Change Your Image
Pozdnyshev
Reviews
Dune (2021)
Eh, It Was Alright
This was a pretty good science fiction movie. You understand the motivations of all the characters, and the plot makes sense. But there was just something somehow lacking in its substance.
The main character, the Chalamet dude, I'm not sure what it is about him but I just never fully bought him as the Chosen One. Even though he went through all the motions, struggling to improve his skills, he still struck me as just some skinny snot-nosed rich kid. The guy in Lynch's Dune, I don't know, I just somehow bought him as both high-born AND a warrior.
The film had an annoying and manipulative habit of drawing scenes out far longer than they should have, and absolutely drenching them in music. I found this unnecessary. Like, you'll be seeing yet another panoramic shot of vast almond-shaped ships dropping bombs on a desert city and the aboriginal singers will start belching to the beat of jungle toms and there's a huge flashing sign that says "EMOTIONAL MOMENT." it's like yeah, I get it.
But then sorry, I just don't really care that much about the characters. Like the movie just isn't as profound as it thinks it is, despite the millions of dollars being thrown on the screen.
A big gripe is how they portrayed the Harkonnens. Like holy wow, what a grand chance to show an awful villain in the Baron. Well they dropped the ball. His first toady played by the big guy from the comic book movies looked the part, but the Baron himself... He wasn't scary. He was just disgusting. He was a languid old fat guy who was photographed and soundtracked like he was SUPPOSED to be scary, but he just wasn't. He barely even friggin' does anything!
But still, as a modern movie (most of which are terrible), it was okay. There wasn't any obnoxious Wokeness in it. I give it a 6.
Howard the Duck (1986)
Painful, Interesting Failure
This legendary turkey of a movie happens to be personal to me. I loved it as a child, or rather I loved its special effects.
I recently re-watched this childfhood flick of mine to see it with grown-up eyes. And oh my God, it's bad. Yeah I loved it as a child, but I literally cringed and covered my face through like 60% of it, it was so bad.
Why? Well that's more interesting than most of the movie. To me, it's not the stupid plot where a "laser beam" somehow can target one individual on a planet trillions of parsecs away and instantaneously spirit it back to earth. No, what makes this movie an abomination to me is this insufferably stupid quality in the way the characters were written, and the way they interact with each other.
It's hard to articulate, but the writers seemed to have a certain type of humor in mind here that just never EVER works the way they intend it to. Everyone is a cartoon character with no depth at all, just a certain schtick that defines them. Philsey the scientist is a loud, hyper-energetic goof. Beverly is a hot chick who develops an implausible crush on an anthropomorphic duck. The cop wants to arrest Howard, "dead or alive." There is an absolutely lifeless void here where pathos and some personal conflict should be.
I don't know what they were shooting for with this kind of character writing, but what they got was a million dollar high school play that had less emoptional depth than a saturday morning cartoon. It holds a close kinship to Broadway (which I despise) in a strange sort of way in that its utter lack of darkness makes it unbearably trite, insipid, and saccharine.
I will say that the special effects still look pretty awesome, especially the go-motion monster at the end from an animation genius at the top of his game (Phil Tippett).
Should you watch it? It's got top-shelf production values and great special effects. It's an interesting failure that you may want to experience once. It's a rare and well-produced turd which probably proceeded from success going to the filmmaker's heads, like this movie's spiritual cousin "Zardoz."
It (2017)
People Don't Seem To Get That This Was Terrible
I hated this movie.
I can't be arsed to go into too much detail. I'll just give my general impressions.
This movie was marketed as having been adapted from Stephen King's modern classic "It." It was about seven children who come together one summer to overcome both their unique personal challenges, and a supernatural monster in their town that feeds on kids every 27 years. It's a brilliant story, a passionate giant of a book.
This movie reduces it into a typical, cliché-ridden, unintelligent, and very bland horror film.
Taken on its own, and without any expectations, it is a fairly decent throwaway popcorn-flick to entertain teenagers. The photography is good. The writing is extremely superficial but still has a thin arc. The special effects are okay. And the jump-scares are amusing for some people.
Taken as an adaptation of the novel, it's an abomination. There is so little character development that by the end of the movie, you can barely tell one character from another. You don't care about any of them because you don't get to know them. They are all contrived cardboard cutouts, and this very much includes the villain "Pennywise" who looks ridiculous, and is reduced to a one-dimensional boogeyman whose existence and motivation is never explained.
The jump scares never end. What the film calls "horror" is an extremely cheap bunch of sound-blasts along with startling close-ups of the handful of mediocre monsters.
The general feel of this movie was one that was written and directed by people who had no idea what the original story they'd adapted this from was about; they just cherry-picked a handful of superficial details (a very few of which I must admit they did right -- the Leper and Butch Bowers' murder) and then added in a bunch of their own ideas which were just weird and stupid (a pharmacist propositioning Beverly? Pennywise beat to death with metal pipes???).
There is a very strange phenomenon going on where people seem to love this movie. I don't fully understand this except that these people don't understand what makes good cinema, and resent anyone who tries to make them aware of this. it's weird, isn't it? it reminds me of feminism, this pig-headed denial of reality. I hazard a guess that it's some weird manifestation of people in America's discontent with a republican presidency.
(edit) never before in my life have I encountered a phenomenon like the almost rabid popular defense of terrible movies like "It 2017" or "Ghostbusters 2016."
Having a profound love of good art, I have had countless arguments with people who think I am wrong in hating these films. All of these arguments have ended in them hurling insults like petulant toddlers in a pram because their love for these rotting placental afterbirths are purely emotional.
