REVIEW: Them (2006)

This should be called “Patience: The Movie.” Because you just keep waiting…and waiting…and waiting…and waiting…and waiting…and waiting…

Director: David Moreau, Xavier Palud

Starring: Olivia Bonamy, Michael Cohen

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0465203/

So apparently this movie was well liked internationally, according to the Wikipedia page, and has a fairly positive score on Rotten Tomatoes. And to that I say, DID ANY OF YOU IDIOTS EVEN WATCH THIS CRAP?! This is wretched, banal and vapid to extremes I haven’t seen in a while. It’s completely directionless, there’s no suspense, the characters suck and the twist is laughable. There, review over.

…no, I can’t just leave it at that; that wouldn’t be a convincing enough warning. Sigh. I guess I’ll have to just go through this whole thing and prove it. Let’s get this bad movie circus started.

Our movie begins with two annoying characters in a car. The mother asks her daughter if she’d like to speak to her father, and the daughter, being a whiny, precocious teenager, gives her a hard time about it. Oh no, she has to SPEAK TO HER FATHER? Call the frigging presses, it’s a tragedy on par with the Titanic. Seriously, nice way to make sure we don’t give a crap from the start about these two. Not to mention their acting is terrible, too. The car breaks down, the mother goes out to try and jump start the engine, and she disappears…the daughter, being a super genius, decides to step outside and start calling her mom’s name incessantly, thinking that MAYBE the fiftieth time she calls, her mom will respond. She gets back in the car and gets strangled, because of course there’s NO WAY she could have heard the car door opening!

"Help! I'm being attacked by implausibility!"

The next day we see a teacher…teaching. Yeah, uh, OK then.

"Today we will be learning about horrible acting and unrealistic plot development. Take out your books and turn to page 50."

She goes home and passes by the opening-kill car, which serves to establish what we already know – oooooh, whatever happened to them is going to happen to her! She goes home to her boyfriend, who is a writer, who says he’s always doing his job, even in his head. Well I’m glad someone is, because whoever wrote this sure isn’t…and why is this important? Open the Plot Fortune Cookie and find out!

Seriously; it has no bearing on the plot and is never brought up again. This movie fails again!

Then we get a bunch of scenes of the two of them playing around and doing couple things; la-dee-da, I’m sure NOTHING bad will happen here! Actually the scenes of him chasing her through the halls could have easily been altered to be much, much scarier than any of the actual horror scenes in this movie. They talk about random stuff, and I mostly just wonder why.

It isn't a good sign when even your actors would rather watch TV than further the plot...

And do we REALLY need to see a scene of them sitting on the couch and watching TV? I mean really, would the movie have suffered if you cut it out? Are you that bankrupt of ideas? At one point the guy even turns off the TV and says he doesn’t need to watch this crap. Ironic considering the movie he’s in…but seriously, we’re almost halfway into the movie at this point. This is only a 70 something minute movie. It shouldn't be that hard to fill up with suspense and things happening, but we're around a half hour in and NOTHING has really happened to advance the plot! That's got to be a new record for worthlessness.

So then they’re sleeping at night when the woman hears a noise outside. A NOISE! OH NO! The guy goes outside and finds that someone is in the car and has TURNED THE LIGHTS ON! Oh the humanity! The lights go out, like in every really bad horror movie, and they turn the TV on too? What fiends these guys are!

The TV is the best actor in the movie and shows the most emotional range by far.

So these two get…really overly terrified at what’s happening despite the fact that they haven’t seen anything yet and that since it’s THEIR HOUSE they should know where SOMETHING is that could help them – a flashlight? Something they could use as a weapon? ANYTHING? But nope, because these people are morons, the plot must go on. The guy gets hurt when a broken glass door slams into his leg and they both end up hiding in their bedroom like cowards. Which would be a brilliant thing to do if you wanted to entrap yourself up there and let your attackers surround you.

Then the woman goes up into the attic, and since this is a horror movie, the whole attic is covered in transparent drapes that make it look like one of Dexter’s kill rooms or something.

"Do you mind?"

The attackers are up there, too, but they wait until it’s dramatically convenient to attack, giving her time to possibly formulate a plan – I’m glad these attackers are so fair. Then one of them is just sort of standing there ominously, because THAT’S a smart thing to do! I’m sure the main character won’t ever think of just pushing him off the balcony he’s standing on…oh, wait.

Whoopsy daisy!

Then she and her husband go for a pleasant nighttime jog in the woods until they come to a fence. The guy can’t get over it because of his leg wound. He tells his wife to run by herself, and being a stupid and selfish character, she goes ahead and does it. I laugh at this scene because all I can picture is what the husband is really thinking: “No, wait! I just said that to look noble! Don’t leave me here, you whore! COME BACK!”

