Monday at Sundance

First movie of the day was The Son of No One, a corrupt police drama. Channing Tatum stars as a cop who killed a couple of junkies when he was a kid. At least one of the killings was in self defense, but he has felt guilty about it for years. He didn't tell the police what happened. The only people who knew were his two friends. The cops pretty much knew he did it, but didn't care because they could care less about a couple of dead junkies.

The local paper starts printing stories about the murders and asking why they haven't been solved. For some reason, his captain starts harassing him about the murders. This movie sucks. It is slow and boring, and the characters' motivations make no sense.

Next movie was Vampire. It takes guts to make a vampire movie and title it "Vampire". This is the strangest vampire movie I have ever seen. It has an intriguing premise. A vampire named Simon meets girls on a suicide chat room. He tells them he wants to kill himself too, and they meet with the intent to commit suicide together. He drains their blood and drinks it. The first 15 minutes or so are pretty good as they set up this story.

Then the movie takes a bunch of left turns. He goes to a party with a bunch of vampire-loving people. They dress up in capes and watch vampire movies. One of them figures out that Simon is a vampire, takes him for a ride in a car, kidnaps a woman, then kills and rapes her. This is where people started walking out of the screening. Simon sits there doing nothing. He is obviously repulsed by this, but he does nothing to stop it. Not sure how we are supposed to feel about Simon.

There is also a subplot about a cop who right away wants to be best friends with Simon for no reason, then introduces Simon to his sister who immediately likes him. We never get any idea that Simon likes her, but she starts coming over to his house, cooking for him, and helping care for his catatonic mother.

Weird movie. I have never seen so many walkouts. Every 10 minutes or so more people would walk out, and by the end only about 10% of the audience remained.

My last movie was The Troll Hunter. From Norway, this is one of those "found footage" movies, like Cloverfield or Paranormal Activity. Three college students follow a strange guy into the mountains of Norway and discover that giant trolls actually exist. The guy works for the government keeping trolls a secret and killing them when they leave their territory.

The movie is kind of fun and interesting for an hour or so. Then it gets kind of tedious. I almost recommend it, but not quite.