Silent House & 21 Jump Street

Silent House - There are good things and bad things about Silent House. First, the good news. It's ridiculously creative. Filmed in one continuous take, the 88 minute long film was filmed in real time and features creative direction and camera tricks. Also, Elizabeth Olsen is INCREDIBLE. Her performance is so terrifyingly real and sincere that it's hard to not become involved in the story. The story, of course, is about Sarah (Olsen) who goes to her family's old lake house with her dad and her uncle in order to fix it up to sell it. It's been mostly abandoned for the last year and there are squatters who keep breaking in and destroying the house. Or maybe the squatters are still in the house. Because Sarah soon finds herself locked in the house. Then she finds her dad's unconscious body and so begins a game of cat and mouse with Sarah trying to stay alive and make it out of the house. Now for the bad news. The movie just isn't scary at all. Plus, it gets a little too weird at one point. Also, it's full of all the same old horror movie cliches. Then there's that ending. SPOILER ALERT. I'm not going to totally ruin the ending. I did like the IDEA of the ending. The problem is I don't think it was executed properly. An ending similar to that has been done so much better before in films like High Tension and Triangle. All in all, Silent House was merely mediocre. The creativity and Olsen's incredible performance definitely make it watchable. If it wasn't for those things, Silent House would just be another run of the mill, trite, boring wanna be scary movie.
Grade: C


21 Jump Street - A few days ago when I reviewed last year's remake of Footloose, I talked about how the best way to remake a classic film (or, in this case, TV show) was to make it your own while still paying homage to the original. Well, 21 Jump Street totally succeeds at both of these things. The film is based on the TV show that made Johnny Depp a mega star and is about a group of young looking cops who go undercover at local high schools. In the movie, Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum star as ex-high school enemies (Tatum was uber popular, Hill was a loser) who become besties and then find themselves going back into their old school to infiltrate a drug ring. This time around, Hill finds himself in with the cool kids (including James Franco's equally strange and talented younger brother Dave) while Tatum is a nerd who is mistakenly signed up for AP-Chemistry. So, the plot is pretty commonplace, but here's the thing - the movie is actually really, really funny. In fact, at certain points, I kept thinking about how this movie really has no right to be this good. In fact, after the barrage of trailers that took over for a while, I was convinced this movie was going to be terrible. But it's not. We all know Jonah Hill is funny but here, again, he's proving that he's a pretty damn good actor as well. Tatum is known as being a pretty face but after seeing A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, I always suspected there was a good actor in there somewhere. Here, he's funny and charming and absolutely great. The supporting cast (from Franco to Ice Cube to Ellie Kempler to a small scene stealing part from Johnny Simmons) is all fantastic as well. Plus, there are cameos by a bunch of the original cast members of the show (including Johnny Depp - whose cameo is absolutely great). All in all, 21 Jump Street is a GOOD movie. The only thing keeping it from being a great movie is the too long run time. Other than that, it's totally recommendable.
Grade: B