20130814: Documentary Review--Journey to the Sea of Cortez

Journey to the Sea of Cortez (hulu+)

1. Live action documentary, 2011.
2. IMDB: no entries.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: only a stub.  Looks like I entered the first review.


4. John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts mounted a mini-expedition to the Sea of Cortez (called the Gulf of California in the USA these days) in 1940, before the USA entered World War II.  The film uses modern camera work to update and discuss the findings of Steinbeck and Ricketts.


5. Ricketts was a marine biologist and ecologist who passed away in 1948.  He and Steinbeck were good friends who were interested in the interactions among climate, ocean conditions, sea life, and human beings.  Some of the characters in Steinbeck's books were based on Ricketts.


6. The expedition culminated in a book (Sea of Cortez) published 05 dec 1940, two days before the USA joined World War II.  The book's impact was muted by the war.


7. The film drives home the point that at least a few people were aware of ecological issues even as early as 1940.  It points out some of the devastating effects of overfishing and the overuse of the water of the Colorado River.


8. Most of the film, though, is about the great beauty and wealth of wildlife that still exists in the Sea of Cortez.  It's a delight to the eye.


9. One line summary:  The great beauty and wealth of wildlife that still exists in the Sea of Cortez.
10. Five stars of five.

Cinematography: 10/10 Framing, focus, colour, depth of field, contrast, and sufficiency of light were all top notch.

Sound: 10/10

Acting: N/A; this is all narrated footage of sea life and ocean environment.

Screenplay: 10/10 Engaging and educating.

20130814: Documentary--UFOTV Presents Touched

UFOTV Presents Touched (hulu+)

1. Mockumentary, 65 minutes, live action, straight-to-video format, 2008.
2. Neither IMDB nor Rotten Tomatoes will touch this thing.
3. Stars: John E. Mack, Arnold Relman, Alan Dershowitz, Patrick Harpur.
4. Case studies of 'real' abductions plus discussion by a variety of researchers.
5. Karin.  Young woman from Florida from an impoverished dysfunctional conservative upbringing.  Strange dreams, OBE, channeling, feeling lost in her own life, as in, is this truth or delusion?  She asks the universe for some sort of physical sign that her experiences are real or not. One night she's beset with electricity and paralysis.  Then she sees something on the bed with her that looks like a big bug.
6. Peter and Jamy.  He's an ordinary well-grounded man.  He falls in love with Jamy, and life is even better after they eventually marry.  They run a comfortable business together in the Caribbean.  One night, months later at home, his sleep is disturbed, and he gets some night terror.  It does not repeat for a couple of weeks, but then it does.  He gets the sensation of electrical flow in parts of his body, and has some residual marks the next morning.  Elited time.  They move back to the States, to snow country, and he enrolls in acupuncture school. She enrolls in a program in psychology.
7. At the hospital where his training is done, Peter meets John E. Mack, MD, a clinical psychiatrist who works with people who think they have been abducted by aliens.  He held a tenured professorial position at Harvard until he died in 2004.  He won a Pulitzer prize for one of his many books.
8. One of his colleagues, Arnold Relman, MD (Harvard Medical School), was interviewed.  Relman led a committee in the mid 1990s to investigate Mack.  Relman asserted that Mack's reputation was somewhat tarnished by his efforts with the 'abductees.'  One of my favorite comments from Relman was that one should at least try to verify the experiences.  Does  anyone fact-check this nonsense?  No.  And why not?
9. For more on Mack versus Relman, see Harvard investigation.  To Mack's credit, he did not end up asserting the physical existence of aliens.  See the same Wikipedia page for a nice discussion.
10. The movie jumped the shark when Peter described how Mack asked him what had happened to him.  Peter came out of the session believing in alien abduction.  Before he had no such notion at all.  Later Peter does regression with Mack.  The film shows Peter making bubbles while a tape of one of Peter's session is played.  This was an odd choice at best.
11. Since Mack died four years before the film was released, the whole subject seems dated and moot.  Harvard did not openly censure Mack. Mack's best opinion on the subject was that the abduction scenario is just part of the grand human tradition of similarities in hallucinations.  This is centuries old, is quite well-known, and is about humans, not aliens.  The alien veneer is more about people sucking in narratives from popular culture, like The X-Files, and adding that to the shared hallucinations.
12. The film maker takes a field trip to Brazil to see whether their culture accepts the experience of beings from other realities.  The third case study shows up, Luppa, a man who had a normal, successful life, and did not need, in any sense, the bother of experiencing alien presences.  The local scientist claims that these experiences can make one crazy, but one does not experience such things because one is already crazy.
13. The regression sessions are pretty heavy-handed.  What Peter comes out with does not seem to come from him.  The added stuff from Mack seems like active interference in this supposed process of discovery, and helps reinforce the pattern of similarity of the faked experiences.
14. People do like their fifteen minutes of fame.  Also, they enjoy lying to be part of a larger group.  Put those two together, and the shared hallucinations are as natural as anything, especially if sharing gets you in a movie.  Also, the stories told by the abductees start out as rather different, but as time goes by, then get closer together.  More time to polish the party line, one assumes.
15. This is especially true in a world where X-Files has been seen by multiple millions, and there are several 'reality' shows on television simultaneously about finding ghosts wherever one looks.  The paranormal, the extraterrestrial, and transcendent beings are all culturally accepted.  Just watch 'Paranormal Witness', or 'Ghost Hunters, season 9,' or 'Ghost Mine.'  These are all current 2013 shows, and there are many more in production.  Ghosts and aliens are an industry in their own right, and have many cliches available for consumption.
16. Three stars of five, for making me look up the biographies of the Harvard experts.  Also, as outrageous faking goes, this was pretty amusing.

Cinematography: 2/10 Video style quality (soft focus, washed out, jerky movements, refusal to frame properly, poor depth of field, 4:3 aspect ratio), and not even good video style.

Sound: 6/10 OK for video sound.

Acting: 7/10 Fairly good.  I usually did not catch the feeling that the interviews with the abductees were scripted.  The Harvard experts seemed to be giving their opinions as answers to questions.

Screenplay: 6/10 I guess I was entertained, though I was still appalled that this kind of hoaxing is still considered fashionable.

Special Effects: 0/10 The movie's director attempts to illustrate what the actors are describing with dancing lights or working with a bubble maker. Yikes.

