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seishino
Reviews
District 9 (2009)
Painfully gripping
This is not a feel-good movie. This is not a movie that will give you a sense of accomplishment over impossible odds, or will leave you imbued with the permanence of human spirit and love. This is a gripping, gritty, sad tale of one man's descent into the mess that he helped architect. In that respect, it is an incredibly compelling movie. The subject matter is an only vaguely masked parable about the squalid conditions in South African relocation camps. We the audience become exposed to the details of power politics, acquiring food, having children, and making a living in the middle of this disposed community. We see the abuses of the haves from the have-nots, and the dark ways the have-nots respond.
The Science Fiction aspects are never backseat to the political messages. How the bug society functions, and more importantly how the humans respond to it, are all thoroughly and uniquely fleshed out. The movie never loses focus on the meaning of human interactions, but the science aspects are simultaneously well fleshed out.
Do not go into this movie expecting Aliens, Total Recall, Close Encounters, or Men in Black. This is a very different experience, similar in tone to a World War 2 biopic. I'd consider it one of the most "important" movies Hollywood has produced this decade. It isn't fun, or satisfying, or pleasant. But it is deeply meaningful, and very much worth experiencing.
Pony Trouble (2005)
Deliciously awful
Pony Trouble is a look at how childlike wonder and joy twist into self-serving hedonism when sheltered suburban youth unprepared for the real world wake up with sexual energy and social drive. The social commentary of this movie is deep and wide.
And at the other end of the spectrum, the plot of the movie itself is just awful. The dialog seems to hover somewhere between adequate and amusing, but you wouldn't know it because the dialog is frequently impossible to hear. The plot (as it is) never gets old because it careens and jolts like a super ball thrown down the side of MT Everest. There is an entire sub-plot about a vampire that is A: never explained and B: never resolved. Even using terms like sub-plot seem inapplicable to this movie, which feels akin to flipping channels when every station is covering vastly different aspects of the same event.
This is not unusual for the movie. People get their head cut off. Drunken half-naked women press up into glass doors. Plots die off as fast as characters. Robots show up. People put on beards and kiss while downing pills. The acting is surprisingly good considering what the actors had to work with, but Pony Trouble was clearly made by unfunded film students to be as bad as possible.
In the grand scheme of things, Pony Trouble is downright awful. But A: it is wonderfully awful, B: it is never boring, and C: it does stick with you. Its driving strength is in just how often it breaks the rules of film-making. If you're looking for the next Clerks, you may want to look elsewhere. If you're looking for pure camp for a college get-together, this film is attack-of-the-killer-tomatoes worthy.
Juno (2007)
Most intelligent dramady in a long time
I'm tempted to call Juno a comedy, but that isn't really correct. It's a dramatically gripping film, with real characters, that happens to be quite frequently funny. The humor generally comes through acid-sharp dialog, which is both sublimely human and thoroughly well written. The drama, however, comes out through characters which are neither black nor white. One moment a character will be portrayed engaging in a creepy and negative act, the next they will be viewed in a sympathetic light. Everyone is behaving with the best of intentions, and we as the audience get to ride along as those intentions twist the characters into an ugly reflection of us all. The excellent acting across the board helps this tremendously.
It's a quite sympathetic movie overall, and nobody comes off looking like "a bad guy." It's a solidly written, acted, and directed piece, that all comes together to feel grander than a simple family story. This may very well be the best coming-of-age film for years to come.
Hostel: Part II (2007)
An exquisitely filmed but ultimately hollow torture flick
Hostel II is an interesting take on this suddenly re-hot genre, that avoids all of the traditional pitfalls yet somehow manages to come off as a bit flat.
For one, basically all of the characters are driven by complications and good acting. No matter how insignificant the character, you get a constant flow of interesting interactions and character quirks going on between them. And the general caliber of acting is much higher than others in similar genres.
Similarly, none of the characters ever do things that can be considered foolish. They all behave believably for people in some extremely not-nice situations. At no point does one get the sense that they're watching movie characters who are simply advancing the plot.
The pacing, too, moves at a leisurely but good build, taking its time to indulge in side stories and character development which only serves to make the character's ultimate demise that much more tragic.
And all of this serves to make the 'sploitation bits all the more shocking. And shocking they can be... the pacing of bits which make you sit back and say "That was 'horrible'" is quite good, and seem to find just the right balance to make the viewer shocked and appalled at the next bit of human tragedy splayed across the screen.
