I said it when I saw V for Vendetta and I said it to myself over and over as I watched Ninja Assassin: James McTeigue is not a good director.  While I find V's direction to be lifeless and bland, Ninja's is downright disappointing. In the hands of a good director who had flair and style Ninja Assassin could have been a great action movie.  Instead, with McTeigue behind the camera, the film is full of missed opportunities.  An example is a scene where our main male character Rain an an evil ninja are fighting in the dark and the only light is from a flashlight our female lead is shining around the room.  This could have been a great scene with flashes of movement and energy but instead it is just boring and mundane.

Now I know some people might disagree but I couldn't help but think of Ultraviolet while watching this.  A lot of people didn't like Ultraviolet but they are all wrong.  Ultraviolet was awesome and my man Kurt Wimmer could have made this flashlight fight scene look totally bad ass. I'm reminded of the fight scene in Equilibrium that was in total darkness and only lit by gun mussel flashes.

Regardless, the male lead Rain does a pretty decent job.  He isn't the best actor in the world or anything but he's entertaining and seems to be doing most of the fighting himself (even if there are times when it seems pretty clear that the chain he's swinging around is computer generated).  The whole time I couldn't help but think of his rivalry with Stephen Colbert.Unfortunately, huge chunks of the film are taken up with flashbacks to the character's upbringing by the ninjas.  This means that other actors are playing the role besides Rain and they are your typical crappy kid actors.

The film isn't terrible but it could have been much better.

two thumbs up

Oh silly ninjas
Why is your director bad?
Go get my man Kurt.

I like low budget films and I like scary films. I liked this film.  However, it could be much better.

It is the film about a couple who are haunted. It is told through "home video" footage that the couple recorded in the style of Blair Witch.

There is a real tension in the film as the couple set the camera down and record the room as they sleep. You know something is going to happen but the question is, what and when? It is pretty tense. 

However, in establishing the low budget aesthetic, they perhaps embrace it too far.  This could have been a much better film that really encouraged repeat viewings by including subtle hints of ghost activity throughout the film.  I'm thinking about something like what was done in Fight Club or something like the alleged "ghost" in "Three Men and a Baby." The film could have digitally added in little things that wouldn't all be picked up on during the first viewing but as far as I can tell there's no evidence that they did that.

Instead it is a rather predictable film with a bit of creepiness in it.  The only notable thing is the credits or lack of them which I'm curious how the various unions let them get away with.

The other main problem is that the woman of the thing is entirely too weak. She spends most of the film cowering and whimpering. Now, I might do that if I were in her position but her lack of any agency combined with her boyfriend's assertion that he can fix it and that he doesn't want this happening in his house to his girlfriend is more than a bit barbaric.

three thumbs up

I always feel like
Somebody is watching me
I've no privacy

I like zombie movies but I wasn't really looking forward to this. For whatever reason it just didn't speak to me. When I did get around to seeing it, I was glad I did.  This is a pretty entertaining zombie movie.

It isn't perfect, though.  The main actor, Jesse Eisenberg, looks and behaves so much like Michael Cera that it is distracting. To make things worse, the main female lead is Emma Stone who costarred in Superbad with Cera. So any time Eisenberg is on screen with Stone I couldn't help but be distracted and wonder if the producers of the film really wanted to cast Cera but couldn't afford him.

The film also is a bit slow to really get started.  There's a flashback to how Eisenberg's character first encountered a zombie that is just slow and not all that interesting. There's also this kind of series of cute meets between Eisenberg's character and Stone's that are sort of entertaining but pointless since the commercials have shown all of them together which means that viewers know that they are going to team up rather than be at odds.

The film also uses one of my pet peeves: letters floating in mid-air for no reason.  I hate when Fringe does it (I keep waiting for someone on Fringe to point at the floating letters and freak out "aaaaaahhhhh") and I didn't like it here either. 

Once it does get started though the film is pretty sweet. Bill Murray's appearance is pure gold. The climax in an amusement park is pretty cool and not one that I recall seeing before.  It is disappointing that the film falls back on the damsel in distress motif  and that a kid is the cause of the problem once again but I can kind of overlook it because the zombie killing is so much fun.

four thumbs up

Couldn't get Cera
But zombies make up for it
Kid to blame again....

Surrogates started out as a comic book.  Even though I'm a comic book nerd I didn't read Surrogates.  I just couldn't get past the artwork.  I didn't like it at all. It looked to me like a bad impression of Bill Sienkiewicz or Ben Templesmith.  The entire first issue is online so you can judge for yourself.

The film reminded me of a cross between the I Robot film and Wall-E.  It is set in a world where something like 98% of all people stay at home and use lifelike robots that they mentally control to go out into the world for them.  The main problem is that the world of the film doesn't go far enough into the issues of what a world like that would be like. 

First, that 98% of all adults could afford a fairly realistic-looking robot seems highly improbable.  There could have been more done with class issues but there really isn't. There is a group of anti-surrogate people but they mostly seem to be ideologically separated rather than economically.

