I'd also like to know the legal ramifications of this. It's pretty obvious that this was blatant theft on Fox's part. The "Johnny C" line is pretty damning.

I strongly disagree with you guys about the opening of Zero Dark Thirty, for a couple reasons.

First, this is a movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. You have to open with the reason why we're hunting this guy, right? You could argue that everyone knows going in, but let's look at it from a movie perspective for a second. 9/11 is basically the inciting incident. I think that the opening scene of Zero Dark Thirty was the most tasteful way possible to acknowledge the events of 9/11 without veering too far into deliberate emotional manipulation.

I get that you guys feel uncomfortable with using footage of real tragedies to tell a fictional story, as you've expressed in the past, but this is different. Would you rather they show news footage of planes crashing into towers? Of course not, and I agree. That would have come across as a very obvious attempt to rile up the audience and get them to hate bin Laden, which is unnecessary anyway. So video footage is out. Should the 911 calls have been faked? Recorded by actors? To me, that seems entirely inappropriate and disrespectful to the people who actually died on 9/11. Yes, this entire movie is actors re-creating events from recent history, but to fake the voices of innocent people who died in a national tragedy? That's crossing a line.

So where do we end up? Mixing together a collage of 911 calls from inside the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11. You have to acknowledge it in some way, and this was pretty clearly the least they could do.

I also didn't like Trey's comparison of this film to a 3rd grade class telling the story of the Pilgrims. Really? That's the attitude they should have taken? They should have come to work every day and thought, "Well, we're just a bunch of assholes who don't really matter telling a story that we're not worthy of telling." Why shouldn't they take themselves seriously? I feel like Trey really undersold the journalistic work involved in telling this story, as well as the professionalism of everyone involved, and that's not fair. Zero Dark Thirty is a very mature, straight-faced telling of history, and I admire it for that.

I liked it a lot more than Dorkman. I haven't got a chance to think about it all that deeply, but here's my initial assessment, having seen it just a few hours ago.

My decision to see the new horror film Mama today was made with great trepidation, and even that’s understating it a bit. I hate seeing horror movies in theaters. The jump scares are too loud and the scary images are too big. I like watching them at home, where I have the option of muting the audio when I know that a loud orchestral sting and a distorted face are about to suddenly come on. Still, I had nothing better to do, so in I went.

I was pleasantly surprised by Mama, not because I expected it to be bad, but because it works on a different level than most other films in its genre. Yes, there are jump scares aplenty and plenty haunted house tropes, but there was something distinctly off about Mama, and in a good way. It seems to be made by a really good filmmaker who has never seen a haunted house movie before. They don’t know that it’s okay not to try in these movies, that people will buy tickets anyway. Still, in spite of this assurance, they charged ahead with a horror movie that has a surprising dedication to its characters and themes. The director knows exactly what he’s doing in every scene. Many newbie horror directors imitate without knowing why certain tropes actually work. Director Andres Muschietti understands horror cinema, and he knows how to push your buttons. He’s also surprisingly artful. A dream sequence in the middle of the film is a standout, and one of my favorite scenes of the year so far. It’s simultaneously beautiful and disturbing, and it feels exactly like a nightmare that someone would have. This is a scene that really shook me, on a level that most horror movies really don’t.

You don’t expect to be particularly invested in the personal lives of horror movie characters, but the core characters of Mama are actually pretty fleshed-our and interesting, and you grow to care about them in a way that is deeper than, “This is scary, I feel bad for them.” Hell, in a nice twist, even the titular ghost is a three-dimensional character with a deep personal history and strong emotions beyond, “RAR I AM A SCARY GHOST, LOOK HOW SCARY I AM.” Now that’s a rare trait for a horror movie. Even in movies that are held up as paragons of the genre, like The Exorcist, the villain’s motivation is little more than, “Humans suck, I like messing with them.” You’re not going to find yourself rooting for Mama at any point, but you do grow to pity her and understand where she’s coming from.

