Amph What was the last movie you saw?

The2ndQuest, I felt the exact same. It was bolstered as Spielberg and writer Melissa Matheson in full ET-mode but doesn't come close to that scale.

What time setting was this supposed to take place in? I think it's the 1980's, because the Queen calls Nancy and Ronnie. I just realized that there was an error there. Sophie and BFG should have made their plea to the Prime Minister, because only she (Margaret Thatcher?) would have had the authority to mount a military campaign and launch an invasion of Giant Country. I imagine the idea of a Thatcher-led military assault would be a pretty tall leap for a Spielberg kiddie-film.

 

Out of curiosity - roadhouse restoration or theatrical cut? I think everybody should watch the former at least once, but it's super long and they have to use photographs in a couple of places, so.

It falls under the Toho Myth Rule of Thumb: if they would've had to film additional footage just for America, it's probably BS.

 

Rewatched There Will Be Blood, about as formidable as American cinema gets these days, and yet I'm still not 100% on board with the fake brother subplot. Maybe I'm just not a fan of that actor's timid, weaseled performance.

 

The theatrical cut, I don't think the longer version has ever been released in the UK (at least on DVD or Blu Ray)

 

That third act is such a hard right turn. It feels spliced in from a different film. I think Boyle was trying to evoke Kubrick and Tarkovsky, but ended up evoking Carpenter instead. I still think there's enough there for a recommend; particularly for sci-fi fans. But that third act is bound to rub many the wrong way because it's the square peg to the rest of the movie's round hole.

 

Dracula AD 1972. Not the best Hammer film, but still good fun.

 

Bummer. Well, if Criterion ever puts out a region B version of their set, I totally recommend it.

 

Peanuts the Movie and Zootopia were the ones i watched this week.

 

Hunger Games Marathon

I watched the first a long time ago and enjoyed it. Then I watched the second and it completely put me off the series. I decided to finish it off.

I'm glad I did, Mockingjay was a pleasant surprise.

The Hunger Games - Gonna keep this short. I love The Most Dangerous Game stories, so obviously this is for me. I identify strongly with what's going on, with that idea expressed so simply but brilliantly in the title, and with the main character.

Katniss is a pretty good female action hero here. Strong, but also vulnerable (though vulnerability isn't done particularly well). Hardened, but capable of softness. She defies any sense of masculinity or femininity. I like that she's a bit taciturn and cynical, with a realistic approach to everything. It fits her background perfectly.

Similarly, Peeta defies any sense of gender roles. He's the more sensitive of the two. He's a baker, an artist. Strong of body, but without much idea of how to use it. The loverboy. Yet, he's also dedicated to protecting Katniss. Not because he's a man and that's what men do, but because he loves her.

Katniss is the stronger of the two, and it is she who ends up protecting him. Nice reversal there.

Oh. I saw Battle Royale the other day. What the hell. It's ridiculous how many details are ripped from that. I was blown away, and a bit offended, that so many details were so similar.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire - This is a total mess.

I think I saw that Suzanne Collins (the writer of the novels) wasn't involved with this? It shows. It's one of the worst adaptations of a novel I've ever seen.

The movie makes a ton of mistakes. For example:

The second book references things that happened in the first book that didn't make it into the first movie. So, instead of removing or altering those references to fit the first movie, or explaining the references, Catching Fire just leaves it there with no context. It's terribly shoddy work.

Several intense scenes from the novel were ruined by a lack of understanding of the meaning of the scenes, though the meaning couldn't be any simpler. For example, the scene between Snow and Katniss at her Victors' house. Sutherland and Lawrence didn't seem to have any idea what was supposed to be going on in that scene, and the acting is terrible.

The acting is really terrible throughout.

The actor who played Finnick wasn't anywhere near as charismatic as the role required, and the character as written didn't play up the charm and seduction anywhere near enough.

Jena Malone does a piss poor job as Johanna Mason (though she redeemed herself in Mockingjay), though part of that is that the character was shoddily written, and completely fails to establish what's so awesome about the character. (again, redeemed in Mockingjay)

Mags' death is poorly shot, which really lessens the impact.

The movie suffers because it doesn't develop any antagonists. The book got away with it because the narration could go deep into the nature of the alliance and its characters, but the movie fails to do this at all, and just leaves the story hanging.

