Inside (2007)

  This has been unavailable through Netflix for years, which is a damn shame.  I got it off a list of the 100 best horror movies ever made.  I don't think it was in the top ten but it's been so long I don't remember.

Sarah (Alysson Paradis) and her unborn baby survived a car crash that killed her husband four months ago.  Now, at Christmas, she is unable to look forward to the immanent birth of her child and instead just wants to be left alone.  Then a mysterious woman (Beatrice Dalle) shows up at her house in the middle of the night knowing way too much about Sarah and demanding entry.  Sarah calls the cops, who are overstretched because of immigration-related riots happening downtown, who send a pair over to do a cursory search.  But the woman is not to be defeated so easily.  She feels she is owed a debt and means to collect Sarah's child as payment.

This isn't based on a singular event but there was a rather famous case in America a year before this was released where a woman stalked another to murder her and steal her unborn baby.  I looked up the particulars on Wikipedia and it turns out this is common enough to get its own page under Fetal Abduction.  I'm pretty sure the movie is supposed to be a metaphor for immigrants or something, but I'm just going to go ahead and say it's Based on True Events.  Which is always scarier than swamp monsters or sentient pumpkin people.

Like it's not terrifying enough to be pregnant, now you have to worry about crazy bitches trying to cut you open with a pair of kitchen scissors.  (Sleep tight!)

This is a total gorefest, too, so if that sort of thing bothers you just keep walking.  There is nothing here for you.  Even I thought it was a little gratuitous towards the end.  Otherwise, this is a pretty standard home invasion film with a nice, tense atmosphere throughout.

Underworld (2003)

  I've never really cared for this franchise, though I've somehow ended up owning all the movies.  I don't think I ever paid for any, however.  They were either gifts or just ended up with me in the carnage of my break-ups.  So I'm going to give them one more shot and see if they've somehow improved with age.

Selene (Kate Beckinsale) is one of an elite group of vampires that hunt Lycans, the vampires' mortal enemies.  She discovers that the Lycans are tracking one particular human, Michael (Scott Speedman), which leads her to uncover one of the biggest secrets in the war:  the original werewolf leader of the rebellion, Lucian (Michael Sheen), didn't die but has been patiently planning the ultimate revenge on his former masters.

This movie has not gotten any better but I have matured enough to at least know what I don't like about it and why, as opposed to when I first saw it where I was just angry and couldn't articulate anything but that I was angry.

The writing is extremely lazy.  It's a very basic premise (werewolves vs vampires) that has been done over and over again since the old Universal horror days with the only "modern" update that the protagonist is a female action hero.  There were four writers according to the credits, with final screenwriting credit to Danny McBride (no, not the one you're thinking of.  Different guy, same name.)  McBride is the one I am blaming for this misogynistic claptrap masquerading as a badass heroine.

There are a ton of different types of vampire myths.  Every franchise has handled them a little differently.  Sometimes they can walk in daylight, sometimes they have reflections, sometimes they have fake Southern accents.  But the writing is what communicates these differences.  Underworld doesn't specify any particular qualities of its vampires.  It just leaves it for the audience to assume "vampire" carries a particular set of traits.  But if so, then the actions of the characters need to conform to those traits.  Only Selene doesn't.

Erika (Sophia Myles) is shown jumping straight from a kneeling position to the ceiling of a room, hanging there like a hissing lamp when Michael wakes up in the vampire mansion.  Okay, so that would imply vampires have super strength and speed.  But Selene can't catch up with Michael as he's running for an elevator in the safe house.  Why?  He's just a human (at that point).  She should have taken two steps and had him by the scruff of the neck.  Then, a little later in the same fight sequence, she takes some damage to the collarbone from a sword.  A few moments later, she is still shown to be bleeding, to the point where she passes out and loses control of the car, sending her and Michael into the river.  Okay, so no superpowered healing?  No "hey, can I borrow your arm?  I need a snack to fix this damage"?  A vampire suffering from blood loss is just a hungry vampire, not a damsel in distress.

But again, lazy writing.  McBride and co. wanted to make it clear that Selene and Micheal need each other.  Instead of making Michael smarter or more resourceful, however, they just made Selene weaker and dependent on him.  What vampire needs mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?  What vampire drowns?  The whole point is that they are already dead.  If the Underworld vampires aren't actually undead, just suffering from a virus or something (which has been done), that has to be communicated to the audience.  Otherwise it looks like a shoddy plot hole or worse, like forcing your main character into the "tough but vulnerable" trope and having her run to a father surrogate every time she gets in the least amount of trouble.  Selene is a fetish being sold as a protagonist and that's gross.