What is going on?
Basically, this generation is not just getting more stupid, which is made apparent by their incapacity to recognize banal-assed filmmaking when they see it. they are also possessed of a certain narcissistic constellation of attitudes towards life that border on sociopathic. Their basic paradigm is that there is no right or wrong, and anyone who tries to force them to follow any rules at all is a bad person.
Like closet Nazis, they cling to anything that promotes these sick values with a hysterical fervor. Some more, some less.
That's why some people say they love these movies. Not because they are good movies, but because they promote a certain worldview of cynical selfishness and a disregard for truth and beauty. It's Leftist propaganda.
Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010)
All Style And Little Substance... But It's Alright...
Beyond the Black Rainbow starts out with a lot of promise: a creepy early-80s style video shows some priest-like doctor who tells us about his team of scientists and how they've found some groundbreaking new therapy that will give us all the happiness we want. It's got a very clear "Heaven's Gate" vibe to it, which was a real-life cult from around that time that culminated in them committing suicide.
From the MK ULTRA overtones conjured by the title, and the highly intelligent dialogue of the doctor, I had an idea that the movie was about to be headed into some sickeningly entertaining territory. Something with the feel of Lynch's "Twin Peaks."
Unfortunately, the movie is really more of an homage to early 80s Cronenberg than it is a story on its own. I love weird movies that don't make sense to most people, but I guess this one went over my head because it's like a jumble of images that really don't tell much of a story; it all adds up to this creepy but kind of boring non-sequitur.
Like... Well... So there's this chick in a mental hospital, Elena, and she's really messed up. The doctor, "Barry," is fairly sadistic towards her. When a nurse sadistically mocks Elena for clinging to a picture of her mother, the nurse gets telepathically killed by Elena a la Scanners. So... Elena, I guess, is a mind-control experiment where I guess they traumatize her in an effort to develop her psychic powers.
Great. Then who is Barry? What exactly is that pyramid thing that apparently is a source of ultimate terror to the girl? I dunno.
Then, via flashback, we see that Barry murdered someone when under the influence of some psychedelic drug. Uhhh... Okay... So that's the whole mystery then? A doctor gone nuts after taking some bad acid, like in "Blue Sunshine?" Okay. Great. And now Barry's still psycho, and is taking it out on Elena, I guess.
No grand scheme. Doctor Arboria is a feeble old man whom Barry apparently euthanizes at his request(???). Which, again, doesn't move the plot along or provide intrigue, it's just kind of "WTF." Some genuinely scary imagery here and there, but when you erase all the scribbly lines I think what I'm left with is just a very cliché story dolled up in some 80s retro psychedelia. It's literally like a 60s art-house film crossed with early 80s Cronenberg, but just... The story doesn't make sense.
Silent Hill (2006)
Surprisingly Good, Imaginative Horror Movie
Wow. I've been saying for a while that most horror movies made after around 2000 are bad. But this one was actually pretty good. I have never played the video game, so this is a review of the movie on its own.
A spooky little girl sleepwalks out to a quarry in the middle of the night. Her hot mother chases her and saves her from plunging to her death into some hellish hallucination of what looks like a bunch of rusty catwalks above molten steel.
The plot is pretty complicated, but basically the girl was adopted from this mysterious town called "Silent Hill." The mother, for some reason, wants to take her daughter there as a way to help her psychosis. When she does get there, she and this woman cop who followed her somehow slip into a parallel reality where this ghost town is always foggy and is constantly raining ashes. The place, it turns out, is infested with deadly and Lovecraftian things that attack them. And every few hours, everything turns dark and there are even more monsters around.
The movie really succeeds in creating a creepy atmosphere. That's what I really appreciated about it. Unfortunately, the way they tied up the reasons behind this hell on earth were a bit lame.
Like, it turns out that this literal Hell on Earth is some kind of fallout created by the town's former occupants. Okay, I totally buy that. But then, what exactly did they do to create a freaking tear in the very fabric of reality? An unholy combination of abominably black magic over hundreds of years, millions of incredibly horrific human sacrifices, and an already unclean location that God himself had forsaken?
... No... It's the vengeful rage of a little girl who had a crappy life and then was burned as a witch. Now this WAS creepy in a way, because yes, severe trauma DOES invite evil into the human heart. Totally buy that. Anyone is capable of turning into a monster after they've been tortured enough.
But... ONE LITTLE GIRL'S SUFFERING and ONE DEMON just isn't enough energy to create a damned interdimensional glitch in the matrix. Not on this massive scale.
Kill a few people? Sure. Drive quite a few people mad? Absolutely. Put together a small, messed-up death cult? Sure, I'd buy that. Haunt an isolated location? yeah totally. But they couldn't turn an entire town into a Cannibal Corpse music video populated with lethal demonic creatures. That's just absurd.
That's my only gripe. But I can easily forgive that because it was an otherwise smart movie (yes I said smart -- the bar is pretty low right now), and the monsters and locations were genuinely scary.
John Carter (2012)
Mediocre On Too Many Levels
John Carter, I understood, had the biggest budget to date of any movie ever made. It cost like a quarter billion dollars, so I went into it expecting something special. Unfortunately, it failed to deliver on too many levels to be anything more than a flashy but banal science fiction flick.
The story is that there's a Confederate soldier (Carter) from the American civil war who finds a cave where he is mysteriously teleported to the planet Mars, or "Barsoom" as the natives call it. The difference in the two planet's gravities gives Carter great strength. With the help of a hot woman warrior, he helps the good aliens beat the bad aliens or something, I can't remember. Then he gets teleported back to Earth.
