Frobozz's Journal

Long day today; but it was for a good cause. Last night was Rifftrax: Timechasers, which was amazing and takes place in Vermont, so there's that. After that we decided to double down and went to see Civil War.

Absolutely a blast of a night. I don't think I could do this again for at least a year. ;->

I just got back from seeing M Night Shyamalan's The Visit. Full disclosure, I'm not an M Night hater. I felt that The Last Airbender was execrable and After Earth had some serious flaws; but for the most part I'm generally happy with the man's output. Since Shyamalan used his fee from AE to make this movie himself, I went in with high expectations... and happily, they weren't let down.

The Visit is a weird sort of film, as you might expect given the writer/director's proclivities. It tries to straddle the line between being a comedy and a horror and -- with a few exceptions -- mostly manages to be both at the same time. It's a found-footage film with all of the quirks and foibles that go along with that particular horror sub-genre... if you hate found footage, there won't be anything in this film to change your mind. If like me you're a big fan of the sub-genre, there's a lot to enjoy here.

The movie is about two children with a sad backstory: they were abandoned by their father, leaving them in the care of their mother, who'd given up a lot to be with the man whom she'd thought was her soulmate. The children want to meet their grandparents, whom they've never before met, and jump at the chance to do so when said grandparents reach out to their mother and ask for the chance to connect with the pair. The children also have an ulterior motive for the trip: to give their mother and her new beau a chance to spend some time together; and also to see if they can help reconcile their mom with her parents all these years after she'd left them to be with her tarnished knight.

As you'd expect from an M Night movie, the characters are all more complicated than a single screenplay can do justice. It's not entirely clear how cohesively these complications would connect to create a full character in some other medium like a novel; but in the world of cinema (which Shyamalan, echoing The Lady In The Water, deconstructs as an important narrative arc of this movie) these complications serve to make the children, their mother and her parents into very interesting and at times unpredictable individuals. Everyone is flawed in this movie and those flaws really help to drive the plot towards its climax. Utilizing his skill at twists, Shyamalan sets you up for one sort of horror movie during the first three quarters of the film and then reveals that all this time he's been setting up quite another one. It would be easy to feel cheated by this kind of subversion; but in my opinion, Shyamalan manages to pull this off with the same grace as he did in his earlier movies.

Unfortunately a director as subversive as Shyamalan has a tendency to introduce some flaws into his movies; flaws that could be avoided by, paradoxically, making the characters more cliched and less interesting. One of the children's fatal character flaws (freezing under duress) is introduced only a few minutes before its invoked by the screenplay; as a result, the audience doesn't get a chance to integrate this tendency towards paralysis into their concept of his character and thus it feels like it comes out of the blue, rather than being part of a fully realized character. The other child has a tendency to Shyamalan-Speech (ie, using words that no other person on Earth would use in a given situation); when used sparingly, this provides a lot of colour for the character. When used with less restraint than was needed here, this just makes the character's words feel a little artificial at times.

But flaws aside, I enjoyed the heck out of The Visit. It was a really disturbing film that relied mostly on the banality of horror to provide most of its creeps. It kept me guessing and really when I go to a horror movie, that's what I want most: suspense and uncertainty.

Last week was a long week (and this one is already longer, despite only being two days long thus far), so I decided that the weekend was going to be all about relaxing and media consumption. My mood's been elevated due to the warmer weather and the extra exercise I've been putting in, so this made for a wonderful end to a week of toil.

Getting my theatrical experiences out of the way first, I went to see Avengers 2 at an early morning timeslot so rambunctious teenagers would hopefully still be asleep. There's not a whole lot to say about the movie. If you're in its target demographic, you're going to really like it. It provides you with lots and lots of fan-love and has some of the best choreographed fight sequences I've seen. James Spader -- a national treasure, to be sure -- is superb in it and plays the titular Ultron with his usual flare for the disturbingly amusing. The only moment of dissonance that I had was at one point expecting the metal man to open and 'Red' Reddington to step out.

We turned the movie-going outing into a double-feature and stayed to watch a screening of Big Trouble in Little China, which is one of my all-time favourite films of the 80s. The film is still a massive festival of John Carpenter letting his inner comedian-slash-fanboy explode all over the screen in vivid splotches of bigger than life martial arts parody. Seeing it with an audience that was also reacting to the movie was great. It felt like we had gathered with one purpose: to watch Kurt Russel basically act like a hero while actually being the sidekick to people much more competent than he.
As it turns out, I've never actually seen Big Trouble uncut. So this was my first time ever seeing the opening scene, which seems always to be cut out in television broadcasts of the film. This was also my first time seeing the film in widescreen! It's quite a bit different from the full-screen creature that I'd watched during my wild and tempestuous (ya, right) youth.

