Review – Oculus

Another deadly-dull evil mirror movie. This one ping-pongs back and forth between two kids traumatized by the mirror’s destructive influence on their parents and the same kids as adults taking their best shot at destroying the thing. The characters’ stubborn refusal to act in any way that might bring the story to a conclusion prolongs the drama but tries the audience’s patience. See if desperate

You deserve a break today

As I finished placing my order at my favorite Chinese carry-out spot, the Nicktoons show playing on the dining area television went to commercial. I got my food and left before the show came back on. That’s either really fast sesame chicken or one hell of a long ad break.

Or both.

Review – The Poisoner’s Handbook

This episode of American Experience explores the origin of forensic science in the early 20th century. The production does a solid job of mixing science, history and dramatic recreations to turn what could have been a dry topic into a story with human dimensions. Mildly amusing

Review – The Heat

Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy do an entertaining turn as odd couple cops. You will need to come into this experience with an affection for female buddy screwball comedies, but if this is what you’re in the mood for then this is a good way to get what you’re after. Mildly amusing

Review – Blended

Typical Sandler/Barrymore comedy. This time around they’re single parents who hate each other. But through a series of unlikely coincidences their families end up sharing a luxury vacation, which of course means they have to fall in love. Situations, plot twists and jokes are all highly predictable. Overall this plays like a 21st century redo of The Brady Bunch. Mildly amusing

Review – Doctors of the Dark Side

This documentary details the CIA’s use of psychiatrists to design the interrogation techniques it uses to torture prisoners. The production poses some interesting questions of medical ethics, but beyond that this is nowhere near as interesting as the filmmakers seem to think it is. That such things occur should come as a surprise to precisely nobody, and the specifics don’t make the general revelation more fascinating. Mildly amusing

Review – Ghosts at Sea

Because if you call your movie “Boring Canadian Lake Haints” nobody will watch it. For thousands of years people have been crossing the world’s oceans, yet the best tales these folks can conjure are some dreary little bits about haunted restaurants somewhere near the shore. See if desperate

Review – 13th Child: Jersey Devil

Alack for the poor Jersey Devil. It’s among the coolest of monsters, but it always seems to end up with the short end of the cinematic stick. The visuals mostly consist of low-budget interviews intercut with the same three drawings over and over. And oh those interviews. Some of it is legitimate folklore, but most are on par with those juvenile ghost stories we all used to make up with our friends when we were eight years old. You know, the kind that go something like “Once there were some boy scouts who were on a hike but then it started raining so they ran into a cemetery and hid in a mausoleum only then Dracula showed up and he was going to drink their blood but then Mrs. Dracula showed up and she was going to drink their blood but then three Frankensteins showed up and they started fighting the Draculas but then ..." and so on. Honestly, this was so bad that a parody would end up looking exactly like the original. See if desperate

Review – Tim’s Vermeer

Obsessive millionaire Tim Jenison develops the theory that Johannes Vermeer used optics to trace reality onto canvas. To put this to the quasi-test, he creates a painstaking reproduction of the scene from “The Music Lesson” and then spends months trying – with exceptionally limited success – to duplicate the masterpiece. I’m not surprised that Penn and Teller produced this bit of dull strangeness. The theory clearly is that the secret to understanding anything is merely to unravel the trick of how it’s done. Inadvertently the production demonstrates just how faulty this approach can be. See if desperate

Review – Admission

Okay, Tina Fey. Enough with the sitcoms about successful, intelligent women completely obsessed with child bearing. This time around she’s an admissions officer for Princeton, obsessed with the notion that a brilliant-yet-unorthodox applicant is actually the child she secretly gave up for adoption 18 years earlier. As is sadly all too typical of Fey’s work, the picture sports a few highly entertaining moments that fail to save it from ending up as another run-of-the-mill relationship comedy. Mildly amusing