Catching Fire is well beneath the rest of the series.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - I'm gonna do this as one since I watched them back to back.

Suzanne Collins is involved with these, and for the better.

I have to mention Elizabeth Banks as Effie Trinket here, because she blows the main cast away with her acting. I'm a big fan of Effie from the novels, but I felt that Banks failed to deliver in the first movie, she didn't quite get her right. Well, here, Banks is everything I thought Effie would be, and it's lovely.

The character of Johanna Mason is the real thing here, and Jena Malone brings her to life. Again, one of my faves, and I was glad to see her done justice.

What makes this film series worth something is that it generally doesn't back down, it tries to keep it real. It does not shy away from the darkness of a bunch of kids killing each other for sport. Mockingjay could have easily been the same old rebel story. Instead, it is different, it is unexpected and relatively new. This is not your simple cliche rebel alliance. This is not Star Wars where the dashing rebels defeat the Evil Empire and live happily ever after.

Instead, it turns out our handsome, brave rebel-with-a-heart-of-gold Gale doesn't have a heart of pure gold, and is actually pretty cold and ruthless, and that comes back to bite him pretty hard. In a bit of a twist, the heart of gold comes first, instead of showing up in the end like Han Solo. In the end, Gale is more hardcore soldier than daring rogue.

Turns out the rebel leader is no saint, in fact she's no different from the evil leader of the evil capitol.

Spoiler: just in case

Having Katniss kill the leader of the rebellion is quite a bold twist, I think.

The Mentor is no Obi-Wan Kenobi, he's a washed up drunkard. This is not new, but fits perfectly.

There's a lot of great political and human complexity here if you go into the details, certainly a lot more complexity than one would expect from a series of movies based on a series of dystopian young readers novels. I think this elevates it head and shoulders above the likes of crap like Divergent and Maze Runner.

Mockingjay's weakness is that it wallows in its own darkness and misery a bit too much. As does Katniss, and it's not handled as well in the movies as it is in the novels (though it's a flaw of the novels, too). It comes off as a bit artificial at times, like that idea DiCaprio suggests in The Departed, of cops fake crying after they use their weapons, even though that's what they signed up to do, they've seen enough television to know they're supposed to weep afterward. Well, The Hunger Games knows there's supposed to be misery here, so it just makes sure it does it long enough to get credit, but it never comes off as genuine.

Can we get rid of that trope where the hero needlessly wallows in self-blame over every little thing? Katniss does it plenty, and it's often nonsensical, and just makes me roll my eyes.

Remember that Sock who came into the Feminist thread and called himself a "Peeta Mellark type"? Well, Peeta gets the girl in the end. So. And the manly Gale does something unforgivable.

Other than Catching Fire, it's a very good series and I'm glad I took the time to finish it.

 

Beetlejuice

 

Whoah whoah…what crazy sauce is all this? Isn't this film like post-WW2 Britain, maybe like late 40s-early 50s?

 

Real Genius

I love a good Val Kilmer movie. Add the 80's and it's gold.

 

The VVitch: When We Came Up with the Title All We Had Was A 17th-Century Printing Press Beautiful cinematography (especially candlelit scenes), great acting, and it keeps true to its setting-- although I'm not entirely sure spoken Early Modern English really sounded like that. I'm always suspicious of it being conflated with Shakespeare, who obviously did not write the way people really spoke. Or the King James Bible.

But I didn't like that the whole plot was basically medieval/early modern Western Christian superstition played straight. For one thing, that's boring. We've been hearing this **** for centuries and the movie didn't bring enough new things to it-- or perhaps anything new at all. Secondly, there are still people who believe in witchcraft and demonic possession and all that nonsense. I've met some of them. I'm not interested in their ridiculous viewpoints getting any sort of validation.

Thirdly... let's be honest. The whole witch thing comes from misogyny and ageism. Yes, men were accused of withcraft too, but the accused were disproportionately women who were in some way social outcasts. And it bothers the hell out of me that it's played straight. Yes, the girl with the weird name I can't remember wasn't directly responsible, but her family was 100% right to fear her. Why is this an okay thing to present in a modern film? Ugly old hags are evil! They steal behbehs! They bewitch boys! They kill dogs! They make crops fail! Paganism is evil! Girls are just looking for the chance to make a covenant with the devil! Blech.

