Blockade Billy (2010)

     Impressed with Steven King's ability to inject an interesting character study into his zombie story "Home Delivery", I decided to give him another chance.  However, Blockade Billy (2010) was probably the wrong choice if I wanted to be impressed.  It is unbelievably short – a short story claiming novella status by virtue of font size and spacing – and the version I checked out from the library did not have the bonus story "Morality". 
     King relates the improbable story of a baseball player removed from the game and record books after one month in the 1957 season.  The player, the titular Blockade Billy Blakely, is called up to play for the fictional Newark Titans (there are Newark Titans at the Ohio State University and the New Jersey Titans are a Women's Spring Football team).  He is an odd duck but one hell of a baseball player.  The entirety of the tale is told as though it is being related to King by the retired Third Base Coach from that team.
     There isn't much in the story.  It is breezy, maybe a little too much so.  King doesn't quite know what kind of story he wants to tell and is quick to go back to peppering in plenty of curse words to fill out the dialogue (something I first noticed when reading his short stories over 20 years ago).  It appears as though King had an idea for a story – and didn't want it to be any kind of horror – but couldn't quite find the human angle.  The reflective observations about what may have been the motivation for Blockade Billy to do what he did felt forced, as though King wanted to have a moral to the story.  I don't think it needed one, not if he had committed to developing it in a manner that would have engaged the reader in the strange month long odyssey of the team.
     I am glad I didn't invest 1,000 pages in a King book to get something like this, but as it was an insanely quick read I am not complaining.  I do think that this story could have been left to sit and be revisited when King had a better idea of what he wanted to do with it; he certainly doesn't need to put out books to put food on the table these days.  There are a couple of King stories I do want to read, and I hope they are betting than Blockade Billy, but I have read worse from established authors.  And much worse from people like myself who can only aspire to be authors.

The Next Three Days (2010)

     I am going to do everything in my power to keep this brief.  The Next Three Days (2010) is an old-school kind of caper movie, with an attempt at some high energy moments in the final act.  It is not entirely successful, largely because the characters – save Liam Neeson's brief appearance as jailbird-turned-author Damon Pennington and Daniel Stern's turn as attorney Meyer Fisk – are all are presented as wooden, mostly unemotional beings.  It is not unlike the restrained manner Daniel Craig affected in Enduring Love (2004), but it applies to all of the character, with Russel Crowe's John Brennan only given three scenes where he has some human level of emotion showing.
     There is a certain level of non-commitment to the whole thing.  Brennan doesn't know how to go about doing what he wants to do, but figures it out in time to keep the movie going.  The police officers are neither the bad guys or co-sympathetic protagonists, but cut-scene filler.  The action is almost – with the exception of a ridiculous FX sequence on the road – as restrained as the emotion in the film.  Sometimes that really works and gives it a grounded feel, and it never draws stark contrast against the play of the characters.
      I feel kind of ambivalent about this movie.  I think that Pittsburgh deserves better than this, Striking Distance (1993) and Sudden Death (1995); maybe that is Taylor Lautner's new movie.  Yes, I know who Taylor Lautner is (the shirtless guy from the Twilight movie commercials, and thus presumably the movies as well).  Back to the point.  This is a decent, consistently paced movie that delivers a mildly interesting story in a competent manner.  Yes, it could have been much better, but it isn't bad enough for me to bad mouth it.  I'd say C+, and think that if it were allowed to drift a little more towards the melodramatic it could have been a solid B.

Case 39 (2009)

