmmm, interesting. I'll keep this short on detail, as so many have done such a good job of pointing out the myriad problems with this series both of itself and as a laughably awful remake of a good original series. Ludicrously similar to the (usually) teen-aged modern "role playing game" fans who constantly talked of the lack of "darkness" in some game they were involved in a decade past, but themselves had so little experience of "DAHKNESSSSSSS" that they'd have shrieked and run not only from anything remotely like one of the creepy crawlies (usually human appearing, but horrific in some psychological or spiritual way) they wanted featured and emphasized into the ground but also shielded and run or simply self-destructed from any realistic darkness that had presented itself into their unthinking little lives. Or perhaps the equally silly conviction of the teen-aged "goths"; kids asserting the world had already gone to hell in its very own handbasket and wearing black and being morose was utterly original and beautifully "realistic" and anyone who did not agree just didn't understand (and was really dumb besides). Come to think of it, they had the the same rabid reaction to anyone pointing out the fact that the last few generations have also had a cadre of black-wearing "originalists" in high school...LOL!!!

The single detailed comment I;d like to make for those seeking enough info to decide on watching or not watching the "new" series involves a couple of subtle concepts called family and wisdom (or alternatively, wise leadership). The original series included truly adult themes such as family and friendship; it is mystifying to those actually "adult" as to why explicit sexual intercourse, drug use, and foul language is supposed to depict adulthood. The original series contained such scenes as an not-seriously-but-still-ill Adama in bed receiving a visit from his small grandson-by-marriage Boxey, who, tucked up beside his grandfather and soundly kissed, proceeds to tell Adama a small-boy version of his own favorite bedtime story.

"There once was a shining planet, called..." "Earth," says Adama, recognizing the beginning line of the story he's often told the child. "No, Mushieland (a type of sweet in the series)," replies Boxey. "Mushieland?" asks Adama, voice and expression exactly what you'd expect from an affectionate grandparent both a little surprised and offering encouragement to go on. "It was full of daggets (essentially an extraterrestial dog)," continues Boxey, "but the best of them all was Sire Muffie (the name of his own pet)." "Sire Muffie," Adama repeats, clearly understanding where this is going, and as clearly content, happy with the boy's company. Again, very much real world, real grandparent.

A moment later the camera shows the medical technician who's been keeping visitors away so Adama can rest...standing just out of sight listening, smiling. She's pretended to be asleep so the boy could sneak in and give the old man some of the medicine he needs most right then.

This is the stuff of reality. This is adulthood. All the "F & S" (reproductive activity and drug sucking) ever shown cannot trump such things on those two counts. It shows when Adama and Apollo --his son-- embrace after Apollo has been out on a dangerous mission. It shows when Starbuck, all choked up and having trouble speaking, sincerely tells the heavily advanced civilization of the Ship of Lights who just revived his dead best friend Apollo "Whatever you want from me, you can have". It shows in the not-too-often, not-too-little use of the term "buddy" between Starbuck and Apollo and Boomer and the trio handclasp colonial warriors use now and then at a difficult or dangerous moment. It shows in the trust evidenced across rank lines, generation lines, and gender lines by people who have worked together, understand each other's strengths and weaknesses, and are committed to each other and to a goal worth reaching out for.

Adama led so well precisely because he showed emotion, valued his family, worried sometimes intensely but let others live their lives, cared and managed situations with flexibility but brooked no nonsense, and was fundamentally an older human being saddened by pain but capable of happiness, flawed (without being a mess) but striving to be the best he could. This, too, is reality. There are bad people in this world, but the sort of disintegration into whoring, in-fighting, and drugs touted as "real" by such shows as this ridiculous new rip off are unreal because they show only the worst case most extreme scenario. (Come on, how many disasters have we read about, seen, or been in ourselves in which EVERYONE turned into a sick-minded nit?)

My advice? Go for the real thing; ignore the fake stuff.