Second, in a world where a robot is your representation of yourself to the world, the robots are surprisingly tame.  There's that one scene which is in one of the commercials where someone has a robot body that is jet black with white hair but that's it.  One would think that people would go a lot further with experimentation and have bodies that were more inhuman in appearance or with multiple limbs.

Third, in a world where it is proven that people can take over other people's robots, security is still biometric in nature with people getting face scans.  Ummm... really?  That doesn't seem like a big security risk to anyone?

I could go on but that really isn't the films downfall. What is the downfall is that the film tries to be raising questions about humanity but unlike Blade Runner, it doesn't really raise questions, it just gives answers. Like Wall-E it just takes for granted that a mediated, largely sedentary existence is bad -- even though they tell us that crime is practically non-existent and there hasn't been a murder in years.  There's no evidence that sitting around all day hooked into these machines is making people fat (in fact one of the only people who doesn't use a surrogate is one of the few overweight people in the film.  I'll let you guess what role the pudgy, unkempt guy plays.  If you guessed computer guy you guessed correction...)  So what is the problem?

They tried to make Bruce Willis look younger and the effect at times looks kind of plasticy but I couldn't really tell if that was on purpose in order to emphasize the artificiality of the robot or it was just bad.  What was undeniably bad were the scenes where the surrogates go all Terminator and start doing super-human moves. It looks obviously like the stunt people are being pulled into the air rather than jumping.

one thumb up

Although Surrogates
Wants to be like Blade Runner
It's like I Robot

Tarantino's latest film is just odd. It exists in a kind of cartoon, comic book world that existed before America actually entered WWII. At least on the covers of those early comic books the heroes would go over to Europe and kick Hitler's butt and end the war.  At that time, while the war was actually going on, those comics served as a kind of propaganda and as a way to raise moral.  But to make such a film now, more than 60 years after the end of the war? It just seems odd.

And the oddness of the film extends beyond the way the film rewrites history. It is pervasive throughout the film starting in the opening credits.  In the opening credits Tarantino uses a number of fonts for the names of actors and they aren't all in a similar font family and there doesn't really seem to be a reason for it.  Now noticing that the fonts on the opening titles change might be a small thing but it isn't an accident.  Things like that don't just happen.  So someone, probably Tarantino himself, decided, "let's use a different font here" and I don't really know why.  Then later on when the Nazis are gathering there are a couple times where names of historically well known Nazis are put on the screen looking like the names were written in chalk or something.  Why? Who knows. There is also no real reason for why we even need to know the names of these people. Like I said, it is just odd.

The acting is fine. The actors who had multiple languages to speak did a good job.  I have to hand it to Tarantino: I like the women he casts.  I'm less sure of their roles in the films or even why their characters exist, but they sure are purdy...I didn't have any issues with the job any of the women or the men did in the film eexcept for the appearance of Mike Meyers in one scene. That he's in makeup doesn't help. It is clear that it is him beneath the makeup and so I just kept waiting for him to start using a funny voice from Austin Powers or something. Samuel L. Jackson also does a voiceover in the film and it is equally distracting.  His voice is so distinctive and he's strongly associated with Tarantino so I kept waiting for him to start cursing and using racial epithets. Of course perhaps both of these say more about me than Tarantino.  Perhaps I'm just on some level wanting him to do the same things he did in the past.

This desire or expectation of Tarantino to do the things he has done over and over again also comes up early on in the film when the main bad guy is talking to a French peasant. I kept waiting for one of them to echo the Bruce WIllis and Ving Rhames scene in Pulp Fiction and "go medieval" on someone's ass. There is a character introduced in this scene and then we jump forward in time a few years and are immediately told that this actress is supposed to be the same person.  But then later in the film we are shown a flashback to when that character was introduced.  Ummm.... why did we need that? You told us from the start that this was the same person so that flashback didn't clarify anything.  We saw the acress' reaction so we know what she was supposed to be feeling. 

This isn't to say that the film is bad. It is just odd.

three thumbs up

Motherfuckin' odd
What is he trying to do?
I got no idea

Sometimes watching a good film is pretty frustrating because as good as that film is, while watching it, you can't help but see how it could have been a great film.  Vantage Point is one of those film.

The film is, as the title suggests, told from several different vantage points.  The problem is, however, that there's not a whole lot of point in it.  The plot isn't all that complicated and it isn't as if each retelling of the first 15 minutes of the film is all that different.  To top it off, at the end of each retelling they do an irritating rewinding of the film. As if we were too dumb to realize what was going on -- especially when they then put up a black screen and tell us what time it is.  Which brings up another problem: the first time they rewind things they say "X minutes ago" but the rest of the time they show the time.  You would think that someone would have said, "Maybe we should have some consistency in the way we do this?"

Despite this, the film is pretty entertaining.  The President is shot and the plot surrounds the attempt to figure out what is going on.  If the commercials hadn't given away a big twist the film would have been much more interesting but still it is interesting to try to figure out how they are going to save the President. This is also another one of the problems of the film: the film is a lot better once the flashbacks are done with.  Especially since the flashbacks all pretty much take place in the same location so we are forced to hear a mayor give the same speech over and over. 

