Nine Things about the Movie Wolf Creek 2
1. Made eight years after the first “Wolf Creek”, this movie continues the adventures of Mick Taylor, the awkwardly charming but brutal serial killer with a nerve-grating chuckle.
2. Like the first movie, this is “inspired by true events”, which means it was partly inspired by two famous Australian killers. But this story never happened.
3. There is a pretty obvious anti-tourist element in the plot of this movie. I might take “visit Australia” off of my bucket list.
4. The first movie was about two European backpackers that are stalked by a killer in the outback. The sequel is about two European backpackers that are stalked by a killer in the outback.
5. Director Greg McLean broke some rules of horror films in the first movie. He also breaks some rules of horror sequels in this movie. So despite having the almost exact same setup, this movie goes in a wildly different direction than the first. It does a pretty good job of subverting expectations and surprising you, at least for awhile.
6. The first half of the movie seems determined to be more violent than the first one. It’s pretty extreme. But it runs out of creative steam about halfway through, and then settles down into your more traditional “terrorize the captive” sequences.
7. Like the first film, the acting is better than you usually find in these kinds of movies. Ryan Corr is really good as the British surfer unwillingly brought into the drama. And John Jarratt guarantees that the Mick Taylor character joins the hall of fame of truly evil villains.
8. There is a very dark and macabre sense of humor to the movie, which lends a somewhat surreal quality to the film. A lot of it comes from Mick Taylor muttering to himself, so unless you are an expert at understanding Australian accents and slang, make sure you have the subtitles on.
9. This isn’t better than the first movie, but it’s not really worse, either. There are some very memorable scenes here. If you are a fan of the first film, you’ll like this one, too. And if you weren’t a fan of the first one, well, this won’t change your mind.
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Nine Things about the Movie Snowpiercer
1. This crazy cool science fiction film is one of the most astounding, violent - and weird - movies of the year.
2. The opening credits frontload the story: In 2014, in order to combat global warming, a chemical was released into the atmosphere to cool the temperature a few degrees. Only it went too far and the planet froze. The only survivors are a few thousand people on a train that continuously circles the globe. The train is divided according to class structure, with the richest people living in the head of the train, and the poorest living in the tail.
3. The movie opens by dropping you onto the train in the year 2031, and lets you figure out the rest of what’s going on by yourself. It gives you the broad strokes, but you have to do some work to figure out some of the details.
4. The main focus of the movie is a revolution by the poor people to advance and take over the head of the train. But as the class warfare escalates, you learn more of the secrets about the train. The story slowly spins outward to encompass a lot of issues and ideas.
5. The movie balances humor, anxiety, fear, chaos, and horror, and places it all on a moving train that nobody can leave. It is a lot darker and more violent than I expected.
6. The mood is lightened a few times by some really weird humor that feels out of place with the rest of the movie, but it’s well done, so you just go with it.
7. The acting is uniformly great. This is easily the best performance I’ve seen by Chris Evans. I didn’t know he could actually act, but I totally forgive him for being Captain America now. And while Tilda Swinton has never given a bad performance, she is deliciously deranged in this movie. This will go down as one of her more memorable roles.
8. Being directed by a South Korean director, the movie was released last year in South Korea, where it broke box-office records. But the American studio releasing the film wanted some changes to make it less weird, not as dark, and easier to understand. The director refused, and there was a battle over the control of the film. The director won, and the movie was released in its original form, although just in a small amount of theaters.
9. Not everyone is going to like this movie. It’s pretty strange. It’s political, psychological, and philosophical. There’s a high body count. It’s both thought-provoking and gut-wrenching. But if you want a science fiction film that is the exact opposite of blockbusters like “Transformers”, then this is what you want to see.
Nine Things about the Movie Wolf Creek
1. This low budget serial-killer thriller manages to be better than almost all horror movies America has put out in the decade since it was made.
