Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield, dir. Michael Feifer (2007)

NIKKI says:
It's difficult to know where to begin. I think I'm most appalled that this film calls itself Ed Gein, opens with shots of the real Ed Gein and his home, takes itself extremely seriously, and yet it features very few facts.

The filmmakers here ignored documented history, and have taken it upon themselves to alter Gein's story to create a gross-out horror film. Somehow the already gruesome facts of the case weren't enough for writer/director Michael Feifer. Why, Feifer asks, hang a corpse from a butcher's hook when you can spice things up and hang a girl while still alive?

And even better, let's remove Gein's penchant for stout mother-figures and have him wiping off mostly hot babes in white cotton panties.

I cannot understand for the life of me what Feifer hoped for with this film. Then again, when you look at his priors, it's not so surprising that this was shit: The Graveyard, The Seductress, Witchcraft IX: Bitter Flesh and about a hundred other classics. Lord. He's obviously not serious. He's a dude with money and a typewriter. That's about all I can ascertain. Still, I don't know why he hasn't been stopped. I'm offended by his rewriting of criminal history, but maybe other people realise what a stupid hack he is and simply ignore him?

Soon, we'll be treated to his Boston Strangler: The Untold Story. I'm guessing that's a film featuring Albert DeSalvo with Feifer just making up stuff to fill out the running time. And get this -- it's going to star David Faustino as DeSalvo. Normally, I wouldn't outright bag Bud Bundy, but BUD BUNDY? As DeSalvo? Why do I get the feeling Feifer's taken his money to LA's underground clubs and enticed has-beens with promises of paychecks and renewed fame.

A bit like Jeffrey Dahmer luring men back to his flat to take "modelling shots", perhaps? "Come on, Bud Bundy, wanna make a movie? I'll pay you. And you can being a friend. What about Corky Nemec over there? He looks lonely. And cheap."

Oh god.

Ed Gein was stupid and pointless and disgusting. I think Feifer needs help -- anyone else get the feeling he's living vicariously through America's famous killers in a creepy, "this is how I would have done it"-type way?

.5/5

STEVE says:
Michael Feifer has somehow managed, with the direct-to-video abortion that is Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield, to slander the name of a grave-robber and murderer, best known for his creative cannibalization of corpses. How do you pull that off? And more importantly, why bother?

It's not like Gein's story isn't compelling enough. He has inspired some of the most famous movie madmen of our day in several heavily fictionalized accounts, and their endless sequels and remakes - 12 titles, off the top of my head. And his "true" story has been filmed more than once. Deranged from 1974 tells the story of Ezra Cobb (Roberts Blossom) and his Oedipus-fueled shenanigans. While the names have been changed, this was the most accurate portrayal of Gein and his story until Chuck Parello's Ed Gein in 2000. While not a great film, Ed Gein (also known as In the Light of the Moon) takes an unflinching look at Gein's exploits, while sticking fairly close to the facts, and Steve Railsback simply channels Gein, down to the little smirk constantly playing about his lips, making you think that there’s always something just slightly amusing going on in there… something maybe having to do with meat-hooks.

Feifer decided to take the Homer Simpson approach to the facts in this instance ("Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true."), and pulling something of a Lawnmower Man on us. Yes, there's a guy named Ed Gein in the movie; yes, he kills a tavern owner and a shopkeeper; and, yes, he wears women's skin. Other than that, Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield tells the story of Ed Gein the way Sleepway Camp tells the story of Christine Jorgenson: Not At All.

Ed Gein was convicted of killing two women, but suspected of killing at least six. Butcher decides to take that number and run with it, throwing accuracy to the wind, and having Gein kill - in the first half hour - a high school girl, his friend Jack, and a caretaker at the cemetery. By the time the movie gets around to the Mary Hogan character, it feels like she's been shoehorned in from another story. Which, in a very real sense, she has.

It continues in this vein, dwelling on speculation rather than known facts, and twisting known facts to fit what can loosely be called a story. The Bernice Worden character - here called Vera Mason, played by Priscilla Barnes - is the mother of the films protagonist, Deputy Bobby Mason. No link to reality there, but it's the story's one interesting facet - the cop is as reliant on his mother as Gein was on his own - so I can't necessarily fault it there. But Mrs. Worden was found in Gein's barn "dressed out" like a deer. In Butcher, Mrs. Mason is found in the barn, lying fully clothed on a work table, and the high school girl is the one hanging from the hooks. Am I nit-picking? Maybe. But I'm thinking, "Why?" Did it help the story to not butcher Mrs. Mason? No. So why change it?

And then there's this Jack fella. He may be based on "Gus", who sometimes pops up in Gein mythology. However, research of the facts tend to show that Gus did not exist, which makes sense: when your house is decked out in human remains, you don't want company dropping by. Feifer says "NUTS" to logic and research, and gives us Jack. The only reason I can see for this character's existence is to give Michael Berryman something to do. Jack's there for about three minutes before he and Gein have a fight and Gein beats him to death with a shovel, showcasing Feifer's incompetence as a screenwriter, as the scene does NOTHING to advance the movie or develop the story. It served as a quick paycheck for Berryman, who, frankly, deserves better.

I will have to give props to Kane Hodder as an actor. As bad a match as he is to Gein, he did manage to portray him with a sense of sadness and pain, instead of as a relentless, drooling maniac. It also has to be said that he acted the pants off of everyone else involved here - which is not exactly a high bar. I'm just saying, for a glorified stunt man, he's not a bad actor.

The worst thing about Butcher - apart from its blatant disregard for facts, intro-to-film screenwriting and inspired miscasting of Kane Hodder - is that there are people out there who are going to watch it and take it as gospel. And that's just sad. Eddie Gein dressed in the skins of dead women and danced around in the moonlight; clearly he was a very, very sick man. His story, as horrific as it is, is also a tragic one. But even if history finds no sympathy for Eddie, himself, surely Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden deserve better than this.

.5/5

Cube 2: Hypercube, dir. Andrzej Sekula (2002)

NIKKI says:
Back to clearing out the "to-watch" pile. I was in the mood for something scary, possibly a bit lame, and short. This one was perfect. Turns out, though, it was wasn't all that stupid. Well, ultimately, I don't know if it made sense, but it was certainly interesting to watch.

I enjoyed the first Cube, because those claustrophobic, how-did-we-get-here films intrigue me and freak me out. I was expecting this one to be a bit a remake. I thought the box would be the same, but that it would do way more gruesome stuff to the trapped people.

Not at all -- the box was stark white, and it was all about altered reality and time and space. The rules of physics did not apply in the box, and time ran in loops and twists, so that the trapped people this time stumbled upon earlier and later version of themselves in ways that really were genuinely creepy.

Example: All the people stuck in the cube are pressuring the old crazy lady because it sounds like she has knowledge of the company they think might be behind the cube. Izon, or whatever it was. So, just when everyone's like "leave the old woman alone" to the guy from Forever Knight, a panel opens with him holding the old lady by the throat, blood pouring from her mouth. "Don't trust her" he says, and then some part of the cube shifts and cuts his head off. Panel closes.

What? Wha? Whee?

Very cool.

I ended up appreciating that this wasn't a horror film, and more a mind-bender. In the end, there were few answers, but, strangely, that didn't bother me as much as perhaps it should have.
Now, I learn, there's another Cube film -- Cube Zero, which looks to take the idea from maths, to reality, to religion. I'm so there.

