Saturday, January 19, 2013

On Bloody Sunday (2007)

After an opening scene of a mother and daughter - who are they?   Do they have anything to do with our story? - we cut abruptly to Isabel, a reporter for the high school newspaper.  Isabel is trying to break a big story about an illegal underground fighting ring.  Some popular kids who are working on a class project with Isabel manage to get her and her friend Zeek into one of the fights.

Isabel, who doesn't know the meaning of the word discrete, brings a tape recorder and shoves a mic into a guys face to ask him what he knows about missing teenagers in the area.  Isabel and Zeek barely manage to escape without being beaten to a pulp.

Next Isabel discovers an online bulletin board which has announcements for underground fights.  In another brilliant sleuth-like move, she posts a message asking who is responsible for the posts about the fights because she's doing an investigation about them.  Good god she's not only an idiot, she's a lousy journalist.

When she gets an invite on Myspace to a Street Style bike event, she jumps at the chance to investigate.  Why she believes there's a connection between the underground fighting, teen disappearances, and the bike event is never revealed.  But I'm sure it's faulty logic based on her methodology.  Also she fails to realize that the invite she received was via a high school group on Myspace.  In other words, anyone belonging to the group was invited, not exactly a private, secret, personal invitation.

When she shows up at the street event, the kids competing tell her to leave because she doesn't belong there.  Uh, so maybe they shouldn't have posted the invite to the public group for their high school?  Our intrepid reports starts to leave as asked, but then decides to make a stand to the anonymous person who invited her.  Does she still not realize it was a generic Myspace group invite? She's standing on a dark lane yelling, "You got me out here.  What do you want with me?"

There are tons of continuity errors and plot holes.  Continuity issues include:
  • scenes that go from day to night and back again
  • a message about bike event is posted in past tense, yet the event is occurring at that very moment
  • the bike event is 45 minutes away - she gets there on her own, but drives back with Zeek. How did she manage to get there?
  • It's the mothers story, yet the time line makes no sense. Her daughter is in either high school or jr high, but Myspace didn't exist when mom was a kid, so what's up with that?
Isabel is a horrible reporter and if she was dealing with real criminals, she surely have been killed by now.  I hope she doesn't decide to go into journalism because she'll be dead within a week. Ridiculous film with ridiculous ending, and did they really think we couldn't guess who the killer was?

Most ludicrous dialogue-

Detective:  Let the big boys handle this
Isabel (angrily):  So you can take my leads?!

Oh god, just let them kill her.

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