Review – The Last Days of Patton

Imagine a made-for-TV sequel with George C. Scott reprising his famous role, and you’ve got a pretty good idea what to expect. The general didn’t live long after the war ended, so this production is appropriately smaller in scope (though strangely not that much shorter). The first half of the story finds our protagonist up to his old rubbing-everyone-the-wrong-way tricks. But after the car wreck this is consistently depressing stuff. Mildly amusing

Review – How to Train Your Dragon

Disclaimer up front: Toothless (the main dragon) reminded me a great deal of one of my cats. Thus I may have enjoyed this a bit more than the average viewer might. Objectively, however, this is an entertaining story told with a solid script, good cast and decent quality animation. Worth seeing

Review – American Hustle

ABSCAM gets an indie dramedy twist. The celebrity casting and the off-the-rack soundtrack compete for most overpowering element of what might otherwise have been a more entertaining production. Mildly amusing

Review – (500) Days of Summer

Turns out putting the time stream in a blender doesn’t make pedestrian romance any better. Zooey Deschanel is cute, but the rest of the picture is an annoying parade of self-pity thrown by a oh-so-typical guy who just can’t understand why his relationships fail. Mildly amusing

Review – The Eschatrilogy: Book of the Dead

Unimaginative (not exactly a big surprise from a low-budget zombie picture), but at least the amateur horror fans who made this contented themselves with filming their flesh-eating sight gags without bothering with too many fruitless attempts to add story or character development. The coda was a strong ah-for-cryin’-out-loud-isn’t-this-over-yet moment, but otherwise this delivers what little it promises. See if desperate

Review – Bad Words

A 40-year-old man (Jason Bateman) with a phenomenal memory enters a spelling bee thanks to a loophole in the rules. If they somehow could have left it at that simple plot combined with the protagonist’s amusing assholism, this would have been an exceptionally funny movie. Inevitably, however, plot and character development intrude, adding awkward complications, questionable motives and treacly relationships. Mildly amusing

Review – 300: Rise of an Empire

Here’s a sequel for anyone who thought the first go-around was too realistic and didn’t include enough speeches. I’m not sure if a knowledge of actual Greek history is a help or a hindrance. The story weaves so artlessly between events before, during and after Thermopylae that it’s often hard to tell what battle is taking place when. On the other hand, it departs sufficiently from the historical record that knowing the history may just make the confusion worse. Perhaps the picture is best enjoyed purely from a “epic battles fuck yeah” perspective. Mildly amusing

Review – Nothing Left to Fear

When I noted in this movie’s description that it was located in Stull, Kansas – and the legendary gate to Hell located therein – I had to rent it. Though I’ve certainly seen worse movies, I was hoping for something better or at least more original. The scariest thing in this picture is the puppet-like performance turned in by Anne Heche. Mildly amusing

Review – Flu

Korean horror scores another semi-hit. I recently read a book about the Spanish Flu epidemic, so I was fully prepared to accept a massive outbreak of the disease as a scary premise. For the most part this is a reasonably good exploration of the theme, though it goes on at least 20 minutes too long and depends far too heavily on coincidental encounters. Mildly amusing

Review – Gravity

So now we’re down to using actors’ heads and voices (and a handful of appearances by the rest of Sandra Bullock’s body). Almost all of the rest of this outer space adventure was generated by computers. Perhaps they should have let a machine write the script as well. An algorithm could scarcely have composed a more annoying patchwork of relentless failure. If your idea of fun is spending an hour and a half watching things go wrong, then you will doubtless agree with whatever mysterious beings put this on the Oscars Best Picture nominees list. To me it felt more like trying to use an AOL dial-up line to replace the radiator on a car: frustrating and ultimately pointless. See if desperate

Review – Robocop (2014)

See, Hollywood. You can make a passably good reboot. This is a textbook example of how to get such productions to work. A story that stays true to the spirit of the original without following it too slavishly. A few in jokes for the fans. A good cast and solid production values. The result is clearly an attempt to make an entertaining movie rather than solely cashing in on familiar property. My sole gripe is that the plot meanders a bit in spots. Worth seeing

