Skeptomania - Paranormal / UFOs, etc.

asmodee

Raven, thanks to your tip on 10,000 BC I was able to shut my brain off enough before this movie to enjoy it, though the start was a little slow.

I just watched Drillbit Taylor. If you like Owen Wilson, he plays pretty much the same lovable screwup who gets it right in the end that he always does. Mildly amusing.

I also just watched the first half hour or so of Vantage Point. I don't recommend it. The movie keeps resetting the clock back to noon and replaying the same thing over and over from a different person's perspective each time. The third time it rewound time to play the same 10 minutes a fourth time I couldn't take it again and shut it off. An interesting concept, but very poorly executed. I had to watch about 8 minutes of the same footage from a different camera to get 2 minutes of new story, over and over again. And then, when I did get some new story, just as it got my interest because something was about to happen the time was reset again. You may call that suspense if you don't have 4 kids and better things you could be doing. Personally, I call it damned annoying. I can't really tell you much more about it because in that 30 minutes I got about 10 minutes of original storyline and then over the next 20 minutes or so I got about 2 minutes of additional storyline twice.

Raven · Google Meister

yea... i didn't think Vantage Point looked like a good idea... i'm glad i chose against it.

I just watched Futurama: the Beast with a Billion Backs...
It was funny as hell, and even better than the last one. i swear, i'm gonna cry after i see that final movie... it will be as bad as when the last ep was shown... it's a good show, damn'it...

asmodee

I watched Hancock at the theater this weekend, then took the kids to the drive-in for Kung Fu Panda and Get Smart.

Hancock was a pretty decent movie, but then, I like Will Smith. It had some pretty good action and kept you guessing now and then, plus some decent, albeit dry, humor. Not much to say about it without giving away the plot really. The storyline did suffer a little when they tried to explain his origins, which they never really clearly did.

Kung Fu Panda was also pretty decent, not great. Pretty standard story line with no surprises.

Get Smart was about what I expected. I was a big fan of the series. It was more or less true to form, but a little boring and very predictable in parts. At one point I predicted the star's upcoming line about a minute and a half before he said it. A bit dry, but not overly stupid if you liked the original. The actor did a pretty decent job with the character. I wouldn't pay to see it again, but since it was a 2 for 1, it was okay.

Raven · Google Meister

I just watched The Anarchist Cookbook via Netflix Instant...

It was very interesting in an SLC: Punk sort of way, but otherwise for pretty much that reasoning, it wasn't very original despite its attempt at seeming original...

asmodee

I watched In a Dark Place the other night and my skin is still crawling. DO NOT watch this movie! The rest of this is a spoiler, big time. Better you get it from here than by watching this crap to the very end to figure it out because the plot was creepy in a slimy sort of way.

The movie is supposed to be about a girl taking a job taking care of two kids whose parents have died finding that the house they live in is haunted. She starts seeing the ghosts and soon comes to the realization that when they were alive, they were molesting the children. She admits her immediate supervisor and only other non-servant at the mansion that she was molested or raped at a young age. She decides that the spirits are after the kids shortly after the girl comes into her room one stormy night and begs to sleep with her because she is scared. The woman agrees and rolls over. The girl puts a hand on her shoulder and says, "You can do anything you want." That is the point where your skin starts to crawl (though not all of that was chronological and IT GETS WORSE).

She is acting like a freak and about to get fired, sleeps with the other woman to be able to stay, which makes her even freakier. It gets to the point where she is too freaky to stay even for a piece of ass and she is asked to leave in the morning. Long story short, you find out at the very end while the boy slowly drowns as she tells him "You're free" because she thinks she saved him from the ghost, the dead people never touched the children, this crazy bitch did. There are no ghosts and this nut case did everything to the children that she thought the dead people had done in their lives.

I hate movies where children get hurt. There are some stories which just don't need to be told. This is one of them.

Yaish · Intel Chief

Wow. Just by the title I was going to make some smart ass remark along the lines "In a dark place eh? Sounds like anal porn".

I didn't think the real story would be worse.

asmodee

Yeah, that was two days ago and there was no indication what was really going on until the very end, so I watched the whole thing. My skin still crawls when I think about it.

Raven · Google Meister

putting children in harm in horror films has been a useful concept since Wes Craven decided that the boogie-man should be a child-raping murderer with claws that comes for you as you sleep... or we could go even further back and reference the Exorcist. Basically, the extra fear that you feel when it's a child being put in harm's way is the point... they could make you jump a little as you watch the dumb big-boobed blonde open the door that we already know has the killer behind it, or they could make you jump allot and squirm continuously by replacing the blonde with a 6 year old...

asmodee

There is a place for it and, if done well, it can add to the story. However, I think Hollywood has used it for a while now to invoke emotions to make you thing you are emotionally involved with a bad movie. They often seem to want us to squirm because they have forgotten how to make decent horror movies, but they can confuse the ignorant into thinking they liked it. The the scene in The Hills Have Eyes, for example, where the thing is going to rape the woman, already a touchy subject, then the other thing comes in and takes over, chasing him off, so the first thing goes over to the baby. Immediately you wonder if he is going to get what he wants from the infant instead and you squirm. If you were less intelligent, you might mistake that for "edge of your seat action" instead of an emotional "cheap cologne" to cover up the metaphorical horrible stench of that movie.

