Movie Reviews End of November 2018

Silent House (2011)


Director: Chris Kentis & Laura Lau


Notable Stars: None, although Elizabeth Olsen is a sister of the once-famous child actors the Olsen twins. She was cute.


Did I like it?: No. It was boring.


What I remember about it: Not much. It was a remake of a Uruguayan movie, of all things, which I'm sure was awesome. For some reason which was never clear to me the titular house that was being remodeled had no electricity and the windows were all boarded up with boards that were effectively impossible to wrench off so that if you misplaced your flashlight you were in complete darkness. I have no recollection of what happened in the movie.


I associate this with: The third movie in this set, maybe, but really nothing.

King of the Ants (2003)


Director: Stuart Gordon


Notable Stars: George Wendt; late-80s era MTV bimbo Kari Wuhrer


Did I like it?: In spite of the excessive violence, I am going to say yes. It held my interest.


What I remember: There is an interesting dynamic going in that this starts out like a 90s era Generation X slacker movie--aimless guy sleeping on a futon looking for odd jobs, the presence of at least the 2 actors named above in an apparent indie movie--and then it transitions rather abruptly into the more sinister, ruthless, dystopian cinematic world that has been familiar to audiences since around this time. The George Wendt character is introduced as the kind of schlumpfy, house painter type guy that you would expect a 90s era George Wendt character to be, but he turns out to be a brutal, sadistic administer of violence, and a good one. He also wears t-shirts and shorts throughout so you can see how enormous he is, which is considerably more so than I had realized previously. I don't like Kari Wuhrer even though I find her alluring, which is unusual with me. She radiates bitchiness, which in itself of course is not an admissible criticism anymore in itself, but she doesn't compensate for this by ever being witty or incisive or any fun at all, so what's the point?


I associate this with: Some combination of Quentin Tarantino meets Kevin Smith meets Traffic meets whoever the big 21st century nihilists are in a dystopian California.

The Others (2001)


Director: Alejandro Amenabar


Notable Stars: Nicole Kidman. Christopher Eccleston, who has appeared in a couple of things that have been written up on this blog.


Did I like it? No. It's another movie full of scary weird people or people-like entities who obviously have something off about them. Not my type of film.


What I remember: The house is very nice. It's set in Britain in the 1940s, but since the children who live in it cannot be exposed to sunlight this is another movie that takes place largely in the dark, which having just seen Silent House was a plot device I was already weary of. This was a good example of how I have a hard time discerning by the style of filmmaking or theme in what year many movies since around 2000 were made, especially period pieces that don't give themselves away by what technology the characters have. By the time it came in the mail I had forgotten it was on the list or what year it was from, and I thought it was a relatively new movie. As such I found myself thinking throughout that Nicole Kidman, who I believe is older than I am (she is--she is 51 now, which would have made her 33 at the time this was filmed), looked remarkably good, and that the 1940s era hairstyle she was sporting really worked for her compared to the usual way of she wears her hair. It did not occur to me that the movie was actually 20 years old until I looked it up.


I associate this with: Everything wrong with modern movies. The production values are lush and beautiful, but the result is lifeless and unsatisfying.

Imitation of Life (1959)

Director: Douglas Sirk

Notable Stars: Lana Turner; Sandra Dee; Mahalia Jackson. Juanita Moore, who played Lana Turner's black maid, is much lauded for her role in this, for which she received an Oscar nomination. I have to admit I had never heard of her before this, though.

Did I like it? I think I like All That Heaven Allows better among the Douglas Sirk oeuvre, but compared to all the more recent stuff I've been making myself watch, this was like cultural oxygen.

What I remember: Personally I found it somewhat uneven and clunky. Sirk has come back in fashion  to a certain degree, but I don't always find that whatever it is people like about him overcomes his well-documented shortcomings, such as the extreme artificiality and heavy-handedness of his movies. This film is an adaptation of a novel by Fannie Hurst, a book which I have not read, though I did read another of her novels, Back Street, which is one of the most relentlessly depressing books I can recollect reading, though one which admittedly tackles some often overlooked subject matter. I wrote about it on my other blog. This story has a similar unsentimental and pessimistic underpinning though proximate to and in this instance even achieving a certain degree of worldly success. The most memorable storyline involves Juanita Moore's mulatto daughter who wants to pass as white once she becomes a teenager and is consequently resentful of her mother and wants nothing to do with her, though the mother has devoted her entire life to her. I have always been rather cold to my own mother in a similar way over the years, and have always wanted nothing more than to get away from her, because of my various unhappinesses with regard to my own social status and popularity and education level. I don't exactly believe that my failures in these areas were her fault, but she would never acknowledge, or more probably had no idea how serious and angry I was about them, and in any event she was incapable of doing anything that might improve my relative standing in any of these areas. Most people would say that at this point of my life I would have been able to move past this but no, I haven't, or at least do not want to. I may have come to some amount of peace with who I am now, but I have not been able to do the same with what I was in the important, formative years of my life. Anyway I have gotten away from the movie. The appearance of Mahalia Jackson was a highlight, and a surprise.    

