The Hole (Nick Hamm, 2001)

Has several ideas, though none of them are executed well. Begins wanting to be a Rashomon meets police procedural story about unreliable narration, but poor direction keeps the film from ever sustaining a plausible point of view and about halfway through the film the Rashomon-esque quality is abandoned as a mere pretense for extending the film's running time. The film then somewhat attempts to become about the dissolution of humanity when faced with entrapment -- sort of a miniatuare Lord of the Flies. But this, too, is bungled by the film's attempts to continually withhold information from the viewer, cutting back and forth between the present and the past, consistently letting every character know more than the audience does before big reveal after big reveal. We are never allowed to live in a moment as if it's actually happening, as the movie is much more interested in trying to trick us than in trying to make us believe anything we're seeing. Thus we are removed from their suffering and, as a consequence, any ability to sympathize with their plight. Bodies begin to pile up before we even have a firm handle on who the characters are. Perhaps the comparisons to Rashomon were unfounded, actually, as this script clearly has another, more recent, movie in mind with its ending: The Usual Suspects. And, like that movie, ends up revealing nothing other than the fact that it has revealed nothing. But The Hole lacks the meta self-awareness of The Usual Suspects, pretending that its ending reveals some dark truth about ourselves. It does not. Because sociopaths are boring. They can do horrible things and not feel bad about it. Why is that interesting? There is something biologically wrong with them. I can understand being interested in that from a scientific perspective. How is it caused? Is it genetic? Can it be cured? These are things worth being curious about. Wondering exactly what kind of awful things they're capable of, I hope for obvious reasons, is not.

Bride Wars (Gary Winick, 2009)

I like 13 Going on 30. I saw it a long time ago and I liked it a lot. I saw the end on TV a few months ago -- still liked it a lot. I like Jennifer Garner and the movie has a cute, bubbly atmosphere that really works for me.

I'd forgotten that my enjoyment for that movie was the reason that I wanted to watch Bride Wars -- Gary Winick being the connecting thread that ties the two movies. Unfortunately, they have almost nothing in common otherwise. Bride Wars exists in a weird, mean, not-cute-at-all world where feminism never happened. A world where platitudes about how extremely important a wedding day is for a woman can be uttered without any irony or self-awareness.

Plays like Rushmore, only if the creators thought the best part of the movie was when Schwartzman and Murray were being childish jerks to each other. The only semblance to 13 Going on 30 lies in the performances of the main characters. Like Ruffalo and Garner, Hathaway and Hudson have an unforced chemistry together, which is a shame because the movie is structured like the invert of a romantic comedy -- keeping the characters apart for 85% of the movie. I almost hated the movie, but anytime the girls were together and not hating each other the movie almost came alive. There's almost something homoerotic about how much chemistry they have together, compared to the lifeless shells the movie calls fiances. A braver movie would've had them both realize their dream wedding wouldn't be complete without each other in a much more literal sense than what ended up on screen.

Though I suppose that could've introduced a whole new set of problems, and since this one couldn't even get relatively small things like the fact that it's okay to be excited about your wedding and acknowledge that it's a life-changing day in any person's life without making it out to be some final piece in The Complete Woman life cycle, it's probably best they left it alone.

Give 'Em Hell, Malone (Russell Mulcahy, 2009)

The kind of terrible, adolescent noir worship that is completely indefensible. Makes Brick look good. There's almost not enough bad things to say about this movie, but I guess the worst would be that it was somehow not made by rich 19-year-olds. If it had it might somehow be understandable. But this movie cost 15 million dollars. And stars Thomas Jane and Ving Rhames. Granted neither of these actors are at career high points, but were there any meetings between agents? Did people show them the script and say, "This will be good for your career." Are they that desperate for money? I have no idea of the inner machinations, but, thankfully, the world-at-large and I are, for once, in complete agreement. This movie was straight to DVD. That doesn't change the disappointment that comes from knowing it was made at all, but I'll admit it helps.

The mad scientists at the script lab came up with this noir style/dialogue/attitude fused with typical hitman action movie plot in which none of it works. Jane has never been more wooden, the girl he spends most of the movie "bantering" with is neither sultry nor badass nor compelling and the only guy who seems to have anything close to a pulse is French Stewart. I am wasting time and words writing about this movie -- a movie no one reading this would ever even contemplate watching, probably, but I watched the whole thing so here I go.

Or there I went. I guess I'm done, except for the part where an old dude hits on an Asian schoolgirl and she gives him a razor blade BJ as a way of killing him. Given the rest of the scene, it wasn't even necessary that he die, or that she take the time to get him into a room, take his pants down and momentarily have his penis in her mouth before he bled to death. I guess it shows how crazy and hardcore a villain she is, but, uh, she could've just shot him.

The whole movie is like that. Gratuity of the ickiest, most unpleasant variety.

The Final Destination (David R. Ellis, 2009)

An exercise in joyless fatalism. It used to be I found these movies grimly cathartic -- to be reminded of all the ways in which I could be dying every day and yet wasn't -- but now their morbid infatuation with the characters' hopeless lot in life is too much to handle. I can no longer feel good about rooting for characters to die, even if they aren't real.

David R. Ellis uses the same skilled workmanlike craft he brought to Cellular and Snakes on a Plane. Many scenes create a palpable tension, even as their conclusions are preordained. That's certainly no easy feat, but I would prefer he get back to movies like those other ones, which at least showed a sense of humor that wasn't entirely founded in cruelty (this film technically has "jokes," but most of them involve asking us to laugh at the gory, splattered remains of the victims).

