Quick Review: “V/H/S”

Week four and someone finally decided that Netflix’s expansive horror catalog was just too damned there to keep ignoring. So they did the only rational thing and picked the 2012 mostly-straight-to-on-demand found-footage anthology “V/H/S”.

So, I didn’t know what this movie was before watching it, and this is maybe the first time ever where I can say that this actively worked against me throughout the film. The movie is a collection of six short films strung together with a loose narrative, each segment being written and directed by a different director. I got suspicious that this was going on about a half hour into it when it went from absolutely atrocious to slightly less unwatchable for no apparent reason. I guess had I known that the movie was to act more or less as a demo tape for different first-time filmmakers (and Ti West) to showcase their talents, I wouldn’t have tried to make so much sense of the way they put it together. Really I was looking for something that wasn’t there, and I wouldn’t have done that if I knew what its deal was going into it.

(And, I mean, I’m not dense, but when you have 6 segments all directed in almost exactly the same way using the same exact style, it’s not as easy to unravel as you might think).

But I digress: let’s all pretend that the VHS format is actually still relevant somehow and still being widely used. The movie, as a whole, is pretty bad. Some segments are slightly better than others, but the whole thing is really limited (intentionally) by two things: 1) the segments have to be tied together with a half-assed and unoriginal narrative, and 2) dogmatically, all segments had to be shot in handicam as though it was found footage. In a way I guess it was an experiment, to see if you could take every sub-genre of horror and see if you could do it Blair Witch style. And when the experiment failed (miserably) they said Cool! Let’s make this movie!

Meet some of the protagonists. This scene specifically was about the hardest 20 minutes I’ve had to watch this year.

So, to elaborate, quite a few sub-genres are addressed in the series of vignettes. The one that works best is the straight-classic slasher film done as found footage from one of the hopeless teens. The rest is kind of just, you know, worse versions of Paranormal Activity or Blair Witch. Not to say it’s all terrible, but it’s all really unnecessary and some of these segments probably would’ve been fine as like, Tales from the Crypt episodes, but unfortunately they weren’t. Unfortunately they were presented as ridiculous found footage shlock. Also, you know, the acting is all really bad, without exception, and even worse, I’m not sure there’s actually a likeable or relatable character in any segment at all. Now, you might be saying, “but all the teens who die in slashers are unlikeable too! That’s the point!” And I would totally agree, because the relatable character becomes the killer. We’re afforded no such luxury here, where even the villains are douches.

Don’t watch it, you know. At best you’ll say “OK, I see what they did there,” and waste your time. At worst you’ll have to write a review and be forced to analyze why it wasted your time.

Letter grade: D

There’s also a segment done completely through Skype, which actually works except for… wait, why was this on a VHS tape? I think they’re getting their decades mixed up.

Quick Stats! For Fun!

So, I recently added my music library to Google Music so I can listen to the whole damn thing when I’m not at home, whether that be while I’m driving or while I’m at work. Or maybe I’ll be rock climbing or hiking or sailing or something. Anyway I guess I’d have to have my phone on me to access it. Maybe my sailboat has wifi.

Anyway, so it got me thinking: how did I come about discovering all these artists? Going back til when I was about 15 I guess I actively started trying to, you know, get music to listen to. So I looked through my whole archive of music going back to when I was about 15 or so and noted whether or not I personally discovered the artist for myself (via radio, or reading about them or whatever), and if not, who recommended them to me. To clarify, I don’t still listen to all the artists I’ve found since I was 15; a lot of them have fallen out of my favor, so they’re not included. These are active artists in my musical roster. So, naturally I made a pie chart with the results:

So the grand total of artists I’m actively all about is 155. Out of 155, I came about 64 of them on my own. Forty-nine of them were suggestions from my Sacramento friend Mike W, and most of those suggestions took place almost 10 years ago. Vince has only recently (as of the past year or two) started recommending me music, and already he accounts for 24 artist (15%) of my current taste. Not bad! Anthony’s got 11 in there (a lot of stuff we just discovered independently around the same time), my brother Ryan’s got 7, and I attribute a solid 5 to my mom. That’s not to say she wasn’t listening to some of this stuff before I was even born, but if she did I wasn’t influenced enough by that to attribute that artist to her. Still, 5, not bad. My wife and my friend Mike T have each contributed 1 artist (Mike T I’ve known for a couple months, my wife for 9 years).