     Please indulge me in this small amount of snarkiness.
     "Some cases should never be opened."  
     Yeah, I'm assuming you mean the DVD case for Case 39 (a 2006 production, 2009 release in Europe and Latin America, and a late 2010 release in the U.S.A.).  Okay, I'm done being snarky.
     This is a bad movie.  Renée Zellweger looks downright unattractive as social worker Emily – if this was by design it is to no effect other than distraction – and delivers 80% of her lines in some kind of a forced whisper.  She seems largely disconnected from her character through most of the film.  There are a couple of scenes where she does seem in the moment, but those come very late – by that point, I was just watching the clock waiting for the movie to be over.
     Always attractive Bradley Cooper and Ian McShane also seem lost in their few scenes.  For the most part, they are talked at by Zellweger, only to be given horror scenes that are dreadfully boring.  Maybe McShane's garage sequence is supposed to be reminiscent of The Omen (1976), but it comes across as lifeless.  Cooper's bathroom sequence is as believable as the CGI creatures afflicting him, which is to say not very.
     Callum Keith Renne – so good as Jim Field in Falling Angels (2005) – gives a decent performance, as does Kerry O'Malley as devil-girl Lilith's parents.  Jodelle Ferland (Lilith) is all over the place in terms of consistency of character, which may be a choice the director made, but she also does not give the other actors in her scenes much to work with.  Cynthia Stevenson shows up for two scenes and is given the worst line I've heard in a recent movie: "Walk the talk."
     I would gladly watch the new Conan the Barbarian (see review here) multiple times rather than have to sit through this half-finished product.  I had heard good things about it, but was consistently less interesting than most SyFy Channel Original movies.  If I had to give it a grade – and assuming that "Incomplete, see me after class" is not an option – I'd give it a D.  Zellweger has been much better than this, and hopefully will be again. I like it when established actors take a chance on a genre film, but I like it much more when said film turns out to be engaging or engrossing, and I can come to care about the characters and the story.  None of that happened here.

My Time with Netflix - Part Five: The Good Streaming Content

     Now I finally get around to the movies and television shows available to Watch Instantly I found rewarding.  No big preamble to this one.

Streaming Movies and TV that were Worthwhile

The Crazies (2009)

     This is another cheat.  I saw The Crazies in the theater, but I wasn't sure if I liked it as much as I was glad Breck Eisner handled the tone with the right mix of tension and absurdity.  Given a second viewing, I might like it a little less, but I am more convinced that it works as a movie.  I'll give Radha Mitchell a chance in nearly everything, but it is Timothy Olyphant who is most successful in hitting the right notes and meeting the intensity level required throughout the calamity.  The Crazies satisfies nearly everything I look for in a disaster movie – it introduces the audience to the characters, then to the disaster, and the audience gets to watch (in this instance) the disaster kick those characters asses.  There is no uniformity in how the people are afflicted in The Crazies, which plays as both more realistic and more terrifying.  Even with a somewhat limited budget, it doesn't feel constrained.  Given how much I enjoyed it, I thought it would only be fair to give the original 1973 version a watch.  I couldn't make it through the first half hour.  Where Romero appeared more concerned with selling conspiracy theories and orchestrated inefficiency, Eisner opts for a more focused approach showing the deterioration of a town through the eyes of a select few residents.  Maybe it doesn't work as commentary, but I'm convinced it was not intended to.  It is an almost horror, mostly suspense, disaster movie where people behave in decidedly less than civil ways.

My Time with Netflix - Part Three: Streaming Mistakes

     I'll be up front and admit that all of the Watch Instantly activity of my now defunct Netflix account was done through my laptop; no gaming console or other device that allows the service to work with the television.  Because of that, I tended to view it as computer watching and not analogous to being a replacement to broadcast/cable television, and it occupied the times when I didn't want to watch 'television'.  It also had the benefit of being readily dismissible; if I had started watching something truly horrible [Moby Dick 2010 (2010)], I could abandon it early on and feel that I was still in control of my activity (unlike suffering through the disappointing DVDs).  Still, I managed to make it to the end of some movies that I wouldn't recommend to anyone; they are detailed below.

The Streaming Mistakes

The Alphabet Killer (2008)

     I guess I became aware of this movie because somebody, somewhere mentioned that Eliza Dushku has a brief "nude" scene  in it.  That isn't much of a selling point to me, but it did manage to keep the title in my head.  When I saw it in in the Watch Instantly category for Suspense movies – with Dushku, Timothy Hutton, and Carey Elwes – I thought it would be, at worst, a middling project.  It kind of is, but what makes it truly disappointing is that the script by Tom Malloy decides to use the trappings of the real-world "Alphabet Murders" as a framework for an underwhelming tale focusing on Det. Paige (Dushku) with quasi-mystical abilities...except that those abilities are really just the manifestations of psychosis.  There may have been a good movie idea in here, but it is hard to watch as Elwes and Hutton both give performances out of their standard repertoire (they may as well have been pulled from other movies and dropped in here) and Dushku plays emotionally troubled as even more detached and distant than her normal, limited range.  As for the "nude" scene, it is oddly superfluous.  Det. Paige is changing clothes and there is a millisecond shot of the side of one of her breast's.  Why is it included?  It doesn't serve to titillate (one of the primary reasons to include nudity), and it doesn't serve to soften and make to seem more vulnerable a hard or tough character (which I think is a better use of nudity in legitimate films).  Reading about the actual "Alphabet Murders" was a more rewarding experience, as I imagine watching the Discovery Channel documentary would be.