20130813: Documentary Review--Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart: The Cost of Low Prices

1. American Live action feature length film, 2005, documentary.
2. IMDB: 6.8/10.0 from 3,606 audience ratings.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 93% on the meter, but 'no consensus yet'.  From audience input, 64% favorable.  There are many mini-reviews posted on RT.  Have a look.
4. Disclaimer: I am not neutral on this issue.


5. Case Study: Middlefield Ohio, the Hunter family's hardware store, and the impact of Wal-Mart's presence.  Despite providing superior service, knowledge of inventory, and personal connections to customers, the well-established local businesses are hurt by Wal-Mart's ability to provide lower prices.  Ohio was not the only case study.  There were a good dozen across the USA, and more in China, southern Asia, Central America.


6. One of the themes of the documentary is that a few Americans are making a huge amount of money because of Wal-Mart, but orders of magnitude more people have their lives degraded by it.  For instance, many long time successful businesses go under.  Property values almost always go down in the neighborhood of a new Wal-Mart.  That is,Wal-Mart presence devalues everything near it.  A memorable quote was that small towns destroyed by Wal-Mart tend to look like they had been 'hit by a neutron bomb.'  That is, the buildings are still there, but no one is in them.  Businesses are closed, people lose their houses.


7. A second theme is that Wal-Mart is a front for Chinese economic warfare against the United States.  One of the statistics used was 'Wal-Mart reduces total wages by three billion USD per year.'  The interviewed Wal-Mart executives brag about forcing as many employees as possible from full-time work to part time.  They also encourage the employees to give the company free overtime.  As internal policy, Wal-Mart stores are understaffed.  An open secret is that many Wal-Mart employees are on public assistance.  That is, taxpayers pay bills that Wal-Mart should pay.  Wal-Mart provided health insurance is expensive, but still has high deductibles.  This pressures workers to get on public assistance.----All of these policies support the second theme; Wal-Mart is hurting the USA by making it less and less viable.


8. A third theme is more of a question: if the US government could rein in Standard Oil, why does it not even try to control Wal-Mart?


9. The interviews were excellent.  The candor of some of the blood-sucking managers at Wal-Mart was amazing in terms of admissions.  Discrimination against women, cheating employees out of overtime already done, browbeating employees to do overtime with no expectation of remuneration, blatant union-busting, and the like.  The interviews with people whose lives were affected by Wal-Mart were very direct and informative.  The pain was clear, but many facts were always delivered in parallel.


10. Wal-Mart gets subsidized up front (before moving in) by local governments and state governments directly, not just in the resulting drag on public assistance.  Many local communities have to scale back on public services such as fired teachers, cut back police departments, reduce library offerings, and so on.


11. One of the tricks I found amazingly bad was negotiating a big subsidy package, building the Wal-Mart store, then building another Wal-Mart store outside the municipality.  The first building is left empty, and the municipality gets zero tax benefit.


12. The section on environmental violations committed by Wal-Mart in the US was impressively bad.  The monetary judgments against WM were almost as impressive.


13. The Chinese segment was scary as well.  One would think WM would treat its Chinese employees better, but they do not.  The maintain sweatshops and teach their employees to lie to inspectors.


14. Given the atmosphere of lying, law breaking, wiping out competition, and maintaining sweat shops, it's not all that unexpected that Wal-Mart parking lots have a long and bad record for being crime scenes.  Rape, murder, kidnapping, armed robbery, auto vandalism, and auto theft are the more usual crimes.  Wal-Mart spends next to nothing on parking lot security for customers.


15. One line summary: The content was great, the visuals were bad.
16. Four stars of five.

Cinematography: 2/10 Poor.  It's video quality, and not the high end of video.  Soft focus, sometimes grainy, jerky camera movement, all of which detract from the content.

Sound: 7/10 Passable for video.

Acting: 8/10 The interviews were quite good, conveying facts and lots of check-able details as well as describing loss and unfairness.

Screenplay: 7/10 The flow of the work was good.

20130813: Mystery review--Exit

Name: Exit (2011)
IMDb: link to Exit

Genres: Psychological Drama.    Country of origin: Australia.

Cast: Kylie Trounson as Alice, Michael Finney as Simon, Hannah Moore as Grace, Drew Tingwell as David, David Whitely as Tom, 

Directed by: Marek Polgar.      Written by: Martyn Pedlar.

The Three Acts

The initial tableau: 
The film is set entirely in a nameless Australian city.  Graffiti and broken and degenerating building materials are used to illustrate urban decay.  These images are paired against huge, great, new, seemingly perfect sky scrapers.  

People are distinguished in similar fashion.  Some are poor, and many of these have a shared delusion that the city has only one exit, and that exit is somehow hidden by powerful forces.  In contrast, other groups are wealthy with deep resource bases.

Delineation of conflicts:

The lost battle their own delusions by questing after the unique illusory exit.  Some spend hundreds of hours keeping track of their 'progress' in searching for the exit: some use 3D models, others paper accounting, others maps and notations.  

Still others give up and flee into addiction to substances that temporarily stop thinking.  These folk are sometimes the victims of criminals.

Some appeal to the rich for assistance; this appeal often fails.

A precious few try to achieve mental health by shucking off their delusions.

Resolution:
What are the usual exits for the lost? Some die from substance abuse, or from failing to pay the criminals from their limited resources.  Some of the deluded stay deluded.  Do any of them break through their imaginary problems?

One line summary: Psychological drama: nothing new, not well executed.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 4/10 Hulu+ claimed to be streaming in HD, but there were jumps in the video, indicating missing frames.  Some of the video is stunningly good, some is annoyingly bad.  Do I care to see acres of graffiti?  I see it in real life, and despise it there.  I have no reason to like the same sort of crap in a movie.  It is just as ugly, and does not advance the plot.  The same sort of criticism applies to the study of the decay of metal, brick, wood, and other building materials.  I don't want to waste my time viewing thousands of frames glorifying ugliness with attendant rotten background music.

Shot in colour, but feels like black and white, for the dreariness, depression, and lack of optimism evoked by the impoverished pallette. Filmed in Melbourne and Victoria.

Sound: 4/10 The incidental music might appeal more to the Australian sensibility than to mine.  The actors seem to be miked OK so that I could hear what they are saying.

Acting: 2/10 Poor.  I do not believe any of these characters feel any obsession.  They are hitting their marks, reading their lines, and not getting paid much beyond receiving billing on a low budget film.