It's a shame, because there's hints of something better in here. An unexplored idea of paranoia, that surviving something horrible and traumatic changes you in a way that makes you infinitely more aware of your own impending death. That would be something worth delving into. At times the movie seems to be moving towards that, only to quickly pull away for the next Rube Goldberg-like death.

A Perfect Getaway (David Twohy, 2009)

A film that becomes too enamored with its own genre awareness. Absolutely a post-Scream thriller in many of the worst ways possible. Unfortunate, as it wastes perhaps the only good performance of Milla Jovovich's career. Maybe it's just her own bad luck that the majority of her work has been with Paul W.S. Anderson and Luc Besson, two directors that, despite their many positive attributes, are more interested in archetypes and kineticism than realistic human emotion.

Twohy, taking a few notes from Hitchcock, uses the personas of his actors against the audience. Specifically Jovovich's naive, innocent work with Besson, as well as transforming Steve Zahn's perpetually flustered stoner act into a perpetually flustered uptight dude act. Then he sprinkles in Timothy Olyphant's penchant for charming sleaze to make a concoction that spends half the movie working pretty darn well, actually.

Unfortunately, the conclusion seems foregone as soon as it's suggested. In making us aware of its awareness about red herrings and the twists and turns of cinema thrillers, as well as a general condensing of suspects to an extremely limited number, it should surprise almost no one who has spent any amount of time watching movies just "whodunit." There's still an element of tension leading up to this unsurprising twist that keeps the movie watchable, but once the reveal is opened up for us the rest of the running time is spent spinning wheels. There's a lot of gruesome stabbing and shooting and maiming, but there's very little formal or psychological reason to care at that point. It's the equivalent of shouting "ta-da," striking a pose and then holding it long after the audience understands the trick and has started to become uncomfortable and unsure whether they should have gotten up and left already.

Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)

A fairly obvious precursor to Twin Peaks in their explorations of sexual obsession and romanticism of dead women. The choice to move Twin Peaks to small-town Americana is an interesting one, as Laura largely concerns itself with the rich upper-class elite and its seedy underbelly. Dana Andrews plays a working-class detective who acts as a cipher for the audience into the opulent and extravagant lifestyle of the rich and famous. Laura, too, is depicted as having worked her way up into this world with perserverance and smarts, rather than sneaky and underhanded methods of the people who surround her. This us vs. them mentality with regard to class in America, began in cinema as a reaction to the Depression, is a fertile playground still being dallied in today. It is not, however, the film's strongest point. Tough-talking Andrews is only sympathetic as a protagonist in relative comparison to the rest of the film's characters as the film's narrative economy leaves very little chance for the character to breathe and take on lifelike qualities. His defining trait is mostly the fact that he falls in love with Laura while investigating her murder case. Other women he's dated come up, and he discusses them bitterly. So the film appears to be trying to deal with the fact that it is easier to love a fantasy, as he does through the romanticized painting hanging in her living room as well as the biased accounts given to him by the many people he interviews, than to love a real person, who may contain all these lovable qualities, but also has a lot of messy, less easy to love ones.

The second act twist is a pretty great one, at least from a narrative perspective.. Even having seen the movie before, I'd actually somehow managed to forget it. But, upon consideration, it mostly only serves to complicate the whodunit mystery of the film without enlivening or trying to deal with any of the film's previous themes. Laura the person turns out to be just as lovable and sweet and innocent as Laura the fantasy, having somehow managed to exist in a world of creeps and swindlers without noticing or being changed at all by them. This makes the eventual coupling with Andrews problematic and unconvincing. Supposedly we are supposed to buy that their shared backgrounds of hard work and ethical beliefs tie them together in a way that the rest of her company cannot, but it raises unanswered questions about what attracted her to this world to begin with.

Ignoring these problems, though, the film is indeed a breezy and entertaining bit of noir. It drops the ball trying to be something more than pretty good, but that doesn't change the fact that it actually IS pretty good. Laura's omnipresence in the first half is handled very nicely, especially with the cute framing of the painting in her apartment, and for a whodunit it does manage to be fairly unpredictable, especially considering how many years Hollywood has had to grind most of noir's tropes into cliches.

South Pacific (Joshua Logan, 1958)

A probably well-meaning film that tries to argue against racism all while demonstrating a patronizing, white-centric attitude that ably pinpoints why we haven't come nearly as far as we should have 50 years later.

The two main characters are a white nurse and an older French colonialist. She falls in love with him, but soon he reveals that he was previously married, that his wife was Polynesian, that she bore him two half-Polynesian children and then died. The wife and children are complete non-entities in the film, serving only as a narrative prop to "expose" the white nurse's racial biases and force the two lovers apart. The scene when they fight, set at night against a gorgeous purple and gold color scheme that made me wish every scene in every movie ever could look that good, is the only really resonant piece in the entire film, dealing mostly with the fact that the children would be a constant reminder of the fact that the man she loves had had sex with a woman of color. It's exceptionally didactic, but in a way that didn't bother me much and actually ends with one of the few memorable songs in the whole show.

The Frenchman, by contrast, is completely unburdened by any notions of racism. His status as a rich colonialist with a servant who never once speaks in the film is completely ignored, as is the rampant exoticism of the film's attitudes towards the Tonkanese locals on the island. Another of the main characters, a Marine lieutenant, is introduced to, and immediately falls in love with, a Tonkanese girl who speaks almost no English. There's a horrifying song number in which her mother sings a song and the daughter mimes the words she's singing along. That the film can slap the wrists of one character, all while championing his love of this cliched depiction of mysterious, submissive, exotic beauty is exactly why Malcolm X once said that the fight for equal rights would never get anywhere if they let liberal white people help them.

(Note: Being a liberal white person, I don't actually believe that's true, but it's easy to understand why he would think so, especially back then.)