Over the Hedge -- 2006 -- PG

Dreamworks' most recent venture into the CG animation world gives us the story of a bunch of animals who wake up to find they're in the sole remaining part of the forest in the midst of a massive residential development. The goal here, oddly, is not to find a way out of this predicament, but to gather food for the winter. This plot not being enough to carry the film, we have an outsider to the group who shows them the wonders of the development and how much food there is to be had. He, of course, has his own agenda of gathering food for a homicidal bear that he stole the food from the begin with, but after endearing himself to this group of animals, he predicatably has second thoughts.

The film follows a classic kid fare plot of a dozen cute and distinct characters who move along for awhile, get betrayed, and then live happily ever after. That being said, though, it does have a multitude of funny moments that bring on more than a few laughs. The story's engaging enough to keep you going to the end (not to see how it ends, but to see the antics it takes to get there), it moves along at a really good pace, and it really doesn't leave any loose ends. The little hyper chipmunk character steals the show quite often and is wonderfully setup for his part in the climax.

So, this ranks as another film that isn't bad at all. If you want a good little film that leaves you feeling good in the end, this one does its job very well.

The Omen -- 1976 -- R

This quasi-religious horror movie succeeds on many levels. The movie asks the question: what if the Anti-Christ were living among us as a child? A woman gives birth and the baby dies. Another woman gives birth on the same night, but she dies. The priest attending asks the father of the dead baby if he would like to take the child of the dead mother and adopt it as his own, never telling his wife that her own child died. He agrees.

What follows is one bizarre series of events. The movie begs the question: are these events mere coincidence or is there a higher power at work here? Is the child causing these things to happen, or are we just convincing ourselves that he is? Is this child truly the son of Satan or is he just a little boy whose father lapsed into a paranoid fit and needs psychiatric evaluation? 

In beautiful fashion, the movie never answers these questions, but leaves it ambiguous ending in the audience's hands.

SPOILER -- I HAVE TO DO THIS.

Happy ending or not? On the one hand, if the child is the antichrist, the father did not complete his mission and evil won. On the other hand, if the father had lost his mind in a paranoid scheme and tried to kill an innocent child, then he was duefully stopped and the child lives. Which is it? Only the sequels will tell.

The Others -- 2001 -- PG-13

Nicole Kidman in a house with two kids and a staff of three. This film looks like it could have been a low budget wonder, since it was all about the story. The family hears noises and things move on their own. The daughter speaks of seeing and speaking to a boy named Victor, who says the house belongs to his family. Freaky weird things happen throughout the film and then we get the twist. 

I suspected it during the film, but the way it was executed was ingenious. All the strangeness of the film melted away into perfect order. While the film ran, it was a spooky haunted house film giving one spooky vibes about any house. Once it ended and all the pieces were in place, everything changed and the spookiness melted away.

Definitely a worth watching film.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest -- 1975 -- R

This one won the big five Oscars in '75, so I had to check it out, and like most Oscar winners, this one ended up as a mixed bag of both incredible filmmaking and bizarreness.

It involves Jack Nicholson in an cast of stars before they were stars like Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd. He is RP McMurray, a man who was transferred from the prison as a troublemaker, and they want to know if he is mentally unstable. He mixes up the patients in this mental institution in a series of antics that do not necessarily endear him to the hospital staff.

As could be expected, 90% of the film is wonderful, and the characters are very well drawn out. Some are likeable; some aren't, but they're all well-drawn and consistent. The plot is more like a series of tableaus, so there aren't any holes to speak of, since there aren't anywhere for holes to be placed. It's primarily a character sketch for McMurray and his time at this institution. It's funny in some parts and troubling in others, but it works very well.

But what is with endings in the 70's? It's like we get away from the code requiring that "Hollywood ending" and everyone forgets that occasionally, we want things to work out for the characters. The Academy seems to like it, but I felt like the ending to this one was just kind of tagged on there. We approach a resolution and everything in the film seemed to be building to it, and then (kind of like a kick in the pants), nothing happens and we move on to something else. Where we end is with a move that not only comes out of no where, but wasn't even remotely setup as a possibility. I actually felt a little cheated.

So if we drop that last 10 minutes or so, it's awesome. Loved it. The tag ending could go as far as I'm concerned. But it is an awesome film for the characters drawn.

The Omen 666 -- 2006 -- R

This is a remake of the film of the same name (minus the 666) from 1976. The plot is 99% identical to the original with a few location and effect changes and a slight updating here and there of stuff that happened between 76 and now.

We start with a lot of prophetic hullabaloo basing a variety of news clips from the past few years (9/11, the Tsunami from a couple years ago, the shuttle explosion) on passages from Revelation indicating the time of the Antichrist has come. Then our her's child is born, dies, and he adopts a child whose mother died in childbirth. He willingly accepts the baby as his own to comfort his wife. Then comes the question: is the child the Antichrist? The 76 version makes this a lot less clear than this one. Everything seemed like more of an accident back then where this one was more deliberate.