Screenplay: 2/10 Breaks the fourth wall.  Automatic deduction of marks.  I don't care for characters talking directly to me when the work is one of fiction.  After all the spaghetti plot, the end comes when one character brightens up and realises, 'my obsession really was nonsense.'  As with many psychological dramas, the problems and pain are in the heads of the characters, not in the common view of reality.  Resolution comes when one character gets out of the trap of their own making.  The biggest problem with this film is that I found none of the characters engaging, for which I fault the writing.

Alternates: Try Marnie (1964) with Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery, Moby Dick (1956) with Gregory Peck, Vertigo (1958) with James Stewart.  These are all psychological dramas and are all good movies.  The difference is that these films had good screenplays, good directors, and good actors.  More recent better psychological drama movies include Memento (2000),  Mulholland Drive (2001), and the monarch of them all, The Sixth Sense (1999), with Bruce Willis.


Final Rating: 2/10, two blackholes for acting and screenplay.

20130812: Action Review--Avalon

(hulu+) Avalon

1. This is a substantial update to the mini-review from 20130629.
2. The movie is largely live action.  For the game sequences, live action with effects.  It is 106 minutes in length, released in 2001, from Mamoru Oshii, who directed the animated series Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor 2.
3. IMDB:  6.5/10 from 9,486 users.
4. Rotten Tomatoes: 'No score yet...' and 70% approval from 8,598 audience members.
5. Shot in Poland with Polish actors and Polish sets: streetcars, flats, bistros, large church, abandoned buildings and world war 2 weapons for the game sequences, and so on.
6. 'Avalon' is a VRMMORPG (virtual reality, massively multi-player, online role-playing game) gone wrong.  This sounds like a number of other films.  On the anime side, the .hack//sign and its many sequels, as well as GITS.  On the live action side, Tron and the Matrix series come to mind.
7. In retrospect, GITS seems positively open, clear, and transparent compared to this work.
8. Dissipation, pointlessness, inaction, game-induced permanent illnesses, lack of direction, out-of-focus closeups of low-tech food preparation, such as potatoe-cabbage-rice stew.  People with eastern European accents checking out old books written in Japanese.  Who could ask for more?  I could.  Was there a point to all of this?
9. The female protagonist, Ash, is one of the top players in this somewhat illegal game.  She attempts to find out why the game is having bad consequences for real-life players.  She follows this through with dogged determination and finds a conclusion of sorts in real life.
10. The ending was just absurd.  At 80 minutes in, we switched from the sepia-river-of-mud visual style to full light, good focus, and beautiful scenery.  Around 90 minutes in, Ash is at a large church where a lavish musical production is going on.  The final, climactic confrontation occurs on these grounds.  Ash debates what reality is with the ultimate nemesis.  The dialog is as stupid as the rest of the film.  The welcome, and long overdue, visual beauty does not improve that.
11. One star of five.  20130927: two blackholes for cinematography and screenplay.
12. As a side note, one of the thoughtful audience reviews I read claimed that the Miramax version (in English) was a disaster in terms of meaning.  The semantic content of the English version was clearly at odds (and much smaller) than the Polish version.  That would explain the lack of sense of the version I saw.

Art/cinematography: 2/10 Poor depth of field, many features obscured by shadows, dismal, murky, out of focus, lots of sepia shots and visual flattening.  Hulu+ claimed it was streaming in HD, but I saw no evidence of that in the visual quality.  This was ugly beyond belief.  The last twenty five or so minutes were nice to look at, but hardly made up for the first 80.

Sound: 4/10 The music was a bit too florid and symphonic for my tastes, but OK in terms of quality.  The dubbing into English was uneven but often badly done: the sound was hollow and lower in volume than the music.  In contrast, the many sounds of terribly sloppy eating were crisp and higher in volume than the spoken word.  For that matter, much of the foley (typewriters, footsteps, game sounds) is louder than speech.

Acting: 4/10 Light on motivation.  Let's blame the screenplay for that.

Screenplay:  1/10 The film was not engaging, mostly because the twists and turns of the plot always seemed one step closer to nothing.  I came away thinking I knew less about the movie after watching it than I did before I started watching.

20130811: SF Review--Apocalypse Earth

Name: AE: Apocalypse Earth (2013)
IMDb: link to AE: Apocalypse Earth

Genres: Action, SciFi   Country of Origin: USA

Cast: Adrian Paul as Lt. Frank Baum, Richard Grieco as Capt. Sam Crowe, Bali Rodriguez as Lea, Gray Hawks as TIM (Trans-human Interactive Machine; shades of Data on Star Trek, the Next Generation), Jayson McCardell as Sergeant Peebles, Michelle Jones as Hannah.

Written and directed by: Thunder Levin.

The Three Acts: 

The initial tableaux:
There is a massive failure at establishing context at the beginning of the film.  Just what is the initial situation?  War?  Disaster?  I'm guessing war, but with whom?  How can a ship (Ark) big enough to transport a sufficient set of survivors across interstellar space take off at a moment's notice from the middle of a city?

After cryo-sleep, the passengers on the Albert Einstein (the Ark seen initially) awake to find they are about to crash on a planet.  There is a lot of confusion, then stragglers coalesce to form the group to be followed by the viewer and the indigenous hunters.

Delineation of conflicts: 
Most of the locals ('Chameleons') are hostile.  For instance, they imprisoned the surviving crew of another Ark, the Isaac Newton.  The Einstein crashed into the prison where the Newton survivors were being held, and some of the Newton survivors are in the group.

The group adds Lea, a non-Chameleon local who is a loner and who becomes their ally.   There is more than a bit of mutual distrust at the beginning: when forming a new heterogeneous group, there is usually the triad: form, storm, norm.  Fortunately, the storm period is not too long.

After the new group is a bit more cohesive, what will they do?  They are outgunned and severely out numbered.  Do they reach for local power, in the form of new allies, or do they try to return to Earth?

Resolution:
After so many losses of personnel and resources, just what did the ark program accomplish?

One line summary: Escape from apocalypse fails.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 4/10 Usually plenty of light, but framing is iffy, and depth of field was poor.  Jumpiness is common; it has the look of recurrent missing frames.  All too often, nothing was in focus, and the level of graininess was high.

Sound: 8/10 There were a few problems with sound effects, but the actors' voices picked up OK.  Some of the background music was rather good.

Acting: 2/10 Looks unrehearsed, at least early on.  Gray Hawks' performance was terrible, as if he were doing an imitation of Brent Spiner as Data.