2. Of course, it’s “based on a true story”. Of course, this story never happened. The movie was based on elements of several crime cases in recent Australian history.
3. The first half of the movie is relatively slow, to make sure you get to know the main characters, two British female tourists who are backpacking across Australia with their Australian friend Ben. During their travels their car breaks down, and they are rescued by a kindly old man who takes them back to his mining site camp.
4. The second half of the movie tells you what happens to them when they reach the old man’s camp. It is a cruel, violent, rush.
5. If you get a chance, look for the name of the mining site camp written on a sign. Spelled backwards, it’s the name of a serial killer the movie is based on.
6. The movie was hated by many mainstream critics, who were appalled at the brutality and bleakness of the film. Roger Ebert gave it a rare rating of zero stars.
7. But other critics placed it on various “best of” horror lists, for the exact same reason. I am one of these critics.
8. What impressed me the most was how relatively smart this movie is - the characters feel genuine, and they have more common sense than your usual movie victims. The movie breaks some traditional rules of horror, so it’s hard to predict what is going to happen - which makes it hurt all the more when you see what does happen.
9. This movie is not for everyone, but it is an intelligent, intense, sadistic piece of work that has more courage
than most of its contemporaries.
Nine Things about the Movie Deliver Us From Evil
1. Another week, another horror movie “based on a true story”. Actually, this movie contains the tag “inspired by the actual accounts of an NYPD sergeant”. It’s based on a real cop named Ralph Sarchie, who saw “The Exorcist” when he was 12 and decided to fight demons when he grew up. He knows demons are around because he gets headaches. So he wrote a book about how he performed some exorcisms. Then Hollywood took the idea of Sarchie and made up a whole new story that never happened. Even the real Sarchie says it’s fiction.
2. In the movie, soldiers in Iraq get possessed and come back to the Bronx. Ralph Sarchie is a cop that fell away from religion, but has a gift of finding evil. He stumbles into the Iraqi demons. In order to defeat the evil, he must go to confession and return to the Catholic Church.
3. This is another routine horror film where nothing ever really happens besides your regular collection of jump scares. Most of the movie takes place on rainy nights, in places where the electricity doesn’t work. Maybe that’s normal in the Bronx, I don’t know.
4. Far from being scary, the demon-possessed people just look kind of pathetic or silly. Especially when they act like cats.
5. One of the weapons that the demons use to spread evil in the world are songs by The Doors.
6. There’s a scene where a demonic soldier attacks a cop with a hammer. Instead of taking out his gun and shooting him, the cop decides to take on the demon with a knife. You can guess how that turns out.
7. The climax of the film is just another variation of “The Exorcist”.
8. The scariest part of the movie is in the “owl doll in the bedroom” scene. Which is in the trailer. Which also never happened in real life.
9. In one part of the movie, Sarchie tells a chain-smoking undercover priest that none of this makes sense - he doesn’t understand it. The priest tells him that absolute evil usually doesn’t make sense.
Which must mean that this movie is absolutely evil, because it doesn’t make sense either.
Nine Things about the Movie 21 Grams
1. This is the second movie of Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Death Trilogy, coming after “Amores Perros”.
2. Despite what it may seem, the title is not about drugs. The movie is not about drugs. The title is a reference to an old belief that a person’s soul weighs 21 grams.
3. This is not a happy movie. But it is a powerful one.
4. The less you know about the movie beforehand, the better. But I can say that it’s about three main characters. Jack (played by Benicio del Toro) is an ex-convict that got saved, and has turned his life over to Jesus. But his faith is not as helpful to him as it needs to be. Paul (played by Sean Penn) is a college math teacher with a fatal heart condition. Cristina (played by Naomi Watts) is a loving wife and mother that battles with substance abuse. The three characters do not know each other at the start of the movie.
5. There are two crucial moments in the movie. However, the story is not told linearly. The movie bounces from character to character, back and forth in time. Some scenes are only about 30 seconds long. Some are much longer. But they dance around the two crucial moments, making you piece it together for yourself before you actually see it.