Okay so like, the special effects are ubiquitous and of course quite well done. Endless armies of fully animated humanoid warrior-aliens in extremely complex native-American getup are seamlessly composited with the live action in scene after scene. The scenes at the alien city and at this giant hive or whatever are incredibly detailed, like a cross between Lord of the Rings' "Lothlorien" and Avatar.
But... It just feels hollow because I'm not seeing anything I haven't seen before. It's not really imaginative, it's just breath-taking in a fifty-foot card castle kind of way. Okay, a city made out of red twisted tree roots. Great. Why? Oh look, humanoids with anteater snouts. Like that wasn't done thirty years ago in "Star Wars". Yawn.
I didn't care about the characters. There was more chemistry between the animated characters than there was between the two leads, which wasn't much at all. Carter is supposed to be smart, but he comes across as a kind of dumb good-ol'-boy, the kind of tough but good-natured guy you knew in high school who would get drunk on beer and pee off of rooftops like it's the funniest thing in the world. The warrior chick had a lesbian vibe to her. It was weird.
Last but not least, this is supposed to be based on the first science fiction story ever written. Well if that's so, then it was a kind of lame story. The only chunks of science fiction here are teleportation for no reason, and a planet's gravity's effect on one's strength.
Un chien andalou (1929)
Early-Stage Cancer
This strange little pioneering Surrealist film from 1929 has an overflowing handful of interesting images, and is also quite boring. But I also think it's an early example of societal decay being re-packaged as "groundbreaking." Just look at the images they use. There is an androgynous woman being protected by the police while she puts a severed hand into a box. Then there's a guy dressed up as a nun riding a bike, with the same box. There is a softcore porn scene, extreme violence in close-up, and a man's mouth morphing into a woman's muff.
These are provocative images that mess with facets of human sexuality and the urge for violence that really should be left alone. Men aren't women, and women aren't men, 99% of the time. Period. You mess with people's identities, and this includes gender, then you get serious mental illness.
I happen to believe that this was a film deeply informed by an understanding of human psychology, and how to manipulate it. Yes there are taboos in culture, but they are there for a reason -- if everyone is a mental patient, then the world becomes an asylum. Which most old-timers agree we have now.
Funny, I read Bunuel was also vehemently anti-religion. Huh. Doesn't like absolute morality. I bet he doesn't, people are easier to exploit that way.
Mama (2013)
Top-Shelf Craftsmanship, But Cookie-Cutter Story
Okay, so some guy goes nuts and shoots his wife. He takes his two daughters out to an abandoned cabin and is about to kill them, too, but is then stopped by a ghost who happens to be at the cabin. Great... Okay, so it was a ghost who was maybe unjustly murdered in a similar way. I can buy that.
But then, even after paying some guys to look all over the place for his body, the guy's brother only finds this cabin (and the girls, who are still there) -- five years later. Really? It took you all that time? Okay, fine, whatever. So the girls are feral and apparently have been helped along by this mysterious, vengeful spirit which they call "Mama."
The guy's brother, and his weird over-the-hill Goth girlfriend, agree to look after the children as they are rehabilitated with the help of a psychologist. Unfortunately, this spirit follows them.
Cue faux-creepy dream sequences, jump scares, and the psychologist slowly uncovering the truth that The Supernatural Is Real.
Turns out "Mama" is the ghost of some violently crazy lady in the nineteenth century who died while drowning a baby she stole from a local church. There is a dream sequence showing this which is genuinely disturbing, although in a disgusting snuff-film kind of way.
"Mama," predictably, wreaks havoc on everyone involved, including killing several people with more ease than a trained assassin. Call me a parapsychology nerd, but human ghosts generally do not have this kind of power. "Mama" slinks around and offs victims like a multi-dimensional Green Beret. This just makes it silly to me.
The ending was just confusing. It's funny, everything about this movie was perfect except for the story. The acting, the photography, the music, and the editing was all incredibly seamless. But the story was bland and cookie-cutter, just another forgettable horror flick.
Sausage Party (2016)
Reinforces A Crappy View Of Humanity
this is yet another Bread & Circuses type of movie where whatever crass and lowest-common-denominator attitudes and values held by most 12-40-year-olds are put in a blender and regurgitated. This time it's in the form of a dippy-ass animated story about supermarket food. Specifically, the love story between a hot dog and a hot dog bun. Oh, brother.
Why does everything in Hollywood have to be so damned gay now? And I don't mean "gay" in a homosexual-bashing kind of way, necessarily (though I am sick of seeing homosexuality being put on a pedestal; I get it, some people are freaks, shut up!). I mean "gay" in a "banal, immature, and stupid" kind of way. The biggest "joke" in this movie is how the men are represented by hot dogs, and the women are hot dog buns. Huh huh huh how clever HAHAHA the hot dogs are penises, and the buns are vaginas HAHAHA holy sh*t go kill yourself.
This is a propaganda movie that just vomits a nihilistic, crappy view of humanity in our faces. I'll save you the trouble: -sophistication means watching an animated movie with cuss words in it -belief in God is unconditionally backwards -recreational drug use is acceptable -sexual immorality has no consequences -homosexuality is acceptable and not weird or inappropriate, ever -humans are little more than their reproductive organs, -profane horse-sht makes a good movie because we're, like, breaking the rules.
I remember when I was young and thought that Atheism and Subjectivism was the neatest thing in the whole world. Then I grew up and realized that they are mostly very juvenile ideologies that have such mass appeal only because they provide a compelling rationalization for unconditional selfishness. Yeah boo God and absolute morality... retards.