Screenplay: 1/10 The first 15 minutes were awful.  Just two minutes of establishing material at the beginning would have made the first half of the film easier to take without giving the story away.  I nearly bailed.  The second half of the film was a bit better, with most loose ends tied up. Filmed in Costa Rica; on IMDB, I saw two estimates for the budget, 1 million USD and 350k USD.  More money on screenplay would have helped, as would more budget on cinematography.

SFX:  2/10 Special effects were unimpressive to just plain bad.

Final Rating: 2/10

20130810: Documentary Review--Flight from Death

Flight from Death: the Quest for Immortality

1. American live action documentary movie prepared for television; 90 minutes; 2003.
2. IMDB: 6.9/10.0 from 230 user ratings.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 'no score yet', and 69% of ticket buying people liked it (717 ratings).
4. Stars: Gabriel Byrne (narrator), sheldon solomon (academic expert; skidmore college), Sam Keen (expert), Robert Jay Lifton (expert), merlyn mowrey (academic expert), irvin yalom (expert).
5. From Rotten Tomatoes: 'the research of late cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker is explored to reveal his theory of death as the primary motivator of human behavior -- especially in regards to aggression and violence' -- That is what the film is about, which is neither 'Flight from Death' nor the 'quest for immortality.'
6. The film makes its position quite clear early on: there is no immortality.  We all die.  There are no exceptions.  There is no flight from death.  The quest for immortality is an illusion.
7. So, theories of immortality are illusions.
8. Three things are repeated again and again. (a) People are willing to hurt others who have different theories of immortality (say the theory of Islam versus the theory of Christianity). (b) many are willing to die in order for their theory of immortality come out dominant (the usual justification for modern terrorism). (c) When forcibly confronted with their own mortality, people are more harsh toward anyone else.
9. ---------------
10. Anyone over the age of 20 has already figured all these things out.  That's been true for centuries.  Read Mark Twain carefully, for instance.  If one lives in a repressive culture, one usually never says these things out loud.  These days a few sorts of repression are a little lighter.  As a result, a 'learned' work like this comes out.
11. It's nothing new folks, and I've wasted 90 minutes.  Please don't make the same mistake.
12. One sentence summary:  I would not recommend this to any one for any reason.
13. One star of five.  20130927: two blackholes for acting and screenplay.

Cinematography: 4/10 It's in TV format, with weak resolution, and generally soft focus.

Sound: 8/10 OK, but not great.

Acting: 2/10 I am quite glad that such things are being said aloud and written in journals by academics.  But it is a tremendous performance (as in performance art) for them to act as if they have discovered something new.  I'm glad they all got publications for it.  Someone should, I suppose.

Screenplay: 2/10 The authors of this work had about six axes to grind.  I think they did well at that, although in a very heavy handed way.  It's just nothing new.

20130810: Documentary Review--Love the Beast

Love the Beast

1. Australian live action 'vanity' documentary movie, 92 minutes, released 2009, rated R for language.
2. Hulu says: Eric Bana's directorial debut explores the importance of his 25-year-long love affair with his first car - a Ford XB Falcon Coupe, "The Beast."
3. IMDB: 7.1/10.0 from 1,344 user reviews.
4. Rotten Tomatoes: 59% and 'no consensus yet.'  Well, yes.  The dozen or so mini-reviews I read on Rotten Tomatoes were polarized.  Among ticket-buying movie-goers, 76% liked it.
5. Starring: Eric Bana, Jay Leno (The Tonight Show), Jeremy Clarkson (Top Gear), Phil McGraw (Dr. Phil).
6. Eric Bana narrates his involvement with the 1974 Falcon Coupe, from early racing seen live in his youth, to Mel Gibson driving one in Mad Max, to having one of his own.
7. His discussions with other 'car people' are really fine, and add a lot of texture to the piece.  I had not expected Dr. Phil to be a car person, but his discussion of what it's like to race was very incisive, as was his distinguishing between operating at peak performance and delusions of immortality.  Jay Leno was also good at adding more information about car people, who are not all racers.
8. The multiple rebuilds of the Beast were interesting.  The final product probably had little or no original metal left from the original.
9. Eric's first race was in Tasmania, and after his 'last' rebuild of the Beast, he returned to run again in that original track.  This was an endurance race, the '5-day Targa Tasmania Rally.'
10. I am not a 'car person', but I like cars and driving.  So the interviews and the racing footage did not put me off.  I could see how a number of non 'car people' might feel disenfranchised early on in the film.  So, proceed with caution.
11. I liked Bana's straightforward enthusiasm and devotion over time.
12. Five stars of five.  I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys automobiles.

Cinematography: 6/10 Much of the archival footage sucked: small images, grainy in every spot, poor depth of field.  The more current footage looks good on the whole, but was sometimes bleached out in the bright Australian sun.

Sound: 9/10 Seldom disappoints.

Acting: 8/10 Lots of interviews: Eric's parents, his early friends, other enthusiasts he met in life.  There was plenty of sincerity and humor.

Screenplay: 9/10 The organization was reasonable.

20130810: Documentary Review--80 Waves

Around the World in 80 Waves

1. American live action theatrical movie, released in 2010, 60 minutes, 
2. IMDB listed the film at 5.9/10.0 from 12 users' ratings.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 'no score yet' from reviewers, and 71% from 337 ticket buying reviewers.
4. There is a lot of travel involved.
5. Pipeline, Hawaii: wonderful water shots.
6. Hydrofoil: shots of surfers using a hydrofoil attached to the underside of the back of their boards.  It almost looks like they are surfing above the water.
7. Waimea Bay, Hawaii: large, heavy, turbulent waves.  Many surfers, many cameras, lots of traffic congestion (not shown).
8. Tavarua, Fiji: small island with lots of waves.  A lot of the perimeter of the island is controlled by a resort, though, and the movie makers could not film as well as they might since they are not all paying customers.  So 'Cloudbreak', one of the main attractions was not available.
9. Tahiti: impressive waves.  Lovely colors on the ocean water.
10. Bali: some fine shots of atmosphere, colors of the ocean, dancers, and the like.  Plus surfers and waves.
11. G-land, Indonesia: island of Java.  Waves were fast and turbulent.  G-land is a surf camp franchise system.  Lots of energetic waves.
12. Regulations for surfing on Hawaii.  The interviewee likened surfing to flying a plane...one needs to know the legal rules, and be trained at least to some degree.  How etiquette might be useful, but seems to be ignored since surfing is a 'selfish sport.'  He makes a good case verbally, and a few shots of beautiful waves almost covered in boats, helicopters, and surfers brings this home.
13. If you like beautiful images, this is a good 60 minutes to catch.
14. Five stars of five.