I can see Mama being criticized for showing its ghost too much. Jaws taught us all that a monster is scarier if you keep it in the shadows and don’t put it on screen too much. Mama goes in the other direction. At around the halfway point, Mama is prominently shown, and we see her clearly in all of her appearances from that point on. Again, I can see people finding this boring, and feeling as though it defangs her to an extent, but I found it refreshing. Mama is, as I mentioned, a character in the movie just as much as any of the humans, so to keep her obscured and hidden would have actually lessened her presence as opposed to increasing it. I will say, though, that the physical design of her character isn’t original in any way. A creepy rotted ghost in tattered black clothes with twisting limbs and long, face-obscuring hair is something we’ve seen a million times. Maybe they wanted to make her more familiar to an audience, so that we connected with her more? That’s probably reading too much into it.

Not everything about Mama works. In case you didn’t know, it is an adaptation of a short film of the same name, by the original creators, and movies of that nature always seem to suffer a little bloat. When you feel like you’ve told your story succinctly in three minutes, it’s understandable to have some trouble with extending it to 90+ minutes. The original short is recreated pretty much shot-for-shot about 3/4 of the way through, and strangely it seems to contrast with the overall tone of the film more than it fits. There are certain characters and subplots that are irritating, and which never go anywhere, but cutting them would have chopped 20 minutes out of the movie, and that’s kind of ridiculous for a movie that’s only about 100 minutes long as it is. The character of the aunt in particular stands out as completely unnecessary and annoying. She contributes nothing thematically, and every time she shows up the movie grinds to a halt. She’s not a major character, but in a rewrite I would have gotten rid of her.

Mama is a movie about parenthood, grief, loss, and love. It has some great scares, and it’s much better than it has any right to be. I happened to show up early, and the credits of an earlier screening of the film were just ending. The film ends with a dedication from the directors:

“To our Mom.”

I’m sure she’s proud. Mama is a solid horror film, and sure to be a cult classic in the years to come.

I agree with a lot of this, mainly that the first 40 minutes are pretty much pointless, and they never pay off. We spend like 15 minutes on how Pi got his name AND his nickname, none of which tells us very much about him. You could have cut the act 1 flashbacks almost entirely, I think.

I disagree about the character development with the tiger, though. Early on, there's talk about whether or not animals have emotions, or if what you perceive as their emotions are really your own reflected back at you. I thought that Pi and Richard Parker had a fascinating relationship, and the movie does a good job of convincing you that yes, Richard Parker is a thinking, feeling character.

I know. It's a bad habit, and one I'm trying to put an end to.

Soundtrack listings giving spoilers bugs the everloving shit out of me. It's not that hard. Look at the Skyfall soundtrack, or Dredd, for example. The titles are vague enough as to not give away plot details, but if you've seen the movie, you know what scene they're referring to. But when a track is literally called "______'s End," there's a problem.

Hey, Norbit got a Best Makeup nomination. Anything can happen.

I watched Versailles today. I found it fascinating for a while, but it lost me in the second half. It's not a bad film by any means, but I personally wasn't all that interested in it. I'm very interested in The Invisible War, though.

I think Day-Lewis is also a sure thing. I'm hearing Joaquin Phoenix could be a spoiler, but I doubt it. Day-Lewis is going to walk away with it.

I just saw Life of Pi, and I'm pretty sure that's going to be the winner. Avengers had some great stuff, but nothing as astonishing as that tiger. I didn't think that special effects could really astonish me any more, but that tiger is just so damn good. They gave it to Hugo last year in a field of big explody sci-fi movies, and I think the same thing's going to happen this year.

I watched The Last Exorcism on Netflix today. I didn't think I'd be drawn in as much as I was. The mockumentary style is an interesting direction to take what would have been a traditional found footage horror film, and it puts aside the question of, "Why don't they turn the camera off?" I also really liked how the film kept you guessing throughout as to whether or not the events were truly supernatural. The ending is terrible, however. Rather than staying with the smart, interesting answer the film gives us, a final climactic sequence invalidates it completely and goes out on a generic note. Too bad, because otherwise this is a pretty solid film.

I've seen some more films, so here's my final Top 10 list.

1) Django Unchained
2) Cloud Atlas
3) Safety Not Guaranteed
4) Looper
5) Holy Motors
6) The Cabin in the Woods
7) Moonrise Kingdom
8) Chronicle
9) Argo
10) Lincoln

Avengers is at #12, Skyfall at #18, and Dark Knight Rises at #21.