An old post about movies

I used to write a lot of two-line movie reviews around here.  Then I stopped because I thought I was going to make a podcast called Contra Zoom.  I thought I'd publish all the capsule reviews on the podcast's website.  Then it seemed like we weren't going to do that show anymore, but by then I was out of the habit of posting them. These were written before we recorded the tech demo / episode zero of Contra Zoom.  I had just been to Vegas, guested on the Combinations and Permutations podcast, and gone to MaxFunCon II.

-Deep Water - Similar to Man on Wire, this is the story of someone who attempted something extremely improbable (a solo circumnavigation by sailboat), why they did it, and how it turned out.  I liked it better than Man on Wire, possibly because I hadn't heard all the details in advance - I just heard the screenwriter of The Informant! mention it somewhere.

-Big Fan - I found the events of this movie surprising, but I shouldn't have.  This is the apt-est title since Apt Pupil.  I haven't seen Apt Pupil.

-Loose Change: An American Coup - The popular opinion on these guys is that they're maniacal revisionist cranks.  I mean, probably, sure, but no less intriguing because of it.  And not really any less believable than any other explanations out there.

-Battlestar Galactica: The Plan - This was better than Razor, since it provides new information at the very least.  Still, felt pretty pointless to watch after the series conclusion.

-Django - This is one murdery western, and probably almost single handedly responsible for the fad of accessorizing with gattling guns that swept 1960s Italy and eventually the world.  You know those photos of your parents when they were just teens or in their early 20s, with their chainguns?  Whether they acknowledge it or not, the whole craze pretty much stems directly from this movie.

-9 - looked fantastic, had some cool action sequences, and has the same appeal that Home Movies or Be Kind Rewind has in seeing objects repurposed.  Also has quite a bit of 'wait, what?' and 'hold on, why did, ah, how does that, er…huh?"

-Dawn of the Red, Zitlover, H.R. Pukenshette, Harry Knuckles and the Treasure of the Aztec Mummy, and Please Kill Mr. Kinski - Shorts distributed by Troma.  The last one is a story told by a director who made the somewhat ill-advised decision to cast Klaus Kinski as the 'name' in a project.  It didn't go well for anyone.

-My Best Fiend - This is Werner Herzog's remembrance of Klaus Kinski.  I didn't know very much about him, and I thought this would be an interesting counterpoint to the preceding short.  Here's the point of view of one of his best friends.   Not as such.  Although one gets the sense that they have fun topping each other in horror stories of working together, supposedly the crew of Herzog's movies were just as eager to murder the guy, who had to be threatened with guns from time to time, just to keep things civil.

-Red Sonja - Not a good movie, but it was nice to see Ernie Reyes Jr. in something.

-Shutter Island - This I liked a whole bunch.  There was some complaining going around to the effect of the ending not being twisty enough, but I think those people are probably missing the point. In fact, the only way to be more wrong would be to be like what seems to be a majority of reviewers and treat the clues as mistakes and then complain about both.  This movie also had one of my favorite Creative Screenwriting podcasts, with writer Laeta Kalogridis (who is now working on The House With A Clock in its Walls!), because she sounds like a lady who's totally on the ball, who knows what time it is and where her towel is, and I feel bad for her for the amount of forehead slapping and 'did you even see the movie?'-asking she probably had to do when people asked her what was up with certain parts.

-Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief - This was apparently a less-successful book adaptation.  Since I didn't read 'em, I'm not as outraged as my roommate that did.  To me, it was a kind of fun, kind of dumb thing with some parts that don't make sense and some other parts with fun references to greek gods.

-Breakout -While this movie does have helicopter pilot Charles Bronson trying to spring framed dope Robert Duvall from jail via helicopter, and a running gag about a bad check, it also has that weird pacing of its era where it seems like nothing is happening, and then everything happened much too quickly, and now nothing's going on again.

-Splice - This was a test screening, and it may be different by the time you see it.  For instance, there might not be a man with an infrared camera and goggles apparatus staring at you and gauging your reactions.  But it's by Vincenzo Natali, director of Cube!  And what's more, I like the recent choices Adrian Brody is making, with this, and Brothers Bloom, and Predators coming up.  It's like he did his prize-winning work, and his mega money blockbuster work, and now he's just enjoying fun projects that catch his eye.  (by the by, Bros. Bloom held up well to recent re-watchings, maybe even now a little more enjoyable in terms of how the ending felt to me)

-Hanky Panky - Intended to be another Gene Wilder / Richard Pryor comedy, except with Gilda Radner instead of Pryor.  Mistaken identity a la North by Northwest, silliness ensues.

