(M) Chain Camera (Kirby Dick, 2001). Grade: C+
Over the course of a year at John Marshall High School in LA, ten video cameras are handed to students to chronicle their lives for a week, and after a week, they pass the video camera onto the next student, and the next, and so on. This documentary features 16 of those students and their lives. The documentarians were too ambitious, showing too little about too many students, causing the stories to be forgettable. Some of the student's stories are real and heartbreaking, others just plain silly, and characteristic of those awkward teenage years. Perhaps it would have been more effective to focus on less students, and delve deeper into their lives over the course of the year.

(M) Tomie: Rebirth (Takashi Shimizu, 2001). Grade: F
Tomie, an art model, is murdered by an artist, but she doesn't just die, she comes back and starts haunting the artist and his friends. She is murdered again, and continues to regenerate and haunt the circle of friends. Regenerates, like a sponge. Uh huh. She gets beheaded, and soon, her head can be seen rolling down the alley, with spindly arms and legs, like some strange science fiction creature. She even grows inside other people. This movie makes no sense, there are no explanations offered AT ALL (like, why did the artist kill her in the opening scene?), and it just shows how Japanese people are f'd up. Haha. This movie is actually part of a series, so maybe if I watched the others it would explain more. Yeah, right. I hated this movie. And I even fell asleep halfway in between. But what else is new?