Martha Marcy May Marlene

As you might imagine from the title, this movie is fractured in more ways than one. The young girl who plays the title character has so many roles with different identities throughout the movie that it's surprising she can keep them all straight in her head...or rather, it's not surprising that she CAN'T keep them all straight in her head, except maybe to her sister and brother in law, who seem unable or unwilling to admit that there's something obviously wrong with her that's not entirely her fault and that she needs help and that they should maybe be a little more forgiving of her eccentricities and not sulk and pout because she's not normal and she's disrupting their structured little lives. In case it isn't obvious, I don't much like the sister and her husband in this movie.

This movie isn't concerned with telling the audience much, instead allowing us to figure everything out on our own, and while it's nice to be treated like an adult who is capable of figuring a plot out myself, instead of a dumbass who must have information spoon fed to me because I can't figure out a plot twist on my own, the mental legwork it takes to piece together the plot of this movie does get exhausting, especially since the plot that must be pieced together is so harrowing. Martha is a young girl who runs away at the beginning of the movie from what we soon learn is a controlling cult with strict expectations for her behavior. We see Martha running away and hiding in the woods and making her way into town, we see a man come up to her in a diner and try to coerce her to come back with him in his truck, we see her using a payphone to call someone who is obviously related to her and sounds worried about her, we see her waiting outside the diner as time passes, we see a car stop to pick her up and we learn that the person she called was her sister who hasn't seen her in two years and has no idea where she's been. Everything we see comes in flashes from Martha's perspective and pieces of the past from her memory, which is very disorienting, because even Martha herself isn't sure exactly what's happening around her all the time.

Eventually we learn, through a series of flashbacks, the story of how Martha came to live with the cult in their secluded farmhouse, and what happened there to change her into the shadow of a woman we see today. We see that she exhibits signs of being traumatized, but that she's unsure if what happened to her was good or bad, right or wrong, we only knew that eventually she seemed to want to escape, but she's not sure how to communicate this to her sister, who is frightened by Martha's strange behavior, while her husband is increasingly more and more pissed off that his life is being torn apart by this young woman he doesn't even know. So Martha doesn't know how to talk about what happened to her, she doesn't know how to act, her sister doesn't know how to reach out to her, but she feels compelled to reach out because she's family, which leaves her feeling trapped and pulled between her sister and her husband, and it's all a big, muddled mess which is difficult to watch.

I should mention, too, that this movie doesn't *do* closure, so it might piss people off for that reason alone. It pissed me off at first, and I declared that I didn't like the movie, but after letting it sit awhile, I liked the movie better in hindsight than I did while watching it. The movie definitely has a lot going for it. Elizabeth Olson, John Hawkes, Hugh Dancy, and the rest of the cast give great performances. Everything is all very engaging as it sucks you into the story, which might piss you off in itself simply because the story is frustrating and frightening and often unfulfilling. This movie certainly isn't for everyone, but it was definitely compelling and worth a watch for me.

Labyrinth

When I was about 8 years old, I was hanging out at one of my cousins' houses one night (which happened a lot since my family was big and really close, so we cousins were more like brothers and sisters when we were little) and the adults put this movie in, let up watch up until the point where the baby brother gets kidnapped, and then they made us go to bed (like I was ever going to sleep again after THAT shit). I never wound up watching the rest of this movie until last week, and I'm glad I finally got to see it.

Far From Home

This is actually a really good movie that I'd never heard about before this movie challenge, and it's annoying and puzzling to me, because the movie has a bunch of well-known character actors and actresses in a serviceable plot with some cool twists and turns and I just don't get why some movies get blathered all over while movies like this slip by the wayside. It seriously pisses me off (almost as much as that damn movie poster pisses me off, because it gives away WAAAYYY too much of the plot for my liking...hello genuises in the marketing department, it's called a "twist ending," not a "we already telegraphed the twist on the poster" ending). I'm happy to have this space to inform people about movies like this one, which deserve a second look.