The Boss Baby (2017)

  This is another film I can't believe got nominated for an Oscar.  In this case, it was Best Animated Feature, which it didn't have a shot of winning against Pixar anyhow, but still.

Tim (Miles Bakshi) has a perfect life for a seven-year-old with two adoring parents (Jimmy Kimmel and Lisa Kudrow) doting on him constantly.  Then a new baby (Alec Baldwin) arrives and Tim is immediately on guard.  He quickly learns that the baby has been sent to infiltrate his home as part of an intelligence gathering mission to stop the company his parents work for from releasing a new breed of puppy to the market.  The baby corporation fears that the amount of love in the world will be taken over by the puppy industry and has dispatched a team of agents to commit industrial espionage.

If that sounds like a totally soulless premise for a kids movie, congratulations, you are smarter than the executives at DreamWorks.  There's nothing really wrong here, per se.  It's competently animated and voiced.  It just lacks any sort of joy or life.  There are so many good animated film out there, it would really be criminal to waste your time on this one.

Wonder (2017)

  This was nominated for Best Hair and Makeup and I honestly wonder why.  The facial prostheses don't look all that extensive but without them, you wouldn't really have a movie I guess.

August Pullman (Jacob Tremblay) was born with a rare genetic disorder that required him to have 27 surgeries as a child and left him with severe facial scarring.  After reaching the limits of her homeschooling abilities, Auggie's mom (Julia Roberts) decides to put him in what the promotional materials called "a mainstream school" but what is really an extremely elite private academy run by the world's most understanding and compassionate headmaster (Mandy Patinkin).  There, Auggie tries to make friends among the kids but still feels incredibly isolated because of his differences.  He is finally accepted when the children learn to look past the superficial and see him for what's really important:  his money.

This is Mask for the Upper-East-Side set.  Wealth and privilege are threaded all through this "inspiring" story.  It's never stated what his dad (Owen Wilson) does, but he makes enough money to be the single income bringer while his wife homeschools.  There's also the 27 surgeries, the prep school, and oh yeah, their other kid, Via (Izabela Vidovic), who also attends an expensive performing arts high school.  

There are no consequences here, no real struggle with anything deeper than "what if other kids are mean to me because of how I look?" which I get, that's a topic to be addressed but this movie is so heavily weighed down with false sympathy that it's unbearable to watch.  Everyone around Auggie has the patience of Job and no one ever calls him out for being a spoiled self-centered brat.  Which he is.  But he's handled with kid gloves constantly while being told he's being treated like a "normal" kid.  At no point does he experience character growth or any sense that the world doesn't revolve around him because of his deformity.

Can we stop with these bullshit, sappy, "inspirational" films about rich white people being rich and white?  I'm so over it.

Into Eternity: A Film for the Future (2010)

  This is a great documentary.  It even has pooping moose!  (I realize that is not a draw for some of you, but as a person who hates winter and avoids anything cold, this was the only chance for me to ever see a moose in something approximating its natural habitat.)

Filmmaker Michael Madsen (not the guy from the Tarantino movies) takes a look a the as-yet-unfinished nuclear waste disposal facility, Onkalo, in Finland.  In particular, he raises the questions of how we responsibly communicate with people a hundred thousand years in the future, when the waste material will be safe once more, when we can't guarantee a common language or even if humans will be the only species to find these sites.  100,000 years ago, humans were barely even a species, much less the dominant one on Earth.  Who knows what ten centuries will bring?

This was our companion piece to 2001 and I really liked this one a lot better.  There's a lyrical, haunting quality to this film that stays long after it's over and I honestly can't say enough nice things about it.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

  It's unpopular opinion time!  I hate Stanley Kubrick.  Just hate him.  And all his films.  Yes, I've seen all of them.  (Except Barry Lyndon.)  No, I didn't like Dr. Strangelove.  Yes, I'm sure.  I think The Shining is overrated and only worth watching for Jack Nicholson.  If someone cut it down to a 30-minute short, it might be a good film.

I know this is supposed to be a classic of sci-fi.  Arthur C. Clarke weighed in on the script and for 1968 this was as accurate a possibility of the near future as humans could get.  That doesn't stop it from being monumentally boring.  Yes, even the part with the killer robot.  Boring.  If I didn't have to watch it for school, I'd never give it another shot.  (Tried to watch it before and hated it so much I couldn't finish it.)

Beginning with the dawn of man, the whole of human history is witnessed by ancient monoliths from the first use of tools to interplanetary travel.  Humans struggle to discover the meaning of the monoliths each time they are unearthed, attempting to keep it from their enemies while trying to understand the alien intelligence required to create these things.