Review – Birth of the Living Dead

If you’re interested in Night of the Living Dead (and if you care about the history of zombie movies, you should be), by all means take the time to watch this documentary. It provides extensive information about how the picture was made and originally distributed (including the sad tale of how it ended up in the public domain). Even the talking-head social-commentary parts aren’t too bad. Mildly amusing

Review – Killing Lincoln

With all the money they dumped on this, I was hoping for something better than a docudrama worthy of the Discovery Channel. Tom Hanks narrating and Bill O’Reilly writing fail to amount to anything better than what we might have gotten from an out-of-work character actor and a script-a-day hack. If you authentically don’t know anything about Lincoln’s assassination, you might find this interesting. But there’s little beyond the basics to be found here. Mildly amusing

Review – Jack Reacher

Despite the Tom-Cruise-iness of the this picture, I actually enjoyed it. The story is a typical blend of lone-wolf-ex-military-cop-hero and complex-conspiracy-murder-mystery. But they spent some money making it, and the cash went to good use for production values, cast, script and muscle cars. Mildly amusing

Review – Flyboys

This must have been an experiment to see if it was possible to pack every known war movie cliché into a single picture. Production values are good, particularly the dramatic re-creations of aerial combat in World War One. They even put together a reasonably good cast. The script just doesn’t give anyone much to work with. Mildly amusing

Review – Gettysburg

Endless speechifying transforms what should have been a feel-good picture about the defeat of the Confederacy into yet another parade of whiny nonsense about the nobility of the Southern cause. The Union gets a little of its due, but unless you and Ted Turner are of one mind about the true nature of the Civil War, this one is likely to be worth missing. See if desperate

Review – Lizzie Borden Took an Axe

Just once I’d like to see a movie version of this story in which the title character turns out to not be the murderer. For what it’s worth, some evidence actually supports the notion. However, that isn’t what we get here (sorry if that’s a spoiler). Instead it’s a run-of-the-mill recounting of the deaths and Borden’s trial. Christina Ricci does a good job in the lead, and the production is professionally assembled. With one exception: this picture features some of the worst soundtrack music I’ve ever heard. It’s like the director’s mom forced him to use his cousin’s dreadful rockabilly band. The resulting noise is completely discordant with the otherwise-carefully-constructed 1890s setting. Mildly amusing

Review – Joe Kidd

Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns attempt to develop a social conscience as the title character takes on a greedy land baron (Robert Duvall) out to kill the leader (John Saxon) of a group of farmers. Elmore Leonard supplied the story, which is better during its action scenes than it is when it bothers with plot and character development. Mildly amusing

Review – The Wolverine

This will no doubt please fans of the title superhero. I’m kinda meh on the character, so I was kinda meh on the movie. If you’re in the mood for a flashy, noisy, expensive action movie, you could do worse. Mildly amusing

Review – Thor: The Dark World

I’ve watched this three times now, not because it’s especially good (or especially bad either) but because I keep falling asleep somewhere in the middle and missing scenes. It must just be that I’m not getting enough rest at night, because this isn’t an especially dull movie. Our Asgardian hero enlists the aid of his adopted brother and human girlfriend to battle dark elves (they’re more menacing than they sound) who are trying to destroy the universe. Long on expensive, noisy effects and short on clever plot elements, this will serve you well if you’re in the mood for superhero-intensive entertainment. I do note, however, that these Marvel movies are beginning to get so interconnected that they may become hard to follow unless you’ve seen all of them. Mildly amusing

Review – Curse of Chucky

Here’s a rare treat: a horror series that long ago descended into dull farce suddenly snapping back, returning to its roots and coming up with something genuinely creepy. Yeah, it skips back into the dumb stuff toward the end, but act one (Chucky settles into a new house) features several successful stabs at doing something authentically scary rather than gory or goofy. I also found myself wondering what it was like for Fiona Dourif to do scenes with a killer doll voiced by her father. Mildly amusing

Review – The Monuments Men

The recovery of stolen art at the end of World War Two is a fascinating topic. Indeed, the subject has supplied fodder for at least one good documentary. But here it gets George Clooney’s awkward blend of drama and comedy, which ends up working as neither. It also features a heap of “greatest generation” schmalz, standing in the way of telling an honest story about real people working to save priceless masterpieces from thieves and vandals. Mildly amusing