Impromptu graph projects are my favorite kind of Thursday night projects.

Quick Review: “Downfall”

Week three sees a departure from Academy Award nominated foreign documentaries, venturing far away into the murky waters of Academy Award nominated foreign dramas.

“Downfall” is two and a half hour historical drama based on the story of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary in the final years of the war, and captures the final days during the Battle for Berlin leading up to Germany’s surrender and Hitler’s suicide.

Boy, it’s not bad at all.

I would recommend you see it for the phenomenal acting performances alone (which you’ll note is a very rare thing for me to do). Really it’s kind of a bold move: making all of these monsters not one-dimensional, even giving Hitler a range of human emotions other than maniacal. It’s fascinating in that sense, to see this side of the war told not only from a German perspective, but seeing these well-known historical figures acting in ways the History Channel or Hollywood has never allowed them to.

My only real gripe with the film is the directing. While not terrible, Oliver Hirschbiegel (who later went on to direct the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers) seems to get in a bit over his head, especially in the outdoors battle sequences. It, in a way, feels like he’s trying to emulate Spielberg with a lot of this and tragically falls noticeably short. That’s not to say the directing’s bad. There quite a few memorable scenes that are incredibly effective and powerful, and the narrative is strung together nicely while maintaining the chaotic atmosphere necessary when conveying the events at this point in time.

Has also spawned a moderately-successful internet meme (as though there is any other kind)

So, yes. Very good, if not unfortunately a bit too Hollywood at times (man, is that not a pretentious thing to say or what?)

Letter grade: B+

Quick Review: “Burma VJ”

Week two of the film-watching thing was nice because I got to pick the movie. And, because I got to pick the movie, we got to watch an Academy Award-nominated documentary. Who could’ve seen that one coming?

Burma VJ is a 2008 political documentary from Anders Østergaard, shot largely with independent handi-cam footage smuggled out of Burma from freelance rogue reporters. The subject of the film is that Burma is a country closed off from the rest of the world, under military rule, and it’s up to passionate amateur journalists to capture what’s happening in the country and to make sure it makes it to their satellites in other countries. The documentary covers a few weeks in September 2007 when the oppressed citizens of urban epicenter Rangoon threaten to revolt.

It’s actually quite a ride and pretty expertly done. The narrative is gripping and effective, and it felt like watching a documentary version of Hotel Rwanda. The key to this was in the editing. When you have hundreds of hours of footage, one can imagine it’d be difficult to string it together in a coherent, let alone powerful story, but this film does it with relative ease. The only times you ever really feel pulled out of the experience is when they throw in re-enactments with the story’s narrator, which while not as terrible as you’d think, are still less than perfect. These re-enactment segments do seem almost necessary if for no other reason than to break up what would otherwise be an hour and a half of handi-cam footage, but I can’t help but label those segments as more unnecessary than anything else.

Really it’s very good though, and it’s hard after watching it not to draw parallels between what happened in this film and similar events that unfolded in Syria, Egypt, and an assortment of other countries during the Arab Spring and in recent times. Yet, on that same note, this film conveys much more a sense of bitter hopelessness; something at least I don’t always feel when I look at other countries in similar conditions.

It’s definitely worth a watch, and one of the better documentaries I’ve seen in quite a while.

Letter grade: B+

Quick Review: “Jeff, Who Lives at Home”

So, I’ve gotten into a bit of a thing where every week for the rest of the year (maybe for the rest of time) I have to watch a film that’s selected for what’s really a poor man’s book club (you know, with movies instead of books) and do a quick review of it. Sometimes I get to pick the movies, but this was not one of those times. This week it was the 2011 Duplass Bros’ film which I could’ve swore was their directorial debut but apparently wasn’t at all: “Jeff, Who Lives at Home.”

It probably would’ve gotten a row at Blockbuster

So yeah, really it does feel like the Duplass Brothers finally got some money from somewhere and hired some TV actors and tried to make an ultra-personal film about a semi-dysfunctional family centering around a day in the life of two brothers (played by How I Met Your Mother and The Office). Unfortunately, not only is their plight of the day thoroughly uninteresting (HIMYM is borderline mentally handicapped and likes the movie “Signs”, and The Office is an unlikable and unrelatable douche who finds out his marriage is falling apart), it’s also ultimately unimportant. All the characters end up as one-dimensional as they start out, and their individual stories wrap up predictably. The whole thing felt like a season finale to a TV show that’s never really been very good. There’s also a filler coming of age sub-story with the brothers’ mother played by Susan Sarandon (one assumes as herself) about her realizing that you can find love in unexpected places or something. Again, I don’t really care that much.