-The Signal - I just put this on as a movie I could safely ignore in the background while writing things.  You can get through a lot of movies by leaving the TV on like we did back in the day, except I don't have TV like that now, it's all movie files and discs and internets.  And this starts off with a bang, dropping you into the middle of another movie by one of the three directors.  Yep, three directors, each writing and directing their own act of the film.  Each worse than the last is one way to look at it, but the first two have some pretty great stuff in them.  It wasn't at all the movie I thought I was putting on, but it was a nice surprise.

1,600: MURDER at 1600

The movie post that wordpress doesn't want you to see!  Between eaten posts and laziness, it seems like the count got off somewhere as far as the site here is concerned.  In truth, I'm up to 1626 at the moment. -In Bruges - a better movie than a city, if the movie can be believed.  I appreciate movies that deliberately subvert movie cliches (Hard Candy pointed out 'why are you threatening me while you're still tied up?) - in this case, it's the fact that blanks are still dangerous. Additional points are awarded for a lean and economic script that uses every part of the buffalo.  I do think, however, that this movie may in fact be zany.

-Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One - An early sort of pseudo-documentary.  Kind of interesting historically - or it would be if anyone at all claimed influence by it - but as an early example of such a common genre now it's mainly remarkable for the line 'every since we've been married I've had abortion after abortion after abortion….'

-Quick Change - This was great, it starts as a cool take on a heist and the ensuing getaway is a solid 90s comedy.  There's something about the writing conventions that just feels great when they hit the right notes.  I hope that comes from a sense of storytelling and not nostalgia.

-The Spanish Prisoner - A twisty turny Mamet thing, plus Steve Martin.  Really great until the last five minutes.  I just don't think he could have possibly gotten there that fast.

-Battlestar Galactica: Razor - This was a waste of time.  When it was new, I bet fans were happy to see nominally new BSG to tide them over, but I'll bet they would have been even happier to have a new story instead of this rehash of previously discussed events.

-Paranoid Park - Like Soderbergh, Van Sant makes the movies for everyone and the movies just for him, and in his case I prefer the latter.  This movie features the most useless subtitles ever.

-The Number 23 - Sometimes you hear about how bad a movie is, and you just have to look.  Turns out, pretty bad.  And nobody had ever even mentioned the Sin City-lookin' sequences.

-Final Destination - This was pretty dumb too.  While there's something familiar and comforting about a script that hits the right beats (in an interesting way) there's something about formulaic editing that just sucks the life out of a movie.  Line.  Cut to character about to speak.  Wait 1 second.  Character says line.  Cut to character about to speak.  Wait 1 second.  Character speaks.  Audience falls asleep.  Maybe they didn't shoot any reactions or mediums.

-Home Movie - From the director of American Movie, a series of shorts sewn together, each about people who live in unusual dwellings.  I may have oversold the movie with that last sentence.

-Ong-Bak: Thai Warrior - See, now what I learned in Gladiator (no, not Gladiator, Gladiator, from the writer of Striking Distance / director of Road House) is that the top of the head is the hardest part of the body.  Don't know why, that's just one of those things that stuck with me.  But here's Tony Jaa, going out of his way to bash people right atop their noggins with accuracy and enthusiasm.  He does a terrific job of it, going after guys in a flurry of human elbows and knees.

-The Yes Men - So these guys pretend to be these other guys, and in character as those guys they pretend to be a third set of guys who pull these elaborate pranks on the World Trade Organization.  The movie shows us some of the pranks, and how the people being pranked fall for it.  I guess you pay a ton of money to attend a conference, you don't suspect lies.  Anyway, I'm glad I didn't buy this on DVD for thirty bucks a few years ago.

-John Oliver: Terrifying Times - I have a standing appreciation of John Oliver.  I even claim that weird indie band 'before they were cool' kind of fandom.  The Department, Political Animal, The Bugle, The Daily Show, and this standup special are all the places you can enjoy John Oliver. And often Andy Zaltzman.

