The thing about FD2 is that the characters make the mistake of trying to figure things out. Their reasoning? If you were meant to die, then you owe death a life. But a new life can cancel out an old one. So if the woman in the white van can safely deliver her baby, then that means that someone else will be saved, or will have to die, I forget which. This is the kind of bookkeeping that makes you wish Arthur Andersen were still around.
Note: The first Final Destination (2000) had characters named after famous horror-film figures, including Browning, Horton, Lewton, Weine, Schreck, Hitchcock, and Chaney. The sequel has just two that I can identify: Corman and Carpenter.
Finding Home
(DIRECTED BY LAWRENCE D. FOLDES; STARRING LISA BRENNER, GENEVIèVE BUJOTD; 2005)
The end credits for Finding Home thank no less than six experts on false memory. If only they had consulted even one expert on flashbacks involving false memories, or memories of any kind, or flashbacks of any kind. Here is a movie in which the present functions mostly as a launching pad for the past, which is a hotbed of half-remembered out-of-focus screams, knives, secrets, blood, and piano lessons.
As the story opens, Amanda (Lisa Brenner) is planning her first visit to her grandmother, Esther (Louise Fletcher), when she gets a message that Esther has died. Esther’s death doesn’t deprive Fletcher of screen time, however, since she’s present in so many flashbacks that the timeline could have just been flipped, with the story taking place in the past with flash-forwards. To be sure, the flashbacks are confused and fragmented, but the present-day scenes don’t make any more sense, even though we can see and hear them, which you might think would be an advantage.
Amanda’s grandmother owned and operated an inn on a Maine island. The inn is one of those New England clapboard jobs with a dock and cozy public rooms and two or three floors of guest rooms. Hold that thought. We’ll need it. Because of whatever happened more than ten years ago, Amanda has been forbidden to ever mention the grandmother or the inn to her mother, Grace (Jeannetta Arnette). When Amanda is ferried to the island in a boat piloted by Dave (Misha Collins), she focuses on his knife with such intensity we’re reminded of the zoom-lens eye belonging to Alastor (“Mad-Eye”) Moody in the new Harry Potter picture. Admittedly, a character who toys with a knife all the time in a movie makes you think.
Dave is a nice young man, ostensibly, although he spends an alarming amount of time in his work shed, carving large blocks of wood into measurably smaller ones. “Who is that going to be?” Amanda asks him of one block that already looks so much like Amanda it might as well be wearing a name tag. “I don’t know who is inside it yet,” he says, a dead giveaway that he has read The Agony and the Ecstasy and knows that with Amanda he can safely steal anything Michelangelo ever said.
“You and Dave were inseparable,” Amanda is told by Katie (Genevieve Bujold), her grandmother’s best friend, who has managed the inn for years. Then what happened to make Amanda fear him so, and dislike him so, and stare so at his knife? I personally think Katie knows the whole story: “Something happened between your mother and grandmother that summer,” she also tells Amanda. And, “Can you really believe what she tells you about that summer?”
Before we can answer these questions, Amanda’s mother Grace herself arrives on the island, along with, let’s see, thumbing through my notes here, the family lawyer (Jason Miller), Amanda’s boss and boyfriend, Nick (Johnny Messner), Amanda’s best friend, Candace (Sherri Saum), her boyfriend, C.J. (Andrew Lukich), and the accountant Prescott (Justin Henry), who after all the trouble that nice Dustin Hoffman went to on his behalf in Kramer vs. Kramer has grown up to be a bad accountant. There is room for all these visitors because not a single guest is ever seen at the inn.
But hold on, how do I know Prescott is incompetent? Have you kept the inn fixed in your memory as I requested? The dock, the cozy public rooms, the clapboard siding, several acres of forested grounds? The hardwood floors, the pewter, the quilts, the Arts & Crafts furniture, the canned preserves? The smell of apple pies in the oven? Well, Amanda discovers that she has inherited the inn from her grandmother, who cut off Grace with a lousy brooch. Prescott the accountant then estimates that the inn could sell for, oh, about $400,000. It is unspeakably rude for a movie critic to talk aloud during a screening, but at the screening I attended, someone cried out, “I’ll buy it!” I shamefully admit that person was me.
Are Dave and Katie the caretaker depressed that Amanda might sell her grandmother’s inn? Not as much as you might think. Does this have anything to do with the flashbacks, the screams, the blood, the knife, and the piano lessons? Not as much as you might think. Did Dave sexually assault Amanda ten years ago? Not as much as you might think. Why does another character choose this moment to announce she is pregnant? Who could the father be? Given the Law of Economy of Characters, it has to be someone on the island. Or maybe it was someone in one of the flashbacks, who flash-forwarded in a savage act of phallic time travel and then slunk back to the past, the beast.
The solution to the mysteries, when it comes, is not so much anti-climactic as not climactic at all. I think it is wrong to bring a false memory on board only to discover that it is really false. After what this movie puts us through, the false memory should at least have a real false memory concealed beneath it. What were all those experts for?
First Descent
(DIRECTED BY KEMP CURLY AND KEVIN HARRISON; STARRING SHAWN FARMER, TERJE HAAKONSEN; 2005)
First Descent is boring, repetitive, and maddening about a subject you’d think would be fairly interesting: Snowboarding down a mountain. And not just any mountain. This isn’t about snowboarders at Aspen or Park City. It’s about experts who are helicoptered to the tops of virgin peaks in Alaska, and snowboard down what look like almost vertical slopes.
I know nothing about snowboarding. A question occurs to me. If it occurs to me, it will occur to other viewers. The question is this: How do the snowboarders know where they are going? In shot after shot, they hurtle off snow ledges into thin air, and then land dozens or hundreds of feet lower on another slope. Here’s my question: As they approach the edge of the ledge, how can they know for sure what awaits them over the edge? Wouldn’t they eventually be surprised, not to say dismayed, to learn that they were about to drop half a mile? Or land on rocks? Or fall into a chasm? Shouldn’t the mountains of Alaska be littered with the broken bodies of extreme snowboarders?
I search the Internet and find that indeed snowboarders die not infrequently. “All I heard was Gore-Tex on ice,” one survivor recalls after two of his companions disappeared. The movie vaguely talks about scouting a mountain from the air and picking out likely descent paths, but does the mountain look the same when you’re descending it at forty-five degrees and high speed? Can rocks be hidden just beneath the surface? Can crevices be hidden from the eye?
The film features five famous names in the sport: Veterans Shawn Farmer, Terje Haakonsen, and Nick Perata, and teenage superstars Hannah Teter and Shaun White. For at least twenty minutes at the top of the movie, they talk and talk about the “old days,” the “new techniques,” the “gradual acceptance” of snowboarding, the way ski resorts first banned snowboarders but now welcome them. “As the decade progressed, so did snowboarding,” we learn at one point, leading me to reflect that as the decade progressed, so did time itself.