Gamera vs. Barugon

Gamera vs. Barugon is dull. It’s mostly talking. It doesn’t help that the people who do the talking are completely bland. I rented this movie for the fight scenes. There were only like, I’m not sure, 30 seconds of fighting?

This movie was very boring. Avoid it. All said.

King Kong Escapes

King Kong escapes was perfect!... Perfectly disappointing, that is.        

King Kong was so tiny. He was smaller than a blue whale. He was only 60 feet. He should be a lot larger, like 30 meters. Also, the adult protagonists were annoying, unlike the kid protagonists from Gamera vs. Guiron. The blond-haired damsel in distress keeps shouting “Kong!” in a really whiny voice.

So I suggest you do yourself a favor and stay away from this movie.

Oh, well. It’s kind of hard to appreciate slurm like this after you’ve watched a great movie like Gamera versus Guiron. 

Slowdown

Reader,

If you check this site from time to time, you'll have noticed that I've gone from posting new material several times a week to posting only occasionally.

If you're a regular reader, you know that I'm an airline pilot and that I also fly in the Navy Reserve.  Well, the Navy has entrusted me with command of a squadron.  I've found that it's an all-consuming duty, leaving me with limited time to watch films, much less compose my thoughts on them.

Nevertheless, I enjoy writing and I hope to snatch the occasional moment to share with you my impressions.  Please do keep this site in your RSS feed.  In the meantime, simply take my advice and avoid King Kong Escapes.

Have a wonderful day,
Alex

Gamera vs. Guiron

Here's another review from my 6-th Grader, Ian!

Gamera vs. Guiron is perfect.

The monsters are fake looking, which is great. I like fake looking monsters. So if you like cheesy movies featuring giant monster battles in which the monsters are so fake looking they’re actually cute, then this movie is for you. If you’re a kaiju fanatic, you’ll love this. If you’re not? Well, naturally, being a kaiju fanatic, I wouldn’t know what the average Joe would think about it. This movie is meant for kaiju fanatics. If you’re not one, I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t like this flick. The movie itself is good, but the DVD cut out one of the best fight scenes: The one where Guiron chops up Spacegyoas (who is just like Gyoas, except white) into pieces using his knife head. This isn’t a big deal however, because you can find the entire battle on youtube, or go on Netflix instant to watch the Mystery Science Theater 3,000 version. They make fun of the battle of course, though. 

I really liked this one. it was just plain terrific! =^D

The Earrings of Madame de...

The Earrings of Madame de… is a relationship movie for people who don’t like relationship movies, a fashion movie for people who don’t like fashion movies.  Why?  Because it’s so good that it doesn’t matter what kind of movies you like: The Earrings of Madame de… will captivate you.

The premise is a twist on ­Daniel Deronda.  A young woman pawns some jewelry after losing big at the roulette wheel.  Complications ensue.  Where Daniel Deronda goes on to use the jewelry as a catalyst for growth and redemption, The Earrings of Madame de… uses it to drive a tragedy.  And oh, what a tragedy.

Master director Max Ophüls (born, coincidentally enough, in my ancestral home of Saarbrücken) sets his tragedy in the Geneva of the late 1800s.  His characters, mostly aristocrats, adhere to the social mores of then-contemporary France, in which one married for business and one loved whom one chose, so long as the love remained discreet.  This may seem off-putting.  After all, who wants to spend two hours ogling the lifestyles of the aristocrats of yesteryear?  It works, however, because it allows Ophüls to do two things: create a world of lavish sets, beautiful costumes, and extraordinary jewelry, and show how the rules of that world can bind and constrict and kill. 

It also works because we care about the members of the film’s love triangle.  Danielle Darrieux (now 96 years old and credited in the remarkable Persepolis), Charles Boyer, and Vittorio De Sica (director of the hilarious Divorce, Italian Style), bring humanity to their roles as Madame de…, General de…, and the Great Love of Madame de…’s life, respectively.  We see through their wealth and their pretensions to the real, needy people beneath their exteriors, and we feel for them.  Director Ophüls and cinematographer Christian Matras brings them to life through a high-gloss, high-beauty black and white photography that would count as realism if the world were just a bit more poetic. 

