Movies I LOATHE
Hello,
Since I'm generally nice where films I've seen are concerned, I thought it was perhaps time to prove to all that I don't like *everything* that gets made in the way of movies. Therefore I intend to mention various films I truly loathe, for the sake of fond reminiscence. ;-D
BTW, I will also forward you all here for my friend roadrunnerdm's very fun discussion concerning the awful films of this past year.
THIS LIST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE FILMS IN QUESTION.
But on to films I loathe (in no particular order):
1) Druids (2001), starring Christopher Lambert.
Complete and utter crapola. This has to be one of the worst films ever made, without the campiness of movies that are awful yet fun to laugh at. I tell you, after suffering through this godawful dud I felt like not only asking for my money back, but also insisting that I be *paid* for my time.
I mean, it was valuable time in my life that I will never get back -I could have been clipping my toenails, or something.
The worst is that this subject matter (i.e. the final conquest of Gaul by the Romans and the life of Vercingetorix, the last chief of the Gauls to hold out against Rome) could have been made into an interesting film. Ah, well.
2) The 13th Warrior (1999), starring Antonio Banderas as an Arab courtier (yep, I kid you not).
And yes, I paid more of my hard-earned money to see this. While not quite at the level of godawfulness of 'Druids' (i.e. see number 1 above), this one had a bloody stupid plot that truly goes nowhere fast.
3) Ultraviolet (2006), starring Milla Jovovich.
Now, I have a wonderful best friend. I truly do. But sometimes I see films because she wants to see them (and because I'm nice enough to go view them with her), and truly end up regretting it. The friend in question shall remain nameless ('cause otherwise she'd seriously want to kill me or something), but I will however say a few things about this abysmal pseudo-scifi-crap-whatever flick below.
The entire film is like one long action sequence that makes no sense and goes nowhere. There. That's pretty much all I can say about this catastrophe.
4) The Omen, (2006) starring Liev Shreiber.
Now, I'll admit I never saw the original, so I don't have any basis for comparison. I have no idea what this one is like in relation to the old one. What I do know, however, is that this movie was truly a sad piece of trash.
The ending in particular, felt like such a lame-ass "we'll make you HAVE to come and see the bloody sequel or die trying" kind of stupid conclusion to a film, that I truly wanted to scream or burst out laughing. For the sake of my sanity (and to avoid getting strange looks from the other poor shmucks who got conned into seeing this godawful piece of... well, you get the picture), I tried to avoid doing either.
5) Freedomland (2006), starring Samuel L. Jackson and Julianne Moore.
This movie was really disappointing because I have to admit that it *could* have been interesting and was just a dismal failure because of a story that went nowhere, possibly because it tried to go in too many directions at once. Finally, I must confess to a serious dislike for films who try to create a plot twist (also known as the ending that comes out left field and wouldn't be believable if the writers swore to it on a stack of Bibles) at the end of the movie, but do it so unconvincingly that you just feel LIED to.
5) Tristan & Isolde (2006), starring... er, what were their names again?
Now I realize I'm likely COMPLETELY biased, but my Irish Catholic heritage screams rather loudly when Hollywood decides to make a film set in a time which to my mind conveniently allows them to ignore roughly 800 or so years of English colonialism and brutality in Ireland and make the *English* the good guys.
That said, the movie wasn't as quite as horrible as several listed above. Soap-opera-ish, it was, and I must particularly commend James Franco as Tristan for giving one of the most uninspiring performances it has ever been my misfortune to witness on the big screen. I mean, seriously dude. Would it kill you to try a facial expression that makes you resemble something *other* than my kitchen table (a wooden one, of course). Ugh.
6) Alexander (2004), by Oliver Stone, starring Colin Farell, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Jared Leto, Rosario Dawson, Val Kilmer.
Oh Lord, where to begin with this truly godawful piece of crap.
The story goes nowhere: Anthony Hopkins is a future scholar (i.e. after Alexander's death) who declaims about Alexander THE WHOLE MOVIE LONG. The movie goes from one battle to another and from one conquest to another, and from Alexander's younger days to his last days. In other words, it tries to go to too many places and ends up nowhere. In the meantime, we keep getting interludes where Hopkins pops up again, just to remind us HOW GREAT ALEXANDER WAS AGAIN.
