Audition -- 2002 -- NR

This was a Japanese film with English subtitles. Had it been reviewed by the MPAA, then it would have an R rating for violence and sexuality.

Seven years after a man loses his wife, both his son and best friend encourage him to try to marry again. His friend, who is a producer, stages an audition to help the guy find the perfect wife. He centers on one girl, and even though his friend says she is wrong for him, he goes for her anyway.

This whole film is a slow creepy build to the final scenes where the girl's true intentions become clear. This definitely qualifies as a psychological thriller as the man learns more and more about the girl's spotty and almost non-existant past and the horrors she leaves behind her. The characters were well rounded and believable, and it had a fair share of truly freakish moments to make your skin crawl. It really is a worthwhile viewing of a film, even though you have to deal with subtitles.

There are some odd points. One was when the guy wanted to know where the girl lived, but he had no address for her. He had her phone number, and his son was seen on the internet. What one thought popped into my head? Reverse phone number lookup. Did anyone mention it? No.

The other point was a big one. This guy was never put forth to be psychic or anything else other than a normal guy. Yet as he explored, he got flashes of what went on in various places, and right before the climax, there was this long dream-ish sequence where the girl's backstory and life is almost completely filled in. He was even in the girl's house, a place he had never gone to. In a movie as strong as this was, this seemed like a cop-outish way to deliver a large amount of exposition in a short time frame, since it felt so clairvoyant in nature.

This aside, the flm was very good, and worth watching if you don't mind disturbing images. Some of the final scene even made my stomach turn.

Ghost Ship -- 2002 -- R

A ghost story that attempts to explain why ships throughout history are discovered adrift without a crew or passengers. In this tale, a stranger entices a crew of ship salvagers to check out an ocean liner he discovered while flying over a particular area of the ocean. Once on board this desolate vessel, strange things begin happening suggesting what might have happened to the passengers and crew of the empty ship.

Not a bad ghost tale really. It has its share of scares and several moments of gore and disturbing images, the opening teaser especially. The ghosts start disturbing and pass from scary to downright interesting in some instances. The overall plot is rather tight and everything gets an explantion as to why it happened, and of course, we get the open end that all good scary movies have.

Where the film gets a little deficient is in the character department. This is, again, another propensity of horror flicks. Strangely, we do get some development though of a couple of characters. Katie, the ghost girl, gets decently rounded as well as one crew member, Greer. You can gauge how well a character has been developed by how you feel when they meet their untimely demise and I felt sorry for Greer. It's a horror flick; this means his dying at some point is really not a spoiler. And like most horror flicks, it's pretty predictable who will live through it.

The story has a good wrap up to it, so overall, it's a pretty good film. Definitely one of the better horror films that you'll find.

The Ring -- 2002 -- PG-13

Dubbed the scariest movie of the year, this one lives up to its tagline. This is the tale of a videotape that right after you watch it, the phone rings and a voice tells you that you will die in 7 days. 

Strange things begin happening over the course of those seven days and for a PG-13 horror flick, it holds its suspense in classic thriller style. A character will look around a room and then stare into the camera...whatever they're looking for is where we (the audience) are, making us, of course, say "What is she looking at?" 

It's hard to say much about the film without spoiling the plot, but it is about a newspaper reported who watches the tape, and then works to unravel the mystery before her seven days are up. Though the video has some weird images, the film does fully explain the purpose and origin of each image, which is very impressive.

This is a scary movie and destined to give you some chills. The DVD even includes the entire video for your viewing pleasure, should you have the guts to view it without fear of your own phone ringing... 

And to answer your next question, it was 2:00 in the morning, the movie was freaky, so I didn't watch the video...

Phone Booth -- 2002 -- R

This was one of those old fashioned cerebral thrillers where someone is dragged into an almost no win situation and must try to figure some way out of it. Stu Shepherd just happens to be standing in the last phone booth in New York City when the phone rings, and he answers it. On the other end is a guy who knows everything about his darkest secrets, and if Stu wants to get out alive, he has to come clean...or does he?

If Stu hangs up the phone, he dies. The guy has a sniper rifle trained on him from one of several hundred windows looking down on this booth, and before you know it, the sniper guns down a guy causing trouble for Stu. Now the cops and riot squads demand that Stu come out, but if he does, he dies. If he doesn't do what the guy want, someone else dies.

