Rating the Movies I Saw in October 2013: King's Dolores, a Pre-Christmas Nightmare, a Conjuring, a Spooky Mama, a Vacancy, and Three Idiots at an ATM

[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 perhaps a stinker) before.

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

Movie of the Month:

Dolores Claiborne

Misery isn’t the only great Stephen King film starring Kathy Bates!  Released five years after Misery, this quieter thriller tells a moving, intricate story of a woman accused of murder for the second time, but more than that, it is a good piece of feminist literature, as not only Dolores, but also her workaholic, drug-dependent daughter Selena (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and her overbearing, pompous employer Vera Donovan (Judy Parfitt) seem to have difficulty with all the men in their lives.  

Dolores and Selena

The men seem to hold all the power, and yet these women are able to stand up to them throughout the story, but not without severe consequences.  For instance, Selena’s now a reporter, and her boss, the editor, who she’s been sleeping with, just gave her story to someone else.  Dolores’ husband was a no-good, lazy, abusive lay-about named Joe (David Strathairn), and he constantly doled out verbal and physical abuse upon Dolores, but she swore she wouldn’t put up with it, and bravely stood up to him.  Then Joe did two more dirty deeds that left Dolores reeling, one of them concerning a young Selena, who seems to have blocked out all memory of it, and the other leaving Dolores’ bank account dry when Joe empties it.  When she goes to the head of the bank, who is a man, she is left no recourse, and he won’t deal with her.  “It’s because I’m a woman, isn’t it,” she tells him, and she’s right, and her righteous indignation doesn’t come off as patronizing.

"Dolores Claiborne" Supporting Cast:  David Strathairn, Judy Parfitt, Christopher Plummer, John C. Reilly

Vera gives her some advice:  “An accident can be an unhappy woman’s best friend, Dolores,” she tells her, revealing at the same time how her husband’s brakes “happened to fail” just when he was leaving his mistress’ house, and so Dolores has just such an accident in mind, which will play out during all the eclipse hoopla around the small, coastal Maine town, and it’s a doozy!  By all accounts, it is a legitimate “accident”, and Joe deserves it, but she doesn’t get off Scott-free anyway, of course, and is doggedly pursued by yet another man in the “old boys club”, Det. John Mackey, well played by Christopher Plummer.  He always suspected foul play in Joe’s death, and in fact, it’s the only case in his entire career that he ever lost.  And so now that Dolores is implicated in the death of Vera Donovan, where she was found standing over her dead body ready to assault her with a heavy rolling pin after Vera fell down the stairs, not to mention the fact that practically the whole town had heard Dolores bad-mouth Vera, he now sees an opportunity to finally condemn the only person who ever managed to allude him.  The only man on her side throughout the whole movie is the constable played by John C. Reilly, who sticks up for Dolores twice when Mackey is trying to demonize her.  Things look even worse for Dolores when it is revealed Vera left her entire estate and all her money to Dolores.  But despite their strained relationships, and appearances, all these women actually come through for each other in the end.

Movie of the Month: 2nd Place

The Nightmare Before Christmas

A little over a decade ago, I named this as runner up for worst movie of the month.  It just so happens that, for that particular month, it really was the second worst movie I saw that month.  Over the last decade, it seems I watch this every year around Halloween, hoping to get it off that list by naming it as the best or second best of the month… but it never seems to come to fruition.  I like this film – the animation, the bizarre story, some of the music, especially “What’s This” (Danny Elfman as Jack Skellington), “The Oogie Boogie Song” (Ken Page and Edward Ivory as Oogie Boogie and Santa), and “Kidnap the Sandy Claws” (Paul Reubens, Catherine O'Hara, and Danny Elfman as Lock, Shock, and Barrel)- but it just never seems to make it into the top two.  That’s because I realize it does have its limitations, but it’s also far from being the worst.  After all these years, there’s still something there.  Will it make it into the top two this month?  Well, maybe… but don’t hold your breath!

Hey, what do ya know, it finally made it!

