Favorite movies of all time

I was recently asked to tell somebody on the spot what my Top 10 Movies Of ALL TIME EVAR!!! are, and I can't tell you how difficult a task that is. I can list maybe my top ten comedies or dramas or action flicks, but how do you compare Some Like It Hot to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? I am going to have to get back with you nonexistant readers on this. Perhaps I'll break the list up...

My Favorite Shots in (mostly) Recent Film

What would a blog about movies be without some sort of list? I have compiled a short list of some of my favorite movie shots of recent memory. These are not listed in any particular order, but they all seem to me to be some of the most expressive frames in recent movies.

I have left off of this list a great deal of old movies, some of my favorites, even, for the sake of making the list more accessible. Nothing bugs me more than clicking some Internet link that promises me the 10 BEST SCENES OF WHATEVER IN MOVIES EVAR!!! only to find that these movies are so esoteric that they've been seen by a grand total of twelve people worldwide.

I've chosen one old movie and a couple of foreign movies, but all-in-all, these should be fairly commonplace films. I haven't ranked them at all. They're all equally awesome shots in my eyes. I've gone on enough on purpose and reason and stuff, so here we go. (By the way, most of these images will get cut off on the right side due to Blogger's formatting. For your convenience, you can click any of the images for the full thing to load up in an otherwise blank page.)

#1: Jurassic Park
Steven Spielburg is not actually very high on my list of great directors, and Jurassic Park is not very high on my list of good movies, but there are a few shots present here that make me smile. Both come from the now-infamous T-Rex scene.

We discover that something is truly amiss when the glass of water on the dash that Dr. Ian Malcom has so recently demonstrated the Chaos Theory (in unfortunately brief and -- pardon the pun -- watered-down terminology) to Dr. Ellie Sattler (thanks, IMDb!) with begins quaking. Waves circle inward from the glass, and this may be the most suspenseful introduction to an action sequence ever filmed.

Not long after, they are driving in their Jurassic Park tour vehicle at break-neck speed away from Mr. Rex. The driver (Sam Neill? It's been awhile...) looks in the side view mirror to see a screaming dinosaur intent on eating them surprisingly close to the car. But to top it off, the mirror has that message that you don't see anymore etched across it: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.



#2: Nosferatu
Max Schreck is absolutely terrifying in this silent film from 1922 that precious few people I know have seen. Nosferatu is the first vampire movie based around Bram Stoker's Dracula, and it's shots like the one below that creep me out even more than modern vampire movies with their special effects and enormous budgets.



The Dracula figure creeps up the stairwell. We have not seen him yet at this point in the film. This shot keeps his form a mystery from us, while hinting at its grotesquery. We can see his curved and sharpened nose, his menacing fingers outstretched in something resembling a strangulation gesture, his other arm pulled back offensively. Shadows encase the scene. This is truly one of the best horror films ever made, and it's shots like this that solidify it. Here is another, equally creepy shot, the reveal shot, when Nosferatu's offensive face is finally given to us.



#3: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Yes, I know this was used on the cover art of the DVD and movie posters for the movie, but there is a reason for that (finally). This is one of the most expressive camera angles I've ever seen.



The cracks in the ice discomfort us, not just because we know the danger involved in laying down on a frozen pond with a breaking top layer, but because we know by now that the relationship between Clementine and Joel is doomed for failure. The cracks show us that they are different, maybe too different to work things out, and yet they are encased by these faults, bound inexplicably together by them.

#4: Blade Runner
Granted, this is a movie that will probably end up on any "best of" list that I will ever put together, but this list is one it belongs on more than any other. This movie is almost entirely about the cinematography. The image here is from the opening shot, showing us a dystopian future view of Los Angeles.



The credits play out here, and we are whisked away to an interview between Leon and an administrator of the Voight-Kampff test where we are shown that replicants are identified by attributes of their eyes. Eyes are an important aspect of this film, and it follows that we should be presented with a great deal of eye shots. Ridley Scott doesn't disappoint. The film is brimming with such shots, images that make you believe that you're looking past the characters' appearance (appearance vs. reality is a major conflict of Blade Runner) and into their souls.

#5: Punch-Drunk Love

Another fantastic opening shot.



Barry Egan is a depressed loner with a penchant for trying to comprehend things which don't make sense to him. In this scene, he sits alone in the back of his warehouse, his desk full of clutter amongst such an expanse of emptiness, on the phone with a customer service representative for a pudding company trying to understand that they actually included and are ignoring a major loophole in a promotion they are running.

Some of the most beautiful imagery in the film comes after he falls in love with Lena, a stranger that may or may not be an attempt by one of Barry's seven sisters to hook him up with somebody.