The Earrings of Madame de… is beautiful to look at and heartbreaking to watch, and entirely successful in every way.  I loved it.

Godzilla vs. Gigan

Here's a review of Godzilla vs. Gigan, courtesy of my 11-year-old, Ian:

Godzilla vs. Gigan is a decent kaiju movie complete with giant monsters flailing around. In the movie, cockroaches invade earth using the alien dragon King Ghidorah, and the cyborg Gigan. Gigan has a chainsaw in his belly and resembles a chicken. Godzilla and his sidekick Anguirus come and save the day. The movie, however, is very cheap.

They keep using stock footage, so the scenes are always changing from night to day (I could see Larval Mothra for a split second in one scene). But, who cares? Not me. The action is great, but a major annoyance throughout the movie was the fact that the movie had soooooo much talking. It was annoying to have to constantly fast forward through all the talking in order to see the action. But, go ahead and rent it. Even if it is annoying to constantly fast forward or watch all the talking, it's still worth the giant monster fight scenes.

Attack of the Monsters

Attack of the Monsters, also knows as Gamera Vs. Guiron, is a late-‘60s giant Japanese monster (or kaiju) movie for kids.  It stars a gigantic, jet-powered flying turtle with really large tusks.  He fights a gigantic lizard-thing with a head shaped like a giant Buck knife and knees that clearly hadn’t been reinforced, because they start to tear in the film’s later stages.  It’s all great fun, with nice model scenery just waiting for destruction and monsters scary enough for an eleven-year-old yet fake enough for a two-year-old.

Here’s the story: Gamera (the turtle) rescues a couple of boys who explore a flying saucer that had touched down near their home (And really, what self-respecting boys wouldn’t?).  See, the saucer is a trap!  It’s remote controlled by evil, brain-eating aliens who look just like attractive Japanese women in shimmery silver leotards!  When the saucer takes off and flies to the Planet of Attractive Japanese Women in Shimmery Silver Leotards, Gamera pursues and does battle with Guiron, the aliens’ attack knife-lizard thing.  Meanwhile, the boys, brave and resourceful, must find a way to escape the clutches of the attractive Japanese women in shimmery silver leotards.  Stuff like this is what popcorn was made for, and my kids ate up every minute of it.

Me?  Well, I had a good time!  Attack of the Monsters so earnestly tried to entertain my kids that it charmed the heck out of me. The Gamera franchise occupies a pleasant sphere as Daiei Studios’ child-friendly answer to Toho Studios’ more teen-oriented Godzilla.  This outing’s aliens were just menacing enough, its sets and costumes just good enough, to help me suspend my disbelief and roll with it.  This isn’t half the movie that my next entry, The Earrings of Madame De… can boast of being.  But it isn’t trying to be.  It’s trying to be light entertainment for monster-hungry preadolescents, and it succeeds.  Attack of the Monsters is a winner.

The Red Shoes

Most movies try to make you believe that you’re watching reality.  The Red Shoes tries to make you believe that you’re watching a stage production.  The sets obviously look like sets.  Players wear so much powder on their faces that we can actually see the line where makeup ends and flesh begins.  Things seem heightened, theatrical.  And that’s before the music starts and the dancing begins.

Here’s the setup:  it’s Europe, in something approximating the ‘20s.  The Ballet Lermontov has just hired a new composer who’s a genius.  Now, it needs a new prima ballerina because the previous one got married.  I guess that’s just how they rolled in the ‘20s.  The composer (Marius Goring) belongs in front of an orchestra.  The new prima (Moira Shearer) belongs onstage.  They belong together.

Here’s the execution: heightened, dramatic, delirious with aestheticism and creativity, The Red Shoes doesn’t care if you suspend your disbelief.  It just wants to blow you away.

