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Le temps qui reste (Fran?ɬßois Ozon) is about a man (Romain) who finds out that he is terminally ill and has three months to live. We then watch him as he processes this information. He decides to tell certain people and not others (some of whom we would expected him to have told). The way he handles certain relationships is very interesting as you watch him struggle between the desire to be alone and loneliness; with living life to the fullest and his mortality.

Ozon didn’t take the story where one typically would expect, which was refreshing. Romain is basically a selfish jerk, but unlike Hollywood formulas does not miraculously change into a different person. Yes, he does go through changes, but not in a cookie-cutter type of way.

Another refreshing thing was that Romain was not another gay characater dying of AIDS. Yes, films about gay men with AIDS are relevant and important, but they certainly abound; it was nice to see a film where a gay man was dealing with something other than AIDS, discrimination, or going to the gym.

The Arisocrats (Paul Provenza) was great. I ruined it for myself a bit, though: after a few minutes of watching, I realized that I wasn’t laughing and thought that maybe I was missing something. So, I looked it up and realized that the joke itself is not supposed to be funny, which was explained less than five minutes after I resumed watching.

Anyway, I couldn’t believe some of the things I was hearing. Bob Saget, especially, is a dirty, dirty man.

Hostel (Eli Roth) was much more of a joke than I’d been expecting. I got the impression that Roth chickened out and went for some less realistic special effects. That’s weird, though, since Cabin Fever was pretty gross.

One cool thing was the cameo of Takashi Miike, whose films arguably define the horror-gore genre.

I thought the setup of characters and setting was pretty good. I guess there’s not much else to say about it, except that it wasn’t as gross or scary as I had expected, and I laughed at certain points. Oh, and the movie posters were pretty cool. Overall impression: not worth the hype.

The whole process of watching this movie was possibly more interesting than the film itself. Ian got it in some odd format that I can’t even remember. We stopped it partway through because we were hungry, but shortly after resuming, it just stopped. Turns out he had an incomplete file!

Now the movie isn’t necessarily good, but in order to start what we had finished, we went to Queen Video. It was out, though, so we had to hold our breath and enter Blockbuster (actually, I’m the one with the Blockbuster hangup – Ian was able to breathe normally).

All of this to say, Final Destination (James Wong) is fine. We got the impression from the special features that its success as a film, and now a franchise, was a total fluke. They showed the test audience reactions and some of the scenes that they had to cut out – absolutely terrible stuff! It was great.