I'll say it now. I don't like most young people because they are the kinds of shallow-minded idiots who watch and enjoy crap like this. They bitch about how religion is brainwashing, but then they totally see the media as a religion. They never use their minds to question the f@ggot-assed bilge being foisted on them by "entertainment" like this.
This is propaganda. Good propaganda, but one that serves to kind of keep people in a state of suspended adolescence.
It looked pretty good, though.
Star Trek Beyond (2016)
It's A Typical Sci Fi Blockbuster
Meh. Unbelievable special effects. Freakin profligate amounts of custom props, sets, costumes, and make-up. Mind-blowing CGI.
Unfortunately, the story itself is just kinda meh. Everything about this movie felt phoned-in compared to the sheer visual spectacle, which I know required a damned army of craftsmen and untold millions to pull off. But still, if that's the only reason to see a movie, then it's more like a monster truck rally. Excitement is the only thing it has going for it.
Y'know, it's a kinda pedestrian, it starts with the Enterprise -- headed by a too-young Captain Kirk who just lacks the charisma to chew scenery the way he should -- being suckered into an ambush by some new Bad Guy who kidnaps most of the crew, and leaves the rest stranded on a nearby planet.
With the aid of a Mary Sue warriorette, the captain and a few others manage to fight back. They find out the Big Bad is, weird facial features notwithstanding, a former Federation officer who was embittered after being betrayed, and seeks revenge with the help of this ancient relic which apparently can be turned into a hydrogen bomb or something. Yawn.
The chemistry between all the actors felt phony and uninspired. There didn't seem to be any over-arching theme or allegory to make the whole thing interesting to me, except for the paper-thin concept of forgiveness vs. revenge.
That's what made the earlier Star Trek so interesting, IMHO. The spaceships and aliens were just gaudy stage-dressing around themes like the existence of God, megalomania, mortality, etc. It was like a subtle and nerdy meditation. These new movies throw all that out the window in favor of explosions and over-the-top CGI.
Borgman (2013)
Chilling but kinda unbelievable
I had heard about "Borgman" as being a movie about some guy, apparently a fallen angel, who slowly destroys an affluent family from within by sheer cunning plus a few little supernatural tricks like affecting their dreams. I happen to think that's pretty damned creepy, so I watched the movie.
That's basically what happens in the movie, too, except the master "Borgman" guy (who looks like a cross between Max Von Sydow and Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson) has some help from some buddies of his who are just as evil and cunning as he is.
He invites them in as gardeners after he manages to wrap the lady of the house around his finger by putting on a "poor abused tramp who hasn't had a wash" act. The thing is, though, is that I just don't buy the lady of the house coming to care about him as much as she did. I mean, she practically begs him to stay. For some reason I can believe that he can affect people's dreams, but the ease with which he gains total control of her makes it a little lame. It's like he's almost omnipotent, so there's too little conflict. Like pitting Professor X versus, I dunno, Randy Quaid.
The same goes for when one of his buddies (Pascal) transforms the house nanny from a sweet, kind of airheaded young woman into a vicious shrew who suddenly hates her boyfriend and fawningly loves Pascal. I don't know; it's like, I know they're fallen angels and all, or at least one of them is. But it's just not as interesting when they have these superhuman powers of manipulation. Dude even Jim Jones would have to take at least a few days plus a position of esteem -- not a damn gardener living in a shed -- to completely turn someone to their will.
The movie is still very well-made, I just couldn't buy these awesome powers the Borgmen had. And oh yeah, they go around murdering people in broad daylight without the police being on to them at all, which also made the movie more boring than disturbing. Like, they go to the family doctor's office and just shoot him in the head without even a silencer. I guess their Deus Ex Machina Fallen Angel powers kept the police from caring about it.
Without giving away too much, the Borgmen eventually wind up triumphant. This left me with the question, "what was the point?" Not the point the Borgmen had of recruiting new members, I got that. No, it's like, what was the point of this movie? What's it trying to say? "Here, watch these imaginary fallen angels ruin a family for two hours"? Without a real-world analog to really link these events to, it ultimately comes across as an extremely well-crafted but kinda lightweight flick.
The VVitch: A New-England Folktale (2015)
Autistic Family Drama with Horror Elements
Just saw this at the theater. I think it is worth seeing because I just plain believed the drama playing out on screen. This is because the acting was very good. It looked beautiful (of course). And the writing was believable.
Basically there's a family patriarch in colonial America who pulls up stakes at his village and tries to resettle out in the wilderness over some kind of moral/religious disagreement with the town elders. The strain of living off the land all on their own, then, is naturally no good for the friction in the family. To top it off, their isolation makes them vulnerable to a coven of witches in the forest nearby who kidnap, murder, and/or craftily turn them on one another.
I'll get the flaws out of the way: the movie has an annoying, pretentious habit of lingering on certain shots for WAY too long. Yes the acting and writing is really good, I really do feel like I'm in the 1600s with this family to whom religion is the center of existence. But the camera freakin lingers on the boy Caleb getting a bandage around his chest for what feels like half an hour... On an agonizingly slow pan up to the treetops of the forest while loud and dissonant music brays like a wounded jackass... It distracts from the narrative and almost feels like a film student who's smitten with his own brilliance.
Also Caleb's death scene was really stupid and drawn out. It clubbed me over the head with "CRAZY POSSESSED CHILD HIJINX" so hard that I almost got a concussion. There's a strange feeling I got that the movie, like, makes you expect something cool to happen (like, I dunno, the mutation scenes in John Carpenter's "The Thing"), but they never do... We just get actors acting crazy and fake blood and loud music. Kinda like a hamburger without the patty.