It's boring.  Skip it and watch Close Encounters instead.

Chasing Coral (2017)

  This was not nominated for an Oscar and I think that's a crying shame.  It really could have benefited from the signal boost.

I'm not going to lie, this documentary depressed the fuck out of me.  I had to go take a stress nap after I watched it.  It's about a group of divers concerned about the widespread death of coral reefs so they start looking into the issue only to find it's like three concurrent issues, all caused by humans, and maybe all irreversible at this point.

Climate Change:  It's Not Just Fucking Things Up on Land

I'm sure that was a rejected tagline.  It's on Netflix and it's beautifully shot and really moving, but seriously, block off some time afterwards to do something nice for yourself.  And maybe go to their site and find out what, if anything, we can do to stop this shit before it's too late.  Jesus.

Lou (2017)

  This was nominated for Best Animated Short this year but lost to Dear Basketball.  It's a Pixar short so it was packaged with Cars 3, which was not nominated for Best Animated Feature so I still haven't watched it.

A monster lives in the box of Lost and Found at an elementary school.  He goes around after recess and collects the left behind or the out of reach and stores it safely in his box until the kids come back out to be reunited.  He is opposed by the class bully who just takes stuff and doesn't give it back.  After a confrontation, Lou reveals the thing the bully lost and uses it to strike a deal.  The bully will return all the kids' lost property before he receives his own back.

This packs a lot of empathy into a seven-minute wordless short.  That's really the genius of Pixar.  It's become like a shorthand.  "You just got Pixar-ed" is not a phrase but it really should be.  For those times when you're suckered by The Feels into believing that the world is not just a huge garbage fire that will inevitably consume everyone and everything into nothingness.  I hope you get Pixar-ed today.

The Silent World (1956)

  Here's one from a couple of weeks back in my Cinema of Exploration class.

Jacques Cousteau takes viewers aboard the Calypso to explore the hidden wonders of the deep using the most cutting edge technology available in 1956: the Aqualung.  It's also notable for having been filmed in Technicolor, as most documentaries were not.

The pros are that it's like going back in time to when the ocean was nearly unspoiled.  The wildlife and corals on display are beautiful and the camera work is really well edited.

The cons, however, are numerous.  First, there's the infamous baby whale scene.  While chasing a pod of sperm whales, the Calypso accidentally runs over a baby, cutting it badly with the propeller.  They harpoon it and put it out of its misery, which seems like the humane thing to do, until you read that Cousteau and filmmaker Louis Malle staged the whole thing based on an incident that happened years before.  So they DELIBERATELY ran over, harpooned, and shot a baby whale so they could get it on film.  Then used the dead whale as bait to lure sharks, who were then pulled aboard and slaughtered in a frenzy of violence.  That is a level of animal cruelty that seems psychopathic today.

They also use dynamite in a reef --for science-- in order to collect specimens of all the fish, hack off chunks of coral --for science-- and harass sea turtles --for fun.

If anything, this documentary serves as a reminder of how much conservation efforts and public awareness have changed in sixty years.  My mom remembers being shown this in school and thinking how wonderful it would be to live underwater.  I couldn't get through it without thinking how Cousteau would be crucified by animal rights activists today.  Imagine what will happen in another fifty years.

Ultimate Avengers II (2006)

I missed last weekend because I took an impromptu trip to Colorado to visit my boyfriend.  But it's Spring Break so I'm going to make it up to you by posting all week long!

  I feel bad for picking on it, but this is nowhere near as good as any of the Marvel live-action films.  Maybe if I hadn't just watched Black Panther this wouldn't be so bad but the comparison is not kind.

After being defeated by the Avengers in Part I, the evil Chitauri/Nazi Herr Kleiser (Jim Ward) sets his sights on the giant ore of vibranium in Wakanda.  Prince T'Challa (Jeffrey D. Sams) reaches out to Captain America (Justin Gross) but he is deep in a depressive spiral and no-one can seem to shake him out of it.  Fury (Andre Ware) puts Black Widow (Olivia d'Abo) in charge of the team but she finds it hard to control a bunch of superpowered egomaniacs.

It's just...not good.  I feel like there's this weird mirror where Marvel live-action movies kick the shit out of DC's but the animated ones are the exact opposite.  I've heard nothing but praise about all the DC Universe animated films, even though I've only seen a couple.  Maybe someday I'll have the time to give them a real shot.  The Marvel ones are going to be a hard pass for me, however.