Our first storyline problem came pretty quick, and that would be the infamous hangnig of the nanny. We got no bonding time with this woman. We didn't see her interact with Damien in any way, nor did we know anything about her until after it was all over. I saw this as an error in character since while her fate is predetermined, we needed at least a little connection instead of, "hm, who's that?" Crack! "Ok, who WAS that?"

The movie progressed, as I said, like the original, so there's not a lot that went wrong. Unlike some remakes that screw up the story somehow, this one simply updated it, and played it just like it did last time, so it actually worked remarkably well. One interesting change was the beheading, but I have no issue with this. It worked just as well as the original version did.

The characters were decently developed for the genre. We didn't have an intimate knowledge of them, but I cared enough about what was going on an about Robert Thorn. Horror movies are meant to hit us in our vulnerable spots, and this one used a child, which is probably the most vulnerable since people don't usually fear their own children, so that was a good little idea as well.

Of course, my one lingering question is "Why the heck didn't they fire the new nanny?" She was breaking rules, arguing with the family, and even brought in a dog that she was instructed to get rid of and never did. Oh well.

People have whined and complained about this movie, but really, it wasn't too bad. I acheived what it was meant to achieve: bring the 1976 story to the present day and tell it again for a modern audience. Whether us movie fanatics wants to admi it or not, there are people who do not watch movies that were made before they were born. Therefore, they would never watch the 1976 Omen, and this gives them access to a horror classic that was remade rather well, in my opinion.

Once Upon A Time In The West -- 1968 -- PG-13

What to say about this one. I've been sitting here thinking about this film and (amusingly) thinking about what I think about it. Sounds goofy, but it's the truth. If ever there was a definition of a smooth movie, this one meets that definition head on. It was definitely smooth, but I'm not sure of how memorable it came out.

It starts with a bang. Three guys wait for a train, and the guy they meet shoots them. Next scene, a family prepares for their mother to come home, and a group of guys kills them all. This is the foundation laid. It is out job while watching this film to figure out why all this happened. The story begins from that point with a woman coming to town to find her family was blown away and there is also that stranger from the earlier train platform. How do they relate? What is his interest in her? What's with the harmonica? Everything that happens works to fill in the blanks, but not until we are finally told what the deal is with this and that, which doesn't happen till 2 hours into this 3 hour movie. It's a long wait for an anticlimactic revelation.

Maybe that was my problem. It was anticlimactic. Every scene worked to a peak and was played out very well. The characters were fairly well drawn for the genre and even interesting. Everything seemed to work really well, the plot really doesn't have any holes in it, and I understood the characters and their motivations, but maybe it just wasn't that dramatic to me. I really can't put my finger on it. It wasn't even boring.

I was drawn into the intrigue of these super secretive guys wondering who they are and why they're doing what they're doing. Little by little, their lives were unfolded to us showing us just a bit more, but leaving enough in the shadows to make us want even more. That worked really well.

So in the end, it's a movie without major problems except that it lays really flat for the 3 hour duration. It's not boring. It's not bad. It just didn't do anything. Someday, I will watch it again to figure out what it is I missed when I watched it this time because for the life of me, I can't figure it out.

Only You -- 1994 -- PG

It had apparently been too long since I watched a chick flick, so here I am again watching this one with Marisa Tomei and Robert Downey, Jr. about the same basic thing all the other chick flicks are about. I can't complain much though. All slashers have basically the same plot, too.

The story here involves a girl that at two points in her life, she has seen the name Damon Bradley pop up as the man she is going to marry. She got it once off a Ouiga board and another time from a gypsy fortune teller, so she knows that this name will be her future husband. Well, time passes and no Damon Bradley, so she ends up engaged to a podiatrist, but 10 days before the wedding, she receives a call from an old friend of her fiancee -- an old friend by the name of Damon Bradley who will be in Italy and can't make the wedding. Needless to say, she hops the first plane to Italy with her best friend (who is contemplating leaving her husband, who also happens to be our heroine's brother) to track down this mysterious Damon Bradley to know for sure whether he is or isn't the one for her.

It's a pretty formulaic construction that flows pretty well through its plot. It provides a couple of reversals here and there which help to keep it interesting, while developing the characters, so it doesn't feel like another retread with a different subject. Everything came off pretty natural so there weren't any real distractions nor were there really any contrivances to take me out of the story.

The characters were typically developed for this type of film, so we cared for the situation by the time the split occurs at the third act break leading us to hope, of course, that they come back together at the end.

These films lend themselves easily to emotionally dramatic stories, and this one follows the mold fairly closely to deliver the goods. While the plot is interesting and gives us a couple of unique reversals, it ultimately offers nothing new in the movie world of romantic comedies. So it works well for what it is, and that's an easy film to watch, follow, and enjoy.

Open Season -- 2006 -- PG

What I expected from this film from Sony was another kid flick like Madagascar or Barnyard or The Wild, since this seemed to be Sony's answer to that vein of films. What I actually got was a film that showed some real humor, a bit of intelligence, and just some decent storytelling.

