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cate_gorski
Reviews
The Box (2009)
*Yawn*
When the movie ended, there was silence.
"....... That's it?" was the general consensus of the room.
4 moderately intelligent people just spent what felt like four hours staring at shiny lights on a screen, becoming even les modemtally intllellegennt.
*sigh* I had actually had hope for this film... but it reminded me SO much of the pointless "The Haunted Airman" that I actually fell into a contemplation about how that movie was ~better~ (it was shorter).
Point one: 'Classical music' played by one instrument repetitively hitting the same 4 notes to lend 'tension' to a scene, backed up only occasionally by 'spooky' lighting or expressions? That played out in the 70s; Mike Oldfield did it better, and with more instruments.
Point two: Some people like movies to make sense. Or cents. ONE party is getting what they want. *HINT: NOT the first one.* Point three: Borrowing all your plot points from other works is annoying. The idea seems morphed from "The Monkey's Paw", random 'meaningful' quotes and references, and (oh-please-STOP-IT) Jean-Paul Sartre's NO EXIT ad nauseum... WE GET IT. THIS IS A MORALITY PLAY. MORALIZE US WITH SOMETHING INTERESTING. (Oh, and we KNOW ~we~ Americans butcher all 'foreign' words (croissandwich, anyone?), but it is pronounced "Sahr-Truh". It is a NAME, therefore not subject to our capricious pronunciation.) I will give the film this: It had me believing for at least 3 scenes that ~something important~ was about to happen. The acting did not make me want to manually go bald. The production values were... well, not quite up to par, but not too bad, either. The CGI was, if not flawless, at least interesting to look at... for the first several times on screen, at least. After that? *snore* Really, we all saw the last (erm, most recent) Batman, and that had much better execution. In ALL ways.
Final point: there seemed to BE no point to this malarkey aside from serving as a morality play for the socially deaf, blind, and mute. "A lemur charging tuppence for fenced novelty ashtrays in the bowels of a cruise ship sailing to Nome, Texas." Did that not make sense? Neither does this film.
I wish/hope for so much, and usually get so little in return for my time and money. Yet again I feel brain-robbed, and I want my hours back.
The Haunted Airman (2006)
Soooooooooo... you want to watch an interesting movie?
YES, THERE ARE MASSIVE SPOILERS IN THIS POST.
Does it matter? ..... no.
No, no, and no. One hour and ten minutes of my life and a dollar and ten cents that I will never get back.
Not to say it didn't have a certain... theoretical something. But Barney on a cracker, it was bad! Movie! You are supposed to have a PLOT. Not a series of oft-unintelligible images framed by a well-regarded actor, a pretty older gal and a semi-hot teen heartthrob who is famous for acting intensely disaffected. Or is that disaffectedly intense? Whichever one, he does. For the whole movie.
I rented this thinking: hey, young Leo DiCaprio wasn't at all bad when he had leeway to ACT (even before Aviator, in which he was rather awesome). I liked Pattinson as Cedric Digory well enough. I think I'll give the shiny vampire kid a chance.
*sob* Oh, I rue the day...
To add insult to injury (do those TV lawyers do pro-bono for intellectual bludgeoning?), every time I thought something would HAPPEN... it turned out to either be a 'dream' (ARGH! CHEAT!!) or some never discussed again empty plot point.
Except for the suicide. Who then comes back. To... haunt him? Give friendly advice with a mute child from... the bombing??? I JUST watched this dreck an hour ago and I have NO IDEA.
Save yourself the agony: it's not the actors faults (probably), the script should have been tossed on the 'interesting but only for a short story' pile, the director should have called in sick (it might have been better! Julian Sands would have been, I'll wager), and the cinematographer... needs to STOP WATCHING MICHAEL BAY FILMS. Not EVERY SCENE that you want to be DRAMATIC needs to be filmed by HAND by a person suffering chronic Jazz Hands Syndrome!! Sorry to get so shouty, but... OK, any movie that starts with the Vienna Spooks Choir "AAAAAHHHH!"ing spookily as the camera pans through spooky trees to a spooky house while using a spookily blue filter (for almost the entire bloody movie) needs to be shot. Erm, never shot. Yes. Never shot.
My tuppence.