GOT THAT? OR ARE YOU TIRED OF BEING HIT ON THE HEAD WITH MY CAPS? MAYBE YOUR BEING TIRED OF MY USE OF CAPITALS CAN GIVE YOU AN IDEA OF HOW TIRED I WAS OF THIS MOVIE BY THE END OF IT. AND OF HOW MUCH I HATE MOVIES WHO THINK THEY NEED TO HIT YOU OVER THE HEAD TO MAKE SURE YOU GET THE SALIENT POINT(S) OF THE MOVIE.
So let me save you the trouble. Alexander conquered a lot of stuff. Then he died. Whopee. By the end of this movie, I just couldn't bring myself to care. (Which is tragic, isn't it, considering the truly fascinating historical subject matter? I'm starting to think historians should be allowed to sue Hollywood for the misuse and misrepresentation of their field.)
Oh, and for any ladies (like a friend of mine who shall remain nameless because naming her would probably set in motion the events leading to my eventual demise) who were hoping for some guy on guy action between Farell and Leto, don't bother. This movie was one which I actually found rather tame in terms of sexual content. (I mention this because it seemed to me that part of the marketing of this film involved putting forth the 'risky/daring sexual content' involved.)
Go ahea and watch this godawful piece of trash though, if you have time (and possibly money) to burn/waste.
7) Hulk (2003), by Ang Lee, starring Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Josh Lucas.
Oh my, but this was CRAP. And I actually liked the old TV series when I was a kid (I watched it dubbed in french way back when).
Why does everyone praise Ang Lee? I have to be honest here and say that after seeing several of his films, I have yet to find a single one I enjoyed.
'Hulk' was a particularly godawful one: do you have any IDEA how annoying it is to have a director who wants to be artsy-fartsy think it's a good idea to have different images coming together and then apart the WHOLE BLOODY MOVIE LONG???
Newsflash, Mr. Lee. It wasn't clever, or fun, or different. Having images come together when people speak on the phone (so one half of the screen shows you one character and one half the other) can be acceptable if it's done with a certain subtletly. But when it happens THE ENTIRE BLOODY MOVIE LONG and when sometimes you have four images together, sometimes an image is split so that one image takes up the top of the screen, and bla bla bla and so on and so on and so on and whatever because this went on for THE ENTIRE BLOODY MOVIE, it's just ANNOYING.
Clear enough???
Add to that yet another plot that goes nowhere (for instance, I don't think the writers had any idea whatsoever where they were going with the plotline concerning Bana's father for instance), and a 'hero' or his alter-ego 'creature' that doesn't seem to care that a whole lot of people have been killed by them (now granted, they were army dudes coming after and shooting at the Hulk, but did the Hulk really need to kill that many of them in self-defense? And wouldn't an ethical person feel truly awful even if it WAS in self-defense?) and therefore can to my mind be deemed morally doubtful at the very least, and you have a catastrophe of truly Hulk-like proportions.
If you're truly cracked, find out more about the dead-in-the-water hulk that is 'Hulk' at the link above!
8) Brokeback Mountain (2005), by Ang Lee, starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Here is a summary taken from imdb.com: "In 1963,two young men hire on as ranch hands in the Wyoming mountains. During the long months of isolation,an unusual bond starts to develop between them, one which they are only vaguely aware of--until one night when it rises to the surface in a passionate encounter.When the season ends,they part ways,only to realize the true depth of their feelings.Thus begins a decades-long affair that the two of them desperately try to hide from those around them--one which will prove simultaneously beautiful and devastating."
Ummm, yeah. The passionate encounter? Just count it as a f*cking encounter, 'cause I failed to see the romance in it, quite honestly. Just as I felt I was being jerked around by this film that tried to draw out the stupid love story in a similar way that Titanic did ('Jack? Jaaaaaaaaacccccccckkkk???' Oooppss, sorry, got the movies mixed up there.) :-)
I understand that having a big budget film about a gay love story was an important step forward with regards to representation. Unfortunately, I'd venture to suggest that the LGBTQ community deserved a better movie than this.
Basically, I just felt I was watching a bad movie (i.e. yet ANOTHER story that goes nowhere).
The movie isn't even capable of telling you definitively whether or not Gyllenhaal's character was killed because of his gay relationship or not. It seems to be the case, but you're never sure if it's simply Ledger who dreams what you see or if it actually happened, and it's never confirmed per se. (In other words, he might have died in some accident which Ledger imagines to be murder because of his fears. So you don't really give a crap, because the movie obviously doesn't, since it doesn't do more than jerk you around some more here.)
Here's my summary for this movie: Two guys get it on in the mountains throughout their lives. One croaks, and the other is left crying. Huzzah!