One exception was a scene involving a crow and a bloody boob. That was clever and a little creepy.
But still, the movie is interesting because it somehow rings true. It said it was based on true accounts of witches, and I believe it. Witches are not nice. They do not mean well. They are monsters who hate everything good, and Christianity is the only thing that really challenges them. There may have been a few good reasons behind the witch hunts.
La montaña sagrada (1973)
Amazingly astonishing visuals... But kinda sickening
The impression this movie made on me was like how I feel about Donald Trump: masterful propaganda that is bona fide genius in some ways, but at the same time gives me this uneasy feeling that it's really not all it's cracked up to be.
A lot of glowing things people say about this movie are totally true. This movie has the MOST amazing visuals I have ever seen, and they were all done only using props and locations -- no CGI. Not even any particularly sophisticated practical effects like in a billion-dollar Guillermo Del Toro flick.
And the "symbolism" very often does seem to point to interesting hidden truths. For instance, the protagonist resembles Jesus, but he is shown passed out and soaked in his own urine. Is Jodorowski encouraging us to have as much compassion for our debauched and unworthy selves as Jesus? Is his use of deformed actors a clever allegory for how we relate to aspects of ourselves which we consider inferior or unworthy?
There's a lot of these sweet little rabbit-hole invitations throughout this movie. But then this profoundly allegorical vision-fest throws a whole lot of disgusting images and themes at me that don't exalt or provoke thought, they just repel.
An army of people holding up skinned and crucified dogs? WTF does that have to do with anything? An old man giving his prosthetic eye to a pre-pubescent prostitute? A titan of industry who makes decisions based on whether the mannequin of his dead wife's pussy is wet or not? Oh yeah, and how seven of the world's most powerful and evil people are treated to a guided path to enlightenment rather than being punished.
What's this supposed to mean? I guess that I should cheer them on because the movie is so visually amazing. Bleah. The whole thing is gorgeous and intelligent, but the spirit behind is just somehow decadent and sick.
Yellow Submarine (1968)
Lame Children's Cartoon Redeemed by Sheer Uniqueness
even if you're not a Beatles fan, even if "psychedelia" isn't your thing, I do believe this 60s time-capsule has enough going for it to where it's worth watching. Maybe not multiple times, but at least once.
This bears saying because it IS kind of stupid, when you break it down to its bare elements. The idyllic English countryside fantasy-world of "Pepperland" has been taken over by the "Blue Meanies," and only the Beatles can stop them. So it's a surreal but nonsensical journey from the Beatles' Liverpool to Pepperland, punctuated by a bunch of their songs which have very little to do with the story. Plus a handful of jokes which are painfully un-funny.
This totally would be an embarrassingly trite cash-grab if not for the truly interesting and unique art direction, which really has nothing to do with the Beatles at all except for them both exploiting a psychedelic look. This Czech guy, Heinz Edelmann, designed everything with this neon-tubed, pop-art, minimalist look that really works.
Even better are the weird images and effects that pop up, especially during the musical sequences. Like the Oscilloscope under the face-caricatures in "Only a Northern Song," or the rotoscoped acrobats in "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." I can see how many would find this all to be just artsy-fartsy nonsense, but for me it works. Even without any apparent underlying meaning, it somehow feels both whimsical and sad, in a good way.
In summation, this movie is well-financed Outsider Art. It's trite, but it's also well-developed in some ways. And there's nothing else out there quite like it.
Across the Universe (2007)
Stupid
I was brought along to see this with some relatives. They had drank the Kool-Aid, like most people had at the time, that there was something necessarily interesting or profound about a garish vehicle for a musical based on a bunch of Beatles covers.
The movie itself was, ehh, it more or less succeeded in what it set out to do. I mean, it really wasn't a terrible movie; the cover songs were decent, the acting was okay, and the choreography and photography and art direction all paints a superficially believable picture of some young guy's coming-of-age experience hitch-hiking around the late-60's UK.
The key word is "superficial," though. It's all fake as hell beneath its cutesy candy coating. There's barely any sense that we're getting to know any of the characters. Every situation is just a contrived backdrop for another Beatles cover done by what sounds like an endless line of 90s alternative rock has-beens who impart a sedate, simplified feel to the classic songs.
The ending of the movie is worse than just the sterile sum of its parts though. It's actually sad in a way I'm not sure the filmmakers intended: the poor guy who was at the forefront of this epic musical journey ends up doing what? Working in a damned factory the rest of his life! I got the strong impression that we are to understand that what we saw him experience will be by far the most interesting thing that happens to him in his entire life, while everyone else seems to continue with their little adventures.
Society (1989)
Whoa. Just Whoa.
They made some movies with serious balls in the eighties, man. And this is one of them.
The movie's basically a vicious, over-the-top satire of what I think many people are afraid is secretly going on with those at the top tiers of society: a covert culture of unimaginable depravity, perversity, exploitation, and soul-annihilating sociopathy. Kind of like Eyes Wide Shut. And that this Hell on earth going on behind the facade of these majestic mansions is, in some mysterious alchemical way, what keeps them on top.
The plot is driven by this popular kid from an expensive Beverly Hills neighborhood who is obsessed with his fear that everyone in his life is not what they seem. And based on what we see, this actually looks like it's true: his family is wooden and distant, and all his "friends" appear to regard him with veiled contempt -- except the two whom his parents openly dislike, of course.
After a series of events which gradually make his world seem more suspicious, it turns out that he was adopted into this family for the sole purpose of being a human sacrifice at one of their parties.
