Thursday Already?
Jan. 6th, 2011 09:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Amazing how time flies. At any rate:
My last two films--rented--were Rodriguez's Machete and Case 39, directed by Christian Alvart, the same guy responsible for Antibodies and Pandorum. The former is just as crazy as you expect--I admire it for its completely committed 'sploitation attitude, which allows Eva Mendes to appear utterly buck-ass naked within the first ten minutes and not look ridiculous, even when she's pulling a cellphone out of (one assumes) her chocha. See also: Danny Trejo having offscreen sex with both Michelle Rodriguez and Jessica Alba, who's as un-whitebread here as I've ever seen her. But although it's extremely enjoyable while you're in it it still goes by pretty damn fast, leaving no aftertaste whatsoever behind.
Case 39, OTOH, is a bit of a puzzler. All the performances are surprisingly good, but the film itself has a distinct MoTW aura--maybe the cinematography, pacing, music, or all three? Shot on location in Vancouver, with Jodelle Ferland playing main CanCon duty and Callum Keith Rennie for back-up. It starts out with Renee Zellwegger "rescuing" Ferland from her parents, who seem to be murderously, hyper-religiously insane; they believe Ferland's irredeemably evil, waiting until she's asleep to stuff her in the oven and turn it on high. Zellwegger then petitions the court to let her quasi-adopt Ferland, who she's fallen in maternal love with. Quickly, however, she finds out that the parents may have had a point...
Ferland, as ever, is superb--and so is Zellwegger, though her turnaround seems monumentally abrupt. It's interesting to note that the narrative works just as well (if not better) when you assume that instead of a "demon" in human form, Ferland might "just" be a telepath who's instinctually learned to manipulate the fears of people around her; even her own infernal self-image may be the direct result of cherry-picking her very Roman Catholic parents' brains. But though the film contains many truly disturbing moments, the denouement is vaguely unsatisfying. It needs...space to breathe, more room, a more novelistic approach. Can a person like this be re-trained to heal rather than harm? Does she actually want love? Is this what Professor X would be like, if he hadn't had the right sort of parents? The film doesn't know, or care.
One way or the other, it all stinks of studio interference. I'm not surprised Alvart went back to Austria, especially after the one-two punch of this vs. Pandorum's all-but-burial.
Okay, so: Today I need to take all the rethinking I did yesterday re "Lagan", make those notes, and try o break back into the story proper--plus input the notes for Chapter One of A Tree of Bones, etc. And wait for my rewrite template...
My last two films--rented--were Rodriguez's Machete and Case 39, directed by Christian Alvart, the same guy responsible for Antibodies and Pandorum. The former is just as crazy as you expect--I admire it for its completely committed 'sploitation attitude, which allows Eva Mendes to appear utterly buck-ass naked within the first ten minutes and not look ridiculous, even when she's pulling a cellphone out of (one assumes) her chocha. See also: Danny Trejo having offscreen sex with both Michelle Rodriguez and Jessica Alba, who's as un-whitebread here as I've ever seen her. But although it's extremely enjoyable while you're in it it still goes by pretty damn fast, leaving no aftertaste whatsoever behind.
Case 39, OTOH, is a bit of a puzzler. All the performances are surprisingly good, but the film itself has a distinct MoTW aura--maybe the cinematography, pacing, music, or all three? Shot on location in Vancouver, with Jodelle Ferland playing main CanCon duty and Callum Keith Rennie for back-up. It starts out with Renee Zellwegger "rescuing" Ferland from her parents, who seem to be murderously, hyper-religiously insane; they believe Ferland's irredeemably evil, waiting until she's asleep to stuff her in the oven and turn it on high. Zellwegger then petitions the court to let her quasi-adopt Ferland, who she's fallen in maternal love with. Quickly, however, she finds out that the parents may have had a point...
Ferland, as ever, is superb--and so is Zellwegger, though her turnaround seems monumentally abrupt. It's interesting to note that the narrative works just as well (if not better) when you assume that instead of a "demon" in human form, Ferland might "just" be a telepath who's instinctually learned to manipulate the fears of people around her; even her own infernal self-image may be the direct result of cherry-picking her very Roman Catholic parents' brains. But though the film contains many truly disturbing moments, the denouement is vaguely unsatisfying. It needs...space to breathe, more room, a more novelistic approach. Can a person like this be re-trained to heal rather than harm? Does she actually want love? Is this what Professor X would be like, if he hadn't had the right sort of parents? The film doesn't know, or care.
One way or the other, it all stinks of studio interference. I'm not surprised Alvart went back to Austria, especially after the one-two punch of this vs. Pandorum's all-but-burial.
Okay, so: Today I need to take all the rethinking I did yesterday re "Lagan", make those notes, and try o break back into the story proper--plus input the notes for Chapter One of A Tree of Bones, etc. And wait for my rewrite template...
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Date: 2011-01-06 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2011-01-06 05:38 pm (UTC)Maybe the problem with telling exorcism stories these days lies in the fact that while everyone's afraid of possession as a concept (because it echoes mental illness, but without even the possibility of diagnosis and cure), no one wants to say straight out: Oh yeah, that's what it was--a ghost, a demon, Satan, God. Because that way lies being known as a proselytizing Fundie, so instead you get an awful lot of hmmm, ha, not actually sure WHAT that is/was. Maybe that guy was just crazy! Yeah, that's the ticket! Which is why stories like Noroi are so appealing, at least to me--they come from cultures A) you don't know the basics of (unless it is your culture) and B) where stuff like this isn't instantly debunked, either.
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Date: 2011-01-06 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-06 05:53 pm (UTC)I don't know if you watch Destination Truth, but I like it for similar reasons. There's one episode where they go to investigate ghosts at a Buddhist cemetery in Thailand, and their translator dude has already told them the signs that ghosts are around = the smell of corpses, and dogs barking (I've heard the dogs barking one myself, in Indonesia). So they're sitting there in the dark waiting for ghosts in the cemetery, and hear dogs barking and smell something bad, and soon the translator is gone. High-tailed it out of there. They find him the next day and he's like "yeah, F the shit you're doing."
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Date: 2011-01-06 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-06 06:24 pm (UTC)I guess from my agnostic/who-the-fuck-knows perspective, "religious horror movies" - or even "ghost" movies with Christian influences, like Amityville - have always seemed fairly, well, Christian. It doesn't bother me mostly (Emily Rose started to grate, however) because they revolve more around hell and evil than they do around the light - and personally, I am more convinced of the existence of the dark than the light, for various reasons that I think Téa Obreht touched on well in "Twilight of the Vampires" - that in highly superstitious developing countries, the light is just a ward against the dark.
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Date: 2011-01-06 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-06 06:10 pm (UTC)It is amazing, I promise you. I watched it by myself and I must admit it freaked me out (because it was so close to the kinds of things, culturally, that scared me as a kid).
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Date: 2011-01-07 12:32 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2011-01-06 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-06 06:59 pm (UTC)(Voice of doctor): Now then, you don’t want to hurt people, do you?
Samara (quietly): But I do.
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Date: 2011-01-07 12:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-07 01:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-06 05:43 pm (UTC)And that sounds like someone Judy Kiss would run into. Or possibly Mac.
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Date: 2011-01-06 06:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-07 01:16 am (UTC)Collection!