Review – Sanitarium (2013)

This anthology piece – bracketed with some mental hospital filler featuring Malcolm McDowell – proves to be highly predictable. That’s at least in part because the first segment features an artist with an insane fixation on the dolls he creates (when was the last time you saw something original done with evil dolls?) and the second is uncomfortably close to the abusive-parent-versus-imaginary-monster bit from Tales from the Hood (not that the twist was exactly new even back in 1995). The trio finishes up with a guy-in-a-bomb-shelter plot that swiftly wears out its welcome. Though the technical quality is reasonably good, the cliché-ridden script kills the picture. See if desperate

Review – Custer’s Last Stand

The iconic commander of the Seventh Cavalry gets a thorough PBS treatment in this feature-length documentary about his life and death. Though little of this information will be new to anyone who’s read a book (or two or three) about the subject, it’s still a good job of dealing with a complicated subject. Mildly amusing

Review – Night of the Creeps

It came from the 80s! If you’ve got an itch for rubber leeches attacking lackwit teens with serious cases of mall head, this picture will scratch it. Mildly amusing

Review – End of Watch

I guess at this point audiences have become so accepting of shaky-cam crap that it no longer bothers anyone that the logic of the whole “found footage” thing has given way to “standard narrative storytelling only with really bad camerawork.” Robert Peña and Jake Gyllenhaal play cops just trying to do their jobs amid the urban (read: ethnic) squalor of South Central Los Angeles. The story is neither edifying nor interesting, but I guess I’ve seen worse cop movies. Mildly amusing

Review – The Little Mermaid

I could have sworn I reviewed this years ago. Well, problem rectified. The characters, story and songs are all typical Disney, so I found myself focusing on the animation quality. Highly inconsistent. The high points are on par with the work Chuck Jones did for The Incredible Mr. Limpet. But in other spots the art is weak and inconsistent. At least it’s a step up from the studio’s output in the 70s. Mildly amusing

Review – POE: Project of Evil

Of course POE could also stand for Piece of Excrement. Edgar Allen Poe’s poems and short stories are used as vague excuses to generate brain-dead torture porn. The result is an insult not only to Poe but to audience members in general. And though I concede that the actors speak English better than I speak Italian, it’s a near thing. Even if it hurt rentals, they should have stuck to their native tongue and subtitled it. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Young Lions

I have trouble putting movies like this in their proper historical context. From my 21st century viewpoint, this is a parade of clichés. Our three heroes (Montgomery Clift, Dean Martin and Marlon Brando) are a gentle-yet-stubborn nerd who becomes a war hero, a singer who wants to be treated like the rest of the soldiers, and a brash German officer suffering pangs of conscience. But I wonder if this wasn’t somewhat more groundbreaking back in 1958. In any event, the story has enough twists and turns to sustain the running time. I’ve seen plenty of World War Two movies way worse than this. Mildly amusing

Review – Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy

If you’re a big Freddy Krueger fan, you’re in more than three hours worth of the right place. Who knew the Nightmare on Elm Street series could generate this much trivia? Some of it even manages to be interesting (assuming you’ve got any interest in the subject). Mildly amusing

Review – The Secret Village

I note that as camcorder technology improves, idiot-with-a-camcorder productions look a little more professional. Now if only a tech company somewhere could invent a box that could write scripts. This is a particularly tedious piece about a journalist dealing with hostile locals while on the trail of a centuries-old theory about mass hallucinations and witch trials. The twist at the end is so blatantly telegraphed that they could have replaced it with a card that said “insert obvious conclusion here.” See if desperate