I know it is used and I know it has been used for a while. In the Exorcist it was used well as an integral part of the plot, not just, "Damn, this movie sucks. Kill a kid to cover it up." It can be used as a part of a good plot. It was not the case in this movie, and, in fact, most movies these days. Take AVP-R, for instance. The purpose of the aliens being lose in a maternity ward was to make your skin crawl because Hollywood seems to think that somehow entertains us. For me, at least, it does not. I would have liked the movie if they would have stopped dragging kids into it.

The point is, if the description had said, "crazy bitch child molester" instead of "ghosts", I would not have wasted my time. I would have known that it was a movie I had no interest in. There were no ghosts, just a crazy bitch, and molestation was never listed in the on-demand description. This movie had no lesson to teach, no truth to uncover and, in my opinion, no story worth telling, though the base concept of the mental illness of a former victim does have potential. While it is possible to endanger children in a good story I found it unnecessarily focused on in this movie and the story in general got about as much help from it as the pointless and disturbingly detailed sex scene in Steven King's It.

Raven · Google Meister

So, if they made a movie about a bunch of kids going in their school and shooting and killing a bunch of kids and then turning the guns on themselves, you would only be pissed because it used kids instead of adults?

On that note... I just watched Duck! The Carbine High Massacre via Netflix Instant
http://www.netflix.com/WatchNowMovie/Duck_The_Carbine_High_Massacre/70014448?trkid=188469
I liked it, it was a bit college-student-film budgeted (judging from the age groups of the people that wrote/produced/directed/starred in it, that might be a literal assessment), but it was amusing, plus i agree with its chosen targets of mockery. I was also amused by the irony of the "bible thumper" being played by a very young Misty Mundae (for those of you who know who she is, you get the irony).

asmodee

Not at all, Raven. I have nothing against a decent story in which children are harmed. I simply think that Hollywood is throwing it in as a dirty trick to invoke emotion that the movie goer may mistake as "edge of your seat". If it does not add to the story line or is, itself, the story line, I don't see the point. If you've ever read Steven King's It you will know that the part near the end where the pubescent girl had sex with five or six pubescent boys after defeating the monster was not really necessary to the plot and was, in fact, quite disturbingly detailed. In the rest of the story, children (and only children) were dropping like flies. Overall, I liked the story. That part was not necessary and the story would have been better off without it.

Basically, if I'm watching a story about aliens killing people, I want to see, by and large, adults in that movie. It was a story about a monster killing children, so I expected children to come to harm in the story before I began reading it. This particular movie I watched only because the description mentioned a haunted house and I like sci fi. It was not sci fi. It was an M. Night ShitForBrains Shamalan style bait and switch. I'm sorry, but an unexpected, very witty twist in the last five minutes of a movie do not make up for 85 minutes of confusion and boredom preceding it.

Watch the movie. You'll see what I mean. It's on the free On Demand right now on one of the pay channels with Mediacom.

Gren · God Of Oreos

Cube (1997 / Canadien / Rated R)

Netflix blurb: "A student, an ex-con, an engineer, a social worker, a cop and a mentally handicapped person [Idiot Savant] are caught like rats in a trap in a maze of interlocking cubes with no apparent way out. They're clueless as to how they got there or why they were chosen. Food or water is nowhere to be found, and upon further investigation, the six discover some of the rooms are booby-trapped with destructive devices. Conjures up the best of the "Twilight Zone."

B+ as a movie. A bit of scenery chewing from 2-3 of the actors. Excellent theme setting opening scene. Intermittent gore, but no boobicles. The six are trapped in a huge cube made of an unknown number of 14 x 14 x 14 ft rooms. Each face of a room (four walls, ceiling, and floor) has a hatch that leads to another room, identical except for wall color - and possible fatal booby trap. Interesting as they figure ways to test and figure a safe path, think their way out hopefully. Is it alien? Man made? Is there a way out at all? How many might survive?

Raven · Google Meister

Cube is classic stuff... SciFi made a sequel for it, it's decent, but not as good as the original...

TheMadHobbit · Subway Tolkien

So far....

Batman: Gotham Nights DVD. Very nice, only 1 flaw, I wish some of the episodes weren;t so short. Basically it is 6 PG-13 animated episodes that get better and better. The first chapter is the weakest, also a bit cliched, but still watchable for the animation. I found the last two chapters to be the best of the lot personally. Nice timing, because I find waiting for Batman: The Dark Knight to be getting really rough.

Just got back from taking lil Hob to see Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D. Basically Brendan Frasier doing a Disney Attraction level of acting in this flick. The plot - well, drink LOTS of tequila before seeing this if you plan on paying attention. It will dull the pain of the inconsistancies and hypocrasies. However, it is probably one of the best 3D films I have seen from an action perspective. While there are some cool moments, this film is basically about as fulfilling as watching someone play a video game. The best part? We got to keep the 3D glasses - they are good quality!

JttCotE3D at one point had me shuddering in horror when I realized that if THIS is what the Hollywood honchos "greenlight", how utterly awful must the scripts they veto for being "too dumb" be???

Tomorrow morning, the Hob family heads out to see Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. And on the flight to Omaha on Monday morning, I have George Romero's Diary of the Dead to watch on my portable DVD.

Raven · Google Meister

hurry up and return Gotham Nights, damn'it, i'm on the waiting list!