I done watched some movies

Caught a few movies on video and in the theater this past weekend. Here they are:
Saw Ju-on (Takashi Shimizu) at the Alamo Drafthouse Village on Sunday. I'm not sure what to think. Apparently, this is the third version of the story that Shimizu has filmed (the first two were TV movies), and he's going to remake it again as an American film starring Sarah Michelle Gellar next year. I think maybe he should just move on to something else. The scary, creepy parts of the film were really effective, but the story was complete and utter nonsense. It wouldn't have bothered me much, but it was needlessly confusing, incoherent, and thin. Why not do away with the story entirely and make a frightening series of mood pieces, or beef it up until it makes sense?
I rented these:
Deathdream (Bob Clark) Clark has had an extremely bizarre directorial career. He started out making really interesting low-budget horror movies, moved on to the "Porky's" series, "A Christmas Story," "Turk 182," and, recently, the "Baby Geniuses" movies. This one is really good. It's the story of a young man, killed in Vietnam, who returns to his small town a sort of zombie/vampire/heroin addict/disgruntled youth combination. Basically, he never shows emotion, save for the occasional sarcastic remark, and kills people, removes their blood with a syringe, and shoots their blood into his arm to stop himself from decomposing. The way it's presented is unique because it works as a drama that shows, in the most realistic terms possible, what it would actually be like if your son came home from the war a bloodthirsty zombie. And the zombie's parents are played by John Marley and Lynn Carlin, who previously played a couple with marital problems in John Cassavetes' "Faces."
First Name: Carmen (Jean-Luc Godard) This is very interesting, but it left me a little cold. Not as difficult as some late-period Godard films, it still kept its distance from the audience. I couldn't find any entry point into the film and admired it more than I liked it. The best scenes involved Godard as a formerly great director named Godard who went nuts and checked himself into a mental hospital.
Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky) Tarkovsky's "Stalker" is one of my ten favorite films of all time, so I had high hopes for this one. I didn't like it nearly as much as "Stalker," but it's hardly a bad film and may even be a great one. Tarkovsky's pacing takes a lot to get used to (it's incredibly slooooow), but if you give yourself up to it, it's incredibly hypnotic. The first two-thirds work beautifully, but I think Tarkovsky showed a failure of nerve in the closing moments, in which a long philosophical discussion explicitly spells out the film's themes. The few moments after this scene, however, somewhat redeem it. Tarkovsky himself said this was the least favorite of his own films, but I would be extremely happy if this was the worst I could do.
Last Night at the Alamo (Eagle Pennell) I'd never heard of Pennell until a few years ago, when he died of acute alcoholism and his obituary appeared in all the local papers. Apparently, he was a minor Texan celebrity. Born in west Texas, he lived in Houston and occasionally Austin. He only managed to direct a handful of ultra-low-budget movies and, eventually, his alcoholism derailed any chance of a continuing career. "Last Night at the Alamo" suffers from its budget limitations (some of the acting is pretty rough, the film stock is cheap and ugly), but manages to mostly overcome them. It's a loosely plotted film. The Alamo is a dive, redneck, working class bar in Houston that's going to be torn down so a highrise can be built, and the clientele are living it up one last time. And that's it. But it's so much more than that. Definitely worth seeing, and the lead performance by Sonny Carl Davis (he's the asshole customer who gets Judge Reinhold fired from All-American Burger in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High") carries the film. And, the screenplay was written by Kim Henkel, who also wrote "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."