Mini Reviews: 7/7/14

The Day the Earth Stood Still:  1951 science fiction movie directed by Robert Wise and starring Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Billy Gray, Hugh Marlowe, and Sam Jaffe.  A flying saucer lands in D.C., and the government is understandably freaked.  When a humanoid figure emerges with a message of peace, a twitchy soldier shoots him.  He’s taken to Walter Reed Hospital, where he announces that his name is Klaatu and that he has a notice that affects the entire world and must be allowed to speak to all major political leaders at once.  This is vetoed by the President’s secretary, and he’s placed under armed guard.  He escapes and takes up lodging at a boarding house while his giant robot stands menacing sentinel at the spaceship.  He spends the next few days befriending people, learning how Earthlings think and act – so this will totally end well, right?

                  It’s definitely worth seeing once.  I didn’t know too much about it before I watched it, which helped.  Despite its age and now well-worn sci fi tropes it wasn’t what I had expected and was unpredictable enough to keep me engaged.

Friday the 13^th Part 2:  1981 American horror movie directed by Steven Miner and starring Amy Steel, John Furey, and Adrienne King.  It’s been five years since a brutal massacre occurred at Camp Crystal Lake.  An enterprising young man has decided to open another summer camp nearby, and has recruited your average amalgam of Camp Counselor Archetypes to join him.  As they gather for training before the camp’s official opening they are warned by the local crazy oracle that there’s trouble on them thar’ shores!  Sure enough, Jason Vorhees shows up and misbehaving teens start dying off like flies.

                  I was never into this franchise in my youth, and really only started watching them because I felt like I should.  It’s fine.  It’s your average 1980s teen slasher flick.  I much preferred the first movie.

The East:  2013 thriller directed by Zal Batmanglij and starring Brit Marling, Alexander Skarsgard, Ellen Page, Toby Kebbell, Shiloh Fernandez, Julia Ormond, Patricia Clarkson, Josh Ritter, Aldis Hodge, and Hillary Baack.  Jan (Marling) is an operative at a private intelligence firm.  She has been tasked with infiltrating The East, an underground anarchist organization that is threatening the firm’s corporate clients.  As Jan gets deeper and deeper into her assignment she starts to develop an ambivalence towards her job, her lifestyle, her boyfriend, everything.  And she is drawn deeper into their world by The East’s magnetic leader, Benji (Skarsgard).

I frequently watch movies that I like.  Occasionally I’ll find something that I like like.  Rarely do I love a movie.  But this?  I would marry this movie.  I would have babies with this movie.  I would grow old and retire and buy a fake adobe cottage in Sedona with this movie.  So yeah, I don’t want to oversell it but HOLY FUCK you guys.  The story is compelling, the acting is exquisite, the characters are multidimensional and empathetic, and the bittersweet ending is appropriate.  There are so many little moments and tiny details to appreciate; like when Izzy (Page) confronts a new corporate target, a man she has a personal connection to – her eyes flash up and it just hits you in the gut.  You must see it.

Somm:  2013 documentary directed by Jason Wise, which follows four men as they prepare for the master sommelier exam.  A sommelier, or “somm” in the vernacular, is a wine expert.  They typically work in fine restaurants or with collectors and are involved with purchasing, storage, cellar rotation, the development of the wine list and recommended pairings.  A Master Sommelier diploma gets you serious cred in the food world and a HUGE pay-bump – all you have to do is learn literally everything about wine.  In the 40-plus years since the Master Sommelier was introduced, 214 people have earned a diploma.  That’s about four people per year.  And so we watch Ian, Dustin, Brian, and DLynn drill and practice and memorize to pass the grueling three-part exam: theory examination (every fact there is to know about wine), service (salesmanship, pairing, dealing with asshole patrons), and the blind taste test (name the grape, region, vineyard, and year).

I barely care about wine and still found it fascinating.  It’s beautifully shot, nicely paced, and I found myself rooting for these Type-A dudes – well, most of them.  The fact that it was all guys and that the girlfriends and wives were presented as long-suffering worriers did get a bit old at times.  Still, definitely worth seeing.