Poseidon (2006)

35 years makes a telling difference...unfortunately for us all

[1/10 · 28 April 2009]

I saw The Poseidon Adventure as a teen; it was an awesome, enthralling, edge-of-your-seat story with an enormous ability to draw you in and make you care about what happened. Perhaps the best few-word characterization of this "remake" is to point out the name change. "The Poseidon" is not awesome, enthralling, or in the least able to get anyone not lobotomized or non-severely ADD interested; it's no adventure It's also stupefyingly moronic. The opening "ship" sequence is so bad I blinked and started laughing (and kept right on chuckling till it went away). Anyone who's ever actually had a life, been anywhere, done anything, probably prefers real to CGI because even the best CGI looks SO fake as soon as it depicts anything in motion...even as a still shot THIS CGI looks like a glamorized cartoon panel of a totally exaggerated boat...not a single line or angle isn't so badly misdone that it doesn't come across as pure caricature. The non-CGI special effects are uniformly bad, though not in that same way; they are so pointless in the movie context you'd be far more entertained watching a disconnected series of random explosions, crashes, etc on YouTube. "Pointless" in fact is a good descriptive for the entire film: for example many have mentioned Dreyfuss' gay character, but the ONLY way the audience knows he's gay is from a single line in which he says his lover has left him for someone else using the word "he" instead of "she", IE the information is utterly pointless in adding nothing to story or character or even that scene. Another example is the utter hash work made of Shelly Winters' incredible scenes as the now old and fat ex-champion swimmer who saves the life of the guy making them all keep going and then dies in one of the most heartrending scenes of TPA; the remake's two possible replacement scenes are: 1. A long swim through an underwater corridor filled with debris in which stupid stowaway chick gets her clothing hooked on some wires and bashes her head, then her dead body is towed out and CPR'd to no avail and simply left like carrion or 2. ridiculously overbearing dad disappears, reappears in an underwater control room, hits a few buttons and switches, goes all glassy eyed, assumes a 'deadguy' facial expression, jerks in a bizarre fashion twice, lets out a bubble of air, and clearly DIES....and then miraculously comes back to life (with absolutely no change from the 'dead' facial rictus BTW) to push one more button as his body is moved around by the currents inside the submerged ship.

hat kind of stupidity characterized a LOT of the so-called action...kid clearly drowns, and then WOW guy who was nowhere near him suddenly pops up obviously far FAR too late but with live kid! Amazing! Guy's face is already underwater and they still need to remove ALL THE SCREWS screws from a ventilation shaft cover to get out, but he's JUST FINE by the time they FINALLY get the cover up. (Sort of the prevailing idea that all we have to do is flip some switch at the last microsecond and anything we've screwed up will instantly be perfectly OK. No nuclear explosion, no eco-catastrophe, no problem of any kind...) And of course, the callousness, the viciousness, the absolute lack of any redeeming anything about what little we did see of characters...there was absolutely nothing in TPA like the scene where one char deliberately kills another to save himself, and it was a tremendous jolt to watch it done as a matter of course here. Similarly the endless scenes of piles of bodies cooked, drowned, etc, with no reaction to speak of from any character OR THE AUDIENCE. 35 years, and we've gone from horror ho-hum at such things. 35 years, and we've gone from great real people chars you care about in a terrifying situation requiring all kinds of horrific efforts and soul bearing (leavened with humor all the more hilarious because of its contrast to the intensity before and after) to moronic unrealistic CGI, interchangeable dummy chars, and brain-dead "action".

I checked the run-times, thinking this turkey must have been significantly shorter because of the blatant difference in any plot and character development between it and the real movie (TPA '72) but it's only 9 minutes shorter. So much for the idea that this is SUPPOSED to be a jump from one idiocy to the next, we have no time to do anything with plot and characters idea.

Quid Pro Quo (I) (2008)

Pretentious, but since it's a first effort, be gentle.