Review – Twisted Tales

Screenwriter Tom Holland has a vaguely impressive list of credits, including the original Fright Night and the first Chucky movie. But if this mess is any indication, at some point he must have suffered some kind of Gary-Busey-esque brain injury. The IMDb notes are vague, but I’m guessing these vignettes were originally produced for web distribution and only later strung together into a DVD. I was somewhat taken with the acting, because it’s rare to see professional actors (including a few recognizable faces) so freely mixed with total amateurs who can barely deliver their lines. The scripts, on the other hand, are uniformly dreadful. The “Pizza Guy” segment was particularly excruciating, though that may just have been because it lasted longer than most of the others. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Storming Juno

This Canadian D-Day docudrama isn’t as slick as Saving Private Ryan, but at least it isn’t as long as The Longest Day. Still, it manages to compete handily in the “parade of Greatest Generation war movie clichés” department. It’s nice for our neighbors to the north to get some recognition for their contributions to one of World War Two’s pivotal battles. Beyond that, however, this is well-trampled ground. Mildly amusing

Review – The World’s End

I’ll paraphrase another reviewer writing about another Simon Pegg movie: if you like Simon Pegg movies, odds are you’ll like this. And why not? Every time he teams up with Nick Frost, they make the same picture. So if you know you like McNuggets, well, you know where to go and what to order. The only odd thing about this go-around is that it takes more than half an hour to even hint at transformation from a boring old-chums-trying-to-relive-their-carefree-drinking-days tale into a more typical blend of slapstick and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. When the actual story finally does get underway, it’s vaguely entertaining for a few minutes before the sci fi angle also becomes dull. See if desperate

Review – The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box

I’m trying to think of any vaguely Verne-y bit of Victorian sci fi that turned into a big financial success. I could at least respect the effort if they were doing it for the love of storytelling (though I admit whoever made this likes this kind of story better than I do). But the end is such an obvious sequel set-up that clearly expectations were higher for box office returns (or DVD rentals or instant views or however success of such ventures is measured now). Mildly amusing

Review – Apartment 1303

Tedious ghost story. The acting is okay and the production values are good (thank goodness no found footage crap). But the script is weak, exploiting the same shocks over and over, never really progressing much beyond the bare bones of a haunted apartment tale. See if desperate

Review – Pompeii

I was disappointed by this production, which is saying something because I wasn't expecting all that much from it. On the plus side, the Vesuvius effects were a ton of fun. Sadly, they were squandered on a movie made mostly of cheesy romance, plot points that came out of nowhere as if scenes had gone missing, big chunks shamelessly lifted from Gladiator, and Kieffer Sutherland doing what sounds vaguely like an English accent. This moment in history deserves a better re-enactment. Mildly amusing

Review – Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2

I’m always nervous at the start of the sequels to popular animated movies; often they prove to be low budget attempts to cash in on the “kids will watch anything” theory. So I was pleased to find that they put an appropriate effort into this production. I thought the environmentalism was spread a little thick (even though I certainly sympathize with the message). But otherwise this was goofy fun on par with the first movie. Mildly amusing

Review – The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

And here the weak spots in Jackson's expansion of Tolkein start to show. I'm not enough of a purist to automatically object to new characters and subplots. However, I didn't particularly enjoy the extended video-game-ization of the story. For example, the famous barrel escape scene becomes a drawn-out orc/dwarf/elf battle that looks and feels like the Playstation version of a water slide. On the other hand, when the production settles down and tells a story, it's as good as any other picture in the Hobbit/LOTR series. After watching the first two sets of Sherlock, I particularly enjoyed the dialogue between Martin Freeman (Bilbo Baggins) and Benedict Cumberbatch (Smaug). Mildly amusing

Review – Banshee Chapter

Y’know, just the other day I was wondering what might have happened if Hunter S. Thompson tuned a short wave radio to a numbers station and then took a massive dose of DMT created by the CIA back in the MK-ULTRA days using extractions from the pineal glands of corpses. And now here we have the answer: transdimensional monsters use everyone who takes the drug as a gateway to enter our world. This indie production mixes up an impressive batch of ingredients but then fails to bake it into a cake. A more coherent story would have been a real plus. Mildly amusing