Cinematography: 10/10 Watch this on the best monitor you can find.  Definitely HD.  Most shots were exteriors.  The framing was excellent, focus crisp, with amazing lighting conditions.

Sound:  10/10 No complaints.

Acting: Not really applicable, but the talking heads do fine during the minutes they are onscreen.  Adam d'Esposito was the most frequently seen in the interviews, and he's photogenic and well-spoken.

Screenplay: 10/10 This is more about organizing clips camera work than pacing discussions and interactions among actors.  There were a lot of beautiful photography here.  The interspersing shots of people talking are short, to the point, and well-miked.  There was quite a bit more time spent on a great white shark spotted near Hawaii.  Other than that, it was wall-to-wall waves and surfing.

20130810: Comedy Review--The Treatment

Name: The Treatment (2006)
IMDb: link to The Treatment

Genres: Comedy, Romance, Drama.   Country of origin: USA.

Cast: Christopher Eigeman as Jake, Famke Janssen as Allegra Marshall, Jake's lover in an affair that eventually bogs down; Ian Holm as Dr. Ernesto Morales; Stephanie March as Julia, Jake's ex; Harris Yulin as Dr. Singer; Blair Brown as Miss Callucci; Roger Rees as Leighton Proctor, Jake's boss at school; Stephen Lang as the basketball coach, Jake's boss in that arena.

Directed by: Oren Rudavsky. Written by: Daniel Saul Housman, Daniel Menaker (novel), Oren Rudavsky.

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux:
Jake is a recently divorced Manhattan high school teacher who is in psychotherapy.  Jake's two bosses enjoy putting him in his place.  Despite the patterns of failure, Jake has his scattered aspirations.

Delineation of conflicts:
Jake wants to be a leader, especially in his own life, but cannot do what it takes to become one. He attempts to resolve his inner conflicts with the aggressive Dr Morales, but the two seldom connect.

He attempts wooing his boss' ex-wife Allegra Marshall, but that also seems doomed.  He has all sorts of ideas about how the basketball team should be managed, but cannot make his voice heard with the coach, who tells him to stick to keeping statistics.  Leighton Proctor tells him to keep his opinions to himself, and to support whatever Leighton Proctor said.

It came as no surprise that Jake has issues with Dr. Singer, his ailing father.

Resolution: The doors continue to slam shut.  Does Jake break through any of them?

One line summary: No laughs in this #FeelBad comedy.

Statistics:

Cinematography:  5/10 The introductory sequence, which included most of the credits, was ugly and out of focus.  The camera work improved immediately after that, but still suffered from soft focus and short depth of field.  With a budget that IMDB estimated at 900,000 USD, I suppose this is not unexpected.

Sound: 7/10 Very nice in the introductory sequence, OK through the rest.

Acting: 4/10 The first encounter of Julia and Jake was irritating.  Stephanie March's performances are always wooden, so I expected nothing there.   Eigeman's acting plus the writing, though, rendered the scene repulsive rather than bland.  Why would Julia (gorgeous and well-connected) marry this nebbish, who can turn any opportunity into rancid failure?

This one small stint told me the entire film would be worse than having a horse step on my foot.  All the subsequent minutes of the film did not change that assessment.  This was a dreary movie, mostly because of Eigeman's acting.  Dragging the viewer through the protagonist's failures is a bit much.  A different lead might have used the situations better; there might have been laughs.

On the other hand, I enjoyed the performances of Ian Holm, Stephen Lang, Famke Janssen, Harris Yulin, and Roger Rees.  That's why it's 4/10, not zero.

Screenplay:  4/10 With another lead, slightly better screenplay, and the same supporting actors, I think I might have had three or four belly laughs, plus a dozen chuckles.  With this lead, I did not laugh once.  This does not recommend a film labelled comedy.  The 'happy ending' seemed like an abrupt change given the bulk of the film.

Final Rating: 4/10

20130810: Documentary Review--The Big Buy

The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress

1. American live action theatrical film, 2006, documentary, 75 minutes, 
2. IMDB rated the film 7.2/10.0 from 88 user reviews.
3. Tom DeLay rose from a 'piece of furniture' in the Texas Legislature to a money making dynamo who took effective control of the Texas legislature, then the US House of Representatives, where he became Majority Leader in the 2003.
4. Also profiled is Ronnie Earle, the relevant prosecutor in Travis County, where Austin is located.  A fair amount of screen time concerns Earle's motives in his prosecution of DeLay.
5. Democratic Texas legislators who were defeated in elections via floods of corporate funds are interviewed.
6. Several members of the press were interviewed, as were relevant lawyers, and other Texas leaders from the period.
7. Three stars of five.

One line summary:  The rise and fall of Tom DeLay in the Texas Legislature and the US House.

Cinematography: 5/10 Many of the archival clips are badly out of focus; sometimes the camera wobbles. Depth of field is consistently poor.

Sound: 9/10 Good, but not flawless.

Acting: not relevant.

Screenplay: 7/10 This is a sketch of the rise of Tom DeLay, and a more detailed accounting of his fall.  The fall included his indictment for felony money laundering charges related to using corporate money for political uses in violation of Texas law.  The indictment resulted in DeLay's resignation as  House Majority Leader in January, 2006, and his leaving the House in April, 2006.  (He was convicted in 2011, well after the film was released.)  The film does fairly well in representing differing points of view on the proceedings.

20130810: Indie Comedy--A Girl Walks into a Bar

Name: A Girl Walks into a Bar (2011)
IMDb: link to Girl Walks into a Bar

Genres: Comedy, Indie    Country of Origin: USA

Cast: Gil Bellows (Emmit Driver, cop), Xander Berkeley (Moe, cop), Alexis Bledel (Kim, drunk and high), Emmanuelle Chriqui (Teresa, one of the strippers), Rosario Dawson (June, hat check at the naked ping pong club), Danny DeVito (Aldo, gangster), Robert Forster (Dodge, ex con), Carla Gugino (Francine Driver, ex cop working with Sam), Josh Hartnett (Det. Sam Salazar), Zachary Quinto (Nick, the dentist), Michelle Ryan (Loretta), Lauren Lee Smith (Karen, dancer), Aaron Tveit (Henry, the pickpocket photographer), Amber Valletta (Camilla, bartender), Kevin Zegers (Billy), and even more actors.