We open with a bear who is living with a park ranger who acts like his mother...and he acts like a child. It's actually amusing. Through a series of misadventures and cleverly constructed dual-meaning scenes, the bear is thrown into the forest and forced to fend for himself. He decides he wants to go back home, and employs the very critter that got him thrown out to begin with to get him back. During their journey (which, of course, takes them no where since the problematic deer has no idea where anything is), he learns how to fend for himself and he ends up facing the real decision as to whether he should stay in the forest or go back to his plush home life of wheel of fortune and indoor plumbing.

Too many times, these talking animal movies are either too human or just too slapstick to be worth watching, but this one maintains a careful balance between the animals behaving like animals, but also acting a little humanistic as well. It creates multiple comedic moments that play out fairly well a lot of the time. The characters themselves were fairly well constructed creating some clear motivations and reasoning behind their activities. The deer got annoying, but I suspect that was his purpose, and he served to up the comedic factor quite a bit at times.

The film moved pretty well throughout and the story arcked very naturally. It was very funny over and over, and I laughed quite a bit throughout. The early scene where the bear and deer have a confrontation behind a backlit curtain was absolutely hilarious. I watched it with the kids and my wife and brother, and we were all just rolling.

Come down to a touchy and sensible ending, and its done. A surprisingly well done animated film in a time when animated films are turning to pure schlock.

Oldboy -- 2003 -- R

The follow up film to Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is leaps and bounds above its predecessor. You almost wonder if the same guy was behind it. This time, we get a single protagonist with a singular problem, and he works it out only with those who affected him in some way...and we even get a big twist.

I do want to be clear though although these first two films and it's final film, Lady Vengeance, are considered part of a trilogy, they are separate stories, so you do not need to watch them in any order, nor is one required to watch any of the others. The theme here is revenge, and all three are from the same director which is their only common thread.

A guy is bailed out of the drunk tank and working to get home to his wife and daughter when he mysteriously disappears. He finds himself locked up in a prison, of sorts, without any explanation as to why he is there. With no word from his captors, he spends the next fifteen years behind those walls working himself up to have at them once he gets out. He tries to dig out, but they let him go just as he finishes his tunnel to the outside.

Once out, he finds himself in contact with whoever it was that had him put away, and challenged to find out why he was put away for fifteen years by a certain date. Along the way, he runs across a girl who takes him in and since she feels sorry for him, does what she can to help him (and you know, they do a little bit of everything, if you know what I mean).

This film keeps moving throughout its structure with very few slowdowns at all hindering our plot progress. The guy spent time training himself for fighting once he got out, and fights he has aplenty. It's not martial arts, as one might want to expect here, but down and dirty street fighting with fists and whatever else you can pick up on the sidewalk. As soon as the film tries to dip into the silly when the fights go on, it gets changed up just enough to prevent it from going down.

Watching the clues and backstory unfold before us maintains interest throughout, and the story is really engaging. And just when you think everything is all worked out, the film zings you in a good way and throws out the "big secret." It's wonderfully horrible, and I wouldn't dare give it away.

Though the first film in this trilogy was mediocre, this one really worked well and showed that the people behind this series do have a clue if they'd only stick with it. Very good film, and for those who dislike subtitles, this one is dubbed in English.

One Missed Call -- 2008 -- PG-13

So my triumphant second return to the game is a J-horror remake called One Missed Call. The Japanese version actually has a sequel, but I doubt the American one will get that far. It seems the Japanese have this thing about possessing technology with angry spirits and this time, the game is cell phones...or rather, voice mail. After all, there is nothing in the world more frightening than..voice mail!

The plot is simple: young people between the ages of 19 and 25 die suddenly at a specific date and time as given to them by the time they miss one specific call placed to them by someone who died only moments before the call came in. They never take the call; it's just missed and the voice mail received plays back what they say and the sounds around them a few seconds before they die. It's a clever enough premise if you don't mind the suspension of disbelief it requires.

That part of the movie was fine. It was constructed rather plausibly, and while the lead character did do something stupid, you have to give her credit: she knew she would die at a specific time, and knew nothing would happen to her before then. But then, why keep running from perceived danger? Didn't quite get that part. One person was completely safe and surrounded by people during her mysterious death, so we had established even being in a safe place won't help.

Where the big break down occurred was again in the character department, but this one didn't totally ignore character; it just did it badly. After all, an attempt was made to fill out the main character (and pretty much only the main character). But the back story and weaknesses we were given didn't really correlate to the plot that much. Yes, there was a parallel, and I got that, but she wasn't given a weakness, really, and the history didn't help her understand anything. And other than a single point at the very, very end, one recurring far didn't play into anything.

Everyone else existed for the purpose of the plot. They had no real depth to them. Only enough to barely remember their names when referenced in passing when the "did you hear about..." conversation kicked off. The twist was ok. It was a forced reveal, at the least, but it did make me at least nod, and say, alright.

In the end, the movie was a bit of a disappointment. It had a nice enough premise that did get freaky at times, but with so much stupidity, nonsensical actions, and cardboard characters, we have another J-horror remake that failed to be anymore than another techno-scare to try and make us fear another every day device. Sorry, guys, I'll still check my voice mail...but I might see who's seen the movie by getting that little ringtone. You know, just because.