-Anvil! The Story of Anvil - At times almost heartbreaking, at other times so absurd and inextricable from Spinal Tap that it seems like it couldn't be real.  (The drummer is named Robb Reiner, for pete's sake.)  But hey, I want to believe.

-The Station Agent - Sought out after learning about writer / director Thomas McCarthy's involvement with the real best picture of 2009, Up.  This was roundly terrific.  I feel like it could lead to some seriously boring discussions though.

-Ninja Assassin - This was a return to $5 Mondays at Cleveland Cinemas.  Also, this sucked.  It didn't look very good, but I was hopeful based on a) director of V for Vendetta James McTeigue and b) the title.  And besides, ninjas.  And then what do they do?  CGI ninjas.  Waste of everyone's time.  Bleh.

-Avatar - I enjoyed watching this movie.

-Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian - I knew this was written by a couple of The State, but I guess I'd seen bad reviews or something.  It was mostly pretty good.  Some bits that didn't make sense to me were either explained in the first movie or didn't jibe with the first movie at all, depending on who I asked.

-X-Files: I Want to Believe - Often referred to as a 'monster of the week' movie in comparison to Fight the Future as a 'mythology' movie.  Morbidly amusing to note they killed off Mulder & Scully's child instead of having them lug him along to crime scenes or deal with babysitters or something.

-Unknown - I think I mixed this up with a Vincenzo Natali movie.  Maybe 'Nowhere.'  It was roughly Sci-Fi Original in quality.

-Sherlock Holmes - Really cool, really solid, I enjoyed this way more than I thought I would, after all the hand wringing that preceded it.  There's kind of a problem that Holmes knows all the details of a murder he neither witnessed nor investigated in any way when he's recapping everything for the audience.  Deleted scenes, I hope.  I wonder what happened to the competing Judd Apatow version...

-Up in the Air - On the one hand, this was pretty good.  But on the other, it's pretty much the same 'slick misanthrope suddenly feels the need for deeper meaning and finds it in family' thing that the director's already made two of.

-It's Complicated - Great cast, but still kind of boring.  I recall the discussion afterward being about how shoddily made parts of it were.  Bears an odd resemblance to Modern Family.

-Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask - Raised more questions than it answered, unfortunately.  How DO you make a man impotent by hiding his hat?  I've hidden hats before.  I don't -think- that was a side effect.

-Book of Eli - As of January 18, this is my favorite movie of 2010.  Cool and fun and works pretty well as Fallout: The Movie.  I felt an odd connection to it when I saw that it was written by Gary 'Gaz' Whitta, former editor at PC Gamer.  Sure, I don't actually know him, but I've read and listened to his work for a while, and it's no surprise that there are some game-like elements in the movie (a good thing).  The fact that people aren't really talking about this one is a benefit to you, the viewer.

-Across the Universe - This was strongly recommended to me, but it's not so much a movie as a collection of videos for Beatles covers.  I'm pretty sure that the reason the non-music parts don't make any sense is to cram in as many additional Beatles references as possible, but I just don't know their catalog well enough to appreciate it.  I guess I've never been into boy bands....

-Assassins - Stallone is an assassin just days from retirement, Banderas is an assassin just coming up.  Moore is a hacker in the finest 1990s computer technology tradition.  The whole thing is worth it for this one entirely inappropriate exchange.

-Laura - A fun old murder mystery where nothing is as it seems!  Really!  It's great when a movie lives up to one of those review cliches.  They probably could have sorted the whole thing out a lot sooner, but not in a 'well why didn't he say that one sentence two hours ago' kind of way.

-Heart and Souls - Kind of reminds me of the original story that lead to Monsters Inc.  Fun premise, well done, just another more or less forgotten '90s flick.

-Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil -  Not at all what I expected.  I guess it gets grouped in my head with The Bridges of Madison County or a River Runs Through It, probably for no other reason than having leafy green poster art, since I haven't seen those either.  Anyway, for some reason, I was under the impression this was going to be a good movie.

-Day Watch - Didn't like Night Watch, didn't like Wanted, didn't really like this.