Skyfall:  2012 James Bond movie directed by Sam Mendes and starring Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Albert Finney, and Ben Winshaw.  MI6 is under attack from a former agent with a serious chip on his shoulder.  That’s pretty much all you need to know.  This is my favorite of the Craig-era Bond films so far.  I found it more interesting than Casino Royale or Quantum of Solace – mostly because they’ve sort of blurred together.  Bardem was brilliant, and I love Naomie Harris and hope she sticks with the franchise.  Winshaw as the new Q was irksomely cocky at first but he grew on me.  It was a bit heavy-handed with the whole meditation on aging theme but at least it acknowledged it?  See it.

 

Mini Reviews: 6/18/14

Dead Fall: 2012 crime drama directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky and starring Eric Bana, Olivia Wilde, Charlie Hunnam, Kate Mara, Sissy Spacek, and Kris Kristofferson.  Addison (Bana) and Liza (Wilde) are siblings on the lam after a casino heist, and when their car crashes and a run-in with a state trooper goes sour they decide to split up and meet in Canada.  So Addison heads off into the frozen woods, and Liza is picked up hitchhiking by Jay (Hunnam), who has just been released from prison.  Sparks fly, and suddenly Liza’s creepy attachment to her brother/father figure is thrown into question.  Meanwhile, state troopers are closing in on both siblings, and a confrontation looms.

                  It was decent.  I was drawn to it for the Hunnam and the Spacek and the Mara of it all, and they did not disappoint.  I still don’t get why everyone is so nuts about Olivia Wilde, but she was fine.  There were no major twists, a few unbelievable but forgivable turns, it didn’t annoy me, and dear god Charlie Hunnam.  Just damn.

Iron Man:  2008 action movie directed by Jon Favreau and starring Robert Downey, Jr., Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Shaun Toub.  Tony Stark, the charismatic head of the defense contractor Stark Industries, is in Afghanistan showing off some fun new missiles when he’s kidnapped by the terrorist group Ten Rings.  He’s injured in the process, and a fellow prisoner grafts an electromagnet to Stark’s chest to keep shrapnel shards from penetrating his heart.  When he’s well enough, Ten Rings demand he build weapons for them.  Instead he creates this fancy arc reactor for his heart and a suit of robotic armor, escapes, and wrecks all their shit.  When he returns home he decides to shift his company away from the arms trade, much to his partner’s chagrin.  He retires to his personal workshop and improves the suit, just in time to fight another battle with Ten Rings, but now he has an angry board of trustees and the U.S. government on his ass.  Being an entrepreneurial genius playboy must be so tiring, right?

                  It’s pretty cute; a serviceable action movie with good exposition and impressive action sequences.  The chemistry between RDJ and Paltrow rings true and the character of Tony Stark is sufficiently charming yet vulnerable enough to keep one engaged when things start to drag.

Iron Man 2:  2010 action movie directed by Jon Favreau and starring Robert Downey, Jr., Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sam Rockwell, Mickey Rourke and Scarlett Johansson.  It’s six months later, Stark has come out as Iron Man, the Armed Forces are salivating (and holding congressional hearings) over the thought of getting their bureaucratic hands on the technology, the palladium core in the arc reactor that’s keeping Stark alive is also slowly poisoning him, and a Russian with terrible hair has a serious vendetta and is looking for a robot-suit-on-robot-suit showdown.  Plus ScarJo.

                  Second verse, same as the first.  I think I liked this one a little more.  Rourke pulls off the scheming, crazy scientist thing rather well, Johansson is a badass, and I was surprised but not disappointed with the Cheadle-Howard switcheroo.  If you liked any of the Avengers-related movies then give both of these a shot.