After witnessing one of his friends basically getting turned into a tapestry of mangled flesh, and witnessing bizarre body mutations, he escapes with the help of his other friend -- which seems a bit unlikely, given how cunning and powerful that "Society" was portrayed as being. But I guess they needed to tack on a happy ending.
But damn, though -- the movie symbolically taps into a LOT of effed-up things that one's innermost heart fears is going on in secret.
Like his high school debate for class president. What appeared at first to be the unpopular nerd vs. the popular athlete was really a fixed game where both sides were completely controlled by the same force... Like how I feel about every presidential election.
Or the fact that in the end, which one of his friends gets "sacrificed?" The relatively fat and unattractive one. It makes you think. Why do I just accept that as a movie cliché? Are we, on some level, just like the awful Society that frivolously ruins and desecrates whom they regard as "inferior"? Would we enjoy doing the same if we were born into such a high caste?
Is this Society, at the end of the day, just the natural order of things? very disquieting.
Another symbol that I think most only see the surface of are the surreal body mutations. In the end, the part where the protagonist witnesses his poor friend (who happens to be Jewish... not sure what that means) gets turned into a huge elastic abomination while getting fisted and eaten. It's not just weird, man, it MEANS something. It could be:
-hallucinations brought on by the trauma of seeing your friend get murdered
-and this is the scariest thing: it's simply the closest visual metaphor we can get for the unimaginably, appallingly sadistic thing they do to people as part of their ritual. I think it's something like eating their soul, not just raping someone but forcing your way into their deepest being and chewing it up like a damned wad of bubblegum before discarding it, leaving the person an utterly devastated wreck.
That's some ballsy sh*t, man. And SCARY. There's like, more going on in the heavens and the earth than we know. Some genius said that once. I appreciate this movie for being the few that makes me feel that way.
Ulysse 31 (1981)
Timeless Epic Dressed Up As An Early 80s Cartoon
I LOVED this show when I was a kid, and would never miss an episode on Saturday morning. Watching a few episodes as an adult, I was pleased to see that I still found it to be not just exceptionally good entertainment, but honestly some of the best I've ever seen.
Ulysses-31 is a cartoon adaptation of Homer's "Odyssey" which takes place in the distant future as a space opera. Aside from its setting which featured an unusual mix of spaceships and Greek ruins, the cartoon looks similar to others of its time. Like "GI Joe" and "Dungeons and Dragons" with their peculiar choppy animation and Anime-inspired character design.
In spite of these similarities, the feel of this show was very, very different from all others - a sad, dark, dissociated, and dreamlike atmosphere similar to the Dark Crystal or Phantasm. It was this that made me fall in love with the show.
I like to believe that this show's surprisingly stunning visuals, and its being adapted from the world's greatest epic, is what makes the show feel this way. I'm lucky to have grown up when this kind of thing was on TV, and not desperately stupid sh*t like "Adventure Time" or "Beavis and Butthead."
Coraline (2009)
So Many Things Going On Here
This is one of the best movies I have ever seen. It is simply a triumph. If you haven't seen it, you're missing out. Although I wouldn't recommend it to anyone younger than 16; there are some pretty messed-up undertones swirling around here.
The first level is the craftsmanship. It raises the bar of stop-motion work to a level higher than it has ever been before. The voice acting is impeccable. And the music is haunting, inspired, and practically couldn't have been improved upon. This alone adds up to a superbly entertaining experience.
The second level is the writing, which is where the real genius is. On the surface, it appears to be a story about a likable little girl who learns a lesson about appreciating what you have in life. This story is told by introducing a villain -- the Beldam -- who attempts to exploit Coraline's boredom with her family by trying to tempt her into trapping herself in an alternate world. Coraline, in true hero fashion, resists the Beldam's temptations, and all is well with the world.
However, below this lies a third level, borne out in certain details. Who is the Beldam? Where did she come from? She's not quite like the villains in other fantasy worlds, like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland or the Witch in Wizard of Oz. The Beldam is quite aware of Coraline's "real" life outside of the fantasy one, and uses that knowledge to try and entrap her. She is not a despotic ruler of some cuddly fantasy world; she's an evil sociopath operating in OUR world. That is creepy.
The paranormal overtones with the "water witching" and the ghosts help to suggest that the Beldam is an evil spirit who is attached to the house. There are countless stories by people who have nothing to gain by lying about having been terrorized by discarnate entities that know things about them.
Perhaps most creepy of all, though, is the omnipotence of the Beldam suggested by seeing her face in the real world's garden at the end. As if to suggest that Coraline has only done what she was expected to do. Again, what is the Beldam? Some personality so cunning that he/she is capable of completely controlling people without being held accountable for it.
Now THAT'S f*cking scary.
Fist of the North Star (1995)
Pretty Good
I was a big fan of the original anime, released in 1987. There were absurdly over-the-top, ultraviolent fight scenes. It also had a surprisingly powerful story that touched on obsessive love, egomania, and unjust revenge. So I was thrilled when I found out they made a live-action movie out of it, which I was expecting to have had all the cool stuff taken out of it -- the weird martial arts moves, etc.
To my delight, the movie is actually fairly faithful to the anime! I mean come on, the scene with Ken getting impaled on Shin's hand is there. The part where Ken's arms are gushing blood in a high-pressure torrent is there. There's even Jaggy (renamed here as "Jackal") getting the arcane "reroute your blood flow so your head explodes" move done on him.