Heroin(e) (2017)

  This was nominated for Best Documentary Short but also did not win.

The film follows three women --Jan Rader, Deputy Fire Chief, Patricia Keller, Drug Court judge, and Necia Freeman, leader of the Brown Bag Ministry-- as they try and minimize the opioid epidemic ravaging Huntington, West Virginia.  Rader pushes her firefighters and EMTs to use new treatments for overdoses, trying to combat the cynicism of people who see ODs as wastes of time and resources. Keller is firm but fair in her sentencing, taking a genuine interest in the lives of convicted in the hopes of turning them around.  Freeman gives food, encouragement, and support along with brown bag lunches to the working girls of Huntington's streets, many of whom are also addicts.

Honestly, anything dealing with drug abuse and overdoses is goddamn depressing.  How these women have managed to hold on to any hope that things will get better is beyond me.  It is truly heroic.

If you need a little bit of a lift, like you want to acknowledge that the world is shitty but still have kind of a silver lining, give this documentary a look.  It's only about 40 minutes.

Victoria and Abdul (2017)

  This was nominated for Best Costumes and Best Hair and Makeup but didn't win either.

People ask me why I watch the Oscar nominees since most of the films chosen aren't in any way popular or generally in a genre that I like.  And I always answer, Because some times there are pleasant surprises like this one.

Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) has lingered on as the reigning monarch, outlasting a husband and 20 prime ministers, but the loneliness and isolation took its toll, turning her into a sad, grumpy old woman.  Abdul (Ali Fazal) is a lowly Indian clerk chosen somewhat at random (he was tall) to present a ceremonial coin to Victoria.  He is warned not to make eye contact while presenting but couldn't help himself.  The queen finds him charming and thus sparks one of the weirdest friendships in British history.  Her doctor (Paul Reid) and head of household (Tim Pigott-Smith) are baffled.  Her son and heir (Eddie Izzard) is annoyed and her Prime Minister (Michael Gambon) is just over it.  No one wants Victoria interested in anything, much less her Indian empire since they've basically been waiting for her to die, but interested she becomes.

I'm going to warn you now because this is based on a true story.  It does not have a happy ending.  It is surprisingly funny and sweet, but kind of a downer.  I wouldn't buy it but I was glad to have seen it, especially since it is so different from what I normally watch.

Kong: Skull Island (2017)

  This was nominated for Best Visual Effects but it didn't win.  And I didn't do an Oscar ceremony recap this year so I'm sorry for anyone who was looking forward to that.  It's one of the many things that slipped away from me.  (Two more months.)

An entrepreneur (John Goodman) cajoles an overworked Senator (Richard Jenkins) into letting his team of scientists piggyback on a geological survey of a previously unknown island in the Pacific.  He requisitions a military escort of soldiers on their way home from Viet Nam, led by the disillusioned Colonel Packard (Samuel L. Jackson), a jaded former SAS tracker, James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston), and a war photographer, Mason Weaver (Brie Larson), to also join the expedition.  Ostensibly, their plan is to use explosions and radar to map below the surface of the island but this is disrupted by the arrival of a gigantic, pissed off ape who destroys their helicopters and strands them in various places around the island.  Packard is all for finding his men and having a showdown with the creature, but Conrad and Weaver aren't so certain this is the best plan.

You already know that this isn't great.  It's yet another attempt by a studio to forge a cinematic universe, this time based around King Kong and Godzilla.  Ambitious, sure, but was anyone really clamoring for that to happen?

I had bought it before the nominations were announced because Tom Hiddleston is in it, but he's honestly not great here.  There's not a lot for him to do.  Brie Larson fares a little better but not by much.  The standout here for me was Toby Kebbell, who plays one of the soldiers and also does the mo-cap for Kong.  I've seen him in a couple of other small parts but he's rapidly becoming one of those Actors to Watch.

The special features were pretty entertaining but there's no distracting from the fact that this is just a popcorn summer flick with no real staying power.  Rent it on a rainy day and then forget about it.

The Third Man (1949)

  This was not for my film class, but extra credit in my Dangerous Art class.  We're looking at the propaganda of the Cold War and this film was assigned to let us see the levels of paranoia and distrust immediately following World War II.

Novelist Hollie Martin (Joseph Cotten) has come to Vienna to meet his friend, Harry Lime (Orson Wells), only to discover that Harry is dead, killed by a hit-and-run.  Hollie is also shocked to discover his buddy was involved in post-war illegal smuggling on the black market.  He doesn't believe it and works to clear his friend's name, running through a host of shady characters before stumbling across a bigger conspiracy than he could have imagined.