2.5/5

STEVE says:
I wasn't so much a fan of the first Cube. To me, the intellectual Indie film came off like a student film with too many ideas and not enough resolution. I much preferred Darren Aronofsky's Pi, which had the same kind of high-mindedness with no resolution, but made such good use of the MacGuffin that, either you didn't notice the fact that you didn't know what it was all about until long after it was over, or you just didn't care.

Cube 2: Hypercube does the same. Nearly. This particular Cube behaves differently from the first, in that not every room is a death trap. Instead, every room is seemingly from a different period in time. Sure, there are death traps here and there, but much more fascinating is a room where our protagonist finds the withered bodies of her companions and herself from a different timeline, or the character Simon who continually meets up with different versions of Jerry who dies and dies again, always eventually meeting up with Simon, who's killed Jerry several times himself. The quantum physics here are never explained, and they don't need to be. It's just part of the Cube.

What I didn't like about this one was the ending. It seems the only purpose for this movie was to set up the sequel, and that left me cold. I actually found myself longing for the ambiguous ending of Cube.

2.5/5

The Girl Next Door, dir. Christine Fugate (1999)

NIKKI says:
Having seen several documentaries about adult film stars or the industry in general, I had certain expectations about this one. I was expecting a tragic tale of a woman scorned by porn, adding Stacy Valentine's name to that growing list of such actresses: Bella Donna, Linda Lovelace, Traci Lords, Annabel Chong, Bambi Woods, etc.

Surprisingly, Stacy's story was different. This was not a desperate woman, or a duped teenage girl, or someone looking for any of revenge or their particular class or culture. Stacy Valentine says she just loved sex, and the industry opened doors for her into a life of comfortability. Never once did she talk about regretting getting into the business, and never does she struggle to get out.

This film is rather clever in that it appears the story of a porn star when it's actually about an everyday woman with the same pressures, worries, and insecurities as anybody else. She just happens to be a porn star. The film resists offering moments of titillation, simply presenting Stacy and her world as Word Play presents its crossword puzzle creators, or Spellbound its child spellers. This is a woman and this is her world, and by the end of it, the big boobs and rampant sex are as workaday for us as they are for Stacy and her colleagues.

Stacy isn't a woman to be pitied for her choice of job. She has a strength about her that really draws you to her. She's got this innocence to her, and never does it come off as forced or fake or pitiable. The film manages to show that her insecurities really have little to do with her work. She wants recognition for her efforts, she wants to be able to trust people, she's never fully satisfied with herself. These are universal women's issues, no matter your line of work. I think this is really the film's major point.

I enjoyed the relationship between Stacy and her parents, who love and respect their very non-wild child daughter. I was also fascinated watching as the relationship between Stacy and her boyfriend built and eventually toppled. Again, the industry the pair belonged to became less and less important as you came to appreciate just how normal they were. The film, really, kind of destroys the image of porn and its people as high-life living sex dolls and their pumped up men.

There's an element of sadness to the whole thing, too You do wish Stacy would give herself a bit more credit. But at the same time, you step away with a sense of this woman as quite strong. She got out of porn when it had given her what she wanted -- money, a foundation, the ability to go anywhere and do anything. And she never turned back. Porn works -- take that feminists. Right?

3/5

STEVE says:
We bought this disc unseen something like four or five years ago, and it's been on our "to watch" shelf ever since. Nikki's suggested watching it a few times, but I've always vetoed it. Just not that interested in watching yet another tragic story of abuse that leads to a life in porn.

But March has been about - with a few exceptions - clearing out that "to watch" shelf, and while there are more movies there than we could possibly watch in a month, even if we watched three a day, I knew we'd get to The Girl Next Door sooner or later. And I gotta say I'm glad we did, because it was nothing like what I'd expected.

That's not to say that it doesn't have its tragic elements. Stacy's relationship with Julian, a fellow adult film star, is the stuff they write ballads about. She can't trust him completely because she can't trust anyone since her divorce, and ends up pushing him away. They get back together and it looks like everything's going fine; they even do a movie together... and that's the beginning of the end.

While not the connoisseur of porn documentaries that Nikki is, apparently, I still feel qualified to say that this one rates higher than most because it's about transformation, not degradation; improvement, not destruction. Stacy Valentine doesn't fit the stereotypical porn star profile: sexual abuse, runaway, hooked on drugs, forced into porn. She got in to it willingly, with her eyes open and a plan to get out in a few years, after she'd made some cash. And that's exactly what she did. She made her last adult movie on Febuary 14, 2000, four years to the day she made her first one, and is now Director of Model Recruitment for Penthouse magazine. Good job, Stacy.

3/5

The Town that Dreaded Sundown, dir. Charles B. Pierce (1976)

NIKKI says:
Oh, what a difference a bigger budget could have made.

This film has everything going for it -- a great story, a brilliant title, and Ben Johnson doing what he does best: playing a cop. But it suffers very badly from a low budget and a screenplay that thought comic relief was necessary in a film about a serial killer.

Still, something about this movie works. It could be that we've just got a thing for low budget crime dramas with cool titles, but it could also be that these guys, specifically writer/director Charles B. Pierce, really, really tried.

You can see it all the way through the movie. Apart from the dopey cop ripped from the Beverly Hillbillies, the inclusion of whom I cannot rightly explain, I got the impression here that Pierce thought he was making an important picture. I feel like he wanted to tell this story and really show the fear Texarkana residents experienced during the killer's rampage in 1946.

Perhaps some of the murder scenes border on exploitative, and Pierce is not too savvy when it comes to building suspense outside of the murder scenes (like Fincher does with Zodiac -- the more gripping scenes are in the investigation). Some moments do drag, too, such as the Dawn Wells chase. But there is effort here, and it's visible everywhere. It gives this feel a real engine-that-could vibe that makes me want to like it, even though I know it might just be total shlock.

I will say, too, that Pierce's direction of the opening attack scene is some of the most well-timed, well-framed scary stuff I've ever viewed. I was glad I wasn't watching at night.

2.5/5

STEVE says:
I'd heard so much about this, and waited so long to see it, that it really shouldn't have come as much of a surprise that it was disappointing.

It wasn't awful, it had more than its share of moments - not the least of which was the opening scene - and it made for a pretty good story. It had kind of a 1940s Zodiac thing going on. But when I realized it was Charles B. Pierce who was behind it, I knew my high expectations were never going to be met, and I should have seen the rest coming; the pointless narration, the comic relief, the "humorous" characters - all things I've seen before from Pierce in Boggy Creek II (the MST3K version, mind you), and none were done particularly well.

I would love to see this remade with an actual budget and a better director, but I guess that's too much to hope for, considering the movie hasn't even been released on DVD yet.

2.5/5

Stand By Me, dir. Rob Reiner (1986)

STEVE says:
I was 15 going on 16 the first time I saw Stand By Me.

Richard Dreyfuss has a line toward the end of the movie: "Friends come in and out of your life like bus boys in a restaurant." When I heard that, sitting in the theater in 1986 with my friends John Loftus, Chris Becker and Crispin Hildebrand, it didn't even register.

I didn't question it, didn't think, "Yeah, for you maybe." It was so inconceivable that this group may not last forever, my subconscious didn't even bother to stir. Maybe it knew better, didn't want to wake me up just yet to the reality that Nothing Lasts Forever, and that my friendship with these guys wouldn't last much longer than another three or four years.