[4/10 · 13 March 2009]

The film has am extremely simple plot. Very young guy confined to wheelchair by hysterical paralysis mixed with partial traumatic amnesia produced by the parent-killing car wreck occurring years ago when he was a child meets but of course doesn't recognize young chick who drove the car that caused the accident and is now obsessed with the idea of becoming a paraplegic like him aka like the kid in the car she crashed into. This simplistic view of two "mental illnesses" gets dressed up with 1) obsessed chick arranging to meet (and sleep with, equally of course) wheelchair bound guy via the plot device of anonymously informing him of a human interest story (he is an NPR-radio-station-type reporter) 2) utterly stupid 'human interest story' (an urban legend style boffo about a bunch of people who "wannabe" paralyzed for no particular reason whatsoever) 3) "magic fred astaire shoes" (of course, again, the shoes are nothing more than a mental "crutch" the guy is subconsciously using to give himself a reason to walk... that enable wheelchair guy to walk...after falling down a lot, only very slowly, with crutches or a cane...sort of like you'd expect someone who has been working out to retard muscular atrophy but who hasn't stood or walked for years to behave when finally standing and walking... 3) a few couldabeengreat lines that came off as too silly to be taken half-seriously because of the trying-to-be-an-allegory but frankly rather silly plot. (Example: "I'm a paralyzed person trapped in a walking person's body." Sillier example: "wannabe" paralyzed to alleviate her guilt over putting the guy in a wheelchair chick says to him --seriously!!!-- after they discover his paralysis is actually hysterical: "Why would anyone wannabe paralyzed?") The story could have been very good. It was just so obvious about its allegory role and so silly in its urban legend depiction of the way guilt-ridden obsessed chick got into crash victim guy's bed that it kind of gut punched its own good qualities. The next effort probably will be decent.

Day Night Day Night (2006)

"minimalist" doesn't mean lack of any content

[1/10 · 12 January 2009]

This is possibly one of the worst movies around. As other reviews, synopses, etc have explained, the "plot" (there actually is no plot or even a sign of one) is about a suicide bomber pre- and during the suicide bombing. I believe the title is meant to convey that the movie covers two days and nights, but even that's guesswork.

The movie has been billed as "minimalist", and "stripped to the essentials". Well, not unless you consider boredom to be the essential minimalism. The first 30 minutes essentially cover unknown female in closeup dimly lit profile whispering for a solid minute (she is apparently praying but even that's unclear), getting off plane (we assume, all we see is her skirt and then the back of her neck, which btw the camera remains glued to every time she is moving), being picked up and deposited at a hotel room after a couple of non-informational stops (well, we do learn she's either not Asian or fully un-Asianized Asian because she has no idea how to use chopsticks). In the hotel room --other than a few minutes with 1, 2, and then 3 guys who all arrive wearing the same pants, shirt, and (so help me God I am serious) black ski-mask-plus-ballcap-bill patting her down/taking pictures of her in what's apparently meant to be Che-Guevara-clone gear/rehearsing her verbally in a couple tiny parts of whatever she is supposed to do/eating pizza with her-- we get to watch her bathe (in nauseating detail, but, guys take note: none of the naughty bits show up on camera ;) ), clip her nails, wash out her socks and undies, turn on lights, chomp down some food staring at nothing while alone, lie on her back and walk her feet up the wall, fol a cellphone over her tennis show lace and flip it around a couple of times, and sleep twice (the first time looking like a puppet whose strings have been cut, or a dead person).

That ridiculous sleeping posture may actually be one of only two actual "messages" in the flick...some existential hoohaw about her being "dead" already. That would actually fit with the first sight we had of her face back at the airport...when she turn around and we instantly think this is a horror film because, between her very heavy jutting forehead and brow ridge and the black circles completely surrounding each eye she looks like she's the lead in "Night of the Living Dead X".

The other "message"? Boredom. Ours, as people subjected to this long lack of content. The actress' or character's (it is not clear which...and that can be seen, I suppose, as a measure of the actress' talent...that we cannot tell if she is that bored or she is that good at portraying a character who is that bored).

I finally quit wasting my life watching this turkey and skipped ahead to the last 5 minutes. Then back to the bomb not going off. And then, thankfully, called it a day.

