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The Box (1974)
Well done soap
I am watching on DVD and am up to episode 230.
The show is well written with a mature modern sensibility that still plays well in 2023. The acting is very good and the characters are well crafted and seem believable. The storylines are well thought out and progress at a steady pace that allows the drama, intrigue and suspense to build.
Beside the workplace and interpersonal clashes and the romantic affairs are some comedy elements and these fit in well. It is always fun watching actors playing scenes about television production and actors.
The show looks much better once it switches to colour in episode 221. Later colour episodes add more comedy and more location-shot footage.
Final Exam (1981)
Falls flat
Mostly good cast and good locations are wasted in a derivative Halloween-type slasher. The makers of the film clearly intended to give a lot of time to the to-be-murdered characters which seems noble - except the characters that we spend so much time on are stereotypical college archetypes. In the event it is just many scenes of their pointless chatter and their trite, predictable situations like hazing rituals, dating, worrying about grades, cheating on tests. And some of the acting is pretty weak.
This is isn't helped by having so much of the film focused on Animal House-type hijinks that do not have any horror or suspense elements at all. When they do hint at horror there are so many red herrings it dissipates the suspense.
The nerdy Radish (Joel S. Rice) is the standout interesting character. Courtney (Cecile Bagdadi) seems destined to be the Final Girl. But really there is nothing that notable about her character, she is just shown to be somewhat shy and is more studious and styled more plainly than her pal Lisa, played by DeAnna Robbins who progressed to soap opera roles.
Connected to the extra time spent with the future victims is the lack of any revenge plot, opening flashback, police investigation, or even a whodunnit connected to the murderer. As it is the killer just shows up. It is never explained who it is, their connection to the location or any of the characters, nor the killer's motive. Really this just falls flat.
The murders are either off camera or are relatively prosaic, and avoid gore effects. A popular move here is the Psycho-style robotic stab. Even some of these kills look clumsily staged, which will disappoint slasher fans for sure.
Bridesmaids (2011)
Entertaining
There are many prickly relationship comedies, many wedding related comedies, many gross-out comedies, many my-life-is-a-mess comedies and many comedies that shoe-horn in a romance.
This has all those familiar elements but it works really well. It is well-paced despite the long run time, with a good mix of the various elements that keeps the entertainment and comedy value strong. Importantly the characters and relationships seem believable which makes the comedy parts so much more effective when they happen.
Kristen Wiig plays the lead character and co-wrote (taking care to include romantic associations with two really attractive guys). Wiig is really funny and effective in the role. I also really enjoyed the performances of Rose Byrne and Chris O'Dowd. Melissa McCarthy is good and her bit on the plane was really funny.
Identity Thief (2013)
Mostly a drag
I must have watched the extended version mentioned here on imdb. At the start of the film I was struck by several long repetitive talky unfunny scenes setting up Jason Bateman's family situation, job move, credit card problems. In case audiences don't get how credit cards work, let's put in another credit card scene.
Melissa McCarthy in the first half is mostly obnoxious with nary a redeeming feature. The premise of Bateman's legal problems and his taking McCarthy across country does not seem to make any logical sense. The audience could easily ignore this if the characters and events were funny but here they aren't. The road movie antics with Bateman and McCarthy drag on with few laughs and little chemistry. The car crashes and villainous pursuers fail to add much tension.
A real problem is the lack of jokes in the script. The main joke seems to be a recurring one where people think Sandy is a girl's name and Bateman insists it is unisex. So if you enjoy repetitions of the line "Sandy is a girl's name!" you might enjoy the film.
In the third act McCarthy pulls out some good acting and the film tries to insert some meaning and characterisation into events. It is kind of effective but is a big switcheroo to try and pull off after the mess that went on before.
Anatomie (2000)
Fun
Entertaining and suspenseful.
There are pacing problems. A bunch of horrors seem to come early, key characters are killed off, and the film reveals the climax then goes back to slow personal dramas involving the main character taking the train back to see her parents then returning to the University. It feels like a day or two passes after some characters have been killed, and no one except the main character recognises they are missing. Others treat her fears like a joke. These missteps deflate the pace and tension.
Also the main character seems badly acted and many motivations do not make much sense.
But ignore the faults and enjoy the tense parts and it can be fun.
Contratiempo (2016)
Twists
Engrossing story with decent twists, good acting, and never boring.
Full of implausible moments which stand out even as the story unfolds. Still enjoyable though.
The Devil All the Time (2020)
Weird networks of murder and revenge
Unusual slow burn examination of shame, crime and revenge in a rural community.
