Three movies on DVD

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Last night, with Dh out of town, I watched two movies we’d rented from Blockbuster. Movies that ONLY I would ever watch. Not him, no way. Girl movies? Right?

WRONG!

So both of them were alright, but fully flawed movies that I cannot recommend at all. I’ll give overviews of them and critique as well.

Movie One: The Butterfly Effect

I saw the promos for this film before it was in the theatres. My thought process was something like “That’s a stupid 70’s movie”, which was pretty much a death knell for it.

How it ended up in our bedroom this week then … is because there it was on the shelf, and looked more interesting on the box than it had on screen-promos, and well, it’s a sci-fi thing … OK.

The movie is about Evan who has a crazy institutionalized father, and lives with his mother who is some kind of nurse or something and fixes her own car … etc.

Evan is 7 when the movie begins, but I’d say he looks an awful lot bigger than 7! Glad they told us in the dialogue finally. Phew! I was guessing 10 or 11. In any case he has some friends. Larry is the goofy fat friend. Then there is the girl … the girl he likes, and she has a brother, Tommy. The girl, I can’t remember her name. At the end of the movie he disses her, so it’s fitting that I can’t remember her name now. So for the rest of this, she’s just “the girl” alright?

Tommy is the girl’s older brother. The girl and Evan seem to be the same age. Tommy and the girl live with their father, a real heap of messed up man. Evan is going over to their house that day. Before that we learn that Evan is having black outs and doing odd things and they don’t know why. (Oh no! Is it the same thing his father has?!!! They say “No, of course not” but have no clue). Evan is told to begin journaling everything that happens so that he can jog his memory or something. We see him writing very childishly in his journal, later we see him much improved in journaling skills.

So he’s 7, he goes over to Tommy and the girls house for the day. Mother drops him off. The Dad has a new movie camera and he wants to make a movie with the children. He then brings them down to the basement and we see very little, just bits and pieces of odd stuff, but that’s because at some point there, Evan blacks out.

The story goes on and shows many other “tramatic” moments in the lives of those children. Tommy always involved, a real bad kid. Evan blacks out and can’t recall what happened each time.

When he was still 7 a significant event occured. He wanted to meet his dad. His dad was institutionalized. So there sits little Evan in this nasty hospital room that looked more like a police interrigation room, and in comes chained up dad. They’ve never seen each other. Just pictures. They do a little talking, but then dad lunges over the table and starts choking his boy. Something ends up killing the dad there, a restraining person or something.

So this is in the journal … fuzzy, cause we didn’t see it all correctly, as didn’t Evan, he’d blacked out then too.

Some bad stuff goes on really bad, and Evan’s mother decides they are moving away. So young teenager Evan gets away from the bad influences finally. He writes a note on paper and puts it up to the window in the passenger seat of the car as they pull out. The girl was running up the sidewalk to him, he didn’t roll the window down or say anything, just the paper “I’LL COME BACK FOR YOU” it read.

So you see Evan then older, 20 years old, in college, psych something, studying brains and gonna solve stuff. He has a freaky roomate, goth, fat, horrid. Evan has had no black outs since moving. Go figure. He’s thrilled with that.

So things progress rapidly downhill from here. He determines that his journals give him power to go back in time and change things. He has to read the journaled event emotinally, block out external noises, but rapidly get “into the mode” of this, way to fast IMO for a real truth to be a work here, it just was like a turned on express train every time. Anyhow, slower would have made more sense. Whatever it is, he found that it didn’t turn out so well to do this.

He would go into his old time past and relive the events, but could make verifiable changes due to getting hurt physically there. He wouldn’t stay there, he flopped right back to real time eventually. So he had a believer in his roomate when he showed a burnt mark on his tummy from that excursion to young-Evan-land.

Imagine it that you see him doing so many things, he figured out THIS was what was wrong with his dad. But HE was going to make it all better. Just wait and see.

So you have him and the girl and Tommy and Larry, and you see them all change positions in life due to Evan’s messing with “the butterfly effect”. The girl dies. He puts the “I’LL COME BACK FOR YOU” paper on her coffin in the ground before it’s filled in. He goes and reads another journal story, vroom! He’s in bed with his girl. She’s alive! She’s a cute sorority girl. But Tommy is around and he doesn’t like Evan messing with his sister still. Evan ends up killing Tommy and going to jail. His jail cellmate is another whole story, but I won’t get into it but to say he uses one journal story there to prove to the guy that Jesus talks to him and reveals himself to Evan. Just watch …zap he does his trick and comes back with proof on his palms, indents of some prank he pulled in the classroom that journal day, he didn’t do it IRL but in Retro-Butterfly world he did. Whatever. So he had cellmate believing in him and helping him. He needed his journals back. Sissy group of guys there in jail had stolen them from him. He needed them to get a good journal story that would zap him out of that place entirely. I guess here he figured that he could judge the ones that were big-time, and the ones that weren’t but not always. So he and cellmate had to setup the other guys and violently stole the journals back, and Evan had to rush into a journal story and force a quick down-into, miraculously it worked.

