2005 movies.
© 2005 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>

For posterity, here are the movie reviews that I posted to my blog in 2005. This is most of the movies I saw last year, and (I think) all of the movies I saw in the theatre or on DVD. There's a bunch of late-night-tv crap I didn't bother reviewing. These are roughly in the order I saw them. (See also: 2004.)

Hellraiser: Hellseeker:

This is apparently Hellraiser 6, and -- though I know this will be hard to accept -- it was actually pretty good! It was more of a psychological thriller than a splatter movie, so it really wasn't much like the other Hellraiser movies at all. It was very hallucinatory, and through most of the movie it's hard to tell which events are real or even what order they are happening in. I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. The acting was decent, and the effects are low-key enough that their budget didn't show.

For calibration purposes: I loved the first one, and thought the second one was decent. Hell on Earth was complete garbage (leave the puns to Freddy, please) and Hellraiser In Space was notable only in that it was even worse than Leprichaun In Space, which came out that same year. I haven't seen the others.

This is the worst movie I've subjected myself to since Dracula 2000. Oh my god, fantastically bad. Even the effects were bad: during the big climactic werewolf transformation scene I thought, "wow, that's the hairiest Pillsbury Doughboy I've ever seen." The prominently-featured wax statue of the Lon Chaney Wolfman was more convincing, and it didn't even move. (The statue turned in ten times the performance of Christina Ricci, too. Clearly the statue should have gotten top billing.)

Rick Baker won an Oscar for the werewolf effects in An American Werewolf in London, and this is the best he could do? He should just run the stock footage instead of using that inflatable hairy baloon. There have been better effects on Enterprise. Seriously.

"Did you not even consult Rotten Tomatoes?" Angela sensibly asked. "I didn't think I needed to! Elm Street! Serpent and the Rainbow! Scream!"

I knew Wes Craven had executive-produced a whole bunch of shit written and directed by other people, like the execrable Wishmaster (though I had forgotten that Dracula 2000 was, in fact, one of these.) I had already caught on that "Wes Craven Presents" means "stay the fuck away." But he actually directed this bloated turd.

Fuck you, Craven. We're finished.

If you are not a fan of the comic book, Constantine might be enjoyable. It's not a very good movie, but it's not terrible for what it is. But they completely, utterly failed to capture the character.

The comic book Constantine is a con man. That's it, that is his one purpose in life. He knows a tiny bit of magic, and convinces everyone he knows more than he does, but fundamentally, he's a grifter and a self-centered bastard.

The movie Constantine is a freelance exorcist, spending his time pulling devils out of little girls in an attempt to attone for his own attempted suicide and earn his way into heaven. Um, what? Who's this guy? I guess he saves the world or something. By the time it happened, I didn't care.

Tilda Swinton is absolutely fantastic as Gabriel, and the guy who plays Satan is pretty good. Everybody else phones it in.

The broken-skull demons were totally uninspired and boring. They were less scary than nippless harpies.

And I cannot believe we were expected to take it seriously when he was attacked by Oogie Boogie from Nightmare Before Christmas.

Oh my god, this may be the most perfect movie ever made.

Next up was a film festival: I spent a week at The Roxie and saw seventeen horror movies (and one stage show). It was very worthwile, and if you're in town, I highly recommend going to the whole thing next year.

Bakko Yokaiden Kibakichi:

This starts off with a pretty good fight scene, but I kinda lost interest about half way through. It's somewhere between Yojimbo and Nightbreed: "wandering samurai comes to town, discovers dark secret". It really felt like an anime, despite being live action. The way the shots were framed or something. I kept thinking things like, "this is the part where the animated version would have cheaped out and just panned across a still-frame." The fight choreography wasn't bad, but the costumes were Godzilla-quality.

Sort of a talky, political version of Logan's Run. Not bad.

A screenwriter's script keeps coming true. I liked this one. There were some techical difficulties, though: apparently the director was supposed to be there, but he missed his plane, and he had the print with him. So what we actually saw was a workprint version, with timecode at the bottom, ambient sound, and the wrong aspect ratio. I may go see this one again just because it'll be neat to see how much the addition of music and sound effects changes it.

