suwakjeff Reviews

We Are Still Here (I) (2015)

I cannot be THIS out of touch

[3/10 · 11 March 2016]

The first fifteen or twenty minutes of this movie were gold. It was horror done right. Atmospheric, paying upon the unknown, subtle scares. The dialogue was pretty bad, but I was more than engaged by the building horror.

then, suddenly, the movie completely loses its restraint and becomes a goofy gore fest with monsters that just might be action heroes.

I don't want to say anything else because I don't want to add spoilers. I'll just say that I love horror movies. It is my favorite genre. There are different levels of horror. There is true, psychological mind screws that get under the skin and stay there for days (my favorite kind). On the opposite end of the spectrum are these CGI, "thrill" driven, blood-and-gore-a-minute for people with no attention spans (my lease favorite kind). The latter has its place. No doubt. My only problem with this film is that it pretends, and many of the reviewers on here seem to be pretending, that it's the former.

I honestly feel like the victim of false advertising and I have a hard time believing the almost universal praise this movie received. I know my tastes lean a bit more towards the artsy and stylish (and old), but I cannot be THIS out of touch. For god's sake, I just watched Age of Ultron last night and enjoyed a lot of things about it.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

World makes no sense

[2/10 · 18 May 2015]

This is a desert world where they pump thousands of gallons of water out of giant pipes, basically the most inefficient delivery system possible, so that the vast majority of it is lost and soaks uselessly into the ground.

This is a world where heroes get their hands on weapons and fire rounds into the ground for no apparent reason, despite the fact that in such a world every single bullet would be immensely valuable.

It's a world with seemingly no food and yet the ability to feed hundreds or thousands of people who power everything through muscle.

this is a world where the technology is so limited that they have to use human beings on giant hamster wheels for power, and yet they are able to determine random people's blood types and rig up complicated blood transfusion systems.

This is a world where a woman falls in love with some random ass pasty white guy for absolutely no apparent reason other than that he's there.

Towards the end of the movie one of the women makes a statement "I thought he wasn't crazy, anymore," despite the fact that no one in that group could have any idea of Max's history, mental state, or the scene that had just taken place inside his head. There is ZERO reason for her to make that statement, and yet she made it.

The feminist metaphor is so cartoonish that the women might as well have walked around with signs around their neck reading "feminist metaphor."

Oh, and gasoline/diesel is extremely hard to come by in your world? Hey, no problem, fuel a giant freaking truck for no other purpose than to act as a mobile stage for an electric guitarist and a bunch of drummers...you know, because in a world where resources are rare, you've got all the fuel in the world to do such a thing.

This movie is great so long as you don't think. It moves very fast, with lots of explosions and inexplicable visuals, so you could conceivably watch the whole thing without ever stopping to think about how most of it makes no goddamn sense. This is, indeed, what must have happened. I can think of no other reason how people could watch this and call it "smart."

Things move so fast that you never get to know any of the characters in any meaningful way. Max is the stereotypical "psychologically scarred loner." Gibson was able to give that character depth in past movies, partly due to his acting but also partly due to the fact that the movies stopped to breathe long enough at times to get to know him.

The writing is terrible. Throwing in some feminism doesn't change that. I am completely dumbfounded at the enthusiastic response to this mindless stream of dreck.