Black Velvet Gown

Black Velvet Gown
an historical melodrama movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5
Meets Expectations: -1
Apparent Rating: 4

This was another movie where the title has very little to do with what happens and the description of the movie even less so. The summary of the movie says it’s about a widow who takes a housekeeping job and the master falls for her and then leaves her the house but society around her is very intolerant of jumped up servants aping gentry.

If you’re interested in this movie stop here. There will be spoilers. If you’re reading from the RSS feed, you won’t see the fold I inserted here.

Dreamkeeper

Dreamkeeper
a docudrama movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations:+1
Apparent Rating: 6/10

There are some movies that meander and seem rather opaque that still end up entertaining, Dreamkeeper was one of them. It was a close call though. I thought a lot of the forced parallels between the legends and the journey were blindingly obvious most of the time and astonishingly inapplicable the rest. I kept getting lost as to what was a flashback, what was story, and what was now.

The “now” part of the story was uninteresting and just next to worthless. I think it existed solely to be a framework for telling these other parables, but generally if I can see why something was done that way it seems like a staging failure. In my own writing, I call that, “Excuse me, your plot is showing.”

Some of the stories were really good. They were well told and interesting. Some of the stories relied upon outside knowledge I didn’t have and those were less successful. The stories were from a variety of tribes, even though the main characters were at one point “Sioux” and at another point “Lakota”– perhaps that’s a variant of Sioux, like when the Pawnee woman added, “Wolf Clan”. None of the Indian parables told failed as badly as the main storyline. The flashbacks, which were supposed to help the viewer sort out the rationale for the main storyline, did not start until late in the movie and by then I’d already written the characters off.

In summary, “Too bad they had all that wasted time with Grandpa and Shane.” It’s a 3 hour movie and at least half of it was very boring. I did not like the resolution in the end either. We’re supposed to see this as a happy ending, but really, the movie would have been a lot better if it had been a dozen little movielets that were just telling the stories.

Overall if you like “Native American” mythology, then you will probably enjoy this movie at least moderately. It was not terrible, but certainly a movie to have your knitting nearby to keep your hands busy.

21

21
a docudrama movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Honestly, 21 is the kind of movie that I know I am going to love. It’s a movie about smart people who make good despite the way the world is slanted toward the extroverted morons. I believe that’s possibly fair in terms of “leveling the playing field” because anyone who needs to flap their mouth to air-cool their brain since it only runs in low gear probably needs for technical, loner-centric jobs to require 4+ hour marathon interviews lest they be stuck in reception their whole careers. But being one of those smart and introverted people who finds small talk pointless or even irritating, I find it difficult to get the right job through networking.

However, movies about smart people doing well in life tend to offend the masses who prefer homogeneity. I also like superhero movies and just about any kind of fish-out-of-water story. Most people think those are fairy tales for children.

That said, I thought 21 could have been a lot more interesting. I didn’t feel like the main character was someone who made the right life choices. Why does he want to be a doctor? Why if he wants to be a doctor does he need to go to Harvard Med? There are cheaper options. Why does he need a pretty blonde girlfriend? I’m sure there are a number of girls in Boston, probably even a number of girls at MIT— as far as I could tell, he was only interested in that girl because she was unobtainable. It seemed like he treated the people in his life badly through this endeavor— people who loved him and knew him and who would have been able to see the inherent problems before the drama hit.

There were a number of points in the movie where I wanted to throw things at the screen because as an actual adult, I know you don’t practice security-through-obscurity and expect it to work. If he could have talked to his mother instead of dodging her, she’d have told him to get a safety deposit box just like I would.

The movie is told via flashback and that was unnecessary and completely blows the element of surprise.

Without the epilogue, I’d have really hated this movie. With the epilogue, I liked it. I doubt regular people will like it at all.

Enchanted

Enchanted
a fairy tale movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: +0
Apparent Rating: 5/10

I kind of enjoyed Enchanted. Except I hated the supposedly good characters and was therefore bored enough to be doing something else while watching. Even with my hands busy and my brain distracted, I noticed enormous glaring plotholes. A huge part of the premise of the movie is that “fairy tales can come true” but the writing seems to indicate that fairy tales are idiotic and non-sensical.