It succeeds, through an audacious combination of dance, theatricality, set design, and special effects.  It doesn’t just show you what a ballet looks like, it shows you what’s happening inside the minds of the creators, the performers, and the audience.  Its music is extraordinary, its dancing is fantastic, and I found myself swept away even though I knew I was watching a show.

What a movie.

House

You have never seen a movie like House.  Director Nobuhiko Obayashi made sure of it.

It was the early ‘70s and Jaws had just hit.  Toho studios, looking to capitalize on the horror market, asked commercial director Obayashi for a script.  Obayashi thought, ‘If Jaws is a success, what’s next?  Movies about bear attacks and bee attacks and ant attacks.  How boring.’  He talked over the project with his ten year old daughter, talked about what scared her.  He wrote down her ideas as scenarios including mummies, skeletons, ghosts, vampires, hungry pianos, murderous reflections, demonic cats ,and much more.  He gave the scenarios to his writing partner and told him to have at it.  The result?  A film that processes a little girl’s night terrors through the sensibilities of the men who made the classic Charles Bronson “Mandom” commercials.

The result is a bold, creepy, and funny horror fantasy.  It gathers seven young women whom the camera will love, fetishisize, and terrorize in combinations that’ll alternately make you smile, squirm, recoil, and guffaw.  It sends them to a spooky house on a hill.  It introduces them to a friendly old woman who may not be friendly at all.  Before long, the flying head of a decapitated Japanese girl will take a bite out of the rear end of one of her former classmates.  And away we go.

Ok, so far so good.  But you’ve seen Sam Raimi pictures and you’ve seen early Peter Jackson flicks.  What makes House so very different?  Execution.  This horror fantasy luxuriates in the fantastic.  It uses every imaginable camera trick to focus the eye, to leap from image to image, and even to play within an image to give the impression of a story told by someone whose mind is racing through and among characters and events faster than she can get the words out.  House’s sets, including deliriously colorful matte paintings and generous helpings of cobwebs, heighten the sense of unreality.  Its use of color, music, and editing make it feel like it has so much story to tell, that it wants to pile on so many ideas, that it can’t squeeze them all into 90ish minutes of classical narrative film.

In other words, House stands as a delirious exercise in excessive, feverish, joyfully weird and innovative filmmaking.  It’s the most fun I’ve had at the movies since Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and I can’t wait to see it again.

And the second time through, I’ll still have never seen anything like it.

Colombiana

Colombiana’s tagline is “Vengeance is Beautiful.”  I’d have made it, “You’ll believe a 115-lb wisp can kick a grown man’s ass.”

The film begins in Bogota, a hot, dusty, and overcrowded series of favelas in which sweaty, grimy men kill for a dollar.  Coincidentally, I’m in Bogota as I write this.  As I look out my hotel window in this city at 8600’ above sea level, I see pines and walnut trees, green grass and a park.  It’s 68°.  The people are better-dressed than the average American.  So really, the film doesn’t begin in Bogota at all.  It begins in the Scary South American Drug Haven of Euro-American imagination.  That’s fine, because the film exists in the world of imagination.  It imagines that Zoe Saldana, an attractive and athletic woman who looks like she never ate a cheeseburger in her life, can deliver a punch that’d actually, y’know, hurt.  It imagines that a villain sophisticated enough to pull off a $50M Ponzi scheme would be a Z-grade vulgarian willing to blow his entire take in the first five years, going by his choices in housing, entertainment, and personal protection.  It imagines, well, it imagines a lot of things.  Your enjoyment of this film will hinge upon your willingness to imagine along with it.

Are you willing, for example, to imagine that a parkour-inspired chase sequence actually happens, since the film cuts so quickly from shot to shot that we never actually see any of the stuntmen do anything?  Are you willing to imagine that Zaldana is capable of learning and performing a fight routine, since the film never actually shows us one?  Are you willing to imagine that a top-notch revenge thriller is unspooling before you?