I love indy flicks. But just because it's an indy is no reason not to say so when someone makes a flick with minimal worth.....and as a last btw...it ain't nece-celery so that ya can't tell the chicks ethnicity....in fact, you can eliminate several possibilities right off.

Quarantine (2008)

Absolutely Silly but not horrific if you have the slightest clue.

[1/10 · 12 January 2009]

btw...although some are calling this a "zombie" movie, there are in fact no zombies in it. Rabies DOES infect humans. The people who have been bitten in this movie are not dying and reanimating and trying to eat everyone --they are supposedly displaying the madness that strikes rabid dogs and running around trying to bite everyone just as the infected dogs will.

It's difficult to imagine the reasoning behind some of the positive reviews calling this silly plot line good or effective or even just frightening. If you missed the advertising and aren't aware it's supposed to be a horror flick the beginning won't clue you in. That's actually one of the good points of the film, a fairly realistically done beginning (informational news piece on the life of a firefighter at the fire station) that provides a few glimpses of some of the man characters and allows the development of some liking and sympathy for them before getting to the action. This segment concludes with the reporter and cameraman riding along with the crew on a call involving a paramedic situation (rather than a fire) that even incorporates the nice touch of the cameraman telling the reporter "I can't slide down that pole with this camera!" and the two detouring to a run down the stairs to jump on the fire truck. The only bad points to this part of the movie was that it went on a little too long and it's impossible to believe a professional cameraman can't figure out how to focus his camera. After the news duo and firemen arrive at the dilapidated apartment building things quickly go south. the film is so DARK that the supposed tears all the victims show can't be seen, and the supposed salivating is actually vomit or blood in most cases. This rabies is scary because it causes disease in minutes instead of in "months" (rabies actually takes 3-8 weeks to develop in most people, and that's do to the physical limits of the virus moving up nerves to reach the brain, which cannot be genetically modified). (And yes, a veterinarian would know that...veterinarians know more about diseases that spread from animals to humans than medical doctors do. They have to...they're the ones most at risk to catch those diseases.)

The CDC, working with the cops, somehow seals off the building (just after the fire department people and news crew get inside) because a man who lived there took a sick pet to the veterinarian and it "ran around biting all the other animals" who started "showing aggressiveness within an hour". Does anyone reading actually think sick animals run around in one big pen in the clinic instead of being kept in separate cages? Well, maybe the sick dog was running around the waiting room biting all the other animals being held by their owners? And of course not biting the owners.....? The CDC being notified and showing up the entire length of the country away THAT fast? For an unknown disease that only affects animals (remember, they said only the animals were showing aggressiveness)? Without the local public health people ever being called in? Let's not even mention that rabies doesn't usually take the furious form (like 'mad dogs') in humans. But it gets sillier.

The CDC comes in wearing moonsuits and start taking samples to see what is causing the problem...with a drill at least 10" long they sink full length in fromt he top of the victim's head! What were they trying to get a sample of, his tonsils? BTW, rabies in living humans can be diagnosed by a sample of cerebrospinal fluid, which only requires a needle and syringe. Oh yeah, and don't forget they handcuff the guy to whatever he's lying on first. at his waist level...so of course he sits up --AFTER they obviously drilled his brain into mush and bites the other CDC guy, unhampered by handcuffs.

No end to sheer stupidity yet. The child who owned the sick dog has had a slight fever for hours, but suddenly goes nuts and bites half her mom's face off...and the cop runs after her, kneels in front of her and assures her things are OK instead of shooting her from a distance --and of course gets bitten too. The building superintendent says he has in his apartment the key to a drain cover they can all escape through (in the basement) while standing in front of glass doors they just shut to keep out an infected guy, and gets bitten. The news crew runs up the stairs after getting the key, blathering about finding a way out that way although we all know by then its not possible, find an apartment full of rodent cages and clippings about doomsday cults and turn on a reel-to-reel tape at half speed but can't tell it's voices at half speed. And the absolute corker...the CDC prevent human egress but forgets all about the mice and rats that infest every slummo house in the L.A. area...