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Reviews
Loot (2008)
Confusing and Cathartic Cinema Verite
In the beginning we're introduced to a self proclaimed "rainbow chaser" who after making a small fortune fritters it away on phantom gold mines in SE Asia. Very quickly we discover that rather than deal with his personal life and family he'd rather chase the next "big thing". Subsequently through him we meet two World War II vets, both who promise finding looted treasures they had separately hid away during the war before coming home. From there the movie shifts to the slow discovery and uncovering of misremembered and forgotten deeds of our past that may haunt us all our lives and to the grave.
The director filmed and edited over 250 hours of footage shot over 3 years and distilled it down to what we have here. Which at first comes across as a middle age man chasing after dreams of old men who are confused about their pasts and what they've done. To be even more meta one could say the director was chasing his own dream of film making via the treasure hunter. But as the end of the film approaches things solidify into something nearly transcendent.
While there are no real buried chests dug up, what we do find is that time changes everything. It changes us and the world around us. Time can strip away the sharpness of what we remember, and we will easily tint our memories to only remember the good and block out the bad. But the things we've done and choices we make can affect us all our lives until we step up and deal with them. And that might be the real treasure of this film.
Don McKay (2009)
Stilted, confusing, and ultimately boring.
What if you made a low/no budget movie about a con and by the end of the movie it came across as more confusing than smart? What if everything leading up to the final scenes were more boring than interesting? What if everyone acting in this film just mumbled through their cringe worthy lines? Well you'd have the movie Don McKay.
This movie is so stilted it only starts to get interesting in maybe the last 20 minutes before the credits roll, anything before that is just, sadly, nothing about nothing. Within the first 10 minutes of the movie you, the viewer, know something is amiss but the movie gives no clues and drags out this expectation of answers until the very end. The rest of the movie is padded with allusions of something happening 25 years prior and by the time it's all tied up in the end, it's ridiculous that it's all been withheld for the entire running time.
Honestly this would have been perfect fodder for a hour long TV episode of the crime/suspense type, and probably gotten a much better treatment on the small screen. The best con of this movie is the fact it separated you from your hard earned money just to waste an hour and half of your life, both of which you'll never get back.
Kansen rettô (2009)
About as good as an American B rated made for TV movie
I don't know the background of this movie, was it a middle to large production or maybe a bit more limited budget type of deal. There's at least one scene where a Tokyo street, nothing too famous, has been shut down to film a desolate scene from several different angles. There's also some half decent CGI shots of a burning and empty city. I can see an effort in some of the film to pass it off as a true epidemic, it's just a shame that things fall apart in the details.
What gets me is that the small scenes are fine, but it's the bigger picture that isn't so harmonious. You have a city that's alive, then dead, then alive, then dead again. There's times when the xx days passed since infection, with xx dead and xx infected, that doesn't seem to fit in with the time line that's taking place in the hospital. There's even one scene that left me scratching my head as they were in a travel depot that's clean and well staffed only to walk out onto a street filled with overturned cars and burning garbage everywhere. Things like this abound in the movie and at times just do not add up. It's like one production crew wasn't aware of what the other was doing and in the end it was all edited together without a thought to how events were unfolding.
Really at its core it's a sappy unrequited love film trying to teach lessons but it's set against a backdrop that's too big for the scope of what's taking place. The acting is fair at times but overwrought with over-acting, bad acting, and bad dialog for much of the other. All the English dialog in the movie is also laughable, but it is a Japanese film, so I can't be too harsh there.
And I have to mention the scene where the guy puts his hand over his mouth and takes an item from an infected with the other hand, then swaps it to the hand covering his mouth, then covers his mouth with the infection exposed hand. Inconsistencies like this abound throughout.
The big letdown to me was that a cure was pronounced 2 months into the plague starting, and then we're told that 6 months later a vaccine is made, and then we're shown a bustling and no-worse for wear Tokyo immediately afterward along with a warm fuzzy message to boot.
If you are into sappy Japanese flicks where people yearn for each other in the most strangest of circumstances than this is truly the film for you. If you are into end of the world, plague type flicks this is truly an avoid at all costs film.
Carriers (2009)
Novel idea marred by painfully slow and predictable execution
It's a shame when someone gets a film made without all the usual Hollywood ado that usually comes along with a story like this when it ultimately fails to entertain in any meaningful way on it's own merits.
In this movie we don't get the usual CGI enhanced money shots of thousands dying, dead lying akimbo along expansive city vistas, or even zombie like infected shambling along (or running willy-nilly) chasing our stories protagonists as one would expect. And this would be a good thing if the movie itself didn't get itself quickly mired down in the drudgery of predictability and a need for every scene to be drawn out well beyond it's welcome on the screen.
Basically at it's heart it's a road trip movie trying to transcend the usual coming of age angst and self-discovery learned along the way storyline by hiding itself inside of a coming of the end of the world angst and self-discovery of hate and loneliness learned along the way storyline.
I really wished I could have liked this movie, as the story seemed to be fairly novel on the surface. But by 30minutes into the film, the world the story is set in just becomes a white noise background for the actors to recite their lines to and move the story along to the end credits. And I found myself repeatedly checking my watch and wishing I had a fast forward button to hurry the movie along with.
Nowadays I try to gauge my movie on experience on three simple things. Did this movie inspire, entertain, or move me? No, it didn't. Would I ever find myself watching this film again? No, I wouldn't. Would I recommend this movie to a friend? Not likely.
I only rate this a 6 for it's original presentation and effort put forth by the makers to make a low-budget end of the world movie. It's just too bad the end of the world came and the movie itself had really nothing to say.