Me, I’m willing.  And not just because Saldana looks great in a catsuit.  I’m willing because Saldana sells it.  She sells smart and menacing and deadly so well that I didn’t even consider the film’s implausibilities until I sat down to write this.  When Saldana declares her need for vengeance (yes, this is just another revenge thriller), when she chaos-cinemas her way through an army of bad guys, I believe it because she believes it.  This woman’s gonna be a big, big star because if anyone can make an audience believe that a 115-lb wisp can do whatever she damn well pleases, it’s Zoe Saldana.

So enjoy your trip to Fantasyland and groove on the ‘splosions and dig the gunfights and all that.  Let your imagination run wild.  Zoe Saldana will help you believe; and it’s beautiful, man.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead

Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Undead had me at the opening credits.

That’s a good thing, because it isn’t a very good movie.  The story’s lame, the acting’s bad, the jokes fall flat, and the makeup sucks.  But hey, it’s a mashup of Shakespeare, Stoker, and Stoppard called Rosencrantz And Guildenstern are Undead.  I’m in anyway.

Here’s the setup: Jake Hoffman is a layabout who answers an ad for a “theater director, easily controlled, human.”  The theater?  It’s a vampire theater, putting on a production of “Horatio,” in which Hamlet is the bad guy.  Many theater-nerd jokes will be told.  Much blood will be sucked.  You will probably check your watch.

But hey, I like theater-nerd jokes, and this film delivers them with gusto.  It also delivers a breezy, “ain’t this fun” attitude that bounces things along for an hour and fifteen minutes.  It looks and feels cheap, but it gets by on silliness and goodwill.  If you like theater-nerd jokes and vampires, you just might like Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Undead.

The Girl Cut in Two

The Girl Cut in Two asks us to empathize with Ludivine Sagnier, an attractive and capable young woman torn between the adulterous lecher who whores her out to his buddies and the murdering child molester who wants her for his very own.

How very French.

Thing is, I’m not French.  The lecher creeped me out.  The murderer scared me.  The woman, well, I didn’t understand her.  These two men aren’t the only two men in the world.  I couldn’t understand why she didn’t tell both of them to hoof it and go find herself a nice young man who was neither an emotional nor physical threat to herself or others.

So there I sat, watching characters I didn’t care about behave in ways I didn’t understand.  Oh, and looking at my watch.  The Girl Cut in Two gave me no “in,” no one to root for, and nothing to care about.  It looked professional, Ludivine Sagnier is a great beauty, and I enjoyed see The Transporter’s François Berléand play the lecher.  In the end, however, these people behaved in ways that made no sense to me and that I couldn’t imagine.

Then again, I’m not French.

Legend of the Fist: Return of Chen Zhen

Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen is an outstanding kung fu picture and an outstanding bit of agitprop.

Donnie Yen (the Ip Man films, the Iron Monkey films, Blade II, Hero, Shanghai Knights) follows in the footsteps of Bruce Lee and Jet Li as the titular hero in this third Chen Zhen film (Lee originated the role in Fist of Fury and Li played him in Fist of Legend.).  Yen, gifted with extraordinary speed and agility, is a formidable martial artist and a charismatic performer.  Through a combination of world-class editing, practical stunts, wirework, and seamlessly executed CGI, Legend of the Fist turns him into a just-that-side-of-superhuman hero.  The film puts him into a variety of brilliantly choreographed fights, one of which even includes a “tribute to Bruce Lee” nunchuck bit that brought a huge smile to my face.  Oh, and bonus: Yen can act!  Shu Qi (The Transporter, So Close) plays the love interest and, well, I’d watch her fold laundry for 90 minutes.  Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, (Vengeance, the Infernal Affairs movies), plays a sympathetic nightclub owner, and he’s steadily rising in my estimation.  I’m going to start looking for movies on the strength of his name.  Director Andrew Lau (the really quite good Infernal Affairs movies) knows how to direct action, and he knows how to direct acting.  He’s created a very slick, very good, very professional kung movie.  I loved it on those merits alone.