The style is like a thoughtful gently-paced drama, until you realise the story is more a survey of small-town incidents involving extreme religious fervour meets bullying meets revenge meets tragedy meets murder.
The various characters coincidentally keep running in to the sexually motived serial killer couple who prowl for random hitchhikers. Once you shift into the slow pace and random networks format of the film it gets enjoyable.
The Weekend Away (2022)
Silly but not boring
Totally implausible but gripping and entertaining silliness.
The story is an exercise in making someone look guilty, clearing them, then moving onto the next suspect.
For this to work the detectives need to be the most inept ever. Let's believe the protagonist's suspicions and blame the dead guy with no evidence whatsoever and case closed. Then the final twist reveals someone else really did it after all. Too bad the detectives never pulled the airline records of all potential suspects.
Red Dot (2021)
Derivative, but effectively suspenseful
I found this tense and entertaining.
The main characters do some ridiculous things and are pretty annoying and self-centred. This is actually well articulated through the film. Like the man does these elaborate romantic gestures as if he learned about life from romantic comedies and social media but has little real world experience.
I have seen several Netflix movies where a couple of people go out to a beautiful but cold wilderness and after committing crimes or dangerous mistakes meet peril, threats, vengeance. It is a good low-budget recipe as the scenery looks great and you can get away with a small cast and not building many sets. The list of films includes Cold Pursuit, Coming Home in the Dark, Fractured, The Trip, Calibre. This isn't the worst of them, and it certainly isn't dull.
Dancing Queens (2021)
Clunky story
Good cast, decent acting and good production values.
However, the story is a mess and makes no sense. In several slow and repetitive scenes we learn that the small-town main character Dylan mourns her deceased dancer mother and reluctantly goes to the city to audition for a dance troupe at the urging of grandma. Grandma got the month wrong (Dylan at no point having googled the auditions for exact dates, times, addresses, and other required info) but the cleaner at the reception area needs someone to fill in so offers Dylan a job as a cleaner at a nightclub where she can watch and learn from drag queens rehearsing. For some weird reason Dylan takes this cleaner job and tells her family the auditions are proceeding. On arriving for her first shift the frustrated choreographer Victor instantly decides he needs someone to help him imagine the moves so asks Dylan to pose on stage for him - where she reveals she is a dancer. What? Victor is a dancer/choreographer but knows no other dancer he can call on? Victor quickly decides the show needs Dylan and the very petite and feminine Dylan, who knows nothing about drag or gay men, spends 10 minutes making herself over into a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman, in an underdeveloped Victor/Victoria reworking.
The constant hair over the face, back-to-camera, abrupt editing of Dylan's dance routines is to hide the dance double but is very distracting and ruins the dance scenes.
I am not sure how Dylan saved the show. There is a cool routine where each drag performer does a solo bit then Dylan arrives for her bit. But each performer was great on their own and Dylan didn't suddenly teach them those miming, hair, makeup, costume, dance and drag skills. They clearly were all pretty good performers already.
The drag queens convince Dylan to return to the show but then she's cast in a different show with the drag queens watching the rehearsal of it, while a dubbed in line helpfully suggests Dylan can do both shows.
Aside from that there are many ideas hinted at but only lightly explored, and the story leaves many loose ends.
Research: Dame Edna is not a drag queen but a character who happens to be a woman, conceived in 1956 and performed by Australian-born comedian Barry Humphries. Humphries moved to London in 1959. Starting in 1969 his character Edna appeared in London stage shows and later did UK TV shows, and later US and Australian stage tours, TV and movies. Edna did not do "drag" mime and dance performances as such. Edna's appearances were winding down by 2013. Victor says he and Dylan worked with Dame Edna doing drag shows "in Australia". The story, location, timelines make no sense, yet the drag queens and Victor's partner all believe it and are impressed by it.
50 First Dates (2004)
Good cast, odd story
Good cast and good production values, but the story is so implausible that the film can't really overcome it. The father and brother faking everything so Lucy would never see signs it was not the same Sunday was ridiculous. Repainting the room every night and putting on the same sports game on video when she entered the room? They can never ever leave the house as they have to keep the charade going, every single day. They wouldn't be able to pull this off if they tried. And what about her hair? Did they do her roots and trim her hair when she slept? What about menstruation?
The tone of the film made a few clunky gear changes. It starts with silly, choppy, scenes that suggest Henry is a love and leave type. Why? Then the series of different wooing attempts with Lucy were silly and played like a run of outtakes included on the special features. This part got very repetitive. The later part tried to develop the story but since it was so implausible that didn't really work.