The rest of the movies I watched this weekend were all either on Netflix or Hulu. I got very lucky: everything I hit turned out to not suck.

Starry Eyes: I've been meaning to watch this indie horror thriller ever since it came out and I've only just gotten around to it. The premise has been done before: young actress is looking to make her big break and has to decide how much of herself to compromise to get it. Starry Eyes takes that premise and turns it into a supernatural horror story that manages to be as thoughtful about its subject as it is disturbing. The actors in this piece play their parts to perfection and it's impossible to look away from the gradual slide into the depths that our main character takes. One word of warning: this movie is not for the faint of heart. There are moments of it that are really, *really* disturbing; though these moments really do help underscore the film's central theme and the destruction of the main character.
Seriously. Not for the faint of heart.
I'm not kidding.

The Mirror: This movie appeared to be a rip-off of the absolutely astonishing Oculus; but it was also a found-footage film, which meant that I had to at least try to watch it. Fortunately, while the movies share a premise (there's a damned evil mirror and no one's smart enough to leave it alone), they diverge wildly in their execution. I enjoyed this film, though it definitely didn't satisfy me. The actors were competent but often failed to really make me care about them, which is a signifigant strike against any horror film. The middle of the film dragged -- which is a common problem with found-footage films that don't pace themselves properly -- but the ending was a real treat. It's worth a look if you're in the mood for some found footage fun and you forgot where you left your fifth-generation VHS copy of The McPherson Tapes.

A Lonely Place to Die: Breathtaking visuals and mostly compelling characters make up for the fact that this is yet another entry in the 'oh no, we're running away from people who want to kill us one by one' film oeuvre. The movie goes deeper into the motivations behind the premise than most of these sorts of films delve and that alone helps save it from being yet another fish in the barrel. I do wish that it had been about fifteen minutes shorter, though.
Also, the mountains of Scotland look awesome. They should have been credited in the cast.

Preservation: The weekend's second entry in the 'oh no, we're running away from people who want to kill us one by one' film. The movie didn't do a lot to differentiate itself from the pack but it did go some very interesting places with its character depth. The last half hour is also very hard to look away from.

Daylight Fades: A vampire film, but a fairly different one than you'd expect. This movie is all about relationships and trust and not so much about the blood-drinking. It's a bit slow in places and the actors sometimes seem to be struggling with their characters but for the most part I really enjoyed it.

Trippin': I'll admit, I almost didn't watch this movie. Drug humour and a movie shot on mini-DV turned me off hard. But a thoughtful review on IMDB made me reconsider and I'm glad that it did. This is an entry into the 'douchebag kids go to a cabin in the woods' sub-genre; but its one that has its tongue planted firmly in cheek and that really made for a fun watch. Sadly, the actors are a little bit unpolished and the characters seem to inhabit different personalities depending on the needs of the script; and some of the humour was too raunchy for me to appreciate. But all in all the good outweighed the bad in this movie.

Ground Zero: The last entry! Technically I watched this Monday night, but it counts as part of my weekend roundup because shut up. This is a zombie movie where the protagonists are cleaners for hire (the sort that disappear bodies; not the ones that make the floor tiles shine) and are suddenly thrust outside of their normal yet extra-legal world into a nightmare. The characters are all incredibly quirky -- in a good way, thankfully -- and it's hard to not get attached to all of them. The film is almost a one-room movie, taking place in a relatively claustrophobic environment. This works for the film as it lets the audience focus on the characters and their shifting dynamics without the distraction of too many scene changes. I loved it.

And that's the list! More to come, I'm sure.

Just saw the Live Rifftraxing of 1998's Godzilla. I was told that there was a hideous, mutated, deformed creature in this film but I really don't think Matthew Broderick was that bad.

Just saw Monty Python Live on Thursday, the positively last ever (probably) performance by the surviving Pythonites, a whole troupe of dancers and two cannons shaped like johnsons. Quite fun! Especially when they started improvising and free-associating in places.
And they combined the parrot and the cheese shop sketches. That was quite impressive! Both require a lot of patter and rapid firing of lines back and forth.
Mmmmm. Crunchy frog.