6. I’ve seen movies told out of order before, but this is extreme. The utter fragmentation of the film’s story bothers some people. But I thought it was brilliant. It requires more attention to detail in order to put things in order. This makes you more emotionally involved in the movie than you might otherwise be.
7. Guillermo Arriaga wrote the movie (he also wrote “Amores Perros”), and he has an almost supernatural ability to capture the intimate details of love and death, shining darkly between the lines of dialogue.
8. Benicio del Toro and Naomi Watts were nominated for Academy Awards for their performances. del Toro plays against type as a man desperately trying to do good, even while it seems God wants him to do bad. And Naomi Watts almost burns a hole through the screen with her scorching performance of a woman who faces grief more than once.
9. This is a gritty, surprising, angry, and tragic story that presents things on screen that I’ve never seen before, and in a manner I’ve never seen before. If you have emotional fortitude and a strong attention span, you will not soon forget this movie.
Nine Things about the Movie Bad Milo!
1. Netflix recommended this movie to me. It’s proof that they need to improve their suggestion algorithms.
2. This movie is terrible. I even watched it drunk, and it didn’t help.
3. The movie begins with a guy named Duncan. His doctor tells him, "You've got a thing in your butt". He needs to find a way to keep his stress down, to keep the “thing” from growing bigger.
4. Actually, Duncan has a monster in his butt. When he gets too stressed, the monster pops out of his butt and kills whatever is stressing Duncan out. Or whatever else it finds.
5. Duncan teams up with a crackpot psychologist, who tells him the “myth of the anus”, and recommends that Duncan bond with the butt monster, which he names Milo. If Duncan kills Milo, Duncan will turn into a zombie.
6. I think the movie is trying to be a metaphor for fatherhood, but it’s an epic fail. The plot makes no sense. The characters are random and full of stupid humor. The movie spends way too much time in bathrooms, and has too many pointless close-ups on Duncan’s demon-filled ass.
7. The movie is obviously trying to become a “cult classic”. But the filmmakers don’t realize that you can’t try to attain that status. It happens naturally. Otherwise, it’s a pathetic waste of time - like this movie.
8. I actually feel sorry for the actors. I don’t know what they could have been thinking when they agreed to make this movie. They need to keep this movie off their resumes.
9. This movie fails on all fronts. It’s a comedy that isn’t funny, a monster movie that isn’t interesting, and a cult film that isn’t edgy. It’s boring and stupid and juvenile.
Nine Things about the Movie The Thin Red Line
1. I first saw this film about the year 2000. I wasn’t ready for it. All I remember thinking is, “this is the strangest and most beautiful war movie I’ve ever seen.” I had just discovered director Terrence Malick without realizing it.
2. I need to make a clarification. This is actually the strangest and most beautiful ant-war movie I’ve ever seen.
3. I’ve seen plenty of movies that show the physical and mental trauma of war. This is the most powerful depiction of the emotional and existential trauma of war that I’ve ever seen.
4. The actual plot of the movie involves one of the key battles of Guadalcanal in World War II. But it’s really about the inner monologues of soldiers talking about death, existence, and God.
5. The cast itself is strange and eclectic, containing performances from John Cusack, Jared Leto, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly, Nick Stahl, George Clooney, and John Travolta, among others. Some of them only really appear for death scenes. There were also stars who were filmed and then cut out of the movie.
6. Sean Penn gives a wonderful performance as a sergeant who wishes he didn’t care about anything. Nick Nolte is awesome as a political and cowardly colonel. Adrien Brody is in one of the shortest and most memorable scenes, when his crew discovers a dead soldier. And it should have been obvious from Jim Caviezel’s role that 16 years later he would play Jesus on film.
7. There is a lot of physical violence in the film. But the real damage is dealt to the characters that live.
8. The title of the film does not become clear from the movie itself. It’s actually from a Kipling poem that calls foot soldiers “the thin red line of heroes.”