There is some great character transformation in Stu from a selfish to selfless during his time in the phone booth, which is the only real setting in the entire film. The tension drawn through the Stu-Killer dialogue is outstanding and makes this a real thrill to watch. High action is fun sometimes, but this is a thriller of a Hitchcockian style like Lifeboat or Rope. The diaogue is the driving force and it continues to drive.

Great flick.

Minority Report -- 2002 -- PG-13

In 2054, people are no longer tried for murder in Washinton, D.C. Instead, psychics called pre-cogs predict that someone will be killed, and the "pre-crime" unit moves in and arrests the person before the crime can be committed. The system apparently works since D.C. boasts no murders in the last 6 years. However, one cop believes the system maybhave a problem when he is predetermined to murder someone he doesn't even know.

This movie is a cool sci-fi ride that kicks off a little slow, but when it starts moving, it really moves. John Anderton's motives for his actions and past are completely believable as well as the reasoning behind what REALLY happens (no spoilers here, sorry). The plot zips through several interesting and intriguing twists, at least one of which I didn't see coming. I noticed my counter hitting 1:45 when the movie is slated for 2:30, and wondered what in the world was going to go on for the next 45 minutes...yeah, I got a little surprise, and for me, that's saying something.

Overall, it has good effects, great direction (Steven Spielberg), and a great story that hooks from one end to the other.

I'm With Lucy -- 2002 -- R

Well, it was high time for another chick flick to cross my path, and this time, I got a tale about a woman who recalls five blind dates she had over the previous year, and early on, we learn that she is marrying one of them.

This is a very simple romantic comedy that despite its five simultaneous date stories, it is very easy to follow and understand what is going on. Through these dates, we get a sense of who Lucy is and her character traits. Each date she goes on exhibits one aspect of her personality. We get drunk/wishful, sexual/professional, asexual/cultural, family/angry, and jealous/societal. Those are the most prominent characteristics displayed anyway, though others are thrown in related to those. It is a very clever way to go through someone's personality and character quickly and easily.

The guy she ends up with ends up fairly decently developed as well, which most of the guys turn out one dimensional. Even with these five dates making up the bulk of the film, we still get the classic RomCom structure of the inevitable separation from perfect guy at the third act mark and she has to decide who is right during the last quarter of the film leading up to the final wedding.

The only confusing point here has nothing to do with the film; why was this film rated R? The blurb at the beginning states "some sexuality." There's a slim outburst of profanity near the end, and some implied sex throughout one bit, but R? I've seen PG movies more risque than this one. Seriously, this is not R material. Likely, the 'F' word was spouted one too many times in a single scene. With that exception, the film has no profanity, no nudity, and only the relationship bits would give it a PG-13 at most. R? Someone made a mistake there.

RomCom's seem to be a very easy genre to not go wrong in as the story flows very easily and simplistically without a plot hole I could find immediately. Some of the dates end, but what happens with the guys feels a little unresolved, but the main plot satisfies well enough.

Jane White is Sick & Twisted -- 2002 -- R

What I learned from this movie? I've watched way too much TV. This film is basically a TV spoof complete with a cast that were regulars on TV at one time or another. I figured I'd been in front of the tube too much when a) I caught every opening spoof at the beginning and b) when Jane rattled off a list of names, and I knew nearly all of them.

This plot follows a completely clueless girl named Jane who uses TV to escape her messed up mother and life and believes that a talk show host is her long lost father. In order to meet her dad, she tries to be the people he wants to talk to on the show, beginning with her trying to be a "closet tranvestite prostitute."

Like most spoof films, it helps to know some of the spoofed material to "get" a lot of the jokes, but this one is so whacked-out that it is not always necessary, and it provided a lot of laughs as this poor girl worked her way to Chicago and never ended up anywhere near it. She did wind up in a desert, though, where she hoped to be abducted by aliens to enhance her sexual powers...anyway.

The actual production seemed to be very TV-showish, and I hope it was done to enhance the overall spoof effect, cause some of the effects were laughable and what one might expect on the a TV show (my favorite being where the driving movements of the actors, the driving sounds, and the moving background failed to line up during one sequence where Colin Mochrie's character drove Jane home).

The only real problem I ran into was that the movie was basically over when Gerry died. There were a couple loose ends to tie up, I'll grant, but all the steam ran out of the film after that point. My concern then was that the event occurred at 57 minutes. I was grateful that most of the last 30 minutes of run time was playing with the credits and outtakes and deleted scenes and such, but it was a disappointing ending to a film that was carrying itself just fine to that point.

So, if you've watched too much TV in your lifetime, and think you know everything, give this one a viewing and see how many references you can catch. It's quite amusing and has its moments.