Lucy twigs due to a parking ticket? That was a pretty boring way to make that big shift.
Frantic (1988)
Engrossing
I enjoyed the dark and gritty Parisian atmosphere of this film. I felt like I was back in Paris.
Other moments recall North by Northwest, Vertigo, and even comedy film What's Up Doc?
The film did not exactly have a frantic pace but the evolving mystery was engrossing.
Harrison Ford and Emmanuelle Seigner are appealing.
Disturbia (2007)
Not Another Teen Movie
This is basically a teen comedy that should have been parodied by Not Another Teen Movie.
This film bogs down in overlong cutesy scenes of domestic soap opera, romance, or the zany friend. This focus just evaporates any suspense. Then the film switches from comedy to suspense and things start to feel tense, but it soon jumps back to comedy again. Then the final act is just a ridiculous Dark Ride of over the top illogical horrors that do not fit anything we have seen in the lead up.
Robert Morse is excellent playing the scary villain but the constant shifts in tone of the film mean the suspense never builds.
Sarah Roemer was good as Ashley but the lingering shots of her in the pool are just too much. Then this key character suddenly disappears from the story just as it is getting good? This is just one of many story defects here.
Friday the 13th (1980)
Oh, it's YOU!
I've seen this twice. Once in the early 1980s once in 2021.
It is reasonably entertaining and sometimes scary but even Prom Night and My Bloody Valentine are probably more effective.
On first viewing I felt it had similarities to Halloween (1978) with an ending borrowed from Carrie (1976). Now I also see similarities to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) - the chase scenes and the helpful older person that meets the heroine - and Black Christmas (1974).
The music seems copied from the Psycho score.
The cast are attractive and all pretty likable. All the guys are shown shirtless for extended scenes painting and chopping wood, and in Speedos and Daisy Dukes. The film kind of limps along with a few random scenes of the youngsters goofing off but we never really get a feeling for their character. So half the time you're confused about who is who. Then when they get killed there's no real emotional response because you never got to know the character anyway.
Some of the deaths are tense in the moments before. Sometimes we see a graphic bloody death. The effects look pretty decent. In the early 1980s they seemed very bloody but by today's standards it is not that gruesome. But half the murders are off screen - we just see the body later. That seems like a waste of a character / murder. Why kill a character in a horror if we do not see the suspense in the lead up to it, or the kill itself? The goofy prank guy Ned could easily have been cut from the film and his antics and silly lines given to Kevin Bacon's character and no one would have noticed as the kids are all so generic. As it is Ned just disappears early on (killed off screen) and no one seems to notice he is missing.
The character of Steve too could have been cut and some of his lines given to Bill no problem. Why did they include the diner bit and all those driving scenes and hitchhiking with Steve? All pointless and led nowhere. Maybe we were meant to think he was the killer? If so that angle didn't really work.
Lacking the slickness of Halloween means the suspense here just doesn't build as well. In Halloween, the viewer knows there is a masked homicidal maniac on the loose, sees them, and knows who it is. That makes it scarier.
This film added the whodunnit angle which many subsequent slashers continued.
The location looks great and is well used.
Aftermath (2021)
Chills
Fits the modern 'streaming' model of filmmaking: small cast and a story where most scenes have only one, two, or three characters, lots of text messages, and most of the film takes place in the same big, modern, expensive home.
This one has some obnoxious, insufferable characters and many prickly interactions. However, I was watching for the chills and those were good. The scary parts were well done. The wife's ordeal was well executed.
Black Christmas (2019)
Pretty bad
The first part is pretty well-done standard stalker mystery. It does have a lot of simplistic and heavy-handed feminism thrown in. It is so clumsy it seems like they are presenting a strawman argument. But the suspense builds and the suspects are lined-up, which works quite well in a cheesy kind of way.
The big old houses, icy conditions, dumb cop, and the creepy phone messages hark back to the 1974 original. This one has none of the atmosphere of that film though. It is filmed in a prosaic TV drama style.
But the main sorority characters are barely introduced when suddenly they are all getting murdered in quick succession. I could hardly recall who was who half the time then they are killed. The second half quickly descends into ridiculous superhero sci-fi fantasy nonsense.
Pretty bad.
Girl on the Third Floor (2019)
Messy
Like many recent streaming style films this has a tiny cast, and many scenes with just one character doing their thing or talking on the phone, and the story launches very quickly.
