craig.duncan's reviews

This movie completely surprised me, something I've experienced only a few times in 50+ years of movie viewing. Saying even this much risks spoiling, so I will simply recommend this imperfect, entertaining, slightly edifying and enlightening, sometimes disturbing, barely known work of barely known makers.

Kudos to Eric Badros and Taylor Graham, and I hope to see much more from them.

I rated this IMHO under-appreciated movie a 10/10, not because I consider it perfectly written, acted, or produced (though I think these disciplines were done well) but because it almost perfectly appealed to an satisfied my personal, idiosyncratic likings of certain movies the supernatural horror genre, that being that it's possible to understand the events depicted in The Innkeepers as explicable entirely to misperceptions of an unreliable narrator, although misperceptions so extreme they border on acutely psychotic.

By personal disposition and choice, I don't believe in the supernatural, making me the kind of person sometimes called a Bright, a skeptic, an atheist, etc. For folk such as me, there are few ghost stories that don't require a great effort of suspension of disbelief to watch in a pleasant, engaged way, so one like The Innkeepers, where only the usual dramatic suspension of disbelief (ie: that the depiction is fictional, not factual) is necessary, is welcome, refreshing, and thoroughly enjoyable.

I also enjoyed the movie because of how it achieved – for me, at least – great tension, chills, and scares, with minimal photographic and sound elements. As I watched it, I felt I was watching a masterful display of storytelling art, rather than a more-common-in-the-genre exercise in latex prosthetics and makeup art.

Though it's perhaps unlikely that it will occur, if any fellow Brights read this, I strongly recommend watching this ghost story movie, pre-armed with my assertion that despite the seeming impossibility of this in a movie of this genre, it can be viewed as supernatural-free.

Expecting a combination of scifi and period film about Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, the history of computers, etc, I was disappointed by this movies nonsensical pseudoscience and mixture of real and fabulous history. It gives the impression that its writer (Lynn Hershman-Leeson) has no real understanding of the Math, technology, or history constituting the film's subject, but is working instead from a sort of fuzzy artistic impression of them. This hits a sore spot with me, as I've long been irritated by the tendency of the arts to glom onto and awfully misuse science terms and ideas to the point of confusion, eg: Emmy Coer: "information waves have a half-life", Ada: "I'm not at all certain that half a life is better than no life at all".

This movie does worse than fail to entertain - it misinforms. The only redeeming value I can imagine for it is that it might attract a viewer to learn about the subject it so badly distorts. It's more likely, I think, to promote a superstitious perception of science and technology of any degree of advancement as indistinguishable from magic.

An entertaining, competently made film.

What may not be immediately apparent to those who were not immersed in the zeitgeist of the mid-1980s is that this film is not purely satirical science fiction. In 1987, both of this movie's main future premises – that autonomous, artificially intelligent robotic "perfect companions" would exist as consumer products by about 2000, and that America would suffer a partial political collapse in the same decade – were not particularly outlandish.

While Cherry 2000 is presently achieving cult film status, it was originally received as a much more conventional SF movie.

My experience of this movie was mostly one of regret and longing for what it could, with minor improvements, have been, tempered with respect for what I believe its creators were trying to accomplish – in the words of its own website "…to excite audiences with a story that will seem credible and dramatic…".

To do this, they appear to have made, and succeeded in, and effort to avoid practically every sci-fi action cliché. This movie is essentially documentary in form, distinct from a true documentary in that it describes purely fictional events and people. On one level, this is refreshing, on another, tedious, but on any level, it is not cliché.

To succeed with this approach, however, a film's realism, with all the details that go into it, must be virtually flawless, so that well-science-informed viewers – who are likely to be the only people audience to fully appreciate and enjoy such a film – do not have their suspension of disbelief abused by such impossibilities as space helmets with visible gaps in their supposedly airtight seals, etc. Failure of such critical details effectively ruins the film beyond redemption, even if it succeeds brilliantly in other areas, such as the rendering of a convincing-looking Martian landscape.

Another area it can fail is if some or all of the characters fail to behave according to the well-informed viewers' expectations of how well-trained astronauts – or the viewers themselves - would behave. Though the interaction of the characters in "Stranded" seems genuine and realistic on occasion, it often doesn't, and, upon discovering the incredible, these supposed scientists and adventurers seem devoid of even normal curiosity. The only line of characterization that consistently feels real is the awe they feel at the beauty of the Martian surface and sky, despite the lethality these threaten.

