400 Days has a great premise, is a fairly good film for the first three quarters, but peters out in the end. In it, four people enter a buried bunker for a social and mental trial, or experiment, to simulate the effects of long term confinement during the trip to another planet. The experiment is to last 400 days, and they are given warning that they will be faced with problems along the way for which they will have to come up with solutions. Along the way, each person faces their solitude in different ways, some with loneliness, others with hallucinations. Near the end of their stay, they are visited by someone from the outside, leading to all kinds of questions about what their stay is all about. For a low budget film, it is very well done until it gets weird and falls apart in the end. I don’t mind a movie that ends with questions, but this one ends with you wondering if even the writer didn’t know how it was going to go.
Jane Got a Gun got some fairly average reviews. I actually really enjoyed it mostly, but like the last film, the ending soured it for me a bit. Jane is played by Natalie Portman, who is hunted by a gang of criminals heading by Ewan McGregor’s character (playing a bad guy for a change). She is protected by Dan Frost, portrayed by Joel Edgerton. Edgerton is great as the steely cowboy, but I’m convinced Portman only has 2 or 3 facial expressions, and I’ve seen them all in previous movies. The title is also a bit misleading, you would think it is a woman-empowering western, but she spends most of the film relying on men for help and protection. And while there is a lot of tension and building excitement throughout the movie, the last 10 minutes is a letdown.
Lamb is a really creepy movie. It is a low budget indie film, starring Ross Partridge, who also wrote and directed. He plays David, who is putting on a front at work that all is ok, when he is actually being divorced by his wife while having an affair with a much younger coworker. He meets a young 11 or 12ish girl named Tommie, who he starts grooming, in a very predator way. He convinces her to spend a week with him at his father’s remote cabin. The viewer gets a definite creepster feel, as she adores him as a fatherly figure, and you keep waiting for him to do something truly abhorrent. He is outed when his young girlfriend shows up at the cabin to surprise him. Actually very good acting by the two leads, and it is riveting, but not in a good way.
Synchonicity has a lot of potential, but is bogged down by rough, cliché dialogue. It is a low budget independent film, which I don’t mind, and it has a great premise, but some of the acting is truly cringe-worthy. Basically a small group of scientists are trying to open a wormhole as a form of time travel, with the help of a rich backer. When they succeed, things get a little murky as the main character is plagued by deception. Sci-fi nerds like myself will still probably enjoy it a bit, but it could have been a lot better.
Regression on the other hand has no real redeeming values. A better cast (Ethan Hawke, Emma Watson), but equally bad script. Hawke plays a detective in a small town, investigating the rape of a Watson’s character. She is claiming her father raped her, but he has no memory of it, so they bring in a “regressive” hypnotist to try to get the father to retreive his memories. It leads to a Satanic cult, but the ending is wholy different that what you expect. Unfortunately it is almost like they had one idea for the movie, and changed their mind before it was all over. Pretty awful.
Jons Movie Takes 