- My excuse is that defenestr8r had free passes to this. While waiting in line, I got my first look at the poster and said, "do you think the designer felt any guilt at using that font?" You know the font: the one that says "I AM A VAMPIRE MOVIE." Well, it went down hill from there. This was basically a softcore Cinemax movie of the type that I didn't think ever got theatrical release any more. Elizabeth Bathory is still alive and killing lesbians, and this cop whose wife got eaten is trying to track her down while fucking everything that moves. Oh, and all his friends and neighbors are 18 year old kinky bisexual supermodels. Then at some point it turns into Eyes Wide Shut. Avoid.
- I have looked into the future, and seen the next five years of the Hot Topic toy section.
The movie starts off well enough, in that I enjoyed Nightmare Before Christmas, and it's largely the same. It turns out that Hell is an Oingo Boingo version of the the Muppet Show, which is kind of awesome. But I'm afraid to say that I dozed off in the middle. I think I was just tired, and this was not an editorial nap. It seemed better than James and the Giant Peach, and I'll probably watch it again when it's on TV.
- I enjoyed this more than I expected to; Denzel Washington plays an alcoholic ex-CIA assassin working as a bodyguard in Mexico; things go badly, and he does the Revenge Thing. There aren't a lot of surprises in this movie, but it's very well done. It's really good looking, the sound design is cool, and there are a number of hallucinatory bits reminiscent of the title sequence of Se7en.
- I only started watching this while flipping channels one night (I mean, come on, Ashton Kutcher?) but it hooked me. It's actually a pretty decent time-travel/three-wishes kind of movie (in the ballpark of Groundhog Day and Retroactive). The main character finds a way to do over certain bad events in his life, and each time, things get worse. "This time for sure." It's got that great Twilight Zone "end up in hell" feel about it, with almost no comedy. I enjoyed it a lot.
- You may recall that after seeing that piece of trash Cursed, I swore I'd never see another Wes Craven movie again. Well, I didn't know this was his until I saw his name came up on the credits, and I went "FUCK!"
But, it turns out, this was actually pretty good. Girl meets boy in airport bar, they end up sitting next to each other on the plane, and then oops, turns out he's a hitman and she's the target. It's a little hokey, but it bounces right along and never takes itself too seriously. This is what always used to be good about Craven's movies: he could do a really simple plot and make it work without getting bogged down in clichés. It also helped that the hitman is the guy who played Scarecrow in Batman Begins, and I was still residually creeped out from that, so that made him seem more menacing.
- This movie sucked ass. From the preview, it looked like it was going to suck ass, but Jodie Foster's in it, and she's not generally in movies that suck, so I gave it a chance.
Do not make this mistake. Avoid.
It starts out as a re-tread of The Forgotten (starring Jodie Foster stand-in Julianne Moore) The Forgotten was basically a B- to C+ episode of the X Files, and hey, I liked the X Files, so I could accept that. But this was worse. The first half of Flightplan is basically Jodie Foster just totally freaking out for an hour, but then it takes a left turn into Mission Impossible-land, then there's a terrorist, then there's a really amazingly stupid ransom plot, and at the end everything is sweetness and light and even she and the Arab guy she accused of stealing her daughter make up. It is to gag.
- This movie is amazingly, incredibly good. Please note that I normally can't stand Jim Carrey, but he's not playing "Jim Carrey" in this one at all. The plot is that there is a company who can erase your bad memories, and he's having his recently-ex girlfriend deleted. The story mostly plays out in reverse, as he's watching the memories being deleted, and realizing that he's made a mistake. It's not as gimicky as Memento, though, because the story is really moving in both directions at once. This is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time.
