Saturday, October 5, 2013

A Fantastic "Voyage", a Musical "Step Up", Something Darkly "Sinister", and a "Haunted" Comedy: My Picks for the Best and Worst Movies I Saw in Sept. 2013

[The titles all link to the trailers]
Since the year 2000, every month in my journal, out of all the movies I saw that month, I always pick my two favorites, and the one or two stinkers I happened to see.  I'm not a movie critic or a true cinefile, which means I often don't get to see most movies when they are released.  Therefore, the only rule is that I can choose any movies I happened to see that month, no matter when they were released, provided I haven't already named it as a favorite or a stinker before.

This is my list for the movies I saw in September of 2013:

The Best:


I loved The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and then saw Prince Caspian, and found myself disappointed.  Then, after recently reading the first three Chronicles of Narnia, I found myself liking the first and third stories more than the second (Prince Caspian), and was therefore curious about what they did with the third Chronicle movie, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  I loved the third book, and the story, though perhaps not as much as the first one.  The story brings Lucy and Edmund back to Narnia to join Prince Caspian’s voyage on his beautiful ship, the Dawn Treader, and with their annoying cousin Eustace along for the trip.  They have many fantastical adventures that were, I believed, rendered quite well here, and all the themes from the book dealing with the five main characters of Lucy, Edmund, Eustace, Prince Caspian, and the talking mouse Reepicheep (voiced by Simon Pegg).


     As with the book, the lion Aslan shows up occasionally offering guidance to the characters when they are in need of him; he's a shadowy presence that is, at times, physically there and not really there at the same time, as he is basically the Holy Spirit for these characters, and when they at last encounter him for real at the edge of this fantasy world, he reveals to Lucy, Edmund, and a now changed Eustace that in their world, he goes by another name, but they can have a relationship with him there just as they do here.  C.S. Lewis’ strong Christian allegory here may be rather blunt, but it works, and I, for one, applaud it!  How can a Christian not really end up liking a set of entertaining, imaginative fantasy stories for children that teach about the concepts and character of Christ?  

The 2nd Best: 


I love dance, and that’s what this movie was all about, and all it was ever intended to be about.  And that’s okay!  I particularly liked the way the filmmakers used the whole “Mob” angle.  Lovers or dance will love it!
 

Of course, no one in these Step Up movies will probably ever receive any kind of award for great acting or screenwriting, but as I said, that is not what these Step Up movies are all about, and as dance movies go, I like these Step Up movies more than something like You Got Served.

The Worst:


This movie was “sinister”, and dark, dark, dark, dark!  Did I say “dark”?  It was dark!  It was dark, dark!  It was darko dark, but not as good as Donnie Darko… dark!  But it was dark.  Is that enough use of the word “dark”?  Maybe not.  It was not only dark in content, but also in the lighting and the way it was shot.  The cinematographer seemed to have a penchant for shooting things without sufficient light, or too much back light, and maybe that was the fault of the director.  They were making a darkly toned horror movie, after all!  Very darkly toned!  Dark!  Even in the daylight, with the sun streaming through their windows, the characters were often in silhouette, or talking in noticeably drab and dark interiors that didn’t get any light from the open windows.  Lighted lamps only gave off a small ring of light, enough to light the lamp itself, and nothing else.  It was like they lived in some dark netherworld.  I understand the green movement and trying to save electricity, but this is ridiculous!  You literally quite often couldn’t see what was going on!  It was dark.  Like, pitch black dark!


     The plot was quite demonic and morbid as well.  Ethan Hawke plays a true crime writer who moves his family into a house where the grisly murder of another family took place so he can write about it and regain his glory days on the best seller list.  He quickly comes across a box of 8mm films left in the attic, containing the moving images of a bunch of family massacres, and makes the discovery that a disturbing, demonic apparition can be seen on each of the films.  Although the main villain was certainly scary enough – we particularly liked the scene where this boogie man’s image is frozen on a computer screen in the background, and while the main character talks about these murders with someone on the telephone, the frozen image moves and looks at him – we did not like the twist towards the end that revealed another group of vicious villains, and we really didn’t like the totally nihilistic, downer of an ending.  Unless you’re a ghoul, you probably won’t like it either.  I mean, even the ending of The Exorcist was a bit more uplifting! 

The 2nd Worst:  



I didn’t want to see this one, and I didn’t have to watch the whole thing, thank God!  I saw a few of the funnier bits, which were still rather raunchy, and other than some well timed farts and a bit of ghost slapstick, when the wife is being thrown all over the house screaming while the husband is oblivious on headphones, there wasn’t much here to recommend for those looking for a good laugh.  I get the Wayans shtick by now, and as for horror movie parodies, we’ve seen this before, quite a bit by the Wayans themselves.  This was as raunchy as their first two Scary Movies; wasn’t as funny as the first, but was better than the second.  That’s still not saying much.


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