Iro's Film Diary

You may be right. I'm just used to using it because it's a broadly descriptive term that I reckon fits regardless of context. An idiosyncrasy, perhaps.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

A PC idiosyncrasy. Which is fine, it's your reviews, but seeing a hooker called a sex worker made me chuckle a bit.

I think "sex worker" is the proper term, while "hooker" is derogatory. Could be wrong though.

*AHEM* The correct term is INTIMACY TECHNICIAN. Tsh.

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Movie Reviews | Anime Reviews
Top 100 Action Movie Countdown (2015): List | Thread
"Well, at least your intentions behind the UTTERLY DEVASTATING FAULTS IN YOUR LOGIC are good." - Captain Steel

I stand corrected.

#374 - Blood Father
Jean-François Richet, 2016



After a young woman accidentally shoots her gangster boyfriend, she must go on the run with her estranged ex-con father.

It's hard to think of a much more egregious example of stunt-casting than Mel Gibson's leading role in Blood Father, especially when the film as a whole seems to be built in response to his more controversial real-life actions. This extends from incorporating aspects into his character's bleak back-story (his first scene involves him recounting his wasted life at an AA meeting) to having him symbolically reject his most notorious shortcomings (most notably when he criticises an old friend for selling Nazi memorabilia). On one level, this does come across as a transparent attempt at rehabilitating Gibson's image that borders on hollow gimmickry, but on another level the question of rehabilitation is practically irrelevant here. Blood Father is less interested in giving Gibson any kind of public redemption than it is in telling a lean and straightforward story that may be constrained a little by its B-movie status but demonstrates enough depth and talent within its lean running time to raise it well above average.

That's not to say that Gibson doesn't work in the role - regardless of whether or not he's personally as sincere as his character is, he still fills out the outline with the appropriate combination of world-weariness and righteousness as he does what he can for his daughter. Erin Moriarty manages to hold her own as the daughter in question and their scenes together have believable father-daughter chemistry in terms of both sharp-tongued bickering and more emotionally fragile heart-to-hearts. This could have been poorly handled, but the writing is there to back it up. It really does need to be as the film doesn't really play out like much of an action thriller save for a handful of intense but generally brief scenes (all of which are handled with sufficient technical aplomb). This does not strike me as a significant shortcoming - the minimal moments of action do help to keep the film in check and encourage it to be more interesting in terms of substance. As a result, Blood Father ended up surpassing my modest expectations, if not by too much. I may not be willing to take it too seriously as a comeback vehicle for Gibson (especially when considering the moments that can't help but feel like deliberately overt references to Gibson's off-screen history), but I don't think that anyone should.

Seems interesting.

#375 - Tickled
David Farrier and Dylan Reeve, 2016



A documentary about New Zealand journalist David Farrier and his increasingly troubling investigation into a sport known as "competitive endurance tickling".

If you have somehow managed to avoid hearing anything at all about Tickled, then I'm seriously asking you to reconsider reading the rest of this review. It's not like finding out the main hook of this film ahead of time is going to totally spoil the experience, but I imagine going in as cold as possible is going to be quite the experience. Even with knowledge of what Tickled really entails underneath its vaguely amusing surface, there's no denying that the film makes for a genuinely unsettling experience. The quest for the truth is presented as plainly as possible without need for flashy visuals, though it's got an interesting stylistic touch in featuring an appropriately foreboding soundtrack composed by Primer creator Shane Carruth. While it's not exactly revolutionary in terms of its technique, Tickled proves watchable (if uncomfortable) viewing that is troubling not necessarily because of the tickling (the makers even interview an actual tickling fetishist in the name of providing a balanced portrait of the subject, though I find said fetishist being credited as an executive producer to be a little questionable) but because of the ways in which it isn't about the tickling.

#376 - Noroît
Jacques Rivette, 1976



When her brother is killed by the leader of a gang of pirates, a young woman decides to infiltrate the gang and seek revenge.

Rivette once again offers his own distinctive spin on a familiar genre - in Noroît, he takes on a tale of swashbuckling pirates and turns it into another slow but visually fantastic piece of work. While the staggering length and pace make watching Noroît a bit of a struggle, it still goes through a solid tale of vengeance that once again emphasises unusual female characters (if anything, all the character genders seem to be deliberate inversions of those found in more conventional pirate stories). It may not feel like it needs to be as long as it is, but it's still got a decent plot full of somewhat unpredictable twists and languid yet engaging vignettes.

#377 - Lars and the Real Girl
Craig Gillespie, 2007



A mild-mannered introvert buys an anatomically correct sex doll and pretends that she is a real human being.

The phrase "high concept" is usually used in conjunction with big-budget blockbusters but I feel like it's a phrase that can be applied to a small indie film like Lars and the Real Girl. The concept of a guy falling in love with a sex doll could go any number of ways, but thankfully the subject is actually treated with a degree of tact and nuance that opts to examine subjects such as trauma, relationships and what it means to be human. Having a solid cast on hand goes a long way towards making this decidedly quirky tale work despite its seemingly implausible nature, while Ryan Gosling definitely shows considerable range as Lars himself.

