Gone in 60 Seconds, The Lives of Others, Prince of the City, & The Lost Boys: The Tribe

Gone in 60 Seconds is not the Angelina Jolie-Nicholas Cage film. This is the original, the one referenced in Deathproof. The acting is amateurish at best, as most of the cast had little to no experience, it's all about the ridiculousness of the plot: stealing 48 cars in two days. It's stupid, it's kinda crap, and it's far too long. But it does have a 40 minute car chase scene at the end. Of an hour and forty minute long film. Basically, you can skip the first hour and still know everything that has happened beforehand by reading this sentence: Insurance worker has to steal 48 cars in two days and steals 47 with little hassle but the last one is a problem and so he has to escape from the vast majority of the Carson City police department. The car chase was clearly a labor of love, as the writer/director/star/every car in the film owner/producer also stunt drove many of the cars in the film, and it's occasionally impressive, but ultimately, it's just an excuse for the car chase. If you like them, then the movie is worth watching, if not, avoid like the plague on bad dialogue and performances the film is.

The Lives of Others beat out Pan's Labyrinth for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. I kinda preferred Pan's Labyrinth. This is a great film, touching, with a realistic ending that makes sense within the film. But I also had a problem with a couple of the slightly-anti-woman aspects of it, and the fact that it felt like it could have been set in any particular totalitarian state near the end of its run. Those are just minor problems in an excellent with an otherwise extremely strong pair of performances by the policeman and the playwright. It just felt kinda dreary and like it'd been done before, while Pan's Labyrinth was full of inventive scenes and didn't immediately feel like anything I'd seen before (even as it brought to mind Alice in Wonderland and Labyrinth).

Deliver Us from Evil is another depressing film, this one about a Catholic priest who goes through a few parishes in California in the 70s and 80s sexually abusing girls and how the Church covered it up by sending him to another parish rather than, you know, actually doing anything about the fact that this priest was raping kids. This is a main reason why I don't trust organized religion: it puts humans into positions where they "talk to God" and therefore have people trust them far more than if they were just a normal person. Plus, the whole "Priests have to remain celibate" just leads to them repressing a normal sex drive and becoming sick and twisted. Sure, some, maybe even most, priests are not pedophiles, but some of them are complicit in the coverups, including the current Pope. It's disgusting what religions are able to get away with in the name of "God". The world would be better off without organized religion. Watching these families still struggle with the abuse thirty years later was heartbreaking.

Prince of the City is a long film dependent upon a performance from Treat Williams. As such, he's actually the weakest thing in this otherwise sprawling epic of cleaning up police corruption in New York City. Especially towards the end of the film, it starts to drag and it's mainly due to Treat being not nearly as good then as earlier. I won't complain about the strong supporting turns by Jerry Orbach and Bob Balaban among many others, but at least some of the blame for Williams's dragging performance is at the feat of Sidney Lumet. The film is too long at almost 3 hours long, and all the supporting characters are hustled in and out fairly quickly, many making their mark, but also requiring a huge amount of knowledge of which characters are which and their relationships, some of which gets confused. It may not have a powerhouse performance from Al Pacino like Serpico, but this feels much more realistic. It's a shame that it gets away from Lumet towards the end.

The Lost Boys: The Tribe is terrible. And cheesy. And Corey Feldman and Corey Haim aren't enough. Eesh. Oh, and if you are watching it for Two Corey action, don't bother, he's only in a scene at the very end, and in some alternate endings included on the DVD. He's not a starring role Netflix suggests. The main characters barely register, and the stunt casting of Angus Sutherland to replace Kiefer was offensive. Angus is terrible. It's just not worth the attempted nostalgia trip. Watch The Lost Boys again, or Near Dark (a better 80s vampire film, even if it doesn't scream 80s as much).