This movie was just chock full of awesome. Cheesy UFO tv-show crew goes to Wales; discovers/shoots/screws/shoots/gives birth to aliens. Seriously, this was fantastic. Hilarious, gory, good effects, full of references to other horror movies. Way better than Dead Alive. Way better than Spawn of Chucky (even though it had no little people). I ended up seeing this three times in one week, and it did not get any less awesome. STRONGLY recommended!

I really didn't need to see this. It's a Japanese Manson Family gore-fest, with carefully crafted details like: a guy has the top of his head blown off with a shotgun by a woman who then spends ten minutes fishing around in his brains. Later, after biting off someone's dick, she is fucked with a shotgun. After the money shot, there is ten minutes of the guy playing with her heart and lungs. In a later arty moment, there is a loving arterial spray onto a Japanese flag.

The most shocking part was what the one thing they chose to censor: it was a scene where our heroine was running and jumped up in the air. They blurred out the upskirt shot. Finger-painting with lung-butter is fine, but pubes would just push it right over the edge.

This is a classic zombie movie, and very well done. Almost the entire movie is one very tense chase scene. The characters are believable, and don't do anything criminally stupid. It's more suspenseful than gory, and does not rely too heavily on spring-loaded cats or loud noises. (You can tell I've seen a lot of bad zombie movies, right?) The best part: the infection comes from mad cow disease. That's right: Zombie Cow. Moooooobrains.

This was a crime drama, wherein some mobsters go to war with an unstoppable assassin. It has the kind of very dark feel of Se7en or Angel Heart. Good acting, lots of implied backstory, and really good, realistic-seeming fight choreography. I loved this one. Also it was the first film for everyone involved, and they made it for like $200,000, which is unbelievably low for how professional it looked. This and Evil Aliens were my two favorites of the festival.

Fratboy and girlfriend break down in small town in Mexico, get abused by cultists and zombies. It had some ok moments, but mostly I just found the main characters to be hateful and irritating and I couldn't wait for them to die because then they'd shut the fuck up. We were told that in the previous showing, the director was present, and he didn't have much nice to say about the actors (and their willingness to stick to the script), so it's not hard to believe that the movie he tried to make was better than this one. But that's not the movie we saw.

This was a vigilante cop story, where one of the cops is (sort of) a recently-turned vampire, and the other one is struggling with an "end justifying the means" debate, as the two of them bump off the bad guys. It's entertaining, well acted, and looks great, and the plot holds up pretty well... until the end. I'm sorry to say, the end just confused me. I have no idea what was supposed to have happened. (Well, I have a few guesses, but those would be spoilers.) Still, a good movie.

This was a short about a very calm, mellow cannibal serial killer. The whole movie was narrated by his seemingly menace-less internal dialog. It was hilarious! "I'm not too hungry, but I could eat. Oh well. Break time's over."

This was a really interesting and intensely disturbing movie that showed you the inside of the head of a serial killer by showing her with her first and latest victim: she's telling the fellow currently under torture about her first time, and how daddy showed her the philosophy behind it. It makes heavy use of split-screens, showing you multiple views on the same incident at the same time. It's really well done. It's also full of the most graphically intense dental nightmares that I've ever seen. And I know me some dental nightmares. This was very hard to watch, but great. It's probably going into the category of "really good movies that I never want to see again", along with Dead Ringers. It's interesting to contrast this with Kichiku Dai Enkai: Katie Bird was more graphic, but was still the better movie, because all that Kichiku had going for it was the gross-out factor.

This was goofy fun. A pro wrestler that everyone thinks is dead comes out of hiding after having himself transformed into a giant squid. Then his nemesis makes a comback as a giant octopus. They are of course after the same girl. It's full of dorky costumes and seafood jokes.