Becker, two years our senior, left for the Navy just after the beginning of our Junior year. I'd see him when he was home on leave, and more often later, after he got out, but he eventually moved to Delaware and we lost touch.

Loftus went off to Lehigh University after graduation in 1988 and we stayed in contact for a year or two after. Once he transferred to Pitt, the length of time between the letters and the phone calls got longer and longer, until one day I realized, almost as an afterthought, that they'd stopped altogether.

Crispin, my oldest friend in the group, and the one responsible for introducing me to the rest, was the last to fall away. We remained close until the summer of 1991. Then - and looking back, I can't help but think it was inevitable - he moved on as well.

Twenty-two years on, and this movie is as powerful as it was in 1986, but for different reasons. Then it was because I could see our friendship up there on the screen, reflected (or possibly refracted) from another time. Now... As time goes by and memories fade, it becomes more difficult to remember specifics about these guys and the things we did together that summer.

Stand By Me has become the surrogate for those memories, with Chris, Teddy, Vern and Gordie standing in for John, Becker, Crispin and myself. Which is somehow both more and less painful than not having them around to share the real memories.

5/5

Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3D, dir. Steve Miner (1982)

NIKKI says:
So into 3-D right now! But damn it makes your eyes hurt after a while. Or perhaps that was just this movie, that made my brain want to implode on itself after about the first two minutes.

Damn, it was shit. But it's always been shit. I think anyone when asked, Which is the worst Friday film? tends to think of the gang members in this straight away. I know I do.

What's with the gang members? What's with Jason killing the bunnies? Why does he torture the hillbillies? They didn't have sex at camp and let him drown! Isn't there a legend we're working with here?

So, this is when random killing replaced real storytelling for this franchise. And even in 3-D, it's still a pile of junk. I didn't root for the Final Girl, I didn't find Jason particularly menacing, and I didn't think much of the kills. The scariest thing about this movie was the severed head on the table -- and that was a flashback to Part 2.

Although -- the 3-D was freaking me out! The opening is genius, with sheets waving from a clothesline and you can see underneath them and off into the distance. And then a guy walks in from the distance and the sheets wave around him. Man, 3-D is amazing. It's the only reason to ever watch this movie.

1.5/5

STEVE says:
What the hell happened here? It's not like the Friday franchise has ever been known for its great storytelling, but this mess looks like the guys at Paramount just stopped caring.

The first indication is that the opening five minutes are just a recap of the climax from Part 2. And not just the good-parts version, either, but the entire scene from the point where Ginny finds Jason's shrine to his mom. What's more excruciating is that it's just assumed that we know everything that happened to lead us up to this point - which is likely the case, but come on. Watching a payoff with no set up is like somebody only telling you the punchline because they figure you can put the set up about the guy who walks into the bar with a duck under his arm together on your own. This flashback doesn't help at all - doesn't advance the story, doesn't supply any information that might come in useful later on - and only serves to pad the movie out for an extra five minutes.

So Ginny and Jason tussle in his little shack, she sinks a machete into his neck and, presumably, goes on to live better days. Push-in on Mrs. Voorhees head and, after the obnoxious 3-D credit sequence, we're treated to the A Night in the Life of Edna and Harold - think George and Martha without the Albee wit. For ten solid minutes we watch as these two hillbillies exchange barbs until Jason dispatches them. Why? Who cares? Cut to the next scene and we can finally begin our story proper, a full 16 minutes and 15 seconds in.

There had been, up to this point, a certain logic in these movies: Teens Have Sex = Teens Must Die. That no longer seems to apply here. Jason is now killing willy-nillilly anyone who crosses his path, and it's all rather boring. From the stereotypical bikers to Shelly the loser, the stoner couple who are inexplicably friends with our teen cast to the reprehensible boyfriend who becomes more of an asshole every time he opens his mouth - they all have to die simply because they're in this movie. And of course they do, just like clockwork, until our Final Girl sinks an ax into Jason's now-hockey-masked face (the cool Town That Dreaded Sundown get-up from the previous film having been cast aside at some stage). As in the first movie, the Final Girl jumps into a canoe and floats along until morning when - and I defy anyone to make any sense of this whatsoever - Mrs. Voorhees springs from the water and drags her down! Wait, no, hang on - it's only a dream... which explains the sudden and incomprehensible reintroduction of Mrs. Voorhees head to her body, but does nothing to explain why this girl would imagine such a thing, knowing nothing of Jason or the specifics of the last two movies.

Shame on Steve Miner. He directed what I still believe is the best of the series, and a damn good movie to boot, Friday the 13th Part 2. There, Jason was a confused man-child who didn't die in the alleged drowning accident, but has been hiding out in the woods ever since, and is now hellbent on avenging the death of his Mother - and, one assumes, his own near-death-by-drowning years before. He was unstoppable, but not inhuman. In Part 3, which takes place only the next day, Jason has ditched the Sundown look, picked up a hockey mask (maybe from the hillbillies?) and is now not only unstoppable but unkillable. How'd he become immortal? When is that shit ever explained?

This hardly feels like a Friday the 13th movie at all, really. It's like a Die Hard 3 type deal, where there's an existing script and somebody says, "Hey, this could be tweaked for John McClane." I'd put any amount of money on it: Someone had written a movie about a girl who had a bad experience in the woods; two years later, she's back at her parents' summer home, trying to put the incident behind her, only to have the escaped lunatic show up again. Some bright spark at Paramount read this and thought, "Hey..."

1/5

Battlestar Galactica: Razor, dir. Félix Enríquez Alcalá (2007)

STEVE says:
I'm a fan of the new Galactica series, not just because it's a vast improvement over the 70s cheesiness of the original, but because of the development of the characters (though at first put off by the female Starbuck, I've come to dig her) and the direction the Cylons have taken: No longer just armored automatons who seek the destruction of the human race, these Cylons have mastered the science of cloning and are seeking - wait for it - the one true God. You gotta love the irony.

But this movie left me cold. It's filler, actually; a way to keep the fans satisfied between the third and fourth seasons. And it felt like exactly that. One of the reviews I read stated that fans not familiar with the show might find it a good primer, a quick introduction to the cast and the story - but isn't that what the pilot episode was for?

Battlestar Galactica: Razor feels like they took two episodes that didn't quite fill out their alloted 40 minutes, slammed them together, then filmed some extra stuff to make it feature length. The movie zips around from "present" time in the Galactica timeline to ten months ago when the Cylons attacked, and there's a flashback to the first Cylon war some 30 years ago thrown in for good measure. And as much as I loved seeing the old-school Cylons and Cylon Raiders, had I not seen it, I wouldn't have missed a thing.

2/5

Nikki did not view.

Shade, dir. Damian Nieman (2003)

NIKKI says:
Meh. This is one of those films where you don't know who's pulling a fast one on who until the final minutes, and, by that point, you're not sure you should care. I hated the revelation that So-and-so was working with Such-and-such because it wasn't a natural conclusion, it wasn't alluded to from the beginning. It was simply a full-on bait and switch, and those make movies just so uninteresting.

I was only into this movie for two reasons -- poker and Sylvester Stallone. Ingredients for a perfect night, right? Well, Sly looked fresh from the plastic surgeon, and the cards were boring and unrealistic. This one needed a good plot to drive it, and, sadly, that was a no-go.

The gist? A trio of small-time hustlers decide to rip off poker champ, The Dean. They prep themselves with a couple of smaller hustles (one ridiculous one involving Jamie Foxx), and then get ready to face Sly, who apparently killed a bunch of guys at a poker table back in his younger days.