His symmetry is found in the lovely Lena.

#6: Cache
Cache is a French film by a German director, Michael Haneke. It is a brilliantly made movie about guilt and shame. The title of the movie literally translates to "hidden." The opening credits pop up slowly in typewriter fashion over a very long shot of nothing happening. The text is tiny and difficult to read. The movie's title eventually pops up within crunched-together movie-making roles, but it's hard to see. The opening credits set the stage for a movie where you're constantly looking for clues in the immense clutter and the strange sense of order that comes from it. Here are two shots from the main character's home.



The bookshelves and media cabinets (what a horribly American term to describe a French film with) are so crammed that we strain to see titles on them, thinking that maybe one of them holds the secret to the mysterious stalker-esque video tapes that continue to appear on the main character's front porch. The crowds of people acting normal make everyone a suspect. The answer to this enigma does lie somewhere in the movie (or perhaps outside the movie; Haneke's a fan of breaking the fourth wall), but it truly is quite hidden.

#7: Funny Games (German)
I've selected the German version of Funny Games because I haven't seen the Noami Watts American version directed by the same German director who made the original as well as the previous movie on this list. Michael Haneke here breaks the fourth wall in showing us that we know how murders go and we know how these disgusting games are played because we see them in the movies all the time. In this particular shot, one of the central family's tormentors has killed the family dog and is now playing Hot and Cold with the mother to direct her to the dog's body. Of course, the mother doesn't know the dog's dead, and we as the audience haven't seen the dog die, nor heard it, nor borne any form of witness to the act, but, as the director suggests, we know how this game goes. To solidify this in our heads, the tormentor (whose name keeps changing throughout the film) turns, stares directly into the camera, and winks at the audience.



#8: One Hour Photo
One of my favorite thrillers in the past couple of decades involves Cy, a photograph developer for the local Wal-Mart style megastore. He develops the photographs of a seemingly happy suburban family and, in his lonely desperation, dreams of being a part of their family someday, an "Uncle" Cy the Photo Guy. Every frame of this movie is still. There is no movement of the camera. And each shot is perfectly framed, as if we are looking at an actual developed photograph. The shot that sticks out in my mind is one I could not find a screen capture of. Cy sits alone in a cheap and dirty restaurant with a scowl on his face as light pours through filthy bulbs onto his table. It's the very embodiment of loneliness and disgruntledness, and it fits the plot perfectly.

RSS

Just a quick note, ladies and gents: I've added an RSS feed subscription tool to this page so you can stay on top of things. You can click on the first dropdown box in the top-right corner here and choose your RSS tool of choice. If you don't know what you're doing, choose Atom. It's probably the most generic and widely supported of the formats. This keeps me from constantly having to post those retarded blog posts at MySpace, the now slightly less than evil website of slightly less than doom.

The Linux Killers

I'm always telling people about Linux. It's great! It's awesome! I feel like a Christian evangelist when I do this. I just feel so strongly for the operating system both as a substance of ethics and as a simply more logical, cost-effective, personalizable, progressive, unique solution for using a computer.

But then I usually hear from friends who are technologically inclined some kind of backlash against it. My distribution of choice is Ubuntu. And it makes me think that perhaps, after all these years of people saying, "Linux has really come into it's own," and being torn down by someone else proving them wrong that maybe Linux is really, truly, there.

This is what I hear:

• You spend so much time configuring Linux that you end up not having any time actually using it.
• Linux is too complicated for the average desktop user.
• My software won't run on Linux

I would like to address these points. It seems like these are excuses to avoid a learning curve. I just don't understand the need to pay a couple hundred bucks for an operating system or at the very least, risk being arrested for software piracy, when you've got completely free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer operating systems out there that best Windows in all aspects.

Configuration
I recently installed both Windows and Ubuntu in a dual-boot configuration on my computer. Here is my experience with installing Windows:

1. Windows gets installed first since I want GRUB, a third-party bootloader that comes packaged with Ubuntu Linux, to be my bootloader. I want this because it's easy to configure. Wow. The first step and I'm already making my decision based on how easy Linux is to configure compared to how difficult it is to configure the same thing in Windows.
2. Insert Windows disk. Boot to it. Uh-oh. This Windows XP installer disk doesn't recognize my computer's HDD. Why? Because it doesn't have native drivers for SATA hard drives.
3. In an existing installation of Windows, I download NLite, a tool to reconfigure and create a new bootable Windows disk from an existing one. I go to Gateway's site (the computer is a Gateway) looking for SATA drivers. I find one, but it's for Windows Vista only. So I have to search around there for model numbers, etc, and spend a good half hour finding an appropriate driver. I use NLite to slipstream the driver into the Windows installation disk. I build a new ISO. I burn that ISO to disk. Back to square one.
4. Insert Windows disk. Boot to it. Cross fingers. Hooray! Now Windows sees my hard drive. Run the installer, partitioning the drive for 30GB to Windows, 70GB unaffected (this will be my Ubuntu Linux partition). Install Windows by letting the installer run, occasionally entering information like time zone, computer name, etc. Of course, these things are prompted for somewhat randomly, and in the middle of the install, so there may be a good five to ten minutes of idling while I'm away doing other things, unaware that these messages are currently on the screen. Yes, I know the messages will pop up during the install. I've installed Windows hundreds of times for hundreds of people, but I have dinner to cook and things to get on with in my life, so I step away during the mostly automated part of this.
5. Thirty to forty-five minutes later, the computer boots to a Windows login prompt. I log in. I'm presented with a low-resolution desktop. I check the Windows Device Manager to find that I'm missing several drivers. These are video drivers, ethernet drivers, wireless network drivers, motherboard chipset drivers, modem drivers, and audio drivers. This means that my monitor will show choppy video at low resolution, will not connect to the internet or any network in any way, will not know how to work with the most rudimentary of hardware, connect to the internet via dialup (big deal, hah), or play any sounds whatsoever.
6. Since I have no networking abilities, I go to a different computer and browse Gateway's site, Intel's site, Softpedia, and countless forums looking for WinXP drivers for this laptop. After several trips back and forth between two computers using a flash drive, and about two hours of trial and error, I have finally found all the necessary drivers for Windows. Everything works, but the Wireless connection is iffy because Windows has this problem where you may or may not need third party wireless connection manager software or services to get wireless cards working properly, and it takes me a few minutes to make sure I can actually connect to my wireless network.
7. I don't feel like ever going through this much hassle over drivers ever again, so I make sure to burn the functional drivers to a disk and store it in a safe location with other computer software essentials.
8. Now, I know there are going to be security problems here, so I go to download all the Windows patches. I spend another hour doing this, and several reboots, and finally have everything put together. Only, I know that I now have registry issues and wasted hard drive space because that's just how Windows is.
9. I download a freeware Windows cleanup utility (these things exist in droves because of their inherent necessity). The one I like is called CCleaner, which is short for Crap Cleaner. This tool cleans Windows, which is to say they think that Windows is Crap. It cleans up a hundred megs or so of wasted hard drive space, and finds 152 registry issues that need fixing. I let it do its thing.
10. So now I've effectively spent about three to four hours just to get Windows up and running smooth, but I've still got to install software like a word processor, anti-virus software, anti-spyware software, instant messengers, and more. I'm just not gonna bother with it now. It's already eleven o'clock PM, and I haven't even started my Ubuntu Linux install. Everybody knows that it's so difficult and time-consuming to configure that I don't want to waste all my time with Windows, since I'm clearly going to be up all night installing Linux and making it work properly.

So now it's time to install Ubuntu Linux. This might take a while. Here goes:

