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Reviews
Price Check (2012)
A movie that never quite gels
Why this movie doesn't work is an interesting question. It kept my attention all the way through, and apparently I'm still thinking about it. Parker Posey is great in her usual style as Susan Felders, playing a charismatic but unstable corporate executive.
Eric Mabius is Pete Cozy (Who sold out for a cozy life, get it?), our ostensible protagonist, he is mostly just a straight man for Posey. We're told over and over how he used to be in the music business, which made him happy, and now he has a corporate job which does not.
Cozy's wife, Sara (Annie Parrisse) seems like an intelligent and loving woman, but in terms of dialogue her main concerns are buying a Volvo, getting pregnant, and not getting a job.
There's some adultery, and some intrigue, the consequences don't really show up until the last 15 minutes and then they're resolved off-screen, leaving everything almost exactly where we started except for a lifestyle bump and additional child for Pete and Sara.
What did it all mean? I don't know. Maybe there's such a thing as too much ambiguity for your characters.
Infini (2015)
Cool concepts, confusing execution
This is basically a movie about a team of teleporting space cops dealing with a zombie creating alien organism. The acting is good, the ideas are good, and there's plenty of tension and drama within the premise. Then they went and ruined it with confusing editing and nonsensical dialogue. Consider this exchange between the main character and his wife:
Whit: We are doing the right thing here.
Lisa: Well maybe we're not. Obviously nothing good can come from getting us out of here and into a better life. Am I too early?
Whit: Not today.
Lisa: The correct answer is "Not any day"
The movie is full of this kind of word salad messing up a perfectly good sci-fi horror movie.
Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010)
Starts off great, then falters.
The premise of this movie is brilliant, and the first third is hilarious. The second third has trouble staying funny as the killings really get under way, but still manages to stay pretty funny.
By the end, however it plays just like any other action/horror movie. I went and got a snack during the climax because it felt like I'd seen it 20 times already.
Still worth watching though. This movie is a pretty good criticism of the assumption that country people are necessarily going to be crude, hostile and violent. However by the end, Tucker and Dale seem to be taking joy in fighting the "college kids" a term they say with more hatred each time.
Ever Since the World Ended (2001)
Not convincing
In the 12 years of scrounging since everyone they loved died and society collapsed, nobody really seems to have changed that much. When they aren't having dinner parties, surfing or smoking weed, they look like they have been.
The improvised dialogue is more about what the actors think of our present society than a convincing picture of a future one. The woman who wants to have a child and raise it on her own is particularly ridiculous. Who in their right mind would seek to become a single parent in a world with no reliable medical care or food supply? The movie actually improves quite a bit in the last 30 minutes. The cinematography gets better, the acting gets better, and there is finally some tension and plot connected to the setting.
Then the movie ends.