Child’s Play 2:  1990 horror movie directed by John Lafia and starring Alex Vincent, Christine Elise, Brad Dourif, Gerrit Graham, and Jenny Agutter.  In the first movie, a dying serial killer transferred his spirit into a doll, which young Andy Barclay then received as a gift from his mother.  The Chucky doll goes on a murderous rampage, set on transferring his spirit again into poor Andy.  The first movie ends (SPOILER!) with Chucky getting shot and theoretically killed by one of his former accomplices.  The sequel begins with Andy (Vincent) being adopted - his mother was locked up in a mental ward after testifying that Chucky was real.  He’s settling into life with his foster parents and new stepsister Kyle (Elise) when Chucky returns to exact revenge and start that whole spirit-transfer nonsense up again.

I haven’t seen the original since I was a kid, but I feel like this is fairly similar.  At this point the Child’s Play franchise takes on it’s slightly more comedic bent, so keep that in mind if you have strong feelings about the comedy horror subgenre.  I liked it, but largely because I liked the first movie and very much enjoy Christine Elise, who you may remember from such TV programs as Beverly Hills 90210 (Emily Valentine 4-EVA!) or ER.

Darkness Falls:  2003 horror movie directed by Jonathan Liebesman and starring Chaney Kley, Lee Cormie, and Emma Caulfield.  The sleepy Eastern Seaboard hamlet of Darkness Falls is home to the legend of the Tooth Fairy, a woman who was murdered by an angry mob and now returns as an angry ghost whenever a child in the town loses a tooth.  If you catch a glimpse of her you are cursed, and she will hunt you down with no regard for collateral damage.  When Kyle (Kley) was a teenager, he was unlucky enough to look upon her creepy visage and in her rampage the Tooth Fairy killed his mother.  Twelve years later, Caitlin (Caulfield) tracks Kyle down because her little brother has suddenly developed a severe phobia of the dark, and didn’t . . . wasn’t there . . . something about Kyle being carted off to a mental institution because of a similar thing?  Kyle reluctantly returns to Darkness Falls and discovers that young Michael (Cormie) has also been marked by the Tooth Fairy, who has been waiting to exact her vengeance on them both.

                  I realize that attempting to apply logic to a supernatural horror film is a fool’s errand, but there was a lot of stupid happening in this movie.  I don’t get the Tooth Fairy’s whole deal.  Does she just leave after she kills a kid who sees her?  And if Kyle has eluded her for this long does that mean she’s been hanging around for a decade?  Does she travel, or can she only kill within county limits?  And the whole threat in this movie (her ability to kill only in the dark) seems to be possible only due to the convergence of a thunderstorm and this town’s shitty wiring.  It’s fine, but a little boring.  I mostly watched it because I love Emma Caulfield.  It might be nice to revisit around Halloween if I need something mindless to watch.  Maybe don’t go to great lengths to seek it out.

Mini Reviews: 6/11/14

First Circle:  2010 documentary about the American foster care system directed by Heather Rae.  It centers mostly on children being removed from homes with meth labs in Idaho.   It was interesting, but perhaps too narrow in focus.  There was a lot I didn’t know about the foster care system – babysitters and sleepover require background checks, and even haircuts have to be approved – but it felt like just dipping a toe in.  I wish there had been more, but it was decent.

The World’s End:  2013 sci fi comedy directed by Edgar Wright and starring Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan, Rosamund Pike, and Pierce Brosnan.  As teenagers, Gary King and his chums attempted and failed at an epic 12-stop pub crawl known as the Golden Mile.  Now in his late 30s, Gary hasn’t really moved on – I mean, he’s still wearing his Sisters of Mercy T-shirt – while the other boys have grown into responsible, relatively sober adults.  He convinces/guilts the old gang into taking another shot at the Golden Mile, but when they arrive back in their hometown it seems a lot has changed.  The townsfolk seem strangely . . . robotic?  Soon their pub crawl turns into a night of reopening emotional wounds, revisiting past crushes, and, you know, fighting for survival.