#378 - War of the Worlds
Steven Spielberg, 2005



When an alien species invades Earth and starts killing humans, a man and his children must try to survive.

How Spielberg's journey through sci-fi went from the competently-crafted one-two punch of A.I. and Minority Report to...this is a bit of a head-scratcher. It's at the point where I can barely acknowledge Spielberg's talents as a master craftsman because they are hardly recognisable. It may be passable on a technical level with its many grainy scenes of apocalyptic destruction and extraterrestrial intrusion, but they're in service to an incredibly flat narrative that has shades of interesting subtext (given the release date, it'd be interesting to see this as reflective of post-9/11 anxieties and/or problems with America's militarised approach to the Middle East) but is still anchored to an incredibly dry story of Tom Cruise's divorced father trying to keep his kids safe through not just alien attacks but also the more reprehensible actions of extremely desperate humans. The aggressively listless narrative is enough to remind me of The Happening of all damn things, but I'm starting to think that Shyamalan's corny yet distinctive ineptitude in that film might actually be preferable to the vacuous Emmerich-like shenanigans that Spielberg resorts to here.

#379 - Snake Eyes
Brian De Palma, 1998



When a politician is shot during a professional boxing match, a police detective present at the match takes the investigation into his own hands.

It's no surprise that De Palma's films frequently take influence from the work of Alfred Hitchcock, but Snake Eyes feels like the work of someone imitating De Palma. There are elements to respect about it - there's the (relative) unity of setting where elaborate revelations and sequences emerge from the location's many details, the sweeping oners that allow De Palma to demonstrate his mastery of the long-form suspense sequence, and the steadily unfolding mystery narrative where the conflicting viewpoints mesh fairly well with De Palma's stylistic touches such as split-screens and POV shots. However, the weak narrative means that the flourishes don't manage to cohere into something particularly solid or interesting. In this context, even Nicolas Cage's characteristically manic lead performance manages to feel flat.

#380 - Go
Doug Liman, 1999



An anthology of interrelated stories that take place on Christmas Eve.

I know it's not exactly inspired to call a film "Tarantinoesque" for featuring anachronic interlocking narratives that all centre around criminal shenanigans and are aggressively stylised to boot, but that's actually a pretty decent summary of what Go is and why it isn't good. Even after setting aside the obvious influences, there really isn't much of worth here as we get to bear witness to a variety of unlikeable characters (and I do mean the bad kind of unlikeable) bounce off one another as they go through a variety of hedonistic misadventures such as scamming dangerous drug dealers to pay rent or engaging in a sex-crazed romp through Las Vegas. Liman's at least able to inject enough behind-the-camera energy to keep things moving along, but that means that there's also a choppiness to the way that things play out and connect with one another (especially in the third chapter) that it really is hard to find anything worth holding onto in this mess.

I'm not a huge fan of the original 1953 version of War of the Worlds, but Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds pales in comparison to the 1953 version, and the ending was terrible.

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If I answer a game thread correctly, just skip my turn and continue with the game.
OPEN FLOOR.

but guys da cgi spaceships come from da ground n da pplz evaperate its so kewl

Those are CGI?

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
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Yes and so are you, mark!

It makes some sense on a sub-textual level, but on a narrative level it's straight-up anticlimactic. I already mentioned The Happening but I reckon Birdemic is also a fair comparison.

#381 - Blair Witch
Adam Wingard, 2016



Twenty years after a filmmaker disappears in the woods while making a documentary, her younger brother launches his own expedition to find her.

Sequels are tough to get right. Even in the best of circumstances, there are still plenty of things that can go wrong and result in the creation of a film that can be disappointing, disrespectful, or just plain disastrous. A lot of it does seem to come down to a question of necessity - how much does a given sequel need to exist? This is especially true of sequels to films that seem to function just fine as singular entities - while that's not to say that there haven't been successes in that regard (The Godfather, Star Wars, and The Terminator are just a few that come to mind), they are few and far between. 1999's The Blair Witch Project is a film that seems like it is capable of both spawning and resisting sequels (leaving aside the 2000 follow-up Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which I admittedly have not seen and thus cannot really address). In theory, the basic set-up of ordinary people getting lost in the woods and being at the mercy of an evil spirit could sustain multiple slightly-varied installments, yet it has taken seventeen years for a proper sequel to emerge in the form of the imaginatively titled Blair Witch. While belated sequels are hardly a new concept, one does wonder if the resulting film would be able to offer a worthwhile follow-up to a film that may not have needed a sequel or even had the potential to support one.

