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Jacob's Ladder feels like a movie built specifically for me. It's a psycho-horror/thriller with elements of surrealism and war, not to mention two of the kids share the names of my brother and I, and the main kid Gabe shares the name of my nephew, AND IS PLAYED BY MY CHILDHOOD HERO.



UPDATE!: I've decided that I'm going to stop updating the original post of this thread and just link to my Reviews list. There are pros and cons to the two different sorting methods I was using and it's getting to the point where any day now I'm going to hit the maximum character limit, so I'm gonna cut out early.
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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




My Way
Military Action Drama / Korean, Russian, German, Chinese??? / 2011

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
So you've seen the World War II movie from the perspective of the Americans (Saving Private Ryan) and you've seen it from the perspective of the Soviets (Enemy at the Gates) and you've even seen it from the perspective of the Nazis (Downfall), but what kind of movie do you get if someone with a budget and no side to root for decides to make movie from the perspective of say... a Korean?

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Well, it would be a Korean, except the Korean is actually Japanese, and it's not just any Japanese, it's literally a colonel in the Imperial Army soooo.... oops?

The premise of this movie is to """retell""" the legend of the """Korean""" soldier captured in Wehrmacht gear on D-Day. Why on earth is a Korean dressed as a Nazi? The movie's glad you asked because that's the story.

Basically Korean Guy, Kim, and Japanese Guy, Tatsuo, are kids with a passion for running... for some reason, however the Japanese have subjugated the Koreans so the relationship between these two aspirational boys is a bit tenuous.

One day Kim's dad(?) delivers a package to Tatsuo's dad(?) and it's blows a hole through his chest so Tatsuo musters enough racism to impress a Schutzstaffel regiment and denounces the evil Koreans.

Not to be outdone, the Japanese become full gamers and ban Koreans from competing against them in the Olympics (because they're sore losers you see). Some bad press reverses the decision and Kim manages to beat Tatsuo but is unfairly disqualified leading to a race riot. The Koreans are summarily sentenced to conscription and you are now 26 minutes into this war film.

Naturally Tatsuo reappears as the Giga **** in charge of Kim's squad, but only after a weird diversion in which they are ambushed by a Chinese sniper who doesn't realize they're firing on Koreans. Kim begins this arc by consistently demonstrating a practically suicidal opposition to violence, which ironically gets him into far more fights than he would find himself in otherwise.

Tatsuo charges the Koreans with a suicide mission and a number of them decide to escape in the night instead. All seems to be well, they even manage to drag Chinese Sniper Girl along too, but at the last moment they see a Soviet tank platoon roll in and Kim decides for some baffling reason to run back and... warn Tatsuo? Who's sentenced him to die?

Everyone gets steamrolled, Tatsuo has a big dramatic scene where he slaughters several of his own troops for fleeing a lost battle, and just like that, Tatsuo and Kim are now Soviet POWs.

Then there's a whole new subplot involving one of Kim's friend who now goes by "Anton", serving as the "proctor" of the enslaved Asians and there's all this infighting now and Tatsuo's basically eating shit the entire time because his character is morally irredeemable.

Hop-skip-and-jump through a few predictable plot points and BOOM, Kim and Tatsuo are conscripted into the Soviet army, Tatsuo has his taste-of-his-own-poison moment and it's supposed to be really eye-opening to him, and I'm like dude, when has it ever made a ****ing ounce of sense to throw soldiers into the proverbial woodchipper for doing something as rational as self-preservation? Do you WANT to expend soldiers?

Do you WANT to lose the war?

Are you a dumbass? Yes? Good, I'm glad we've established that.

Anyway, so the Korean and Japanese guy are both Nazis now because they're on a streak of losses and they still have to top their personal best.

There's something tonally inappropriate about the big magical slow-mo running to reunite on the beach scene you see in so many movies... when it's Normandy and both characters are fresh-faced Nazis.

"OMIGOSH I NEVER THOUGHT I'D SEE YOU AGAIN, sieg heil, WHATEVER HAVE YOU DONE WITH YOUR HAIR!?"



Anyway they get captured by the Allies, but Kim dies and Tatsuo takes up his identity as a Korean to avoid retaliation from the Americans.

The whole movie culminates in the twist that the marathon runner that's named in the opening scene is in fact Tatsuo, who murdered numerous people as a racist imperial *******.

In fact, Tatsuo (and to a lesser extent Kim) is portrayed as having killed Americans, Germans, Soviets, AND Koreans and Japanese. So the big happy ending to the movie is this dude with insurmountable blood on his hands from every side of the war masquerading as a Korean person to escape retribution during peacetime where he gets to live out his fantasy of winning marathons without his archrival alive to stop him.

Kim is the most tragic character in this whole movie, he's proven to be an objectively better runner than Tatsuo, more committed to improving himself than Tatsuo, constantly eats shit both to spite and to save Tatsuo... he's one of those unreasonably virtuous characters where he basically has no character faults outside of the fact that trying to stop violence more often than not nearly gets him killed on a regular basis.

But he dies and Tatsuo gets the happy ending? Nah. Maybe if Tatsuo didn't do what he did, and MAYBE if this movie wasn't trying to recreate historical events it'd be easier to appreciate, but on top of the bad taste in the mouth, the whole story seems like a farce.

I'm willing to believe that some Asian guy managed to get himself conscripted into the Imperial, Soviet, and Germany armies. Like, SOMEBODY has to get luck that bad sometimes...

but it's not just one guy, it's two guys,

and it's not just two guys, it's a Korean and a Japanese,

but it's not just that, the Korean is a conscript and the Japanese is a colonel,

BUT IT'S NOT JUST THAT they've also had a marathon running blood rivalry since childhood predicated on mutual racism.

Gimme a break, that's jumping a few too many sharks for me.

I'd like to point out that this movie features dialog in Japanese, Korean, Russian, German, and even Chinese and there are NO baked in subtitles. You gotta find an .srt file with all that shit in English if you want to follow along with the story at all. I did not watch the English dub (if there even is an English dub).

Overall the movie was leaning in the direction of Meh... for me. It clearly got a big budget and it was spent well overall. Acting was solid, music was serviceable, CG was only occasionally obvious.

This movie clearly does not glorify war, but nor does it really denigrate war, ironically the characters manage a peaceful 3 years as Nazis, whereas the "fight or die" turnaround time in the Soviet and Imperial armies were far shorter. It's much more interested in it's characters, which I'd be more appreciative of if they weren't increasingly obvious fictional inserts.

A quick Wikipedia search finds that the person this movie is based on isn't even named Tatsuo or Kim and it's questionable whether they even existed at all, so that kinda puts a rusty nail in the coffin of this movie's plausibility.

It was okay. I can't really see my self itching to see it again. I could never quite figure out why it's called My Way.


Final Verdict:
[Okay]
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Stay
Psychological Thriller / English / 2005

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I want every psychological thriller I watch to be the next best thing I ever see, but I don't expect much. This time we have one starring Ewan McGregor and Ryan Gosling both around the peak of their popularity.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
The premise is pretty straight forward. Obi Wan Kenobi is a college psychiatrist with a formerly suicidal cursed-videotape-journalist for a girlfriend who crosses paths with Driver who claims to be losing touch with reality and plans to kill themselves on Saturday.

We're initially clued in to the idea that there's more going on with intermittent flashbacks to a car crash, but also the fact that this movie has a doom-and-gloomy soundtrack and LOOOVES morph transitions. So it sounds spooky all the time and we're constantly shunting characters between shots with violent shifts in perspective and sometimes direct transformations of one person's face into another person's face.

This gradually becomes compounded when small little oddities like weather predictions and increasingly concerning levels of deja vu lead Doctor Kenobi to suspect that Driver knows more than he lets on, and eventually, when he starts meeting characters meant to be dead, his own assertion about what is real and what isn't comes into question.

This movie did a fine job of keeping me questioning and speculating up until the end what was going on, but MOST IMPORTANTLY it didn't bitch out like so many other movies do by being surreal for surrealism's sake, leaving the ending entirely open to interpretation, and effectively resolving with no point whatsoever. I HATE that, but fortunately this movie doesn't do that, and it doesn't condescend to explain it to you either, it's show-don't-tell demonstrated in the simplest sense.

We get repeated allusions to a car crash in which multiple characters are suggested to have died, the main character's girlfriend is suicidal and by the end I assumed that the entire cast was dead and they're in some sort of purgatory, but that isn't the case.



Instead, what unfolds is a previously incomplete scene of the crash in which the alleged deaths DO occur, and Ryan Gosling's character, overwhelmed by guilt over the crash lays dying on the concrete and first interacts with the rest of the cast who have left their nearby vehicles to see what's happening. It's established that they otherwise don't know each other, and we can infer through various clues that the movie we watched was essentially a projection of a world full of the faces he saw, or is seeing as he dies.

Multiple times Ryan and Ewan's character trade places or share dialog and it communicates that Ryan imagines Ewan as the therapist he thinks he needs. We also see his crush and Ewan's girlfriend trade places, further creating a parallel relationship that only exists in Ryan's head.