But Legend of the Fist has a whole other thing going on.  Chen Zhen’s story takes place during the period of Chinese history called the Warlord Era, between World Wars One and Two.  The once-proud nation was divided and weak and easy prey for both Western powers, who sought commercial exploitation, and Japan, who wanted an empire.  Anyone who wants to understand contemporary Chinese political thought and international strategy needs to understand this time -- it has become a touchstone of Chinese identity.  This was the time when the proud kingdom was on its knees, when tiny Japan maligned it as the “weak man of Asia.” When Legend of the Fist begins, Chen Zhen and his comrades are in Europe, fighting WWI with the Allied Powers.  The film tells us they had no military training and were sent as laborers, digging trenches and hauling ammunition.  Of course, they get shot and blown up just easily as the white men carrying the rifles.  When the war concludes, China’s ignored in Versailles and its erstwhile allies look the other way as Japan begins its conquest.  Chen Zhen becomes a resistance leader, fighting the evil Japanese and standing up for Chinese national pride.  He and his allies humiliate the Japanese.  They humiliate the corrupt English police chief who, when humbled, mumbles an American-inflected “whatever.”  Chen Zhen, thus, becomes a symbol of modern Chinese nationalism, of a nation fighting complacent Western and Western-allied powers for respect.  Chen Zhen wins.

I imagine this goes over hugely well with Chinese audiences and, for that matter, with the Chinese government.  But you don’t have to be Chinese to groove on the fantastic action, the very good performances, and the intellectual exercise of analyzing nationalist film’s place in modern China.  I thought Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen was fantastic.  If you like this genre, I think you’ll love it, too.

Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench

As longtime readers of this blog (Hi, Mom!) will know, I’m not particularly bright.  This is why I spent a healthy portion of Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench asking, “What’s going on now?”

See, here’s the deal:  the movie begins with Guy and Madeline on a park bench.  They appear to be breaking up.  An intertitle comes up, saying “Some time earlier,” or something to that effect.  Guy and Madeline, a pale brunette, are together.  Then Guy’s with some other pale brunette.  Is this different actress portraying a different aspect of Madeline’s personality?  Is this Guy’s next girlfriend?  The girlfriend before?  What’s going on?

I literally had no idea.  All I knew is that I was watching a 16mm, B&W film with a great jazz soundtrack and some good song ‘n dance numbers that suffered from being overenunciated (Madeline, tell your voice coach to get bent and sing like a human being.  At least, I think that was Madeline.  It could have been the other pale brunette.).  Was it original?  Yeah.  Was it particularly interesting?  Well, I liked the music, and I imagine that a Bostonian would dig the local setting and the Bostonianisms.  But I had a hard time telling the pale brunettes apart and I spent a healthy portion of the film in a state of mystification.

I feel badly about it, because I often complain about the dullness of the factory-built 3-act film.  Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, filmed in a vérité style and having the guts to try something different, deserves great credit on that account.  I just wish I were brighter.  Perhaps then, I could have kept up.

Bad Boy Bubby

Ugly, crude, and intentionally shocking, I hated Bad Boy Bubby in a way I haven’t hated a film in years.

The picture, a 1993 Australian import and multiple Australian Film Institute Award winner, centers on a man who’s been raised like an animal, abused and imprisoned in a basement for thirty-five years.  When he finally makes it to the outside world, he does his unhinged best to cope.

But the outside world, like the basement and the people in it, is ugly and coarse and horrible.  This is intentional, as Bad Boy Bubby seeks to shock and dismay.  But you know what?  I do a lot of traveling around the world, and I’ve seen my share of ugly and coarse and horrible.  I don’t need it in my entertainment, and I don’t need to see Bad Boy Bubby ever again.  Goodbye.

Wild Target

In Wild Target, Bill Nighy plays an uptight assassin who accepts a contract on manic pixie dream girl (MPDG) Emily Blunt.  But there’s a problem: Emily Blunt is too smart to play a MPDG.  Something about her eyes doesn’t let her do “carefree and irresponsible.”  She looks like she’s faking it.