1. Insert Ubuntu Linux live CD (standard desktop distribution format). Boot to the CD. I get a menu. I choose to run the Live CD. Within five minutes, I'm looking at a full-resolution (for me, that's 1440x900) desktop. There's an icon here that says, "Install." I double-click it.
2. Over the first few screens, I tell it what language I speak, what keyboard I'm using, and what time zone I'm in. Then I go to a hard drive partitioner. Unlike the Windows installer, this will let me choose some simpler options (you know, like if I'm a n00b at installing OS's) like "Guided - Use entire hard disk" or "Use largest contiguous free space" which will let you resize an existing partition without losing data or making an OS suddenly not boot. But I've done this a couple of times before, so I choose the advanced method. It's nice that Ubuntu recognizes my hard drive, and even nicer that I can set up a new partition table in five minutes. I've got 512MB for my swap file (which will likely never be used), and the rest is for my OS install. The partition I set up for Windows goes untouched.
3. I click "Forward" and I'm presented with a summary of my intended actions. I read over them. They say what I want them to say. I click "Install." A progress bar comes onscreen. It takes twenty minutes for the progress bar to fill, and it tells me what's going on each step of the way. Partitioning, copying files, package upgrades (which it skips, since I've opted to not connect to the internet), and then it's done. It tells me I can keep using the Live CD or I can reboot. I click the "Reboot" button that it provides for me.
4. My desktop drops away. I get a decreasing progress bar. After a moment, I am told to remove the CD from the drive and press [Enter]. The CD is ejected automatically for me. I remove the disk and press the key. The computer reboots.
5. I am presented with GRUB, my bootloader of choice, which has been configured by the Ubuntu Linux installer to include Ubuntu, a Safe Mode for Ubuntu, Windows XP (yeah, it detected that automatically), and a memory test application, which is nice if I ever have memory problems, but I admittedly have never used this function, despite its prescence in Ubuntu distros for a couple of years. I boot to Ubuntu in Normal Mode.
6. My desktop is here in full resolution. I'm hearing logon sounds. Ubuntu is telling me that there's only one driver that it didn't automatically install. But it's not telling me it couldn't find the driver. It's telling me that Ubuntu does not have the legal right to install the firmware for my wireless network card without prompting me first. So it's prompting me. It installs the firmware upon my command, and all I've had to do is plug into a cabled network for the time being. All my drivers are installed, and I never had to go back and forth with another computer. Compared to the amount of time that it took to get this far with the Windows install, I'd say this configuration is going pretty quickly. It's taken me about one-tenth of the time.
7. Not to mention, I don't need to install an office suite, because OpenOffice.org 2.4 has already been installed. It's a free one, and it's already reading the proprietary Microsoft Office 2007 formats. I have no need for security software, because Linux isn't about to catch a virus or any kind of malware anytime soon. My instant messenger is already installed, as well; it's called Pidgin, and it works as an IM merger between AIM, ICQ, GTalk, MySpace Messenger, Microsoft Messenger, XMPP, Jabber, and other protocols that I've never even heard of. I'm all set. I'm done.
8. Now for the bells and whistles. I click on my Applications menu (the Gnome Desktop equation of the Windows Start Menu) and click Add/Remove... I run a search in the new window for "Advanced Desktop" and put a check next to Advanced Desktop Effects Settings, the first result. I click the Apply button. The package manager automatically downloads all the software dependencies and configures it all and then tells me it's done. I launch the configuration window from System->Preferences and a few clicks later, my desktop is fully functional with the extra benefit of having multiple virtual desktops and gorgeous, screen-rip-free transistions between them. Here's a demo (pops) of those effects.

All in all, configuration turned out much easier and less time-consuming in Linux than in Windows. In fact, I got farther with my Linux config than I did with my Windows config in a total of about one-quarter of the time. So, uh... myth debunked, I guess.

Complication
Let's get this one out of the way. Windows causes fragmentation of the hard drive because of its obviously inferior file system. Windows has the registry which is the primary target for evil-ware due to its blatant security vulnerabilities, and also contains erroneous data that even Windows itself can't seem to keep track of. Windows has an updater program for itself and separate updater programs for every other application it runs, depending on the application, so that at any given time that I want to do updates for my Windows OS, I have to run umpteen different updaters and reboot umpteen different times for no apparent reason whatsoever except that Windows has "tight integration," which is another way of saying, "one application crash always has the very frightening possibility of rendering my entire OS useless."

Ubuntu Linux (and most other Linuxes) do not allow hard drive fragmentation to happen. Period. No complication there. Linux has no "registry." No complication there. All of your applications get updated through a single updater program which also updates your OS, and only asks you to restart your computer when something really necessitates that action. No complication there. So... Where's the complication?

"Well," the Linux know-nothings will say, "there's the command line. You can't actually accomplish anything without the command line."

To which I respond: "Fool! You know nothing! Haven't I already installed the OS, installed software applications, not to mention new firmware for my wireless NIC without using the command line once‽"

Yeah, I even say the interrobang.

The point here is that leaps and bounds have been made to move the Linux user interface away from the command line and toward what we now consider a "desktop" approach. The Gnome Desktop Manager (GDM) and the K Desktop Environment (KDE) are two different ways that users can interface a Linux desktop, and even though I'm a fan of Gnome over KDE, I will recognize that both environments have innumerable benefits over the Windows desktop, especially in the way of simplicity with customization. I can't even begin to go into the details of all the specifics that can be customized within these desktop environments, but I can tell you it's very easy to do, and neither interface requires a single command at the terminal level to do any of that, nor do they require the editing of any configuration files. You can even have the option to boot into one or the other at any given time. You can swap back and forth between desktop environments at the click of a button!

So if both Windows and Linux are just as easy to configure, and you can get more out of a Linux desktop than you can out of a Windows desktop, then where's the trouble? Another myth debunked.

Software
Your software is written for Windows, compiled under Windows, and therefore will only run under Windows. Half the time you'd be right. The other half of the time, you'd be wrong. First, you have to understand that anything written in the Java language can be run under Linux just as easily as it can under Windows. There is no difference whatsoever. Second, you can always see if the same software is available under Linux. It might be, but this is a case where I will admit that you'd be stretching for hope. However, the real solution is to find an open source version of the software.