The first part is simple but effectively intriguing. This would have been OK if all the weird elements later fitted together into some sort of story. But the last act is ridiculous - just a stream of nonsensical creepy scenes and weird imagery that doesn't explain much or form any real story.
I'd avoid this one.
The Girl on the Train (2016)
Intriguing
Starts slow and the story and character relationships are initially confusing.
At first I wasn't sure what sort of film this would even be with the drama storyline and several actors known for comedy roles.
Eventually the story becomes clearer and the suspense kicks in.
Overall this is effectively intriguing.
Late Night (2019)
Drama with funny moments
Emma Thompson is excellent. Mindy Kaling is cute and funny. The other cast members are fun. Overall it is entertaining. There are some funny moments but this is more a slow-burn drama and character study than laugh-out-loud comedy.
Some scenes and characters work well other moments seem arbitrary and do not unfold naturally. The dialogue and actions as written tell us the how the characters are feeling, but we are told how people feel - the impressions do not come naturally from the situation.
Thompson's character Katherine interviews Dorian Kearns Goodwin and the execs don't like that she does serious stuff instead of jokes on social media memes. But Katherine is also supposedly a horrible and ruthless boss distant from her staff. She has a reputation for hating women that is why her writing staff are all men, but she hasn't even met most of them anyway so it seems like she doesn't care much for her male staff either. Katherine fires a few writers but with Molly's influence later learns the names of the current writing team - but apparently later fires most of them anyway. As a performer Katherine has rested on her laurels with a tired show. So she bounces back by interviewing oddball youtube stars and the clips go viral. I don't know how all these elements fit together. Wasn't she ruthless due to a perfectionist attitude? But the show is said to be tired? New hire Molly comes up with one or two ideas for the monologue but I do not really see how she actually changes much. Characters say that she changes things, but we just don't see this in the film.
Many ideas are raised but most get just a cursory exploration.
Superbad (2007)
McLovin it
Funny crazy comedy.
The characters are brilliantly written and acted and feel very authentic despite points of exaggeration throughout.
The script is quite deadpan with many verbal stream of consciousness scenes, but there are interesting twists through the story and gems of comedy and poignancy keep shining through.
The Babadook (2014)
Arty
Well shot drama about a single mother living (improbably) in a large old stone house with a troubled son who is especially disturbed by a scary pop-up book. Then come horror elements that recall The Exorcist, The Shining, Repulsion, Eraserhead and... Corinne's baby being possessed by the devil in comedy series Soap.
The arty style for me recalled Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. It had the deliberately stilted performances by those playing the unsympathetic support characters. Costumes and sets and art direction to die for. And all those carefully arranged camera shots making for beautiful and striking images.
There were some scary moments and spirited performances from the leads Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman. But as it all seemed so self-conscious, I was constantly reminded I was watching a film so wasn't totally immersed in the story.
You Don't Mess with the Zohan (2008)
Amusing
Amusing, leisurely-paced comedy. Sometimes too leisurely-paced: it seems to go on a *long* time.
There are few real laugh-out-loud moments but it is moderately entertaining.
Deathcheaters (1976)
Stunts
Apparently after The Man From Hong Kong, Brian Trenchard-Smith, Grant Page and Roger Ward had some free time, film, and the hang glider left over, so cranked out this meta stunt and filmmaking actioner.
If you liked The Man From Hong Kong you'll probably like this lighter re-working of it.
Margaret Gerard is beautiful.
Many of the same crew later did the similar Stunt Rock.
Butterflies Are Free (1972)
Captivating
Romance comedy drama that is captivating beginning to end.
It works so well due to the strength of the original material and fantastic performances from the three leads. The characters are engaging and believable. Eileen Heckart's character goes from being unlikable to sympathetic and Heckart deserved the Oscar she won for pulling this off.
Essentially a filmed stage play, but the long takes add to the drama.
There's a Girl in My Soup (1970)
Fun but thin
Fun but thin comedy romance.
The characters of egotistical womaniser Robert (Peter Sellers) and plucky but sensitive Marion (Goldie Hawn) are well done and funny. Their early scenes are great. Unfortunately after they go to France the film falls apart, descending into snippets of silly slapstick and travelogue footage. There's a final scene to tie up the loose ends of the story. This resolution is played with gravitas but it seems contrived and the character motivations in it make little sense.
You never really feel like the romance between Marion and Robert is genuine love. But the idea Marion actually loves Jimmy (Nicky Henson) doesn't really come across either.
Supporting actors Nicky Henson, Tony Britton, John Comer, Diana Dors, Nicola Pagett, Francoise Pascal are good in their brief scenes.