Jumper, Wages of Fear, Horrors of Malformed Men, Snake Woman's Curse, & Blind Woman's Curse

Jumper begins promisingly enough, and then Hayden Christensen appears. Is there anyone who would have been good as Anakin Skywalker? Certainly not him, and he's really terrible here, as is basically everyone in the film, even the normally enjoyable Diane Lane, Michael Rooker (both of whom were given nothing to do) and Samuel L. Jackson. The only thing that makes the film enjoyable at all is Jamie Bell, as another jumper who hunts Paladins who hunt jumpers. Apparently, very little of this comes remotely close to the book. So the question becomes, who's responsible for this infanticide? The studio, the director Doug Liman, or the three writers Simon Kinberg, David S. Goyer, and Jim Uhls? Sadly, I think everyone is to blame. The film is only 88 minutes long, suggesting studio meddling in an attempt to make the film remotely sensible. Doug Liman is talented, but there is a messiness to this film that suggests no actual plan to make this film work with such a wooden cast and terrible script. Why, exactly, scriptwriters, did you need to create the Paladins? Why not just keep the NSA as the bad guys? Seriously, this movie is a completely bad idea and sometimes you just need to make fewer crap movies with good ideas that would make someone like me think it could be acceptable. This was not good, Hollywood, not good.

Wages of Fear is the original film that Sorcerer is based on. I saw Sorcerer years ago, and it was a very good and tense film. To describe the plot simply: four guys have to drive a truck of nitroglycerin across Central America. Somehow, it stretches to two and a half hours of extremely tense scenes and greatness. I like films where people just go back and forth in various languages, and this one goes back and forth from French to English a lot, and includes Spanish and German as well. As much as you might expect this film to be ridiculously simplistic, the tension mounts, due to the great direction by Henri-Georges Clouzot, and it's just a masterpiece.

Horrors of Malformed Men is the first in a series of three bizarre Japanese films I watched this weekend. And it's probably the most bizarre film I've seen in a long time. How many films can you think of that are banned in Japan? This is partly due to the title, which references the people disfigured by the atomic bombs (along with using an offensive term in the original Japanese for the malformed men), but also, there are huge sections that are very similar to the grostequeries of Caligula, but it isn't mediocre porn (just many, many topless women sewed to goats or other people). It's actually a combination of short stories by Edogawa Rampo (say it quickly, and remember these are detective stories), but it actually works quite well as a single story. Not sure it's all that good of a movie, but it's really not too much like other ones.

Snake Woman's Curse is supposed to be a ghostly horror movie, but it isn't very scary. It is, however, a condemnation of 16th century Japanese feudal society inequality. Blind Woman's Curse stars Meiko Kaji as a yakuza who accidentally blinds a woman and a cat starts to torment her. There are some weird visuals, and it's somewhat more of a yakuza than ghost movie. Eh to it an Snake Woman's Curse.

Also, I finally made it through my old blog's archives, and I have almost three years of movie reviews to include. I could even include my reviews from my horror class, which are amusing as they're written with the same attention to detail as the blog you're currently reading, but were turned in for grades. How often and how many reviews should I post? Should I just start a new category and call them "Caseus Archivelox" or somesuch, or should I backdate everything? I have around 100 pages of reviews of movies, a few I've already posted, but mainly just half-assed reviews of films I may have forgotten I've seen. I'm leaning towards posting each day as a separate post, tagged with Caseus Archivelox and the date and time of original posting for the blog entries and dates for school papers. But the problem is how many not to overwhelm? If you have any suggestions, comment, and I'll take them in to consideration.