Need MS Office? No you don't. Strip yourself of your petty dependency that costs money every three years when Microsoft decides they need to rape your wallet. Use OpenOffice instead. It's already well caught up to MS Office, and updates are frequent. The development of open source software is much faster by nature than the development of closed-source, license-ware, copyrighted software. The fact that the market is not willing to pay $150 every month for a new version means that feedback and development cannot be addressed in a timely manner.

Need Microsoft Money? No, you don't! Try Home Bank. It's open-source. It's free of charge. It's just as good.

Linux has free, open-source software solutions for all of the following categories:

• Office Suite
• Finance Management
• Screenwriting
• Email
• Secure web browsing
• Instant Messaging
• Computer Programming
• Web Page Development
• Note-taking
• Casual Games
• High-speed 3D First-Person-Shooter Games
• Commercial Games, like Penumbra: The Black Plague (pops)
• Advanced Graphics Editing
• 3D Modelling
• VOIP Phone Dialing
• Media Playback
• iPod and other portable media player interfaces
• DVD Playback
• CD/DVD Burning
• Professional Audio Recording/Editing
• AND MUCH MUCH MORE!

And if for some reason, you can't find a viable, free of charge substitute for your paid-for Windows software, you can always try running it under WINE. WINE stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's basically a rewrite of the majority of Windows system files for Linux to allow Windows software to run in a Linux desktop environment. MS Office runs under WINE, if you're really that attached to it.

And if that's not enough for you, it should be said that all of this software is available to download and automatically install and configure itself through a simple point-and-click interface, without ever having to insert a CD or manually locate a misplaced installer file.

Myth debunked again.

All that said, there are some cases where Windows is better. Commercial gaming, while present on Linux, hasn't reached full force here, so for the latest and greatest games, Windows is a better choice for you. But since Linux allows you to dual-boot so easily, why not make the switch? Where are the detracting points? They can all be debunked. Why? I hate to say it because it's been said so many times before now, with limited truth, that Linux has truly come into its own. With a little extra popularity, it can become the operating system, or set thereof, that puts Microsoft in its place.

In other news, Bill Gates is retiring this month. Coincidence?

Guess How I Know It's Summer?

I know it's summertime because I've seen two movies at the theaters in the past month and both of them have sucked. Before, it was The Strangers, which has been poorly accepted by critics (myself included), and slightly better accepted by audiences, judging by its IMDb score and the oddly long legs of the flick.

Tonight, it was M. Knight Shyamalan's latest blockbuster powerhouse of crap, The Happening. Somehow, critics think even more poorly of The Happening than of The Strangers. That's not to say that The Happening was good, just better than The Strangers. By definition, everything is better than The Strangers.

The Happening has some genuinely funny moments, like when Mark Wahlberg talks to a plastic tree, and also some unintentionally funny moments that ruin the movie. Also taking hand in making this one a bomb: poorly written characters. These characters, like in every other Shyamalan film, have a personal struggle to make it through which they are concerned about even through the overt problem of the entire northeast United States committing gruesome suicide. Needless to say, just like in every other Shyamalan movie, they manage to overcome this internal struggle. The characters are all cartoon characatures with a small selection of emotions that don't allow for nuance.

Also, like in every Shyamalan movie, I guessed the plot "twist" six minutes into the movie. Granted, The Happening's "plot twist" feels less like a condescending self-affirmation on the level of Stuart Smalley than, say, The Sixth Sense, or The Village.

Receiving the theme of The Happening is like being slapped across the face with a tuna. Yes, we should live every day as if it were our last. Of course, love conquers all. And we may never know every single reason for nature's actions. Duh. We've had this pressed on us since we can remember.

There are a handful of scenes where Shyamalan attempts to create art, like the shot I kept hearing about where a pistol changes hands a few times, that fall flat on their faces. It makes Shyamalan look like a guy who only wishes he could be pretentious.

The acting here is pretty bad, though not awful, and certainly not the fault of the actors. They were given a pretty crappy script. Shyamalan can't write, and he basically gave each character one or two basic emotions and absolutely no tension. There's hardly any conflict here, and that's what drives characters' actions.

Our favorite director whose first name is "M" has basically taken other movies that came before and mixed them together to create something decidedly not new. More specifically, The Happening is kinda like The Last Man On Earth meets The Poseidon Adventure. His Netflix account should be revoked unless he starts renting better movies. A good one for him to watch would be the German Funny Games, which I watched recently in response to The Strangers. He'll pick up a few methods of handling suspense and horror and even paranoia, which is something he obviously tried to make central here, and failed.