9) Cold Mountain (2003), starring Nicole Kidman, Jude Law. With Renée Zellweger, Natalie Portman, Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Why did I hate this one? Because the story was bloody awful, in particular. In other words, it goes nowhere, which now seems to be a regular theme of my (movie-watching only, I hope) life. Law meets Kidman, they fall in love, he goes off to war, he deserts, he runs across the country meeting a whole lot of different people who are featured in the film as Kidman's character learns how to survive after both war and her father's death -she hires a young woman to help with the farm and they have trouble with local troops who hunt down deserters... Er. Maybe you're starting to get why this story went
nowhere.
Add to this the supposedly GREAT romance between Law and Kidman which failed to convince me as to WHY they would care about each other when I
certainly didn't give a crap about either of 'em...
And don't get me STARTED on Zellweger's Oscar winning performance, which caused my ears to bleed (because she created such a fake-sounding
and *atrocious* accent).
Save your money and your time and avoid this abysmal clunker of an epic!
10) King Arthur (2004), starring Clive Owen, Ioan Gruffud, Keira Knightley.
One of the most truly BORING films it has been my misfortune to see, which features as an additional bonus the unfortunate and creepy casting of a teenage Knightley as Guinevere, alongside 31-year-old Gruffud and 40-year-old Owen. (Unfortunately, this kind of thing is not rare in Hollywood.)
I literally forgot everything about this film once I left the movie theater. (Actually, this may have even happened before I left, since I may have fallen asleep during... zzzz... Er, where was I???)
11) We Were Soldiers (2002), starring Mel Gibson (i.e. the racist, misogynistic, anti-semite).
IMDB summary: "The story of the first major battle of the American phase of the Vietnam War, and the soldiers on both sides that fought it, while their wives wait nervously and anxiously at home for the good news or the bad news".
Hands down, this was just a racist, imperialistic piece of trash. The film tries (laughably, to be honest) to 'balance' things by showing the viewpoint of one lone North Vietnamese soldier... In order to make him more easy to identify for Western (read 'white) audiences who apparently can't differentiate one Asian (much less one Vietnamese) person from another, they made him the only fellow with glasses. Aside from the 'viewpoint' of this particular low-level soldier, the film focuses entirely on the suffering of the soldiers on the U.S. side.
Newsflash the second: The United States carried out horrific human rights abuses during this war. So the focus of this film is really, really problematic given actual historical events.
(12) Radius (2017), starring no one you've ever heard of.
IMDB summary: A man wakes up with no memory of who he is, and finds that everyone who comes within a certain distance of him suddenly dies.
Oh my, but this was bad!!! This is a film that, rather than try to provide any kind of explanation of what is happening (i.e. the weird events that have taken place), decides to throw in a plot twist that comes out of left field.
...Actually, the plot twist at the end doesn't come out of left field, it comes right out of another galaxy. It's that ridiculous (i.e. it turns out that the main character is a serial killer, which in no way explains the weird happenings in the film).
Don't waste your time with this crap, really.
(13) Level 13 (2018), starring yet more people you've never heard of (and who might well regret agreeing to act in this thing...).
IMDB summary: In a highly regimented boarding school, a pair of students discover that things are not as they seem.
This summary could also have been written as, "Girls are being raised in a super restrictive boarding school in order to harvest their faces. Because this totes requires misogynistic scene after scene where the girls are taught to be pure & good, only to be sexually abused and murdered".
Good times!
(14) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), starring Yun-Fat Chow, Michelle Yeoh, Ziyi Zhang.
IMDB summary: A young Chinese warrior steals a sword from a famed swordsman and then escapes into a world of romantic adventure with a mysterious man in the frontier of the nation.
Unfortunately, this film has the very great problem that it is all over the place and the story goes nowhere fast.
(15) Bird Box (2018), starring Sandra Bullock, Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich.
IMDB summary: Five years after an ominous unseen presence drives most of society to suicide, a mother and her two children make a desperate bid to reach safety.
What is a shame is that there were several good actors in this. The film just makes no sense: *something* makes people crazy and drives them to suicide. What this something is, is NEVER explained (frustrating!). All we ever find out is that it has to do with being able see (i.e. so the characters spend most of the movie covering their eyes). Yippee. Dumb.
Also, the film seems to hint (but, like everything else, never CONFIRMS or EXPLAINS) that pregnancy provides some kind of protection.
Hey script writers and film makers: if you can't be bothered to give a damn about your story and movie, why should we? Ugh.