His suicidal thoughts project onto her, and his view of the Brooklyn Bridge is projected into her art, emphasized by his signature eventually appearing on all of her pieces. The man who buys his painting is also the same man who aggressively tells him to stop smoking on the train (which he really should do because it's extremely selfish behavior and I genuinely ****ing hate people that do that) which is a reversal of character that's never explained, but can be inferred as Ryan just reusing the same face for multiple characters in his imagination.

Very early on he makes a comment about how Ewan has the exact same ring that he lost, which is the ring he intended to give to the waitress he had a crush on, but never did, again a parallel to Ewan never giving his girlfriend the ring.

There are lots of little insights like this that aren't spelled out, but "paint a picture" that presents the increasingly hallucinatory terrain that is this movie as his dying imagination, and I'm sure if I rewatched it again I'd find even more little hints along the way.

Near the end I was also feeling a little bit stuffy...

I'm not prepared to say that this was a great movie. Not that I can really fault it for much, the production quality was solid, it kept me engaged, and the payoff was pretty good... BUT it lacked a really strong "hook" for me. The acting was only serviceable, it takes a bit to get going, and once it does it just kinda blurs into that whole surrealist circlejerk where you're basically waiting for the movie to finish.

I preferred the performances and intrigue in Jacob's Ladder, but I also prefer the presentation and twist ending of this movie.

It's hard to say, I think this is one I'll have to revisit after I've given it a bit.

EDIT: Apparently this movie got kinda shit reviews for some reason?

At review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 26% of 124 critics positively reviewed the film, and the average rating is 4.66/10. The critical consensus reads: "A muddled brain-teaser, Stay has a solid cast and innovative visuals but little beneath the surface."
Morph transitions are not innovative, and the cast is "solid" only insofar as they are reputable actors. No idea what makes this movie "muddled".

James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave Stay 2½ stars out of four, calling it "interesting" but finding it "hard to recommend to anyone but the small cadre of David Lynch devotees who will inhale anything with a whiff of similarity to their favorite auteur's scent."
Comparing this movie to anything David Lynch has made is an insult to this movie. David Lynch does not have a monopoly on surrealist fiction.

Lou Lumenick of the New York Post panned the film, calling it "a trite, incoherent and pretentious bomb."
It's quite coherent, if you understood what was implied by the ending. The only "pretentiousness" I could possibly read is occasional references to Hamlet and certain artists, but this isn't insufferably delivered to the audience like it is in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, and it's not unreasonable to expect someone dying to recall back to notions of abstract importance, like quotes about the universe and whatnot.

Michael Booth wrote in The Denver Post, "What's this movie about?" and added, "Stay goes nowhere for far too long, then tries to go everywhere in just a couple of final moments. I can’t tell you how they try to explain it, in part because that would give away what little satisfaction the movie holds, and in part because I have no blooming idea.
I really don't think the conclusion I came to is that ****ing buried or open to interpretation. There is a blind character, alleged to have died, who miraculously regains his eyesight and says "this world isn't real". It's just a question then, what sort of world are we in then?

I think the ending answers that question pretty succinctly, but maybe it's just more obvious to me than whoever gets paid to write stupid shit for The Denver Post?


Final Verdict:
[Good]
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Little Miss Sunshine
Dark Comedy Drama / English / 2006

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've watched it many times before, but it occurs to me that I've never reviewed it and that I still got that itch at the back of my mind questioning whether it's anywhere near quite as good as I remember.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I have one complaint about this movie: The literally one scene featuring fried chicken. **** fried chicken. Go vegan. **** you.

Now that that's out of the way and we're conveniently ignoring that stain on these characters... allow me to now explain why I think this is unironically a really good movie.

I am already hard to impress with comedies. I'm further hard to impress with family drama. The drama is either too petty or the jokes too forced.

Little Miss Sunshine manages to sidestep these issues in several ways: by featuring characters with real character faults, multiple life-changing tragedies, undermining these characters in various small silly ways, having them NOT acknowledge the absurdity of these events, and most of all; finding a way to pull some Grade A Wholesome Shit out of it.

You'd think a movie with a cast such as Heroin Grandpa, Winning-Obsessed Dad, The 40-Year-Old Suicidal-Ideations, and Hatred The Video Game would be absolutely miserable to watch, but it's got some of the most adorable moments I've ever seen in movies.

Much of it surrounds Olive, the chubby daughter with glasses with unrealistic dreams to win a beauty pageant, but who is slated to compete regionally after a cynical technicality that ultimately ropes the entire dysfunctional family into a dysfunctional minibus for a dysfunctional trip to the Little Miss Sunshine Pageant.

For the most part, the characters bounce off each other in pairs, Grandpa is secretly teaching Olive her talent routine, Dwayne, the son, and Frank the uncle both feel like similar outcasts. And Richard and Sheryl are having obvious marital problems.

To be critical once more, I feel like Sheryl is the only character who never gets any sort of arc to her character. She's established to be a closet smoker, and looks to be on track to get a divorce given Richard gambling a lot of money on his chances of becoming a motivational speaker. But that never really changes, so far as we're aware.

The movie is very good at communicating with the characters what the audience is most likely thinking in reaction to something that happens. Richard repeatedly demoralizing Olive by suggesting ice cream will make her fat and that she's a loser if she doesn't believe she'll be a winner is greeted with exactly as many deathstares to the back of his head as I believe are warranted in that moment.



It's established, visually, in the very first scene, the contrast between Olive and the beauty queens she idolizes that she's just not in their league, and by the time everyone gets to the pageant and the whole family sees the competition, you can tell that they realize that they've put their daughter on stage to get slaughtered, and that this whole event is actually kinda twisted, especially with the hyper-sexualized outfits and... is that guy a pedophile?

All of this is to say that not even subtle communication in this movie was used to further Sheryl's character which is unfortunate because I feel like it makes her the odd one out of the entire cast.

The entire cast is great by the way. The big names in acting aren't wasted, Abigail Breslin and Paul Dano basically got their careers start with this movie, and we even get some supporting roles from pre-Walter White, and post-Chloe O-Brien.

This movie also earns a feather in it's hat for the soundtrack which can only be haphazardly described as "indie music", but manages to consistently straddle the line between uplifting and melancholic which simultaneously makes the heartwarming scenes warmer and the gutpunching scenes punchier.

The pace is very brisk with not a single scene struggling to keep me engaged. Often, even when I think about movies I love, there might be 1 or 2 scenes I'm pretty whatever about and wouldn't mind skipping, but honestly nothing comes to mind here.

You might think that this movie would lean heavily on deadpan and awkward social interactions, but considering we're working with Steve Carrell here, The Office is 100% NOT the flavor of comedy here. It's really not trying to make you cringe into a pretzel in embarrassment, it's just pockets of absurdity and the occasional dialog where we get a face-shot of Olive in her giant dorky glasses being told she's a fatass, or Richard being unintentionally implied to be gay to other characters (which, by the way, VERY tasteful use of a gay character, thank you).

You might also feel like the movie's trying to make some sort of statement about beauty pageants and the characters practically say as much, but most of the movie doesn't really concern the events of the pageant, it's more about the journey, the tragedies, and the comically incessant minibus horn that carries these characters along the way, as well as a desperate shared interest in seeing Olive realize her dream, if no one else's.

I recommend both this movie and it's director's commentary.


Final Verdict:
[Great]
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Take Shelter
Psychological Thriller / English / 2011

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It's a psychological thriller that's been buried among the identical marketing material for other rural dramas like Gone Girl. Is it good? Other reviewers think so.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I'm pretty disappointed in this movie.

Not because I expected a lot going into it, but because it raised my expectations as it went on and it failed to realize the premise summaries I was reading about it.

Basic premise is Main Guy starts having nightmares that begin affecting his day-to-day life, it's eventually revealed that he worries that they foretell a big storm, while simultaneously worrying that he's developing paranoid schizophrenia in his 30s like his mom did.

The whole issue stems from the "it's eventually revealed" part, since I was reading that he was supposed to be receiving 'apocalyptic visions', but that's not at all what was communicated to me by the movie. There's an intermittently recurring storm theme in his nightmares, but nothing's immediately to suggest that it's "apocalyptic" beyond the rain being a funny color. It takes all the way until 90+% of the way into the movie before he imagines birds falling dead out of the sky.

Most of the time he's just imagining his dog attacking him, or someone else he knows attacking him, and then he associates that with some gas phenomenon he sees on TV once.

There isn't even any reason to believe he's experiencing schizophrenia symptoms whatsoever before he's borrowing mental illness books from the library and going to consult his mother on her experiences BEFORE we're ever told she's in a home for schizophrenia. The comments she makes about believing people were out to get her are really just a confusing contrast to Main Guy's experiences, which we only know to include nightmares.

The first time he hallucinates anything at all is the day after he takes some medication to help him sleep which confounds the premise even further.