It's all so familiar, right? I think that show, Tilt, had almost the exact same premise. I just didn't care. I was like, which reprehensible crim do I root for? The cheats or the murderer? Help!

Can we please have a movie now about some honourable poker players? I know they're out there somewhere.

1.5/5

STEVE says:
I've said it before - I don't get poker. Movies about poker, less so. Movies about poker cheats, you've lost me completely.

Why bother with this one then? Well, Stallone for one. Then there's Gabriel Byrne. And, you know, there's always the chance that there's going to be an exception to the rule, that maybe this movie about poker cheats will be the one that holds my interest.

But no.

Did it suck? Not really, not in a Lucky You kind of way. But everything from the cinematography to the script to the performances were just "okay". Everyone involved performed ably, but not exceptionally. I stopped caring early on and just waited it out. As it happens, I needn't have paid much attention to the first 90 minutes, anyway, as the last five came out of nowhere, not bothering with such trivialities as "set-up" or "logic".

That said, we picked the "twist" ending from very early on, which speaks more about this film than I could possibly ever hope to.

2/5

Kissing Jessica Stein, dir. Charles Herman-Wurmfeld (2001)

NIKKI says:
This is one of those films I avoided due to massive hype. You remember -- the sassy, New York-based lesbian romantic comedy written by its stars that was supposed to turn them into the Next Big Thing?

Little in that statement appealed to me at all at the time. We eventually rescued the DVD from an ex-rental sale bin, when the hype was way over, and all these years later have finally watched and enjoyed it.

It's light and fluff as any decent romantic comedy should be. It's well-written, funny, and the characters, thankfully, feel like real people rather than the stereotypical cut-outs you might find in a Kate Hudson movie.

My only problem with it had to do with its resisting to really dig deep into its major themes -- neither of these women are lesbians and yet here they are in a lesbian relationship. And if you look at the timeline, they're together for quite a long time. Yet one is resistant, and the other not at all. So what does it mean for straight girls, even those who might be latently gay or bi, to explore these alternative romantic routes?

It's never addressed. Briefly, Helen is chastised by her friend for choosing lesbianism on a whim, but this argument is never really resolved, and the issue is dropped. Much of the lesbianism discussion is about how strange the whole thing is to these women, how fun it is, how they just make each other happy. I felt there were big issues here that were going ignored. Was the lesbianism this film's gimmick, or did these women really have something to say about lesbianism as a genuine alternative to a struggle-filled dating scene?

Still, I enjoyed the movie. Its pluses raise it above. And it passed the Cry Test. If I don't cry in a romantic comedy at least once, it's a failure. I cried twice in this -- during the scene when the mum tells Jessica the play "could have been the best ever", and when Helen walks in on Jessica and her mum getting their dresses fitted and realises Jessica has been lying to her. So much emotion. I just wish they'd given me a bit more to think about.

3/5

STEVE says:
Apart from the high percentage of Zombie movies in our collection, I like to think my taste in movies is varied and diverse. It's movies like this one that back that argument up.

I enjoyed it, I don't know what to tell you. Sometimes the occasional chick-flick is something more than your standard Boy-Meets-Meg Ryan, Boy-Loses-Meg Ryan, Boy-Gets Meg Ryan-Back story. Kissing Jessica Stein was that movie.

I like to think that if Woody Allen was a young lesbian in today's world, this is the movie he'd make.

3/5

Land of the Dead, dir. George A. Romero (2005)

Interview, dir. Steve Buscemi (2007)

NIKKI says:
So, it seems we've moved away from every one of this month's planned "themes", and have gone back to "let's watch this!" -- be it preview tape, new release, or what.

Our plan for this month was to watch movies from our ever-expanding To-Watch pile. It has something like 200 movies in it, and our Hitchcock event was a way of culling that number. Then we were going to do docos, and pulled out H.H. Holmes. Then we were going to do westerns ... Ugh. Now, we're kinda doing whatever. And it's okay -- I like the randomness, I think. Plans are hard.

Continuing at random: Interview. I got it as a preview screener at work today, and we've both wanted to see it for some time, so we went with it. I did enjoy it, but I don't know if I liked it, if that even makes sense. I was with the story and the characters throughout, but the end threw me for a mad loop. So much so that I'm not entirely sure if anything I thought about these characters or their motives was in any way close to fact.

Ultimately, though, I think that's the point. What do we see when we view people through a lens, or a tape recorder, as the case may be? And what does an interview say about the interviewer? What is truth? How much of the world we inhabit is made up of semi-truths, so-called truths given to us by journalists and based on their moods, their particular ideals? When it was revealed that these characters were feeding on the desperation and barbarity of each other's hidden lives, I discovered I was as culpable as they were. I believed in the lies as much as they did, and for similar reasons.

How easy it was to explain away and excuse the actress's behaviour based on her revelations. How easy it was, as well, to pity the interviewer based on his... But then they run away into the night, and I'm left stunned.

Challenging film, great performances, more great directorial work from Buscemi.

3/5

A Mighty Heart, dir. Michael Winterbottom (2007)

NIKKI says:
I knew little about Daniel Pearl and his wife before this film. Their story is tragic, and the events leading to the eventual revelation that Daniel had been murdered by a Pakistani terrorist group are truly harrowing.

I have a measure of understanding as far as Mariane Pearl's desire not to feel "terrorized" following the event, but I don't know if I'd have that kind of strength.

The film is really a recreation of FBI and Pakistani police pursuits, looking for Pearl's kidnappers, and looking to free him. This is suspenseful even though the outcome is well-known. It's horrifying to watch these men as their hopes build and fall at various moments throughout their search. And when Pearl's fate is revealed, it's testament to this film's storytelling that we are shocked, and that we do relive the insurmountable pain with Mariane.

So, it is harrowing, but it's a fascinating story of Westerners caught in this strange, "other" world of extremist violence.

3/5

STEVE says:
I'd like to take a moment and speak to everyone who ever employed the hand held camera technique: Stop It, Please.

I know the idea is to make it fell gritty and real, like You Are There, but unless you're making a documentary, most of the time your editing lets you down because, hey, real life does not cut to a close-up. It's distracting. Granted, it's worse in mockumentaries - like in The Office, when the scene continuously cuts back and forth over the shoulders of two people without ever revealing either cameraman. And how many cameras do you need to shoot a scene in a 6x8 office, anyway?

A Mighty Heart was an excellent movie, and I was glad it focused more on the investigation into Daniel Pearl's disappearance than the aftermath. But there were times that the hand held "documentary" feel would pull me out of the movie and back to reality. And that's not something you want to happen with such an engrossing story.

3.5/5

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, dir. Andrew Dominik (2007)

NIKKI says:
I'd been anticipating this film for some time, and worried that I'd perhaps built it up so far in my mind that it couldn't live up to my expectations.

I expected epic filmmaking, grand scenery, a leisurely paced story that might remind me of Tombstone or Unforgiven. I wanted suspense, history, scarred characters, and a harsh American landscape.

And, you know what? It was all there. It was pretty much exactly as I'd pictured it. The photography was probably more than I anticipated, which worked in my favour, too.

