Monday, July 9, 2007

V For Vendetta

V for Vendetta was a sweet magic carpet ride over the Arabian desert of conscious being
It was a sucker punch from the artistic bowels of Muhammad Ali
It was a single wrapped up golden present in the bottom of my Christmas stocking
It was a fire blazing deep in the night with no origin and the fuel of a million matches
It was a giraffe in a movie-forest full of zebra
It was a heat seeking panther
It was cold soothing rain on a warm summer evening: refreshing and longed for
It was a blank canvas in which all my thoughts and feeling could be painted
It was
Fucking awesome!






V For Vendetta's Website

Hard Candy

We are immediately confronted with the controversial subject of pedophilia. Coupled with that dark and evil container for all that is evil: the internet
As far as I know this is the most mainstream film to deal with such issues. The basic premise of the film is that the young girl who is sought out by the older man online turns out to be the one who was doing the hunting, as she seeks to take out her anger and vengeance on the man she suspects to be a pedophile.
It is a subject matter which could have potentially had audiences the world over gritting teeth, anxiously hushing each other and scurrying out of the cinema and caused someone at some poor censorship committee to lose their job when an angry British mob got out of control. I don't mean that it could have been perverse, I just mean that it could have been forcing a subject which we all know happens in real life into our faces, which most people get pretty gritty about and prefer not to think of these things actually happening...
Such a film would have had many people talking but would have been gut wrenching and no-one would have actually enjoyed seeing it.
Thankfully, Hard Candy is not a film resembling any of that.
The director did a good job of making the subject matter prominent without taking it a crucial step into painstaking reality, and thus made a film that can be watched and enjoyed without the awkward nagging that can often come after seeing a film that points out something quite horrible that's actually happening in the world but we'd rather not think about (Like "Hostel" AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH Just kidding. Fuck you Eli Roth! Seriously though... Like an Inconvenient Truth: The Film That Makes You Think That Maybe You Should Do Something).
So, thanks to a well placed director and some extremely well played acting, Hard Candy is an enjoyable film, the greatness only multiplied by the fact that there are only two actors and one set for about 95% of the film.
A perfect film?
Not at all.
In fact, not close, here comes the criticism!
I feel that, because the director made sure to tip-toe around making the film too controversial, since it would have been very easy to do so, the film manages to evoke no thoughts or feelings whatsoever... there are moments when you think something very wrong has happened or is happening such as a particular scene when the pedophile is being brutally tortured by the young girl.
The initial reaction is almost to cheer on the girl as she sticks it to the perverted fucker.
But so as not to make the film have an extreme bias we are quickly made to think that maybe this little girl is just nuts and maybe is going too far against a man she has no evidence over.
Then we're quickly flip flopped back to remembering that this guy clearly is a fucktard and deserves everything he's getting.
Then you're reminded that the girl is a bit of a psychopath.
Then you're reminded that the guy is sick.
She's a psycho
He's a cunt
And so the movie goes on, flip flopping around thoughts so much that it's impossible to stick to one or even think about any sort of point the movie might be making, which I'm not sure it does...
I think the director sort of chickened out of trying to make any point because to do so would be to enrage someone or other out there...
So, I'll give this one 3/5 mainly due to some good acting, and some credit does go to the director for taking the subject matter and making it completely unpreachy. I just feel that it could have been some preachy about something.







Hard Candy's IMDb Page

Dark Water

Most creepy 'what's going on?!?' type horror films (The Ring, The Others, The Grudge, The Waterboy) follow a basic pattern whereby the character development in the film is limited only to information that's relevant, such as finding out a character has a deep abandonment issue from their childhood which comes into play later in the movie when they're left alone in an empty cardboard box, leaving the bulk of the film to be used to develop a plot and to have all sorts of creepy things happen, such as photographs melting, Japanese girls gibbering to themselves about a curse, televisions mysteriously switching off and on when no-one is accidentally sitting on the remote or little boys who 'meow' when they open their mouths (It's amazing how tame that seems when it's typed...).
Dark Water is like the exact opposite of this idea... it was marketed, as far as I remember, as being part of this wave of creepy ghost story horror films that was at it's peak a few years ago and yet for the first hour of this film you'd think it had been written by Charlie Kaufman (before being swiftly censored and edited by some asshole from Fox, resulting in a long drawn out romantic drama with a few slightly odd characters who managed to slip through the net when the evil whore-hounds at Fox tried to turn Mr Kaufman's work into an all-encompassing feel good romance movie... this movie has nothing to do with Charlie Kaufman or Fox...) and it's not till far too late into the film that we are given even the slightest of slight creepy feelings.
Alas it is too late...
Had the entire film contained the spooky elements that were present in the last half hour this film would have been a moderate to poor horror film.
Instead it was a poor to poor horror film.
And the use of the term 'horror' is questionable.
On the positive side, the characters in the film are quirky, realistically odd and well played. Down to characters who only play a really small part in the film (Such as the lawyer, the school teacher and the landlord).
Unfortunately this is not a film in which I should be pondering over the complexities of such small parts, I should be wondering why there is a constant creepy drip coming from the floor above.
Why there are endless demonic carol type singing of children's nursery rhymes eminating throughout the elevator shaft.
Why the stains on the ceiling resemble a creepy little girl.
WHY DOES THE CARETAKER REFUSE TO SPEAK TO THE LITTLE GIRL AND WHY DOES HE ALWAYS SHAKE WHEN SHE'S AROUND AS IF TO IMPLY THAT SOMETHING VAGUELY CREEPY IS GOING ON BUT WE
JUST
DON'T
KNOW
WHAT?!
I should be concerned as to why the child has dissapeared and no-one seems to recall where she is, who she is, if she even had a daughter when she entered the building.

Why, if she had no daughter, is there a love-heart squeaked onto the glass of the window which Jodie Foster only finds when she breathes on the glass?

Why is it that only Jodie Foster can remember her child in one film and Julianne Moore in another? Thus furthering her career in which she will eventually become Jodie Foster??

None of this happens in Dark Water
None of it.
Something creepy should have happened
But it didn't
Something should have made me jump
But it didn't
Godamnit, you'd think this film had some sort of impact on my life the way I'm going on about it


But it didn't



Dark Water's Official Site

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Scanners

Scanners is a movie
In which some people die
Their heads go kablooie
When the evil scanner tries!






Scanners IMDb Page