Russian Ark -- 2002

Once this was over, I just had to say "wow." The most compelling part of this production was that it was a 90-minute film presented in a single, continuous take. It is the only feature film in history to do this. It was also shot in one take, which is, again, the only film in history to do this.

During the film, it really felt like you were following along with this guy as he was walking through this Hermitage Museum in Russia. He had a guide, or more like a companion, for a time which gave him someone to talk to, but for the most part, we were experiencing this from one person's POV the whole time.

The basic plot is a filmmaker finds himself in this museum and he travels through time while walking through this museum experiencing everything that happened over a 300 year history. If that sounds boring to you...well, that's kind of the crappy part. It kind of is boring.

Technically, the film is impressive. To coordinate everyone involved in the production to do everything all at once is a feat worthy of a great regardless of the story line, but judging the story just leaves you flat. The camera occasionally "looks" at something for an extended period, and you just want to move on. The traveller guy acts oddly at many places, and at one point trades raspberries with someone else who had kicked him out of a room. It was really odd. I guess the film would mean a lot more to those who know the history, but to me, I just didn't get it.

It was amusing at several points because the actors inadvertently take you out of the film by glancing at the camera. Maybe they're looking at the "guy" who's walking around, but he goes unnoticed most of the time. The end was odd when he was clearly walking backwards through the crowd and they had parted in front of him; you could see them closing the gap behind him.

So from a filmmaking perspective, this is a landmark film. A single take is nothing short of impressive for a feature film, no matter what the story is. But the story is mostly a documentary. So you trade one for the other.

The Banger Sisters -- 2002 -- R

Yup, another chick flick night. This time we have a tale of two friends who called themselves "the banger sisters." Well, actually, it wasn't them, it was Frank Zappa who named them this. The reason? Well... Let's say these weren't church-going girls. Any guess on what "the rock cock" collection is?

Anyway, we start out with the wild friend played by Goldie Hawn getting sacked nd then traveling to Phoenix to visit her old friend played by Susan Sarandon who has gone all conservative and gotten married to a lawyer, had a couple kids, and now has a closet full of beige. on the wya to Phoenix, wild friend meets a writer intent on killing his father played by Geoffrey Rush. She recruits him as her special friend and hangs out with him in his hotel room while she figures out what she wants to do with her revelation of her friend being Miss Goody-Girl all of a sudden.

As can be expected in a film like this, wild friend pulls conservative out of her shell causing mass panic and ruckus in her family, and reveals to her family just wild momma was in her younger years. All this was really inevitable in a film like this which plays out like a reverse coming of age for the other character, where the lead actually experiences no growth.

Technically, the plot was decent, and the main three characters fleshed out pretty well. Everyone else just kind of worked like furniture with only the eldest daughter coming close to being more than cardboard throughout the film.

Some annoyances include the daughter's declaration of mom being a hypocrite because her younger years were hidden. We have geeky daughter and perfect daughter. Someone fails their driver's test and then steals the car. The wild one is intent of invading everyone's life and making them just like her. The writer was an introvert...that's not a cliche, but rather true to life...I was just saying...

The plot is very much driven by the wild one with her decisions influencing nearly everything that goes on, but I found her to be a bit over the top with her friends' family, actually lecturing the kids at one point. Seriously...

So, it's not a chart topper or anything, but it's entertaining anyway, and they did pay attention when they put it together. It was nice to see a film about crazy adults instead of all these teen flicks that run around so often.

Master of Disguise -- 2002 -- PG

Hm. It is after films like this that one can't help but wonder why, and even how, something like this got made. It had some elements of humor, and I'll admit that I even laughed once or twice, but on the whole, this movie had very little to offer. I rolled my eyes much more than I laughed or even chuckled.

The backbone of this storyline hinges on the magical diguising abilities of the Disguisey family, which is supposed to be Italien. The main character's name is Pistachio...as in the nut. This ability allows them to disguise themselves as any person in the world using their skills. This means they can also change size and shape to accomodate whatever they're changing into, but strangely, this ability also relies on their ability to make a cool mask to peel off at an opportune time.

An example that won't spoil here: Pistachio disguises himself as a cherry pie. He fit on a dessert cart in the pie pan. When he emerged, he had a full cherry body suit, as if he had fit himself in his entirety in that pan. Odd, but if that's how it works...ok. Clever. They can also change disguises in an instant. Same deal, even though the logistics don't really pan out again...ok.