Eventually we're supposed to believe that he's gone over the edge and is convinced there's some end-of-days gas storm on the way which he's endangered his daughter's ear surgery and borrowed against his house to expand a storm shelter to protect against... but really, the only evidence we as viewers have that he believes any such thing is the choices he makes insisting such, and he barely insists at all. He's virtually stoic throughout the entire movie up until the scene where he gets fired from his job (which makes that "risky loan" he took look especially nasty) and flips out on an entire room of people insisting "THERE'S A STORM A-COMIN'!!!".


So it's really just that sort of post-hoc "this is why the viewer surrogate is doing this" sort of thing which is just kind of frustrating to watch. This stuff can be visually communicated to me through the medium of MOOOVIES and I'm not really getting that.

The proverbial cigarette burn that seals my issues with this movie is two-fold. One; there's really only two ways to end this movie: It was all in his head, or he's genuinely foretelling disaster. Take Shelter decides they want to have it both ways by having the big reveal that he's hallucinating the big storm, but then also betraying that by having an actually big storm.

I realize that's the more negative way I could put that, but that's how I feel about when it doesn't feel like either angle was earned.

Two; The "actual" big storm that's revealed in the end seems pretty ****in' feeble. We get a wideshot of the ocean with scary clouds, a couple visible waterspouts off in the distance, and the rain is piss-colored.

Ooooh, big dramatic moment where The Wife wordlessly nods her acknowledgment that Main Guy was right all along. That's pretty worthless to me. The one wideshot shot of the sandstorm in Mad Max: Fury Road, a movie known for relatively conservative CG, would have been a better sell on an end-of-days storm.

Now I'm not all negative, I like Main Guy's actor, it's easy to engage with him, the sound design was solid, I appreciate that Deaf Daughter wasn't the brutally hamfisted plot device that they were in A Quiet Place, or the kid in Signs, whose singular quirk is the alien's weakness or whatever.

Overall all though, we're clearly building up to this moment where we're revealing one of two obvious paths and it feels just a bit melodramatic when it's just "oh, there's a storm", rush down to the shelter, "okay storm's over", "but what if it's not!?" and we basically need the orchestra to pull a lot of weight that the script is failing to muster.

I would have been annoyed by the outcome, but I would at least have been somewhat surprised, if the plot entailed Main Guy locking them all in the shelter and then destroying or losing the key. Or even what the Wikipedia article suggested, possibly locking himself apart from his family to protect them from himself, which at no point happens.

The Wikipedia article also mentions this movie "explores themes of masculinity" which is also a massive ****ing lie and clearly written by a mentally deranged butthole because that is in literally no way substantiated by the movie.

Dude pisses the bed and is embarrassed to talk about how his nightmares have made him scared of the family dog, that's nothing to do with masculinity, that's just a human being with shame. Shut the absolute **** up, whoever wrote that horseshit.

Anyway, I'm calling this one on the upper-end of Meh... but I'll give it an Okay.


Final Verdict:
[Okay]
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The Lighthouse
Psychological Thriller / English / 2019

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
The Green Goblin and Edward Cullen live in a lighthouse. Wouldn't even bother if it wasn't labeled psychological thriller and it wasn't recommended by YMS (however YMS likes art films and I do not).

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"DAMN YE! Let Neptune strike ye dead, Winslow! HAAARK! Hark, Triton! Hark! Bellow! Bid our father, the Sea King, rise from the depths, full-foul in his fury, black waves teeming with salt-foam, to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs 'till ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more... only when, he, crowned in cockle shells with slithering tentacled tail and steaming beard, takes up his fell, be-finnèd arm – his coral-tined trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet! BURSTING YE, a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now – a nothing for the Harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon, only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the Dread Emperor himself, forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea... for any stuff or part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul, is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea!"

"Alright, have it your way. I like your cooking."

This is one of those movies that just throws a whole bunch of what-the-**** imagery at you and resolves literally nothing by the end.

...which is all you need to know to know that I'm going to give this movie a shit score.

I... HATE... movies that do this. Symbolism is cool! Psychological breakdowns are cool! I can even ignore the artsy-fartsy choice to film the movie in black and white and a non-standard aspect ratio, and I've even demonstrated that I have an interest in navel-themed settings.

None of that goes to solve the most basic ****ing issue with this movie, which is that it accomplishes NOTHING. It is like Eraserhead with every possible negative connotation attached; it makes no sense, there are random continuity breaks, it is needlessly gross and hard to watch, and amounts to **** all by the end.

The best things I can say about this movie is that Willem Dafoe as a crotchety former sailor is kind of entertaining and Robert Pattinson's talent was officially wasted on Twilight. But that is not to say that it was well spent here.

Honestly, if this movie was marketed as Willem Dafoe flips out on Robert Pattinson in a lighthouse, I'd be more interested than I was, but that's not even what we get at the end of the day.

Robert is presented as Willem's subordinate, both of which are assigned to lighthouse keeper duty for a month. It's rapidly established that Willem appears to do no work, and spends his time masturbating up in the beacon, where he for some reason needs to lock himself, whereas Robert is shown doing basically all of the work.

It's also immediately established that both parties should be sharing the work and should not be drinking. If both of these things were held true, none of the conflict in this movie would have taken place. So we are talking about The Chumscrubber level of writing, where the out to literally the entire plot is blatantly presented and ignored from the outset.

I don't think I've ever compared any movie to both The Chumscrubber and Eraserhead, and let me tell you, I do not have good things to say about either of those movies. Those are easily in my Top 25 WORST movies I've ever ****ing seen, so it is not a generous comparison.

Basically, we follow most of the movie from Robert's perspective, he gets shafted with all the work and threatened to have his pay cut if he resists any of the extreme unreasonableness of Willem's character. Willem's portrayed as having some sort of weird sexual ritual while he's locked up in the lighthouse, but is also presented as possibly some secret Lovecraftian nightmare creature?

Simultaneously, Robert oscillates between having weirdly aggressive run-ins with seagulls which culminates in him grabbing one out of the air and violently and beating it into a bloody pulp... after he's been warned that killing a gull is bad luck. Also he's randomly hallucinating sirens, we even get a full-shot of mermaid vag as well as Robert thrusting into it interspersed with all the usual violent penetrative imagery art films love to associate with sex for some ****ed reason.


So basically, it seems Robert's losing his mind, and it doesn't help that Willem repeatedly gaslights him into doubting how long they've been there or who was responsible for what thing.

That would seem like a relatively straightforward Shutter Island-type scenario, but they decide to convolute matters by suggesting that Robert and Willem only get along when they're drunk, which they become many many many times, resulting in fights, crazy sailor rants, and other random plot developments like how Robert is pretending to be someone he watched die... which is relevant for some reason.

It all comes down to a big fight where Robert treats Willem like a dog, basically buries him alive, he goes to the lighthouse, then he leaves the lighthouse for some reason, gets axed by Willem, who axes him back, goes to the lighthouse again, screams into the eternal void of the beacon... for ART REASONS and then falls down the stairs inside the lighthouse... only to smash cut OUTSIDE the lighthouse to him being eaten alive by seagulls...

...and apparently the lighthouse is missing now? Whatever the hell that's supposed to mean I have no idea, there's plenty of shots in this movie without the lighthouse in the background, so how on earth we're expected to suddenly believe the lighthouse is missing from a wideshot of an ambiguous rocky surface is entirely beyond me.

This entire movie is entirely beyond me. What was the point of the mermaid sex? What was the point of the seagull smackdown? What was the point of Willem stripping naked in front of the beacon? What was the point in him turning into a octopus creature?

What was the point in him being butt-naked and staring a laser beam directly into Robert's eyes? Apparently this shot is lifted from an art piece depicting "hypnosis"? WHAT DID THAT ADD TO THE ****IN' MOVIE YOU PRETENTIOUS ****IN' DUMBASSES!? What value is it if it doesn't correlate to anything that's happening? You just decided "that's a neat shot" and crammed it into the movie with zero regard to how violently it rips me out of my experience so I can say for the umpteenth time; "WHAT THE **** IS HAPPENING???"

I don't give a shit about either of these characters, I don't care if they die, it adds nothing to my experience to watch them masturbate themselves to tears because I can find more fulfilling pornography in Sonic the Hedgehog foot fetish fanfiction.

AT LEAST there was some semblance of mystery going on, and that's the only thing that keeps me from giving this movie the lowest possible rating, there are way more infuriating movies out there, but in terms of complete wastes of time, this movie fits the bill exactly.

This is the sort of movie I imagine Werckmeister Harmonies to be, and that is why I haven't watched it.


Final Verdict:
[Bad]
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The Fisher King
Urban Fantasy Comedy Drama / English / 1991

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Possible pro: It's a fantasy movie starring Robin Williams.
Possible con: It's a fantasy movie directed by Terry Gilliam.

Only thing I know is that it's supposed to be another movie that plays with reality.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Terry Gilliam's movies are very hit-and-miss in my experience. And I suppose the same could be said of Robin Williams' filmography too.

Overall, while I appreciate what this movie was trying to do, I'm going to say that it's execution has been a miss for me.

