Her Master's Voice

Nina Conti was ten years into her stand-up ventriloquism career when she decided to give it up. Before she had a chance to tell her mentor and former lover Ken Campbell - the man who introduced her to her career - he died, unexpectedly leaving her his entire collection of books, tapes, and puppets. She deduced to make one last trip, to a ventriloquist convention in Kentucky, and to donate one of Ken's puppets to Venthaven, a museum and resting place for puppets of dead masters.

That's the plot, at least, but it isn't the story. What really matters is that Nina is at a crossroads, scared and unsure, yet she shares her deepest most inner thought through her puppet Monkey and through those of Ken she voices. A lot of the film is her having conversations with herself - and it works. It really works well.

Her Master's Voice
2012, 59 minutes, directed by Nina Conti

Modus Anomoli

I really got angry with the protagonist of this outdoor survival horror. Carrying around a flashlight when being hunted outdoors falls in my stupidpeople category. There's a full moon. Do you have no night vision?

In the end, though, they explain everything, albeit in a way that leaves me baffled for an hour until it clicks. If you start to watch this definitely see it through.

Modus Anomoli
2012, 87 minutes, directed by Joko Anwar

The Raid: Redemption

Brutal.

The Raid: Redemption
2011, 100 minutes, directed by Gareth Huw Evans

This film is worth upgrading your sound system for.

WE ARE LEGION: The Story of the Hacktivists

This feel-good activism documentary chronicles the story of Anonymous and it's offshoots, from its origins on 4chan, early operations against Hal Turner and Scientology, through the Lulzsec activities of 2011. It does a good job of marketing the Freedom ethos, but there's little time spent on opposing viewpoints if you want an apolitical account.

If you don't believe the government will always protects ALL your freedoms, you too rely on Anonymous. I expect though that only those who agree with film will ever see it.

WE ARE LEGION: The Story of Anonymous
2012, 89 minutes, directed by Brian Knappenberger

Keyhole

The director of this film describes it as "gangsters meet ghosts" turned into an autobiography of a house. Ulysses returns to his family home, determined to reach his wife Hyacinth on the top floor. To get there, though, he must navigate the other rooms of the house and their unearthly inhabitants.

Or at least that's how it's billed. I describe it more as surreal experimentation. Or a black & white cinematic study of how many actors (young and quite old) you can get full nude and acting like a crazy ghost on film.

It's not really for me.

Keyhole
2012, directed by Guy Maddin

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.

Safety Not Guaranteed

I'm old enough to be sentimental about things. In the film they say "It's not about a girl, it's about a time and a place." But it's not. It's really more about finding who you want to be right here and right now.

Darius (Aubrey Plaza) and two coworkers follow a classified ad:
"WANTED: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. 'Safety Not Guaranteed.' I have only done this once before."

Safety Not Guaranteed
2012, 85 minutes, directed by Colin Treverrow