Category Archives: movies

Lucky

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Now for a movie review of sorts. The name of the film is Lucky. The only way that I can think of to do this without a ton of spoilers is with the following sentence:

A writer overcomes writer’s block through unusual means.

To say anything else would really take away from the viewing experience. That would hardly be a review, so I must elaborate. By elaborating I am going to go into spoilers galore mode, be warned.

The only reason that I feel compelled to do a review of this movie at all is that all of the reviews that I have read over at Rotten Tomatoes seem to have missed a couple of key events that really change the meaning of the movie. That doesn’t make them wrong or myself right, but it does make a hell of a lot of what happens in the film just impossible. I will get into all that as this spoiler-riddled, review-type-thing continues.

The movie starts with a long, quite introspective, narrative by the main character Millard Mudd (Michael Emanuel). Over the first five minutes or so of the movie, the camera slowly goes through the beer can jungle that is Millard’s home. It continues on as the already drunken Millard realizes that he is out of beer and goes to buy some more. The fact that he takes one beer from the six pack, then forgets the rest of them still sitting on the roof of the car, and continues to drive home is absolute proof of his inebriation. It is no surprise, as the camera shows more and more blurred road-markers, the car veering into the wrong lane and the such, that the drive ends in tragedy. Millard has run over a small dog, but, more importantly, the cans of beer break when the fly off of the top of his car!

Millard, being a good samaritan (which is slang for covering his ass), took the dog home to try to nurse it back to health. The dog was in a pretty bad way, there was not really any way it could actually have been alive if the (really bad, joke-shop style) guts were hanging out. Our hero, Millard, continued to try though. He tried everything Beer and….Well that was about it.

This is the point where all of the reviewers seemed to have missed the point. It is my belief, my strong belief, that the dog was actually dead when he took it to the back yard to bury it. The happy puppy didn’t wake up, no, it was dead as a stone. Millard’s mind, however, was getting stronger.

For the next half an hour or so the movie switches between scenes where the talking dog (David Reivers) is funneling ideas to Millard, and other scenes where Millard is having fantasies about Misty (Piper Cochrane). This is, in my mind, the second clue that the dog wasn’t even there. Later in the movie they make a point of telling you about the girl who works at the liquor store, what days she works, what time she works, what car she drives, where she lives…Yet, it is the ‘dog’ that forces Millard to go out. Millard then meets the ‘real life’ Misty.

Now, here is where it is going to get just a little bit confusing, I will try to keep it on course as best I can. When Millard first meets ‘Misty’, the dog tells him to tell her that she has a nice dog. Misty doesn’t even look down…I don’t think our Millard had a dog with him at all when he first met ‘Misty’. I also don’t believe that Millard and Misty had any sort of a relationship, excepting the possibility that he did the necrophilia thing on her corpse (or perhaps a bit of consensual sex before she realized that she was never going to walk out alive). As the movie played, Millard got more and more vicious with his ‘fantasies’, to the point that it showed ‘Misty’ hanging dead from a rafter; I don’t think that was a dream at all.

There was one scene where his weird fantasy was being shown in normal focus, normal light, and with the ‘Misty’ character laying tied to the bed. The dialogue seemed almost joking, as she asked him what he was going to do to her. The fact that she specifically asked him not to disfigure her face can only bolster my case that there was no dog. In that ‘dream sequence’ it was only Millard and Misty, no one else could have heard about the plea to not damage her face. No one else could have heard ‘Misty’ tell Millard to take a tooth as a trophy, yet, both things did happen. Her face was disfigured and a tooth was taken.

Now there is the issue of the other people that died at Millard’s hand. He killed them all, the dead dog was not involved.

I am relatively sure that Millard killed the lot of them. One of the driving reasons for this assumption is that a twelve-pound, Terrier-mixed, dog could not drag a human body around, much less dig a hole to bury that body in. Add that to the fact that the voice of the dog seemed to come out of Millard’s mouth at least once, and the fact that Millard took over the killing duties. I think it is a case closed, though I am still a bit weirded out by the necrophilia.

When Millard goes out to stalk some women later, it kind of cheapens the experience. It has been him all along. There was never a dog feeding him information. It was always his own mind in turmoil. Possibly the death of the dog just whet his thirst for killing, who knows, but, for the sake of this arguement, the dog died when he initially hit it with the car. Everything that happened after that point was only in his mind.