Unfortunately, the movie never moves beyond its exploitive roots. It uses good techniques not seen in other films of this genre to build attachment to characters, to build the sense of impending dread, and to make the doom and dread all that more bleak. But ultimately, none of this is in service of any higher or more interesting narrative. You're clearly watching a "giggle and cringe at the guts on the screen" movie. A very well filmed gut-filled film, but one without a lot of real merit on its own.
Unfortunately for a movie that starts out strong and builds throughout the middle, the ending is quite weak and unsatisfying. I won't give it away, but needless to say it ends abruptly without resolving (or even addressing) a lot of the underlying issues which the film seemed to be building towards.
All-in-all, Hostel 2 is what it is... a hollow torture movie made exquisitely well by a skilled director and talented cast, but a hollow torture movie nonetheless.
The Dreamers (2003)
A disquietingly beautiful film
To steal a metaphor from the movie, The Dreamers is like watching your parents have sex through the keyhole of their door. It disturbs you, sometimes so deeply that you want to run away. But it is so real that you can't stop watching. And as you watch it, your view of the world changes a little.
This is not an easy movie. It starts out lighthearted, innocent, and 2-dimensional. But as it progresses, it gets deeper and deeper and the characters get more and more complex. Uncomfortable aspects of the people are brought to the forefront. While it doesn't bask in hedonism like most Hollywood films, it doesn't shy away from any controversial subjects as long as they're the reality of the people.
You don't have to be in an open relationship to identify with the situations the characters find themselves in. Taking place almost entirely with three people in one large house, it's amazingly acted, wonderfully heartfelt... If you are strong enough to watch it, The Dreamers is well worth the effort.
Satomi hakken-den (1983)
Should be one of the legends of campy Japanese Film
Satomi Hakkenden will be understood the moment the viewer realizes that the soulful, classically Japanese score is being played on a cheap Casio synthesizer, and that somehow that is good. Being one of the country's very traditional legends (stolen from China), the writers drew from literary sources to make their movie, and it shows. The movie has heaping doses of melodrama, decapitations, and dead children. It also has characters dressed like a costume shop exploded, giant flying snakes hanging by ropes, a truly terrible 70's power ballad love song, and a plot so stereotypically Japanese it can be considered prototypical.
None of that is to say that the movie is bad. All of those things add to the ambiance of the movie. It also contains incredible special effects for 1983, some of the moments are surprisingly poignant, and the fight scenes are great. The plot may be telegraphed from a mile away, but it is still entertaining to watch it all unfold. If you are at all a fan of Japanese culture, you have seen this movie before, in one way or another. Yet if this sounds at all appealing to you, you owe it to yourself to see the original. Satomi Hakkenden deserves a larger spot in great camp history.
House of the Dead (2003)
Textbook example of what not to do
Uwe Boll has taken what could have been a great horror movie and turned it into a textbook example of how to create a truly atrocious licensed movie.
The writing in House of the Dead is so bad you will be rooting for the zombies, if for no other reason than they don't talk. The dialog varies between gratuitous and painful, with the occasional welcome sprinkle of unintelligible. Characters frequently exceed the normal stupidity found in most zombie movies, often deciding to run into the massive horde of undead instead of away from them. Of course, while the undead vary quite widely from the tree-leaping lupine zombies to the slow, lumbering, and kind-of-lost zombies, they are by far Hollywood's least threatening monsters. They are so weak they can be felled by a single bullet, and even lose several knife fights. Forget about smashing through walls, these zombies can't even push over small pieces of wood blocking windows.
OK, so the writing is atrocious, the plot is terrible, and the zombies are paper-thin. But at least there is a great, grand house like in the videogames, and is beautifully filmed to take maximum effect from each scene, right? Sadly, no. While in the videogames the house of the dead could easily be described as a mansion, here it is a tiny and run-down two-room affair... An outhouse of the dead, if you will. Even the now-infamous shots of the house spliced in from the videogames look more convincing. And yes, the movie makers do splice in shots from the video game. And every time a character dies they get a death animation stolen from Resident Evil. And they use the Matrix special effect about 30 times. Even if you discount these atrocious effects, the normal cinematography is still so bad Gilbert Godfried would be ashamed to show it on USA's Up All Night. The only visual effects that really worked were of the zombie's exploding heads, which while not terrifying were surprisingly satisfying.
We came into this fully expecting a bad movie, only to be surprised by the true depth this movie achieves. Characters throw up on each other. Zombies swim. People arrive at an empty rave full of blood-soaked clothing and immediately have sex. Within the first 30 minutes no fewer than six breasts had been exposed. Did I mention that zombies lose knife fights? If you're looking for a truly awful movie, look no further. This is it. This is the standard by which all bad movies will be judged in the future.