So, basically, it's a story of obsession. Obsession with people and legend, but also with affirmation and heroism, and the need to feel worth something. The film did well to really develop these conflicts within Robert Ford. The early stages of the film show us the lively fanboy who lapdogs around Jesse James. But once in Jesse's camp, Bob finds things aren't like they are in the nickelbooks. Jesse, the man, is conflicted himself, not always personable, not particularly heroic. Bob's view of Jesse alters so much that he discovers a way to use Jesse's legend to secure his own.

That Robert Ford goes down in history as a coward is rather unfortunate considering Jesse's means of taking care of business -- beating kids, pistol-whipping lowly train conductors, and, what do you know, shooting his friends in the back.

It's a complex story, always compelling, with some genuinely amazing moments, such as the dinner table argument midway through when Bob is teased for his James Gang fandom. Also, Nick Cave's bar scene, and Jesse's visit to Ed Miller who he learns is conspiring against him.

The performances were great, too. Casey Affleck just proves himself so much in this film. His performance is majestic. Brad was a bit Usual Brad -- doing that laugh and stuff. But still, in the tense moments, he was great, too. Sam Rockwell was a stand out for me. Watching him trying so hard not to look guilty in every scene from the dinner table argument to Jesse's eventual death is just wrenching, and horribly suspenseful.

I just really enjoyed it, and I think it deserved greater representation at the Oscars this year.

4.5/5

STEVE says:
I have to admit, I agree with pretty much everything Nikki said. Yet The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was something of a disappointment for me.

There were times when I started looking at my watch, thinking, "Do we need this?" There were long stretches where the film strayed away from either Jesse James or Robert Ford, such as the bit where Dick Liddel and Wood Hite visit Hite's family home and Liddel ends up bedding his stepmother. Granted, this comes back around, so it was a plot point upon which other things hinged, but it could have been cut back some.

And then there's the ending. Act Three starts on Palm Sunday, the day before Jesse is killed. It does exactly what it's supposed to do, there's a little wrap up, and then... It's one year later. Bob and his brother Charlie are now re-enacting the killing on stage, night after night, to a crowded theatre. And Charlie kills himself, and Bob gets drunk, and Bob gets in a bar fight, and Bob meets a woman, and on and on and on until Bob is killed by someone who - like himself - was just seeking fame and glory.

If the aftermath of the assassination was so important, maybe shooting Jesse should have been the midpoint, rather than stuffing up the last ten minutes of what was otherwise a pretty good film.

3/5

H. H. Holmes - America's First Serial Killer, dir. John Borowski (2004)

NIKKI says:
So, I just found out The Devil in the White City is to be a film. Great news -- it's a magnificent book, contrasting H.H. Holmes' murders with Daniel Burnham's building of the Chicago Worlds Fair. I don't think I've ever read a book that's beguiled me quite so much.

If you've read that book, though, America's First Serial Killer will reveal very little about Holmes and his exploits. It's rather short, and really just a rundown of events with brief talking heads from a criminal profiler, an investigations expert, and Harold Schechter, author of a book on Holmes.

What's kinda cool and perhaps slightly revelatory is the film's soundtrack, which overlays the sounds of Gilded Age Chicago with old-timey shots of the city at the time Holmes built his horror castle.

Otherwise, it's really all just photographs of people involved in the case pasted different ways against different backdrops to give the impression of movement. So, it wasn't the most gripping of films. Still, there's much to be learned about the chronology of the case, and bits and pieces after the event, such as the transcriptions of Holmes' letters and journals written throughout his incarceration.

As stated, not too revealing if you know about Holmes, but not a bad way to revisit those events. Even if they are so horribly shocking.

2.5/5

Detour, dir. Edgar G. Ulmer (1945)

NIKKI says:
We decided to end Hitchcock week, and head into Noir Night, with Detour. We picked it because the plot sounded too good to resist -- a hitchhiker takes a ride from a guy who dies during their ride. To avoid suspicion of murder, the hitchhiker takes on the driver's identity. He then picks up a hitchhiker who knows his dastardly secret!

Come on, right? Perfect noir set-up. I enjoyed it, though it had its faults. I wondered why he didn't just go to the cops. If the guy died of natural causes or whatever, surely that would be revealed. But then, I'm forced to think back to The Wrong Man, and I'm with Al in this movie -- if ever I ride with a dead man, I might just cover it up, too.

Particularly brilliant in this movie, and something I'd love to see redone in a modern film, is the death scene involving the telephone wire. How great was that? Ulger is definitely a Hitchcock rival as far as tension and horror goes. I enjoyed it, and will watch more like it, for sure. I do think this is ready for a remake, too.

3/5

Family Plot, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1976)

NIKKI says:
I'm thinking we might end Hitchcock Week now before our opinion of him as the "master of suspense" alters any further. In just a handful of films, Hitchcock's catalogue is beginning to resemble a Backstreet Boys album -- some really fine work scattered amid a hell of a lot of filler.

Family Plot is the worst of that filler. An attempt a suspense-comedy (if that is a real sub-sub-genre), this one gives us a relatively complex plot that pieces together in novel ways, but instead of suspense, we're treated to meandering scenes, boring chases, and so-called comedic moments which are really just Barbara Harris being way annoying. I wished Humphrey Bogart would wander along and just slap her.

This was not Hitchcock's finest hour. In fact, apart from the sagging second half (as in Torn Curtain and The Man Who Knew Too Much), I could barely find Hitch here at all. Where was the suspense, the horror, the dark shadows, and even darker human thoughts? This was all just surface sheen, so little depth, and I don't want shallow in a Hitchcock movie.

Perhaps it was his old age turning on him? What a tragic pity this was his last movie. It's just woeful. So, I think Hitch Week is done, unless we just go back and watch the known classics -- Vertigo, The Birds, Psycho, Strangers on a Train, and the hit tracks. But even then I'm a bit scared. I think, even in those, I might spot more clearly Hitch's failings. I don't want that!

If we do finish Hitch Week on this one, it's definitely been an education.

2/5

STEVE says:
Wow. Up until Family Plot, I would have said that a Hitchcock movie is like pizza - even when it's bad, it's still pretty good. But that's not taking into consideration squid pizza, or potato pizza (no kidding), or Aussie pizza, where they put egg on it. Egg! What are you doing? You've ruined an otherwise perfectly good pizza with egg!

And that's where I stand with Family Plot.

It didn't start off too bad. A little wacky with Barbara Harris' pseudo-psychic and Bruce Dern's cantankerous cabbie, but that's alright. Hitch likes to have fun and can quite often play up the comedy in an otherwise straight scene - as we saw in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Here we learn that Harris is helping a wealthy octogenarian find her last living relative - a bastard nephew who has no idea of his heritage - so that he can be named a beneficiary in her will.

Once that's set up, we move away from them and on to the mysterious blond with the gun, the whole kidnapping/diamond heist plot with Karen Black and William Devane. Switching gears, I like this. So it's back and forth between these two stories until they come together at midpoint - Devane is the missing-and-presumed-dead bastard nephew. That's at 45 minutes; great midpoint for a 90 minute flick, but for 2hrs it comes up a bit short, leaving the second half an extra 15 minutes to meander and lag.

Family Plot reminded me of the worst of the Coen Brothers' work - in my opinion, the Oscar-winner Fargo. The comedy and the drama weren't balanced, the comedy often sapping the drama out of otherwise fairly tense scenes. When the brakes on Harris' car are cut, for example, all Babs can do is grab on to Dern's tie and swing her legs up around his neck - forget that he's doing all he can to keep them on the road and in one piece. It's meant to be funny, but in all actuality it's just irritating as fuck.