Since I'm generally nice where films I've seen are concerned, I thought it was perhaps time to prove to all that I don't like *everything* that gets made in the way of movies. Therefore I intend to mention various films I truly loathe, for the sake of fond reminiscence. ;-D
BTW, I will also forward you all here for my friend roadrunnerdm's very fun discussion concerning the awful films of this past year.
THIS LIST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE FILMS IN QUESTION.
But on to films I loathe (in no particular order):
1) Druids (2001), starring Christopher Lambert.
Complete and utter crapola. This has to be one of the worst films ever made, without the campiness of movies that are awful yet fun to laugh at. I tell you, after suffering through this godawful dud I felt like not only asking for my money back, but also insisting that I be *paid* for my time.
I mean, it was valuable time in my life that I will never get back -I could have been clipping my toenails, or something.
The worst is that this subject matter (i.e. the final conquest of Gaul by the Romans and the life of Vercingetorix, the last chief of the Gauls to hold out against Rome) could have been made into an interesting film. Ah, well.
2) The 13th Warrior (1999), starring Antonio Banderas as an Arab courtier (yep, I kid you not).
And yes, I paid more of my hard-earned money to see this. While not quite at the level of godawfulness of 'Druids' (i.e. see number 1 above), this one had a bloody stupid plot that truly goes nowhere fast.
3) Ultraviolet (2006), starring Milla Jovovich.
Now, I have a wonderful best friend. I truly do. But sometimes I see films because she wants to see them (and because I'm nice enough to go view them with her), and truly end up regretting it. The friend in question shall remain nameless ('cause otherwise she'd seriously want to kill me or something), but I will however say a few things about this abysmal pseudo-scifi-crap-whatever flick below.
The entire film is like one long action sequence that makes no sense and goes nowhere. There. That's pretty much all I can say about this catastrophe.
4) The Omen, (2006) starring Liev Shreiber.
Now, I'll admit I never saw the original, so I don't have any basis for comparison. I have no idea what this one is like in relation to the old one. What I do know, however, is that this movie was truly a sad piece of trash.
The ending in particular, felt like such a lame-ass "we'll make you HAVE to come and see the bloody sequel or die trying" kind of stupid conclusion to a film, that I truly wanted to scream or burst out laughing. For the sake of my sanity (and to avoid getting strange looks from the other poor shmucks who got conned into seeing this godawful piece of... well, you get the picture), I tried to avoid doing either.
5) Freedomland (2006), starring Samuel L. Jackson and Julianne Moore.
This movie was really disappointing because I have to admit that it *could* have been interesting and was just a dismal failure because of a story that went nowhere, possibly because it tried to go in too many directions at once. Finally, I must confess to a serious dislike for films who try to create a plot twist (also known as the ending that comes out left field and wouldn't be believable if the writers swore to it on a stack of Bibles) at the end of the movie, but do it so unconvincingly that you just feel LIED to.
5) Tristan & Isolde (2006), starring... er, what were their names again?
Now I realize I'm likely COMPLETELY biased, but my Irish Catholic heritage screams rather loudly when Hollywood decides to make a film set in a time which to my mind conveniently allows them to ignore roughly 800 or so years of English colonialism and brutality in Ireland and make the *English* the good guys.
That said, the movie wasn't as quite as horrible as several listed above. Soap-opera-ish, it was, and I must particularly commend James Franco as Tristan for giving one of the most uninspiring performances it has ever been my misfortune to witness on the big screen. I mean, seriously dude. Would it kill you to try a facial expression that makes you resemble something *other* than my kitchen table (a wooden one, of course). Ugh.
6) Alexander (2004), by Oliver Stone, starring Colin Farell, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Jared Leto, Rosario Dawson, Val Kilmer.
Oh Lord, where to begin with this truly godawful piece of crap.
The story goes nowhere: Anthony Hopkins is a future scholar (i.e. after Alexander's death) who declaims about Alexander THE WHOLE MOVIE LONG. The movie goes from one battle to another and from one conquest to another, and from Alexander's younger days to his last days. In other words, it tries to go to too many places and ends up nowhere. In the meantime, we keep getting interludes where Hopkins pops up again, just to remind us HOW GREAT ALEXANDER WAS AGAIN.