Hell yeah! Quite a lot more than the tepid, oddly irrelevant movie I expected -- something desperately cliché and having little to do with its source material, like "TMNT III." Now I know this movie is dumb, too, but it's somehow dumb in a way that doesn't take itself seriously. Like it's winking at you the whole time saying "look, we both know that no one's gonna pay for a truly accurate Fist of the North Star movie, but this is the closest you're gonna get."
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Damn what a great movie, but UFOs are not necessarily aliens
All throughout this movie, I couldn't stop thinking how GOOD it was. The special effects are incredibly seamless. The camera work is impeccable and truly inspired - there are so many iconic images in this movie like the hands thrusting up to the sky, or the living room mountain sculpture. I cared about the characters, who acted more or less like real people, not some pretty but empty cardboard cut-outs. The movie has a certain sentimentality towards average folk that is, to me at least, heartwarming.
Last and most importantly, it's an extremely accessible and brilliantly-written story about weird sh*t that science can't explain. People REALLY DO see UFOs. These phenomenon REALLY DO make cars stop working, or leave people with strange wounds that doctors can't explain.
BUT. Regardless of how amazingly lofty an achievement this movie is, I believe it's a mistake and a little dumb to insist that these phenomenon are the result of an intelligent race from another planet. It's just... off. Never mind that even if this WAS the case, then why the hell are they kidnapping people in their spaceship? The climax amounts to a light show followed by the scientists and aliens exchanging looks of starry-eyed wonder. Where's the profound revelation about the future of humanity and the nature of the cosmos? It left me dazzled by the effects, but a bit empty, like a TED talk.
Anyway, I've been interested in paranormal phenomena my whole life, and the "aliens" explanation for UFOs has never sit well with me because UFOs always manifest in fragmentary ways that almost never leave any physical evidence behind -- exactly the same as ghosts. That just doesn't sound like a physical spaceship zipping around, which is what people have turned UFOs into in popular imagination because it's easier to understand.
Real UFOs, and most "paranormal" phenomena, are more like these bizarre holograms that blink in and out of existence for reasons no one understands. This is why I think it's reductionist and boring to say they're beings from another planet. They are more like sentient objects from another dimension. I would have liked the movie to have abandoned the "benevolent aliens" thing for a scarier look into the truly bizarre nature of the paranormal, but then it wouldn't have been a feel-good movie.
Pacific Rim (2013)
Somehow boring in spite of mind-blowing visuals
I know enough about filmmaking to where I can look at a movie and have some idea of how much work had to go into making it. And right from the start, Pacific Rim is STAGGERINGLY well-produced, so much so that it blew my mind. Giant monsters tear up the Golden Gate Bridge in slow motion. Giant robots wrestle with them underwater. Funky Chinese neighborhoods rebuild around the rib bones of vanquished monsters. We see the sumptuously detailed, futuristic airplane hangars where the giant robots are built.
And it starts off pretty good, too -- giant marauding monsters from a tear between dimensions at the bottom of the ocean? And the only way they can be fought is with giant robots? I actually bought that, the way they explained this at the beginning made it seem plausible -- sort of a surreal parable about man challenging the gods with his cunning. With the promise of there being even more dangerous monsters to come, I was excited about seeing the rest of it.
Unfortunately, it slowly got more boring after the exposition. It wasn't the lame acting, which was good enough for a movie about giant robots. This isn't Officer and a Gentleman.
No, the biggest problem was just that the monsters and the robots just looked BORING... And all VERY SIMILAR. I mean come on, you have all this money and all these top artists and animators at your disposal, yet the monsters are all these desperately middle-of-the-road "Godzilla 1998" knock-offs with absolutely no personality. The monsters from "Inhumanoids" were more creative and scary than these brain-dead lumps that just lumber through towns and throw slow-motion haymakers while roaring like walruses.
Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
asks you to enjoy sadism
Yeah, I'm sure lots of you jaded jerks will be all like "I enjoy sadism already." Well **** you, I think you're sick.
Napoleon Dynamite is much worse than a boring collection of half-baked character sketches. It's a cruel mockery of people with Autism spectrum disorders very cleverly packaged as a quirky indie comedy.
The whole movie frames it as not just acceptable but a foregone conclusion that I enjoy laughing at people who happen to be socially maladjusted, and easy targets of ridicule.
THAT'S what people like me don't "get" about this movie. Being a stupid dick.
Napoleon's uncle being weak-willed, vaguely homosexual, and funny-sounding doesn't make me want to laugh at him to boost my self-esteem. It annoys me and makes me want to tell him to commit to a martial art or something to increase his confidence.
Napoleon taste-testing milk isn't charmingly quirky or funny to me. It's the writer's clever way of saying that Napoleon willfully drinks a white fluid -- jizz -- for the pleasure of other men. He's calling Napoleon a faggot with this scene. That's not comedy to me. It's just mean-spirited and makes me think the writer is a spoiled brat who wouldn't know adversity if it slapped him in the face and introduced itself.
The football-playing dude who tries to go back in time with a machine that electrocutes his balls -- I get it, huh huh huh kicking an unpopular person in the balls is supposed to be funny. It's not, it's just mean.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
Agonizingly Boring
I don't like recent (from 2000 and onwards) remakes of classic horror movies because they're always shallow, dumbed-down shadows of the original. For example, the new Evil Dead reboot had unlikable and one-dimensional characters along with a stupid and needless sub-plot about heroin addiction that some idiot threw in for God knows what reason. But some guy I was talking to couldn't say enough glowing things about the 2010 remake of the Wes Craven classic. So I decided to give its poor reviews the benefit of a doubt, and I rented it from Netflix.
