Here is what I am watching (so far) during the quarantine for COVID-19
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365 Days
Personally, I found 365 Days FUCKING HILARIOUS. I'm not sure if my friend thought it was a waste of time or not, but I was laughing for most of the movie (which is not a comedy, btw). I'm not gonna lie: the sex scenes were pretty hot. You even see a flash of D in there. But the characters are terrible, the music is worse, and the plot is non-existent, so treat this only as bad movie night fodder and go in with rock bottom expectations.
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The Belko Experiment
I think there is a better movie somewhere inside The Belko Experiment that just didn't make its way out. This horror/thriller takes place in a business office in Bogota, Colombia that employs mostly Americans for some reason. What do they do there? No idea--it's not really relevant to the movie. On this particular day, a voice comes over the loud speaker telling everyone they have pick two of their coworkers to kill or something worse will happen. Everyone thinks it's a joke, until they realize that steel doors have covered all the windows and exits, locking them inside. After they fail to pick two people to kill, a bunch of folks' heads explode! Turns out that a condition of working at Belko Industries was that you had to have a chip implanted in your skull, which is supposed to protect employees from being kidnapped (which I guess is a common thing in Colombia??). Well, turns out those chips are explosives. LOL.
The voice comes back and tells the remaining employees that now 30 of them must die, and if they fail to meet that metric, 60 will be killed. So basically, this movie is Battle Royale meets Office Space. The movie has a decent roster of lesser-known, but very talented actors, including John Gallagher Jr., Tony Goldwyn, and John C. McGinley. But despite the talent and interesting concept, The Belko Experiment is pretty forgettable. It's entertaining while you're watching it, but it's not going to haunt you the way a good horror or thriller should. It's also a bit nihilistic, which didn't bother me but did surprise me. You kind of assume that the "good guys" will find a way to band together and outsmart the "bad guys" and that the entertainment will be the creative ways people find to get out of their predicament without resorting to violence. But, no. Basically, it really is just a battle royale. Which is fine but not what I was hoping for. The Belko Experiment is just movie popcorn: tastes good while you're eating it, but it doesn't fill you up.
Grade: B
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The Loved Ones
Now here is a horror movie that haunts me, but not because it's good. It's because it honestly kind of goes too far. The violence in this film, which is clearly inspired by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, is creative and relentless in a way that left me feeling gross and worse for having watched it, which--as readers of this blog should know--is a difficult bar for me to reach. I'm open to watching a lot, and I mean A LOT of violence. But something about this one just felt like too fucking much.
Here's the basic plot: high school senior Brent (Xavier Samuel) turns down weird girl Lola's (Robin McLeavy) request to go to prom with him. Lola and her dad then kidnap Brent and subject him to an insane amount of torture. Here's a partial list of some of the stuff they do to Brent:
- Inject bleach into his vocal chords so that he can't speak.
- Force him to pee in a cup while threatening to cut his dick off.
- Carve initials into his chest and throw salt on the wounds.
- STAB KNIVES INTO HIS FEET, PINNING THEM TO THE FLOOR.
- Drill a hole in his skull and prepare (but don't succeed) to pour boiling water into the hole. (Cool Jeffrey Dahmer reference, bro!)
Look. I get that this movie thinks that it is especially edgy because the torturers are a teen girl and her dopey dad, but this movie goes beyond shocking in an engaging way to just plain disgusting. It's hard to grade the movie because as horror, it fucking works. I was horrified! And honestly, there are movies I've seen (ahem, The Poughkeepsie Tapes) that are far more disturbing. But this one just didn't do it for me. It felt like too much violence and too little plot. Like, I'm cool with the insane amount of violence in Tarantino movies because there's a lot of interesting dialogue and action sequences in between the scenes of eyes getting gouged out. But like I said, the main feeling The Loved Ones inspired in this viewer was exhaustion. Recommended only for horror enthusiasts.
Grade: B-
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Oxygen
A forgettable and unrealistic sci-fi film starring Melanie Laurent as a woman who wakes up in a coffin-like container with a computer voice telling her that her oxygen is running out. She also doesn't remember who she is and must use her smarts to figure out where the hell she is so that she has a chance at survival before the clock runs out and she asphyxiates.
This movie has already been made and it was titled Buried and starred Ryan Reynolds. With Buried, I felt the insanely high stakes of the film and was sitting on the edge of my seat until literally the last second of the movie. It was also depressing as hell, but in terms of making me feel something, it did an excellent job. Oxygen, while entertaining (especially in its first half before you really know what's going on), is just not as good. The sci-fi element actually takes away from the movie because there are things the character can do in the movie that seem really unrealistic, yet she can't do other basic things (like find an alternate oxygen source). Essentially, the technology in the movie is super advanced so that it can help the main character remember who she is and contact people for help...but like, not advanced enough to have a secondary oxygen source? That really took me out of the movie.
Like The Belko Experiment above, Oxygen is good for a night of entertainment, but it's not going to be a movie you're thinking about a week later.
Grade: B-
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A Glitch in the Matrix
This documentary by Rodney Ascher (who previously directed a really excellent doc about the movie The Shining called Room 237--check it out!) is about people who believe that reality is a simulation. I've heard this theory before and honestly thought it wasn't that crazy, but then I read a bunch of reviews criticizing the director for giving a platform to "crackpots" and "nutcases", so fuck me I guess.
To be fair, it's one thing to idly think to oneself "whoa, what if we're just like, a video game for aliens mannnnn" and do another bong hit. It's quite another to allow this theory to rule your life. So maybe Ascher *is* doing society a disservice by inadvertently promoting a theory that could contribute to more and more people experiencing derealization. The film kind of tackles this problem by giving a lot of time to a man named Joshua Cooke who is currently serving a prison sentence for murdering his parents in the early 2000s after he became obsessed with The Matrix and convinced that reality wasn't real. Why he had to test his beliefs by murdering his fucking parents is anyone's guess, but I can see how becoming "infected" with the idea that we are not living in "true" reality but some kind of simulation could make a person go a little coo-coo.
A Glitch in the Matrix is far less interesting than I thought it would be. Interviewees (in addition to Cooke) include anonymous believers in the theory who are disguised as elaborate animated avatars and who claim that they know we are living in a simulation because they like, thought really hard about goldfish and then walked around town and saw...a goldfish on a sign oh my god you guys it's the matrix!!! Or how about the theory that if you go into a bookstore, most of the books have no words...until you open them because the computer knew you were going to open it and filled the book!! Of course, this theory is impossible to prove because...because it's bullshit you guys. We're probably not living in a simulation. And even if we are, so what? Does it actually change anything about our day-to-day lives? Am I going to kill someone because "nothing is real"? No, I am not, because 1) I don't want to kill people and 2) prison is going to feel pretty fucking real when I go there...which is what Joshua Cooke found out after he murdered his parents.
I think what's more interesting that the actual simulation theory is the fact that more and more people are sort of disassociating from their lives and relationships due to technology these days. And don't @ me if you're a tech nerd who thinks tech is neutral--I'm pretty convinced at this point that the echo chambers sites like Facebook, Reddit, and 4chan created have contributed to the rise in extremist violence all over the world. Tech may be neutral, but that doesn't mean it's all good for us.
A Glitch in the Matrix is a fairly interesting film, though not as thought-provoking or mind-blowing as it could be. It sets out the be an exploration of how science fiction and technology have merged to change our view of the world but ends up be an inadvertent dive into the darker corners of the human psyche.
Grade: B
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