Where the real break down occurred was the humor. The plot itself was very, very thin. Guy wants to steal national treasures and sell them on the black market using the girl of the story as a hostess on his black market "QVC-ish" network program. We also have the plot of Pistachio coming into the family disguise business. Each of these don't offer much in the way of sustainment for a 90 minute film, but they try. Since it's a comedy, a lot of room was left for the humor element, but unfortunately, most of the clever humor was foregone for crude and toilet humor.

Yes, I did laugh when the villain laughed heartily and then abruptly stopped when he farted. But the training sequence where he was told to slap the robot and use the phrase "who's your daddy?" to intimidate the opponent didn't work for me at all.

There was some attempt at making the humor in the costume characters, but most of the time, there wasn't much to invest in, so the humor fell very flat and even got old very quickly (such as in the case of Mr. Peru). There was an extended Mr. Peru scene on the DVD that was flat boring, since it was just Dana Carvey bouncing around.

In the end, Dana Carvey's humoristic talents were wasted in this film. He tried, but the story and the humor just weren't there to work with. It boiled down to a cheap attempt at something that probably didn't have a prayer to begin with.

City of God -- 2002 -- R

Here's another one of those top films of all time that I just had to watch at some point to see what all the fuss was about. What I found was a film based in some reality about the slums, a kid who didn't want to be there, and everyone who perpetuated the nightmare.

City of God places emphasis on a particular piece of storytelling that that majority of the films regarded as great place their emphasis: character. There are a lot of characters in City of God and nearly every single one of them gets their moment in the spotlight. Sure, we don't have a bunch of lovable hoodlums here; nearly all of them are pretty despicable, but where the film begs us to look is at their situation which is covered almost as thoroughly.

There are a few redeemable characters in the film that have relatable qualities. These characters are given some redemption sequences to show that they don't want to be in the situation they're in right before they meet their end. In fact, Shaggy and Benny were both trying to leave to a better life when they are killed.

Really, this film was more about the characters than any kind of plot, which takes a backseat here. He see the lives of the characters unfold little by little, one by one and each follows their individual plot, though those individual plots tie into a larger picture which is more or less the rise and fall of Lil Ze. Our main character, Rocket, is pretty much the observer to all the events in the story; he's the everyman character who tells the story, but it is Lil Ze that the story really revolves around in what gets him his rise to power and what he does wrong to bring himself down. Throughout this, on neither side of the fence, is Rocket, who is just trying to avoid all the gang stuff and get out of the City of God.

This is a film that takes some patience to watch (especially if you don't speak Portuguese and are reading the subtitles -- let me thank my Japanese horror for the experience there), but it uses the convention of showing you the end before reaching back to the beginning, so you wonder about that scene as the lives of the characters unfold. I do find it to be one of the better films out there and definitely worth watching.

Chicago -- 2002 -- PG-13

Movie musicals are rather few and far between when you look beyond the confines of animation which seems to require that the characters sing for some reason, and Chicago gives us a bit of a unique format for a musical setting. Rather than Rodgers & Hammerstein's classic scene-song-change format, we get musicals numbers interspersed within other scenes set like they are actually musical numbers behind the regular storyline.Fortunately, we are also given a decent reason for seeing it happen like this.

Roxie Hart is a wannabe star who is going out with a guy who promises her that he knows a guy who can make her a star. One evening, he reveals that he only told her all this to get some action out of her, and so she kills him and ends up on death row. The songs are frequent and serve to fill out the characters of those who sing them in most cases, with the exception of the notable tap dance number in the climax of the court scene which was nothing short of clever.

Roxie meets a host of colorful characters in prison while waiting for her trial including another wannabe/has been by the name of Velma Kelley, who was the big name in the news under the lawyership of Billy Flynn until Roxie came along and wisked the newspapers out from under her (until Roxie gets her dramatic irony). Velma moves from flippant to desperate as Roxie takes the whole spotlight away from her, and almost sends Roxie up the river in a final attempt to get herself off.

I see the musical numbers as the way Roxie sees the world. She is so desperate to become that big name on stage that she sees the world as a night club stage and everyone in the world players in a cabaret type show. Hence, all the musical numbers (except the deleted scene) occur "on stage" while real life goes on behind them. It's a fascinating device for a musical and only slips up in one way: a musical needs some plot songs too.

