Category: Review

I’m sortof glad I watched The Ring first and Abandon second. I was so scared by The Ring that even just sitting in the darkened theater, waiting for Abandon to start, I started feeling a level of suspense and fear unrivaled by anything in the actual movie.

Abandon stars Katie Holmes, Benjamin Bratt, and Charlie Hunnam as the possibly dead ex-boyfriend who’s still hanging around harassing Katie. That’s right, Katie Holmes plays a character called Katie. Anyway, the basic story of Abandon is about Katie and her relationship with the 2-years-missing boyfriend and the cop just-outta-rehab-alcoholic who is investigating his disappearance. The flashbacks to the boyfriend don’t tell us why she fell for him or why she’s scared of his return, the “detective” doesn’t seem to actually do any detecting until after he quits his job, and my favorite plot was a sub-plot (Katie and her best friend competing for a job at the same presitigous firm) and my favorite character was a supporting character (Katie’s best friend, played by the ever-charming-and-wonderful Zooey Deschanel).

The missing boyfriend begins appearing, but he seems to be stalking Katie. He follows her around and only approaches her when alone, and when he does approach her it seems alternately passionate and threatening. Which would explain why she was scared, if there was any evidence he was threatening before his return; she was certainly scared of him before seeing him again. Okay, okay, enough about Katie’s emotional responses not making any sense and being mostly unbelievable. If I really wanted to go into that, I’d have to talk about her childhood abandonment issues, her bizarre relationship with a psychiatrist, the way she seemed alternately stressed out about being overdue on slash unable to complete her thesis and to have forgotten she’s a student at all, and maybe a few other failings between the writing and the acting to portray believable human emotions and reactions.

I don’t want to say that Abandon is not worth watching at all, but the scariest moment for me was when my mind started to wander and I started thinking about The Ring. A little later came the dreaded moment that ensures I won’t be adding this movie to my collection of DVDs, and will likely avoid re-watching it: I actually found myself saying out loud “well, I’m bored”. It wasn’t time to walk out. It turned out that some of the best of the movie was after that very moment so late in the movie, but only because of the not-entirely-impossible-to-figure-out twists, without which the movie would have been entirely unwatchable.

So, not scary. The possibility that her ex-boyfriend might come back after a couple of years and knock Katie around just doesn’t strike fear into me the way a deadly, unknowable, infectious evil for which there is no clear or direct defense does (ie: The Ring). Zooey was a delight. Benjamin Bratt sure is hot, and shows endearing vulnerability as a struggling alcoholic. Katie Holmes still looks like smooth skin stretched over dangerously fragile bones, a skeleton reminding us of the dangers of anorexia. If you want to see a semi-scary movie with enough mystery to keep you interested, but not so scary (The Ring) that it keeps you up at night, this might be it. Or it might be Below, another scary movie in theatres now, which I plan to see soon.

Some of you may be aware that I’ve been having some difficulty getting to sleep at a reasonable hour lately. Today, through a combination of waking up early, the effect of my extended period of insomnia, and plenty of riding my bike back and forth across Tempe dropping off resumes trying to find employment, I was mentally and physically ready to go to sleep by nine o’clock. I tried. I even managed to stay in my darkened bedroom for nearly an hour before I had to get up and turn all the lights on, having determined that sleeping tonight would be entirely impossible.

Not because of insomnia. Not because of stress about trying to find work; I have to be up before seven AM tomorrow to start training for one of my opportunities. Not even my mind racing, keeping me awake. Tonight it’s my heart that’s racing. I don’t remember the last time I felt this way about a movie. I don’t think it’s ever been this extreme before, literally moving me from bed, afraid of the dark and what might be hiding there.

When I left the theater after watching The Ring, I was satisfied. I didn’t think it was particularly scary, and I don’t remember the opening-night audience screaming even once (though I might have missed it, as intently as I was watching the movie unfold). I hurried home to watch Firefly and John Doe, believing that I could forget about The Ring as easily as a similar re-make of the Japanese classic horror film Ringku, feardotcom. Then I turned out all the lights, put on some music and tried to sleep.

Images from the deadly tape kept appearing before my eyes, whether I had them open or closed. The dark was enough that the difference was negligible. Dark, except for the images she was showing me. Don’t you understand? She never sleeps.

Okay, okay. Keep it together. The movie. As you may already be aware, the basic premise of The Ring is that there is this video. When you watch the video, as soon as it’s over, your phone rings. A voice tells you you have seven days, and is gone. Exactly seven days after you watch the video, you die. The movie follows the seven days of a young woman journalist as she attempts to figure out where the video came from, whether it can really kill you, and then how she can try to stay alive. More than once the film gives the impression that it’s over, only to keep revealing more of the story.

Thinking back over the film, there were few specific sequences that were particularly scary. The very opening sequence, almost everything after the first time you think the movie is over, and the actual content of the video were all quite scary. There was a constant feeling of something being just around the corner, a constant level of suspense drawn out continuously throughout the film very effectively. There were a few startling moments, but no big jumps. (Do you remember when the alien’s shell suddenly burst open in ID4 and literally everyone jumped back in their seats? Nothing quite like that.) Something about the movie seemed to have everyone moving slowly but steadily back into their seats, further from the screen as it became increasingly intense though.

Why do I have these images in my head? Why won’t she leave me alone? I’m supposed to be learning how to handle paperwork for filing loans in a little over 5 hours. I was supposed to be asleep over 5 hours ago. My head is starting to hurt, and I don’t know if it’s from lack of sleep or from physical manifestations of the images I saw on the video. I may try to go to sleep one more time after I finish writing here, but somehow I have this nagging feeling that I won’t be able to slip into unconsciousness.