All in all, this is probably worth watching if you rent it, or better yet, if your friend rents it and invites you over. Shyamalan probably has another Unbreakable in him, but I firmly believe that he should stop writing his movies and just stick to the direction. That said, even The Happening had a handful of shots that made me laugh due to their overdone cliche methodologies.

The Happening is just not happening.

The Strangers is the worst horror movie ever made.

Let's talk about what makes a horror movie good.

For me, I don't necessarily need to be scared, since I don't get scared at most horror movies, but if it can make me frightened, that's definitely a plus. I guess what I really need is for the movie to make me feel like if I were in the same position as the characters that I would do the same things they do to try to get out of that situation, and that what they're doing would be all that I could do. I need psychological frights, not cheap jolts to my ears when the music spikes to accompany a bad guy leaping into frame.

If you agree with me, don't watch The Strangers which just came out. I would have felt cheated if I hadn't had to pay to see this pile of garbage. It's like the screenwriter and director picked up a document called "How to Make a Horror Movie" and followed its formula to a T.

The first problem The Strangers has is its pacing. It's dreadfully slow. Boring, even. The director, Bryan Bertino (a first-time director, and it shows), is trying to go for something artful here, but long shots of characters walking (seriously, I watched Liv Tyler walk slowly for two minutes solid, at a stretch) doesn't make art. Neither does framing a victim behind bar-like shapes that make them appear to be "trapped" in the frame of the picture. That's not art. That's cliche.

Speaking of cliche, this movie makes its own cliches. By the time I was done watching this flick (if you can call it that), I was prepared to vomit if I had to see one more masked figure walk slowly out of darkness behind somebody. This isn't even scary the first time it happens. Why should I be scared the next fifteen times?

That's not even the worst of it. The characters here are James (Scott Speedman) and Kristen (Liv Tyler), and they must be the flat-out stupidest characters I've ever seen in any horror movie. See, I can suspend my disbelief if a character in a horror flick does something stupid when they're in the height of their distress, but these characters are doing stupid things before the titular tormentors are even in the house.

Kristen gets scared when her boyfriend goes out for a pack of smokes and strange knocking comes on the door. She tries calling him. How incovenient (or rather, how really convenient for a screenwriter) it is that her phone's battery is dead. So she plugs it into the wall. Then she gets a cordless land-line phone and calls James on his cell. Somebody cuts the phone lines in the house. (Cliche!!!) So she runs back to her cell phone, UNPLUGS IT, and marvels that she still has no battery power. She gives up. Any person with any amount of rationality knows that YOU CAN MAKE A PHONE CALL FROM A CELL PHONE, EVEN IF THE BATTERY IS DEAD, IF YOU HAVE IT PLUGGED INTO THE WALL!!!

During another scene, she screams when she gets frightened, letting her stalkers know exactly where she is. But all of a sudden, she gets concerned that the lamp in the room is on, which -- ZOMG! -- might alert her stalkers that she's in the room. Her solution? Try and turn the lamp off. That might be a good idea, if she weren't too fucking stupid to figure out which direction to turn the switch on the light. Failing at turning the lamp off the normal way, she resorts to BEATING THE LAMP ON THE GROUND, MAKING LOTS OF NOISE, AND COMPLETELY DEFEATING ANY CHANCE SHE MIGHT HAVE HAD OF NOT BEING DISCOVERED!

When James makes it home, the strangers disappear. Of course, he thinks she's gone crazy (CLICHE!!!) since there's no evidence, but when the phonograph turns itself on, he knows somebody's in the house. So he goes to his car to get his cell phone (since Kristen's has been thrown into the fire by a potential killer), and sees that his car's windows have all been beaten in. Nevermind the fact that the masked madmen managed to smash these windows without making any noise whatsoever. He already knows that Kristen's cell phone has been taken away from her by the killers. He can assume the same about his own. Yet he walks slowly to his car carrying a butcher knife and what does he find? Yep, his cell phone's gone. And now he's being attacked. So Kristen runs out to him. Why? Because the script told her to. They proceed to be attacked by the killers in a truck.

Here's another good one. They're face to face with one killer in the truck. They've got two directions they can run. They can bolt off into the very nearby woods which have trees so dense that no truck could ever possibly drive through them, or they can run back to the house. What do they do? Run back to the house. Why? I speculate they do this because the screenwriter wrote it that way. Do their survival instincts ever kick in?

No.

So now they're back in the house. This is James's father's summer home, so he says he knows where his father keeps a gun. He apparently doesn't because he scrambles to find it. He looks for a full-size shotgun behind books on a bookshelf with shelves so narrow that you could never fit a full-sized shotgun on them. He eventually finds it on top of the bookshelf, which makes more sense. They find some ammo in a shoebox in a bedroom closet. Why James's father would keep his firearms and his ammo in two completely separate locations is beyond me.