The songs primarily advance characters as they introduce themselves or react to situations; the tap dance number was the only one that advanced the plot. This means that every time a character reacted or introduced, the plot came to a grinding standstill as they sang. This is okay in the beginning, but near the end, we needed the songs to advance the plot as the character sang, and not continue with just show numbers; this is the reason I enjoyed the tap dance courtroom number so much because it advanced the plot and intergrated itself with the scene. Very cool.

This was a fun, simple little story with some nice musical numbers and some interesting characters. I can see why it did so well. Not a bad viewing at all.

Adaptation -- 2002 -- R

This is the only film I've ever seen like this. It is that unique. As the title suggests, this is an adaptation of another work, but it is unlike any other adaptation I've ever seen in that it not only adapts the book, but it adapts the life of the author of the book, and the screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman.

In a nutshell, the film follows the main plotline of screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, working to adapt the book, The Orchid Thief, into a movie. It's hard to say how much of himself Kaufman put into this film, but his trials in adapting the material are amusing, disturbing, and wild to watch. I'm not sure how the book actually goes, but the movie also follows much of Susan Orlean interviewing John Laroche for the book, and the relationship that develops between them. The two lines eventually collide giving Charlie a satisfying ending of knowing how to write his screenplay...the one we just watched.

The characters are very well drawn (I mean, if you don't know how to write yourself, what do you know?), and the plot flows very smoothly through Charlie's and Susan's lives in the film. No, I don't for a minute believe that this is a 100% accurate depiction their lives (it's a movie, people), but the idea that it is real lends a lot of fun and amusement to the flow of the movie.

I really can't recommend this one enough. It was wild and bizarre, but a lot of fun to watch it play out. Definitely one of the greats.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance -- 2002 -- R

Would you believe I have sixteen movies backed up that I haven't reviewed yet? I'm going to try and get through a lot of these today, but I know I won't get all of them. I'll start with this Korean Vengeance trilogy from Chan-wook Park.

The opening film is Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and this is not a film that made much of a splash for me. I ended up watching this group of films for a couple of reasons: one was because the second film, Oldboy, was on IMDB's top 250; the second was because the title of this one was on the byline of someone's avatar. But the film itself? Nothing to write home about.

Our basic plot does inspire some sympathy and would create some wish for vengeance in this character. You have a deaf guy who desperately wants to help his sister who is dying of problems with her kidney (I believe). He finds some people who promise organs on demand, and when he goes to them, he learns that it's a trade for one of his organs plus some money (all he has saved for the operation should a legitimate kidney become available). Well, of course, the people take his kidney and money, he never hears from them again, and within a week, there's a kidney donor available...but he doesn't have the money.

What to do? Well, he concocts a plan with his girlfriend (who heads up a Korean terrorist organization) to kidnap a child and ransom her off to her rich exec father for the money he needs for the operation. It seems like a clean, cut and dry operation: keep the kid happy until daddy pays up. Well, trouble rears its ugly head again when dead guy's sister finds out about the kidnapping and kills herself while deaf guy is out getting the money. As if it couldn't get any worse, the movie takes its first major downturn when he goes off to bury his sister in their favorite place and the kid wanders into the water and drowns. This is where my Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance ends. Now, I'm rooting for the kid's father.

This movie's major problem is that it is either slow or annoying or occasionally both at the same time. The characters and situations are very clever, and I certainly can't fault the creativity, but the execution is so flawed, it's difficult to pay attention to the movie. Pacing lags very frequently, and I don't even understand the disabled guy at the lake. The director has us stare at mundane tasks forever, and doesn't even give us anything suspenseful to pay attention to so we don't get bored watching people eat.

The other problem is what I mentioned in the plot: I lost all interest in the plight of the main character as soon as the kid died. I understand he didn't hear her, but I honestly can't see her wandering into the lake and trying to swim, when there was a bridge that spanned the entire width of the lake, and our Mr. Vengeance crossed it both ways. So who is going to draw the audience's cheers more? The guy who lost a kidney to some thieves (oh, it sucks bad; don't get me wrong), but killed a kid trying to steal the money from someone who had nothing to do with it. Or will it be the guy whose child was killed by a kidnapper after you paid the ransom? This isn't rocket science.

Naturally, the movie turns into a dual vengeance film once the father starts trying to track down his child's killer, and we get both tales running simultaneously from then on. Some of it is quite good, but those two speed bumps are hard to recover from.

So this is a film that barely works. If its execution were top notch, it would likely be a lot better (though we'd have issues with the construction of the plot), so while we'd complain about the shift in protagonist, at least we wouldn't be bored while watching it...so very, very bored.