Hell, even my wife knew that. Millard cracked into some sort of schizophrenia and started taking out the locals. Not so far-fetched when you look at it that way. Had he worked at a post office, we would have a word for him, since he didn’t, we just call him a bad, bad man.

Fox Sunday; Underworld

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Well, I skipped yet another update and the net result was one of my site’s busier days of all time. I had 6 visits, of which I can only name three of them. I think that the pretty picture that I had on the last update might have been a contributing factor. At any rate, yes I skipped another one, and if anyone who is reading this (other than my wife) really cares, shoot me an email to let me know how disappointed you were, perhaps I will feel for you and soldier on, even on days when I really just don’t give a damn. Don’t hold your breath.

There are three contributing factors to my missing an update yesterday. 1) I played way to much of the damn ‘Deadly Rooms of Death’ game. 2) With the obvious exception of ‘South Park’, Fox’s Sunday evening shows, King of the Hill, the Simpsons and Malcolm in the middle are the only reason anyone should ever watch network television (unless you get addicted to ‘Survivor’ like I did, in which case you can watch an hour of CBS on Thursday). 3) I watched a movie that my wife had rented on DVD, which I will likely bitch a lot about later.

The good news on the DROD front is that I have learned all of the necessary tactics to win nearly every board with ease. The even better news is that this has resulted in me not enjoying it quite as much as I did when I started, and as such had no clue how to play or what the hell was going on. The net result of that is that when I enter a new board I will scan it for a minute or two, come up with the solution and then play it through. Sometimes the playing it through can take thousands of moves, literally, and that becomes a tad boring. I think I will go ahead and complete my current level and then give it up. Much like Tetris, this game loses all of the enjoyment once you know all of the rules and the boards become more tedious than actually challenging. Hell, at least Tetris forces you to move faster the further you progress..

As far as Fox’s Sunday night line-up goes, it was pretty good this week and kept me watching. I think it is a solid fact that pretty much any show they put on after ‘The Simpsons’ is going to do really well in its time slot, but ‘Malcolm in the Middle’ is a rather amusing show. Perhaps I only think that because my mother has taken to believe that I am Malcolm, while the older brother who is away (I forget his name) is my oldest brother, and Reece(sp?) is the middle brother, who was always causing trouble just for the sake of causing trouble. As far as that little equasion goes my mother did pull of a pretty good ‘insane mother’, back in the day, while my father was never so subserviant as the father in the show, but it certainly paints a better picture of a real family than say ‘Full House’ for example.

• UnderWorld

Thankfully I did not have to pay theatre price for this movie. I watched it even after reading the horrible review that Flux over at BlackChampagne.com gave it. It was every bit as horrible as he said.

My biggest bitch about the movie is also one of my ‘pet peeves’ when it comes to films. Ammunition. You can either take the Hollywood approach, that is that you never run out of bullets, ever. Or you can take the ‘real life’ approach where both sides have to reload. You simply can not mix those two without making the movie seem absolutely fake. This movie even goes so far as to show you the clip that is being used in the ‘semi-automatic’ gun, which is conveniently ‘fully-automatic’ when it is necessary. Though the clip is mostly empty when you see it, you can deduce that it could only hold eight or nine more rounds, for a total of thirteen or fourteen, at best. Yet, the hand-guns are routinely fired sixty+ times, then they stop to reload. Come on..

Then there is the issue about Selene, she can be all-powerful, when necessary. She can be as fragile as a 300 year old tea service also, when necessary. She can beat the shit out of a dozen of the werewolves, yet can’t seem to open her own nail polish. It just seemed so fake.

As far as the ‘plot twist’ at the end of the movie, if you didn’t see it coming by the time you were a half-an-hour into the movie, you just weren’t paying attention.

The movie did take my mind away from real life for about two hours and that is roughly 1% of a week. By that metric, it only cost a few cents to watch the movie, and I still think I got screwed.

