If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It, Just Do It Again. But In English.

Ahhh, October! What a wonderful time of year. The world turns colder, the trees turn orange and yellow, people start burning fires in their fireplaces, filling the air with that delightful burning smell, and Hollywood offers us yet another Saw film, this one, of course, promising to be the last. Luckily, I haven’t had to sit and watch that movie yet.

Don’t despair, though, as it is October there are plenty of other scary movies to watch before the big one comes out later on this month. As a matter of fact, I recently saw Let Me In, an American remake of the Swedish film Let the Right One In. Let’s deal with the original first.

Let the Right One In, adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his novel and directed by Tomas Alfredson, is definitely in the right place at the wrong time. Vampires need to be left to their coffins, or bathtubs, or crates for about the next 20 years. We’ve seen so much of them that they just aren’t scary anymore, and any sensuality or sex appeal they ever had has been destroyed by the angsty, self-aware, shimmery vampires of the Twilight Saga. Happily, that’s not what these two films were going for.

This movie is very dark, perfectly befitting a vampire movie. It’s also rather slow and quiet. This sets up a feeling of loneliness, bordering on despair which is perfect for little Oscar, one of our two main characters. It was something I enjoyed, actually. Not very many movies are written well enough to be slow, quiet and compelling. The only problem is this feeling lasts for the entire movie, so even though I was interested in what was going on, by the 1:45 mark I was hoping they’d just get on with it. The other big problem with this movie is they way they deal with Eli’s (Oscar’s mysterious new girlfriend) backstory. There’s not a lot of detail besides Eli consistently claiming she’s not a girl and a brief glimpse of her while she’s changing clothes which appears to verify her claims. That was just a little too much.

The movie as a whole, though, worked perfectly. Eli and Oscar were convincing even though I couldn’t understand a word they were saying (the subtitles were helpful in that regard, though). The rest of the acting was on par and the action of the film itself was believable and logical, something most horror movies are unable to accomplish. It is, in fact, that reality that makes the movie all the scarier. !!!SPOILER ALERT!!! I say that because at the end of the film we have a dilemma. Oscar’s first friend is evil. He realizes this and he has a choice. He can either let her die or help her live. He knows she is a killer and must kill in order to survive and needs someone to protect her and help her kill her victims; the movie makes no attempt to hide or gloss over this fact. And Oscar is in love with her and decides to run away with her, becoming her protector. Watching Oscar’s life, though, the part of it we’re allowed to glimpse, I’m pretty sure I would have done the same. Now that’s scary.

Let Me In (adapted from the aforemenationed movie, not the original novel, and directed by Matt Reeves, who also directed Cloverfield) is basically the same movie. It corrects the two problems I had with the original. It has a quicker pace through the middle of the movie so it doesn’t seem to drag at all. There’s also no showing of forcibly improvised girl-parts. Even with these changes (made for the shorter attention-spans and puritanical minds of American viewers) the movie is almost entirely the same. The acting is still good, especially for a movie riding on the shoulders of two very young actors. All the plot points are the same, if not slightly simplified or switched around for time-saving’s sake. The only real difference between the movies is that this one is in English and it has cameo appearances by Ronald Regan. Oh, and Elias Koteas (the guy that played Casey Jones in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies) plays a cop.

However, as much as I like these changes, I watched the same movie. It was as good the second time as it was the first, but it’s still the same. There was no additional point to be made, and nothing gained by the English being spoken except that I didn’t have to read for two hours. It did however give Chole Grace Moritz another opportunity to do stuff no little girl should really be doing. So that’s something.

What the Devil?

There’s no arguing with the fact that M. Night Shamalan has had a rough go of it the last few years. I even stuck by him for a while; my love for Signs and The Village (yeah, I liked it, so what?) gave me the courage to stand up to his detractors, knowing that it was still in him to make good movies. Lady in the Water was passable, but only because Paul Giamatti is the coolest man on the planet and I have a strange love for boring, modern-day fairy tales (C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength). Then The Happening, well, didn’t, and The Last Airbender was so impossibly bad that I, even I, could no longer keep up the fight.

But it still seemed strange to me that this man with such magnificent ideas could so very quickly lose his rational mind and think that releasing these most recent films would be a good idea. It’s like whatever affliction is corroding George Lucas’s brain has latched onto M. Night full-force. And I’m saddened, just as I’m saddened at every mention or thought of Jar-Jar Binks, that it is so obviously true. This is why I was initially worried about Devil, first part of the Night Chronicles.

There were two things, however, that gave me hope for this movie: It was directed by someone else (John Erick Dowdle, director of 2008’s not-horrible Quarantine) and it was written by someone else (Brian Howard, writer of 2007’s 30 Days of Night adaptation). That’s not a terrible team, right there. Neither of those movies were blockbusters, but they were both entertaining and a little scary. So hopefully, with easily the scariest supernatural enemy any group of humans could face and the twisted mind of M. Night on their side they should be able to concoct a watchable, somewhat scary and at least decently entertaining movie. Wonderfully, that’s exactly what happened.

This movie hits all the main fear-groups: claustrophobia, xenophobia, acrophobia, demonophobia, and for readers of this review, hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia. They also used my favorite scary-movie tactic, darkness. Instead of showing everything, they leave the really scary parts to our imagination by only allowing us to hear what’s going on. Coupled with all the tight shots (even in relatively open rooms, the shots still tend to be directly on the actor’s faces) this movie makes you feel like you are in the elevator of the damned.

That being said, there were some problems. First, the underlying story was a rehash of Signs with different supernatural baddies and a decided lack of Mel Gibson, no matter how hard our hero (Chris Messina, Julie and Julia) tries to be. And, even worse, the end was totally predictable, and a little anticlimactic. Predicable doesn’t bother me, except in this case it’s a repeat of one of M. Night’s previous stories. Luckily, the point of the whole thing makes up for these two failings, and makes the movie worth watching. On DVD.

"Hawaii Five-O" Review

The Fall television season is under way and there is no shortage of new shows this year. And there are some good ones; but the rebooted "Hawaii Five-O" is, I must say, the cream of the crop. It's fresh, it's fun, it's funny, and (perhaps more important than anything, if we're honest with ourselves) it's HOT!
My first impression from the previews this summer was great, and I may have been a little biased, because I've been an Alex O'Laughlin fan since his "Moonlight" days. And Scott Caan is always great as the gruff-with-a-gentle-side, moody-but-really-a-nice-guy sidekick. Add in that guy from "Lost" (aka--Chin Ho Kelly) and a hot asian chick (aka--Grace Park), and it's a can't-miss, right? But with that impression (and the fact that O'Laughlin's tv history is rather bleak), I was a touch dubious, too. It kinda seemed too good to be true...like one of those movies where all the good scenes were shown in the previews and everything else was just sucky.
"Hawaii Five-O" lives up to the hype, though.
Well-cast, well-written, well-shot, well-set...so far, with four episodes under their belt, the show is doing great. The interaction between McGarrett (O'Laughlin) and "Danno"--because no one remembers, much less cares, that his last name is Williams--(Caan) is terrific. The on-going pseudo-feud over the nickname "Danno" is especially entertaining...although it probably shouldn't last more than another couple episodes before it gets old.
Then there's the beautiful setting of Hawaii. Brilliant for a fall show. Remember all those hot summer shows set in Miami, the Hamptons, and other great vacation spots? Yeah, well, it's Fall now. School. Cooler weather. Why not give your viewers some warm, vacationy scenery? Well played, CBS! Well played!
Bottom line..."Hawaii Five-O" is the hottest show this Fall. This is one can't-miss that actually didn't miss.