Written and Directed by: Sebastian Gutierrez.

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux:
Set in Los Angeles, California, mostly at night, almost entirely in 10 bars populated by cops, gangsters, strippers, bartenders, ex cons, dancers, singers, hat check girls, and naked ping pong players.  The characters interact with each other in intertwining stories.

The action begins when Francine gets Nick to ask her to kill his wife, and records it on the sly.  That sets the rest of the stories in motion, split across locations and small groups of characters.

Delineation of conflicts:
This is a film with an ensemble cast and intertwining stories.  Each transaction between characters sets in motion other transactions.

Francine wants 20k USD now, so Nick goes to Aldo to get back some money he's 'invested.' Aldo can't get it the same night unless Nick does something for Aldo, namely rob the ping pong club. Nick meets his wife at the ping pong club, and they confess (her infidelity, his murder plans) and make up.  While waiting for Nick, Francine visits various bars to track down a pickpocket who can get a picture back from Emmitt, her ex.  Sam officially covers the action at the ping pong club, updates Francine when it's over, and ends up getting close to the hat check lady June.

Resolution:
Add in about 20 more interactions, and you have the film.  The story threads finally converge with side effects.

One line summary: This was a pleasant indie ensemble 'feel good' movie.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 8/10 Almost all interiors, well framed, sufficient light for the cameras.  The focus was a bit too soft for me in several passages.

Sound: 10/10 Just fine.

Acting:  8/10 The veteran actors were good (Carla Gugino, Danny DeVito, Xander Berkeley, Robert Forster, for instance), and most of the actors I was unfamiliar with were competent.  Zachary Quinto was disappointing again, as expected.  He has almost reached the level of deal breaker for me.

Screenplay: 8/10 The storylines came together fine, and I did have that 'feel good' at the end.  I could have used a few more laughs during the main body of the film.

Final Rating: 8/10

20130809: Anime Series Review--Blast of Tempest

Blast of Tempest: The civilization Blaster

1. Japanese anime serial, two seasons, 24 episodes each 25 minutes, 2012.  Action, fantasy, mystery. Original title Zetsuen no Tempest.
2. Wikipedia gives fine details for character and episode descriptions.  Episode 13 featured a recap of the first 12 episodes, and the beginning and ending clips were updated.
3. IMDB rated the series as 6.8/10.0 for one critic.  The one review is a good one.
4. The series is set in 'modern' times on a world clearly not our own.  The basis of the story is that two great Trees battled one another in the past, with one winner, but both Trees badly wounded.  In the era of their recovery, human civilizations arose.  Those attuned to the Trees can practice magic.  The Trees are now awakening, and civilization is getting pulverized in the process.  A small number of specially trained individuals attempt to shape this awakening for the good of civilization.
5. This series is ruled by dialectic processes.  The Tree of Genesis versus the Tree of Exodus.  The two central human characters: Yoshino (intelligent, calculating, reclusive, quiet and courageous) versus Mohiro (entitled, unyielding, impulsive yet determined).  Physics versus magic.  Human civilization versus the sheer power of the two Trees.  Each Tree has a single human who is most strongly attuned to it; in a sense, the entire story is about the dialectic between those two individuals.
6. I usually do not care for flashbacks.  This series is one that I will cite in future as a huge exception.  There are perhaps 200 flashbacks (yes, around 10 per episode) in the series.  By the fourth or fifth episode, I lost my usual irritation at the flashbacks.  Well before the end of the series, I saw the brilliance of the execution, and welcomed every flashback as a well-timed back-fill of characterization or plot.
7. If you can, avoid reading spoilers.  I did, and the power of the final episodes was impressive.
8. Five stars of five.  I would recommend this series to anyone who likes anime or a long, good story.

Art: 10/10 Always between competent and exceptionally good, usually closer to the latter.  This was the most beautiful series I've seen in years.

Sound: 10/10 No complaints at all.

Screenplay: 10/10 Complicated, gripping, and brought to a satisfying conclusion in the last episode.

Characterization: 9/10 A few actions seemed a bit off, but not many.  There were around ten main characters, and well before the end I felt I knew them fairly well.  The last three episodes were exquisite for the final deepening and fulfillment of the characters.  The handling of interrelationships over time was a joy.

20130808: Horror Film Review--Chop

Chop

1. American live action theatrical release 2011, Horror, Comedy, Thriller, 98 minutes.  Filmed in Los Angeles County, USA.  Rated NR; language, indicated sex, drug use, but mostly blood and gore resulting from savage intentions.
2. Starring Will Keenan (Lance), Timothy Muskatell (the stranger), Tanisha (as Lance's wife), and Elina Madison (as Tammy).
3. IMDB: 5.5/10.0 from 690 user reviews.  From the Storyline section, IMDB says, 'Lance Reed is forced by a psychotic stranger to confront his duplicitous past.'
4. Rotten Tomatoes: 'no score yet' from critics; 43% liked among responding ticket buyers.
5. That first sentence from the IMDB storyline pretty well sums it up.  The movie is about how the stranger encourages Lance to remember bad things he has done in the past, and that Lance did some of them to the stranger.
6. The hideous edge of the film comes from the methods that the stranger employs.
7. Among other things, he tricks Lance into killing his brother.  Then he kills Lance's wife, and cuts off Lance's left index finger.  The police know Lance is involved in the deaths, and Lance retreats into drug use.  Lance looks for bugging devices, and descends into a drug-aided rampage where he tears up his own house.  Upon awakening, he's down the other three fingers on his left hand.  His interview with the cops after this does not go well.  After all this, Lance is still making zero effort to remember his tormentor.
8. Lance eventually admits to a hit and run felony and to a murder, but he still does not remember what he did to the stranger until it is too late.
9. One star in five. 20130927: two blackholes for acting and screenplay.

One line summary: Bad acting and screenplay make this film not worth the time.

Cinematography: 8/10 Hulu streamed this film in HD, and it looks good throughout.  There was sufficient light for the cameras.  Framing and focus were usually both good, but with a few glaring failures.

Sound: 10/10 The actors were well-miked, and the incidental music was fine.

Acting: 0/10 The people billed as actors here hit their marks and read their lines.  They went through the motions successfully.  However, I laughed at none of the lines, and cared about none of the characters.

