Crunching the Numbers: Nine Lives Left

47.3k · July 27, 2022

ACNE

Phoenix Fire comes out with a genuinely disturbing depiction of self-harm, with a very gnarly and gruesome escalation in the third act that shows the self-fulfilling tunnel Basso's main character has driven herself into. A few things hold the film back a bit. The first is the film relies too much on exposition, with Basso explaining things that happened to her character when younger, when brief flashbacks depicting the occurrences might have hit a bit harder. Another issue is the film feels like the studio forced an optimistic ending onto it, since the film goes darker and darker and more hopeless, and then following the climatic series of events, pulls up into an ending that while not completely happy, is much more upbeat and shifts forward to all the issues being resolved. It does feel like a little bit of a last minute command to not end on a downer.

The film overall is pretty taut and grim, and relies heavily on Basso's performance showing a young woman increasingly beset by delusions and self-doubts. It's a good one.

47.3k · July 27, 2022

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THE MIRAGE

I pre-read this for Slam and a few changes have been made since my prior pass on it, and those changes do clean up a couple issues I had noted. The main thing to note going into this movie is that it is not intended to make coherent sense, it is deliberately modeled after the "Weird Westerns" of the late 60s into the 70s, which operated far more on vibes, atmosphere, and images as opposed to any defined character or plot. That is the case here, where the only character with any real definition or substance is Glen Powell's Ralph, whose outward hammy depiction of a Neo-gunslinger cowboy masks the fact that he's an extremely insecure, socially inept, and quasi-misogynistic moron whose only real skill is saving his own skin.

If you try to make sense of the plot, and the wholesale malarky of a cult of motorcyclists torturing inhabitants through murder and forced reincarnation, your head will melt, because what is actually going on in the setting doesn't matter, except insofar as it impacts how Ralph sees himself and changes in how he acts towards others. It's a story of a man's journey into the weird, and how it reveals the man he truly is.

Not every part of it clicks, but it is certainly a memorable experience at the bare minimum.

47.3k · July 27, 2022

AMONG US

When it comes to video game adaptations, the question that drives the transition from game to film is how faithful the adaptation should be. Sometimes a film goes too far outside the lines, and sometimes a film hews far too close to the source material, with the result that things which work in a video game medium simply do not work on film.

Among Us is the latter.

As a game, the concept of nameless, faceless, completely covered up space station workers, identified by color, makes perfect sense, because the characters don't matter, it is the actions and interactions of the players in the game that matter. But, in a movie, giving the audience a bunch of faceless, obscured, unidentifiable characters with a minimum of personality traits simply does not work. There's no real way for the audience to care about these characters, feel tension when they are threatened, feel relief when they succeed, go ooh and aah when one gets butchered, if they're just blank slates. This is compounded by the film, being live action, going overly cartoony with spacesuits sweating, blushing, etc. for no reason other than the film realizes it needs to show things that would not be an issue if we could actually see the character's faces.

If this was an animated cartoon film, a lot of the above problems would not be an issue, because it'd be a cartoon and cartoons get away with stuff like that all the time because of the implicit understanding of the medium. But this is a live action film, and the film, by adapting the game with the utmost fidelity, robs itself of its greatest asset: it's cast.

The second big issue the film has is that it is far too tame. The PG-13 rating, aside from a few bits where the film takes great pains to avoid being graphic, is very light and bouncy, and the film never really reckons with the tone and horror of someone gruesomely killing their comrades one by one in some occasionally very nasty ways. We have people being dismembered, crushed, etc. and it's all done in a very Loony Tunes tone, which again, for a cartoon, would probably be fine, because it would all be part of the joke, but in live-action, it does not work well, and Gunn's filmography is no stranger to the bloody and gruesome R-rated carnage that still milks some comedy out of the situations.

In short, Among Us was adapted with a clear vision, and it hits that vision precisely and with no hiccups.

But it was the wrong vision to have.

47.3k · July 27, 2022

That concludes the scheduled set of reviews.

Since lanamana and Slam's friend each did only one film this game year, I will review both so they get some feedback from me.

So I will be reviewing Second Dimension: Last Hope and Someone's Grace later this week.