Forest Whitaker plays the everyman and adds a bit of working man street-level view to the film. He does a pretty good job but the part is hurt by him happening to intersect with all the characters at the most climactic moment.  It is just a bit too coincidental.  They could have played this a bit more for laughs or something and made his part more useful.  Similarly, Sigourney Weaver is all over the commercials but her part is pretty small. I would have liked to have seen more with her and I would bet that there's a few scenes of her on the cutting room floor.  Of course that would have added even more flashbacks to the film. 

If there was more variety to the flashbacks, or even a reason for them to really be there it would have been much better.  If they would have been more subjective it would have been more interesting as well. Perhaps it could have been told by the people after-the-fact or something but that would have changed the ending.

five thumbs up

Needs more Sigourney
A kid ruins everything
I hate kids so much...

Is this the best movie ever made?  Perhaps. 

Probably not though.

I did love it though. 

Why?

Because it is horrible and preachy and thinks everyone who disagrees with its message is just ignorant.

OK, so this is another Christian movie.  The premise of this one is that in the 1890s a guy writes a book that at one point includes a line that implies that although Jesus is great, it is still good for people to do good things even if they don't do them because Jesus told them to do it.  One of the author's college strongly disagrees and says that even if you are the best person on the planet you will still go to Hell if you don't worship Jesus.  So right off the bat you know this is going to be good. Nothing like saying that people like Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, and the billions of people who never even heard of Jesus are in Hell or going to Hell for the foundation of a good family film...

So the guy who opposes the book claims that implying that you can be a good person without worshiping Jesus just happens to have built a time machine that he uses to send the author into the modern era.  Once the author gets to the modern era the real fun begins.  We are told that secular film and television are tools of the devil, that if science contradicts the Bible it is the Bible that must be wrong, that manikins wearing revealing clothing will make men horny,  that television showing people kissing is corrupting society, and that modern society is just as evil as the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Of course, like all good Christian films such as the Left Behind films and the films just like the Left Behind films that were made by the same people who made the Left Behind films, this film also treats everyone who isn't a devout Christian as just ignorant and in one case not even knowing who this Jesus guy was. 

Now to be fair, the film is also hyper-critical of Christians who aren't devout enough.  It has a scene where the Church group goes to a movie and the guy freaks out when someone takes the Lord's name in vain. He is dismayed that not everyone in the church is beating down the doors trying to convert everyone else, and looks down its nose at churches that have things like golf leagues and take kids to theme parks. 

At some point I was wondering, "OK, these are the opinions of this guy from the 1890s. So maybe the filmmaker doesn't want us to take everything the character says as being what the filmmaker things we should do. Maybe I'm supposed to find the character's opinions as over-the-top as I do."  But I don't really see any evidence of that. 

five thumbs up

So over the top
its the best thing ever seen
if you're blasphemous

I like this movie a lot.  Or rather I like the first 3/4 of it a lot.  Although a lot of people on IMDB criticize it for not explaining things I think it falls apart when it starts to explain too much.

The film is really low budget but it has a great simple plot that doesn't need a big budget and is really well shot.  The plot is basically that the friends, co-workers, and ex-lover of a woman are being killed.  Less basically, the people are being killed by themselves.  I don't mean that they are committing suicide.  No, they are being killed by people who look just like themselves. 

The question that is going throughout the film is "what the hell is going on?" and it is that sense of mystery that makes the film work so well.  I really wish that they hadn't explained anything.  It would have been a much more powerful film if it has just ended with everyone saying, "What the hell just happened?"  Instead they do try to explain it. 

Now they don't explain it entirely.  There is a sense of mystery about it but they do explain it a little bit.  The explanation they give, to get a bit spoilery here, is like The Forgotten but without any children which makes it better.  Like The Forgotten the explanation is less than satisfying to me at least. 

Four thumbs up

The killer in me...
Is disarming, so to speak
Just don't explain it

I got this from Netflix expecting a creature feature.  The story is advertised as a group of people shipwrecked on an island where the only food is mushrooms and they turn you into a mushroom person.  While this is technically correct, it is also a bit of a misrepresentation.  It is actually more of a Lord of the Flies-esque story about what happens when people start to turn against one another.

It is pretty entertaining if a bit slow.  The mushroom people are actually pretty underplayed.  I wish there would have been more of them in the film.  As it is, the film is more about the people and how they deal with being shipwrecked and facing starvation.  The problem is that none of the people are particularly likable.  It is more soap operatic than it needs to be.  There are people turning against one another, and people stealing food, but all the while you are just waiting for the mushroom people to show up.

One thing about it that is interesting is the framing device that is used to tell the story.  It is really quite noir in tone.  It reminded me of Sunset Boulevard in tone.  I've seen a number of black and white Japanese monster films and this is teh first one I can recall drawing on the noir tradition in such a direct fashion.

two thumbs up

He's quite a fungi
Oh what a punster I am
I'm such a fun guy...