And then we see even more of our main heroine’s intelligence as she finds a car and gets inside, even as the attackers surround her. It’s not like she could just open the doors and make a break for it, right? That would just be silly.

Then we cut to the husband, who somehow got over his fence problem (and whose injury is only debilitating when the plot requires it to be) and pursues the attackers by listening to the nice soundtrack of his wife’s screams. He finds a secret cavernous entrance to the sewers, I guess, which looks more like a place Jigsaw from the SAW movies would love to hang out. There he finds a bunch of little kids committing the horrendous act of MAKING HIS WIFE SMELL SOMETHING IN A BAG! Really, that’s what it looks like. The picture quality is too murky to determine anything else, so…yeah.

But seriously, a bunch of little kids? That’s your big scare of the movie? “Won’t you play with us?” is the movie’s chosen scary line for them to say, and it’s even sillier that way. Oh no, they’re going to make us play hide and seek with them! In fact that’s really all this movie is. A big, stupid, incredibly boring game of hide and seek.

So anyway, one of the kids, a younger one, tells the older one to stop torturing the woman. But before any character development can happen, the husband says NO and just kills the older kid, saving his wife. But then they hear the sounds of the other kids coming in! The little kid tells them to follow him, and since they’re morons, they agree. To be fair, he was trying to get his buddy to stop torturing the woman, but still, are you telling me they couldn’t just go back toward the entrance and face the kids head on? That these two GROWN ADULTS can’t take a bunch of whiny little brats who probably should have been beaten more by their probably neglectful parents? Get real!

And then when they’re trying to escape, the kid suddenly betrays them anyway! Then why was he telling the kid to stop torturing her earlier? And for that matter, what’s the logic in acting like he’s going to help them escape when the other kids are right outside, when he could have easily just let them get captured in the first place and saved us all 5 minutes of this excruciating excrement? This movie has less logic than…a dog driving a car!

Well, that 2 minutes was far more entertaining than the movie itself, but since I still have to finish this review...

The film ends with both of them dead and the kids all getting on a bus to go and ruin more good cinema. Oh what a joyous rape of the senses…I hope that bus burns.

All aboard the bus to cliche horror ending-ville! Tickets are free except we do want your dignity and brain cells. Those are kind of in short supply where movies like this are made.

This was awful! There’s nothing entertaining or suspenseful about this at all. This had a cool set up, with the cover art and the nice, desolate setting, but man oh man did they waste all of that. The amount of sheer nothing contained in Them is enough to fill a football field. If you like movies that are actually about something, that contain any modicum of wit or style to their proceedings or that have any inch of atmosphere to them, avoid this like the plague. To sum up in short: little kids are evil and can easily overpower grown adults with nothing else but their bare hands and the cover of night. Yup, that’s about the size of it. What a joke.

Review: The City of Lost Children (1995)

Director: Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Juenet

Starring: Ron Perlman, Judith Vittet, Daniel Emilfork

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112682/

The City of Lost Children was nothing less than a total acid trip from beginning to end. Starting off with a surprising and shocking scene involving multiple Santa Clauses, the film establishes right away that it will not be a ‘normal’ venture…I mean, look at this first scene. It’s just…eh, let me show you:

After that mind-fuck of epic proportions, the movie evolves into a rollicking, colorful sci-fi adventure with a ton of creativity albeit the very, very little sense being made. I think the fact that this was in French created more confusion, as I probably missed a few things in translation, even with the subtitles. But that's not to say this isn't good. There are a few moments in the first half hour or so, like right after that Santa scene, where you get all these weird little clone-guys screaming simultaneously…and it’s pretty much unbearable. But the movie improves, and throughout the film even the most non-French speaking individuals will be able to follow the story pretty well.

The story, about a mad scientist who kidnaps children to steal their dreams and make him eternally young, is told with vibrancy and energy, and it becomes a lot of fun even when you don't know what's going on. The directing, with all its strange, alien colors and architecture, is just splendid. It’s really like nothing you’ve ever seen before, as it looks like some sort of steampunk world, if it was crossed with a 1930s gangster environment. Like there’s this one scene in a bar that just overflows with scenery that looks like a hybrid between Once Upon a Time in America and The Fifth Element. That’s just so weird I can hardly take it. But it works. It really, really works.