But the story gets worse in that he gets into wierder and weirder worse things, the story changes with every zippety-doo through time. People die, are alive after all, uglier, nicer, meaner, friendlier, sick, ruined …

He goes to one of the big events in his past. Where they put a stick of dynmite in a mailbox. In real life, he didn’t know what happened, no one would ever tell him. He found out all those years that the lady that lived in the house got home as the dynamite was probably getting closer to blowing. She went to the door of her house, then turned around and walked to the mailbox. She had her baby in her arms. Kaboom! So it goes, he found out, she and the baby died.

So Evan would go back to that time and fix it. He ended up changing his life around again that time, for the weirder segment. He woke up back in his dorm bed, relief. No. In bed next to him wasn’t his old roomate, it was Larry, old fat friend from childhood! Yay! Or not. The girl was there with Larry, in bed. Bad. Poor Evan. Poor Evan! He sat up, and had no hands! Story goes that he got them blown off in that “life re-do” he had just done. So Tommy is in this new life too. He’s a nice clean cut “Jesus” boy. He “got saved” when that dynamite went off. He saved the woman and baby. Evan was reaching for the mail box to see if he could get the dynamite out before it blew. That’s why he lost his arms.

This segment was really weird. Yes he got out of it. I’m totally whizzed in my brain about what happens next, but eventually here he ends up in the good old mental institution that his Dad had been at, and where Evan’s own doctor was too. Horror of it all they were predicting his death soon, and worsely they told him there were no journals, never had been. See, Evan changed something and made it so that something had not happened with his Dad back when he started writing the journals for real. So there was Evan, with it being said “that’s how his dad was” and that it was amazing he was still walking. He finds out then that his dad had kept asking for a photo album, “just like Evan asks for those non-existent journals”. Bingo! Hey Mom! Do you still have that movie from my birthday party? Sure honey, I’ll bring it over.

So he ends up locked up secretly in the office on the floor with the movie running: the birthday party where he met “the girl” and they had a little kid “kiss” and that was the start of friendship, doomed friendship. So he’s getting into the mode, and vrromp! There he is, in birthday boy land. He waits, mother brings “the girl” up and introduces her. In real life it was sweet. So he decided to scare her off in the re-do, affecting a better life for all, he hoped. He said something nasty about killing her mother if she ever … and the girl ran off. Butterfly effect in mode change, schllooop. There was Evan, happily back to hisself and no one had a clue who “the girl” was, with Lenny being his roomate in college in that final re-do, again. But Lenny had no idea who Evan was talking about. That settled it, he knew it was alright. Next thing you know, you see he and Lenny burning all of Evan’s journals. Confident guy!

Year later he is walking down the city street somewhere, a professional head something, and he passes “the girl” and smiles. And keeps going.

That’s short version. Ugly isn’t it? It’s worse in real watching time. The butterfly effect modes are like this: he read aloud and the page starts shaking, the room starts shaking and shimmering and then vvwop there he is a little kid again or older and somehwere else, etc.

He learns about his black outs, learns what happended slowly for each thing. He affects good change on many of the events, but something worse then happens instead.

That’s why he kept trying. One time he found the girl a prostitute, cynical and uglier than ugly. So he found her in many different scenarios. The best one was the last one. Forget her. Send her away right at the start.

It’s funny, the movie treats that as a good clean thing. In the beginning, that girl and Tommy and their Dad were a bad family. His wife had left. Daughter elected to stay with Dad to be near Evan. Dad was a freak, pedofile sick guy.

So, if that’s how it really was, first, why was it any different because Evan scared her off saying mean ugly things (a phrase he had picked up from someone else in the stories of his life) at the end for his LAST butterfly effect dudydady. Whatever.

I know it can’t be so ice cream social friendly. See his birthday party was the earliest memory he had to work with. He hadn’t had interaction with the Dad then. But Dad was just a short time later in his real memory life. He was a horrible guy. So he had to be horrible in the “send her away” mode of life too.