-Food, Inc. - This was the movie being used to demo my new movie watchin' monitor, so I made it the first movie I watched on said monitor.  Not great.  Doesn't really add anything new to similar programs that have been coming out for what seems like years now.

-Black Cobra and Warriors of the Wasteland - Two more courtesy of Doc Mock.  Black Cobra himself, Fred Williamson, actually appears in WotW too.

And now, even shorter reviews for short films:

-Balance - A: Awesome.  It's right here if you want to see for yourself.

-Bullethead - yuck.

-Un Chien Andalou - I thought the cloud on the moon was more effective than the actual eyeball shot.

-100 Years at the Movies, President McKinley and Escort Going to the Capitol, President McKinley Taking the Oath - kind of neat, but mainly just me working on my lists at icheckmovies.

-Validation, Signs - two sketch-like shorts of a very simple premise heightened over time.  Neither mind-blowing nor disappointing.

-Hangar #5 and I Love Sarah Jane - two shorts made as effects demos, the latter in conjunction with fxphd, and notably better acting  (Sarah Jane would become Tim Burton's Alice, I think.)

-The Adventures of Andre and Wally B - very early pixar work.  Not terrific, with its off-camera punchline.

-Dug's Special Mission - Very recent pixar work.  Much more terrific.  Looney Tunes in flavor.

-9 - Slightly less good looking than the feature that followed 4 years later, but containing just about as much story.

-Some Folks Call it a Sling Blade - Another short that was expanded into a feature.  Rather less CGI intensive though.

-Anna is Being Stalked, The Delicious - two by Scott Prendergast, whom I heard interviewed on TSOYA.  The former played at Sundance.  I would not be able to explain why.  There was nothing for me in these.

-The Cat Concerto - Inspiration for the Mouse Organ?  No, that's a Katzenklavier, this is an Oscar-winning Tom and Jerry cartoon.

-The Cat Piano - speaking of the Katzenklavier...didn't really dig this one.

-Skhizein - a little bit weird and unsatisfying, which probably effectively communicates the feeling of being displaced by 97 centimeters.  Terrific idea.

and finally...

-Murder at 1600 - You might be surprised to learn that this suspense featuring Wesley Snipes as a cop who plays by his own rules and builds meticulous scale models of entire cities who is called in by White House staffers going through the motions of pretending to be interested in solving a murder and insists on pushing through the lies, upholding the law, and bringing the murderer to justice was chosen only because of the number in its title and is not, in fact, especially good.

#1,512: Hard Candy

-Take the Money and Run – Early Woody Allen.  Has its good parts.  We don’t get too many movies built out of fun jokes anymore, like we did from the folks that came out of the Your Show of Shows writers’ room.  Something to ponder… -How to Rob a Bank – The biggest mistake made by this first time writer/director who hasn’t done anything before or since, was having some kind of free screening for the cast, crew, and family.  Without those valuable dollars, the film was left leaning on fans of 90s rock band Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale to bring in the powerful $109 opening weekend en route to a powerful thousand dollars domestic take.  Also, the movie is terrible, not least because every character talks just the same.

-The Killing -  Early Kubrick.  Only 5 big Kubricks left for me.  I didn’t like this as much as I expected to, or as much as I think I’d like hearing someone else describe it.

-Bottle Rocket -I think I saw this on TV a couple years ago, but it didn’t make the list since I didn’t remember a thing about it.  It’s only been a couple of weeks since I saw it again.  Couldn’t really tell you anything that happened in it though.

-In the Realms of the Unreal – A doc that falls short of an amazing but unknowable subject: a gentleman in NYC who spent his life writing and illustrating tens of thousands of pages of a vaguely original fantasy story.

-Crank 2: High Voltage – On one hand, basically the same movie ast he first one.  On the other hand, I liked it a lot less.  Maybe a difference between theater viewing and DVD?  Not sure.  And I’m writing this too much later to remember specifics.

-Drag Me To Hell – A big crazy cartoon.  You have to suspend your disbelief about things like there being an ice cream shop next to that fortune teller on Olive.  Alison Lohman is always great, and the whole movie is worth it for the ending.

-The Caller - This was very….French.  Like a few items in the list, the setup and the puzzle are more fun than the solution.