In this movie, Drew Barrymore plays a sullen almost-14 year old girl who is supposed to be on a road trip connecting with her estranged father, but she's mostly pining for home and wishing he weren't such a clueless dipwad. I feel justified in making that assertion, because seriously, he does some of the dumbest things I've ever seen a character do in a movie, including getting them stranded in the middle of nowhere in a town where everyone seems creepy and violent and angry all the time and all the local gas stations are out of gas so there's nothing to do but wait for the delivery truck to come (I'm not sure this was a believable premise even back in 1986, and you mean to tell me he NEVER noticed they were running low on gas until it was too late and they ran out? Really?)

Once the father and daughter are stranded, they wind up renting a trailer in a trailer park owned by a creepy, abusive, angry lady who is one of the worst parents in history, and the daughter catches the eyes of not one but two creepy local boys. the dad should be protecting her from these guys, but he's too busy shacking up with a woman he meets at the trailer park who is also stranded, so his young teen daughter is left to roam free and get menaced and maybe dragged off and murdered while father of the year isn't paying attention. This movie is like an instruction manual for what NOT to do as a parent.

Despite the dimbulb moves of the main characters, I enjoyed this movie and I enjoyed seeing so many character actors and actresses (hello Richard Masur, and Anthony Rapp, and Jennifer Tilly!) and the story was cool and twisty, and even though I figured out what was going on pretty early in the movie, there were still some nasty surprises in store for me. Definitely a fun watch.

Oliver & Company

People always give me weird looks when I tell them this is my favorite Disney movie. It's more obscure than it deserves to be, and people don't seem to think it's as awesome as I do, but it's been love at first sight ever since I first saw this movie when I was about nine. First of all, I've always been obsessed with Charles Dickens and his stories of the haves and the have-nots and how these groups intersect and interact in society. We grew up pretty dirt poor when I was a kid, so these kinds of stories always seemed relatable even if Dickens was writing about times in the distant past and a kind of poverty I never knew. "Oliver Twist" is a pretty depressing story in a lot of ways, but it still resonated with me enough for me to like almost every story even remotely related to it.

Being a Disney movie, this version changes many aspects of the story (the most obvious being, well, the characters are stray cats and dogs instead of orphaned kids) but the sense that these are the outcasts of society is still pretty strong with me. I relate pretty strongly to animals anyway (I kid you not, when I picked up my kitty from the animal shelter I had to suppress tears the whole time and I wanted to take all the animals with me...seeing them abandoned there broke my heart). This movie opens with a scene that never fails to make me cry. Oliver is a stray little kitten who is in a box on a street corner with his brothers and sisters eagerly awaiting someone to come by and take him home. The look of happiness and hope in his eyes every time someone looks into the box, and then the let-down after someone chooses one of the other kittens and leaves Oliver behind, is heartening. Oliver keeps a smile on his face though, always hopeful, until late that night when all the other kittens have been chosen and he's abandoned and alone in the rain...seriously, it cuts me to the bone every single time. The lyrics to the song that plays over this scene get to me, too:

"How could anyone stay starry-eyed when it's raining cats and dogs outside and the rain is saying 'now you're on your own?' So, Oliver, don't be scared, though yesterday no one cared, they're getting your place prepared where you want to be. Keep your dream alive - dreaming is still how the strong survive - once upon a time in New York City."

Not to get all melodramatic here, but Lord do I EVER relate to that. It's hard getting back up and trying and trying and trying again just to get kicked back down over and over and over again. Sometimes I repeat these lines to myself, that dreaming is still how the strong survive, and it helps. It helps me keep going. So it's good, and it touches me, and I don't care if it's a kid's movie, it's more inspiring than most of the sermons I've ever heard in my life. So there.

So Oliver keeps fighting to survive, and finds friends (though at first, they don't seem that friendly...Dodger the dog, voiced by Billy Joel, is very much a "don't let yourself get attached to anyone" kind of guy) and the gang of friends he eventually finds are all stray dogs who work for Fagin, who in this version of the story is much more loving than he is in other versions. Here he's not just exploiting and using the gang, he actually loves them, and they love him. When Fagin is down and depressed about not having the money to pay off his creditors, the dogs cuddle with him and bring his slippers and share their dog biscuits with him in an effort to cheer him up, and it's sweet and touching. I really love it.

Of course, this being a Disney movie, there are more twists and turns coming, and a little girl who will love Oliver and give him a forever home, and if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go hug my adopted shelter kitty and give her some treats now. Yes, I'm a sap. I blame the movie.