            It was really good, but my least favorite of the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy (the other two being Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz).  The acting is brilliant – Frost and Pegg continue to impress me.  And Eddie Marsan is just fantastic; he’s been given smallish roles in blockbuster movies like the Sherlock Holmes redux with RDJ, but he shines brightest in smaller films like this.  The scene where he’s confronted by his former bully was an emotional sucker punch and it just made me so happy to see him with enough of a role to stretch his legs.  Anyway definitely see it, but be prepared for it to fizzle out at the end.

The Grey:  2011 thriller directed by Joe Carnahan and starring Liam Neeson, Frank Grillo, and Dermot Mulroney.  John is a solitary, melancholy hunter at an arctic oil drilling site, literally keeping the wolves at bay while working side by side with guys he describes as “men unfit for mankind” – fugitives, roughnecks, drifters, and the like.  During a flight back home the company plane crashes, and he has to get his fellow survivors organized if they're going to make it back to civilization and fend off the wolf pack that's closing in on them.

It wasn’t what I had expected.  At all.  There’s a lot of waxing philosophical about death, religion, and family.  It was better than I thought it would be, but not amazing and fairly predictable.  Maybe give it a shot if you’re looking for an action movie filled with bearded men scrapping in the hinterlands and talking about atheism.

The Last Days of Disco:  1998 dark ensemble comedy directed by Whit Stillman and starring Kate Beckinsale, Chloe Sevigny, Chris Eigeman, Mackenzie Astin, Matt Keeslar, Jennifer Beals, and Robert Sean Leonard.  Alice and Charlotte are twenty-something’s in early 1980s New York, working at a publishing house together, living in an apartment together, going to awful clubs together, and secretly competing with each other while surrounded by Wall Street assholes and Studio 54 assholes and whatever.

I kind of hated it.  Charlotte (Beckinsale) is an insufferable human being, and Alice (Sevigny) has no personality and no spine.  Was I supposed to empathize with these people?  I only kept watching because I hoped something awful would happen to them.  But instead I had to sit through a series of endless speeches delivered flatly by shitty characters.  Eigeman as the lady-killing scoundrel Des is the only redeeming part of this movie, and only because he provided occasional comic relief.  It was depressing and pointless and you shouldn’t bother.

I can't even look at you in that dress.

 

Tonight You’re Mine (a.k.a. You Instead):  2011 romantic comedy directed by David MacKenzie and starring Luke Treadaway, Natalia Tena, Mathew Baynton, and Gavin Mitchell.  Adam and Morello are lead singers in two bands performing at T in the Park, a Scottish music festival. When their initial meeting immediately turns into a tiff, a passing preacher decides it would be cute to handcuff them to each other.  Now they have to get their bickering in check long enough to find someone who can remove the handcuffs, all while dealing with their significant others, performing, and handling band conflict and drunk managers.  Will they learn to cooperate?

            Despite my aversion to music festivals (too hot, too loud, too many people) and the fact that it’s REALLY predictable, I still liked it quite a bit.  Tena, who you may recognize from her role as Nymphadora Tonks in the Harry Potter movie series, is always a delight.  And the skinny indie electropop front man character suits Treadaway nicely.  Give it a try.

Mini Reviews: 5/31/14

The Lady Vanishes:  1938 thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas, and May Whitty.  Young Iris is waiting with her fellow passengers to board a train through pre-war Europe when she receives a severe bump on the noggin.  She’s helped into her car by the sweet, elderly Miss Froy, who she shares a cup of tea and a nice conversation with before blacking out.  When she comes to she can’t find Miss Froy, and everyone else on the train claims they've never seen her.  She enlists the help of a charmingly caddish musician named Gilbert, who agrees to help her solve the mystery – and perhaps save all their lives.