I associate this with: Nothing, really. It doesn't specifically remind me of anything else.

Wilderness (2006)

Director: Michael J. Bassett

Notable stars: No one I am familiar with.

Did I like it? No. It's a British movie, and I think they have an even more dystopian view of life in the 21st century than we do.

What I remember: It's about a bunch of juvenile delinquents sent to a remote island which is already inhabited by other criminals, and in the ensuing conflict almost everyone dies by some kind of extreme violence. The dialogue does not share any lineage with the fizzy British stage  tradition either. I remember people being killed every few minutes, ambushes, things being burned, 2 girls being on the island among about 20 or 30 guys and one of them having sex, which I think was sort of consensual, in that she seems to picked a favorite out of the crowd, though abstinence probably would not have been a option. I was not into this. I am watching more of these modern movies to try to get a more nuanced understanding of what's going on in the present day world of my own adulthood. They are by and large not helping me.

I associate this with: Fish Tank, modern British crime shows emphasizing the psychological and physical hellscape that apparently a lot of people think England has become.

We're a long way from Stolen Kisses.

The Train (1964)

Director: John Frankenheimer

Notable Stars: Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, Jeanne Moreau. Now these are movie stars.

Did I like it? Of course. I cheated a little here, since I watched this and wrote about it for the blog back around 2010-11, and I have a policy generally about not repeating myself. However as I had watched it on VHS on that earlier occasion, and as it came available after sitting in my "saved" Netflix queue for the better part of a decade I took advantage of the opportunity to see it again. It does feature Nazis and there are firing squads and bullets to the head and crowds sprayed with machine gun fire and all of the well worn associations of the 2nd World War, so to criticize the other movies for their fixation on murder and blood while enjoying the wartime body count in this one because I find it more aesthetically to my taste seems not wholly consistent. The 1964 take on World War II does nod at least to the former existence of a fairly advanced civilization and the continued existence of individual people who have some such idea as a reference point, which saves films of this type from just being pointless demonstrations of depraved man's savage butchery without any redeeming higher qualities, which is how I experience these more modern movies.

What I remember: As I noted before, I love all of the old European railroad stuff, the stations, the yards, the iron and steel and grinding wheels, the little offices with their wooden file cabinets and their coffeepots. This was filmed in France and while my memory of that country is that much of the railroading scene had been modernized and suburbanized by the 90s, the aesthetic in Eastern Europe, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, et al, was still similar to that depicted in this movie. The France presented here, while still somewhat romanticized, is nonetheless done so in a grimier and more elemental way than it is usually presented, especially by Americans. I even like Jeanne Moreau here, who in her immortal ur-French art movie roles is usually a little too complicated and lofty for me to appreciate.

I associate this with: Closely Watched Trains (for the railroad connection). I have not seen a lot of the classic World War II action movies that were ubiquitous in this era, to which family I imagine this movie belongs somewhat. They must not be rated very high.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)

Director: Chris Columbus     

Notable Stars: You probably know.

Did I like it? Maybe it is because I have children and have been overexposed to them, but it seems that, in part because of the popularity of this series, there are so many movies like this now, and to me this didn't stand out from any of the other hundreds of kids' fantasy movies that have been released during the last 20 years. Ho hum. But obviously it is beloved by people of a certain age.

What I remember: There is a school story, and traditionally I have liked school stories. Maybe it is a generation gap problem, but the characters in this world do not grab me. Nor do I have any interest in the problems they face. The story isn't beautiful, or poignant, or profound, that I can see, and an air of self-satisfaction and arch runs through it that I find annoying.

I associate this with: Every carefully formulated kids' series of the last 20 years.