Does the Belgian police really wear those red arm bands? That’s just bizarre.

Are those armbands for real!? I tried googling them but came up blank.

The Treatment. Hans Herbots. 2014.

Eep. This is a movie I bought at random for my one-movie-per-country blog series, but I didn’t watch it because it looked like it was New French (only Belgian) Extreme Cinema.

But I’m giving it a try now in case I was wrong… but I’m ready to bail if it get too grisly.

It starts off with a paedophile frolicking with a boy in a field.

*sigh*

Hm… but is this more of a police procedural? It’s very dark. I mean, everything is risibly in need of more light bulbs: Nurses are working under 2W lamps…

Hey! Almost all the tomatoes like it.

It really is a police procedural. If it hadn’t been for the extreme levels of (thankfully only implied (so far, I’m writing this at the 20 minute mark)) horrors, it could have been a BBC TV series. It’s got all the clichés, with the investigator having his own daemons; the retired cop with the clues; going rogue; ad nauseam (and I mean that literally).

OK, now there’s an autopsy and I skipped forwards a bit.

This is a competently made thriller, but it’s kinda ridic. It’s so over the top. The only way this movie even remotely works is by bludgeoning the audience with the horrors shown and alluded to.

Vegas Vacation. Stephen Kessler. 1997.

So this is part of the National Lampoon “vacation” series? I’m not quite sure how I come to have this DVD, but I think it may have been part of a box set…

I think I’ve probably seen these movies before? But I have no recollection of this one.

I thought it started off pretty well, with quite a few good jokes. But then it just went… boring…

It’s not so much that the jokes are lame (and they are), but that there’s so few of them. There’s even minutes where there’s nothing that can be identified as an attempt at a joke. And when there’s a gag it usually doesn’t land. And you can see how you’d just tweak some of these gags slightly and they’d work.

But it’s otherwise well made, I guess? There’s nothing annoying in the viewing experience.

It’s just not very funny.

I did like the “Guess what number” casino.

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead. Sidney Lumet. 2007.

How odd. I’ve seen the first three minutes of this before, according to Emacs. But… I bailed?

So this is Sydney Lumet, they guy who did a gazillion worthy movies in the 70s. Like Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, Equus… I haven’t seen a movie of his since Deathtrap in 1982, so I don’t know whether this movie (his final) is an anomaly for him or not.

Going by my extremely limited knowledge of him, if I were nasty I’d say that he’d seen Pulp Fiction and too much New Era Of Quality TV and then decided to make something m. o. d. e. r. n.

It has it all: Small-time crooks; hyperviolence; a messed-up timeline; oh-so-ironic outcomes; etc.

In short: It’s pretty awful.

It features two actors I know a lot of people like: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke. I don’t particularly like either of them. At least Marisa Tomei and Albert Finney is in here to class things up.

I’m guessing this was a successful strategy, because:

The critical consensus reads: “A tense and effective thriller, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead marks a triumphant return to form for director Sidney Lumet.

People love this kind of thing! I mean, The Sopranos was wildly successful and it as all about listening to some moron nattering on about whatever, and that was endlessly fascinating because bad boys are so interesting. Showing a criminal not being a monster 100% of the is just so deep!

The cinematography’s pretty awful. It looks like a digital video shoot, and those didn’t start getting good until a few years after this was shot.

It’s an ugly, boring movie.