In many ways, what made this movie worth watching is how the elements of fairy tales are satirized with a completely straight face. It definitely is a comedy, but only if you are well-versed in Disneyfied fairy tales. For example, the Princess sings a non-verbal melody and all the little woodland creatures come to help her. When the Princess is in New York City, all the little creatures come to help her because of the power of her voice. That is a dark magic, compulsion, and it’s illustrated by having cockroaches climb out of the tub drain and eat mildew. Most of the romantic fairy tale elements are shown in a slightly twisted kind of way. The writers were clearly poking fun at fantasy.

In that way it reminds me of the Amanda Bynes movie, Sydney White. Since Enchanted borrows from several fairy tales, it works as a parody of the genre quite well. (Sydney White was a modern remake of Snow White, without really drawing that connection for viewers.) In a number of scenes, Enchanted reminded me of the one Bollywood movie I watched (loathsome! unmentionably loathsome) because of the musical nature.

One caveat for the movie is its combined nature, the first segment is animated, then the animated Princess is exiled to real world New York City and shows up looking like a stoned idiot. The Princess is saved because the guy’s daughter believes in fairy tales and makes him help her. Normally when children are used as plot devices, it is about an unwanted pregnancy or a demonstration of the evil nature of the villain. So that was intriguing, but only in an intellectual way. The actress playing the daughter is not the next Dakota Fanning.

The whole movie is mediocre if you watch it straight up, if you watch it as a tongue-in-cheek satire of a genre, it’s rather amusing in an annoying way. But those aims work at cross-purposes. It is impossible to suspend disbelief while the movie is laughing at itself. It is impossible to tolerate the common plot elements from fairy tales as portrayed without it.

I think it could have been a decent fantasy drama. I think it could have been a decent comedy (though it would have seemed like a Shrek rip-off in many ways.) What it ended up being was mediocre.

Dragonlance

Dragonlance
an animated movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 6/10

I enjoyed the Dragonlance cartoon movie. I found it campy and fun, very much akin to a Scooby Doo cartoon from the 1960s. The plot was fairly complicated considering, and there were a ton of characters. Most of the characters were extraneous and frequently they were similarly dressed.

The animation style is frankly pathetic. Nothing had depth or shading. There was a limited palette of colors, like someone bought the animators a 24-pack of markers and they couldn’t use anything else or combine colors.

The movie did not make a lot of sense if you are not already a fan of the books. That was too bad, but I am a huge X-Men fan and I loved the first X-Men movie while people who are not fans were left cold and I was really peeved that they kept panning the movie instead of watching it two or three times and getting with the program. So I am probably bending too far backwards giving the Dragonlance people the benefit of the doubt. I could sum up with, “The characters all act completely randomly throughout the movie, but there are glimmers where other characters reference things we never saw which promise that the characters actions would make sense, if we knew them better.”

The voice acting in Dragonlance was flat out horrible. There were some really big names, Kiefer Sutherland, Lucy (Xena) Lawless, that Baby Buffy girl who also played Harriet the Spy, and some other recognizable people. But the Scooby Doo effect of the animation and the really lousy script probably hampered their efforts and it is unfair to lay the blame at the actors’ feet entirely.

In the end, it’s an animated movie with dragons and magic and there was an actual story. So I kind of liked it. If those things don’t float your boat, you should definitely take a pass. If you’re a fan of Dragonlance and happen to be reading this blog post without having seen the movie, it’s worth Netflixing.

It could have been so much better, but it’s hard to tell whether the improvements I wanted would have destroyed the campy vibe that kept me amused throughout.

Batman: Gotham Knight

Batman: Gotham Knight
an animated movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 3/10

Batman: Gotham Knight is the “Clone Wars” of the Batman universe. It is a series of animated shorts which are supposed to bridge the time between Batman Begins and Dark Knight.

Unfortunately, there is no story here. It was like watching animator auditions. “Hey we’re making an animated Batman movie, send us a 15 minute film and we’ll consider you.” There was very little story. It was a lot like waiting 7 months for a graphic novel to come out and realizing the summary blurb has more story than the whole book because they wasted all that space on pictures that take several dozen times as long to draw as it would to write descriptive text. Also the animation style changes severely between shorts.

All of these favor the modern anime style animation where everything moves fast and is underlit and unidentifiable and gritty. They definitely favor the modern style anime where the vast majority of the story is only shown in the viewer’s imagination, so anyone who does not have a strong affinity with the Batman franchise is going to be left cold.

