Detention (2011): Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am!
Nyarko-san: Another Crawling Chaos (2012) aka Haiyore! Naruko-san aka Haiyore! Nyarlko-chan: Sometimes, it would be easier to be among the number of people who can declare movies - or in this case anime shows - to be a guilty pleasure, something to look down on from on high and enjoy ironically. Sadly or fortunately, I don't have that sort of barrier protecting me from actually enjoying stuff, and so it can happen that I'll go out and shout at all the world that'll hear it: "Oh boy, this generic, clichéd and low-brow anime romantic comedy - with mandatory fourth wall breaking - is often really funny, at least if you enjoy laughing about its millions of Lovecraft/Cthulhu Mythos and pop culture related jokes per episode!". Then, people look at me funny and at best mumble some crap about the show probably being "so bad that it's good", when it is in fact good enough to make me laugh. Repeatedly.
The Clairvoyant (1935): Music hall clairvoyant Maximus (Claude Rains) suddenly develops actual prophetic powers when in the presence of a woman (Jane Baxter) not his wife. After various melodramatic happenings, our hero's marriage to a pre-blonde Fay Wray is on the ropes, and he's standing in court for causing the catastrophes he foresees.
Let's start with the positive: Wray and Rains really play well with each other, and Wray's more naturalistic acting style often helps reign in the cinematically less experienced Rains's tendency to just stare at the camera and declare his (pretty terrible) dialogue melodramatically like a bad stage actor. Unfortunately, that's about it: as a supernatural melodrama, the film's just not very interesting. The melodrama seems far-fetched, things happen because they are in the script instead of having the fated feeling they are supposed to have, and the film's treatment of the actually pretty fine ideas at its core is buried beneath tonal insecurity and complete lack of characterization (just try and describe Rains's character with a different word than "melodramatic").
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