9. This is a gorgeous, profound film that a lot of people don’t like. It uses war against itself to show the savagery - and the humanity - of violence.
Nine Things about the Movie Transformers: Age of Extinction
1. You can tell a Michael Bay movie from miles away - they have the same visual style, like everything takes place on a clear, windy, late afternoon. His movies are also big, loud, and dumb. Well, this is Bay’s biggest, loudest, and dumbest movie yet. But that's OK - you don’t go see a Michael Bay film for the story (which is good, because this has the worst script of all the Transformer movies).
2. This fourth Transformer movie is almost three hours long, because it’s really two different movies smashed together like cement and steel after a Decepticon attack.
3. The first story is about a Transformer named Lockdown who is hunting Autobots in order to capture Optimus Prime, who, it turns out, is some sort of galactic knight. There’s an unfocused religious tone to this film, where Autobots talk about having souls and looking for their Creator.
4. The second story is about how a corporation has discovered a new element, “Transformium”, which is an unstable metal. The corporation “mapped its genome” and can turn it into anything they want...like new Transformers. This is a stupid plotline (any high school chemistry student can tell you that elemental metals don’t have genomes) that only serves as a way to bring Megatron back from the dead.
5. The advertising for the movie highlights the Dinobots - kind of like Transformers, except dinosaurs. Yes, the Dinobots are totally badass. Too bad they only show up for about 20 minutes during the final battle.
6. The dialogue of the movie is clunky, and the humor is terribly cheesy. There are plot holes large enough for Optimus Prime to walk through. Speaking of clunky dialogue, it’s weird to see Mark Wahlberg spend more time being a protective dad than an action hero.
7. However, the action sequences are probably the best of all the Transformer movies. And let’s face it, that’s why we go to them. This movie provides ever-increasing spectacle, where bigger and bigger things get destroyed until it becomes almost numbing.
8. I know product placement is a thing, but it got out of hand in this movie. Why would you use Transformium to make Beats speakers or a My Little Pony toy? And when you see a Transformer painted like a package of Oreos, you know a line has been crossed.
9. As Bay himself once famously said, “I make movies for teenage boys. Oh dear, what a crime.” And that’s exactly what this is - a loud, shiny movie with fast cars, giant robots, lots of destruction, and a hot girl. And that’s it. If you can tap into your inner teenage boy, you will love this film. If not, then you might want to pick a different movie.
Nine Things about the Movie Are All Men Pedophiles?
1. This is an unusual documentary about the natural attractions that men have to younger girls. It weaves together threads from evolution, religion, psychology, and society.
2. A lot of time is spent explaining that what a lot of people consider pedophilia is really hebephilia (which is attraction to adolescents). This distinction is very important to narrator/director Jan-Willem Breure.
3. There are interviews with victims of pedophiles, and admitted pedophiles.
4. The movie highlights the hypocrisy of western culture, which condemns attraction to younger girls while simultaneously portraying girls as sex objects, especially in the fashion industry.
5. The movie does a remarkable job of walking a fine line on the subject... as much as one can. It seeks to understand the different forms of men’s attraction to girls, without condemning all forms outright. This has caused controversy, and the director has been accused of not having a strong enough agenda, making him kind of suspicious.
6. The movie also makes the case that the fear of pedophilia has gone too far, that paranoia is taking over, and that men and boys are being taught that they are naturally a danger to girls.
7. There is a weird strangeness to the film, due to the way the interviews are edited. The people move and talk in slightly abnormal ways, almost like they were computer generated. It’s very creative, but it’s also very distracting.
8. After the credits, you see director/narrator Jan-Willem Breure give his own answer to the question in the title of the film. It’s sort of a bold answer.
9. This is an interesting, confrontational, and sometimes uncomfortable examination of human sexuality. It leaves you feeling that love and desire are hopelessly uncontrollable, no matter how society tries to structure them.
