Movies
A pretty cool concept—the entire movie (mostly) is a slow escalation of horror surrounding an autopsy in which the two morticians discover stranger and stranger things about the body as they search for a cause of death. And for maybe 50% of the runtime, it's a really effective execution of that premise. Like a lot of horror movies, though, Jane Doe completely loses control in its finale, but things begin to slip far before that. There is some really dumb stuff in the back half of this movie, both in terms of lore/exposition sense and present-tense narrative, and the craft of the film basically falls in line with those blunders, becoming less and less interesting as the movie's events become more and more silly. The very end has some nice creepypasta vibes, but overall, this movie is a total wash in its final 40 minutes—disappointing considering how strong the opening 40-50 are. Also—and this goes for the movie as a whole, not just the back half—there's a lot of lingering over a nude female body in this movie, which sometimes felt a little skeevy to me, especially given the trope of female-corpse-obsessed camerawork in crime films. I realize that lots of shots of a nude corpse is kind of baked into the premise of the movie (and for spoilery reasons, the plot of the movie eventually requires the corpse to be female), but I do wonder if there is a less leering approach to this premise, or if this is simply an idea with this inescapably built into it. Grade: B-
A really solid "strangers on a train" thriller that's pretty edge-of-your-seat twisty until the last half hour with Ben Kingsley's character kind of deflates it into generic territory. I gotta say, I know he's kind of a thoughtless rube in this movie, but I would 100% be Woody Harrelson's character, going bananas over all the train equipment and old steam engines to the point that I miss my actual train and leave my wife to fend for herself with mysterious strangers. I'm not proud that I would do this, but I'm just being honest here. Grade: B
The feature-film debut of Lord and Miller is very much a Lord and Miller feature, which means it is a very fun romp through some borderline surreal material buoyed by their impeccably twisty sense of humor. It's not all amazing; looking retrospectively after literally all of their movies used the trope, their lampooning of the "nice, misunderstood dweeb" feels like a crutch more than an asset, and there are a lot of jokes at the expense of people's weight, which is not fun. But what works works very well. It's also an early example of CG animation achieving a reasonable approximation of cartoonish exaggeration without veering into the uncanny imagery that often befell 2000s CG animation that tried the same thing; this and Tangled feel like the visual stage-setting for all of 2010s CG animation, which is cool. I mean, cel animation had basically perfected all of this decades prior, but whatever. I'm not bitter. Grade: B
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