Abandoned – Ghost From the Machine

The plot summary – guy tries to invent a machine to bring his parents back from the dead – sounded vaguely intriguing, but the actual movie is merely a mess of character-intensive, indie meandering. I even gave it an hour to see if it would eventually go anywhere. But then I had to pause it to deal with something else and couldn’t force myself to go back to it.

Abandoned – Howling 5: The Rebirth

If you’re gonna make a werewolf movie, you really ought to consider actually putting a werewolf or two in it. I waited patiently for half an hour before giving up.

Review – My Best Friend’s Wedding

This is the meanest romantic comedy I’ve ever seen. Julia Roberts plays a harried writer who learns that her best friend slash longtime crush is getting married, so off she goes to Chicago to thwart his plans. Predictably enough, the resulting parade of tricks and betrayal lacks sympathetic characters, clever plot twists or anything else that might merit your attention. See if desperate

Review – The Asphyx

When people know they’re going to die, spirits called Asphyxes attend their passing. A couple of gentlemen scientists figure out how to trap the things, which apparently makes them immortal as long as the trapping occurs right around a fearful passing, the right light shines on the racket-making puppet spirit and it’s locked away where the light never gets turned off. The concept is weird enough to work in a metaphysical-version-of-autoerotic-asphyxiation way, but it doesn’t survive a script packed with bad dialogue and low logic levels. Sadly, this picture will only interest you if you’re especially fond of British horror movies from the 1970s, you’ve never seen an immortal guinea pig or your ass is broken. See if desperate

Review – Half-Caste

There’s a good movie buried in here somewhere. The shape-shifters of sub-Saharan Africa have a lot of cinematic potential, some of which is realized here. The production also touches on some of the racial elements of the myth and its history. Unfortunately, rather than produce a straightforward, narrative picture, the filmmakers opt for yet another goddamn found footage reality show parade of random video crap. Sad. See if desperate

Review – The Fourth Kind

Owls that speak Sumerian are kidnapping people from Nome, Alaska. Okay, watch it yourself and then you tell me what it’s about. Space alien abductions, maybe? Rightly suspecting that this is an insane pile of boring rubbish if you don’t believe it’s closely based on something that actually happened, the filmmakers do their best to pull off an elaborate hoax. Perhaps if they’d succeeded this would have been a better movie. On the other hand, it might be silly and dull whether or not you accept it as true. See if desperate

Review – Blood Gnome

Rubber monsters need to feed on blood, their hunger satisfied by killing members of the blood fetish sub-stratum of the BDSM scene. If you’re shocked or titillated by nudity, bondage or crappy rubber puppets, then they finally made the movie you’ve been waiting for. Sadly, that’s all this picture has to offer. See if desperate

Review – Grave Encounters

Okay, let me make sure I understand the concept. A team of videographers working on a reality show about haunted houses end up stuck in a house that’s really haunted. Oh no, it’s an abandoned asylum. And rather than actually put monsters or ghosts or any kind of supernatural thing in the movie, the production is mostly given over to characters bickering with each other. Huh. Nobody’s ever done anything like that. Thank you, Vicious Brothers. To be completely fair, when this movie actually does anything scary, it musters some fun effects (at least some of which were a little too reminiscent of House on Haunted Hill). But that’s less than five minutes total out of more than 90, and zero for the first hour or so. Too little too late to save the show. Plus killing the rat would have cost it a point if it had any points to spare. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Hollow

I admit at this point I’ve lost almost every ounce of tolerance I ever had for found footage horror movies. Throw in “cheap” and “British,” and there’s just no way it ends well. The production got off to a fairly good start with a spooky old tree, but then it doesn’t really go anywhere with it. Unless you count the usual cast of annoying 20-somethings bickering with each other as “going somewhere.” Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Promise Keeper