Who cares though. Evan was free from her. Right? So let’s pretend it’s all peaches and roses.

The other weird thing in this movie is what happend with major butterfly effect mode changes. All the “new memories” he had went backwards and were pulled out of his mind, and new one inserted and his nose would bleed and he’d wrench around moaning and someone there would be shouting something about “take you to the hospital” or something about a doctor for Evan. He never went.

So don’t bother with this grimy movie, it’s not worth the rental. It’s not worth a TV free viewing really. It’s a weird movie that I have no desire to see again, which means it’s trash. OK? 🙂


Movie Two: Code 46

Sci-Fi about some genetic laws … nope.

It’s only about sex. Two people in a weird future world. This world, but totally different due to “cover” you had to have some official pass to go places, it was called “cover”.

Close matching DNA in people meant they could not have children, or rather “were not allowed to”.

So Code 46 is that stupid law.

So Man goes to a company to investigate fraud. It’s girl who’s fraudulently making documents and stealing them for others so they can go do things they can’t officially get documentation for. Some of them die because of it, since they weren’t given clearance for good reason. I took it that the government in charge told them “NO you cannont go to such and such a place” and leaving it at that, not giving the REASON, which drove some people to seek out fraudulent ways of doing what they wanted to do, then dying when they did it due to a reason. So it was government intrudes for our own good, but doesn’t tell us why and so we thwart that and do what we want, and lose out since they were doing right in keeping it from us, but not in Not Telling Us Why!

So the story is slow and dream like. Girl is weird. She sees investigator and it’s her birthday, just weird, and they end up having sex. But he has a son. He goes home. He loves his son. Oh, now he’s home. See, man has son AND a wife at home. Go figure.

It’s a tepid romance sci-fi with that whole scene going on, and it ends up that government takes girl and aborts the baby since it’s a code 46 violation, and they also take her memory of the man, the sex, and knowledge of being pregnant. [They can do that with minds in the future, cool! Not.]

So man finds out, and following up on fraudulent case he finds her and basically twists her to remember him, and she does, from her birthday dream. So it’s “great sex again” in another place that they went to. She gets her wrists belted to the bedframe for the act, since the government would have put a virus in her to react bodily against the code 46 violation act with whomever it was before that did her. Yes it was him, he knew it. So she was willing to be tied up to do it. Wierd. So it’s over, she gets out of bed goes downstairs and uses the telephone immediately to report herself as a code 46 violation. The virus. Wierd.

So he knows she did that and says they have to go. They will be coming for her at any time. So they find a car to rent and get out of Dodge. Driving on the road they are going fast, and you can see something behind them encroaching. Finally some things of people/animals etc in the road distract them and they drive off the road and flip over and over.

Next thing is the end of the movie. He is in the hospital. His brain is the one that that memory was wiped out of this time. He thought he was only in a car accident and has no recollection of the girl at all. She has her memory intact. She was banished to the outside. She had lived there before. So you see her now wearing different clothing, ethic cloth over head, wrapped around her.

He is Tim Robbins. She … I don’t know her name. Unremarkable, odd looking though. Short butched hair, with long curly hair she might have been cuter.

Nasty movie though. I saw it only for hope of a redeeming ending. It’s was the second movie of a night of movie weirdo movies.

I do not recommend Code 46 to anyone either. Butterfly Effect was actually much better than Code 46, so that’s saying something, if you read the above Movie One review.

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To leave this post on a positive note: I’ll give a great recommendation for a movie recently out on DVD. The Forgotten. It’s a sci-fi movie with a tingly spine chilling flavour, but no gore. No real bad stuff, just hints of stuff that ends up with a great story being told. It’s worth a rental, and for me it’s worth the purchase eventually. It’s a good movie, worth seeing more than once.

The DVD does have the theatrical version on it, and an extended/alternate ending version.

I like the Theatrical version so much more than the alternate ending one. Both are good, but the alternate ending is a bit far fetched and goes to try and answer some questions that you have watching the Theatrical version. But I figured out the right stuff, asked the right things and percieved the right answers. Seeing the alternate ending only cheapened those thoughts, and just tried to answer TOO much. Theatrical version keeps the mystery mysticalness and wonder alive.

One other scene inserted in the extended/alternate ending version is a bedroom scene in the house by the beach, they kiss, and talk about desires, then make a funny joke worth laughing at, but the Theatrical version of that scene is plenty good on it’s own, keeps a fine measure of restraint and moralness in the film.

So watch it, watch the Theatrical version. Enjoy this one. It’s a good treat of a movie. IMO.




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