It's a shame because otherwise it was really well-made and I suppose that's what got it a lot of praise.

 

Ahh well. You're putting that political angle on it.
I found it interesting to play it straight. The movie gives all those hints about repressed sexuality, and grinding poverty and desperation, and primitive religious fervour as reasons, and then flips it on its head. I liked that. I'm not going to read any message into it. It was an attempt to view the phenomenon from the eyes of the times.

 

Might have to watch that.

 

The Conjuring 2.

 

Grimsby. I'm not a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen in the slightest but this movie had me in fits of laughter. It was just stupid, disturbing British comedy and I loved it.

 

Darth Guy, I had a really different reaction to the misogynistic elements of The Witch. Um, mild spoilers to follow, but nothing particularly major.

I think that the movie was actually quite critical of the traditional elements of the witch myth. In many ways, I felt that one of the major themes of the film was masculine failure. The father fails his family in every way: its his stubbornness that puts them in the position in the first place and then he fails to grow crops or kill animals for food and ultimately . . . well, okay, I guess, fairly major spoilers so let's go behind tags.

Spoiler

Ultimately he just surrenders. That moment when he just lowers the ax and lets Phillip kill him was one of the most shocking moments in the film. And, by the by, that scene where he can't bring himself to just tell his son that the dead baby isn't in hell was just chilling. I don't know how you can watch that scene and not pick up on the fact that this movie is very critical of Christianity, not just a straight retelling of Christian superstition. And I'm also not sure why you say that the family was right to fear the daughter; at the end of the day, she's basically the last character to fall prey to the Devil's machinations. The two young children are corrupted at some point or other and the brother falls prey to his sexual desires in a really disturbing way (he's down to **** his sister or maybe some stranger in the woods . . . or maybe Jesus, if all else fails; let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth). In many ways, the film is about how fear tears this family apart, fear of what the daughter may be. She isn't a witch, but she is something just as terrifying to people at that time: a girl about to become a young woman. The fear that she's a witch is just a stand-in for that deeper fear.

And ultimately the coven is just a way to control and manipulate women. The witches aren't the real evil here; in some ways, it's only at the very end that the girl becomes self-determining in a way that she hasn't been through the entire movie, but I think that's subsumed by the way the Devil manipulates her in those final couple of scenes. "Remove thy shift," he says. I think we all know why that's in there. And ultimately she's been repressed to the degree that she can't write and therefore can't even be self-determining enough to be evil. "I cannot," she says when he asks her to sign her name. And what does he say? "I will guide thy hand." I mean, I don't know how you could have a horror movie scene that's more obviously about the repression of the female. That's really a perfect scene in every way. Good enough that it would have made an equally good, if less visceral, final scene.

I think it's a much deeper and more challenging movie than you're giving it credit for. It's anything but a straight presentation of misogynistic myth. I saw it a few months ago and, honestly, it's a movie that I still think about a lot. It's incredibly complex is just about every way. I'd urge you to watch it again and try to dig a little deeper. Anyway, I thought it was a masterpiece and I'd hate to have people who haven't seen it put off by your presentation of the film as misogynist.

And now another horror movie.


The Conjuring 2 (2016) – James Wan



Janet’s asleep . . . and I’m talking.