My Time with Netflix - Part Two: The DVD Mistakes

     One of the tasks I didn't like with Netflix was assembling a list of movies I wanted enough to see that I would be willing to watch them soon after they arrived.  At the beginning, I was just adding titles that I might want to watch under the right circumstances.  Then I started adding movies I knew I missed in the theatre, hadn't bothered to rent from Blockbuster or RedBox, and had a vague interest in seeing.  Neither of these strategies proved to be very good.  Below is a sampling of what I consider to be wasted viewing experiences.

The DVD Mistakes

The Reeds (2009)
     I had just finished reading "The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood and was somewhat hopeful that a horror film titled The Reeds would at least, even if by accident, embody some of the flavor of that short story.  Sadly, that didn't happen.  I want to stop short of calling The Reeds a bad movie, because somewhere within its complicated mythology and economy-level special effects there just may be an interesting story.  But what I remember is that it had a long and plodding build-up, one in which I didn't feel the audience was being introduced to the characters (so we can care about them and what happens to them) as much as we were witnessing them doing uninteresting things.  Then things happen in such a manner that we know that time isn't a set concept in the titular reeds, and that goes from being interesting to a cop-out used to end the film on an indefinite note.  The movie isn't scary, it doesn't evoke a consistent mood of impending menace, and the cast is quite unremarkable. All in all, I guess I consider The Reeds to be a mistake largely because it was the first DVD Netflix sent to me and I just didn't enjoy it.

Suspension (2008)

     Though billed as a Sci-Fi piece about a man who discovers he can stop time, Suspension (2008) is more of a deeply effective and insightful presentation of obsession.  It acknowledges the "I don't know why" early feelings and motivations to be a positive part of the object's life (and I cannot think of a better term for how obsession absolutely dehumanizes the people upon whom it is focused).  It highlights the easy path into questionable and illegal behavior under the guise of having the right to take such actions because the need to do them is so strong.  It doesn't shrink away from how the intensity of an obsession can lead the afflicted to believe that it can only be love, that it must be a miraculous, strong, and undeniable love that must be made real.
     Suspension effectively starts with work-a-day family man Daniel Bennet (Scott Cordes) awakening from an auto accident that has killed his wife and teenage son.  His entire world shattered, Daniel is left emotionally adrift and attempts to navigate the early transition from pre-accident to post-accident as well as he can.  He understandably makes himself distant from friends and absent from work, choosing instead to spend time in his house mourning what he has lost.  In his exploration of his son's belongings he comes across a video camera (VHS) that has the ability to stop time.  He doesn't know what to do with it at first.
     Daniel has chance to encounter Sarah Caine (Annie Tedesco), the widow of the man who caused the accident that ended Daniel's family.  Daniel decides to not pursue a lawsuit against Sarah, in his mind imaging that, because of the accident, the two of them share some transcendental bond.  Daniel becomes obsessed with Sarah.  He moves out of his house -- an especially vivid depiction of how his obsession is driving him from his old, stable, normal behaviors.  He keeps an eye on Sarah without her knowledge (easy to do when he can control time).  His behavior grows darker throughout the film, but it always feels like the real progression an obsessive experiences, especially when there is no outside force keeping the obsession in check.
     Directors Alec Joler and Ethan Shaftel do an amazing job with the limited budget.  The locations (the movie was filmed in Kansas) have a very anywhere in America feel to them.  Both leads, Cordes and Tedesco, fully inhabit their roles.  Cordes especially gives Daniel an air of cool, sometimes calculating, menace.  Tedesco plays Annie with understandable vulnerability and a strong survival instinct.  A few of the supporting cast distract from the tone with substandard performances, but not enough to draw the audience from the suspension of disbelief the film has banked by those points.
    I would caution any viewer going in expecting more from the Sci-Fi angle.  The camera is a plot device that allows for Daniel to indulge in his obsessive thoughts and behaviors.  It drives the movie forward because it is what helps Daniel have the access to Sarah's life to realize his desires.  As such, a viewer not especially incline to Sci-Fi may just as easily dismiss the implications of the camera as a Sci-Fi fan could ponder them.  Suspension is, quite frankly, the best film representation of obsession I have ever seen on film.  While it may not be a fun movie to watch, it is a rewarding experience.
[Suspension is available from Netflix by DVD and streaming.]