This was just kind of "eh." I expected more from Bruce Campbell. This just seemed like a not-very-good take on the Steve Martin movies The Man With Two Brains and All Of Me, except that the slapstick wasn't anything to write home about. Ted Raimi's range continues to consist of telling an un-funny joke then making a dorky face at the camera afterward. Go see Bubba Hotep again instead.

A widower with a teenage son decides to take advantage of his role as a movie producer to audition potential wives while pretending to audition actresses. So, of course, he picks a loony. It's a bit long: it bogs down some in the middle, after the set-up and before the hallucinations and torture, but it's still fantastic and creepy.

Code 46:

I liked this movie a lot. It reminded me a bit of Until the End of the World. It's a weird little detective / love story set in a eugenics-heavy future. The part I liked most about this was how well the science fiction aspects of it were done: there's a ton of backstory and technology in it, but almost no exposition about it. They just dropped you in the middle of this internally consistent future and let you figure out how the world worked as the plot went along. Very well done.

I liked this a lot. It's a really interesting-looking movie, and it's worth watching for the eye-candy alone. The plot is a little slow, but interesting. The main character is on a sort of quest inside a massively-multiplayer online game, and the division between the game and reality blurs in a Matrix-y way. It's basically a live-action anime, made by a Japanese director in Poland, which adds to its oddness.

I enjoyed this, but I've already forgotten most of it. I'm sure that by this time next year, this movie, Troy, and Alexander will all be the same movie in my memory (file under "Manly Men With Catapults".)

In one of my previous movie-review posts, someone commented that, while Crow 2 was horrible, Crow 3 was not bad, and was a decent sequel to the original. Dear whoever-said-that: you're an idiot. This movie was crap.

I was a fan of the Farscape tv series for most of its run, but honestly, I couldn't keep track of half of what was going on in the last couple of seasons. It just got completely incoherent. This ~3 hour miniseries wraps up the cliffhanger and ends the series, but even watching it all at once, I still was halfway between not following the plot, and just not caring. Ok, I was also dozing off a bit, but that's not really a vote in its favor either.

This was a lot of fun. Goofy slapstick kung-fu. I thought it was a lot funnier than Shaolin Soccer (same director/star).

Utter crap. Less bad than the previous two, I guess. It felt like maybe there was a decent idea or two in there struggling to get out. Maybe ten years after Lucas dies, someone will remake these, and that version won't suck.

This was pretty good. Jet Li plays "innocent simpleton" well. The fights are entertaining, and the comedy's not bad. I kept feeling like I'd seen this movie before, though; "Jet Li, ass-kicking fish-out-of-water in France" is pretty much the same plot as Kiss of the Dragon, isn't it? Maybe I'm thinking of something else.

This was fantastic. It really felt like two movies, back to back: one about Bruce Wayne in the monestary, and then one about Batman. The villains are awesome, and I appreciated the attempts at explaining of where all his toys came from. When Batman dangles a scumbag off a building and asks him a question, he doesn't just grumble at him, he roars. Bale pulls off both roles really well, and the supporting cast are all great (except for the Utterly Forgettable Love Interest who is only there to remind you that yes, the guy in the armor-plated pervert-suit likes girls).

This was pure fluff, but fun. I've completely forgotten everything happened in it already, but it had the sort of wisecracking relationship that you'd expect in a Cary Grant movie. (Not that it was that good, but that's the kind of target they were aiming for.)

This was just a big waste of time. It wasn't bad, but it just wasn't interesting at all either. Johnny Depp plays Michael Jackson, and a bunch of kids play clichés. The title character is about as interesting as tap water.

However, I'd say the worst part about this movie was simply that it reminded me of the original, since I hated the original: I hated the characters, I hated the acting, and most of all I hated the songs. So, in that I don't remember any of the songs from the remake, the remake must be far superior.

This is a remake of Parts: The Clonus Horror, which I remember seeing when it came out. That movie was a terrible, lower-budget rip-off of Logan's Run and Coma, neither of which were very good to begin with, and this remake shows that, much like multiplying fractions, stupid times stupid times stupid equals really, really, really stupid. (Most people who have seen Clonus probably saw the MST3K version. Warning sign.)