The premise is Jeff Bridges (who looks and acts like a completely different character that The Dude I associate him with) is a "radio shock jock", which from the opening scene establishes for us what that term means by illustrating him as an incredibly insufferable ********.

For some reason his extremely unlikable persona on-air has made him a wealthy douchebag and just as he's prepared to migrate to television he discovers that his comments towards a frequent caller resulted in a mass shooting that left 7 women and the caller dead. Thankfully this news immediately impacts him, he feels terrible for what he did, and his empire spirals down the shitter as he now mooches off his girlfriend 3 years later.

Fast forward and he finds himself looking to take a concrete jump into the river when he's saved from hoodlums by... a homeless Robin Williams.

Williams' character, unlike Bridges, is unfortunately his usual turbo-autistic hyper-active psychotic with-a-heart-of-gold, only now he's surrounded by other crazy homeless characters and he's filthy too!

Williams saves Bridges and tells him about his quest for the Holy Grail (in a Gilliam movie???) before Bridges discovers that Williams is the husband of one of the women he incited to kill, so now he feels like he owes something to him, but it's kind of difficult to help him because he doesn't respect money... but there is a love interest he's been stalking...

So suddenly the main thrust of this movie becomes Hitch, which I'm not a fan of. Nevermind that the girl he likes is herself an unlikable character and Williams literally trips over himself to appease her, but throughout all of this we get Williams' mad ravings, allusions to the story of The Fisher King which he wrote about when he was a teacher before he disassociated, and this hallucinatory threat of "the Red Knight" which looks appropriately intimidating, but only Williams sees it and it's not like it ever gets him run over or anything (although it gets close).


We're also treated to Bridges' strained love life with his girlfriend which is given a entirely unnecessary slap to the back of the head when after he hooks up Williams, salvages his career, and starts feeling good about himself again, says "I think I should be alone for a while".

The Girlfriend reacts to that in typical (though not entirely unreasonable) Girlfriend ways and it's just unnecessary additional conflict.

Also Williams is attacked by the cartoon thugs he saved Bridges from and is put into a coma until Bridges actually breaks into the random home Williams decided contains the grail and steals it. He does, and of course everything just works itself out in the end for some reason, credits.

It would be a mistake not to credit the fair bit of humanizing character development Bridges goes through, particularly with regard to his attitude toward the miscellaneous homeless characters he comes across. They have their own personalities, own pasts that have hurt them, and we get some nice moments between him and them where their commentary either situates the audience, or serves to inform and enlighten Bridges.

I'm disappointed that Williams never really comes back to reality, he disassociates with his former life as a teacher with a wife, and only after re-associating does he once ask Bridges permission to love again, or something. I don't really get it, but Bridges' character is secretly crying during the scene, so it's an important moment that's lost on me.

If Robin Williams was less Robin Williams,
if Jeff Bridges' girlfriend wasn't a subplot,
if the love interest was less quirk city...

I dunno, I feel like I can imagine a version of this movie that axes the Holy Grail through-plot and isn't attempting to crowbar in some parable about The Fisher King and Bridges attempts to restore Williams' life through more interaction with the homeless friends he's made in the past 3 years, then I could see a more enjoyable movie in this.

As it is, it's just that same weird style you expect from Gilliam movies. A lot of interesting camera shots, a splash of fantastical absurdism, but intercut with extraordinarily dark and sometimes gross or gruesome imagery. And then there's just a random love story or two in there somewhere for some reason.

Not a fan. I didn't expect to be a fan.


Final Verdict:
[Meh...]
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Young Sherlock Holmes
Mystery Adventure / English / 1985

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've seen it many times, but not recently, and never reviewed it.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Pheasant and horses.

I already have a lot of nostalgia for this movie since I grew up with it on VHS so it's naturally challenging to judge it objectively with that in mind. But having not seen it in a long time I can definitely look back on it from a more critical perspective.

The most glaring thing to me is how much this movie seems to be an amalgam of Temple of Doom, which predates it, and Hook, which it predates, all three of which are Steven Spielberg movies.

Hook's climactic swordfight seems to be lifted from this movie while Temple of Doom's iconic scene where a trio of protagonists sneak up on an ancient religion's cruel secret ritual shortly before becoming their next victims almost begs for a bingo game to be made of the similarities.

In truth, Young Sherlock Holmes is a much more family-friendly Temple of Doom movie, and I say that bearing very clearly in mind how much nightmare fuel there actually is in this movie.

This movie separately reminds me of The Rescuers Down Under insofar as it's disturbing imagery is concerned, and the fact that I'm pretty confident that it unintentionally awakened some pretty concerning fetishes in children at some point.

The whole premise is simple enough; we get a voiceover narration from the perspective of Watson presenting a fan-fictionalized account of his first childhood encounter with Sherlock Holmes, initially demonstrating his abilities and gradually working an origin story into every individual piece of his iconic outfit, from hat to pipe.

The conflict here is that they school they attend is home to a mysterious """serial killer""" who kills their victims by means of a blowpipe that induces hallucinations which cause the victim to kill themselves.


Not by any direct or reliable means, just that the hallucinations scare them enough to do something reckless, like jump out a window, get themselves run over, or stab themselves... That they managed to intentionally kill anyone this way is the biggest mystery of this movie.

Anyway the hallucinations presented are pretty varied and at times wildly nightmarish. The opening scene involves a man ordering roast pheasant only for it come alive and start eating him instead. Truly a vegan dream come true, but alas it gets worse.

Watson himself, in an unnecessary stab at his character for being slightly overweight hallucinates a bakery which comes to life, restrains him, and forcefeeds themselves to him, all in graphic stop-motion animation. I guarantee someone developed some kind of vore fetish from that scene.

Most noteworthy of course, I must mention, is the Stained-Glass Knight who is credited in The Making Of Jurassic Park as the first ever fully computer generated character in a feature film.

Overall I do like this movie, the characters are appreciable enough, the main theme song and the "temple chant" are extremely memorable, honestly if you like both Temple of Doom and Hook, this a very similar experience, just with much lesser known actors.

In terms of criticisms, I can't complain too much. It is an EXTREMELY brisk movie, it's like 2 hours but it flies by very quickly, perhaps too quickly.

We get basically one scene introducing the characters, one scene demonstrating Sherlock's skills in a test of problem-solving, some very brief bullshit about him being good at fencing and getting unfairly expelled for cheating accusations, and then we're less than halfway through the movie and we're all-in on the Egyptian Cult Mystery.

The pre-established romance between him and The Damsel in Distress at least spares us the usual pain of courtship scenes, but that's really all she's there for, to be kidnapped and rescued, nothing more. Her makeup is also immaculate in every scene she's in, despite escaping a dusty pyramid burning the ground in which she was nearly mummified and and boiled to death...

There's some continuity errors, Watson's adult voiceover abruptly cuts in to give us the summary of what characters could explain themselves... and the all important reason why Sherlock deduces that the guy subtly named RATHE was actually the bad guy all along is conveniently glossed over in a cut between shots. That's kind of unforgivable.

Not only does this break consistency with every other time Holmes explained his reasoning, but it's a Sherlock Holmes movie, that makes it an obligatory mystery movie, but there's no mystery here at all.

Or at least there's no mystery-solving. The average Scooby-Doo episode has more mystery-solving than this movie. Case Closed, which is directly inspired by Sherlock Holmes puts this movie to absolute shame in that department.

It's got as much mystery in it as any other thriller with an unknown killer in it, they just go "oh well of course it's obviously this guy" and then never explain.

If there's any big strike against the movie it's probably that, but honestly I find it a bit difficult to believe that it was it's betrayal of genre that lead it to get lukewarm reviews. Either way, I don't feel nearly as positively or negatively toward it as I do any of the above-mentioned movies.

It's a fine movie, nothing really to write home about, and despite my nostalgia it's not about to find a place on my shelf of favorites in any foreseeable future.


Final Verdict:
[Good]
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Horror / English / 1974

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I saw a brief clip recently of what was Leatherface's initial reveal from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie and realized I'd never seen the original, only parts of the remake.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Various living and dead animals.

It's honestly strange to me that TCM is a 70s movie since it's considered such a horror staple and yet the the modern horror genre definitely owes most of it's popularity to it's rise in the 80s with Halloween.

Bearing that in mind, it definitely has it's own original idea of what a scary movie ought to be and isn't really playing from an overwrit playbook, which I imagine contributed to it's success.

Success or not, though, I definitely can't say that I like it, for many of the same reasons I don't like typical horror movies; I'm just not in it to feel bad. Thankfully, for such a macabre movie about a family of redneck cannibals, there's relatively little gore and I personally didn't even find it all that scary.

I mostly just find the premise and grim presentation very disturbing. You really just have to share some headspace with the exact kind of serial killer freaks to even make a movie like this convincing, and that's just a dreadful place conceptually. I'd much rather watch a serial killer documentary than a movie like this.