-Creepozoids! and Endgame and Santa Claus and Poultrygeist – Courtesy of Doc Mock’s Movie Mausoleum.  Some girl from the Horror Convention Massacre made a big deal about being in Poultrygeist.  Didn’t even spot her.

-Seance on a Wet Afternoon - grabbed because it's on a bunch of lists.  I guess mainly to showcase Kim Stanley as the 'lady Brando.'  No acting really covers the convenient plot element of crazy that pokes through just enough to blurt incriminating evidence though.  The set up was kind of sharp though.

-Topkapi - Not a big fan of this one either, I guess because I was looking for a heist more than a heist parody.  Like Seance, the crime elements work pretty well.  In this case, the extra element is: Swingin' 1960s Italy!

-They Live - Might have napped through this the first time.  Made much more sense the second time.  Maybe just the longest fistfight you ever did see.  I always think the old John Carpenter movies must have been even more awesome in their day, since today they seem watered down by having been ripped off countless times.

-Astro Boy - The digital technology is pretty impressive, the way they auto-tuned an emotion into Nic Cage's voice at some point.  Also, they should have just made everything out of the same material as Toby's invincible hat.

-The Hot Rock - Now this was a great caper.  In fact, it's a bunch of great capers, since if everything went right it wouldn't be much of a movie.  The museum sequence is genuinely suspenseful and clever and terrific.

-The Friends of Eddie Coyle - Two in a row for director Peter Yates.  Also great, but dark and noir-y where the Hot Rock was lighter and more fun.  Watch this movie.

-The Final Countdown - Do not watch this movie.  There's no more gutless, toothless, bloodless and wimpy a production made from such a great premise.  The set up: what if a 1980s aircraft carrier traveled through time to Dec 6, 1941, with Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen on board?  The answer:  the USS Nimitz will take a dog 40 years into the future, and a hell of a lot of stock footage of planes taking off and landing will be shown.  Boooo.

-Rififi - This is noir + caper + the director of Topkapi.  The crime is like half an hour of the movie, with no dialogue or non-diagetic sound. [edit to add:  and that's awesome, in case I wasn't clear]

-The Machinist - Christian Bale was pretty good in this, but I don't know if he was the machinist.  I'm not sure the pieces of the puzzle really add up correctly though, even though there's an awful lot of 'look how clever we are here' in this one.

-The Squid and the Whale - I thought this looked awful when it came out, and I liked it kind of a lot.  I even went and re-watched Kicking and Screaming again afterward.    I like Noah Baumbach's writing.  I liked how instead of kids who talk like adults because the script is clever, these kids talk like adults the way real kids do: through mindlessly parroting things they don't understand.

-Genuine Nerd - Not a good doc.  Exploitive and laughing at the subject more than with him…or..something.  Bleh.

-My Neighbor Totoro -Thought I'd go back and check out some older Miyazaki.  I couldn't tell you why this one makes so many lists though.  I just didn't get it.  Nothing actually happened.  By the time it seemed like the end of the first act, the movie was done.

Hard Candy - (Presuming you've seen this one...)

BEFORE:   That's an awesome poster.  I'll check it out.

AFTER:  That was…kind of disappointing?

I turned briefly to internets to see if I was experiencing a common problem.  No good.  The macguffin is child molestation, which a) creates a thick fog of useless rhetoric in which everyone feels the need to waste line after line decrying pedophiles, which is 1) noble and 2) necessary to ward off all the posts calling everyone discussing the movie a pedophile but not really relevant to the discussion, and b) gets me all off track with 'mole station' puns.  ("Mole Station Zebra!"  "That's no moon…." &c., &c.)

So…maybe the thing is that I'm not entirely clear on who the protagonist is.  Nobody's a hero, per se.  He's guilty, and she's some other kind of monster.  We're going to sympathize with him, because otherwise we're probably a little monstrous ourselves.  If we're going to watch him suffer for a couple hours, then movies teach us to hope to see the tormentor's comeuppance.

It feels a little bit like the Gothika problem.  That is, murdering someone who turns out to be a criminal doesn't excuse the murdering.  (Especially since in Gothika she had no idea.)  This story doesn't have the explicit moral relativism of say, Death Wish, but she does seem to get away with it.