Pretty much every 5 minutes, this movie had me saying, "Oh my god that's SO STUPID!" and every time, they upped the ante. "Why didn't they just... GAAH!" "They aren't really going to... GAAAH!!" It was so stupid I was still reeling from its stupidity the next day. It was the kind of stupid that sticks to your clothing so that people on the street turn around and stare at you with a "what's that smell?" look on their faces.

The best part is that the studio neglected to buy the rights to Clonus, and thought nobody would notice that it's the same movie. they were wrong.

This movie is really great looking, and the plot is kind of dumb, which is to be expected, since that's the case with most of Bilal's comic books too. I enjoyed it for the eye candy, but wow, some of the computer animation was so incredibly bad! Half of the characters were live-action and half were computer generated. It probably would have been easier to take if they had done something like: have the humans be humans and the aliens be graphics, but they didn't; for no sensible reason, half the humans were computer generated too, and since they were animated so badly, they seemed more alien than the aliens.

I wanted to love it (half-naked blue alien chicks! Flying cars! A giant Egyptian pyramid floating over New York!) but it was just so-so.

It invites comparisons with The Fifth Element: The Fifth Element has better effects and better acting. Immortel has a better plot, and a complete absence of Chris Tucker. Advantage: Immortel.

This was a very odd movie. It's fully computer-generated, and has some pretty interesting critters and character design (talking worms with jetpacks!) but is still well into the uncanny valley. The design of the world is really interesting; some of the bad guys live in this sort of lake of oil. The animators clearly spent a lot of time working on the fluids, and it shows; much of the movie is very trippy looking. The world is basically this giant tree floating in the clouds, with superstitious hunter-gatherer types living in the branches, which reminded me a bit of Niven's The Integral Trees.

Van Helsing was a far, far better movie than The Brothers Grimm. I think Brothers Grimm may be the worst movie I've seen this year, and that's really saying something. Since I couldn't fast-forward, I actually started playing solitaire on my phone a couple times.

A group of private-school students end up trapped in an underground bunker, and a shrink tries to get the story of what happened out of one of the girls (Thora Birch, who is great). The story is re-told several times, Rashomon-like, and it gets uglier with each telling. It's very tense, and I liked it a lot.

Charlize Theron plays an ageing tweaker prostitute who, while trying to provide for her needy, underage girlfriend (Christina Ricci) gives up prostitution in favor of murdering johns. Theron won an Oscar for this, and it was well-deserved. She's amazingly creepy and believable.

I put off seeing this for a long time because, fan of zombies though I am, I thought the preview looked really, really stupid. I didn't even smile at one of the jokes in it. But, the movie is actually pretty entertaining!

I had never seen this, and every now and then it would come up and someone would say, "you haven't seen Falling Down? It's a classic!" Well, I'm sorry, people, your memories of this movie far outstrip its quality. It is complete garbage. It is wall-to-wall clichés, starting with "it is Hero Cop's last day before retirement" and going downhill from there. The racial stereotypes were especially bad: I kept remembering a scene in Hollywood Shuffle where Robert Townsend was trying out for a role, and they kept asking him to act "more black". This could have been the movie he was thinking fun of!

The movie is an extended revenge-fantasy, but it's the fantasy of a writer who is just a dick.

I was ready to stop watching after about 10 minutes, but my friend was captivated by the sights of the early 90s LA strip malls and freeway construction. I didn't know you could be nostalgic for that kind of thing, but apparently you can.

Dumb fun. Not as good as the first one (which was... not great, but entertaining.) Very near the beginning, a skinny blonde woman dressed as a nurse rips open her coat and proceeds to aerate the building with machine guns while wearing only soaking wet lingerie. That kind of sets the tone for the rest of movie. There is some decent fight choreography. Unfortunately there's also a precocious child, and an almost complete disregard for the laws of physics. The level boss ending is somewhat anticlimactic.