GOT THAT? OR ARE YOU TIRED OF BEING HIT ON THE HEAD WITH MY CAPS? MAYBE YOUR BEING TIRED OF MY USE OF CAPITALS CAN GIVE YOU AN IDEA OF HOW TIRED I WAS OF THIS MOVIE BY THE END OF IT. AND OF HOW MUCH I HATE MOVIES WHO THINK THEY NEED TO HIT YOU OVER THE HEAD TO MAKE SURE YOU GET THE SALIENT POINT(S) OF THE MOVIE.
So let me save you the trouble. Alexander conquered a lot of stuff. Then he died. Whopee. By the end of this movie, I just couldn't bring myself to care. (Which is tragic, isn't it, considering the truly fascinating historical subject matter? I'm starting to think historians should be allowed to sue Hollywood for the misuse and misrepresentation of their field.)
Oh, and for any ladies (like a friend of mine who shall remain nameless because naming her would probably set in motion the events leading to my eventual demise) who were hoping for some guy on guy action between Farell and Leto, don't bother. This movie was one which I actually found rather tame in terms of sexual content. (I mention this because it seemed to me that part of the marketing of this film involved putting forth the 'risky/daring sexual content' involved.)
Go ahea and watch this godawful piece of trash though, if you have time (and possibly money) to burn/waste.
7) Hulk (2003), by Ang Lee, starring Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Josh Lucas.
Oh my, but this was CRAP. And I actually liked the old TV series when I was a kid (I watched it dubbed in french way back when).
Why does everyone praise Ang Lee? I have to be honest here and say that after seeing several of his films, I have yet to find a single one I enjoyed.
'Hulk' was a particularly godawful one: do you have any IDEA how annoying it is to have a director who wants to be artsy-fartsy think it's a good idea to have different images coming together and then apart the WHOLE BLOODY MOVIE LONG???
Newsflash, Mr. Lee. It wasn't clever, or fun, or different. Having images come together when people speak on the phone (so one half of the screen shows you one character and one half the other) can be acceptable if it's done with a certain subtletly. But when it happens THE ENTIRE BLOODY MOVIE LONG and when sometimes you have four images together, sometimes an image is split so that one image takes up the top of the screen, and bla bla bla and so on and so on and so on and whatever because this went on for THE ENTIRE BLOODY MOVIE, it's just ANNOYING.
Clear enough???
Add to that yet another plot that goes nowhere (for instance, I don't think the writers had any idea whatsoever where they were going with the plotline concerning Bana's father for instance), and a 'hero' or his alter-ego 'creature' that doesn't seem to care that a whole lot of people have been killed by them (now granted, they were army dudes coming after and shooting at the Hulk, but did the Hulk really need to kill that many of them in self-defense? And wouldn't an ethical person feel truly awful even if it WAS in self-defense?) and therefore can to my mind be deemed morally doubtful at the very least, and you have a catastrophe of truly Hulk-like proportions.
If you're truly cracked, find out more about the dead-in-the-water hulk that is 'Hulk' at the link above!
8) Brokeback Mountain (2005), by Ang Lee, starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Here is a summary taken from imdb.com: "In 1963,two young men hire on as ranch hands in the Wyoming mountains. During the long months of isolation,an unusual bond starts to develop between them, one which they are only vaguely aware of--until one night when it rises to the surface in a passionate encounter.When the season ends,they part ways,only to realize the true depth of their feelings.Thus begins a decades-long affair that the two of them desperately try to hide from those around them--one which will prove simultaneously beautiful and devastating."
Ummm, yeah. The passionate encounter? Just count it as a f*cking encounter, 'cause I failed to see the romance in it, quite honestly. Just as I felt I was being jerked around by this film that tried to draw out the stupid love story in a similar way that Titanic did ('Jack? Jaaaaaaaaacccccccckkkk???' Oooppss, sorry, got the movies mixed up there.) :-)
I understand that having a big budget film about a gay love story was an important step forward with regards to representation. Unfortunately, I'd venture to suggest that the LGBTQ community deserved a better movie than this.
Basically, I just felt I was watching a bad movie (i.e. yet ANOTHER story that goes nowhere).
The movie isn't even capable of telling you definitively whether or not Gyllenhaal's character was killed because of his gay relationship or not. It seems to be the case, but you're never sure if it's simply Ledger who dreams what you see or if it actually happened, and it's never confirmed per se. (In other words, he might have died in some accident which Ledger imagines to be murder because of his fears. So you don't really give a crap, because the movie obviously doesn't, since it doesn't do more than jerk you around some more here.)
Here's my summary for this movie: Two guys get it on in the mountains throughout their lives. One croaks, and the other is left crying. Huzzah!