Stinker of the Month

ATM

ATM:  Three idiots and a ridiculously lucky killer

Three complete idiots get locked into an ATM on a freezing cold December night by a psycho with a big hood on his jacket hiding his face.  The first mistake they made was park so far away from the ATM they needed to use.  The second mistake was not running while the psycho was murdering a guy walking his dog.  From there, it was just a series a one mistake after another, including a security guard that is dumber than a soap dish.  That killer was lucky all these people are so stupid!  They tried to do an interesting twist at the end, similar to Arlington Road, but it was laughable, and not gratifying in the least.  This cheap film is at such a lower level!  

I’ve seen these actors in other roles:  Brian Geraghty as the new recruit in The Hurt Locker, Alice Eve as Carol Marcus in Star Trek: Into Darkness, and Josh Peck in the Disney Channel show Drake andJosh.  He was affable in Drake and Josh, but here he winds up playing a completely selfish and arrogant, bone-headed jerk.  This film had a few good scares, but they would all be non-existent if the characters were smarter than a bag of rocks, or if the plot maneuverings dealing with the killer had made sense.

Other movies from October:

The Conjuring 

One of the better ghost stories we’ve seen lately, it had scenes that were spooky, shocking, and creepy in all the right places.  There’s even an exorcism in the end.  The film juxtaposes two families – one with a whole passel of daughters that moves into a new house, and a ghost-hunting couple with a daughter of their own.  This couple, the Warrens, were apparently based on the real ghost hunters who later dealt with the family who owned the Amityville house.  I was never much of a fan of The Amityville Horror franchise, but this film manages to deliver the goods in the end.  That’s good.  I don’t think I could have taken another Sinister.   

Mama

This was one of the better horror movies we’ve seen lately, but we still didn’t like the ending.  The way the movie ended was still much better than, say, the way Stephen King’s The Mist ended, which we HATED!  But still…

They spared no expense on the story or the ghostly effects, particularly the title creature, and the acting was quite good, and you could see everything quite clearly, unlike many other dark horror films (like Sinister).  In fact, this could have been an all ‘round great movie, if only it hadn’t ended on such a downer.  I’m sure there are some people who liked the way it ended, and that I perhaps missed the meaning, but I didn’t.  Without giving anything away, I will simply say that I understand what they were trying to do, but it just didn’t really work.  We would have preferred an ending in which everyone survived.  Still, I was very impressed and absorbed with this film up until the very end.

Vacancy 2: The First Cut

It’s been so long since I saw the first Vacancy with Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale.  I remember I liked it, and that it was about killers at some backwoods motel, but I didn’t remember the basics of the plot, namely that people were being filmed while killed, and the snuff videos were being sold on the internet.  Now with Vacancy 2, we get the story of how it all started.  This is strictly direct-to-video fare, but as such, we found it rather scary, and truthfully, the gore was turned down (just a bit) in favor of suspense and shocks.  In other words, the filmmakers, to their credit, did not relish every opportunity to linger over torture and blood and dismemberment, like you would normally expect from a direct-to-video cheapie.

            

I recognized David Moscow, who here played the slime-ball owner of the motel, striking a deal with the killer to film his assaults for profit, and then finding himself having to sometimes assist in the rampage, eventually paying the ultimate price for it as well.  A long time ago, he played the 13 year old version of Tom Hanks in Big.  I suppose it’s a good thing he’s still working in film, but to compare his career with that of Tom Hanks… sad to say that his is actually the career the vast majority of actors have, or will have, eking out a smaller audience with less prestige.  After looking for the pictures included below, I discovered Moscow is a leftist political activist (no surprise there for a Hollywood actor, of course, especially since he states in an article, "What I want to do in my life is to make commercial, left-wing propaganda.  I want to change whom the world views as heroes." - see the link here - As the Church Lady used to say, "Well, isn't that special!") and has been making quieter, independent films lately, such as this one, or David & Layla about a Jewish man who falls in love with a Muslim woman, and is developing a TV show, probably for a cable channel, about his real parent’s lives as liberal political radicals.  So there you go.  A quieter, more specialized career.  They can't all be as lucky or well known as Tom Hanks and Kathy Bates, you know.