Perhaps I grant it's "convincing", but that's bare minimum for just about any role an actor has to play. I appreciate that there's a clear family dynamic between Leatherface, "The Cook", "The Hitchhiker", and "Grandpa", and the Hitchhiker in particular I enjoyed because he is immediately unsettling to look at and listen to, and because I'd seen and heard impersonations of this character before and never seen the character, so it's cool to recognize them that way.

Unfortunately, this family dynamic really only enters the picture in the last quarter of the movie and by that point all but one of the main characters has been killed off. One of my biggest grievances with this movie is that it drifts too close to what Friday the 13th did; killed off most of the cast before the main characters can even appreciate that there's a killer.

Basically every main character gets killed by mallet or chainsaw mere seconds after running into Leatherface. If the characters are our viewer surrogates, then how am I supposed to feel scared if they just blindly walk into danger and get punked out by a hammer?





I'm simultaneously annoyed at what this movie inspired too. Having played Dead by Daylight quite a bit recently, I'm aware that both Leatherface and an off-brand Leatherface clone exist as playable killers in the game. The game also centers around sacrificing survivors on meat hooks which I have previously remarked seem to almost NEVER show up as a killing tool in any horror movie.

Well, TCM features Leatherface hanging one of the main characters on a meathook. For a few seconds. And it doesn't even kill them.

This, I take to be the direct inspiration for designing a game in which every horror movie antagonist they could license proceeds to kill every one of their victims by hanging them on meat hooks 12 times in succession. What the actual ****?

I'm also inclined to note that there's a distinct lack of a sound effect for this action, there's no suckling meat noise when Main Girl #2 gets hung up on the rack, and you never see the hook entry wound or anything, so the movie's really just relying on you being squeemish enough to hate the idea of a character being put on a meat hook.

The sound design in this movie overall is pretty strange. Even though I thought Halloween was a trash movie, I can at least grant it had an atmospheric score, whereas here it felt like mostly silence culminating in a montage of extreme close-ups of eyes and screaming, which was none too pleasant.

TCM never made me laugh or provoked me to ridicule some corny or nonsensical aspect of it, but that doesn't mean it was more engaging. The characters were virtually all flat, the girls were interchangeable, and Boy #1 looked distinctly less 70s than Boy #2. Handicapped Boy also wouldn't shut the **** up about his fascination with butchery, which is why I'm played he took a chainsaw to the stomach.

Dunno if the Vegan Girl was the one who survived (or the one who opened up with talking about the malefic phases of Saturn), the movie made little effort at all to distinguish them.

Overall crap boring movie, but could have been a lot worse.


Final Verdict:
[Weak]
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The Evil Dead
Horror / English / 1981

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've only seen the Evil Dead remake and Army of Darkness. My only knowledge of this movie is that it potentially kicked off the "Cabin in the Woods" subgenre of horror, it was supposed to be seriously, but after a sequel it completed it's transformation into a comedy. Oh, and somebody gets raped by a tree.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
If you had asked me whether I thought the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Evil Dead would be more gory, I would incorrectly suggest Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The remake is certainly gory, but I underestimated how much blood there would be in this movie. And I don't like it.



Perhaps there's something to be said of the practical effects versus the CG of the remake, but honestly the practical effects in general were kind of bad, and overall the production of this entire movie was noticeably amateur.

Everything from the ambiguous basement light sources to the obviously polygonal cut holes in the front door of the cabin by the end of it all looked super low effort/budget, continuity errors and all.

There were also some bizarrely obvious logical errors, like Ash getting attacked through a large window, so the first thing he thinks to do is... lock the front and back doors. There's even a shot where he moves a dresser across the same wide open window to block the front door, as if it's been established that the spirits of the cabin can only enter through doors or something.

Anyway the entire plot is spirits around a cabin possessing the cast of characters and the characters have to start killing each other. That's pretty much all you need to know. There's a book that passages need to be read from to summon the dead, yada yada yada, there's a recording, blah blah blah.

Part of why I'm being very brief while writing this is that I'm incredibly distracted and annoyed at a parrot I recently adopted. It screams at such an infuriatingly ear-splitting level and somehow pattern recognition has failed to register in it's little brain that screaming gets it's cage covered.


What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the acting is serviceable I guess? At least until anyone gets demonically possessed, then they start overacting like crazy. Also there's uber spooky voices in the darkness that start saying "Join us..." basically right away so it's no surprise Raimi would feel the need to quickly pivot to comedy.

There really isn't a whole lot to comment on about this movie since pretty much performed about as I expected, save for including a lot more blood and little more stop-motion skin dissolving animation.

Best thing I can say is it starts quickly and remains engaging, and it's not just the characters getting sequentially punked out before anybody else realizes what's going on.

I do feel like there's a version of this movie that could have been genuinely creepy and atmospheric, but this movie's about as atmospheric as a dozen fog machines.


Final Verdict:
[Weak]
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Evil Dead II
Action Horror / English / 1987

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Supposedly this movie bridges The Evil Dead with Army of Darkness tonally by being a more schlocky comedy horror movie. All I know is somebody gets an eyeball shot across a room into their mouth, complete with eyeball cam, and Ash somehow gets transported to the dark ages.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
This is a markedly better movie that The Evil Dead.

Rather than being a direct sequel to The Evil Dead, Evil Dead II feels more like a remix and deliberate setup for Army of Darkness.

Ash is back with another girlfriend named Linda, takes her to a similar cabin in the woods, finds the same tape recorder, and unleashes the same wooded evil that torments the cast by possessing each of them one by one.

We basically get a super quick rehash of the first movie in the first 20 minutes of this movie, and by the 20 minute mark, it drops all pretenses and suddenly Ash is having a slapstick chainsaw struggle with a headless puppet.

Ash has more alone time in this movie since his girlfriend is possessed and killed super early on, so there's a stronger emphasis on him going mad in the presence of the evil spirits that will happily cackle at him if they can't kill him.

The family of man who owns the cabin and discovered what is only now called the "Necronomicon" eventually show up and sequentially add themselves to the antagonists' ranks and we even get some very brief flashbacks to the origin of the book that spawns this evil, so there's a tiny bit more lore in this movie for those that want it.




The puppetry and fight scenes are pretty clownshoes early on, which is fine, and there's a fair bit less gore overall in this movie, which I appreciate (the walls spewing blood in Ash's face was pretty unnecessary and predictable though).

Ash also gets possessed twice in the movie, although both times he's inexplicably cured by sunlight and his memories of a necklace, and this principle isn't echoed any other time in the movie, so super deus ex machina bullshit. Also making any actor try to fight off their own hand is just asking them to embarrass themselves.

Obviously the main reason to see this movie is to see Ash suit up with the shotgun and chainsaw arm and start spitting catchphrases, that's definitely the highlight. Couldn't really pick out a highlight of the previous movies.

My biggest grievances regarding production quality is also assuaged here; I really didn't notice any glaring continuity errors or blatantly cheap props... although the basement still has weird light sources, it at least doesn't dwell on those shots long enough for you to notice. I wouldn't have mentioned them if I hadn't noticed it in the previous movie.

I will say, however, that the medieval armor the characters were wearing at the end did not look historically accurate. Source: I'm a geek.

Similar to the first, this movie also picks up right away and maintains a nice brisk pace throughout the whole runtime.

Overall, not scary in the slightest, but definitely a more enjoyable movie experience.


Final Verdict:
[Okay]
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Dawn of the Dead
Zombie Horror / English / 1978

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Never seen it. Hugely influential.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
While not the first zombie movie, this is definitely the movie that had the biggest influence I think, and that seems strange because I question how much has really carried over into other zombie properties.

Half the cast are cops, most of the movie takes place in a mall, there's an undercurrent about humans being the biggest threats after all... but some stuff about this movie was also quite a bit different than I expected.

For one, the cast are all adults, which definitely ventures away from the mall rats taking refuge in a mall idea, also while the movie overall takes itself very seriously, the soundtrack regularly undermines itself with goofy cartoon music that I guess is supposed to be an exaggerated version of the sort of muzak you'd hear at a mall. Maybe the 70s were all a cartoon? Either way, it doesn't exactly "contrast" well with the increasing amounts of gore, which oscillate in terms of realism.

Some shots just look like disrupted clay, other shots look actually gruesome. In general, the zombie makeup looks terrible, just a bunch of people with baby powder or some blue facepaint to portray them as "dead". The blood is also much too red, which I'll credit Evil Dead for getting right.

There's a lot more going on in this movie than the previous two I've watched, we're plunged into the onset of the zombie apocalypse behind two cops and television studio employees. The cops are united by one of them being black that shot another officer in the black for going on a racist rampage killing innocent people, and the other officer won't snitch on him.

I dunno why that was really necessary to establish his character, it's not as if race plays into any other part of the movie. Maybe they wanted to sneak in a comment about "other-izing" the zombies in a similar fashion? If that's the case the commentary didn't land and I don't know that any of the moralizing of talk show hosts we're occasionally greeted with really means anything, partly because it's always mid-debate and I can't entirely tell what sort of point is being disputed at any given time.



