WaxBellaAmours

It sounded like a great idea on paper. Stephen King adapting his own novel on screen? Since most of the film adaptations of his novels have been criticized for deviating from the source, it would seem like he would be the perfect one to get his own vast, peculiar imagination displayed best on screen. True, "Pet Semetary" is probably one of the more faithful movies based on a King novel, following the narrative flow much more closely than other adaptations have. Unfortunately, something sounding great on the page doesn't mean it looks good on the screen. And "Pet Semetary", for all it's fidelity to the Pet Semetary book, is a truly Awful movie.

Indeed, after reading "Pet Semetary", many of its ideas certainly we're great to toy around with inside the head. The book certainly highlighted a fascinating, universal idea (the ability to control death) and managed to make it truly terrifying, knowing the reader's own imagination would be the greatest catalyst for the book's greatest shocks, with King managing to effectively convey his musings on morality while allowing the reader to do their own coloring of much of the film's narrative action.

That in turns makes the whole movie seem pointless and, in the details, rather silly on the big screen, where all the imagining is already done for us. In fact, this adaptation is just downright ludicrous. Some of King's more mercurial creations (the ghost of a dead student the film's doctor protagonist couldn't save, a skeletal-looking mentally ill sister of the doctor's wife, and don't forget a demonic toddler!) just look ridiculous on the big screen. Indeed we're not sure if the director is meaning to be Ironic, but as on-screen bogeymen there just goofy and absurd, and not in a good way. This film shows far too much, becoming far too explicit and ends up just being extremely condescending to the audience, for whom nothing but silent or uttered laughter seems to be the only appropriate response. And while King certainly knows how to write a novel, writing a screenplay is a different monster, and there are some awkward scene transitions and lapses in thematic explanations that make certain plot points that we're clear on page seem rather preposterous on screen.

All in all, stick with the book. As condescending at that sounds, the silly film you're about to watch is going to do nothing but simply snigger at you while you do nothing but snigger back.

Trying to bring the Italian giallo genre into the then-popular American slasher genre, Nightmare is a half-clever attempt. Those two extremes don't seem like a good fit, with the typical slash-and-hack, one-by-one structure of the slasher genre mixing a bit awkwardly with the more flamboyant, open-ended and director-focused giallo film movement. "Nightmare" isn't particularly coherent and can feel a bit half-hearted at times, but it has enough startling moments and a truly twisted (and brutal) view of sexuality to at least be interesting beyond it's initial viewing.

Often considered a Grindhouse staple, it shares the qualities of many other films of that "genre": lousy dubbing, horrid acting, completely conspicious continuity blunders, a soundtrack and film print that makes the viewer feel like their head is being held under muddy water. It's also unusually bleak and morally ambiguous for an American film, a telling sign that this was directed by an European. There's also a sense of the American-slasher puritanism, as noticed by the Killer's view of promiscious adults around him, but it's not quite as black-and-white as many of the like-minded films at the time. Largely because we're asked to look at the film's largely unseen killer with a more subjective eye.

"Nightmare" may be poorly made, although a few cat-and-mouse sequences are well-staged and engaging enough, but it's far from useless. It's cross between American DIY ethos and lavish, fetishitistic European flavoring is uneven and sloppy but always weird and alluring enough to keep you watching. The film's modest cult following is understandable.

As the movie's title suggest, I truly wanted to fall in crazy love with "Like Crazy". By the end, I instead just gave it a pat on the shoulder and became more interested in what the stars and director would be doing after the movie than in the film that just screened. In a movie about the complications that ensue when an American guy named Jacob and a British girl named Anna meet in college, fall in love and then eventually are separated when the latter is denied entry back into the US after overstaying her visa, it's never as compelling as it very well should have been.

"Like Crazy", a big hit at the Sundance film festival, is well-made and has some scenes of heartbreaking immediacy that give it considerable promise. Unfortunately it only shines through it's individual moments, but as a whole it lacks a certain emotional center as the main romantic pairing, played by Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin, is just not convincing.

Not for lack of trying. Director Drake Doremus has certainly made a lovely film out of a very small budget, and again proves (after his first film Douchebag) that he has a way of coaxing some nuanced performances out of familiar character archetypes. It's refreshing to see a movie where people don't always know the perfect thing to say and end up saying what they actually feel, or feeling unable to say anything at all. And his understated mis-en-scene and on-the-cheap cinematography is quite impressive, bringing a very cinematic atmosphere to "Like Crazy" despite the film's modest means.

For the central pairing, Jones (a distinctly lovely actress with a remarkably subtle face and physical acting style) in particular brings a fascinating duality to her character of Anna: she can feel both warm and reserved, naive but very intelligent and observant. Jones slowly melds what could initially seem like a contradiction into a very real, imperfect human character that you can't quite understand but you can feel remarkably close to, and it's easy to see how someone could be very drawn to her. Anton Yelchin, as Jacob, has the much harder task: his Jacob has an almost too-passive interest in this love affair, but while the character on the page might be too much of a cipher, Yelchin has a clever acting style that suggests there's more to Jacob than meets the eye.

And there's no questioning that "Like Crazy" is a consistiently engaging and intriguing experience. There's just a big problem when the central romance in an in-and-out-of-love story is the weakest part of film. Their relationship ultimately feels completely tied to plot, with no real sense that it would exist off camera. We become interested in Jacob and Anna individually, but never as a couple.

Jacob seems rather unwilling to uproot his life to be with her, or even borrow money from her parents so he can stay the post-graduation summer in England, and it is a bit baffling to wonder how someone as smart (or supposedly smart) as Anna would be willing to overlook his slowly growing indifference and find out far too late that their romance is dying.

There's a bit of suspense later on, as both Jacob and Anna get romantically tempted by someone close to them (by Jennifer Lawerence and Charlie Bewley, respectively), but that plot devolpment ultimately feels as superficial and mechanical as the movie's main immigration predicament. It's more an affirtmation of Lawrence's considerable talents as an actress that she takes a role as contrived as this and ends up making the audience truly feel her heartbreak. Though it's a big problem when we're more torn up over the affair rather than the movie's main romance.

It's not that there isn't a sense of real care and affection between Jacob and Anna, but the movie just doesn't take enough time to let us figure out exactly what exists between the two. It seems like while Anna may be in crazy stupid love, Jacob seems to see it as a passionate summer fling but nothing to change his life for. You end up wishing they would just move on and live their lives rather than root for them to make it through their immigration-complicated struggle, as the feelings just do not seem to be reciprocated. The disintegration of their relationship feels more expected and, frankly, welcome than it is heartbreaking.

Perhaps what's hindering the central romance is that the movie is far too hurried and uneven that it doesn't really have time to show a substantive, organic growth of Anna and Jacob's relationship. The early scenes of Jacob and Anna's romance are far too brief (with an excessive fondness of montages and quick scene cuts) and far too much screen time is spent after Anna's banned from the US that "Crazy" never really has time to breathe. There's never any time to truly reveal what would make these two would-be romantics not only connect but fall passionately in love with each other. Surely it's more than a mutual love for Paul Simon's "Graceland" or rides in go-karts (yep, that's in the movie too).

Perhaps it's a compliment to say that the film should've been a bit longer, but it also means we're left needing more. The movie does have a potentially terrific ending, but too bad the charming but uncogent scenes before make it an afterthought rather than something more potent and emotional. That makes the whole experience just all the more tantalizing and disappointing. We haven't fallen in love with "Like Crazy", we're just enamored with what could've been.