Screenplay: 2/10 This does not work for me as comedy of any type.  I found nothing funny in this particular portrayal of the depredations of a drug addict, or the self-righteousness of a 12-stepper. The psycho stranger was even more savage than the drug addict.  The film did not work as a thriller, because the acting done for the protagonist role was so hollow.  The blood and loss of limbs was indicative of horror, but the lead was cardboard.   I might have thought of the film as a mystery, but by the time the central secret was revealed, I did not even shrug.  Perhaps it was meant to be a knee-slapping good punch line, but it failed at that was well.

20130807: Documentary Review--The Raw and the Cooked

Das Rohe und das Gekochte (The Raw and the Cooked)

1. This a much enlarged update of the 20130525 short review. 
2. German live action straight-to-video film released in 2012, 83 minutes, documentary.
3. IMDB: 5.5/10.0 from 8 user reviews.  I added my 10/10 to that.
4. Rotten Tomatoes: 'not rated yet' and no audience ratings.
5. Available streaming on Netflix, and on DVD from Amazon.
6. German director and writer Monica Treut's  culinary journey around the island of Taiwan.
7. The film visits the Amis people, the Hakka people, the Han Chinese on Taiwan.
8. Gathering food, preparing food, delivering food, and enjoying food are displayed from the standpoints of the groups listed above.
9. Documentary had a lot to say about remembering one's culture through food ceremonies, about the interactions of food consumption and health, about using locally grown and recently harvested foods.
10. Five stars of five.

One line summary:  Fine documentary about Taiwanese culture and cuisine.

Cinematography: 10/10 Excellent camera work throughout; well-lit, sharp focus, and good framing are common.  Many of the settings are beautiful, and the camera work catches that.

Sound: 10/10 Music was fine, very much including the local ethnic music.  The speakers and singers were sufficiently miked.  For many of the Taiwanese spoke in their native language; the subtitles seemed sufficient.

Acting: 8/10 Most of the local chosen for the film were good at illustrating food growing, preparing, eating, and singing before feasts.  Some of the Han Chinese restaurant scenes were a bit crowded and busy and not very informative.

Screenplay: 10/10 I liked the travel format, with strong references to local customs.  The story moved right along as the island was traversed.

20130807: Updated Review--Alien Hunter.

Alien Hunter

1. Released 2003, American live action theatrical film, 92 minutes, rated R for language and some violence.
2. IMDB: rated 4.9/10.0 from 2,734 viewers.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 'No score yet' from critical reviewers; 22% from audience 1,233 audience ratings.
4. Starring James Spader, Keir Dullea, Roy Dotrice, and Carl Lewis.
5. Spader's character is a womanizer and brilliant code breaker whose career mostly crashed after the shutdown of SETI.
6. An artifact found under the Antarctic ice near an American research site is recovered after emitting a signal tracked by the US government.  The signal resembled remarkably a signal sent from near Roswell in 1947.  Spader wrangles passage to the site.
7. The usual perfect storm of instances of Murphy's Law culminates in the alien getting lose, research staff dying from alien disease vectors and from shooting each other.  The Russians bomb the site at the behest of Washington, obliterating evidence.
8. Similar to The Abyss, the aliens break into the proceedings with their superior technology.  Quite differently than The Abyss, no humans notice this, except the four who were saved.
9. Slow moving, neither compelling nor funny.  The ending was a bit novel, but not much.
10. This was probably my least favorite James Spader film.
11. One star of five.  20130927: one blackhole for screenplay.

One line summary: Presence of good actors does not salvage bad SciFi script.


Cinematography: 4/10 Very often dark, with cameras insufficient to the challenge.  Lots of grainy video.  The film never looks great, and seldom looks good.  I've gotten spoiled by HD, I guess.

Sound:  7/10 Never bad, but never crystal clear either.

Acting: 5/10 The actors I named above were OK, but the others were between dull and incompetent.

Screenplay:  2/10 The Russians use nuclear weapons on Antarctica at Washington's request?  I doubt this.  The movie was often plodding, short on motivational framework, long on bad decisions, and heavy on bad luck.

20130807: Documentary Film Review--Chasing Ice

Chasing Ice

1. American live action theatrical film, 75 minutes, released 2012.  The movie follows National Geographic photographer James Balog and his team as they documented in film the changes in northern hemisphere glaciers over time (in months and years).  The film was one of the better products of Balog's Extreme Ice Survey.
2. IMDB rated it 7.5/10.0 from 1,650 users.  My first rating on IMDB was for this film; I gave it a 10/10.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: the film scored a whopping great 96%.
4. This film was well-crafted: good early explanation of why the effort was made, clear illustrations of early technical problems that were subsequently overcome, and exceptional at presenting ongoing good results.
5. Many challenges were encountered and overcome during the project.  The first setups for cameras to take pictures over entire arctic winters did not go all that well, and sturdier components had to be found.  Balog experienced health problems from the climbing over rugged ice features.
6. The time lapse photography of glaciers over time (months at a time) was spectacular.  Many stills taken at intervals were assembled into short videos.  The impact of these videos (real photos, real locations, current time) was strong.
7. Five stars of five.

One line summary: I would recommend this to just about anyone; incredible camera work.

Cinematography: 10/10 Breathtaking.  Brilliant.  Inspired.

Sound: 10/10 No complaints.

Screenplay: 10/10 The story was engaging, and the arguments were made with care.  The editing of the film from its many sources was first class.

Acting: 10/10 Perhaps this does not apply.  The principal 'actors' were telling their own story.  They were not irritating, did explain things well, and advanced the story at a nice pace.

Special Effects: 10/10 There were graphics associated with the measurements and observations of the team.  These varied between competent and quite nice.

20130807: Horror Film Review--The Thirst

Name: The Thirst (2007)
IMDb: link to The Thirst page

Genres: Horror   Country of origin: USA

Cast: Matt Keeslar (Dune, Rose Red) as Maxx, Clare Kramer (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as Lisa, Jeremy Sisto (Law and Order) as Darius, Serena Scott Thomas (The World Is Not Enough) as Mariel, Adam Baldwin (Firefly, Full Metal Jacket) as Lenny.

Directed by: Jeremy Kasten.  Written by: Ben Lustig (story), Liz Maccie (screenplay).

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux: 
Drug addicted couple (Maxx and Lisa) are going in opposite directions.  He's clean and in a 12-step group.  She's still using.  Lisa starts puking blood and collapses while doing a strip tease.  The drug addiction was on top of her advancing terminal cancer, which she can no longer hide from Maxx.  