Joseph Cotten isn't my favorite leading man by a long shot, but he is very sympathetic here and that's what really drives the film.  Alida Valli looked a little too much like every other dark-haired European heroine for me to engage with her character.  I kept getting shades of Ingrid Bergman or Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo.   This really is just a fantastic noir that everyone should see at least once in their lifetime.  It won an Oscar for best black-and-white cinematography (the category was split between B&W and color for a while) and was also nominated for Best Director and Best Editing.

Kon-Tiki (1950)

  More cinema of exploration!  This was the companion piece to Aguirre. 

In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl and five other Norwegian scientists set out to prove Heyerdahl's theory that Pacific islands were settled by early South American natives, rather than the contemporary theory that they had emigrated from Asia.  His crew built a raft from balsa wood, ignoring Western advice to follow as closely as possible examples of native engineering.  They set sail from Peru with no propulsion but the wind.  After 101 days, they reached their first island.

Heyerdahl's theory has been disproven by other scientific enquiries but this is still a fun documentary.  The crew extolls the virtue of living on the open ocean, where food literally falls from the sky in abundance.  There are some minor issues, like some of the film stock being ruined by water, and almost losing two of the crew because they misjudged how fast the raft was actually traveling, but they mostly stay pretty sanguine.  After all, it wasn't like they were completely adrift.  Onboard were five radios that kept them in contact with the outside world with regular frequency, and they had been supplied with MREs by the U.S. Army, eager to have test subjects on this new technology.

Parts of this film also verge into a colonizer mindset when they hit some of the inhabited islands.  And there's some footage of their interaction with the wildlife that could have benefited from modern understanding.  For example, we now know that whale sharks are filter feeders and -while gigantic- pose no real threats to humans, making the Kon-Tiki's crew's paranoia about being followed by one seem silly.  The whale shark was probably just curious and absolutely did not deserve to have some freaked out Norwegian stab it in the head with a harpoon.  The shark was fine but quickly abandoned its explorations.  Its smaller cousins were not so lucky, having been hauled up by the crew to die on the decks in the dozens, again under the misapprehension that shark = evil.

It's still an interesting and lively film, helped along by the droll English narration.  We were originally supposed to also watch the 2012 dramatized remake but it got dropped from the syllabus for time constraints.  This is free with Amazon Prime, so if you have a Prime account (or someone's access) and you really need a shot of the tropics during this long, cold winter, give it a watch.  It's only about 55 minutes and it won an Oscar for Best Documentary once.

Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)

  This is from my film class.  As you might imagine, given that I didn't even post anything yesterday, I am woefully behind on my Oscar nominees.  I actually bought a bunch in the hopes of getting to them but that's most likely not going to happen.

I can't express how ready I am for school to be over.  People keep asking me what I plan to do once I graduate.  Here's my plan:  nothing.  I am going to do nothing.  And it is going to be so fucking glorious.  I am going to nothing so hard that it might permanently alter the balance of entropy.

Anyway, Aguirre.

In the late 1500s, Gonzalo Pizzaro (Alejandro Repullés) dispatches a team of conquistadores into the Amazonian jungle to search for El Dorado.  Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), the second-in-command, stages a coup when the leader (Ruy Guerra) wants to turn back to rejoin Pizarro.  Aguirre leads the increasingly desperate party deeper and deeper into the jungle on a megalomaniacal quest to dethrone the Spanish empire and conquer the New World.

This is directed by Werner Herzog and apparently suffered from a host of backstage dramas and intrigues.  Like, the guy Herzog paid for the sound recording just took the money and ran, leaving the film to rerecord all the dialogue in post.  Kinski apparently refused to read his lines unless he got a boatload more money, so it's not his voice in the final film.  Herzog and Kinski had screaming fights on set just so Kinski didn't play the character like a total scenery-chewing cartoon villain.  They filmed it in the actual Amazon, with all the attendant issues there.  Oh, and my favorite, Herzog had paid a guy a bunch of money for crates of monkeys but the guy had double-sold them and was going to rip Herzog off, so Herzog pretended to be a vet and told the guy the monkeys were sick and needed to be quarantined, then just took them.

Those stories are actually way more entertaining than the film itself, which is mostly a depressing slog of colonialism and mania.  Herzog is clearly not on the side of the colonizers, which is nice, but that's mostly because he's more interested in seeing people implode and destroy themselves.  If you do decide to watch it, get ready for long takes of nothing much happening interspersed with Kinski being weird and moments of the bleakest humor you can imagine.  I had to stop and take a nap halfway through.  Still, it's a classic...?