The directing is a little less than competent, bizarrely making use of quick zoom-ins as though this were an acceptable technique to be using in a theatrical drama. The dialogue is natural, again mostly because they just wrote the movie about themselves, and the acting isn’t terrible, it’s just really meandering and at times, hard to watch. What’s weird about this movie, though, is that the first hour is just a set up for a half-hour slow motion montage that is the third act, wherein the third act is a five-minute resolution to all the characters’ problems. It’s the kind of thing you’d see in, like, House, or something, but at least they wouldn’t drag it out for an entire act.

So yeah, you don’t really need to see it.

Letter grade: C-

And they all lived happily ever after I guess.

2012: The Great Film Year-End Review

Well it’s about that time of year when I decide to share what I’ve REALLY been working on all year long (as opposed to coming up with marketing ploys and funding for improving my blog): the annual film list.

As most of you will already know, every year going back to 2007 I’ve decided to keep track of every movie I watch, its director, what letter grade I gave it, and a couple other bits for statistical tracking. 2012 was no different, and I ended up with a respectable amount of movies watched despite the fact that Juliet’s too old now for me to just strap her into a swing and let her go while I watch film after film all weekend long (oh what a grand six weeks those were…)

You can see the whole list in full by clicking here.

As always, I count an entire television season as a single entry, which in the past I’ve both defended and opposed as being either fair or unfair at one point or another. This year I offer nothing other than that it happened. Though, it didn’t happen as badly as last year, I guess. I’ll get to the breakdown in a bit, but first,

TOP 10 BEST First Watch Films for 2012:

01. Nosferatu (1922, F.W. Murnau): A
02. The Graduate (1967, Mike Nichols): A
03. Dog Day Afternoon (1975, Sidney Lumet): A
04. Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei M. Eisenstein): A
05. Cosmos (1980, Adrian Malone): A
06. The Dust Bowl (2012, Ken Burns): A
07. Faust (1926, F.W. Murnau): A-
08. The Stranger (1946, Orson Welles): A-
09. Battle Royale (2000, Kinji Fukasaku): A-
10. Shadow of a Doubt (1943, Alfred Hitchcock): A-

A hair better than 2012’s “Battleship”

The top 6 there are in no particular order, as I gave them all the highest grade I give. And yes, the Cosmos is the old Carl Sagan science series which I’d never seen. If you haven’t, you know, you probably should. I mean, I gave it an A and all.

WORST 5 First-Watch Films for 2012:

01. An American Haunting (2005, Courtney Solomon): D-
02. Dr. Wai in the Scriptures With No Words (1996, Siu-Tung Ching): D-
03. The Green Hornet (2011, Michel Gondry): D
04. Detective Dee & The Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010, Tsui Hark): D+
05. Session 9 (2001, Brad Anderson): D+

This movie A) is not scary B) makes very little sense C) is actually about rape D) scares Donald Sutherland

So, what about television? Well this year I watched 36 separate full seasons of television shows. This is almost identical to last year’s 37, but the shows I watched this year were much less involved, and the run-times are really much lower (yes, I keep track of that too, obviously). This year I watched 325.05hrs of television series, which–if you’re willing to grant than an average movie is 2hrs long–breaks down to the equivalent of 163 movies. Last year when I did the same kind of math, it came out to 187 movies. So yeah, down 24 or so.

But the movie total this year was definitively higher. I watched 90 separate films (which, you know, I add to the TV total to give me a GRAND total of 126, you know, for the record), but unfortunately only 30% of those were things I’d never seen before. In years past I made a greater effort to watch new things. Not this year. This year it was more like “OK Juliet what have I seen before that I can put on?” Which, you know, isn’t really a bad thing, but it is shameful. And if you look at the list, it’s not even family-friendly movies. I only watched 9 family movies this year. So it was more like “OK Juliet, what have I seen before that’s just lying around. Seven Samurai? Cool.”

And, of course, the rest of the stats… in graph form!

And there you have it! Much like last year, I plan on re-watching LOST in its entirety to start the year, which also gives me a nice break from finding semi-child friendly material to throw on while I’m watching Juliet.