Trollkien
Member
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2006
- Messages
- 15
Saw LOTS of movies over the weekend - and slept through some of the duller ones which i shall not mention here.
First up was The Stuff a fairly entertaining shlockfest by Larry Cohen. Unlike most of Cohen's other films though, this was not consistently interesting. Also it was short on the audacious scripting and events which made God Told Me To, It's Alive and Q - The Winged Serpent such amazing films. It's essentially about a malignant ice cream like material, found oozing out of the ground, that soon becomes a nation-wide fast food craze in America, taking over the people who eat it and forcing them to do its insiduous bidding.
Urotsukidoji - The Legend of the Overfiend: A hilariously OTT hentai anime. The directors realised that there was nothing that holds people's attention more than sex and violence and so there's very little else to distract the viewer by way of plot or interesting characters or any wuss crap like that. The severely notional story is about a beast-man/angel who wishes to summon up the Overfiend to cleanse and regenerate all three worlds. Naturally the forces of Hell are not too enthusiastic and so keep sending out their minions to rape and murder wide-eyed anime chicks; it being the sort of reaction evil creatures have to ANY situation.
However much to the manbeast's shock and horror, the overfiend turns out to be no different from the forces of Hell and unleashes a cataclysmic doom on the world. All of which is rendered in the most drop-dead gorgeous anime I've seen so far. There's nothing that can compare to the majesty and brilliance of some of the destructive scenes or the perverse inventiveness of the monsters — something I wish i get a chance to see on a fullsized movie screen at some point of time in my life, to appreciate fully. While this may not be for everybody (the only sort of sex that's had in this movie with a couple of exceptions is rape) it's still a very entertaining film.
Pulp Fiction: After hearing so much about this film, I was confident I wouldn't quite like it and there was no way it would live up to the hype. Well, it quite naturally doesn't, but is still a very fun film — snappy dialogue, very black humour and a pace which never makes you conscious of its 2 hour+ length — except the annoying sequence where Bruce Willis is romancing his retarded French girlfriend.
On returning home and being plagued by insomnia i saw Badlands by Terrence Mallick. I don't think any director I've ever seen so far has been as capable of doing justice to landscapes as Mallick — his shots are so well composed and ethereally beautiful, a plot REALLY wouldn't matter. And yet, there's quite an interesting one driving Badlands — inspired by the same killer couple whose rampage across America in the 1950s was referenced in Nebraska by Springsteen and Natural Born Killers by Oliver Stone. While Stone turned the killers into cool slick smartasses, the couple in Badlands (Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek) seem to live in awful limbo-worlds of their own, interesecting only at the point where they beleive they are in love with each other. And as the movie progresses and the bodycount mounts, even that is no longer enough to keep them together. Martin Sheen is nothing short of brilliant in this movie. He plays this not-too-bright guy who desperately wants to be James Dean and to have his rather placid laidback version of a good-time; genuinely horrified by the efforts that people go through to stop him. He's not a particularly cocky killer; doesn't toss-out lines that will go down in history, but at the same time is not entirely devoid of wanting to play to a gallery — rearranging his hair even as he drives in the last car chase and magnanimously tossing memorabilia to the cops who apprehend him.
The Wicker Man: WOW! From a rather slack beginning this film evolves into one of the most original horror flicks I've seen in a while. It's notionally a Scottish Pagan twist on the backwoods brutality genre — except apart from the last sequence there's no real brutality, just an sense of utter and total 'wrongness' that seems to know absolutely no peak. An upright seargent arrives at the island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a local girl and finds a (Christian) Godless place where people carouse about naked, sing lewd songs about the landlord's daughter and do rustic bump and grind routines on her, under the approving gaze of her father; use toads to cure illnesses, teach 9 year old school kids about phallic symbols and do this in an absolutely casual manner, like they know no other way. Much of the horror stems from the contrasts offered to these by our straightlaced protagonist with his very Christian notions about propriety and good behaviour and his helplessness at seeing the law he is obviously proud to represent being undermined so casually. I won't spoil the climax for you, but its easily one of the most visceral, all the more so because there's no copious bloodletting. The entire movie is set to a gorgeous folk-rock soundtrack that will sit very well with fans of bands like The Pentangle and Fairport Convention.
