200 Cigarettes (1999)

★½
Movies with lots of dialogue can be great if the characters have something interesting to say. When they talk simply to talk because the writer didn't know when they should stop, then you get the endless banter of 200 Cigarettes, which is a wildly uneven tale featuring smokers, yuppies and partyers all mulling around on New Year's Eve 1981 before attending a bash in New York City's East Village to say farewell to the year and give 1982 a big welcome. The crowded cast is, I think, a cover for a screenplay with no idea how to use dialogue to create a sustained narrative and hold our interest. 1995's Before Sunrise was simply about two people (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) who meet on a train and decide to tour Vienna while discussing their hopes, dreams and expectations for life. Their conversations stemmed from a desire for human connection and diverged into other topics naturally.

Geostorm (2017)

★½
Geostorm is Dean Devlin taking a stab at directing a disaster movie after years of producing Roland Emmerich's projects. He was very capable at that job, delivering profitable movies without the production headaches of something like Waterworld. If his debut film in the director's chair is any indication, Devlin's strengths truly lie in producing. The possibility exists that he could make a better movie down the road, but I never spotted anything here that demonstrated that he learned anything from his business partner in terms of storytelling and presentation. Maybe he figured that he could just go with what works because it worked before and brought in the money. Whatever his thinking, Geostorm is a tepid sci-fi disaster movie that isn't a complete disaster on its own, but it shows that Devlin has a ways to go if he wants to match the excitement of Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow.

Devotion (2022)

★★★
The U.S. military has long had non-white members in its ranks, though they were not initially seen as equals. It took people like Ensign Jesse Brown to break the color barrier and prove that they belong. His story is one of triumph and tragedy. He demonstrated his ability to fly a plane just like anyone else, but he endured heckling from fellow service members who should have treated him much better. Devotion is his story. It takes place during the lead up to the Korean War and follows a group of pilots through training, qualifications and finally the mission at the North Korean/Chinese border to take out vital enemy supply lines. Despite the hardship, Ensign Brown demonstrated his patriotism and commitment to the mission.

Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (2022)

★★★½
Give me the option to choose one director’s works that I could take with me to a deserted island (which has a power source, television and D.V.D. player of course), and I would choose Richard Linklater and his astonishing lineup of amazing stories. Other than the unexceptional School of Rock (which Andrew Lloyd Webber turned into an unexceptional play) and Fast Food Nation, Linklater's output has been consistently remarkable. His careful study of Generation X through the years in all its highs (the Before trilogy) and lows (subUrbia) is the result of a curious Baby Boomer eye on the generation after his own. He has fondly recalled his own generation's coming of age (Dazed and Confused), but perhaps he sees the Xers, the latchkey kids, the Oregon Trailers, as both a proper continuation of and a direct result of his contemporaries. Baby Boomers have been getting a bad rap lately (the moronic "Okay boomer" taunt being one manifestation), but Linklater sees them (and himself) from a different angle. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood isn't just a space movie, but it is also a celebration of a childhood shaped by the realization that the works of Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke were coming close to fruition. It was a promise ultimately unfulfilled, but what a time to dream about it. The catalyst was right there on television, and in the case of young Stanley, right across town.

M3GAN (2023)

★★★
M3GAN's message is not subtle. A sense of discomfort came over me as I watched it, because I knew it was so right. Children (and some adults too) have become too enamored with iDevices and the like to the point that it might as well be an addiction. Not only that, but such inventions are too easy for parents to give to their children as a substitute for a babysitter or as a substitute for themselves when they feel they come up short in some facet of their role. What does the future hold with conditions such as these? A child psychiatrist in the movie provides the answer: the inability for children to form lasting relationships with real people. We're not quite there yet, but if artificial intelligence evolves to the point that a M3GAN doll becomes reality, then this movie provided a cautionary tale of what could happen. One of the founders of Facebook admitted that the whole purpose of the "Like" button was to get users to crave the satisfaction that comes with the "Like" notification, which induces a dopamine release that the body will want again and again. M3GAN is basically walking around and hitting the user's "Like" button in real time.

Bad Taste (1987)

★★
Before he made a name for himself internationally by adapting J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings novels into the beloved trilogy we know today, Peter Jackson was a splatter movie director who made the hilariously over-the-top gorefest Dead Alive (1992) and his debut film Bad Taste (1987). His first shot at mainstream success was the astonishing Heavenly Creatures (1994), but seven years before that, Jackson released this labor of love made with his friends and on a shoestring budget. Like George A. Romero, John Waters and David Lynch before him, Jackson came out swinging, and while he doesn't land every punch, he makes sure that the ones that do connect are adequate enough in quantity to make an impression. They do. While not an entirely successful film, Bad Taste is an admirable attempt to combine comedy and graphic violence in a way similar to what Re-Animator did before it.

Prom Night (1980)

zero stars
A character in Scream says that if someone watched Prom Night, that person would know the rules of the slasher film genre and survive if such a scenario ever came up. As I watched Prom Night, I couldn't find any rules established anywhere in its runtime, so its educational value is in question. Its entertainment value is also in question, since there is not a single decent acting job to be found, nor is there any reasonable attempt by the director to generate any kind of tension, nor is there any interesting dialogue written to get the plot going. In short, this is a wasteful 87 minutes of stunningly awful story exposition.

The Perfect Score (2004)

★★★
High schools place way too much pressure on students to achieve greatness on the S.A.T.s. Most big universities will accept students who score about average. I scored a 1060 on my first attempt in March 1993 (630 on math, 430 on verbal). The guidance counselors actually told me to retake the test to get my verbal score up. Retake? As if my total score wouldn't be good enough, they told me to try again, which I didn't do. I still managed to go to college. The Perfect Score is a movie that examines the paranoia of scoring high on the S.A.T. to get into the best colleges. It's pretty funny and has a good caper plot at its heart.