@El Squibbonator since none of your films got caught up in my monthly randomizer, I would like to review a couple films of yours as well. Please let me know two films you would like me to review (excluding Shadow of the Comet)

47.3k · July 28, 2022

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SECOND DIMENSION: LAST HOPE

Multiple reviewers have already commented on the grammar/spelling/formatting issues the written summary for this film has, so I am not going to belabor that point. Instead I am going to focus on the substance of the film itself, because there are some good points and some bad.

The primary issue the film has is that which faces a number of films that are designed to be the first part of a larger saga. While they contribute to the saga as a whole, they sometimes fail to tell a full and complete story on their own. Everything should not just build towards the destination, but also feel like there's its own story. Here, the goal of the saga is clear: Unite the dimensions to stop the Evil Overlord from his conquests. The goal of this movie is to find the map to the third dimension and then travel to the third dimension, and it just feels like a goal that isn't long enough to justify the amount of film devoted to it, and the result is we get very lengthy episodic sequences that while featuring a number of interesting things in their own right, definitely feel padded. And the film is also structured strangely in that what would feel like the second act climax, a rescue and escape sequence that features a multi-layered fight against the main antagonist and a heavy blow to the heroes, actually occurs mere minutes before a final action setpiece and then an abrupt stop to the film. Everything just feels a little off in the structure and pacing.

The film does feature some strong character work and casting. Jason Clarke brings a world-weary but sharp attitude and layer to the role of Candor, and Gemma Chan brings a poisoned honey charm to her small but vital role in the film's back half. I'm not sure Chloe Zhao was the optimal choice for the film, but she does bring a visual eye to many of the travelogue and internal segments of the film.

Some of the flaws central to Second Dimension I think can be chalked up to the film devoting a lot of time to set-up, before the meat of the saga comes. I hope that when the next film comes around, some of these structure and pacing issues have been sorted a bit better.

47.3k · July 28, 2022

SOMEONE'S GRACE

So, the elephant in the room for this film is how it is written. Instead of being written in a normal CAYOM summary, it is written as a novella told in the first-person. Which by no means is disqualifying, but I think does impact how certain elements of the film register in the reading.

There's actually a decent core to the film in a young woman's dealing with the curveballs thrown at her by life and persevering through trauma to find a meaning and purpose, but there are two things that hold it back. First, the film, instead of being told from the perspective of that young woman, and following her directly, is instead told from the POV of her mother, who for all intents and purposes is a bystander to most of what happens, and the result is the film takes a more clinical and detached view of someone judging another person's situation, rather than exploring what that affected person is really going through. The second issue is that the film trails off in a very long epilogue that spans years and is more devoted to tying up every loose end and crossing every T instead of concluding at a logical emotional and character inflection point. This leads to the film dragging on a bit longer than it should.

47.3k · July 31, 2022

Since I never got a response from Squibb, I went ahead and read everything else.

Festivities of some sort may occur.....tonight

47.3k · August 1, 2022

Let's kick things off with the worst of the worst, shall we

5.

Spoiler

Guinea Pigger

4.

Spoiler

Socksucker

3.

Spoiler

Father III : All Hell Breaks Loose

2.

Spoiler

Home Invasion: Part IV - Curtain Call

1.

Spoiler

Fatal Error

47.3k · August 1, 2022

Given that a few players took the year off, let's dispense with any also-rans and go straight into the meat.

25. MECHAMEN

24. GRACE AND MERCY

23. MARTIAN MANHUNTER

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22. TONGUE TIED

21. THE NEXT GOOD DAY

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47.3k · August 1, 2022

This is the part where I say that if Tongue Tied had chosen a more appropriate director, was rated PG instead of an unnecessary PG-13, and fixed up the third act a decent bit, it would have been much higher.

After a decent amount of things that hinted at mixing things up with the classic set of tropes, it kinda defaulted to the mega happy standard fantasy meet cute and everyone gets married angle

Edited August 1, 2022 by 4815162342

SLAM! · August 1, 2022

9 minutes ago, 4815162342 said:

This is the part where I say that if Tongue Tied had chosen a more appropriate director, was rated PG instead of an unnecessary PG-13, and fixed up the third act a decent bit, it would have been much higher.

After a decent amount of things that hinted at mixing things up with the classic set of tropes, it kinda defaulted to the mega happy standard fantasy meet cute and everyone gets married angle