Lunch; Secret Window

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Today was a rather enjoyable day on the homefront. It is not often that my wife and myself go out and do things, which we did today. I suppose that the base reason for this is my agoraphobia, not that I think I actually have the affliction, but anyone seeing my reaction to large public places would surely think I did. It probably took me quite a while to become the hermit that I am, I don’t really mind going out in public places as such, I just try to avoid it when it is not necessary. I don’t think that it is a fear, or anything of that nature, it is more like a choice to simply avoid all the weird people doing weird things. Okay, I am going to change the subject here, as I seem to be digging myself an ever deeper hole.

The really strange thing about my not going out much is that the times we do, I really enjoy it. We never see the weird people doing weird things, we simply go out and have a little fun and then come home. Why, then, do I have this notion that I want to avoid all the strangeness out there? I gots no idea.

As sited in a Previous Blog, my wedding anniversary was last Wednesday, and it certainly did not get a celebration at all. We went out today to do something enjoyable to make up for the lack of being able to do so then. We decided on lunch and a movie, which is like dinner and a movie, minus the not getting home until midnight aspect of it.

My wife’s parents had given us a gift card for On the Border, which is an upscale type mexican restaurant that serves really yummy food. It is not exactly authentic mexican food, but the version of it that those of us who are not Hispanic have grown to love. Tasty, tasty stuff, and huge portions of it. Though at the prices they charge the portions had better be huge. The meal would have been completely free to us, had I not indulged in a beer once I had received my food. Perhaps it was better that I ordered that four dollar beer, as it would have seemed really cheap to try to put the tip on a gift card, IMHO. My wife left the tip for the meal, which was five dollars, even after I had offered to pay it, since that was darn near the price of the beer after tax. Oh well, tasty, tasty stuff.

My wife’s brother (yes, my brother-in-law, but it seems that I should give credit to my wife for having the family, since I never got so much as a call from any one of my relatives for the anniversary, let alone a gift) gave us a gift card to AMC theatres for the movie. The card did not have an amount printed on it, so my wife opined that it may not be enough to cover the tickets (her brother is only twenty, and not independantly wealthy) so I would make up the difference at the box office. As it turns out, he went above and beyond the call, giving a twenty dollar gift card. We spoke briefly of using the remaining balance to buy soda or popcorn, but eventually decided that one of us could go to the next movie for free if we didn’t. So we didn’t.

The movie that we saw was Secret Window. This movie has gotten really bashed in the ratings game, having only a 47% positive review on Rotten Tomatoes. Ebert has This to say. I think that Ebert does a much better job of describing the film than the people that reviewed it over at rotten tomatoes.

I don’t like Johnny Depp much as an actor, but he did do a very convincing drunkard in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie. He did a pretty good job in this movie as well. The novella, by Stephen King, that this movie was based on does not have really anyone in it. Just the main character, his (ex)wife and her boyfriend. Without character interaction there can be little dialogue, without dialogue you really don’t have any way to judge a character’s actions. Depp certainly made the point that the character was not ‘all there’ with his actions, most notably scrubbing his hands for way too long in one sequence.

It is hard to try to discuss an actor’s performance in a movie without giving away plot elements, that is what I am trying to do, so bear with me.

At exactly the point in the movie that I knew how it would end, they threw in the fiance of his (ex)wife. That was entirely too convenient to the flow of the movie, and thus, had no effect on the outcome. Had the editors put that scene further back in the screenplay, to give it enough time to fade from your memory a bit, it would have made the whole story a lot stronger. I think so anyway.

I am going to speculate that King wrote this little story while he was going through a little bit of a ‘Writer’s Block’. Like many King stories you simply must read the story to appreciate the screenplay. This is one of his stories (like most of his work) that I have not read. I am sure that it is extremely difficult to try to act out the thoughts of a character, yet Depp did it, and pretty masterfully I might add.

Johnny Depp just seems to have that touch, much like Tom Hanks, where he can act out any role and turn that movie into a blockbuster. Why that didn’t happen with this film is still a mystery to me. I think that the number one reason is that it is so similar to another King story called “the Dark Half”. Start telling the same story twice and even your fans may turn on you, no matter that the other film was released well over a decade ago.

The movie was pretty good on its own merits, better if you have never read any Stephen King. The ideas that he used may have been recycled, but they were recycled from his own twisted mind. Can one ever actually copy theirself?