The first short in this is the most worthless and offensive bit of tripe you’ve ever seen too. Three kids talking about their day where they each saw Batman. Pandering crap.

I did not think it was worth watching. This is really bad.

Appleseed Ex Machina

Appleseed Ex Machina
an anime movie
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: -1
Apparent Rating: 4/10

Normally I have a strong opinion about a movie I’ve watched, even if it is a strong “Meh.” type feeling where I don’t care. Appleseed Ex Machina was a really strange viewing experience since I’ve seen the previous one (Appleseed) and had been told over and over that it was great and profound until by the time I actually watched it, I had convinced myself I liked it a lot. So when I watched the new one, I was expecting to like it a lot and have no opinion positive or negative.

On the whole, I think this was a more interesting story, but so little of the story made it onto the screen that it was hard to notice. That was the problem with the previous movie too. What I hate about anime is how they leave out 80% of the story and just show glimpses that might indicate that the characters have actual motivation behind their actions and what those motivations are is left up to the viewer. It means the story is as rich and textured as the viewer’s imagination and if an anime movie seems to suck, there is a strong implication that the viewer is somehow at fault. You get out of watching anime what you put into it.

The idea in this series is there is non-nuclear armageddon and the world chooses to start a special city where the population is part cyborg or android and does not get angry or feel strong emotions. That way all the citizens live in peace and harmony. It supposedly gives hope to the entire world that there is something to strive toward. But what they show on the screen is the population of that special world gets angry and feels strong emotion and there sure seems to be a lot of violence and cheating. So I don’t understand.

In this instance, the government of the special Appleseed city is trying to convince the world that they should have control over all surveillance satellites because the rest of the world is irresponsible. Emperor Palpatine anyone?

The side plot is how the characters who fell in love in the previous movies are being separated by their boss at work.

I guess I didn’t bring my imagination because I don’t care. I don’t believe in the Appleseed project, I think it’s ridiculous to take people who are inhuman and say they represent hope for humanity. I think it’s ridiculous to expect emotionless people to strive toward anything more than monotony— there would certainly not be the level of innovation which would be needed to sustain some sort of seed project. I was surprised that anyone who had lived through armageddon would trust their government at all.

The reviews all say the animation in this was incredible. I thought it was mediocre and they spent way too much time on stuff that was hard and too little time on everything else. The integration between the characters and the CG backgrounds is vastly improved, they no longer look like Colorforms™ who merely float atop their environment. But there were a lot of hair close-ups and not much face-to-face dialogue.

I think I might like this movie, or these movies, more if I could actually see the whole story. Maybe there’s a book version that uses its words to explain the backstory and why things are important.

I did not really like this movie, but I wanted to and I expect if you are an anime fan, that you would have a lot of joy in seeing this, but I’m not sure since there was a love interest and not so much gory fighting with fancy laser blasters.

Flawless

Flawless
a movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 3/10

There wasn’t anything special about Flawless that made it a good movie. I know there are people who start out with a middle-range grade and plus or minus off that. That is what I think this was.

There are some serious minuses to this, like Demi Moore in the female lead. She was very off-key. Some of that was probably intentional, figuring to show us what it was like to be the only woman in a real role in a male dominated company, country, world. But it doesn’t come across like that, or at least it did not to me. Whenever she was on the screen, I knew this was a mockery and a fiction.

I did not like the way the foreshadowing was handled. Michael Caine is not creepy enough to be foreshadowing all by himself, but his character was behaving strangely enough that no one should have trusted him enough to risk her career.

I liked the plot and the sort of Robin Hood aspect. I hated that the whole thing was a flashback. I was really incensed by the overt morality that some people give and some people take.

And mostly I was just bored. It’s a movie about a diamond heist, but the twist (but this is a remake of a previous version, so most people are familiar with it. In fact the idea was borrowed for an episode of MacGyver too) really came from the secrecy of the plan, so the audience isn’t told and doesn’t see anything. So we see some people talking and see some other people talking and see some people talking. Then near the end of the movie a lot of people are really angry and upset, but it’s not until the very end that we see what was done. The whole story is being told via flashback, but they couldn’t allow hindsight to add in interesting bits of motivation or texture or planning or anything. So the deal in making it a flashback was completely and totally wasted. They might as well have shown it straight up and added an epilogue.