Review – All Hallows’ Eve

The advantage to anthology pieces is that if you hate one of the segments, at least it will be over in less-than-feature-length time. But then if all three segments and the bracket are amateurish, grainy gorefests, the experience is pretty much the same as watching a single, feature-length piece of crap. If you’re scared of clowns, this should terrify you at least as much as an episode of Howdy Doody. Otherwise the only way you’ll get any joy out of the experience is if you’re excited by cheap gore and screaming women. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – You’re Next

Here’s the next entry in the family-in-an-isolated-house-beseiged-by-killers-in-masks thing. A couple of “clever” plot twists don’t magically transform this into anything other than a nerve-grating gore fest. See if desperate

Review – Black Forest

SyFy digs up the creepy roots of well-known fairy tales and turns them into a typically half-baked horror movie. A group of random tourists gets trapped in a strange world where old folk tales are real and homicidal. See if desperate

Review – Odd Thomas

Odd movie, especially from Mummy director Stephen Sommers. The story – based on a comic book series – closely resembles The Frighteners: a guy who can see ghosts battles evil spirits and serial killers. It’s entertaining in a self-consciously quirky way. Mildly amusing

Review – The Unnamable 2

Because after I loved The Unnamable so much, why wouldn’t I watch the sequel? Oddly, they did manage to stir tiny bits of Yog Sothery in every once in awhile. But for the most part this was two softcore porn actors (one in a rubber suit, the other in a Lady Godiva wig) duking it out in an uninteresting battle between good and evil. See if desperate

Review – Frozen

Obviously this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I honestly don't see what all the fuss is about. This is a perfectly entertaining Disney animation, but I didn't think it was particularly better than the studio's typical product. But apparently I'm in the minority, as this was a runaway box office hit. It's cute. It's fun. But every once in awhile I found myself outside the pure fantasy of it all. For example, I couldn't watch one of the two female protagonists use magic to whip up a spectacular ice castle without wondering how she would get the plumbing to work. Mildly amusing

Review – Devil’s Pass

Typically the found footage approach to horror storytelling doesn't really ruin much. It sucks (hard to look at, places harsh restrictions on plots, overused beyond all excuse), but it doesn't exactly damage a picture that wasn't going to be anything more than a mediocre ghost story under the best of circumstances. This tale, on the other hand, might have been really good if not subjected to some really bad filmmaking. A typical wad of young Americans goes in search of clues about the disappearance of a team of Soviet scientists, uncovering some creepy stuff in the process. See if desperate

Review – Insidious 2

Second verse, same as the first. See if desperate

Review – G.I. Joe: Retaliation

Here's another strangely audience-free picture. It's too juvenile for adult moviegoers (even action movie fans). But it's packed with too much graphic violence and foul language for the traditional pre-teen G.I. Joe market. I should admit that I don't follow the whole Joe thing closely enough to have the necessary level of familiarity with the characters. Oh, and my opinion of Bruce Willis is a matter of substantial public record. Still, I've seen worse brain dead war movies. See if desperate

Review – Scary Movie 3

Netflix placed this prominently in the “new arrivals” section as if it was a big deal. That’s an odd decision, as anyone immature enough to find this amusing probably isn’t old enough to remember the movies it parodies (the two main targets are The Ring and Signs). Though it’s clearly a relic of its time, folks who liked the first two may get a snicker out of this as well. See if desperate

Review – A Fistful of Dollars

Yojimbo gets a Spaghetti Western makeover in this first collaboration between Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone. Like its Japanese predecessor, the action scenes are excellent but some of the slow spots really drag. Mildly amusing

Review – Despicable Me 2

Not as cute as the first one, but still quite entertaining. The filmmakers have clearly figured out that the Minions are the main draw, but there’s enough of Gru and the girls to keep the story stuck together. Production values remain high. Mildly amusing

Review – Monsters University

This is an apt prequel to Monsters Inc. The story takes us back to Mike and Sully’s college days, serving up a predictable arc of rivals-to-best-friends. I was particularly pleased that they didn’t skimp on the animation quality at all. Indeed, the production here is even more sophisticated than the first movie. It’s good to see Disney continue to distance itself from the horrible sequels it used to churn out. Mildly amusing