The first Conjuring film was an against-all-odds complete success in my opinion, one of the best horror films ever made really. As if that wasn’t miraculous enough, to make a genuinely great film out of the classic clichés we’ve all seen a dozen times, the franchise has pulled off an even greater feat: a masterpiece of a sequel. It’s hard to just stack the two films next to each other and make a decision about which one is “better,” because it’s not that clear cut. The story here is better, I think, than the story of the first film, with a more creative and surprising twist at the end. But, scary and suspenseful as this movie is, it’s not as arresting and petrifying as the first movie; perhaps the first movie just had the benefit of being the first film set in the universe of these films. We just weren’t at all ready for the kind of quiet dread and extreme tension of the first film but we knew what we were getting this time? Maybe. But even the nun character here isn’t as scary as Annabelle (a character who did ALMOST NOTHING in the first film, but haunted me for weeks) and the Amityville cold open isn’t a patch on the Annabelle cold open from the first movie. But I love the fact that this movie focuses more on the Warrens themselves as real people; in the first movie, there was some of that, but it was still mainly just them as the investigators. In both films, there’s real emotional focus on the family being tormented to the degree that you genuinely care about them, but this film really makes you see the Warrens as real people by exploring their relationship in a way the first film really didn’t. This leads to what is, I’d say, the biggest diversion between the two films which is the tone of the endings. No spoilers, not even general ones, but I’ll just say that the masterful final shot of the first film was absolutely pitch perfect and the tone of this film’s ending is really exactly the opposite to the first film’s ending. I can imagine the ending of this film being controversial (and if you’ve seen the film, I’d love to hear what you thought about it), but I thought it was fine, if not as impactful as I might have liked.

But enough about the film in relation to the first film. How does it stand up on its own? Like an absolute champ. All the performances are brilliant. Frances O’Conner is fantastic (feel like I haven’t seen her in YEARS) as the mother of the tormented family and Madison Wolfe gives a genuinely star-making performance as young Janet, the girl at the center of the evil forces. The film captures the period perfectly and director James Wan once again knocks it out of the park by imbuing the world with blues and greys and blacks, creating an oppressive and melancholy atmosphere. His skills at generating suspense are as good as they’ve ever been and he nails some really knock-out sequences (I’ll just say the dog looking out the door; I’ll just say that; no, really, that’s all I’m going to say, except I think my jaw literally dropped). And I have no interest in angering the Nun, even though she/he/it isn’t as scary as Annabelle; the Nun is ******* scary as ****. At the end of the day, this is a terrifying exercise in suspense cranked to the maximum, boasting creepy moments, serious scares, great performances and a well-written emotionally resonant script. It appears that Wan isn’t going to be doing the third one in the series, and that may just spell the end of the franchise, which would be too bad. But even if all we get from the world of the Warrens is these first two films, we’ve gotten way more than anyone could have anticipated. We’ve gotten two cinematic masterpieces, two of the best horror films ever made. 4 stars.

tl;dr – sequel both improves on & falls short of the original, but is consistently well-written, terrifying, suspenseful and brilliantly acted; a horror sequel that’s basically as great as the original. 4 stars.

More Movie Reviews!

 

See, I hated the first Conjuring for many of the same reasons ("Catholic superstition is true and these two real people aren't complete frauds!") that I dislike The VVVVitch, and on top of that it was a conventionally dumb horror flick.

I disagree with a lot of your interpretation. I don't agree that William was the cause of most of the family's misfortune. He moved them out there because they were exiled, but that's it. The reason for their misfortune is the witches and that stupid goat. The reason for the crop failure is somewhat debatable I suppose, but the reason they couldn't catch any game was quite clearly the work of the witches. He didn't fail because of his own flaws. He failed because of devil women. I don't really want to write much more. I certainly don't want to watch it again any time soon with so much still to see.

 

The book was written in 1982 and took place in (then) modern times. I did some sleuthin'. I figured so when the BFG was evading Cold War era vehicles in London- then the Queen and her phone call to Nancy & Ronnie (Reagan) was the giveaway for me. The setting wasn't very well established, at least in my first viewing. If Spielberg dropped a clue (direct or indirect), I missed it. I almost recall a very quick reference to Princess Diana, a quick throwaway line, but I could be wrong.

Then I was right. BFG & Sophie should have taken the nightmare to 10 Downing Street, not Buckingham Palace. Wayyy to political for a kiddie story lol!

Spielberg made a movie with a fart scene including Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth II! I wonder how that screening went down at the Palace?

 

Ah ok. Never read that Dahl book. Read James and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The BFG came just a few years too late for me.

 

This movie is so wonderful, so well shot, that I barley noticed the camera moving.

It's narrative, of Sexual desires, the concept of understanding love and Lust, twisted in the most seductive mannerisms....

It almost convinced me that this was a from of love...

Well, in a way you can...

Watch it, analyze it, think and feel.

 

In the book they also dealt directly with the queen and her flatulence, rather than the PM, so that's accurate adaptation.