Mirrors

Mirrors (2008)


Director: Alexadre Aja
Writer:Alexadre Aja, Gregory Levasseur (screenplay) based on Korean movie
Starring: Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton

Synopsis
Um, this suspended cop dude starts working as a security guard at an abandoned department store.  He starts to see things in mirrors.  Then everybody else who he knows who also has a mirror starts seeing things. Then they start mutilating and killing themselves and every single reflective surface becomes dangerous.  Then, through a practically infinite string of idiotic coincidences he figures out what's going on.  Then he goes to the sticks.  Then he goes to this other place.  Then he goes back to New York.  Then he may or may not have stopped this from happening again.  If you want to know that last part you'll have to either think a little or watch the fucking thing.

The Woman
this movie.......man. it was totally supposed to be scary, but  i laughed through a good percentage of it. it was way hardcore ridiculous. kiefer sutherland was so intense and yelling all the time. the wife/ ex wife who thought he was delusional (rightfully so) when proven wrong, that this demony thing with the mirrors was actually true, said "i should have believed you". when this lunatic is raving about how the mirrors are making people do things, i think she should have called the looney bin, personally. i know i would lock my dearly beloved husband up. i mean i would totally believe him and fight the mirrors by his side.

not only was the acting outrageous, but the plot didn't make sense at all. why would this guy stay at a shitty night time security job when he's so creeped out by the things he sees in the mirrors. when things go south most of humanity would say they were outta there. the whole movie takes place in a week maybe ten days. i know i'm a hard worker, but jeebus, when i see burning people and reflections that aren't there, you could bet your ass i'd be at burger king watching a training video the next day. supposedly this dude, kiefer, he's been through some shit as a cop. we don't know what, and we never find out. but the man loves to rant and rave and take some mystery pill that treats his mystery emotional problem, stemming from this mystery shit that went down.

just when you think this movie can't possibly achieve any more crap content, the courics go off the chart. (that's a south park reference for those who didn't catch it) and listen closely because i'm totally going to give away the movie.... supposedly this thing that's happening in the mirrors is a demon that leaped from a possessed little girl in the 50's, when the burnt out department store building was an insane asylum, into the mirrors of this treatment room. see dr. whocares thought that schizophrenia could be cured if the affected were strapped to a chair in a room full of mirrors and hallucinate to themselves. demon girl gets strapped in, and the demon can't take it for some who knows reason. after a massacre in the asylum shortly after demon inhabits mirrors, the walls of the vanity schizo treatment room get sealed. asylum becomes department store. somehow demon starts to show up in all the mirrors of the department store. then demon starts showing up at kiefer's home. how does demon travel? we don't know. now that i write this down i can see that maybe in the original, the one with more thought put into it, that it maybe is a metaphor for the evil in us all, and once we see evil in that particular mirror, we see it everywhere? i don't know. but if that was the point it was done terribly. there's also this whole issue that happens where the demon repossesses girl, who is now a dead nun. isn't the whole point of possession the fact that the person is living? if the demon could possess dead people why did it need dead nun, who is alive at this point, to come back, it's killed tons of people. why not possess one of their dead bodies? could that just be me thinking that somebody should give a poop when writing terrible scripts, and casting terrible acting, and funding terrible remakes? ooh, ooh, i forgot to mention the ending...okay somehow kiefer gets crushed by a falling burned out department store while fighting of a possessed dead nun, and he thinks he's still alive until.....all the words everywhere are backwards!!!!! he's been collected by the demon and is now trapped forever inside mirrors. at least that's what i think, because it wasn't really explained.

oh man. this movie was poor.

MOster
This movie is like someone keeps trying to hack away at trees on their way out of the jungle, but the machete is so dull that each tree they hit only gets cut partway and they get hit on the head as the tree falls in the wrong direction.  When they wake up, they forgot that they tried this already and they get hit on the head again. Rinse and repeat. Eventually they bleed out and die.  It might be more pleasing to believe that they would have been eaten slowly by a large feline, but even that notion is too entertaining for this movie.

Through the first half-hour of this I was trying to figure out from where the main theme was lifted.  Turns out it was Lord of the Rings, note for note and instrument for instrument, to the point where I wonder if it's legal.  The premise here stems from the worst pieces of every important mirror story ever told (and surely some silly ones), from Lewis Carroll (thanks to my woman) to Neil Gaiman with any number of stops in between.  However, in creating the outline the writers didn't even bother to edit what they pasted in from these other sources, and in some cases when they copied from those sources they missed modifiers such as, "not."  Seriously, if the solution was so simple it would have happened immediately after it was the problem.

The single most egregiously stupid thing that anybody does in this movie is to stop the windows from being reflective by putting newspaper on the insides (while painting mirrors that could just as easily have been covered... or removed) and then IMMEDIATELY GOING OUTSIDE AND STANDING IN FRONT OF THE GLASS.

Production design and production value were the only elements of this piece that warrant any sort of praise, and the highest I'm willing to go here is, "adequate."  Everything else is just garbage.  Keifer can't even act, let alone overact, and the only other elements of the cast worth mentioning are Amy Smart's ass and sideboob.  So, casting gets an F.  The camera moved around a lot in an attempt to show how everybody and every thing were at least a little fucked up.  It sure did move, but it lingered on almost nothing that would explicate anything.  So, cinematography gets an F.  The director told the camera people what to do and whatever he said to the actors caused them to act like they were marionettes being controlled by a drink. [That's not a typo. They were being controlled by a container of potable liquid, not an inebriated human.]  So the director gets an F.  The executive producers and producers gave people money to make this movie and continued to pay salaries after they saw the dailies.  So they get expelled.

The worst thing about this movie is that it doesn't even really qualify as awesomely bad.  We laughed at it a few times, but we didn't have fun.