Actual Promise Keepers would have been more frightening. This is just some squish about a law firm that decorates its lobby with an African fetish that turns out to be dangerous to anyone who makes a promise, drives a nail into its head and then breaks the promise. So seems like three ways to avoid running afoul of the thing right there. Further, the lion’s share of screen time goes to relationship drama silliness rather than scary fetish fu. I’m giving the production a respect point for multiethnic casting and for at least having a plot rather than taking another tedious trip down found footage lane. Otherwise, however, this is amateur hour stuff. See if desperate

Review – Your Sister’s Sister

As if Robert Altman hadn’t already proved this, when you let actors improv in front of a camera you don’t get realism. Productions like this always seem to be after spontaneous takes on genuine human interaction. Instead they inevitably get embarrassed smirking and what-clever-line-would-my-character-say-next dialogue that makes everyone seem drunk, high or otherwise mentally impaired. This mopey indie further adds a ludicrous quasi-plot about a woman whose male best friend has secret sex with her lesbian sister. See if desperate

Review – Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1

Clearly they don’t make these things for me, and other than special occasions (such as being in a hotel room with limited channel options) I tend not to watch them. I should also admit that I’ve skipped one or more chapters, so if something crucial to this one was revealed in one of the other sequels, I missed it. That said, the only above-and-beyond objection I had to this round is that Stephenie Meyer seems too willing to paint herself into plot corners and then escape by inventing some new vampire and/or werewolf rule that allows her to wiggle out. Otherwise this is a reasonable example of what it is. See if desperate

Review – Zero Dark Thirty

This obvious, desperate attempt to reproduce the success of The Hurt Locker falls well short of the mark. Gone is the clever tension of bomb diffusing, replaced by standard espionage thriller fare. Almost all the “surprise” bombings in this picture are so ham-handedly telegraphed that they become “throw the switch and get on with it” ordeals. Further, I frequently found myself distracted by little nagging details. For example, the infamous torture sequences struck me as more pointless than objectionable. Why demand email addresses that even a witless teenager could have set up anonymously, made untraceable and abandoned at the first hint of compromise? Is this really how they tracked down Osama Bin Laden? See if desperate

Review – The Bourne Legacy

Here we go with a new operative same as the old operative. They’ve replaced Matt Damon with Jeremy Renner, and they stirred in some nonsense about a virus. The IMDb notes indicate that Paul Greengrass, the director of the first two Bourne sequels, suggested that this round be called The Bourne Redundancy. Which hits the nail squarely on the head. See if desperate

Review – The Tenant

This is like two rotten movies for the price of one. The first half of the picture tells the story of a mad scientist whose genetic research ends up infecting one of his two unborn children. The best part about it was Randy Nolnar – who played the scientist – looking just enough like James Lipton to supply a brief “hey, what is that Actors Studio guy doing in this crappy movie?” moment. Then right around midway through, it abruptly shifts course and turns into the umpty-millionth “hey young folks, don’t go into that abandoned asylum” story. The best part of the second half was when the credits rolled. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Zombie Lake

Ugh, what I won’t sit through just to get a movie that starts with Z. Imagine Shock Waves redone as one of those crappy Euro-softcore porn movies that Cinemax used to show late on Friday nights. If you want to watch a stupid zombie movie, the video world abounds in it. And if you need porn, they make this new thing called The Internet. The only thing this picture supplies that can’t be had in abundance elsewhere (thank you, movie gods) is a painfully corny soundtrack. At one point in the Netflix Instantview copy, the sound dies. Oh glorious respite! Unfortunately it comes back later. Additional crime against humanity: getting “Fire Lake” stuck in my head. Who wants to go to Zombie Lake? Seegah! Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Rig

Even though this has to be the zillionth time someone has trapped a group of workers in an enclosed, industrial space with a monster, this actually isn’t too terrible. Or maybe it’s just that I’d watched two or three monumentally horrible movies before taking this one on, so anything that spent any time or money or had actors of any kind was bound to seem good by comparison. An oil rig in the middle of the ocean is attacked by a humanoid fish monster. Mildly amusing