Something I was pleasantly surprised by was the extent to which the mall was utilized. I feel like I've seen a decent amount of mall-oriented zombie media at this point, but the characters in this movie went beyond what I expected to capitalize on and prepare the mall for eventual raiders. They blocked the entrances with semis, they found an alternate vent path to their "safehouse", they obscured the hallway to their safehouse with a false wall, and this is all after finding a small room buried away in the ceiling loaded with "survival supplies".

They shop for clothes, load up at a gun store, ice skate, have dinner at a restaurant, all after locking the main doors and killing the remaining zombies inside the mall so that they're safe. So long as electricity and plumbing holds, they've got it made.

Of course until the raiders show up which goes about as expected.

The zombies were conventional "slow zombies" with the slight differences that they are afraid of fire and have a limited understanding of tools and implements.

I think the characters were decent, Peter entirely evades the 'black guy dies first' trope and becomes Main Guy by the end, and "Fly Boy" I was half convinced was a young Juror #5 from 12 Angry Men.

Anyway, it wasn't anything like Return of the Living Dead, and there was plenty of gore for gore's sake, so not a whole lot I enjoyed in this movie, although I appreciate it for perhaps doing the mall thing better than any other zombie movie or video game I can think of.

For a 70s zombie romp, I think it's aged relatively well, albeit not my cup of tea.


Final Verdict:
[Okay]
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Rosemary's Baby
Supernatural Thriller / English / 1968

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Showed up in a "greatest horror movies of all time" list. I've heard about it, but never seen it and none of the screenshots I've seen give me horror movie vibes.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Meat.

Sure enough this is not a horror movie, it's a supernatural thriller at best.

Basically a couple move into an apartment with a sordid history of witchcraft and wizardry with the intent of conceiving a baby.

Not just one baby though. Three babies. They were very clear about that. This couple who's never had a child are completely set on having 3 children "all at the same time".

I just had a parrot rescue take back the parrot I recently adopted two weeks ago because it was too much for me, but these fictional ****wits have already decided that one baby isn't enough for them.

I also love the completely insincere husband who's just constantly undermining his wife's confidence only to 180 and and go "Okay, we're having a baby. 3 of them. All at the same time. I've already penciled us in, WAPOW!" *slaps calendar* "You can fit so many babies into this ****in' thing."

"Oh, honey really? Are you sure?"

"Absolutely toots, now shut and get to ovulatin', I got a soul to sell to Satan in exchange for a role in a play you've never heard of, WAPOW!"

"What happened?"

"I raped you in yer sleep, and you can't be mad cause you're complicit and I was drunk and this will be what conceives the Antichrist, so chillax, sugar ****."



So yeah, the whole gimmick is a series of peculiarities suggest that the other apartment tenants and eventually Rosemary's doctor and husband are in cahoots to abduct Rosemary's baby for witchy purposes. It's all very circumstantial and only very brief completely irrelevant dream sequences actually suggest anything paranormal is going on... so nothing paranormal is going on.

The strongly recommended doctor is concerningly into "natural" remedies and ambiguous herbal drinks... up until he says "take pills" out of the blue, which seems to undermine his objection to pills in previous scenes. He casually dismisses Rosemary's pregnancy pains saying they'll go away in 2 days, but they last for months and she instantly regains trust him again when they conveniently vanish.

Everybody's just a tad too invasive and controlling in Rosemary's life. Even if there weren't a coven of witches I'd say it's good enough reason to bail.

The biggest kick in the dick in this movie is the bombastic claim of "I won't take any chances with my baby's safety". This same stupid character is seen drinking, inhaling secondhand smoke, and walking into oncoming traffic.

And given that everybody else is revealed to be a corny-as-**** "HAIL SATAN!" rando in the end, it really leaves you with nobody to sympathize with. Hell, you can't even sympathize with the baby because you never see them and it's implied to be a hellspawn of some sort.

When did she's conceive? Apparently during the sailboat dream she had Satan just walked into the room and plunged his 8 foot spiked demon cock into her and spooged? And her husband just took a seat in the other room like "Yeah, I have no regrets about the course of these events."

It's just not an enjoyable movie. It's not awful, but it's ambiguity implies one of two predictable outcomes, and they went with one of those outcomes, and it wasn't even interesting. Rosemary just rips through the wall in her closet and finds a lounge where everybody's just hanging out and the only thing out of place is the random black crib with an upside-down cross hanging over it. Then everybody just starts yelling "HAIL SATAN!" over and over again.

Just the laziest most least interesting way they could have executed the idea.

A remake could definitely do this idea some better justice, but as it is, this movie just kind of struggles with the balance between creepy implications and subtlety. The neighbors making overtly anti-religious comments, the husband making a side joke about marijuana... for all I know this was some devout Christian's idea of a morality tale.

Not great cinema and in no way deserving of the reputation it seems to have.


Final Verdict:
[Meh...]
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Treasure Island
Adventure / English / 1990

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I think I've seen it before, but never reviewed it and barely remember it. The only opinion that stands out from my memory is that they didn't portray Silver the way I wanted.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Supposedly this is the best and one of the most faithful adaptations of the book Treasure Island, but having seen Treasure Planet, it sucks to know what could have been.

Treasure Planet, being a fairly standard Disney affair does indeed tell the basic story, but it also convolutes and distracts from the narrative by incorporating Goofy-like characters and forcing family-friendly comedy into the equation. The Disney stand-in for the Ben Gunn character is a disastrously unfunny "comedy relief" character and I've struggled to come into possession of fan edits that specifically edit out his involvement in the movie.

Which is unfortunate because Ben Gunn plays a significant role in the story, but more importantly, and why I feel so mixed on a more genuine interpretation of the book is how Treasure Planet handled Long John Silver.

While he is intended to be the ultimate antagonist of the story, he's supposed to be sympathetic, at least insofar as you, the viewer, come to like him as Taylor Hawkins likes him. In Treasure Planet, Silver plays the chef aboard a legitimate ship on a mission to recover buried treasure left behind by a barbarous pirate, but is eventually revealed to be a mutineer with a pre-existing interest in stealing the treasure for himself and a majority of the crew already wrapped around his finger.

This alone is the minimum you'd expect of the character, but in Treasure Planet, Hawkins, who only has a mother to speak of, looks to Silver as a father figure, and Silver's allegiances are vague and difficult to discern. This makes it a bigger gutpunch when Silver puts Hawkins on the spot and forces him to choose between the shipmate he's become friends with or doing the right thing.





My biggest issue with this movie is that they betray Silver's motives far too quickly, and Hawkins really never develops any sort of meaningful relationship with him, other than that Silver is soft towards Hawkins for no readily apparent reason, and Hawkins in some small way plays into Silver's notion of "honor amongst thieves".

This is definitely not helped by a young Dark Knight having the same inscrutable expression on his face for practically the whole movie. It's the same pouty-lipped expression you see in his more reserved moments in American Psycho. That look that says "your business card is inferior to mine".

At least Charleton Heston, who played Silver is likeable. The Wikipedia page says his performance sucked and I know he's a beloved actor, so I really do wonder what movies I've missed that he slam-dunked so well that this passed for a poor performance.

Yes, Christopher Lee is in this movie too apparently, but I was mainly struggling to remember the guy who plays one of the dinosaur poachers in Jurassic Park: Lost World who I only just now learned died over a decade ago. I also just now learned that there are two conflicting claims on his Wikipedia page claiming two separate movies provoked Spielberg to call him "the best actor in the world".

Always nice to see Julian Glover, he can be my posh British good guy or secret Nazi bad guy any day.

There's not a whole lot else to comment on other than the fact I had to watch this with subtitles because the pirate jargon is so thick I can hardly tell what they're saying half the time if I'm not reading it.

Anyway, it's a decent movie, but nothing special.


Final Verdict:
[Good]
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A Ghost Story
Fantasy Drama / English / 2017

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Today I tried ChatGPT for the first time and asked it for some movie recommendations based on my likes and dislikes. This was the top suggestion.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
First off, I'd like to say, that I think this was a pretty solid recommendation. It definitely hits that sweet spot between surreal imagery and a coherent narrative while also trying to serve up an emotional gutpunch all at the same time. Very satisfied with the recommendation.

That said, this movie was kind of painful.

Now, overall, it's not a bad movie, the premise was a pretty solid hook. Despite looking like a horror movie from the outside, it most definitely is not one. We follow Main Guy and Main Girl who live together, but plan to move soon, shortly after their relationship is established Main Guy dies in a car crash directly outside their home. Later he awakens in the hospital as a stereotypical bedsheet ghost, invisible, silent, and can only communicate to other ghosts in subtitles. He appears to be offered a portal elsewhere, but he doesn't enter.

Main Ghost returns to his home to watch Main Girl live out her life, up to and including writing out a secret note and hiding it in a wall before permanently moving away.

We pan transition through various phases of the house and it's subsequent occupants and loosely absorb information about the extent of Main Ghost's ability to interact with the real world as well as the fact that something in his psyche must be anchoring him to it.

