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Reviews
Heavenly Creatures (1994)
overlong, badly acted, bad special effects
Two Girls form a Lesbian relationship and kill to protect it.
Yawn.
Well that's the stereotype over and done with now for the movie...
This film has little enough charm: it's overlong, character development is replaced by screaming and girning and then there's the special effects.
Now perhaps I was spoiled as I recently watched Operazione Paura and La Maschera Del Demonio but I can not understand why Peter Jackson opted for Digital Effects rather than camera trickery for this film. The effects look dated now while the sophisticated lo-fi tricks of Bava are still spellbinding and beautiful.
Indeed La Maschera Del Demonio highlights another problem with this film: the woeful acting. Bava's characters all act in very formal, staged ways and Jackson tries to do something similar but his conceit falls flat on it's face through the inability of Kate Winslet to act her way out of a paper bag. Kate Winslet's acting reminds me of the old joke that an actor only has two expressions 'hat on and hat off' but in her case this is 'kooky and extra kooky.' Winslet girns, screams and shouts her way through the whole film leaving to poor viewer with a feeling similar to discovering a stone in one's shoe while on a forced march through the desert.
In short a failure in almost every respect. It got two marks for Serah Pierse's wonderful, nuanced performance.
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
offensive, overlong and heterosexual
two cowboys meet, fall in lust, marry and continue their relationship behind their wife's backs, mope about...
That's about it for this film. I know other people may claim it's a great love story but, frankly, there allot better ones out there and there's decidedly more Queer ones too.
This film concerns the relationship between two bisexual cowboys who are (alas!) torn apart and eventually destroyed because of their love. Well isn't that an example of Heterosexual Cinema's love affair with the suffering homosexual? Everything is present and correct for a Homophobic representation of Queer Men: the disgust at their sexuality, the pain and suffering and one is even killed by the end of the film (one is reminded of the convention of the Queer dieing in the last reel.) A step forward? A Gay classic? No, just another Heterosexual movie, just another violence visited on the metaphorical (and, within the frame of the movie, actual) flesh of Queer people, just another white Heterosexual Liberal movie for white Heterosexual Liberals.
On a formal level the film is well shot but overlong. Given it's excessive running time the film can't even manage any real character development: the lead characters go round in circles and the female characters are thin and unconvincing.
1 out of 10 and that's just because there's a pretty mountain in the opening scene.
Solamente nero (1978)
Guilt, Catholic ritual and death.
A Professor visits his Priest Brother on an isolated Island near Venice to recover from stress brought on by flashbacks related to a Childhood trauma. On his first night his Brother witnesses a murder and later begins to receive notes from the murderer threatening (what appears to be) violence. The brothers begin investigating the crime and the expected red herrings, pov shots etceteras entail...
What separates this film from the Giallo of Argento and co. is not it's lack of that genera's expected tricks (black gloved killer, inventive murders, pov shots) as these are all referenced in knowing ways (the Director even discuses his debt to Argento in an interview included on the Blue Underground DVD) but it's obsession with guilt, loneliness and existential pain. The film's washed out colours and waterlogged settings alienate us not just from the surroundings but even from the visual aspects of the film, the aspect of film itself, the idea of entertainment. Instead we focus on the character's interior life's: their traumas, their loneliness, their religious doubts.
The film features great performances, beautiful editing techniques and an ironic echo of the Catholic Rite of Confession wherein it is not the killer's confession that provides the relief from suffering but the discovery of the killer, the release from childhood trauma.
Watch with Fulci's Non si sevizia un paperino rather than Susperia and have a catholic encyclopedia open.