The set-up for Blair Witch once again invokes the found-footage approach as it centres around the creation of another documentary, this time about young paramedic James' lifelong search for the truth about what happened to his big sister (and The Blair Witch Project protagonist), Heather. Heather and her friends disappeared completely while filming an amateur documentary about the "Blair Witch", a centuries-old ghost who haunts the woods near a small Maryland town and is allegedly responsible for many unexplained disappearances and deaths. When Heather's footage is posted online by a pair of paranormal obsessives, James decides to head into the woods and takes his friends along for the ride. His best friend Peter and Peter's girlfriend Ashley are there to lend him moral support despite their own skepticism about finding either the Blair Witch or Heather. Meanwhile, film student Lisa wishes to make her own documentary about James' search for the truth, even going so far as to give the others their own hands-free cameras. After meeting up with Lane and Talia, the locals who originally found and posted the footage, the group proceeds to head into the woods. From there, things settle into familiar territory as the expedition starts falling apart. Internal tensions bubble to the surface and the Blair Witch starts making increasingly unsettling and dangerous intrusions as per the original, which only prompts the question as to whether or not the creative duo of director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett can offer any interesting variations.

When it comes to reviewing a sequel, there's an understandable inclination to compare it against its predecessor in order to determine its own worth for better or worse. Blair Witch can't help but invite a lot of comparisons to its ground-breaking but divisive source to the point where I question whether I can actually cover the film without making explicit comparisons. That being said, even without existing knowledge of the original film one can recognise plenty of flaws with its development. A major one has to do with the characterisation. Even by horror standards, Blair Witch feels especially flimsy because of how it grants characters potentially interesting back-stories that tend to be left frustratingly underdeveloped instead of intriguingly vague. As a result, character interplay is utilitarian to a fault - James and Lisa's obsessions with finding Heather and filming everything respectively amount to little more than vacant motivations to get the plot going and barely factor into the film at large or inspire anything more than the very occasional tiff with the others. Meanwhile, Peter the skeptic naturally butts heads with true believer Lane at every possible turn. Even so, that's still better than Ashley and Talia being limited to one-dimensional girlfriends for Peter and Lane respectively. It's nice that they establish distinct motives for at least four of the six characters, but even the instances where opposing motives clash against one another don't feel particularly organic.

One would hope that the actual moments of horror in Blair Witch would compensate for any lacklustre character development, but that really doesn't seem to be the case here. The prospect of being lost in the woods is scary enough even without the prospect of paranormal activity (especially when the resulting stress can cause the characters to become even greater dangers to one another and even themselves), but the ways in which the situation complicates land with dull thuds more so than hard hits. Even the promise of extra preparation on the part of the characters as they bring along a variety of high-tech cameras (including a drone, no less) and walkie-talkies somehow doesn't make any significant difference to the proceedings aside from justifying how everyone can be in on recording the film's footage and thus allowing for more (if not exactly better) angles. While I could easily pick apart the ways in which the film frequently compromises its creepy atmosphere for the sake of shocking an audience with loud noises and jumpy visuals (with editing that sometimes gets choppy enough to result in jump scares over nothing), I'm a little disappointed in how it teases interesting concepts only to do nothing of worth with them. The main offender in this regard definitely was the one that had to do with how time functions in the film, which I reckon is the most interesting new development due to its capacity for influencing how the characters and situation develop. However, its actual usage within the film is sparse to the point of being virtually redundant and only proves more tantalising as the film progresses.

I'm still not sure whether or not The Blair Witch Project can actually sustain a decent continuation, though Blair Witch at least shows hints of unrealised potential for variation beyond its generally derivative nature (though that may just make things worse by throwing the flaws into even sharper relief). Unfortunately, the film is content to lean into straightforward escalation and extrapolation upon its source, which is more liable to expose weaknesses in the storytelling as it struggles to handle the many different elements at play. There may be twice as many characters as before but this means that their development is compromised, which results in their interplay failing to contribute much to the horror as a result. Technological advances and an increased budget only end up sanitising the experience in ways that more visceral additions cannot overcome. Though it's not completely lacking in scariness, the terror barely feels earned as the film will skip over more promising facets in favour of expanding upon its weaker moments. As a result, watching Blair Witch is enough to make a viewer feel like James as he searches for Heather - perpetually chasing after each tiny glimmer of hope regardless of how bad the situation ultimately gets.

#382 - End of Days
Peter Hyams, 1999



In the days leading up to New Year's Eve 1999, an ex-cop is drawn into a Satanic conspiracy to bring about the apocalypse.

Given my pet theory about how the best Schwarzenegger movies are the ones that don't need him to work but are all the better for his presence, I'm still unsure if End of Days proves or disproves my theory. The man himself is not too bad here as he plays one very wounded individual whose personal issues are compounded and challenged by the Devil's prophesied plans for world domination. He really does need to be good enough to carry a rather uninspired plot that plods along through a variety of supernaturally-themed moments of action and horror that are only intermittently interesting. It's not without its merits, but it does feel awfully disposable in ways where not even having a Serious Actor in the leading role would help.