A girl dies during an exorcism, and the priest is on trial for murder. The story is told mainly in flashbacks to the big event. This was pretty good; it was suspenseful without too many spring-loaded cats. It was interesting how the telling of the story managed to remain fairly noncommital on the question of "was it demons, or epilepsy?"

But man, religious people are weird. It always seems like they've heard of Occam's Razor, but they just don't quite get how it works! They kept saying things like, "God allows people to be posessed to prove to others that God exists". Well you know what, if God really wanted to prove that he existed, I don't think he'd have any trouble doing that, being God and all. Instead of making a statue bleed in front of some backwoods hick, why not make ten thousand statues bleed at the same time? It's fuckin' God! So the obvious, clichéd answer to that is that God doesn't actually want to provide proof, because he wants people to have faith (AKA "believing something for no reason at all"). In which case, posession proves nothing except that, well, God's kinda mean.

In fact, providing proof of God would be more up the Devil's alley, wouldn't it? Proof would destroy faith. So is God skulking around like the Men In Black covering up Satan's spoilers?

Also there was some nonsense about 3AM being "the witching hour" because Jesus came back from the dead at 3PM. Which immediately made me ask, what time zone is God in? And does he follow Daylight Savings Time?

Maybe I could just Google this, but why are Catholics always seeing Mary instead of Jesus? Is she like the Press Secretary or something? Or is she more like Karl Rove?

My excuse is that Liz 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.

I know I'm a little behind the curve on this one, but I finally got around to downloading this. I had to install and learn how to use fucking BitTorrent and everything, and man, that sucks. Anyway, in case you've been living under some other rock than the one all the nerds live under, Global Frequency is a fantastic comic by Warren Ellis that almost became a TV series. It's about a secret organization that stops weird disasters, kind of like Men In Black but without the aliens. A pilot was made, then the show was not picked up (and rumor has it that the fact that the pilot was leaked to the internets is part of the reason why, but who knows.)

The pilot's worth watching. The copy I found was a bit dark and muddy. It looked kind of like a VHS transfer, but that may have just been crappy encoding.

Minor spoilers:

Regarding the muddiness: for example, early on, they have a prop that's a corpse that has been cut down the middle. Ellis posted about having seen this prop in person, and how insanely realistic and impressive it was. Well, the thing could have been made out of wet cardboard for all I could see of it in the few seconds they flashed it on screen. Bad encoding, or edited away for grossness? I couldn't tell.

As all pilots do, it suffered from too much exposition, but you have to get used to that. Unfortunately, it also suffered from a bunch of other Standard TV Stupidities, such as: their laptops have software that can magically -- and with much beeping each time a new number rolls up -- calculate the exact number of people who will be killed when a bomb goes off.

Miranda goes all Matrix to break into the Secret Facility, and then once she's in, she gets out by calling the Secretary of Defense and saying "I know what happened in Bumfuckistan." Um, ok, great. If you'd made that phone call first, maybe you wouldn't have had to beat up the guards?

My suspension of disbelief snapped like a rubber band when they needed to recruit a gymnast to jump over the Death Star Shaft to reach the off switch -- I repeat, the off switch -- for a power distribution substation.

And when they go to recruit Gymnast Girl, all it takes to make her leave the house in the middle of the night with a stranger is "OH WOW, YOUR CELL PHONE." I'm sorry, you've really got to sell it better than that.

In the comic, the recurring characters were the two ringleaders; each issue featured a different set of recruited specialists. Miranda and Aleph, the ringleaders, were done really well in the show. But, they seemed to be setting up the series to have the real main characters be "Nerdy Physicist Girl" and "Former Cop Living On The Edge". You know the guy, his stubble shows that he doesn't follow anyone's rules but his own, and not even those. That was... not really working for me.

So, yeah, it seems like it could have grown into a good show, depending on the quality of writing they got for subsequent episodes. It certainly would have been better than most of the stuff that started this tv season. But I guess we'll never know...