Lisa commits suicide, or so it would seem.  When his friends invite Maxx to a goth club some days after the funeral, he sees Lisa at the club.  He returns later and finds her and a nest of hungry vampires.  Lisa soon converts Maxx.

Delineation of conflicts:
The notion of trading one obsession (drugs) for another (blood sucking) is explored to some extent.  Lisa and Maxx try to control their blood lust.  This does not go well.

Their attempt to adapt to vampire life was replaced by an effort to stop the family (the nest of vampires) at any cost.  The other vampires are not pleased with that part.

Resolution: Do the protagonists embrace vampire values and settle into vampire lifestyle, or do they align themselves to human values?  They do make a choice.

One line summary: Substituting vampirism for drug abuse.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 4/10 Insufficient lighting, soft focus, grainy final presentation.  There's a bit of jerkiness from the low light and cameras that cannot handle it.

Sound: 10/10 The film had several background tracks that were witty and fitting.

Screenplay: 3/10 Poor.  The fifteen minutes of story was stretched too far to get an 88 minute runtime.  The exposition of motivations was terrible.

Acting: 3/10 So many actors, so many bad performances!  Jeremy Sisto (the reason I quit watching Law and Order) disappointed even more than usual, and the coming and going of his various accents was irritating.  Clare Kramer (a major reason I stopped watching Buffy) was marginally better than I thought she would be.  After Firefly, Adam Baldwin has been a favourite, and he did not disappoint me here. The rest of the actors were forgettable at best.

Special Effects: 0/10 Abysmal.  The blood sprays and the bursting into flames are laughable. Blood sprays are all too common, and quite over the top in poor execution.  The fact that they are done in such a ridiculous way eliminates any serious tone to the film that might have been intended. Seeing the tube that feeds the red fluid on Keeslar's back 60 minutes into the film was an amazing gaffe.

Final Rating:  2/10  Awesomely bad: three black holes for acting, screenplay, SFX.

20130806: Horror Film Review--The Attic

Name: The Attic (2007)
IMDb: link to The Attic page

Genres: Horror, Thriller    Country of Origin: USA

Cast: Elisabeth Moss as Emma Callan, Catherine Mary Stewart as Kim Callan, John Savage as Graham Callan, and Tom Malloy as Frankie Callan.

Directed by: Mary Lambert.   Written by: Tom Malloy (screenplay and story).

The Three Acts:

The initial tableau: 
The Callan family moves to a new house.  John Savage is the controlling father, Catherine Mary Stewart the former beauty queen mother, Elizabeth Moss the troubled teen, Emma Callan.  At the new home, Moss starts seeing someone who looks just like her.

Delineation of conflicts:
Ninety-five percent of the film is psychological thriller with horrible outcomes.  Everything in the plot can be explained by Emma's family's dynamics and her maladjustment.  The other five percent provide bookends concerning the family that lived in the house before Emma, and the family that would live there afterward.  That would be the horror overlay, the hint that there was something supernatural that contributed to Emma's downfall.

Numerous attempts are made to help Emma come to terms with what she's experiencing: interviews with a physician, a psychologist, a wicca expert, and so on.  She shuts these out, just as she shuts out her friends from the town where she had last lived

Resolution: 
Emma's childhood issues are eating her alive.  One should see the film to see how the tragedy is played out.

One line summary: Dysfunctional daughter crashes and burns.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 8/10 Mostly well-lit and in good focus, with reasonable framing.  Occasionally, a vignette filter was used, which I could have done without.

Sound: 8/10, good but not the best.  In several passages the spoken word seemed hollow.

Acting: 6/10 John Savage gave the performance I expected.  I'd seen Elisabeth Moss in Mad Men and Top of the Lake, and this performance was not nearly as good.  Elisabeth Moss is the centre of the piece, so the whole movie seemed awkward.  Tom Malloy gave a competent performance as the brain damaged brother.

Screenplay: 6/10 Emma's refusals to cooperate with the police resulted in no consequences.  Horror films, and also psychological thrillers, are all about consequences, so this struck me as mighty unlikely.  That her family would allow her self-destructive behaviour to continue was hard to believe.

Final Rating: 6/10

20130804: Horror Film Review 2--Laid to Rest

Name: Laid to Rest (2009)
IMDb: link to Laid to Rest page

Genres: Horror, Thriller   Country of origin: USA

Cast: Richard Lynch (Halloween, Invasion USA) as Mr. Jones, Lena Headey (The Brothers Grimm, 300,  Game of Thrones) as Cindy, Sean Whelan (MIB, Twister) as Steven, Bobbi Sue Luther as 'The Girl,' Kevin Gage as Tucker.

Written and directed by: Robert Hall

Chromeskull

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux:
The female protagonist wakes up in a coffin, makes her way out, and nearly gets killed by the man who put her there in the first place.

Delineation of conflicts:
She manages to survive the night, but most of the allies she meets along the way get killed trying to help her and to live themselves.  Her adversary's motives are rather opaque, and remain that way.

Resolution:
There is a sequel, Chromeskull: Laid to Rest 2 (2011), with a new cast.  Perhaps that film has resolution.

One line summary:  Cliche inscrutable almost invulnerable slasher villain.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 10/10 Framing, focus, natural colours, all OK.  Most scenes are dark (night scenes), as one should expect from a horror film, but the cameras used were up to the challenge.

Sound: 10/10 Good, with the actors well-miked.

Screenplay: 3/10 The killer could not finish the protagonist.  This made no sense, since he murdered quite a few others in ten seconds or less.  No one could take out the killer with guns, crowbars, or anything else...until he applied some extra-powerful glue to re-bond his mask to his face.  The police did not show up in force until the few living witnesses had fled the scene.  The ending provided only a minimal amount of resolution.  The motivation of the killer was never disclosed or even hinted at.  His need for the mask was not explained, and so on.

Acting: 4/10 Bobbi Sue Luther seemed more than a bit green as the female lead.  I expected more from Kevin Gage (the male lead), whose resume was longer.  The character actors Richard Lynch, Lena Headey, and Sean Whelan had enormously more talent and experience than the lead actors.  If not for these three actors, I would have rated the acting at 0/10.

CGI: 5/10 There were some poor special effects of the more bloody scenes in the unrated version.

Final Rating: 4/10, neutral