The women in the 1950s were completely cowed. I don’t know when the change happened, but I’m glad it did. I would never put up with being ignored and passed over and treated like furniture or worse, talking furniture the way the main character did. I look at what the life-roles of women were and I don’t understand how the majority of the population could possibly tolerate that. I found that display in this movie to be completely and totally offensive. Maybe it’s good to remind us why feminism exists— it was to fight for equality, not to fight for extra maternity benefits because “all” women are mothers— but I found the display repugnant.

So, to sum up, no story, badly told, mediocre acting.

Juno

Juno
a movie
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: -3 (due entirely to personal squick factor)
Apparent Rating: 2/10

Normally a movie about a pregnant woman would go on a list of things never to watch, like sports news or fly fishing tournaments. However, Juno was an award winning movie that was supposed to be extraordinarily well written. I am all about the writing.

First. Let me say that the overall experience of the movie was really good. The writing was good, the directing was good, the production values matched, the settings were good, the acting was appropriate. The story’s premise is still inherently wrong and immoral and disgusting. There isn’t a way to get past that. The movie scoring a 2/10 in my personal ratings, shows it must have been phenomenally well done.

Scooting aside what I thought, Juno has some really big flaws. Like where does she get all that money? Seriously? 3 pregnancy tests and a gallon of Sunny D? That’s like $30 right there. She drives an hour out to the boonies and back in a station wagon. That’s like 8 gallons of gas. Sure the movie is from last year when gas wasn’t more than $4 per gallon, but still. Juno buys Bleeker a case of TicTacs. I don’t know what the case discount is, but a box of TicTacs is more than a dollar. Juno is always drinking on something non-water. Slushies or whatever. Those are $3-5 each in that multi-quart size. And she’s always eating. Junk food, but always eating— not eating at home, but at the mall or quickie marts or whatever. I didn’t have a couple hundred bucks a week when I wasn’t working and was just barely 16.

Some spoilers.

Things To Do

Things To Do
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: +2
Apparent Rating: 7/10

Things To Do is also listed as an indie comedy. I know that my opinion of this movie is buffed up because compared to Garden State, it was actually funny. Compared to stuff that’s actually funny, it was lousy. If I had watched this during a week when there was new TV or the movie selection was better, I know my personal rating would be lower.

The premise is that a guy comes home from the city to recuperate mentally and emotionally after his best friend kills himself. Though you don’t find that out until about 2/3 through the movie. It helps to know the guy has a reason to be where he is.

His parents are horrible creatures. His home town is full of people who keep saying “Al Gore’s Internet” and “Al Gore’s the eee-mail”. The place has nothing going for it and the people who didn’t leave really just got stuck in some sort of Purgatory.

The weird part of this film really is how the guy finds an old acquaintance who really functions as some sort of fairy godmother and therapist. The guy decides to make a list of things he really wants to do— because who knows, he might die suddenly. The new friend makes a lot of these things happen for him. Many of them are quirky. They skydive from a little prop plane. They build a soapbox car. It started with putting a board on top of a wheel barrow with a little ramp so the main character guy could slam dunk a basketball. He gets a little banged up from it, but seems to think the sacrifice is worth it. One of the things on the list is beating up a school bully from ages ago and it turns out there really was karma.

A lot of the things seem kind of risky or juvenile or immature. But I think people really have those kinds of desires. It’s certainly the stereotype of young men (which is sexist and doesn’t tell you whether I did crazy things at that age). And I think people really are hurt when they lose someone. It’s easy to become disconnected from everyone around you by losing one person. The process by which the threads of life are ferreted out again is different for everyone. I liked very much how a lot of the things the main character wanted to try didn’t work out so well. It seemed like a growing experience.

I was honestly touched by this movie, but I didn’t think it was funny.

There is one major problem, I received a damaged DVD from Netflix, nothing I did made it spin up. There was a tiny chip in the rim, so I returned it and flagged for replacement. The replacement DVD did the same thing. I was only able to watch it by coaxing it along. Then I could not stop once the movie actually started because it was unlikely I would be able to baby it enough to get it started twice. This left me with the impression that the manufacturing standard for this movie was extremely low— two discs in a row with hidden imperfections that keep the DVD from spinning up? (And I did not get the same disc back, I checked.) I actually hesitate to recommend the movie in case all of the DVD copies of this are defective.