After what must be many years he finally manages to pull the note from the wall, but is interrupted when the home is demolished and we timeskip to a skyscraper in a city deep into the future. Main Ghost jumps off the roof and we time travel back into the distant past for some reason.

After observing some Pre-American settlers killed and decomposed we find ourselves back in the house we started in and Main Ghost starts observing Main Ghost observing Main Girl. He cuts away from the eternal viewing party to pull the note from the wall, reads it, and disappears. Cut to credits.

The WORST part about all of this is that we never get to see what's on the ****ing note.

It reminds me of The Frame, which drummed up one character's ability to play music and finally at the climax the movie is completely ****ing silent like it was hit by a Youtube DMCA notice.

This was the perfect opportunity to present something that's clever, or thought provoking, or heartbreaking, or something as unimaginatively basic as "I love you", but we don't even get that. The writer's cheap out, we never see the note, and the movie ends. I HATE THAT.



And I especially hate it because this movie is otherwise so slow, so all of the weight that you've poured so heavily into every dragging scene just POOF!s when Main Ghost reads the note.

There are shots in this movie, mainly at the beginning, that go on FOREVER. Obviously the most poignant one is him eventually awakening in the hospital, but we also get a shot of the couple just snuggling in bed for a couple decades, and even less importantly we get a shot of Main Girl just dragging a big ****ing box to the curb which itself drags on for several thousand eons.

I deadass expected we were about to learn that she killed him and stuffed his body in the box for all of the emphasis that was put on that shot, but nope, that shot seems to serve absolutely no purpose in the movie.

Apart from stuff like that, I actually did like the editing of this movie. We get some good transitions, some excellent smash cuts without any backing track or musical stings, there were a lot of scenes that could have had music, but didn't and I don't feel like they needed any.

The presentation was kinda weird. The simple ghost costume is about as budget as you can imagine, but they manage to make it look sad rather than scary. On the flipside, this movie is cropped to nearly 1:1 and there's some bullshit explanation for it on Wikipedia about the "claustrophia of being stuck in a box for eternity", which is just pretentious nonsense. That implies that 4:3 aspect ratio movies and earlier were intended to, or unintentionally, conveyed any amount of claustrophobia.

Also, we never see him in a box, let alone the one box they show Main Girl dragging around for 17 trillion lightyears onscreen. What's claustrophobic about his existence when we see him inside, outside, and well above his house, and nowhere near a coffin?

Some of the movie logic falls apart after the time reversal too.

First off, let's assume I'm mistaken about the time reversal. Wikipedia states that the Pre-American girl is humming a song he wrote, which suggests that this is either the EXTREME deep future, as hypothesized by Random Party Dude #7, OR, even deeper, an Eternal Return phenomenon, which I find more appealing, but is less substantiated by the story.

So, if this is the future, why can he see his past self?
And if this is the past, why can he see his past ghost self?
And better yet, why did it take him years to pull the note from the wall the first time but mere seconds the second time?

Main Girl specifically painted over the crack in the wall which is what made it difficult to retrieve, did she just not do it in this timeline? Why was Past Main Ghost slower to act on that than Future Past Main Ghost?

Anyway, this is one of those movies that pours every ingredient into a big payoff ending only to shit out a "WE'LL LEAVE IT UP TO YOUR IMAGINATION!!!" bit instead.

It seriously harms my opinion of the entire movie up to now if the payoff it's been alluding to for over an hour is nonexistent, and that's why this ending is going to tank my rating something fierce.

For what it's worth though, this movie would be significantly worse if he ghost had an inner monologue.


Final Verdict:
[Okay]
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Forrest Gump
Historical Drama / English / 1994

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It's been a long time since I've seen it and I've never reviewed it.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Fishin' and Shrimpin'.

If you don't already know the premise, Forrest Gump is the life story of a mentally deficient man as told from his perspective to strangers at a bus stop, recalling an increasingly fantastical involvement in various historical events from the 40s to 80s.

From inspiring Elvis's dance moves and causing the Watergate scandal, to bringing into the world who would become Sora from Kingdom Hearts.

Movie begins with an overly saccharine opening theme and Tom Hank's stuttering performance feels a bit forced at first, but over the course of an incredibly brisk 2 and a half hours, it quickly cements itself as a serious, albeit intentionally funny at times, story that contrast's Forrest's innocent and wholesome window into the world against the harsh realities of war, politics, and sexual abuse.

Hanks sinks into his role flawlessly and it's almost entirely on his shoulders that this movie rests because it is only our endearment towards his character that draws us in and carries us to the gutpunch finish line. And it also thanks to some clever writing that this movie becomes a defacto template for how to narrate over the course of an entire story.

Forrest doesn't seem particularly emotional in most scenes, but the occasional moment when he becomes rattled or panicked really punctuate those scenes, and it's a great way to represent somebody who's socially awkward, but not entirely ignorant of his surroundings.

I personally think the most heartbreaking moment in the whole movie isn't one of the many characters deaths we see, but Forrest attempting to reconcile his sudden responsibility with being a father at the end, particularly because he fears that his son could be low intelligence like him. This is the only time in the whole movie that he reacts emotionally to the fact that other people view him as "stupid", he reiterates a couple times that he doesn't like being called that, but even when it is brought up it's just something he's learned to endure.

That he extends this sympathy that few people have shown him which he otherwise hasn't conveyed actually bothers him until this moment demonstrates that it does bother him, and in that moment the one-dimensional handicapped kid at the beginning of the movie is revealed to have yet another side after what is already a movie busy with every idea and opinion Forrest shares with us over it's course.

Another character that easily stands out is Lt. Dan, probably because he is one of only three characters to really have an arc. He begins as Forrest's Lt. while they're on duty in Vietnam and after losing his legs and Forrest saving him from his "destiny", he folds into himself, denies God, and resolves to wile his pains away with drink and prostitution.

There's not a moment of screentime Dan doesn't steal with his big, cynical, and confrontational personality. We really get to see his ego get crushed and come out the other side empathizing with Forrest, who, unintentionally, seems to wind up as his only friend.
On the other hand, his arc is punctuated most blatantly by a "shrimping business" subplot for which I possess no empathy and it really takes me out of the movie.



But what was even more impactful to my experience was the character of Jenny, who Forrest effectively falls in love with at the start of the movie.

Thankfully it's not an Overnight Romance type of deal, but perhaps even worse, it's an almost entirely parasitic relationship.

Jenny begins as a nice girl at the start of the movie and it's suggested that she's repeatedly molested by her father. This, apparently, is all sufficient justification for Jenny to become a miserable bitch for the next 30 years.

She becomes wrapped up in various abusive relationships, various drugs, various radical activist movements (which were left-wing and appropriate for the time period), and it really all just comes down to this bizarrely counterintuitive notion that getting molested by her father basically made her "damaged goods".

That certainly doesn't help the case against Forrest Gump being a "conservative movie".

I would have been content for Jenny to have personal issues she can't share with Forrest, but the fact that she basically re-enters his life once a decade just to make him feel all warm and fuzzy and make herself feel all worm and fuzzy, only to cut it off just to get into the nearest bus or taxi en route to self destruction is incredibly frustrating.

It just makes me feel like she's taking advantage of Forrest, particularly when she has sex with him in her second-to-last appearance and bafflingly gives birth to and raises his son to grade school age without him even involved. How incredibly ****ing selfish can you be?

You can't just handwave that with "I was messed up, Forrest". It's clearly and repeatedly established that he is the best guy in your life and you kick him to the curb every single ****ing time because "OH MY HIPPIE FRIENDS" or "OH MY CRACK ADDICTION" or "OH MY 70th BOYFRIEND WHO ABUSES ME". It's just so transparently ****ing dumb and they really could have put a little bow on her character at the end by really driving home how stupid she is.

Because stupid is as stupid does, and Forrest is a ******* Mensa genius compared to her.

I really don't like this narrative trope of the "Loser" character hooking up with the "Misfit Girl" only for their relationship to be toxic as ****. I'm distinctly reminded of reading The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, which started out as a pretty intriguing romance before it spun out into this awful mutually destructive relationship.

At least Forrest came out of this with his character unscathed, but I cannot watch this movie and like Jenny any more than I did decades ago when I saw it for the first time. She's just a miserable character and I don't like watching her, especially when her shitty decisions negatively impact characters I actually like.

There's not a whole lot else to say about this, it was produced well, some special effects are pretty sneaky, but some of the old film reel they edited Forrest into have some glaring issues that wouldn't pass the sniff test today, particularly with regard to the framerate disparity of Forrest and the faces they edited to react to him.

It's a great period piece, makes me wish I had a big house out in Alabama, and I will admit this movie joins the ranks of movies that have managed to make me cry.

For that alone, I have to score it pretty high, but otherwise my rating is tempered by the issues outlined above (EDIT: I'm going to give it a 3.5, I keep regretting giving out 4s.).

That said, moviegoers were pretty spoiled in 1994.