Nighy never looks like he’s faking anything, and he makes for a fine straight man in this British comedy.  Rupert Grint shows up as a hapless stoner and displays good comic timing, as does Rupert Everett as a very angry villain and Martin Freeman as a competing assassin.  Unfortunately, we never really buy Blunt in the Zooey Deschanel role, and this sucks the air out of the proceedings. 

It’s too bad, really.  I’d buy Ms. Blunt as a detective or a scientist or the Queen of England.  But she just doesn’t have MPDG in her.  Here’s hoping that next time, she chooses a role more in line with her strengths.

13 Assassins

13 Assassins is as good as movies get.

The picture, a “men on a mission” story set in pre-Meiji Japan, opens with a samurai committing seppuku, a ritualized form of suicide in which the individual disembowels himself.  It’s incredibly difficult and painful, and 13 Assassins presents it in all its horror by not showing it to us at all.  We see the samurai prepare, then we see his face in closeup as he goes through agonizing pain and exertion.  Understand that seppuku was normally committed with a “second” standing by, sword raised to decapitate the samurai after he makes the first cut, to spare the man the agony of disembowelment.  This man has no “second.”  Music plays, sound effects suggest what’s happening below the frame, and our stomachs curl and our hands clench and our hearts break for this man.  We’re only two minutes into this movie, and we feel moved and involved and completely engaged in the world of the samurai and the repercussions of this act.  Later, another samurai commits the same act under different circumstances.  He has a “second,” and this suicide takes on an entirely different aspect of nobility and technical excellence in its portrayal.

I’m not arguing that suicide is cool.  I’m saying that seppuku was a part of feudal Japanese culture, and that 13 Assassins approaches this subject dramatically, artfully, and with perfect technical execution.  I use the film’s portrayal of seppuku to illustrate what the film does throughout its 2 hour and 21 minute run time: it nails feudal Japan, from its social structure to its mythology to its code of honor and even to its view of suicide.  It does so with class when appropriate and with horror when appropriate, and it does so with the absolute surety.

13 Assassins is not some kind of Merchant-Ivory historical fetishization.  That first seppuku propels a “mission” film that rocks every beat, from the gathering of the team to the cohesion on the road to the laying of the traps to a final battle that compares with the absolutely fundamental Seven Samurai.  Its characters are interesting.  Its jokes are funny.  Its action set pieces, including the aforementioned (45-minute long) final battle, are both cool and comprehensible.  This is a good time at the movies.

Credit director Takashi Miike, whose Ichi the Killer and the short film “Box” from Three Extremes suggested talent, but not on this level.  Kôji Yakusho, aging very well since 1996’s Shall We Dance?, is suitably wise and commanding in the Takashi Shimura ‘Samurai Leader’ role.  Gorô Inagaki, new to me, does petulant villainy as well as I’ve ever seen it done and gives us a character we can really love to hate. 

Y’know, I could go right down the credits list, telling you how great everything and everyone is.  I could probably figure out a way to compliment the Key Grip.  But here’s the bottom line: 13 Assassins is a flat-out classic, successful in every way.  If you care about movies, you need to see this as soon as you can.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Greg Sorenson nailed his review of Exit Through the Gift Shop, and he's graciously permitted me to reprint it here.  Enjoy.

==

"Street Artist" Banksy cobbles years of footage of himself, Shepard Fairey, and other graffiti/stencil artists doing their thing, all meticulously documented by a compulsive videographer named Thierry Guetta. In the course of making the film (more accurately, in the course of wrenching Guetta's footage away from him and turning it into something usable), Banksy convinces Guetta to go do some street art of his own. He adopts the persona "Mr. Brainwash" and does a little street-stencil work before hiring a stable of designers and artists to churn out a ton of derivative pop art, displaying it all in a huge, wildly successful 2008 art exhibition.