Diablo; Signs

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I would like to go into a bit of detail about my neck again today, but let’s be honest, I am absolutely sick of writing about it, and you are no doubt sick of reading about it. Instead I will just say that you should assume that it is in the same condition as it was the previous update if I do not mention it. That way, hopefully, I won’t write about it again until the injury is healed…Don’t quote me on that.

I stayed up late last night playing DiabloII:LOD, several months ago that was a very common thing for me to do, but now it seems almost like my world has gone in a big circle. I started playing DiabloII after I had bought it for my wife as a birthday gift. I played single player for at least a year or more before the ‘purity’ of on-line play pulled me in. By the time LOD came out, I bought two copies of it, one for desktop, one for laptop. I played the game so much and had gotten so much gear muled that I never played a character that was not *helped* by my other characters. This became rather boring after a while, and I just resigned myself to just using a sorc, baba and zon for magic find, and that was all I played for the last few months of my Diablo career.

While waiting for Blizzard to get around to releasing the patch (that was like two years in the making), I split my time between everquest and a diablo mod that was really pretty cool. In the process of doing that, my on-line characters mostly expired. Out of a total of 32 characters, only four of them remained, one high level sorceress, and three mules, though not the mules with the elite gear. None of my friends were playing online anymore as they had moved on to the everquest for the PS2 or World of Warcraft, this made levelling a new character difficult. So what did I do? I started an off-line character so that I could adjust the difficulty to help me gain experience between act bosses.

It had been so long since I had played a character through from the beginning that I was a bit surprised at how difficult it was. Not that there was really any threat of my death in the first act, just that the monsters were all a lot tougher than I remembered them. Keep in mind that this was the first time in probably at least two years that I had been playing a character without hand-me-down gear to help him out. When Andariel (boss of act 1) died and dropped a magic mace I was overjoyed. I used that weapon for the majority of act 2.

That led me to thinking about just how different this was than my recent play style. I never picked up anything that was just magical unless it was an elite item, now I was picking up every magic item I saw and saying please,please,please as I identified it. It is a lot more fun this way, but if I were to start a character on-line again the temptation to trickle some gear down from my mules would overcome me (probably about the time I had to fight Duriel, since I always have a problem with him), and that would take away the anticipation and joy of seeing an item drop then seeing it is actually a useful item.

What is it about DiabloII that has this effect on me and so many others? In just a quick look around what passes for an office at my house I can see Morrowind, Alone In the Dark 3,Arthurs Knights 2, Atlantis: the lost tales, Egypt Tomb of the Pharaoh, I could go on. I haven’t spent more than an hour or two playing any one of those games( never even installed a couple for that matter), yet I am still consumed by DiabloII. The only logical answer is; Blizzard put subliminal messages in the game cinematics that make you want to play it more.

As long as I am in the mood to write about Diablo, I may as well throw a theory out here regarding ebay. In lots of articles over at DiabloII.net people have criticised Blizzard for not taking a firm stance against people who sell game items for real money. I don’t really care either way, if someone is dumb enough to pay actual money for a string of binary code that can only be used in an on-line game, the deserve what they get. A theory that I have had in my mind for a while, though, is that the Blizzard employees actually sell gear over ebay to cover the costs of maintaining battle.net without having to charge the players. The reason that I really love that theory is that it would mean that people who don’t play often enough to find the really good stuff (that is part-time players), and those with more money than brains, would be paying for the dedicated fans who devote ten hours a day to it without ever dropping a cent. This is also the reason that it can’t possibly be true, it would make me far too happy if that was the reality.

I woke up early this morning and was not able to get back to sleep, so I decided to watch a DVD. I found one under the end table called Signs and popped it in. Before I go into detail below, let me just say that there was a BlockBuster sticker on the front of the case that said “Previously Viewed $14.95”, and I think that BlockBuster is just assuming that whoever rented it was actually able to view it.

If you have never seen the movie and plan to, I am gonna spoil it all here, so don’t read it.

The trailers for this movie, as well as the description on the box, say that this is a movie about one family’s experience dealing with crop circles and extraterrestrials. That is true, to a point. The villains in this movie could have been pigeons, frogs hell even day-glow ping-pong balls and it would not have made a difference to the plot. Here is the entire plot in a sentence; Man loses faith in God, things happen to make man believe again. That is the entire movie.

