Dreamcatcher

By Adam Lippe

dreamcatcher_big

Dreamcatcher is overlong and jumbled and it is so many different Stephen King novels smushed into one, from the 4 friends with telekinesis, to the childhood friends bonding over dead and/or in jeopardy, bodies, viruses that will take over the world, etc., etc. The first 40 minutes is not bad, but they never go in an interesting direction with the character development, and it all seems very familiar. And the title of the film not only seems like a misnomer, they don’t even really bother to tie it in to the film at all, the Dreamcatcher is just a decoration in the friends’ log cabin in the woods, and has no real relevance to the story.

When the story shifts to being about aliens that come out of your ass, it loses all momentum in terms of its character development, and attempts to build generic horror suspense. And even when it starts to do that, there is a 10 minute flashback scene, cut right into the middle of it. The flashback is very light in tone, and is completely at odds with the previous material. It’s just another example of the hideous editing throughout the film. The ending is the biggest tragedy, destroying any plausibility or logic the first 2 hours had. Despite being a horror movie about aliens trying to infect the Earth with a deadly virus, the last scene concludes with some of the few surviving characters smiling in a freeze frame, as if they were at the end of a sitcom. It was one of the misbegotten ideas to ever appear at the end of any Hollywood movie, and that’s pretty much all you remember about the whole thing anyway.

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Roadracers

By Adam Lippe

Whenever there’s a genre parody or ode to a specific era of films, such as Black Dynamite’s mocking of Blaxploitation films or Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, the second half of Grindhouse, the danger is that the film might fall into the trap of either being condescending without any particular insight, or so faithful that it becomes the very flawed thing it is emulating.

Black Dynamite has nothing new to say about Blaxploitation films, it just does a decent job of copying what an inept [...]


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On Cold Fish:

Though the 16 year old me described the 1994 weepie Angie, starring Geena Davis as a Brooklyn mother raising her new baby alone, as “maudlin and melodramatic,” Roger Ebert, during his TV review, referring to the multitude of soap-operaish problems piling up on the titular character, suggested that it was only in Hollywood where Angie would get a happy ending. “If they made this movie in France, Angie would have shot herself.”

Well Cold Fish was made in Japan, where Angie would have shot herself and that would have been the happy ending.