Or does he? Long before Exit Through the Gift Shop was released, rumors were circulating that Mr. Brainwash was a hoax put on by Fairey and/or Banksy. Guetta is quite the character. Artistically he's akin to Mark Borchardt and Tommy Wiseau, but does appear, at least, to be very good at turning trash into cash -- he's first shown putting hundred-dollar tags on "vintage" clothes at his trendy LA boutique. He's maybe a little too good at this to be real; as the years of videography go on, and then as his (seemingly very expensive) art show comes together, I thought at least once, "where's this money coming from again?"

If Mr. Brainwash is indeed a hoax, does that make EThGS a mockumentary? I don't think so, It's still about creating subversive art, and it's quite possible that Banksy has documented a creation of a human installation

Monsters

Monsters posits a world in which extraterrestrial animals wind up in Northern Mexico.  US and Mexican authorities establish a “quarantine zone,” in which they use chemical and conventional weapons to try to eliminate enough creatures so they don’t gain a foothold in our ecosystem.  The film convincingly creates and ages this world, making us feel that this isn’t a new phenomenon and that the two governments have been fighting the monsters for quite some time.

Our audience surrogates in this alternate world are a news photographer and his charge, the boss’s (adult, and rather fetching) daughter.  They’re trapped on the wrong side of the quarantine zone, you see, and they need to get to America.  Why they don’t just catch a commercial flight from Mexico City is never explained, but just play along – Monsters is trying to tell a story, here.

What happens?  Well, it’s kind of a mix of It Happened One Night and Sin Nombre, with the two Americans hiring a gang of coyotes to escort them through the quarantine zone and across the US border.  Is it good?  It’s fine, I suppose, but I never bought into it.  This isn’t because the film makes Northern Mexico look like Central America, and it isn’t because it places a Mayan pyramid within walking distance of the Texas border.  It’s because the movie couldn’t decide if it wanted to be Apocalypse Now, any of a dozen movies about illegal immigration, or the aforementioned Frank Capra movie.  And you know what?  I could have accepted that if it weren’t for the film’s big, climactic moment, the moment in which we’re supposed to feel awed at the aliens’ beauty and empathy with their plight as unwanted interlopers.  See, all I saw were creatures of Lovecraftian horror that needed to be eliminated, even if it meant the irradiation of all of Northern Mexico and much of South Texas to make that happen.

I can credit Monsters for originality and craft.  Its aliens look alien and its world looks convincing.  But in the end, it’s just a road movie with an unsuccessful climax.  Pass this one by.

Ink

Ink is bold and creative and a fantastic example of what someone can do with vision, originality, and a $250,000 budget.

In the world of Ink, we live surrounded by beings much like angels and demons.  The angels come to us in our sleep and renew us with sweet dreams and good hopes.  The demons come, as well.  They bring nightmares and horror.  Some demons even steal souls.

Ink, short for Incubus, is just such a soul-stealer.  Hunched and ragged, he lays hands on a sleeping little girl and whisks away her soul while her father concerns himself with other things.  Ink wants to bring the soul to his masters as a sacrifice.  Can the angels stop him in time, and can they save the father’s soul in the bargain?

This is a great idea for a story, and Ink overcomes its budget restrictions to tell this story in a fantastical and compelling way.  The angels and demons are martial artists, which makes for great battles between them.  While the angels are your basic attractive young people, the demons are truly horrifying and otherworldly, with a design unlike anything you’ve seen before.  Further, Ink contrasts the spirit world and the real world with music, lighting, and set design that accentuates the difference, particularly when illustrating the hopeless, horrifying world of demonkind.

Yes, the script has some jarring moments, and the performances range from pretty good to “somebody’s parents must have put up some production money.”  Nevertheless, Ink stands as a successful low-budget film that serves as an object lesson in how to stretch $250k.  It creates a convincing world, uses that world to explore themes of duty and love, and delivers an entertaining night at the movies.

Good job, Writer / Director / Composer /  and, for all I know, Craft Services Guy Jamin Winans!  I look forward to seeing what you do next.