I liked Serenity, but it felt rushed. It seemed like they tried to fit the entire second season of Firefly into a single two hour movie. They lost all of the subtlety and ambiguity; pretty much every character's quirks were laid out for you right on the surface. At least some of this was no doubt because they felt the need to have a lot of exposition for the benefit of people who hadn't seen the series, but still, it was annoying.

One of the best aspects of the show was the clever, bantering dialog, and there wasn't too much of that.

It was nice to see the story get (mostly) wrapped up, but I guess it just wasn't terribly satisfying, since I could see how much better it would have been if they'd had half a dozen more episodes to flesh it all out. So I feel like I'm being extra critical of it, not because it's not a good movie (it is) but because it wasn't the second season that it could have been.

Spoilers:

Book's character was totally wasted. We never ended up getting any backstory about him at all, and he had the potential to be pretty interesting.

The new Reavers origin story ("it was teh drugs!") was much less interesting than the old one ("space madness!") I also found them much less scary than in the series. The very first Reaver attack, on the bank-robbery planet, was really well done (mostly because you hardly saw any of them.) But after that, they just seemed like the Borg's slightly retarded cousin. And in the big, alegedly-climactic space battle, I couldn't tell whose ships were whose.

I fully expected the sexbot to be a Buffybot. How could they pass that up!

The "secret radio station hidden on the other side of the Death Star Shaft in the basement" was just total fucking idiocy. Give me a break. That whole scene was intelligence-insulting and a waste of time.

Also, haven't I seen that endgame in another movie? Oh, yes. Hackers.

This movie is an incoherent train-wreck. If you've seen the trailer, the whole movie looks and sounds like that: it's the same washed-out look that Tony Scott used in some of the more surreal parts of Man On Fire, but this time the whole movie is like that. Also, the stuttering, echo-delayed voiceovers are also like that, through the whole movie. It's a cute trick once or twice, but not for two hours. It's a cute trick once or twice, but not for two hours.

The plot, such as it is, is about a bank robbery run by idiots. They end up dismembering somebody because of basically a pun. There's an interminable Jerry Springer bit -- it was probably ten minutes long but it felt like hours -- that has absolutely nothing to do with the plot of the movie. Like, someone thought, "ha ha, I wrote this funny thing about how Jerry Springer is funny, let's just stick that in here too." It is not, of course, funny. At all.

And yet, this movie couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a stupid slapstick comedy, or a bleak look at some fucked up peoples' lives, or a music video, or just an excuse to watch Keira Knightley pout for two hours. They really should have just gone with that last one.

This movie was just ok. Backing up a little bit for context, I really liked Cube. I thought the Lord of the Flies aspect of the mistrust between the prisoners was done well, and the punchline -- (mild spoiler, I guess) -- that no one person really designed the thing, that it just sort of happened -- was a really nice alegory for how profound evil can occur in the world simply through bureaucracy rather than malice.

Cube 2: Hypercube wasn't terrible, but it wasn't really very good either. Not only did it go into impossibly magical technology (where Cube hadn't) but it gave us actual bad guys, which I thought weakened it a lot.

Cube Zero is a prequel that deals with the behind-the-scenes operators of the machine, and how they don't really know the whole story of what they're doing or why. In that respect, it's more in line with the first movie, but it still brings in a lot more fantasy elements. It seems like they wanted the ending of Cube Zero to mesh with the beginning of Cube, but it doesn't quite.

This is great. Definitely Cronenberg's least weird movie ever, and as such, not as creepy as you'd expect from him, but still very good. It's all about violence begetting violence, and it's handled really well. The violence is pretty graphic, but in a realistic way that makes you not want to be anywhere near it, instead of the usual Hollywood way. All the actors are fantastic.

This is Penn Jillette's documentary about the history of a particular joke. The structure of the joke is such that it's an excuse for the teller to just be as crude as possible for as long as they can keep it up. There are a lot of different tellings of the joke itself, which are awesome, and that's not as repetetive as you might think, but there's also a lot of discussion about why the joke works, and why it's funny. I really didn't expect a concept like this to be able to hold it together for the length of a whole movie, but it really does. It's hilarious. There's a mime version of the joke. There's a version done as a card trick!

