Insidious

Everybody has their ‘inner expert’ telling them whether a horror movie is any good or not, and I believe in each individual case, it’s 100% reliable. Did it scare you, did it engage you, did you like the characters, fear for them, empathize with them? Fear is a strong emotion, and to invoke that through a movie is a pretty big deal, it can have a physical impact on the human body, but that said, only if it works for you would you feel anything like this. Firstly, I get absolutely nothing from jumpy films (Gotcha’s as Roger Ebert calls them), 10 seconds after the stupid “jump” all is forgotten, that’s not a horror film, yeah it provokes a physical response, but that reaction is temporary, and I think it’s too easy to make a film designed to make people jump, but not actually put the fear into them. The jump formula is simple, and even the editing sequence and timing can be easily copied from a reliable example, with the audio in the right place, you’ve got a guaranteed audience reaction. Some people like that, and fair enough, for them it’s a reaction they like. There’s no denying that there isn’t a tension building moment, there’s a wait for it…………..aghhhhh! then the “Oh it was her stupid jock boyfriend who just climbed in through the back toilet window” or maybe you would even see something scary. But are you going to go to bed that night, still thinking about the jump, when handsome jock #2 put his hand on Generic blonde #3’s shoulder. Probably not.

World's Greatest Dad

Watching this movie seriously reminded me of watching Napolean Dynamite. Let me just say I thought ND was ok, but that dancing at the end of the film was kind of a strange necessity to make people think they’d actually just watched a movie, otherwise you may just think what the hell was that? I just didn’t see any kind of resolution in ND, no heroic end-of-the-third-act moment, other than, “yeah the guy learned how to dance”, So........... WGD, very niche humour, weird, gross out comedy. I don’t find it funny to just hear people swear or say sexually suggestive things in a movie, Superbad was as unfunny as comedies come in my opinion. WGD was a movie that centered fairly uninteresting people (not characters, it goes deeper than that), specifically a teenager with a sick mind and poor social skills, and the normal people with little more than generic twenty first century live's that surround him. The best thing about this movie was by far, Robin Williams. He is such a fantastic versatile actor, and the emotional performance he gave to this film, is just down right phenomenal. I began to love his character, I was amazed, almost shocked at how this man handles his life. WGD is a sad, depressing, but mildly amusing, and (for some) a fascinating film.

Unstoppable

It’s kinda rare i’ll write about a movie a week after watching it, but I kept thinking about this one so I thought I’d get something down on screen. Unstoppable, Tony Scott, Denzil Washington, and Chris Pine. I don’t know much about Chris Pine, I liked most of Star Trek and thought he was pretty good in it, but another Scott/Washington partnership is nothing to turn your nose up at. I enjoyed the film, but I didn’t necessarily think it was that great, but, I don’t think it was really........trying to be. Tony Scott sure wanted to make the best out of what he had to work with, but a film of this kind of subject matter, could it really be any better than this? Unless it goes all dusk til dawn on your ass and turns into a vampire massacre, but it doesn’t. The movie is about a train carrying some kind of toxic chemicals belting towards a small town in a grim looking Pennsylvania, it’s going at full speed and there’s nobody driving it. Pretty tense huh?