The Gate

This is a movie I got to watch when I was younger, not in my kidlet years but in my teens, and then I've watched it a few more times over the years, so I thought I had a pretty good handle on what it was about. A kid with an active imagination discovers that a hole in his backyard where workmen tore out an old tree is actually a gate to hell and if he doesn't find a way to stop it, demons are going to use the gate to crawl into the world and take it over. That's what the movie is about, but I guess I forgot how cool it is. Young Stephen Dorff is a lot of fun to watch as he fumbles his way around, and his friendship with his best friend as well as his relationship with his sister (antagonistic at times but loving underneath) ring true and make the movie more intriguing. The special effects aren't very special, but I expected that, and they're not so bad that they detract from the fun of watching kids fend off some monsters (which would have been so awesome if I could have done it as a kid). this movie takes me back to the fun of trying to solve mysteries and fight imaginary evils in my childhood, so for all the fun memories it brings back, the movie is a keeper for me.

A Fish Called Wanda

I really wanted to see this movie when I was a kid. I was always intrigued by movies and books with odd titles, and this one was enough to catch my attention. Seeing it today, I think it's probably better I didn't watch this when I was a kid. It's pretty sexual, which is neither here nor there, but it's something that would probably have gone over my head when I was a kid, and I might have thought the movie was boring back then and written it off because I didn't get its subtle humor (or even its unsubtle humor). Plus it was just a real treat getting to see the movie for the first time today and being pleasantly surprised at how much fun it was. It had me laughing out loud a lot more than I ever would have expected. Definitely a lot of fun watching the most crooked crooks in the world pull off a heist and then proceed to turn on each other so often I'm surprised they didn't get dizzy. Pure fun from beginning to end.

Troll 2

Now, I saw the original "Troll" a few years ago, and I remember a few people telling me that the sequel was better, so I was mildly interested in checking this movie out. you have to understand that "better" is a relative term, since the original "Troll" was such a huge pile of shit that it would be hard for anything to be worse than that, so indeed, this movie is better, and it was a ton of fun to watch (I laughed my ass off more than once) but I can't in good conscience recommend it to people like a normal movie. It's not "good" in any way that will be meaningful to much of the moviegoing public.

During the opening sequence, I was mocking the young actor playing the little boy who is the hero of this movie, thinking he was a terrible actor, but the joke was on me, because he's actually the BEST actor of the bunch here, and everyone else is so terrible and wooden that you'll soon be begging for the little boy to be in MORE scenes. Not only that, the script is so horrendously bad, it almost seems like most of the lines were written as jokes, like the screenwriters got drunk and high one night and wrote the script as a prank, but the filmmakers weren't smart enough to realize this, so they kept the script as written (I don't think I saw an editor in the end credits, and if he was there, he's probably been drug out into the street and shot long ago for his conduct in this movie).

There's more wrong with this movie than just the dialogue, too. Seriously, the premise of this movie isn't even remotely believable. A young boy's grandfather died, but the boy keeps seeing his grandfather appearing to tell him stories that warn him of Goblins, but the grandfather never bothers to speak in a straight sentence and say "look, goblins exist and they're coming after you, here's what to do to protect yourself." No, the useless ghost sits around telling stories and doesn't bother to speak up in any helpful manner until ti's too late and several people have died (but they were all annoying, so we don't care much). Lazy worthless ghost. And since when do farming families from small towns switch lives with families in big cities for a week for no apparent reason? Maybe for a reality show, but this movie was made long before the dawn of reality TV. And what family is going to encourage their teenage daughter to bring her boyfriend along with her on a family vacation? "Here honey, you and Billy have fun having sex all night! Here, use mommy and daddy's bed!" It's just absurd on every level. These characters never act like real people. I would have thought this was awesome when I was ten years old, but I'm a little old for these kinds of shenanigans nowadays.

And yet I had fun with this movie. It was too much fun laughing along at all the horrible crap happening onscreen, and if I had a ten year old, I'd watch this movie with my kid so we could laugh along together. That's the biggest endorsement I can give. those with a smidgen of maturity and common sense should probably stay away from this movie.