Don't get me wrong, there were some great twists and turns, but more often than not I was sitting there, rolling my eyes. No less so than in the final moments when Hitch pulls out the old chestnut of having Babs' "fake" psychic powers turn out to be real. So what, she was faking being a fake psychic the whole time? Are ya fuckin'... what? WHAT?

We had wanted to do a whole week of "unseen" Hitchcock, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to agree with Nikki on this one: Maybe it's best if some of the Hitchcock titles we have here remain unseen.

2/5

Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, dir Julian Schnabel (2007)

NIKKI says:
I took my mum to see this at the Kino cinema in Melbourne. We haven't been to the movies together for a long time, since before I left for America in 2000. Mum reminded me that the last movie was saw together was Legally Blonde, and I was highly embarrassed that I'd paid money and likely bought M&Ms for something so ridiculously banal.

But then I realised I've come an awfully long way from the days when I'd pay cinema prices for just about anything. Nearly a decade on and we're in an independent cinema, at a film we both deliberately selected, as far from cinema puff as one gets. I felt proud, and I think mum did, too. I still had the M&Ms though, so not everything has changed.

We both enjoyed the film, as much as one can enjoy something so deeply painful. I was conflicted at the end, because I think I'm accustomed to feeling some sense of uplift with such stories. You know -- he was paralysed from head-to-toe and died, but he changed the world! Well, I didn't get that with this one. It was a depressing tale, and the filmmakers allowed it to be such without wallowing in that depression. The story was told quite matter-of-factly, and I think that's what has remained so fascinating for me. The film stripped away any potential sugar, anything that might make dwel on how sorry we felt for Jean-Do, and simply let us listen as he told us exactly what life was like inside his diving bell.

The story itself, and the incredible compassion of his speech pathologist, Celine, were just amazing. And I don't think I've even seen a film quite like this in terms of it's visual aspects, like director Julian Schnabel's ingenious method of making Jean-Do's remaining good eye the camera throughout much of the film. It was disconcerting, off-putting, and difficult -- probably the perfect way to really let us into Jean-Do's experience.

Everything about this film really stunned me. The story, the vision, the character development. My heart broke a few times, like when Jean-Do's wife must translate his responses during a telephone call to his mistress who has not been to see him since his accident. Also when Jean-Do says "death" during a conversation with Celine. Therea re so many key moments in this film. It's just superb.

4.5/5

Steve did not view.

The Man Who Knew Too Much, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1934)

NIKKI says:
Talk about out of my comfort zone. As soon as this one started, I was forced to dig right down deep in my movie-lovers heart of hearts and repeat: This is the history of cinema. Without this, we would have no Breakfast Club. So, clear your mind of old-age prejudice, and revel in history in the making.

Turns out, I needn't have been quite so dramatic. After the clay shooting and skiing ended (both scenes required the most rudimentary of "special" effects), the film felt like any other black and white piece, and so I could sit back and enjoy.

Unreal, really, that movies were this edgy way back in the 1930s. That's a lessons I'm still learning, that innuendo and sharp wit are nothing new in film. Filmmakers and screenwriters, I should know by now, have always been slightly ahead of the times (artists often are, right?). It's something that makes films of this vintage so much more enjoyable for me, that I can sit back and witness the development of modern screenwriting and character creation. I should be less shocked, too, from now on, when I see a film like this one and think how far the medium came in such a short time.

Though the film has its faults -- Peter Lorre's character is revealed, in my opinion, slightly late, and the gun battle at the end is tedious to say the least -- it still manages to compel. Just what is going to happen to the daughter, and to what lengths will Leslie Mann go to get her back? The everyman protagonist trapped in a big intrigue-ridden chase is common in Hitchcock's films now that I think about it, and Mann's struggle is among the more interestingly played out. There's a particularly fascinating exchange at an opera show that will remain with me as something quite ingenious.

There are no real surprises here as far as the plot. but it's nonetheless an interesting film, as much for it's place in film history as much as anything else. Watching Peter Lorre skulk around, smoke-in-mouth reminds, too, that movie stars are just made differently these days. More's the pity.

2.5/5

Dial M for Murder, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1954)

NIKKI says:
Of all the film's we've watched so far for our mini-Hitchcock marathon, this is by far my favourite. It's tightly plotted, tense, well-written and acted, and expertly directed.

I loved everything about this one. I enjoyed the supreme malice with which the husband plots to kills his wife, and the way none of that malice ever really shows on his face because it's just something he's going to do. I love how he uses every twist in his own tale to his advantage, such as when his plan goes wrong and he has to think on his feet to come up with another plan to escape suspicion, and thus turns his victim wife into a vicious murderess. It's all so wicked.

I enjoyed the staging of the piece, with it all feeling very much like a play, only with three-dimensional aspects, such as furniture in the foreground, adding a strange depth even in standard 2-D. It was filmed this way to capitalise on the 3-D phenomenon movie going on in the mid-1950s, and still works today because it's not so in-your-face, so to speak.

I relished every twist in this story. I was consistently shocked at just how intricately the plot revealed itself, and when it didn't work one way, off it went in another direction and worked even more majestically than before. This is plotting and structure used to classic effect.

4/5

STEVE says:
At the risk of stating the obvious, Dial M for Murder is a brilliant film. Can't fault the story or the performances, and I've found a new respect for Ray Milland, who up until now, had been familiar to me only from sci-fi movies like X - The Man with the X-Ray Eyes and The Thing with Two Heads. (Sad, innit?)

If only I'd been able to see it in its original 3D presentation.

There's a featurette on the DVD about the 3D process and how it was used here by Hitch. Unlike many other films of the time, where 3D was used aggressively and almost always unnecessarily (I'm reminded of the paddle-ball guy from House of Wax), Hitch used it here to replicate the experience of seeing the original stage production of "Dial M". He didn't throw things in your face - apart from the scene where Grace Kelly is getting strangled and her hand shoots out at the camera - and instead used the 3D process to literally create a third dimension for the audience. Plants, lamps, chairs - all these things sometimes get "in the way" of the action, never obstructing the audience's view, but instead enhancing it, making it feel as though you're watching it live on stage.

It's to Hitch's credit, though, that the movie doesn't suffer from a 2D viewing. Since the 3D effects were so subtle in the first place, the absence of the 3^rd dimension isn't felt, as it so often is when movies make the dimensionally retrograde adjustment for home video release.

Dial M is what a Hitchcock movie should be. Every single thing about it was - if not perfect - perfect Hitchcock, and it's yet another black mark on my record that I'm seeing it for the first time at 37 years of age.

4/5

The Wrong Man, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1956)

STEVE says:
This movie annoyed the hell out of me.

Hang on, let me back up. The Wrong Man was a pretty good movie. Based on a true story, Henry Fonda's Manny Balestrero is arrested after being misidentified as the man who held up several businesses in his neighbourhood. While trying to find people who will corroborate his story (that he was away on vacation with his wife during the time of the first robbery) Manny's wife goes insane and must be committed, leaving him to face the trial by himself. Fonda was great, Vera Miles as Mrs. Balestrero was great, and Hitch was top-of-his-game, even shooting outside the box on this one, using real New York locations instead of going his usual studio/back projection route.