                  It’s a great early Hitchcock movie, slightly lighter on its feet than others.  Lockwood and Redgrave have a nice adversarial chemistry, there are plenty of twists and turns, and it involves just enough humor and weirdness to keep it from getting too dark.  It’s also the first film appearance of the British cricket-obsessed comic duo Charters & Caldicott, who you may remember if you’ve also seen Night Train to Munich, an indirect sequel to The Lady Vanishes.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service:  1969 Bond action film directed by Peter R. Hunt and starring George Lazenby, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas, Gabriele Ferzetti, and Ilse Steppat.  James Bond is on the trail of the nefarious Ernst Blofeld, the head of the international terrorist organization SPECTRE.  On a tip from his current paramour’s father, he gains entry to Blofeld’s clinical allergy research institute (okay . . .) by posing as a genealogist (sure . . .) who has come to secure Blofeld’s claim as a Count or Viscount or whatever.  Fine.  Bond quickly surmises that the lovely young female patients are being brainwashed at night in a plot to distribute biological weapons around the globe.  Also Diana Rigg is there.

It’s definitely the weirdest older-period Bond movie.  I’m a big fan of the Connery and Moore and Craig eras, and never had much use for the others.  I continue to stand firm in that feeling.  It’s too long, especially during the action sequences that have this strange frenetic desperation.  It was Lazenby’s only turn as Bond, which I completely understand because this movie is a hilarious mess.  The real bright spot for me was Telly Sevalas, who I totally buy as a smooth-talking mastermind but not an expert skier.

Sneakers:  1992 comedic/dramatic caper directed by Phil Alden Robinson and starring Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, Mary McDonnell, River Phoenix, Sidney Poitier, and David Strathairn.  Martin Bishop is a former hacktivist (shut up, it’s a perfectly cromulent word) who leads an unlikely team of security specialists that assist companies in beefing up their surveillance.  Martin is approached by the NSA and they offer to expunge his hacking record if he recovers a package from a mathematician.  His team succeeds, but when the mathematician is killed things go haywire and suddenly they don’t know who to trust – were those guys even with the NSA?  And could Martin’s former partner-in-hack be involved with all of this somehow?

                  It’s just delightful.  Kingsley can really pull off crazy, Dan Aykroyd’s nickname is Mother and it tickles me, Phoenix is adorable, Strathairn can pretty much do no wrong in my eyes, Donal Logan wears a white turtleneck under a cream blazer – I could go on.  It’s the height of early ‘90s spy heist caper excellence and you should definitely see it.

The Road:  2009 post-apocalyptic drama directed by John Hillcoat and starring Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, and Robert Duvall.  In an unspecified time after an unspecified cataclysmic world event a man and his son are on a meandering quest towards the South, and have to contend with thieves, hunger, cannibals, and roaming violent gangs.

I couldn’t finish it; it was just way too upsetting.  I gave it a shot because of Viggo, but after feeling nauseously stressed to the point of tears for the second time in 20 minutes I turned it off.  The book by Cormac McCarthy manages to be both heartbreaking and heartwarming, both uplifting and soul-crushing, and is one of the best books I’ve ever read seriously period.  It’s something I imagine is much harder to capture on film.  Skip it, and read the book.

 
The Jeffrey Dahmer Files:  2013 documentary about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, directed by Chris James Thompson.  It follows the last months in Dahmer’s life before he was arrested, and features interviews with a former neighbor and some of the officials who worked on the case.  I thought the dramatic reenactments were well done and for the most part spared the more gruesome specifics.  It’s fascinating – but I wouldn’t bother unless you have an interest in criminal psychology and can stomach the gory details of serial murder.

 

Mini Reviews: 2/17/14

The Bourne Legacy:  2012 action thriller directed by Tony Gilroy and starring Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Joan Allen, and Edward Norton.  Aaron Cross (Renner) is a field operative in a top-secret like totally super secret shouldn’t even be happening Department of Defense black ops program.  While he’s completing a training exercise in Alaska, a higher-up at DoD (Norton) realizes that the program is at risk of exposure, so the best solution would be to just kill everyone involved.  A drone is sent to kill Cross, but because he’s taking these fancy performance- and intelligence-enhancing pills he manages to escape.  He tracks down the last remaining biochemist who worked on the program (Weisz) and manages to save her from CIA assassins, but now they need to get their hands on more of those fancy pills before he goes into withdrawal and turns into a bumbling idiot.  Which won’t be great for their chances of survival.

