THE WARD (2010)

Set in 1966, the story is about a girl (clue #1: dressed in a hospital gown) who's running through the woods. She comes to a old farmhouse and burns it to the ground. As she's watching it burn some cops roll up and take her back, oops, I mean to a nearby insane asylum. Once inside, the nurse takes her to her room and (clue #2:) erases the name on her room's door (Tammy) and replaces it with a new one, Kristen. If by this point in the film you haven't figured out the twist ending then you're an  idiot and you've obviously missed out on the other 34,000 movies that have been released in the last decade with the same exact twist.

Being a fan of John Carpenter, I had hopes that THE WARD would be atmospheric and awesome, but that just didn't happen. It's not a bad movie, but there is nothing to make it stand out either. It passed the time well enough, but I would never watch it ever again. Months from now the only thing that I'll remember about THE WARD was the three main chicks are all attractive.

Completely unoriginal story. Good acting. Nice pace. Passable direction by Carpenter, but nowhere near what he's capable of. Worth a rent, if you're bored, but that's about it. That said, it was better than Wes Craven's MY SOUL TO TAKE.

MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY (1993)

I love this film.

Larry and Carol Lipton (Allen and Keaton) meet the older couple, Paul and Lilian House, who live in the next door apartment. It's an exciting evening spent discussing such subjects as stamp collecting, health issues and twin cemetery plots. The next night Larry and Carol walk out into the hallway to find the paramedics toting Lilian out on a stretcher covered by a sheet. Dead of an heart attack.

Carol is saddened by Lilian's passing even though she didn't really know her...but there's something just not right. Carol is suspicious by Paul's lack of mourning. A few day's after Lilian's death, Carol and Larry run into Paul on the street and he seems almost cheerful. This rubs Carol the wrong way and despite Larry's "forbidding" her to investigate she does it anyway and eventually gets him in on the case too.

If, like me, you're a huge fan of both Woody Allen and the witty and playful banter between Nick and Nora Charles in THE THIN MAN films then you'll be in movie heaven with MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY. There's nothing fancy going on, it's just a fun, breezy film that is a delight from beginning to end. Highly recommended.

One thing that I like to do whenever I watch MMM is to imagine that Alvy Singer and Annie from ANNIE HALL got back together, married and this is them 16 years later!  It's like ANNIE HALL 2 that way!

Camera crew visible in broken mirror.

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