So they load up. Right as they're about to get to the two-inch-thick solid wood front door, an ax comes chopping through it effortlessly with one blow. Wait. That's not wood. That's styrofoam. Now there's a hole in the door big enough to see the killer's mask outside it. He shoots from a distance, but there's no way in hell that he could possibly hit the ax-wielder because it's a freaking scattergun aimed from twenty feet away from a hole the size of a human head. Instead of walking up to the hole and scaring the bejeezus out of their tormentor, then shooting, taking off half of that person's face, he shoots once from a distance, then runs the other direction - BACK INTO THE HOUSE!

He eventually makes his way outside after another dreadful period of silence and him killing his best friend (or maybe it's his brother, I can't tell because none of the characters have even that level of depth) on accident, he winds up hiding in the woods. He sees one of the killers and that killer doesn't see him. Instead of using that to his advantage and, I don't know, shooting her to death, he lets her find him, then gets his ass kicked and the shotgun taken away.

This leaves Kristen on her own. She runs out of the house, and falls into a ditch that wasn't there when James left the house. Her leg is hurt. Instead of crawling up and away from the house, since none of the killers know her whereabouts, she decides she's going to be stupid again and crawl back toward a barn which is right next to the house.

Allow me to describe this barn. It's very dark. The front door to the barn is very well lit. If somebody were to try to get in, Kristen would know immediately, and be able to do something about it. The other entrance is a window that's so high up and so small that it simply wouldn't be viable to enter through it, especially if you were trying to sneak up on a person. The barn is full of could-be weapons. You've got chainsaws and machetes and a place where an ax used to be, but truly, anything in this room could be used to do some serious damage to a person if thrown or swung. Instead of wielding any of these items, Kristen chooses to turn on an old amateur radio to call for help, as if anybody actually uses those anymore. That's why this piece of shit is IN THE BARN!!! Of course, talking over the radio alerts the killers to her whereabouts (she doesn't even learn from experience in this movie), and one of them swings an ax in through the high-up window, effectively scaring her and destroying the radio... but not much else. Like I said, that window is too high and too small to actually be a threat. But does Kristen keep her position in this safehouse? Hell, no! She runs back to the house which is huge, has multiple entrances that can't be watched all at once, and has been proven several times already to be a major danger zone.

She's very quiet in the house, and her leg (which keeps healing itself and then getting worse again as convenience allows) is all better for the time being. The result is that somehow the killers don't know where she is. One even walks into the room with her and walks straight past. She should grab the knife that's sitting on the counter nearby and stab the fucker in the back. But she doesn't. She hides in a closet.

You ever notice how all closets in horror movies have doors with slats in them? You ever notice how the victims can see out these slats perfectly well, but the killers can never see in? Same deal here. Though hiding in this closet isn't too bad an idea. You can see the killers when they walk in (and one does, and he walks in circles, sits down in an easy chair, then stands back up and does more circles for about five boring minutes), and there are most certainly no other entrances. Kristen's almost in control here. She should jump out and kill these masked freaks while she's got this opportunity to do so. It should be mentioned that NONE OF THEM ARE CURRENTLY ARMED!!! But she failed Kindergarten, so she doesn't do that.

So they get her and they get James (who's still alive) and they tie up the couple and stab them a bunch. There's this great, operatic scene where the killers remove their masks. But we still don't see their faces, so what's the point? Oh yeah. Running time.

I won't tell you how this ends, because you don't want to know. It's too insipid for words (though the screenwriter certainly put those words on paper at some point). What I will tell you is that you don't want to see this movie. Your intelligence, if you have any, will be insulted. I should also mention that the flick is full of inconsistencies, like the ditch that wasn't there before and the fact that, though Kristen cuts her hand really badly on a butcher knife early in the movie so that her hand is bleeding profusely for the following sixty minutes, there isn't any blood on the knife at any time until Kristen gets full-on stabbed by it. I can also tell you that the movie opens on some title cards followed by a 9-1-1 phone call recording of Kristen screaming and saying that there's blood everywhere and that she doesn't know where she is, but that scene is never in the movie because it couldn't have possibly happened because the phone lines are cut and all their cell phones have been destroyed.