            I liked it, and I like Renner as a Bourne-esque offshoot.  It’s a fairly good action movie, all in all.  And while I’m glad this reboot happened for the aforementioned reasons, it certainly wasn’t necessary.  So I’m torn.  It captured the feeling of the The Bourne Identity, without getting bogged down like the two sequels that followed it.  In order to understand Legacy, it would help to see the first movie and then skip the other two and then see this one.  Which is essentially the same movie with different characters.

The Collection:  2012 horror movie directed by Marcus Dunstan and starring Emma Fitzpatrick, Christopher McDonald, Lee Tergesen, and Josh Stewart.  A serial killer dubbed The Collector has kidnapped a young girl and her father recruits the killer’s only known surviving victim to track him down.  It’s a preposterous sketch of a movie.  It’s boring and too outlandish - not in an inventive way.  It seems to start midstream, and now that I know it’s a sequel that makes sense.  Perhaps if it had been more interesting I would have gone back to The Collector and then started this again, but that seems more effort than it would be worth.

Tabloid:  2010 documentary by Errol Morris, about Joyce McKinney’s bizarre tale of love and misunderstanding.  Or kidnapping.  You decide.  In 1975 McKinney met Kirk Anderson in Provo, Utah.  She was a blonde, buxom former Miss Wyoming; he was an upstanding young Mormon.  According to her they began a torrid romance, and his church whisked him off to the UK to keep them apart.  She found him, rescued him, and tried to break through the Mormon brainwashing with a weekend of wild, consensual sex.  According to the British tabloids (and Anderson, and the courts) she developed an infatuation with him that he did not reciprocate.  When he was sent to do his missionary work, she and a hired thug followed him, kidnapped him, and then she sexually assaulted him.  It’s a bizarre he-said/she-said that deals with the tabloid media, journalistic ethics, and the trustworthiness of seemingly emotionally unstable interview subjects.

Sadly, the documentary is not nearly as interesting as that synopsis makes it seem.  Anderson declined to be interviewed for the movie, so most of his side of the story is taken from former friends of McKinney’s and the newspapers.  And McKinney seems totally whack-a-doo, but does that mean she’s lying?  I found myself unable to side with either party totally, which in the end didn’t matter because I wasn’t really invested in the movie.  It was fine, but Morris has done far, far better.

Bully:  2011 documentary directed by Lee Hirsch about bullying in American schools.  It focuses on a slightly odd but very endearing 14 year-old boy named Alex; a girl called Kelby who is dealing with the fall-out after coming out as gay in a small Oklahoma town; and 14 year-old Ja’Meya, who was so fed up with being bullied that she pulled out a gun on a crowded school bus and is now facing 45 felony charges.  Surrounding these kids are terrified and frustrated parents, school administrators both clueless and helpless, and the bullies themselves. 

The Bully Project has now become a bit of a phenomenon, which is great.  It’s moving the issue forward.  I’m not happy that the filmmakers chose to gloss over the preexisting mental health issues of a boy named Tyler Long – who the movie asserts committed suicide solely because he was bullied, because I think that’s absolutely part of the larger conversation.  That being said, it’s definitely worth seeing.

It’s a deeply upsetting film, a great conversation starter, and pretty much universally relatable.  Everyone goes through this to varying degrees – be prepared for it to hit a nerve.

Chapter 27:  2007 drama directed by Jarrett Schaefer and starring Jared Leto and Lindsay Lohan, about the murder of John Lennon.  I was annoyed within the first three minutes.  While I appreciate Leto’s commitment to embodying Mark David Chapman with the weight gain and that horrible voice and the mannerisms, that’s about all the positive feeling I can muster for this.  The music seems desperate to make the movie quirky.  The narration is fucking terrible.  And though Lindsay Lohan seems so normal in this movie as to be shocking, her character is rather pointless.  She is apparently there to provide a human connection for Chapman, a reaching out from the universe towards this lonely, unbalanced man.  What total shit. 

