You're Next

I missed this at Fantastic Fest a few years ago - it showed once and then disappeared from the schedule, one of the legendary screenings that got away.  Now it's back in all its glory.  A family gathers for reasons both complicated and unknown, while masked terror lurks.  When the horrors unleash, a family guest reveals her true nature.  It's pretty damn awesome.

You're Next
2011, 95 minutes, directed by Adam Wingard

The Book of Eli

I knew this film had religious undertones, but whoa.  Still, this was a good story of the re-emergence of hope in world where it had long passed.  And there's a decent bit of knife combat.

The Book of Eli
2010, 118 minutes, directed by Albert and Allen Hughes

The Dark Knight Rises

It's been a long time since this series started, and so long since Heath Ledger's death.  Is this the ending I wanted?  Is it what I needed?

Mercenary Bane has taken Gotham City hostage, striking directly at the police and the resources of Batman.  Even with the enlisted help of Catwoman, Batman will need to give everything he has to succeed in this final chapter of the Dark Knight trilogy.

Batman's righteous anonymity leaves me hanging.  Maybe that's a lesson on humility I need to hear.

The Dark Knight Rises
2012, 165 minutes, directed by Christopher Nolan

Sinister

SXSW's not-so-secret screening was the first public screening of Sinister, exactly as everyone thought.  While I appreciate all the effort they went to for the film to screen here, it just didn't work for me like I'd hoped.  Ellison (Ethan Hawke) is a true-crime writer seeking his second Big Novel, having suffered several unspecified failures.  He moves his family - wife Trace (Juliet Rylance), son Trevor (Michael Hall D'addario), and daughter Ashley (Clare Foley) into the house of his latest focus, a family of five where four members were hung from a tree in the back yard, and the final member, a daughter Stephanie, disappeared.

Very quickly the scope of the crime grows when Ellison finds a box of "Home Movies" in the attic, along with a Super 8 film projector.  The first film shows the murder of the family - a film the police never found.  The other four films show the deaths of similar families, each killed by a different method, each in a different state, and each (as he later learns) with a missing child, stretched out over the past 45 years.  At the same time the supernatural events in the house lead him to believe that maybe the killer never left...

I didn't think Ellison's actions were plausible, something admittedly I can overlook (as I often must) for horror films.  The real problems though were in the ending.  I have BIG SPOILERS below the film info below.  Read on only if you have seen the film or have no intention of doing so.

Sinister
2012, directed by Scott Derrickson










THESE ARE SPOILERS!  Things that just didn't work:
1. The biggest problem is the slow, all-cards-on-the-table ending.  We just didn't need everything spelled out like that in passionless film.  First the kids should not have already been mindless automatons when they killed their families.  It would have been better if they were doing it scared shitless and crying, while being forced to by the Boogie Man.  And what Ashley does after Ellison dies seems redundant.  Who cares that the kids live in the film?  The movie should have ended the instance Ellison was killed, his family dying first.
2. When Ellison learned that one dead family previously lived in a home that was itself the scene of an earlier film, it was obvious the same would be true for all the other murders.  It also meant that "family piles into the car and flees" would never be a suitable ending.  Either they'd need to fight and win, or they wouldn't make it.  That's all fine, except that the phone call from the deputy at the end where he explains all of this is completely pointless.  I got it already, thanks, don't slow things down.  Maybe the only useful bit is the deputy's comment that his action might have "accelerated the schedule" which was somehow true but really never explained.  Why'd they need to die the day they moved?  The other families clearly lived at least a little while in their new homes based on the films.
3.  Why did the Boogie Man switch to Super 8 in the 1960s?  Was that when he stopped using photographs?  During the course of the film - which could also double as an Apple product instructional video - Ellison proves the editing superiority of digital cameras and a computer.  I think it would have been more satisfactory somehow if Ashley was filming on her dad's digicam at the end, with a USB stick dropped in the Home Movies box if that clip isn't cut (as it wouldn't be I guess if they want a sequel segue.)  The Boogie Man needs to keep up with the times or else he'll be stuck with a family that doesn't even know what the Super 8 projector is.

Red Riding Hood

Another SXSW is here, and this one starts off early with a midnight premiere of Red Riding Hood.  Ahem, actually we are just the "first audience to see the film" since studios like to co-opt the term "world premiere".  I guess then technically we were the "first audience to see the film after having to empty our pockets and be swept by a metal detector" as well.  Thanks Warner Bros.

The film is beautiful, in that much of it consists of images of the snowy village and close-ups of Amanda Seyfried's face.  I did get the impression that there was a driving force to create a vision for the camera.  Alas, what I didn't feel was any immersion in the plot.  There's a love triangle which barely goes anywhere, a few family secrets laid bare, and lots of suspicion about who the werewolf might be.  And of course there's Solomon, the killed-my-own-wife werewolf hunter who acts in the name of the Holy Church but of course fails to act very holy at all.  Yes, they even run through all the major points of the modern version of the fairy tale.

But all is not lost.  As director Catherine Hardwicke said before the film began, "Luckily I didn't have to have any grown men sparkle in this movie."  For that, I truly feel lucky as well.

Catch it on Netflix.

Red Riding Hood
2011, 102 minutes, directed by Catherine Hardwicke

Linkeroever (Left Bank)

As expected, Alamo's wireless network failed yesterday. It's not the signal strength that's the problem, it's the DHCP server or the router. Eventually they just run out of or stop serving IP addresses. Thank goodness for Maudie's Cafe down the street and their free, functional wireless.

Anyway, I don't have much to say about Left Bank. It's a dark film, with predictable turns and a confusing ending. If you're up for run-of-the mill occult secret drama, go for it.

Linkeroever (Left Bank)
2008, 102 minutes, directed by Pieter Van Hees