So, The Ring: Captivating cinematography, excellent maintenance of suspense, great acting (even from the little boy, whose performance will undoubtedly be compared to Haley Osment’s, but who did a great job in a totally different way), and did I mention that it has scared me so much that I’m afraid of turning out the lights to go to sleep? It’s pretty f***ing scary. F***.

Of all the movies I’ve seen today, I most highly recommend The Rules of Attraction. It’s based on a novel by the author of American Psycho, but I definitely liked this movie a lot more overall than American Psycho. And as some of you may know, I identify with the main character of American Psycho on a deep, personal level. (Though I wish I had more in common, like wealth and the ability to so easily get away with mass murder.)

The Rules of Attraction doesn’t have nearly as much death in it as American Psycho, but it definitely has at least as much weird, and quite a bit of well-written, introspective voice-over narrating characters’ inner-most thoughts. It’s basically about the relationships between people who want someone who wants someone else, though there’s plenty of sex and drugs and just-plain-craziness to distract from this complex examination of mis-placed emotional attachment.

I recommend that you watch both trailers for it. Trailer 1 really gives you a good idea of what the movie is about. I don’t want to give too much away, because there is just so much great stuff, innovative story-telling, interesting combinations of characters and situations and temporal dynamics that sometimes even conflict with themselves that this movie is almost worth watching again. (Except that I still don’t have a job, so spending so much on movies isn’t really the best idea right now.) There are things that will make so much more sense after seeing it all the way through. I saw things I missed just re-watching Trailer 2 for this review.

Great performances by Van Der Beek and Sossaman and Somerhalder, and a surprize appearance by … wait, that would ruin the surprize. Fun camera work, and you may be interested to know that just like Trailer 1 says, one of the features of this movie is “backwards”. Not in a Memento way. More … interesting and fun. You’ll like it. Go See It.

The Transporter is pure action flick. It opens with a fast, fun, original, well-thought-out car chase, and it hardly slows down from there. Lots of very skilled driving, but you’ll see why they call it The Transporter and not something awful like “The Driver”; plenty of vehicles make their way into this man’s hands.

Sure, they’ve thrown a little story in, but basically as a vehicle to anchor all the fun action and fight sequences to. One day the transporter accepts a job that happens to involve moving a kidnapped woman, which leads him to break his own rules, from which point everything gets totally out of hand. By the end of the movie, instead of being a nameless guy who works for whoever will pay and gets away with it, he’s our hero fighting to save the lives of the innocent.

There is a point in the movie where it becomes clear that he must have been trained as a Navy Seal or equivalent, and from that point forward it just becomes less and less believable that one man so young could have learned all this in the course of a military career and managed to get out and onto the business of “transporting”. The fight scenes just become more and more inventive as the film goes on, moving into smaller and smaller spaces or introducing stranger and stranger elements.

There is one fight in particular where ‘our hero’ intentionally spills something like 25-50 gallons of dirty motor oil on the ground and himself to help him fight off 10 or 20 armed men. They can’t get a hold of him or stand up, and he’s slip-sliding around with ease, kicking and punching and trippin and bashing them. He slides out of the huge oil-slick, grabs a bicycle and jumps straight down on it, breaking the pedals off before throwing the bike at a couple of guys who have regained their footing. Here’s the REALLY clever bit: he steps into the pedals (they have those straps to hold your feet on) and is then able to stand and fight in the middle of the oil slick while surrounded by men who can hardly keep from falling, let alone fight. It goes on like this for almost two hours, and if you love action, you’ll love it!

There’s one scene we’ve all seen in the trailer for this movie that depicts him deflecting a rocket with a pie-plate or similar hand-held metal disc, and sadly to say it was not included in the final movie. Or I blinked. There was definitely a rocket fight.

Still, an overall enjoyable movie. The story was well-worn and forgetable, but the action it anchored was more inventive and interesting than most of the action I’ve seen lately. Good stuff.

Knockaround Guys has been waiting well over a year to be released. It was originally scheduled to be released in late September of last year, but I guess it involved criminals on planes, and there was one scene where a plane burns to the ground, and someone thought it wouldn’t be able to make money right after 9/11/01. So they put it off and they put it off, and it finally came out today.

Starring Vin Diesel, Seth Green, John Malkovich, Dennis Hopper, Barry Pepper, etc. The basic premise is that the sons and nephews of big, powerful leaders of organised crime are trying to prove that they’re worthy of being involved in the family business by starting with a simple job. All they have to do is fly cross-country, pick up a package, fly back and deliver it. Of course, they manage to screw it up. The bulk of the movie is watching them further screw up trying to make things right.

Overall, Knockaround Guys comes just short of feeling satisfying to me. That may be because I’ve been waiting for it a while too long, or it could be something about the movie. There are a lot of satisfying elements within the movie, but somehow they don’t seem to add up quite right. Some of the film feels like its trying to be dark and gritty, and where it tries, it succeeds. Other parts are moving the plot along, and while they all make sense and come together without gaping holes or unbelievable twists, they’re too easily predicted and almost like the moviemakers realised part-way through that something was missing and lost their enthusiasm.

Angela may be able to say more about this movie. We’ll see. If you’ve been looking forward to this movie, you should probably see it; it is just what you think it will be. If you’re iffy, remember that you may find the movie a little iffy, too.