So how is it really any different from your The Strangers or your Funny Games?  Jeff's imprisoned in his own home at the sadistic whim of some absurdly effective invader.  But, he's alone, and a criminal.  If anything, it's longer.  The in-house cat and mouse is kind of repetitive.  We could have probably skipped some of that and not missed it - the neighbor never does anything useful, for instance.

Perhaps it's just directorally weird.  The first feature from a music video director who went on to do the horrible 30 Days of Night and is on Twilight 3 now.  The physics-bending dolly move transitions, the completely weird and distracting mid-shot lighting and color changes, the vicious shaky cam to let the audience know when something exciting is going on…

…Or maybe this is just the most "torture-porn" flavored of the home invasion genre, with a big sensationalist gimmick, and a neat poster.  At least it got me to wonder about it.

Batting .333 on that batch, and there's another 30 I've already accumulated, plus maybe some year-end stuff I could do, fashionably late.

#1,514: KRAA! The Sea Monster

Surviving Disaster ended last month.  Better Radio rages on.  Applied for UCB's Maude and Beta teams.  Writing a lot of things.  Booked holiday plane tickets.  Watched some movies.  Watching movies faster than I'm writing 2 liners about 'em though, so I'm just going to do that in sections for a little while. -The Last Temptation of Christ - Courtesy of the hulu.  Started off funny.  Became less so.

-Let the Right One In - Cool, especially for explaining what happens to a vampire who ISN'T invited in.  I may have been late to the scene, but at least I saw it before the remake.

-Secret Beyond the Door... - Not a very good secret, frankly.  The orchestra liked this movie significantly more than I did.

-Closed Mondays and Your Face and Kiwi! -Animated shorts, like you read about, presuming you read about short films, or animation, or something.  Maybe a general interest publication with a particular focus this month on award-winning short subjects.  Kiwi was great.

-Shooter - I guess if they explained the shock reveal of the last couple minutes at the beginning when it was equally valid, it wouldn't be much of a movie.  Certainly, Marky Mark wouldn't've had to commit the dozens of murders he ought to be prosecuted for instead.

-Battle for Terra - Humans are the invaders! Oh no!  It wasn't clear why flying creatures need flying machines, or what they have to fear from falling.I think it looked good except for the humans, but it didn't stick with me.

-The Girlfriend Experience - A Soderbergh experiment.  Better than Bubble.  Making the story non-linear just seemed like a technique to spread a thin story...thinner?  That can't be the analogy.  That's not something you'd do on purpose.

-Toy Story and Toy Story 2 - in 3D!  Hadn't seen these before, but part 3 is coming.  Except now I don't want to see it.  Part 2 was almost exactly the same movie the first one was, with the same jokes, the same one song, same...everything.  Seems like a waste.

-Zombieland - Yuck.  This is to the zombie genre as timecrimes was to time travel.  It's the smallest possible amount of story they could bother with and still technically be a zombie movie.  Just terrible.

-The Informant! - Hey, this was really good.  Soderbergh's 90s by way of the 70s.  Lots of great comics in cameo roles, cool story, funny, well done, this is the opposite of cinematic warm mayonnaise.

-The Strangers - Worth it for one long genuinely creepy shot of Liv Tyler on the phone, with one of the strangers hanging around in the house, unbeknownst to her.

-Redbelt - I heard sometime later that this is a movie people don't like.  Those people are wrong.  Fancy Mamet-y plotting unfolds, honor is preserved.

-KRAA! The Sea Monster - Truly a misunderstood horrible monster of the sea.  Courtesy of Doc Mock's Movie Mausoleum.  (still, better than the sequel, KRAAmer Vs. KRAAmer)

#1,497: Inglourious Basterds

Here's a post that didn't post at the end of August, because I was too lazy to do all the two-line reviews: Feverishly hacking away at the mountain of editorial assistance required to bring SpikeTV's Surviving Disaster to a television screen near you starting next Tuesday, Sept 1, and every Tuesday thereafter for the next ten weeks.

In June, we had a little time off and I went off to edit a feature film shot on the RED, The Selling, written by and starring Gabriel Diani (who you can hear in episodes of Better Radio, my sci-fi sketch comedy radio show (re: podcast) ).  It's great, by far the best feature I've worked on so far.  Spooky and funny in turn, it's a haunted house story that's more inconvenient for a real estate agent than it's terrifying for a family.