What annoyed me here was the way the case was handled - whether by screenwriter Angus McPhail or by the actual persons involved, I cannot say. Either way, it was a mess. The women from the insurance office who identify Balestrero in the first place are simply paranoid. This man looks vaguely like the robber - in that he's tall and thin - and therefore he must be the robber. Nevermind asking why the robber - who never covered his face or tried to hide his identity in any way - would simply waltz into the office a few weeks later and transact business as usual. They jump immediately to the conclusion that Balestrero is their man. More unbelievable is the fact that they'd been robbed by this guy twice before. I'll allow that you might misidentify someone you've seen only once - but when he comes back a second time, you'd be able to tell him apart from Henry Fonda, I don't care how similar their features.

Then there's the police: Considering that The Wrong Man was filmed ten years before the Miranda v. Arizona case, I didn't exactly expect them to read Manny his rights. But all through the questioning he was flat-out denied a phone call, and no one - not even Manny himself - suggested that having a lawyer present might be a good idea. Manny was pretty much railroaded. You could argue that this is what really happened, but that only makes it all the more infuriating.

When Manny finally does hire Frank D. O'Connor to defend him, O'Connor puts the onus of finding witnesses and alibis on Manny! I ask you: What the hell kind of lawyer doesn't have an investigator working for him? If, gods forbid, I'm ever involved in any kind of legal complications, and my lawyer wants me to do the footwork, you'd better believe I'm going to ask for a kick-back.

And I would be remiss in talking about a movie that deals with a wrongfully accused man, were I not to mention the West Memphis Three. Manny Balestrero - at least this movie's representation of Manny Balestrero - spent one night in a holding cell, and about 45 seconds in prison after his arraignment. Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin have been in jail since 1993 - Damien, on death row - convicted of murdering three little boys in the Robin Hood Hills area of West Memphis, Arkansas, with no actual physical evidence to prove that they committed the crimes, and despite the fact that - wait for it - Jessie was at a wrestling match several towns over at the time the crimes would have been committed. Nearly fifty years since the Balestrero case and it's only gotten worse.

I want to say "Regardless of all this, it was a good movie," but I'm not sure that makes sense. Yes, it was well-made, the acting and direction were superb, and the location shoots added a layer of reality that I find missing from so many Hitchcock films, due to his reliance on the "controlled environment" of shooting in a studio - but... can it really be a good movie when the true events were so ridiculously unbelievable?

I'm afraid the jury's still out on that one.

3/5

NIKKI says:
So many things made The Wrong Man enjoyable. Henry Fonda's performance, for one, as the workaday husband and father, the family man with his heart in the right place. Fonda does here what he does best, mixing stoicism and vulnerability, to create a complex character whose success you can't help but root for.

The story, too, was interesting, based on a true account. To witness Hitchcock's recreation of that account and watch how it all played out was genuinely compelling, if entirely frustrating that such ridiculousness could happen to anybody.

And Hitchcock's dark shadows and visionary direction made the thing even more watchable.

What was difficult to enjoy about this one was just how mad the whole situation was. How Manny was persecuted simply because he might, sort-of, perhaps looked like another robber working his neighbourhood. The women at the insurance office coulda sworn he was the robber, and so without physical, or even remotely logical, evidence, Manny is charged and spends time in jail. Then he is forced to spearhead his own investigation, with Manny and his wife travelling the countryside looking for that much-needed evidence to clear him.

I suppose this all happened, but can you believe it? Well, I guess we can, because it's not a stand alone incident, and it's not something that stopped occurring as investigative techniques and technologies improved.

In all, the history lesson, coupled with Hitchcock at his swift directorial best, made this one a good, if hellishly frustrating, piece.

3.5/5

Torn Curtain, dir, Alfred Hitchcock (1966)

NIKKI says:
Steve was in the mood for Hitchcock, I was well-rested and happy to choose something a bit meatier than those just-keep-me-awake horror screeners. So, we went with Torn Curtain. Neither of us had seen it, and it's been too long, for me, between Newman films.

I'm a bit torn with this one. I very much enjoyed the film, and especially its performances. But the final half of the film was very weighty, not nearly as fast-paced and exciting as the first half. Once we knew what Michael was up to, we just had to wait until the wrong people found out and chased him around a bit.

When the suspense began to involve so many people, the film really lost its tenseness. Early on, when Michael is followed first to Berlin, then to the farmhouse, everything was taut -- it was Newman in peril. But suddenly when Michael and his wife are fleeing the bad guys in a bus full of people, and then when they're in the post office with a weird woman, then we're in the ballet theatre with a big audience, suddenly the focus is removed from them, and I felt far too separated from them at a point when I should have been right with them. If that makes sense.

Still, bits here rank up there with my favourite Hitchcock moments, like the scene in the farmhouse when the young woman comes to Newman's aid. That was horrific. I also enjoyed the ballet sequence, just because it was so freakin' weird. Paul was great, as always, and even had a chance to the romantic lead in the early parts of this film, which is something he doesn't do a lot. I think I may request a Newman Week for our project. This was okay -- makes me want to watch more Hitchcocks I've missed.

3/5

STEVE says:
Torn Curtain kicks off a week, not only of movies neither of us hasn't seen before, but also a celebration of Alfred Hitchcock. We've decided that the horror screeners we've been watching were just too painful to continue, at least right away, and how can you go wrong with Hitch?

Unfortunately, the answer to that is "By starting your week with Torn Curtain".

For the first hour, as Nikki mentioned, it was classic Hitch. Intrigue, spy stuff, murder - the self-defense killing of Gromek will stay with me forever. But after we reached mid-point, the movie became plodding and tedious. The scene on the bus was awkward - everyone speaking in German was a brilliant move, as it kept most of us as in the dark as Newman and Andrews. But the belligerent woman on the bus served no purpose but to have someone repeat everything in English, even though the woman was German and would have understood the exchange in the first place.

Much of the 2nd half could have been lifted out and never missed. The Countess Kuchinska bit, for example. Sad as this woman was, she did nothing but stretch the running time of the movie. All she had to do was take Newman and Andrews to a post office. Why the layover at the coffee house? So she could get them to agree to sponsor her move to America - which never happens, anyway, because she's caught after the ultra-tedious post office scene.

Hitch's MacGuffin this time around was a defensive weapon against offensive nuclear attacks. That's all we need to know - usually. But this time out, Hitch had Newman and Professor Lindt battling equations from this weapon on a blackboard - none of which meant anything to anyone at home. The purpose of the scene was for Newman to get information from Lindt without really giving him any in return, and indeed it worked. But it went on and on, with each of them writing equations, the other arguing against, and yadda yadda yadda. By Hitch's own admission, the MacGuffin is an object around which the plot revolves, and as to what that object specifically is, "The audience don't care!" But when you present us with a scene like this, we have to care, or we become bored.

No, this one didn't do very much for me, although Newman's performance was top notch - even if Hitch himself was not.

2.5/5

The Bet, dir. Mark Lee (2006)

NIKKI says:
I was in he mood for something different -- no horror, no comedy, no serious documentaries. So, I chose The Bet, an Aussie film set in the world of high-flying bankers and stockbrokers. It stars Matthew Newton and is directed by Mark Lee -- two definite selling points. And it wasn't too bad.

It was awesome, though. A few things bothered me -- I felt like I didn't know the true reasons behind both the bet and Aden Young's character's Machiavellian shenanigans. I felt like I should have been let in a little bit more to just what Young's character wanted and why he went to these specific lengths to get it. At the end, when Young's deception is revealed, it felt like a let down because of the major event preceding it. A major event I didn't think needed to happen.