Review – Despicable Me

One of the greatest challenges facing the creators – especially the writers – of kids’ movies is coming up with ways to keep them from getting way too treacly. One possible solution: make the bad guy the main character. In this production, a supervillain trying to outdo a rival adopts three orphaned girls as part of a scheme to infiltrate his competitor’s lair. Our antihero’s transformation from evil genius to loving dad follows predictable paths, but it’s still an entertaining story. The animation is good. And of course the Minions steal the show. Maybe I was just in an unusually good mood when I saw this, but I found it a fun experience. Mildly amusing

Review – Captain Phillips

Though I was probably supposed to spend the second half of this movie on the edge of my seat waiting to see what would happen next, instead I remained comfortably reclined and ran numbers in my head. Somali pirates kidnap the captain of a cargo ship and demand $10 million. In response the Navy dispatches two destroyers, a small carrier and a SEAL team. Mightn’t haggling with the pirates have been cheaper? And if the counter-argument is that this response deters other pirates (unavailing in a part of the world where career options are often limited to “crime” and “starvation”), extend the question farther. Why are American taxpayers footing the bill to clean up a mess that might have been avoided in the first place if shipping companies would stop supplying vessels transporting millions of dollars in goods with less security than your bank’s local branch office? The dubious economics dovetail with the absurd twists of events to turn this into a farce, which makes it a shame that it was directed by a guy who specializes in Bourne sequels. See if desperate

New this week - A lot of bad movies

And last week. And the week before. They weren’t all terrible. Just most of them.

• Pacific Rim
• The Croods 
• Iron Man 3 
• Man of Steel  
• Carrie (2013) 
• Augustus 
• Last Stand 
• The Lone Ranger 
• Emperor 

On the brighter side, I finished reading a good book: Photojojo!

Review – Emperor

Here’s a closer look at the question of victors’ justice in post-WW2 Japan. General Bonner Fellers (Matthew Fox) must decide if Emperor Hirohito should be tried (and likely hanged) for war crimes. As is sadly usual for such stories, the plot is complicated by our hero’s love for a local woman. Otherwise, however, this is a reasonably compelling tale of slaughter and politics. Mildly amusing

Review – The Lone Ranger

Once again Gore Verbinski cranks out a movie you can see without actually seeing. Just imagine Pirates of the Caribbean with the pirate tropes unplugged and Western tropes installed in their place. The clichés and random silliness are spread so thick that the picture becomes an act of self parody; I’m a little surprised we weren’t treated to a scene reminding us where the title character takes his trash. They do a better job than the Lone Ranger of yesteryear at dealing with racism and injustice inflicted on Native Americans, though even that comes across as self-conscious. The thing that probably killed this with audiences was the script’s stubborn refusal to tell any kind of coherent story. Either that or people are finally getting tired of big budget Johnny Depp action comedies. Nah, gotta be the script. See if desperate

Review – Last Stand

High Noon gets a noisy new twist as not-aging-gracefully Arnold Schwarzenegger and his band of misfit deputies square off against a Corvette-driving drug dealer and an army of mercenaries. Stuff blows up. People get shot. Hero and villain spend what seems like a really long time driving around in a cornfield. You get what you paid for. Mildly amusing

Review – Augustus

Here’s a grim trudge down the familiar road of Augustus Caesar’s biography. This isn’t smart enough to be interesting or gross enough to be entertaining. Nor does it have enough content to justify its three-hour running time. See if desperate

Review – Carrie (2013)

What a disappointment. Chloe Grace Moretz has done good work elsewhere, and I was looking forward to seeing the lead in this familiar Stephen King tale played by an actual teenager. Sadly, she comes across as less of a high school outsider and more of a general dimwit, an angle that makes the character less sympathetic than she should be. The production’s good technical quality is largely undone by the aura of dumb teen drama. Though I’ve seen worse, I’ve also seen better. Mildly amusing