While I was working on that, I was also watching:

-Public Access - Bryan Singer & Christopher McQuarrie's first movie.  Not exactly...good.  Reminded me of Sex, Lies, & Videotape a bit.  And there's the formative version of the big twist they'd get right the next time around.

-Jandek on Corwood - Documentary on a musical recluse.  Not at all as interesting as its own subject.

-Zombie Girl - Same problem, different cause.  I'd suspect this was shot without a plan, and pieced together from the footage, which is a much less likely route to a captivating doc.

-Man on Wire - I probably would have been way more into this one if I'd seen it cold, a year ago when it was new, instead of hearing all the details all over the place in advance.  It was, however, a fun inaugural run for MustacheTV.

-Captivity - Kim Bauer Gets Kidnapped: The Movie.  Snooze.

-Push - Why aren't original movies about superheroes any good?  What's the exception to this rule?  Is it because (almost?) all of them try to break from comic book tradition with the edgy, raw, gritty idea of using superpowers in order to be lazy?

-The Great Debaters - Good, but pretty by-the-book example of one of these.  Also, I think it had some anachronistic stuff about Hitler and WWII that wouldn't've happened yet at the time the movie takes place.

-The Hurt Locker -  This was pretty good, but also kind of a cheat.  What's more exciting in a movie than the stock moment of 'will the bomb be defused in time?'  And this movie is a huge collection of those scenes!  I did wonder though, about what they might have been saying with the spent cartridge floating and bouncing in slow motion, and why they bothered to set it 5 years ago when it probably wasn't written that way, with all its references to things that didn't exist 5 years ago.

-G.I. Joe - I was never at all a fan of G.I. Joe back in the day, so I went into this one not knowing who anyone was.  Thankfully, they make it easy on newcomers by putting one of everyone on both teams.  I wonder if the toys were just repaints of the same figure.  It's been a good year for animation, so this is far from getting the 'one of the best animated movies I've seen this year' joke.  Still, way better than Transformers, even if I did doze off for a bit somewhere in the middle.

-Funny People - First Apatow movie I've seen.  Good thing they didn't call it 'Good Actors.'  I liked it overall, especially from the perspective knowing a bunch of upcoming comics.  That Jonah Hill guy though; yuck.

-District 9 - Cool movie.  Loved it less than the popular response.  Close as we'll get to Half-Life: The Movie.  Still don't like when mock docs don't commit.  Hope, like Cloverfield, they'll have the guts not to take the bait on a sequel.

-District 13 - Action parkour fighting movie!  Kind of like Escape From Paris.

-District 13: Ultimatum -  The sequel to action parkour fighting movie!  I actually liked this one even better for the most part.  Crazy and more elaborate fights, flashier parkour chases, and an even more disappointing ending!

-Ponyo by the Sea - Hot on the heels of the original, Studio Ghibli's anime remake of last year's action hit Taken is a terrific retelling.  It hits the beats of the original while still adding something new to the father's relentless search for his missing daughter.  The casting for the English dub was well done, and the recruiting Liam Neeson to reprise the original role is brilliant.  The primary difference in this version is that the girl is overcome with Hugo's Disease.  I don't think anything I've seen in the theater this year so far has gotten as much laughter as this did.

-Last of the Mohicans - the 1936 version.  AND

-Last of the Mohicans - the 1992 version, which is a remake of the 1936 edition, not a fresh version of the book.  I thought I'd start a series here on double features, but it's been a while since I saw these, and I was surprised by how lousy they were.  Even more so, how the movie doesn't seem to be about the Last of the Mohicans (who, by the by, aren't extinct).

-Inglourious Basterds - this was fun to see, the way it's always fun to see more from someone who has such a distinctive mark on their movies.  And it was fun to see the audience around me not-enjoying it, from the walk-outs to the guy who kept complaining that scenes didn't make any sense and it was too much work to read the subtitles.  I liked the way it would make silly concessions and then double back on them and turn out to be clever.  I wonder how much it changed since it's premiere at Cannes, since Ebert's review didn't seem to apply to the finished cut.  Also, one gets the sense that the clan of Basterds were only included as an excuse to use a title QT loved on his movie about something else entirely.

8 or 9 out of 17 this round.