It was an interesting watch. I enjoyed Mark Lee's direction -- the solitude and steeliness of the broker offices contrasted with the colour and magnificence of the Sydney skyline. I thought Matt Newton was really good, and the twists and turns in the story kept me watching. I don't think it came together in the end, though.

2.5/5

Dan in Real Life, dir. Peter Hedges (2007)

NIKKI says:
Damn, I wanted so much more from this. I thought, from the trailer, that I was getting a clever, possibly subversive, romantic movie, perhaps something like Eternal Sunshine or even Once. I thought more focus would be placed on the main character and his tribulations. Instead, this came dangerously close to becoming a male version of The Family Stone.

While Steve Carell was genius as always, and rather heartbreaking in scenes, I was still forced to watch the big, happy, quirky family, who just never listened until it was vital to the story. In fact, many annoying things just suddenly happen when they absolutely must to keep us on Dan's side. For instance, Dan's in love with his brother's girl -- never a good thing, but worse when the movie does that thing where it has us love the brother in the beginning, then slightly loathe him in the end when it's time for the true lovers to come together.

That was this movie's failure -- too many irons in the fire. Dan was getting over the death of his wife, he was in love with Marie, his brother had Marie, All well and good. But there was that huge family that did very little to propel the story. Brothers and sisters popped in only to make Dan uncomfortable, or to show how little he was understood by those closest to him. I don't know if we needed 17 family members, seemingly without problems of their own, to do that.

The juice of the story, between Dan, his brother, Marie, and Dan's three kids, was good, for the most part. Dan and Marie felt like they should be together, although I wasn't convinced when suddenly she got all jealous when Dan met another woman for drinks. Marie had made really no attempt to let us or Dan know she liked him, so her outward jealousy didn't fit with the film's other subtleties. She climbs all over the brother one minute and then wants to be jealous when Dan has a date? Sorry, but that just did not make sense to me.

I don't know, stuff like that just bugged me in this. It was romantic and well-written only in parts. Otherwise, it was stock-standard and a bit dumb. When the parents were standing there at the end telling Dan to "go for it" with Marie, I'm thinking -- where did that come from? Weren't we all just horrified that Dan would betray his brother so harshly?

Anyway... Steve Carell made the movie. I enjoy him a lot. But I'm going to have to drop this a point for some terrible situations here. Including an horrendously misguided wedding sequence at the end (sugar attack and ... blurgh).

2.5/5

STEVE says:
Dan in Real Life was light, unoffensive, dysfunctional family fare - pretty much everything I hate in movies today.

Why do movie families have to be so fake? Who actually has a crossword puzzle competition on a family holiday? And a family talent show? It reeks of The Brady Bunch in the worst possibly way. I half-expected Steve Carell and Dane Cook to build a house of cards in the end to see who goes home with the girl.

And then there's the shower scene. Can someone explain to me how this was anything other that just plain fucking creepy? I know it was supposed to be cute and uncomfortable, but Jeez-Louise!

Steve Carell was good as the widowed Dan, but we've seen him play this sort of introverted nice-guy before in The 40 Year Old Virgin, so he wasn't exactly exploring new territory here. And neither, it seems, were the writers, Pierce Gardner and Peter Hedges. (Gardner and Hedges, heh-heh.) Dan in Real Life was as predictable as light, unoffensive, dysfunctional family fare can be - down to the happy, everybody wins ending.

2/5

Groundhog Day, dir. Harold Ramis (1993)

STEVE says:
So I run this film class in Echuca on Wednesday nights, where a group of us get together once every two weeks, watch a film and discuss it afterwards. I set this up largely because, apart from Nikki, I can't find anyone around here who actually likes to think about a movie as they're watching it. The first movie we watched was Blade Runner: The Final Cut (which I didn't blog about because Nikki and I had watched it only a few weeks previous), and that went over pretty well, so I thought I'd do a complete 180 and give them a comedy - albeit a deeper comedy than they were probably expecting.

This movie works on two levels: You can enjoy it just as a silly Bill Murray comedy, or you can look at it philosophically and see that it holds a deeper spiritual meaning than, for example, The Passion of the Christ. Either way, you know.

Groundhog Day uses the Kübler-Ross model as a template, taking Bill Murray's Phil Connors through the five stages of grief and tragedy - Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance - as he relives the same day over and over again for what director Harold Ramis tells us on the commentary is ten years (but what screenwriter Danny Rubin, a Zen-Buddhist, originally conceived as 10,000 years). During the discussion afterwards, we found that Phil was indeed in denial at first, questioning whether someone was playing a large-scale practical joke on him, or whether he was, in fact, insane; then he became angry, which manifest itself in more of a playful, devilish Phil than a truly angry Phil, where we figured he'd be lashing out at people; when depression set in, he began killing himself over and over and over again - and this is when he started to get really mean to people, displaying some of the anger we'd expected before; and finally into acceptance of his fate, which is what broke the spell - he started doing good things for others, solely because it was the right thing to do, rather than thinking about how it might benefit him.

The one stage we couldn't identify in the movie, thought, was Bargaining. Arguments were made that each time he attempted to change something from a previous "day", it could be construed as bargaining, but I felt that it was more of a gamble, as Phil wasn't giving anything up in order to make things right. But even so, what a fascinating model for a film that, on the surface, seems to be a light romantic comedy!

I was struck by the fact Phil is pretty much the same guy Murray played in Scrooged - the jerk who's reformed in the end by realizing that humanity on the whole is greater than himself. It's part of the "Cinderella" archetype (goodness triumphant after being initially despised). Makes me wonder if Murray isn't drawn to this sort of story.

3.5/5

Nikki did not view.

Catacombs, dir. Tomm Coker and David Elliot (2007)

NIKKI says:
What was I just saying about terrible films? I'm so over this shit. I hope.

So, Pink invites her sister to Paris to party, really. The sister is there for other, deeper reasons, but never really gets a chance to explore them, because Pin takes her to an underground party onto of a huge grave and she ends up getting the freak scared out of her, poor thing.

That was the one interesting element of this movie -- Shannyn Sossamon's character and her fear. But it really ended up meaning very little. I felt like I watched an 80 minute build up to a trick ending. Not good enough.

Was nice to see Pink acting. I could stand to watch that again. And I think Shannyn Sossamon is good, too. So, there was eye-candy.

Some scary moments (I was frightened most by what turned out to be a fuse box with a red light on it, oops), but basically ultra-standard and kind of annoying.

1.5/5

STEVE says:
This is a classic example of Predictable vs. Inevitable.

After setting up the urban legend of a goat-head-wearing fella who lives in the catacombs beneath Paris, Pink is killed by said goat-head guy at the 30 minute mark. Then it's another 80 minutes or so of run, run, run, chase, chase, chase, only to find out that Pink wasn't killed, and the goat-head guy was one of her friends in a mask.

We called this pretty early on, based solely on the goat-head guy. He was just too ridiculous to be real. A killer skulking around the catacombs, that's fine. Even a masked killer skulking around the catacombs, I'll buy. But is the skinned goat head really necessary? Not unless you're just looking to freak someone out.

If it was inevitable that it was a joke (and it could have been, as Pink's friends were set up as pranksters), we wouldn't have been able to call it. But the movie overplayed its hand and fell over the line into predictable. It still would have been boring, mind you, but at least we wouldn't have been sitting there waiting for the movie to catch up to us.

So it was pretty much April Fool's Day all over again. And we didn't enjoy that one the first time.

1.5/5