I believe that the right technical consultant could have made this movie a classic on a par with "2001: A Space Odyssey" – while clearly made on a tighter budget, "Stranded" avoids the confusing metaphysical finale that many feels marred "2001". As it stands, I expect this movie will be lost and forgotten in the worlds discount DVD bins with barely a ripple in science fiction fandom. Even with its inevitable movie channel rotation, I will be surprised if it gathers 1,000 votes on IMDb.

Ham-handed homage to honest hacking. Felt good in a soft-core way about equivalent to its mild pornography, until its vapid lack of technical and economic reality, emotional and moral sophistication became apparent.

Basically a muddled '90s remake of '85's "Real Genius", with fewer and stupider geniuses, and a cynical bad ending.

Perhaps this movie would appeal to someone delighted by the thesis that becoming a billionaire is so easy it's almost accidental. Or perhaps to technical types who like seeing themselves depicted as cool and sexy. Speculating about the reasons someone might like this movie is certainly more interesting than the movie itself. The movies closing credits song is more interesting than the movie itself.

A very neat movie, though it risks bewildering and annoying viewers who aren't good at piecing it together. Editing it into a less confusing chronology, though, while making it easier to watch, would spoil the fun of figuring it out. Watching it a second time, I was able to catch (one of?) its near subliminal tricks, which pretty neatly confirmed what I'd concluded by the end of the first viewing. There's a minor incorrect detail: insulin is never even occasionally injected into a vein. If I'm nit-picking, it's because otherwise I could find nothing to criticize. Unlike with nearly all psychodrama, recent or old, I couldn't find inaccuracies in Memento's depiction of neuropsychology, or anything else. It's clearly a masterwork.

Thick accents - on occasion, I had to rewind, or "translate from English" for M - and cool 80s English pop/punk soundtrack, this movie at times seemed to be struggling to become a prepubescent Flashdance, a sort of wordless dance musical of one (except for one number with Julie Walters Billy's teacher). All the jumping and tapping to music couldn't fail to amuse and move the story along to as happy an ending as could be had without being trite and cliche, a bullet I was happily surprised to see dodged. Ultimately, I was left glad-hearted and amused, with one nagging question on my mind: is Billy, in fact, a Poof?

My wife invited my son and I to watch this on cable TV on a lazy Saturday evening, thinking that it might show an unusual role for Juliette Lewis. On this promise, at least, the movie delivers: her character is ineffectual, adhering to nearly every slasher-type horror movie cliche. As does the movie. A cataloguing of its studied adherence to them would be an exercise in recall of something I hope to quickly forget, so I won't make one. Basically, this is a whodunnit, heavy on the red herrings: everybody appears guilty, rather than just the two one suspects from the beginning. The "rule out the logical and obvious, and what's left is it" rule of bad horror movies works well on this one. The only surprise to have any impact on me was its final snagging of the indeterminate ending cliche: will Jane keep her appointment with her attempted rescuer, who will tell her the (obvious to the audience) identity of the 2nd conspirator, propelling her into another round of hysterical victim-play. Mercifully, I will never know.

I'm surprised at the popularity of this film, as it felt like a fable, but instead of archetypal characters, is populated mostly with contemporary stereotypes: The husband in midlife crisis; the status-starved wife; the body-image disordered daughter; her self-esteem deficient girlfriend; etc. Have these stereotypes crossed a line in the collective unconscious to become, as some have suggested, "Modern archetypes?" I don't think so. Archetypes are by definition very old, so for something modern to be one, it must in actuality be connecting to the deep-rooted, old form. With the exception of Lester and Rickey, who seemed to be different sorts of pilgrims, all these basically dysfunctional characters seemed to me to map to a single, fairly static archetypes; the lunatic. While feared and revered, it doesn't do well to have too many lunatics in one story. Archetypal tales stick with one. A day after seeing it, "American Beauty" is already fading for me. I appreciated its flawed, but persistent, allusions to beauty and wonder, but was mostly caught up in a mildly amusing contest with my movie-going companions to correctly solve this dystopic whodunit.