Final Verdict:
[Good]
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Citizen Kane
Drama / English / 1941

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Never seen it.

Also it is widely held by movie critics to be the greatest movie ever made in the history of movies, so automatically I have to like it too, right?

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Various animals that almost entirely appear only in the first 5 minutes.

Right off the bat, I have to admit I had the ending to this movie spoiled for me by Family Guy, so just bear that mind.

That being said, having now seen the whole movie and imagining what my reaction would be having not known the "twist" up to then, I have to imagine I'd be pretty underwhelmed, which was my overall experience of this movie.

The basic premise is an ungodly rich man dies and his former newspaper business eagerly tries to poach readership off of his dying word, "Rosebud" (it's his sled), and off one reporter goes to interview some of the closest people in his life to try and figure out what the great mystery was, learning about the character that was Charles Foster Kane.

It honestly could have been an interesting premise to a story, but I don't think they did very well with it at all.

The first 10 minutes of this movie are continuous annoying half-hearted radio presenter speak of the fictional newspaper article announcing Kane's death, and as though the summary of his life wasn't exciting enough, there's another 180 minutes serving to essentially repeat whatever this movie thought were the highlights of that story.

The most confusing thing about this whole movie is how Kane even comes into his fortune in the first place. It's either entirely omitted or terribly explained, but essentially some random bank BUYS Kane from his Mom and Dad and gifts him something in the way of 60 million dollars when he becomes an adult.

Why?

There's so much timeskipping around in this movie that shortly after he receives these funds, his "caretakers" die and we never see any return on whatever this investment was supposed to be.

Initially, Kane presents himself as some sort of virtuous character who decides to buy up a newspaper to inform the public about the shady deals of the marketmen he lives around, he even eventually runs for Governor under that pretense, but countless other character can see, and even the audience sees, that his "campaigns" to help the underprivileged, whatever they might have been, were more or less bullshit. He's just cares about himself, and what other people think about him.

And whatever principles he claims to have regarding "truth" go right out the window when he does a hostile takeover of his newspaper rival and converts their whole operation into a tabloid.

Even interpersonally, he's just a shitty person. He doesn't give his wife the time of day, then eventually cheats on her for another girl who he ends up controlling the life of. He builds her an opera house, and forces her to sing until she leaves him, and then he makes himself out to be a victim and throws a temper tantrum in the middle of his MegaMillions McMansion...

There are some moments where I guess we're supposed to sympathize with him, like when one of his longtime editors decides to write a scathing criticism of his wife's performance in the newspaper and he decides to finish it himself because that would be "honest"... but then he fires that editor anyway. What's supposed to be our takeaway from that scene?

When he's blackmailed over his infidelity during his election campaign he refuses to drop out, but still runs a story falsely alleging voter fraud when he loses...? Like, our main character here is not a good person.



Am I supposed to like him? Am I supposed to hate him? I can't sympathize with him because he's a cartoon character, literally raised by a bank to be a selfish rich ****. What am I supposed to be getting out of this movie?

Ah, but of course, the missing ingredient; the surprise ending... with his dying breath he cast his mind back to, of all things... a random ****ing sled we see him playing on for barely a minute of screentime at the beginning of the movie.

Oh, how sad, poor Kane, wasted millions of dollars ruining journalism, failed to run for office with his own "Hillary for prison" arc, built an opera house nobody likes, got twice divorced, BUT IN HIS HEART HE WAS STILL A YOUNG BOY WHO MISSED HIS SLED.

...a sled which he apparently still owned and was so important to him he just never pulled it out again and buried it in all the random shit he bought.

With all the whinging about the "working class" and him being a "liberal", is this supposed to be some half-assed commentary about the decadence of the elite and materialism? Cause that's what it feels like.

I think Ink does a much better job at that.

I'm hazarding to guess what it is that people see in this movie that they think is so special... I'm sure at the time this was a pretty expensive production, the age makeup across multiple characters is decent, Orson Welles acts fine in it. There's a whole thing at the end where they emphasize that most of the cast were inexperienced, so the fact that they weren't all completely awful must mean the casting was exceptional in some way?

It definitely wasn't the music, because those big raucus orchestral strings are at complete odds with the tone of the movie.

Oh, and how could I forget to mention the completely random and unexplained cockatoo jumpscare? What actual **** was that?

I really don't know. This really wasn't a special movie to me, and like another 40s "classic", Casablanca, I'm sure I'm going to forget most of it very very quickly.

At least I now recognize the context for two more pop culture memes.


Final Verdict:
[Weak]
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Coherence
Psychological Thriller / English / 2013

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Another ChatGPT recommendation.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Reading the synopsis on this movie, I was expecting a pretty predictable plot, maybe something in the vein of Phenomenon, but I was mistaken.

This is one of those movies that tries to tackle some really ambitious concept like multiverse theory, but explains it very poorly and ultimately undermines it's own excitement.

The premise is that there's a house party, a comet flies overhead knocking out the lights, and in an effort to contact a nearby house whose lights are on, it's quickly discovered that the mysterious second house is a mirror of their own, and not long after that it's determined that every house in the neighborhood is a pocket dimension containing a house party of guests slightly different than we're familiar with.

The rationalization here is quantum mechanics, and Schroedinger's Cat is used as an example, but, whether intentional or not, it's immediately misunderstood.

The Schroedinger's Cat example supposes that until it enters into observable reality, the cat in the box may be simultaneously alive or dead at the same time. I don't pretend to understand quantum mechanics myself, I didn't understand Primer, but it at least seems obvious to me that the example doesn't suggest that anyone caught in a "pending multiverse", or whatever you want to call it, isn't necessarily at risk of dying.

A similar example could be made of a coin flipped in a closed container, you don't know whether it's heads or tails until you open it. Schroedinger's Cat is just a macabre example of the same concept, but at least one of the characters in this movie immediately becomes a ticking timebomb when he interprets it to mean that only one or the other version of him will live.

It becomes a core conflict of the movie; speculating over whether they should go and steal a book on quantum mechanics from the other house under the assumption that depriving them of that information may prevent their alternate version of this character from coming over and killing them... then further speculating about going over there and killing them first... when nothing of the sort need be assumed at all, and in fact if the "neutral" version of this character were less presumptive, then the odds are relatively greater than his alternate versions would also be less presumptive.

So really, it's a self-fulfilling conflict, which is really stupid.



It's also really stupid when there are not one but two infidelity subplots, just to inject some additional artificial conflict into the equation.

I honestly burst out laughing when they dropped this line:

"Do you not understand what I'm saying? This all started tonight, and if there are a million different realities, I have slept with your wife in every one of 'em."
What a dumb line, it makes a little bit more sense if it is in fact true that reality branched at the time of the comet, but that's not certain and it also undermines the other infidelity subplot because those characters also have a relationship prior to the comet.

The main point of contention here is that there is one scene where Girl #4A snogs Guy #1A, and Girl #3A witnesses it and informs Girl #1A whose married(?) to Guy #1A so Girl #1A gets upset and confronts Guy #1A, but discovers that Guy #1B is not in fact Guy #1A because Guy #1B did not snog Girl #4A, you get it?

Girl #4A I guess gets jaded as the party starts getting violent and Guy #3A gets attacked by Guy #3J, which is honestly his fault in the first place, so Girl #4A bails and visits various houses until she finds a peaceful one and isolates Girl #1Z, attacks and replaces her. Which works until the comet passes and evidence of what she did still exists and it's implied that Girl #1Z still exists.

It's pretty underwhelming because she really doesn't go through any sort of character arc, it's really just "That one psycho bitch who potentially drugged all of us told me you kissed your ex so now I'm going to go kill an alternate reality version of myself and life with an alternate reality version of you instead."

The coolest part about this whole movie is the idea that when people go outside, they enter a "roulette" that puts them at an alternate reality version of their house party and by the end of the movie, almost everyone is discovered to be from an alternate reality house party, so there's a whole "imposter" game that could have been played with in this movie, but barely gets any sort of mileage at all.

A couple characters discover that they're not originally from the house they're in and just bail after quite a bit of screentime, and yet despite setting up all these plans to try and undermine or social engineer the other versions of themselves they just don't do it, even though trying to figure out who among the cast are actually real would be SUPER ****ING COOL.

There's just no whodunnit element, no The Thing element, it's just dropped on us at the end that everybody was mixed up about where they were and came from at the end. Really wasted potential.

The infidelity subplots were bad, the explanation of multiverse theory was bad, the ending was predictable, everyone was too quick to explain what was going on, I wish the dumb drug-dealing astrology bitch got hit by a car, and what even were the value of these characters at the end?

The first 15 minutes of this movie are just these talking heads and you establish maybe one or two points of interest that come up later in the movie, what did I need all that for?

I didn't care about any of these characters except maybe Hugo Armstrong, because his voice makes me feel warm and fuzzy, but he also vaguely reminds me of Vaush and I now see his Twitter account is one of these turbo-cringe Hollywood partisan accounts.

A lot of potential wasted on this one.


Final Verdict:
[Meh...]
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