Review – The Messengers 2: The Scarecrow

When I watch movies about evil scarecrows, sometimes I find myself wondering if I were a crow, would I find this scary? Given that crows are actually quite smart for birds, I’m betting even they wouldn’t give a fig for this production. A down-on-his-luck farmer (The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus) digs a Freddy-Krueger-looking scarecrow out of a hidden niche in his barn. He puts it up in his cornfield and then has the gall to be all surprised when evil stuff starts happening. See if desperate

Review – Barrio Tales

If this is any better than an average “moron with a camcorder” movie, that’s due more to improvements in video production technology than to upgrades in the moron department. Three shorts held together by a cheap bracket. Frat boys kill their maid and suffer a horrible curse. Suburban kids are turned into Mexican food by Uncle Tio (doesn’t that mean Uncle Uncle?) and his taco truck. And rednecks who kidnap and torture undocumented workers get a violent comeuppance. This might work as a minor critique of anti-Mexican racism if it didn’t wallow so heavily in the racist muck along the way. It’s also hard to side with the sound editor’s guess that viewers would have more interest in the twangy guitar soundtrack than in the dialogue. See if desperate

Apple, are you kidding me?

Late last Wednesday afternoon I had what by now has become all too familiar: a Mac hard drive crash. Fortunately I learned my lesson after the first three times this happened to me, so this time I had a reasonably current backup. I lost just three or four days, almost all of it stuff I’d uploaded to the web already.

So the issue wasn’t data loss. The issue was the hard drive itself. The problem required a trip to the Apple Store (not exactly right next door), where the computer had to stay for three days. As down times go, that honestly wasn’t too bad. It was actually sort of nice to have an excuse to take a break from connectedness for a little while.

Plus the Apple “Geniuses” were nice to the verge of customer service overkill. One even told me that the company’s in-house code name for the computer I bought is the Ultimate. That made me wonder what their name is for the model with a few extras I didn’t get. Best not to know. I’d hate to think about people unwittingly using a computer known as the John Holmes.

My problem with all this (aside from this being the fourth hard drive crash in less than two years) was that in days gone past I could have tackled the repair at home. If the hardware was seriously torched (and in this case it may have been), then off to the store it would go. As I’d had it only a month or so, it was still under warranty. But at least I could have tried running some diagnostics and attempted to fix it myself before swapping in an expensive replacement part.

But in this brave new world that doesn’t happen. Because I needed to be able to boot from an external system disc so I could go to work on the internal hard drive. And do new Macs come with a CD system disc? They do not. Of course there’s a certain logic to that, as the new Macs don’t have disc drives. But I have an external drive that I use mostly to watch DVDs on the computer. So if I’d had a disc, I could at least have given it a try.

Another option would have been to use a Firewire connection to link the problem child up to an older, functioning computer that I happened to have downstairs. But Apple in its wisdom decided I didn’t need a Firewire port in my new machine.

Here then is the deal: in Apple’s imagineered vision, we’re all going to live in the cloud. We’ll store all our data in the cloud, connect to our peripherals via the cloud, watch movies from the cloud, do everything we do entirely from the fabulous world of the net-connected cloud. For the full effect, read that last sentence aloud while standing on your tiptoes, flapping your arms like a happy little bluebird and employing your most sarcastic tone.

In Apple’s defense, the cloud works great. Until it doesn’t. It provides us with all kinds of new possibilities. But if we rely exclusively on our net connections, we lose a measure of autonomy (not to mention opening our lives up to scrutiny by hackers at the government, corporate and freelance levels). At the very least, we appear to have surrendered the ability to opt in or out at our discretion.

So if Apple is going to watch over us like we’re a mass of ignorant children, then the corporation is going to have to make a bigger commitment to being a better parent. A few more geniuses in the design and assembly stages might save employing fewer at the customer service end. Just a thought.