This is old, but somehow I missed it. It's great: it's about a bunch of temps working in an office and how they start out as friends but eventually get beaten down by the system and turn on each other. It's kind of a sadder, less-comedic version of Office Space.

I liked Clockwatchers so much, I made that night a Parker Posey double bill. I'd seen this a long time ago, but it's still awesome. Shallow, directionless club promoter finds her true calling as a librarian, re-arranges room-mate dj's records by the Dewey-Decimal system.

If you were completely unaware that there had ever been a cartoon called Aeon Flux, you might have enjoyed this movie. Since I was a huge fan of the cartoon, this movie was a huge disapointment. Not just because the story and characters bore only the slightest resemblance to those in the cartoon, but because it wasn't even the same kind of story. It wasn't even remotely weird enough. This wasn't a surprise, though; trying to make a live-action version of that cartoon was obviously a terrible idea from the start, even if everyone involved had been fans. I doubt it could be accomplished at all. I guess it wasn't the train wreck I expected it to be, but it still wasn't very good. Bad science, worse fiction.

The plot of this one will remind everybody who hasn't forgotten about it already of the execrable The Island (above), making this a stupid re-tread of a stupid re-tread.

The one good thing to come out of this movie is that they finally re-released the whole cartoon series as a 3-DVD set.

The always-awesome William H. Macy plays a miserable casino employee whose job it is to screw up people's winning streaks: but he does this just by standing near them, since his super power is that he is incredibly bad luck. Then he falls in love with a girl, which is of course his kryptonite.

I loved these books when I was little, though I haven't read them since I was 9 or 10, I guess? From what I can remember, the story was very faithful to the book. The acting was decent, and the effects were ok. I thought they did a lot better with the realistic animals than the fantastic animals: e.g., I thought the centaurs were kind of hokey, but the beavers were great. The big battle scene was mercifully brief. Still, there was something kind of flat about the whole thing. I can't put my finger on it, since all the right elements were there, but I came out thinking it was just ok.

Still, I liked it a lot more than the Lord of the Rings movies. I thought Fellowship was ok, but by 40 minutes into Two Towers, I was done. It turns out that about 4 hours of Tolkien is all I can stand: I never even bothered seeing Return.

There's been a lot of talk about the Christian overtones in Lion, but really, who cares? It's still a good story, and as far as I can tell, they didn't mess with the book at all.

Until he appeared on screen, I had completely forgotten that Santa Claus is in the story: he's their arms dealer! Onward Christmas Soldiers!

This is about Edward Murrow going after Joe McCarthy. It was a great movie, and the analogies to modern goings-on were subtle (an easy mistake to make in a movie like this would be to beat you over the head with it, which they didn't.) I had heard that all of the McCarthy footage was historical, because they didn't want anyone accusing them of putting words in his mouth, and I was expecting some kind of CGI trickery, but it was a lot more interesting than that: they just showed you everyone watching him on tv. You get the strong impression that through this battle, Murrow and McCarthy never actually met face to face, which hadn't occurred to me.

Overall, though, it felt like kind of a small story about office politics; I understand that standing up to McCarthy was an incredibly risky and surprising thing for someone to have done at the time, but it seemed like they didn't sell that very well.

I kept thinking about The Insider, the story about the tobacco industry whistleblower who got left out in the cold by 60 Minutes when their corporate owners pulled the plug on the story.

This is pretty good. It could have done without most of the first hour (it really drags until they get to the island) but the fight sequences with the dinosaurs are fantastic. Most of the effects are pretty good. Kong himself is consistently convicing. When he's picking up or tossing around tiny humans, they are consistently unconvincing. Also the "stampede" scene wasn't very believable. But overall, pretty impressive effects. All of the human actors are decent, except for Jack Black, who is as intolerable as always. (I haven't liked him in anything but High Fidelity, and I probably would have hated him in that if I'd seen him in anything else first. He only ever plays the same dickhead.)