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Reviews
The Little Death (2014)
Very Promising, yet Oddly Unsatisfying
Shot as a series of vignettes, the film is quite uneven. It is very loosely tied together by a man canvassing the neighborhood to inform people that he's a registered sex offender, using a unique and amusing device to distract them from his message -- by gifting nostalgic cookies that evoke happy childhood memories, that are long- discontinued because they were racist (an American equivalent would be "little black Sambo" cookies, if such had existed).
This is the first film for the writer / director, and it seems quite obvious that he took a psychology class on Deviant Sexual Behavior, utterly didn't understand the material, formed the conclusion that anyone with out-of-norm sexual interests is doomed, and decided to write a comedy about the subject. Four-fifths of it doesn't work, (unless you like your comedy about people whose lives and relationships are falling apart due to lack of communication) and the end appears to have been desperately cobbled together because he ran out of inspiration.
Apparently, there's no Internet in modern Australia, so no one can use it to find out anything about exploring non-standard sexuality, nor is there any open and honest communication between long-standing couples, such that they could discuss their desires in a productive way. Therefore, the "comedic" elements of the film consist of increasingly desperate spouses discovering an interest that excites them, then spiraling out of control and destroying their relationships while trying to either trick their significant other into satisfying their interest, or complying with that interest so outlandishly that it meets with disaster. Or both.
The saving grace of the film (and the only reason I didn't rate it a "3", is the beautiful and luminous 5th vignette about the public service sign-language-interpretation-for-the-deaf operator who inadvertently gets stuck interpreting a call to a phone sex line by a deaf person. Because the writer didn't understand the paraphilia of making obscene phone calls, he wasn't able to make "light" of it, and instead the skit becomes about two people making an hauntingly- intense, if brief, connection while coping with an awkward situation. If the entire movie had been like this one skit, it would effortlessly have been a "10".
Extinction (2014)
Oh God, Oh God, Cameraman James, PLEASE for the love of God in heaven stop talking!
This could have been an interesting movie, in spite of the "found footage" nature. The location was great, and the B-movie acting talent wasn't bad. Generally, I'm a B-movie fan.
Unfortunately, it is terminally mauled by the premise that a film crew with enough budget to hire a cameraman and a producer in the first place and fly them to Peru, manages to hire a cameraman so incredibly stupid that he doesn't understand that he is not supposed to walk last so that every moving shot in the entire movie is ankles, butts, and ground, constantly turn the camera around and talk to it, take shaky spinny camera shots from behind seats, behind people, behind rocks, behind trees, yammer on and on and on and on and on and on, and shoot perhaps 7x more shots of his producer's erect nipples than of the conveniently available dinosaurs that they eventually discover.
Imagine hiring Steve Stiffler from American Pie to work a camera on a documentary, and you pretty much have "James". Obviously, their SFX budget was minuscule and they wanted to conserve on-screen dino time, but instead, it comes across that James is so mind-numbingly moronic that when he's actually physically pointing the camera at a living breathing dinosaur, he'd rather turn the camera away and point it at his producer's face or nipples and talk.
Did I mention that James is also operating the only documentary camera in the history of documentaries that utterly doesn't have night vision? Because, well, why would you take one of those into a jungle? And they're sleeping in a tent, in the Amazon, with every window zipped up tight as a drum, because god knows that you wouldn't be seeking a breeze in a Peruvian rain forest -- or to well, be able to see out, using the night vision that you didn't bring.
Oh, or flashlights. Why would you bring flashlights to a jungle? Also, early on they lose their guides in a separate car -- who go forward on a one-lane road because they're scared, but who somehow vanish for the entire of the movie because they, I don't know, teleported to behind them, perhaps?
It's perhaps a minor complaint among all the rest, but if your car is stopped because it's broken the night before, it probably shouldn't just start and drive away the next day.
And in spite of the "found footage" nature of the film, including the "we put this together by timestamp" intro, the producer and professor survive. Meaning that it's not truly found footage at all, just film put together by the actual person who'd have been doing it anyway. But of course horribly in any case, because cameraman James.
Unfortunately, no dinosaurs eat James. God, was I rooting for them to do so. He does die at the end, though. So yay.