Battle in Seattle

The film is based on the 1999 WTO Conference in Seattle and how the protests surrounding it got out of hand.

It does not glorify the civil disobedience but rather strives for a balance for both sides. The protests and traffic disturbances caused humanitarian causes to take the biggest hits. Resources were shifted to the main part of the conference, cutting off speaking time from causes like Doctors Without Borders that would usually happen alongside, while all relevant people are gathered in the same locale.

But much more than paint a big picture, it focuses on the human stories, which takes away some of the force somehow. Peppered in are TV clips from Seattle used to cover that part of the story.

It does sport quite the impressive cast and is thoroughly watchable although it is never quite clear where it stands or if, indeed, it takes sides at all.

6/10

Alexandra's Project

Steve comes home on his birthday expecting a surprise party. While he was at the office, his wife had all photos of his family sent over to the house. Supposedly, the will be used as part of a surprise present.

What Steve gets instead is a chair placed in front of a TV set, playing a tape of his wife telling him about her frustration with their marriage.

He sits through the recording, that begins with his children telling him happy birthday and then leave. He watches his wife have sex with their neighbor while telling him that this is how she has been earning her own money while home alone.

And he learns that she has not only sent the kids away and is leaving him, she has also taken every photo he possessed of the children with her as the ultimate punishment.

An interesting concept and quite well made film.

Certainly disturbing.

8/10

The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard

A struggling car dealership owner calls in salesman extraordinaire Don Ready to move some cars and avoid having to sell the lot and have it turned into a rehearsal space for the local boy band (man band). Their claim to fame is that they once opened for O-Town (remember them?).

Don has his demons pestering him because he falls for the car dealer's daughter Ivy. Something similar has happened once before in Albuquerque ("Querque") a while back, when he was more interested in getting laid than concentrating on his trade - something that cost his best friend his life.

To complicate matters further, he also thinks that one of the young salesmen may be his son.

Yeah it's ridiculous but it also features a lot of actors you would expect in a weird comedy.

4/10

Child's Play

When criminal Charles Lee Ray gets shot while running from cop Mike Norris he transfers his spirit into a popular children's toy.

The toy is a doll from the Good Guys TV show. Ray now goes by the name of Chucky (Ray's nick name).

Little Andy wants nothing more than one of those dolls. His mother gets him one and the doll proceeds to wreak havoc on the boy and his family while at the same time trying to take revenge on everyone that has done him wrong in his lifetime.

This is cult!

6/10

The Apparition

During a séance a spirit is set free into our world and it proceeds to haunt people. The haunting manifests in - at first - a fungus spreading in a nice condo, a neighbor's dog dying, claw marks in a closet and - ghasp! - open doors.

Now, this undefined spirit was set free in the second of two botched séances and the couple haunted were not in that session at all. The guy was in session 1, which went all wrong, as well. The consequence of it was that his then girlfriend disappeared into the wall (literally). Why the spirit-thingy would come and haunt the later uninvolved guy and the totally uninvolved now girlfriend is never explained.

Why the séances were held in the first place goes unexplained, as well. And why the hell there would be a second session is beyond any horror film afficionado's understanding, I believe. The group holding séance number two even thought that they could trap the spirit. Right.

Anyway, an old friend (and from all appearances the initiater of this whole ghost calling venture) comes to the rescue of the frightened couple, bringing all kinds of fancy equipment with him (lacking, apparently, a decent hand held camera or merely a run-of-the-mill phone with camera function). They want to send the spirit back where it belongs by playing a recording of the session backwards. Ta-da!

Anyone suprised that this does not work? Yeah, me neither.

What a load of crap.

1/10

Identity

The lawyer of Malcolm Rivers makes one last ditch effort to stay the execution of his client. Rivers, convicted of murdering six people a few years back is brought to a middle-of-the-night hearing, where the lawyer and a psychiatrist try to prove that he was not aware of what he was doing because of his multiple personality disorder.

The many people in Rivers' head all end up in a motel in the pouring rain that keeps them from getting where they want to go. The group is as random as can be, including a family with small child, a prostitute, an actress, a couple of criminals, a former cop...

What happens in the court hearing and is played out by the character in the motel is that the one personality that made Rivers kill has to be irradicated. To achieve this one by one the people at the motel get killed off until the sitting judge is convinced that the culprit is gone.

The real story in the film is what is going on at the motel. The characters don't seem to be aware of what they actually are in the bigger picture, so this plays out as a quite brutal whodunit. Each person that dies gets marked with a room key, counting the bodies down from 10 to 1. They all hurl accusations and cannot seem to find any common ground on how to handle their situtation. Halfway throught the killings, one of the most level-headed of the group, Ed, turns out to be the personality that the committee around Rivers can work with.

This is when the two stories overlap, Ed suddenly finds himself strapped to a chair a not recognizing himself in the mirror. He is confused as to how he is no longer in the pouring rain by the motel. But this really turns out to be the way in. When all but one of the characters at the motel are gone, the committee is satisfied with their progress and Rivers' death sentence is overturned.

However, on the way back to the prison the psychiatrist realizes to late that one of the personalities believed to have died in an explosion acutally survived and that was the very one they would have needed to eliminate. Deadly mistake.

Despite the flaws and the confusing set up I really, really enjoy this film.

8/10

Cube

Cube is one of those wondrous films that feature nobody you have ever heard of and develop from a simple idea and visual.

Six people that have seemingly nothing in common wake up entrapped in cubic rooms. Each room has portals - one in the middle of each side - that leads into another cubic room. They have no recollection of how they got there and - after some deliberation - venture on together to look for a way out.

Only trouble is that any given new cube/room could hold a deadly trap - and quite wonderful they are. You could be sliced into pieces, you could take a load of acid in the face, the room could turn into an iron maiden. At first, they test for traps by use of their shoes. Eventually, the figure out that each room has a unique set of nine-digit numbers and deduct that whether or not the adjoining room holds a trap can be figured out through the number based on whether it is a prime number or not.

Thankfully, one of the six is a maths wiz. But once the prime number theory fails them they have to adapt their search by a new numeric parameter. Here another of the group comes into play. One young, mentally challenged man, who was previously regarded as a burden to the group, can calculate impossile problems in his head in no time.

As the search for an exit goes on, people get more and more agitated and turn on each other. Through trial and error they finally do figure out a way to make it out again, by being in the right room at the right time. See, it turns out that the rooms shift and the numbers not only include coordinates but also a time frame (it is all very mathematical and way above my head).

So simple, yet so effective.

8/10