First up was The Stuff a fairly entertaining shlockfest by Larry Cohen. Unlike most of Cohen's other films though, this was not consistently interesting. Also it was short on the audacious scripting and events which made God Told Me To, It's Alive and Q - The Winged Serpent such amazing films. It's essentially about a malignant ice cream like material, found oozing out of the ground, that soon becomes a nation-wide fast food craze in America, taking over the people who eat it and forcing them to do its insiduous bidding.
Urotsukidoji - The Legend of the Overfiend: A hilariously OTT hentai anime. The directors realised that there was nothing that holds people's attention more than sex and violence and so there's very little else to distract the viewer by way of plot or interesting characters or any wuss crap like that. The severely notional story is about a beast-man/angel who wishes to summon up the Overfiend to cleanse and regenerate all three worlds. Naturally the forces of Hell are not too enthusiastic and so keep sending out their minions to rape and murder wide-eyed anime chicks; it being the sort of reaction evil creatures have to ANY situation.
However much to the manbeast's shock and horror, the overfiend turns out to be no different from the forces of Hell and unleashes a cataclysmic doom on the world. All of which is rendered in the most drop-dead gorgeous anime I've seen so far. There's nothing that can compare to the majesty and brilliance of some of the destructive scenes or the perverse inventiveness of the monsters — something I wish i get a chance to see on a fullsized movie screen at some point of time in my life, to appreciate fully. While this may not be for everybody (the only sort of sex that's had in this movie with a couple of exceptions is rape) it's still a very entertaining film.
Pulp Fiction: After hearing so much about this film, I was confident I wouldn't quite like it and there was no way it would live up to the hype. Well, it quite naturally doesn't, but is still a very fun film — snappy dialogue, very black humour and a pace which never makes you conscious of its 2 hour+ length — except the annoying sequence where Bruce Willis is romancing his retarded French girlfriend.
On returning home and being plagued by insomnia i saw Badlands by Terrence Mallick. I don't think any director I've ever seen so far has been as capable of doing justice to landscapes as Mallick — his shots are so well composed and ethereally beautiful, a plot REALLY wouldn't matter. And yet, there's quite an interesting one driving Badlands — inspired by the same killer couple whose rampage across America in the 1950s was referenced in Nebraska by Springsteen and Natural Born Killers by Oliver Stone. While Stone turned the killers into cool slick smartasses, the couple in Badlands (Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek) seem to live in awful limbo-worlds of their own, interesecting only at the point where they beleive they are in love with each other. And as the movie progresses and the bodycount mounts, even that is no longer enough to keep them together. Martin Sheen is nothing short of brilliant in this movie. He plays this not-too-bright guy who desperately wants to be James Dean and to have his rather placid laidback version of a good-time; genuinely horrified by the efforts that people go through to stop him. He's not a particularly cocky killer; doesn't toss-out lines that will go down in history, but at the same time is not entirely devoid of wanting to play to a gallery — rearranging his hair even as he drives in the last car chase and magnanimously tossing memorabilia to the cops who apprehend him.
The Wicker Man: WOW! From a rather slack beginning this film evolves into one of the most original horror flicks I've seen in a while. It's notionally a Scottish Pagan twist on the backwoods brutality genre — except apart from the last sequence there's no real brutality, just an sense of utter and total 'wrongness' that seems to know absolutely no peak. An upright seargent arrives at the island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a local girl and finds a (Christian) Godless place where people carouse about naked, sing lewd songs about the landlord's daughter and do rustic bump and grind routines on her, under the approving gaze of her father; use toads to cure illnesses, teach 9 year old school kids about phallic symbols and do this in an absolutely casual manner, like they know no other way. Much of the horror stems from the contrasts offered to these by our straightlaced protagonist with his very Christian notions about propriety and good behaviour and his helplessness at seeing the law he is obviously proud to represent being undermined so casually. I won't spoil the climax for you, but its easily one of the most visceral, all the more so because there's no copious bloodletting. The entire movie is set to a gorgeous folk-rock soundtrack that will sit very well with fans of bands like The Pentangle and Fairport Convention.