Review – Man of Steel

As I watched the latest reboot of a long-familiar story, I found myself distracted by comparisons between this outing and the Christopher Reeve version from 1978. The script and visuals of the 21st century go-around are a great deal more sophisticated, quite a departure from the moral-ambiguity-free Superman of yore. I was surprised that a Zack Snyder production sported plot twists worthy of J.J. Abrams, though overall the movie stuck close enough to genre conventions to pass as a standard action movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Iron Man 3

Each successive effort in this series becomes more Tony Stark intensive. Frankly, I would have gone in the other direction. I find the armor and the explosions a great deal more entertaining than a rich alcoholic’s personal demons. Although I had little interest in the characters, the battles were enough to keep me watching. Mildly amusing

Review – The Croods

I spent my childhood in the age of Goofus and Gallant, a time when media aimed at kids were expected to be educational and morally uplifting. I’d hoped that the farther we got past the hippie days the more movie studios would be able to relax and focus on entertaining storytelling. But if this production is any indication, the exact opposite is occurring. A computer programmed with a transactional-analysis-intensive psychology text could have written this dull-witted tale of cavepersons adapting to new circumstances. Some of the animation was cute, but that wasn’t enough to sustain the movie’s running time. See if desperate

Review – Pacific Rim

Well, that was noisy. Effects are the main draw for this extended tag team wrestling match between giant monsters and giant robots. Clearly the studio spent a lot of money on this, but the result plays like an extra-long episode of Johnny Sokko. Mildly amusing

New this week - Metamorphoses

Not a ton of new content this week. Indeed, the only movie I saw was I, Frankenstein, noteworthy only because it’s the first time in awhile that I’ve made it to a movie theater.

However, fans of The Metamorphoses Project will be happy to note that I finally managed to add the content from last year (both spring and fall). The project is now up to 23 images (four of which are my creations).

Review – I, Frankenstein

Just try to summarize the plot of this movie without sounding like a dim-witted seven year old. Gargoyles and demons are having a war and the demons are trying to win by bringing dead bodies back to life and filling them with demons only then Frankenstein shows up and at first the gargoyles kidnap him but then they give him magic whupping sticks and he starts killing demons until ... see what I mean? Director Stuart Beattie is known primarily for screenwriting, so I’m a bit surprised he’d go to work with a script this bad. Though the action sequences were reasonably well assembled, I found myself constantly distracted by questions such as “if all you mighty supernatural beings are trying to keep your war hidden from humanity, should you really be rampaging through the middle of a city knocking the roofs off buildings and making demons pop like Fourth of July fireworks?” See if desperate

Review – The Bell Witch Haunting

Found footage movies and Amityville Horror reheats don’t make a good combination. As if anyone was really curious about that. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Raven (2012)

My big curiosity about this picture was how they’d spin a short, grim poem into a two-hour-long movie. The answer, of course, is that they didn’t bother trying. The picture has little do to with “The Raven,” instead creating a highly fictionalized Poe helping the Baltimore PD track down a serial killer who steals his modi operandi from the author’s tales. This is a slick production; someone spent a lot of money on it and got a reasonably good return on his investment. Mildly amusing

Review – Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters

Wow, does this movie ever spend a lot of time tap dancing around some uncomfortable topics. Almost right from the start the production labors awkwardly to draw lines between its comic book monster hunting and the all too real evil of Europe’s infamous witch hunts. And yet the filmmakers appear not to have learned history’s lessons. The line between “good witches” and “bad witches” here separates young, athletic, conventionally attractive people from goths, loners, the elderly and the physically differently abled. In other words, it’s a lot like the real genocidal crime spree that killed tens of thousands of people. History aside, this is an acceptably entertaining entry in the [familiar figure] versus [random monster] thing. See if desperate

Review – Bingo Long’s Traveling All Stars and Motor Kings

Baseball and civil rights: what’s not to love? I wish this movie had been made just a few years later, when meandering scriptlessness wasn’t quite so in vogue. Writing aside, this is a charming tale of a barnstorming baseball team’s attempts to make a living and have some fun in the days before Jackie Robinson. Worth seeing