It turns out I was totally right about it being a pallid, depressingly dim-witted echo of the brilliant 1984 original. However it wasn't quite as bad as I was afraid it would be: it was just boring, but not offensive. And it touched on a few twists to the Freddy mythology that were interesting before the movie just threw them away.
What I mean that it wasn't offensive is that at least it doesn't put teenage promiscuity on a pedestal like it's the coolest thing in the world and has no consequences. Cabin in the Woods did this and it was annoying even though it was a really good horror movie. The kids in Nightmare 2010 may be beautiful but unrelatable cardboard cut-outs, but at least it's not a part of the Leftist propaganda that we evolve backwards into rutting, diseased, unplanned-baby-having chimpanzees.
In fact, the movie is aggressively chaste. Which brings me to the most interesting thing about it: at about the 40 minute mark, I realized that the writers had transformed the Freddy mythology into something slightly different from the original: The first Freddy was a truly scary personality, a smart and nasty guy you wouldn't want to mess with. He, like Jason, represented the fear of sexuality -- his victims were nubile and sexually active teens. And like many other slasher movies, the teen to vanquish him was the relatively androgynous and chaste female.
The 2010 reboot's Freddy, in contrast, is just pathetic. Almost everything he says sounds laughably phony, like a wimp trying to sound tough. The scenes with him playing with children were the only scenes that looked right to me -- he looked like he just LIKED kids, but wasn't a child killer. The movie entertained the idea that Freddy was just an unfortunate misfit who fell victim to a mob of misguided assh*le parents.
This suddenly felt RIGHT to me. It fell into place when I saw Nancy burning herself to stay awake, then had big cut-marks on her arm after waking up from a dream -- self-mutilation is rampant in kids who can't deal with the problems in their lives -- it's like, her parent's violent and unjust bigotry in the past, ironically in an attempt to protect their children, has turned around to bite them in the ass by making their teen-aged children want to burn and cut themselves. And they want to burn and cut themselves out of guilt for their parent's lack of remorse over murdering an innocent man for what amounted to him being "weird."
Almost as if to say that a hysterical crusade against imaginary pedophiles and child-killers really only hurts children in the end. I was temporarily roused from my stupor induced by the phony characters and contrived plot.
Then it turns out Freddy really is just a sadistic psychopath played by a wimp pretending to be tough, and they kill him. Fart noise.
Drop Dead Fred (1991)
Just Plain Weird
I saw this when I was about thirteen. I had loved kooky, fun, and effects-laden movies like "Beetlejuice," which is what I expected when going to see this. I had also had imaginary friends as a child, so I thought I could identify with it.
But Drop Dead Fred was a very different animal from the movies it was marketed to be like - "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" and "Beetlejuice" were fun and harmless romps, in comparison. In between its sparse effects that were kind of entertaining, DDF was an annoying and vaguely disturbing experience that couldn't seem to decide whether it was a kid-friendly comedy, a kooky and adult horror-comedy, a quirky romance movie, or a very sad and dark story about an insane young woman.
Something else that annoyed me was that this was also kind of a chick flick, while it was obviously marketed towards children and young adults. The scene where the scantily-clad chick fixes dinner for her successful jerk boyfriend felt like something I didn't sign up to see -- it was like something in a soap opera. I also felt a little sorry for the homely guy we're supposed to believe is going to be her future husband -- how do we know she won't be bad for him? I mean, she likes vain and successful men, and he's neither of those things. Plus she's nuts, capable of destroying her friend's houseboat without remorse, and he's kind of a chump.
The guy who played DDF was miscast, too. He's supposed to be the product of a little girl's imagination. What we get is a loud, scary English dude who knows a little more about sex than you'd think a child would dream up. I think they chose this guy because he WAS some kind of successful comedian, but his "loud, insane, dirty limey" schtick just doesn't work here.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Gay And Oh-So-Quirky With Not Much Substance
This movie tries to be "quirky" because it's a romance with two crazy people. The problem is that these people are so nuts that they don't need to date each other, they need case workers.
Look, I can identify with Jim Carrey's character. I like to sketch weird drawings that don't make sense to anyone, and I'm not the smoothest operator in life. But this guy is so retarded that it's irresponsible to present him as a potential date for ANY chick.
He sits cross-legged on the ground in public drawing in his sketchpad, he dresses like a damned fifteen year old girl with Aspergers syndrome, and he lives in his own world. He doesn't need a girlfriend, he needs someone to teach him that some of his behaviors are not helping him in life at all. Like a "big brother" for adults. The script should have known that.
Winslet's character is a wolf in sheep's clothing, a damaged slut who would not just quickly tire of a boring nerd like Carrey and cheat on him once, but over and over again. She'll probably keep whoring it up until she's too old and/or diseased to make that work for her, and then she'll live with a lot of cats. Many people think this is "progressive," but it's really just the cultural equivalent of a Thalidomide baby: a nasty mutation that doesn't do anyone any good.
The script should have known this, too. I hate how this movie unironically presents me with this "quirky" love story like it's doing me a favor, when all it's doing is trying to sell me some bullsh*t platitude about "meeting the right person" instead of stepping back and asking why these people are such losers in the first place. That's why this movie is so popular, too, because people are idiots who agree with its pretension that "weird" people just need to find other "weird" people to have relationships with, and then they'll be happy.
The scene where the kids run the machine on Carrey and steal his food and liquor was just disgusting. What a couple of spoiled turds! They were such insufferable children that I stopped caring about the movie at all, I just wanted to see something bad happen to them. Like getting raped by wolves.