I will also say that the movie doesn't trust its audience. It opens on title cards that explain the situation. And a voiceover reads it back to us in full. Thanks. I, unlike Kristen, got through the third grade. I can read just fine. In fact, if I could watch the French original that this movie is based on, I would watch them in French with English subtitles. I would read my way through that movie. Also, they set up this scene where, when we're first introduced to these two retards, Kristen is crying and James is disappointed. He takes her back to the summer home where she's shocked and a little guilt-ridden to find that he's really romanced the place up. There are candles everywhere, music ready to play on the record player, and rose petals all over the floor. He sets a ring box - the kind you get from the jewelry store - down on the table. I assumed, as I hope everyone in my theater did, that he had just proposed marriage to her and had been rejected. But that apparently wasn't enough. We need a series of two or three flashbacks to explain that to us in excruciating detail.

There's also this one scene, when the door is knocked on for the first time, where James says, "What time is it? Like, four o'clock?" Then we get a shot of a clock on the wall announcing the time as 4:05 AM. It's a small thing, but it's just another example of how this movie spells everything out for you and leaves absolutely nothing to your imagination except for how the characters got so stupid.

The killers' excuse for coming into the house and killing them comes in the last fifteen minutes of the movie and the last fifteen seconds of the trailer for the movie: "Because you were home." Let that be a metaphor for this movie as a whole. It doesn't make any more sense. I mean, sure, they were psychotic people with a penchant for murder, so they picked some random house and killed people in it. But it's supposed to be a catalyst for the entire ninety minutes and it just doesn't work. It might have worked if the killers had character depth. Look at The Devil's Rejects to see how a "just because" logic can work very well. I must say that I have not seen a movie this bad since I watched fifteen minutes of Norbit on a lunch break at work once.

Don't watch this. Please, for the love of God, don't watch this. Even when it's on HBO at midnight in a few months, don't watch this "because it was on."

Time...

File under
Examples of Man Trying to Control Nature
·or·

Things Which Are Arbitrary
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Why Even Bother?

Daylight Saving Time came and went, much without incident, even when we were expecting the worst. I guess that proves that when you expect the worst and the unexpected happens, it's really not all that bad in the end.

DST did make me think about the nature of time and how none of it makes any difference anyway. See, time is this intangible thing. I can't touch it. Niether can you. But we all know it. It's really nothing more than a measurement, so it's no more real than a centimeter or an inch. Time is how we measure the sun's progress through our skies (and I don't want to be corrected by some heliocentric theory-proving smartass, either; I know how it works, I'm just being romantic).

So man creates time as a measure of this and somehow we decide that one sun-cycle should be broken up into twenty-four pieces called hours and that those should each be busted up into sixty smaller segments called minutes and that (probably for the sake of accuracy) minutes are really a sequence of sixty even smaller units, seconds, but for all humanity's infinite wisdom, we manage to contradict ourselves in correction after we realize that we were off by some tiny margin in our initial assessment of this breakdown. That twenty-four count of hours should probably have been a little closer to a twenty-five count. And the assessment, after all, was more than just a little bit off.

What was decided was that one year (previously considered to be consisted of 365 days) was 365 ¼ days. So we were underestimating. So now every four years, we throw an extra day in for good measure, to prove ourselves right. But there's nothing to prove except that we were wrong.

Where did we go wrong? Was it when we decided that the day should be twenty-four hours long when it should have been more like thirty? Was it when we decided an hour should be sixty minutes when in reality it should have been seventy-five? Or when we realized that our measurement of one minute was nine hundred seconds too short? The answer, of course, is none of the above.

Where we went wrong was deciding that we as humans could control nature. The sun rises and falls when it's going to and, since Earth is tilted, most likely any breakdown of time measurements we could create would be somewhat inaccurate. I'm not the only person to realize this. Obviously someone else came to this conclusion first, because for about half the year, the United States of America pretends that we're reliving an hour just so we can sleep and work better. Time, as an intagible entity that doesn't really exist, marches on while our perception of it changes dramatically. It's like time travelling. At two AM on the fourth Sunday of November (I think), our clocks are supposed to jettison straight back to one AM. Then in the springtime, when the clock strikes two, we leap straight to three o'clock in the morning. We first create time and then dispose of it. Our days are just as long, just a little brighter. Here's a diagram.

So you see, we live 1 AM twice on November's fateful day, and disregard 2 AM completely in March just to suit our needs of having daylight to work in. Since daylight is overrated anyway, and since we actually have the ability to do this, I can safely conclude that time is just a way for man to attempt to control something which he created. If time were really nature, we wouldn't be able to do this. You can't disregard what is obviously there.

And if this spelling-out of what you're all already aware of didn't help you see it any better, perhaps this will serve as proof that none of it matters anyway. I don't eat lunch at noon. I eat lunch when my stomach growls. My hunger is not controlled by time. It is controlled by my nature of consumption and excretion. So why bother changing the time if all it means is that my stomach will growl an hour earlier?