Mini Reviews: 2/3/14

The Birds:  1963 thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, and Suzanne Pleshette.  When the mischievous young socialite Melanie Daniels begins a flirtation with Mitch Brenner at a pet shop, she winds up following him to his seaside home in Bodega Bay to play a little prank.  Once there she has his kid sister, overbearing mother, and former lover to contend with.  Also?  Swarms of murderous birds.  Gulls and crows and sparrows et al descend upon the sleepy fishing town and for no apparent reason start attacking the residents, seemingly with malicious purpose.  Suddenly there’s no safe haven, with birds infiltrating homes, businesses, cars – how will they escape?

It’s like a tense romantic drama set in a horror movie – I looooooved it.  I want to be friends with the Melanie Daniels character and learn how she does her hair and also how she manages to not scream when birds are dive-bombing her glorious face.  Another Hitchcock film to add to your must-see list if you haven’t already.

That Guy . . . Who Was In That Thing:  2012 documentary by Ian Roumain and Michael Schwartz about the lives and careers of working character actors.  It features interviews with Zeljko Ivanek, Xander Berkeley, Craig Fairbrass, Bruce Davison, Timothy Omundson, and eleven other actors who make their living as supporting characters in television and film.  You may not recognize the names, but you would probably recognize their faces – which is the whole point.  The actors talk about the various career idiosyncrasies of the character actor:  loving getting typecast or hating it, the horrid process of auditioning, everyone does Star Trek, etc.  It’s okay.  Mildly interesting.

Black Rock:  2012 horror-thriller directed by Katie Aselton and starring Aselton, Lake Bell, Kate Bosworth, Jay Paulson, and Anslem Richardson.  Sarah (Bosworth) has invited her friends Abby (Aselton) and Lou (Bell) to a fun girls’ weekend on a remote island off the coast of Maine where they used to camp as kids, in hopes that it will repair their broken friendship.  But they’re not alone on the island, and when a horrible accident turns The Others against them they have to work together to survive.

            It’s fine?  Pretty good?  Yeah.  Fine, pretty good.  The presence of Bosworth had me concerned that it would be chick-flickish, but it totally wasn’t.  The conflict between the girls made it more interesting, but there was also a The Descent element that felt perhaps too familiar?  Maybe?  I liked the people involved, and it was certainly more interesting and intelligent than your average horror movie of today.  It’s a what-are-you-prepared-to-do kind of thriller.  Not super gory but NOT for the squeamish.  The Big Bad turned out to be utterly predictable but still interesting in the end.  Fine.

Black Sunday:  1960 Italian horror film directed by Mario Bava and starring Barbara Steele, John Richardson, Andrew Checchi, Ivo Garrani, and Arturo Dominici.  A Moldavian vampire witch is burned at the stake with her lover, but not before placing a terrible curse on the future generations of her family.  Skip ahead a few centuries and some nimrod bumbling around her grave accidentally breaks the cross that’s keeping her body from reanimating and she totally comes back to life and starts killing people.  Great job.  I watched this only because I felt like I should – it’s considered a classic of Italian horror and hugely influential to many filmmakers all over the world, and so forth.  I’m glad I watched it, I did find it sufficiently creepy, but I don’t know that I would seek it out again.  Italian horror is just not my genre.  But if you’re into that sort of thing, definitely give it a try.

Ghost Bird:  2009 documentary directed by Scott Crocker, about the mysterious and elusive Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.  Long thought extinct, the bird was supposedly spotted in a remote area of Arkansas in 2004, and the news attracted expert ornithologists and amateur bird-watchers the world over.  After years of searching, no physical evidence of any kind has surfaced.  But if the bird really is extinct it will hurt the local economy and could stop funding for restoring wildlife areas, so the hunt continues.

It was kind of cute, but couldn’t hold my interest.