The characters are all really good, too. I surprisingly found myself really drawn into them – in fact, I’d say they were the main reason I kept watching the film. The lead is oddly named One, played by Ron Perlman, who is a simpleminded circus strongman who is pretty much the kindest soul you’ll ever meet. You don’t get a whole lot of backstory about him (or any of the characters, really), but it’s implied that he’s a protector of the weak and helpless. He protects his younger brother, who has been kidnapped by the mad scientists, and he protects young, tough-as-nails orphan Miette (Judith Vittet) for most of the movie, too, calling her his little sister. Miette doesn’t show a lot of outward emotion but feels for One in his simple, emotional quest to save his loved one, and helps out accordingly, breaking away from her friends in the orphanage and the oppressive (and really odd) pair of conjoined twins that domineer over them all. These two characters are just really enjoyable to watch, and the simple emotional arc they are a part of is sweet, involving and captivating. They’re helping each other. That’s as pure and simple as it gets.

There’s also Krank, who is the leader of the Cyclops, the group of strange mad scientist/soldier types who was apparently a little child who was aged prematurely by the ‘original’…who has been shrouded in mystery. He wants to steal the childrens’ dreams to become young and stop himself from decaying completely. He talks to this odd brain thing in a test tube that seems to know everything, and eventually leads them to the ‘original,’ who lives in a submarine under the sea. But not a pineapple under the sea. That would be going too far even for this movie.

These Cyclops guys are grown up children who weren’t given a chance to have a real childhood, because, well…they’re clones of some freak scientist who now lives in a submarine. To gain back their childhood, they have to take it away from other children, so really, nobody wins. The Cyclops are victims, too. They’ve been created against their will – they didn’t have any part of it. There is a tragic undertone to all of this, if you can believe that after seeing some of the images this movie throws at you. But that's really part of the movie's genius. I did end up buying the 

Add into this whole thing a plotline about the conjoined twins trying to kill One and Miette to get back some gold they apparently stole, and this becomes a right jam-packed epic. There’s always something going on on screen, and the film never becomes boring. This works because the atmosphere is dreamlike and surreal, and it runs deep to the movie’s core. This is an authentic work of art that is quirky, silly, morose and pensive all at once. If you like movies that entertain on a bit of a higher echelon, The City of Lost Children will deliver fully. I want to watch this again someday and I think I'll notice new things and perhaps gain a new understanding of it. This is just one of those movies that really caught my attention, and that's why I'm sharing it with you all.

None of these images are mine and I take no credit for any of them.

Joyeux Noel (Merry Christmas) (2005)

Starring: Benno Furmann, Guillaume Canet, Daniel Bruhl

Director: Christian Carion

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424205/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyeux_Noël

"Joyeux Noel" (or "Merry Christmas" in English) is a 2005 French film about the real-life World War I Christmas truce. It focuses on a number of German, French, and Scottish soldiers who in December of 1914 lay down their arms in order to put a stop to the fighting, if only briefly, and fraternize with each other.

This movie kind of has an unfair advantage. I say this because it was probably going to be good no matter what anyone did to it just because it is such an amazing story. Well, then again, anything is possible, especially in the realm of film making; I guess we should be thankful that this was a foreign film as opposed to one created by Hollywood. Anyway, whatever the case, it turned out very well. It did a fantastic job of showing the difficulties of fighting a war against those with such a similar culture and who under normal circumstances would be your friendly neighbors instead of the people who you are being ordered to kill. While there are strands of uneasiness and animosity, the troops genuinely want to be at peace with their counterparts, as they drink together, exchange information about themselves and their living conditions in the trenches, and even play soccer against one another (okay, they're European, so its technically football).

You know how when you are a little kid (or even as an adult) you get really depressed when Christmas comes to an end? Well...how do you think these guys must have felt? Almost needless to say, the soldiers on both sides find it very difficult to go back to the bloodshed after two days of harmony. They refuse to shoot the enemy, and even go so far as to hide them in their respective trenches during artillery bombings. Eventually, however, the military leaders intervene and the inevitable realities of war rear their ugly heads. Still, the extraordinary peace that these men experienced during those few days remains with them, if only in mind and spirit.

I know this review seems more like a summery than an actual critique, but that is mostly because the story itself does reveals most of the emotion and power involved in the movie. As I mentioned, there was the small possibility of that it would fail, but this was far from the case. The performances are excellent, there are a number of great lines exchanged between the characters and the music that is sung or played throughout the picture is fantastic. All of these factors make it a really wonderful and inspiring film to watch anytime of the year, but especially over the holidays, and I strongly recommend it.

This review, while a little short, seems like a fitting one to post on the site on Christmas Eve, though more reviews will be featured before the year comes to a close. Merry Christmas.