To be fair to the movie I guess I should do a bit more detail about that. The main character (mel gibson) is a man of the cloth. His wife dies in a car accident which makes him question his faith, he turns in the cloth (this happened before the point where the movie starts). As the movie progressess he begins to think that his faith helps to save his son not once, but twice. He then believes that his son has asthma only because there would be a point where poison gas would be sprayed in his face, but God had made it so that he couldn’t breathe at the time. He then believes that what he used to think were his wife’s non-sensical dying words were actually a vision of the future, telling him what to say to his brother six months later when faced with a dilemma.

Okay, I am gonna take a few deep breaths and try to collect my thoughts since it does get even LESS logical.

There are a lot of things in the movie that are inconsistent or just don’t make a damn bit of sense. The first in my mind is why would the aliens decide to try to invade the earth when water is toxic to them. Wouldn’t they have noticed in their cursory exploration that we live on a planet that is more water than land? Wouldn’t they have seen that every dwelling in the entire world -regardless of wealth- had water in it? Attacking would be like trying to dig a paperclip out of a huge bowl of razors, are these beings, that have already mastered interstellar flight, really that stupid?

There is also the issue of the aliens and their ability, or lack thereof, to open doors. In one scene there is an alien that is not able to escape from a pantry which has a couch against the door, in another scene you hear them break out windows to get into a house, then find a disused coal chute (which would surely have been sealed off when the house went to a more modern climate control system) and somehow break through that. Even in the basement where two grown men had done the pole-under-the-doorknob trick and were also leaning against the door, the aliens nearly broke through. This was necessary to build tension, sure, but it was just not consistent.

Then there is the dead wife. So she was hit by a truck and pinned against a tree. In the scene you can see at least three ambulances and a dozen firemen and EMS workers. They just left her there until Mel got there. Great. The movie explained this away saying that the woman should be dead but that she hadn’t died…Well that is when one is supposed to use medical knowledge to keep them not dead, isn’t it? I am sure that letting her bleed internally for however long it took for Mel to get there was probably why she died, but I guess that was what the movie was going for. I think that what you are supposed to believe is that their combined faith had kept her alive long enough to talk to him one more time, so she could could say “swing away”.

My wife said that she has never even made it thirty minutes into this film, and I am actually kind of surprised that I did. I just kept looking at the timer on the DVD player and thinking, something has got to happen soon, and it never did. This is one of the worst movies that I have ever actually sat through, but I did sit through it, so that is something. I just sat through it waiting for something to happen, and then it was over, and then I was pissed off that I had just wasted over an hour and a half of my life watching a movie that you could see at vacation bible school. But don’t take my word for it, the Cap Alert guy gave it what I would say is the best review of his that I have ever seen.

Hoping to see how the movie was reviewed by people other than ultra religious kooks, I went to Rotten Tomatoes and found that it actually has a 78% positive review. Did those people watch the same movie as I did? 78% is like a C+ right? The movie I saw doesn’t even deserve a letter, or if I had to give it one it would be a ‘Q’ or an ‘S’ for Quit or Stop. But it doesn’t even stop there, I went and checked Ebert’s review and he is blowing more sunshine up your ass. The last two paragraphs of his review aren’t too far off the mark though;

Instead of flashy special effects, Shyamalan creates his world out of everyday objects. A baby monitor that picks up inexplicable sounds. Bo’s habit of leaving unfinished glasses of water everywhere. Morgan’s bright idea that caps made out of aluminum foil will protect their brains from alien waves. Hess’ use of a shiny kitchen knife, not as a weapon, but as a mirror. The worst attack in the film is Morgan’s asthma attack, and his father tries to talk him through it, in a scene that sets the entire movie aside and is only about itself.
At the end of the film, I had to smile, recognizing how Shyamalan has essentially ditched a payoff. He knows, as we all sense, that payoffs have grown boring. The mechanical resolution of a movie’s problems is something we sit through at the end, but it’s the setup and the buildup that keep our attention. “Signs” is all buildup. It’s still building when it’s over.

The problem is that I could not find anything better (worse for the movie) to put here from anyone with a reputation. I guess I may be the only one in the whole world that hated the movie and I am okay with that. It just goes to show that there is a damn good reason why I rarely watch any movies other than comedies.