9) Cold Mountain (2003), starring Nicole Kidman, Jude Law. With Renée Zellweger, Natalie Portman, Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Why did I hate this one? Because the story was bloody awful, in particular. In other words, it goes nowhere, which now seems to be a regular theme of my (movie-watching only, I hope) life. Law meets Kidman, they fall in love, he goes off to war, he deserts, he runs across the country meeting a whole lot of different people who are featured in the film as Kidman's character learns how to survive after both war and her father's death -she hires a young woman to help with the farm and they have trouble with local troops who hunt down deserters... Er. Maybe you're starting to get why this story went
nowhere.
Add to this the supposedly GREAT romance between Law and Kidman which failed to convince me as to WHY they would care about each other when I
certainly didn't give a crap about either of 'em...
And don't get me STARTED on Zellweger's Oscar winning performance, which caused my ears to bleed (because she created such a fake-sounding
and *atrocious* accent).
Save your money and your time and avoid this abysmal clunker of an epic!
10) King Arthur (2004), starring Clive Owen, Ioan Gruffud, Keira Knightley.
One of the most truly BORING films it has been my misfortune to see, which features as an additional bonus the unfortunate and creepy casting of a teenage Knightley as Guinevere, alongside 31-year-old Gruffud and 40-year-old Owen. (Unfortunately, this kind of thing is not rare in Hollywood.)
I literally forgot everything about this film once I left the movie theater. (Actually, this may have even happened before I left, since I may have fallen asleep during... zzzz... Er, where was I???)
11) We Were Soldiers (2002), starring Mel Gibson (i.e. the racist, misogynistic, anti-semite).
IMDB summary: "The story of the first major battle of the American phase of the Vietnam War, and the soldiers on both sides that fought it, while their wives wait nervously and anxiously at home for the good news or the bad news".
Hands down, this was just a racist, imperialistic piece of trash. The film tries (laughably, to be honest) to 'balance' things by showing the viewpoint of one lone North Vietnamese soldier... In order to make him more easy to identify for Western (read 'white) audiences who apparently can't differentiate one Asian (much less one Vietnamese) person from another, they made him the only fellow with glasses. Aside from the 'viewpoint' of this particular low-level soldier, the film focuses entirely on the suffering of the soldiers on the U.S. side.
Newsflash the second: The United States carried out horrific human rights abuses during this war. So the focus of this film is really, really problematic given actual historical events.
(12) Radius (2017), starring no one you've ever heard of.
IMDB summary: A man wakes up with no memory of who he is, and finds that everyone who comes within a certain distance of him suddenly dies.
Oh my, but this was bad!!! This is a film that, rather than try to provide any kind of explanation of what is happening (i.e. the weird events that have taken place), decides to throw in a plot twist that comes out of left field.
...Actually, the plot twist at the end doesn't come out of left field, it comes right out of another galaxy. It's that ridiculous (i.e. it turns out that the main character is a serial killer, which in no way explains the weird happenings in the film).
Don't waste your time with this crap, really.
(13) Level 13 (2018), starring yet more people you've never heard of (and who might well regret agreeing to act in this thing...).
IMDB summary: In a highly regimented boarding school, a pair of students discover that things are not as they seem.
This summary could also have been written as, "Girls are being raised in a super restrictive boarding school in order to harvest their faces. Because this totes requires misogynistic scene after scene where the girls are taught to be pure & good, only to be sexually abused and murdered".
Good times!
(14) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), starring Yun-Fat Chow, Michelle Yeoh, Ziyi Zhang.
IMDB summary: A young Chinese warrior steals a sword from a famed swordsman and then escapes into a world of romantic adventure with a mysterious man in the frontier of the nation.
Unfortunately, this film has the very great problem that it is all over the place and the story goes nowhere fast.
(15) Bird Box (2018), starring Sandra Bullock, Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich.
IMDB summary: Five years after an ominous unseen presence drives most of society to suicide, a mother and her two children make a desperate bid to reach safety.
What is a shame is that there were several good actors in this. The film just makes no sense: *something* makes people crazy and drives them to suicide. What this something is, is NEVER explained (frustrating!). All we ever find out is that it has to do with being able see (i.e. so the characters spend most of the movie covering their eyes). Yippee. Dumb.
Also, the film seems to hint (but, like everything else, never CONFIRMS or EXPLAINS) that pregnancy provides some kind of protection.
Hey script writers and film makers: if you can't be bothered to give a damn about your story and movie, why should we? Ugh.