Movies
The Mist, 2007 - â â â (contains spoilers)
This review may contain spoilers.
This was an OK movie. I enjoyed it. It was good enough to hold my interest (which is not easy to do).
Stephen King can build believable characters and Frank Darabont does a good job following up on that.
First, a few trigger warnings. If you have issues with gore horror, this might be a problem here, though it's far from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The religious zealots are more of a problem if you have issues with that. Unfortunately, it's also believable: all you need to do is to read the news. People kill in the name of God for much less than being threatened by the supernatural.
The movie builds toward the climax nicely, and you get the chance to get up close and personal with the characters. The feelings of dread and panic are believable. There's a bit of a cross into the cliche with some military experiment gone wrong and creatures crossing from another dimension. This is not a huge spoiler, because the origin of the horrors in the movie is of little importance. Way more important is what the people do to survive and how they cope (or don't cope) with the monstrosities. This is the beef of the movie, and King drives it home well.
I'm a bit angry with the ending (Spoiler alert! stop here!!).
It doesn't end well, and I don't like how fast David (Thomas Jane) gave up on everybody, including his son. He decided that, nope, that's it, time to commit group suicide and give up. It feels pushed. King wanted to show us that real hell is making decisions, but this last one doesn't make sense with the rest of the movie. Oh well, it was still fun.
Gave up on The Colony. Here's what I had to say:
"too much "been there, done that" to care. It feels like a Children of Men mixed with Mad Max, and it fails at both... ..."
The Colony, 2021 - â â â
I started watching yesterday, got bored, started watching again today, got bored again, decided it's enough for now.
The Colony starts OK. Earth is kaput, and the rich humans settled in a different remote place, where they discovered they can't reproduce. Desperate for the survival of the human race, they return to earth to see if they can restart.
But it's too narrow, and too much "been there, done that" to care. It feels like a Children of Men mixed with Mad Max, and it fails at both. Blake, played by Nora Arnezeder, crash-lands on earth with her co-pilot Tucker. It seems like Earth is hostile, with badass mutants and radiation, and the pair worries about that - at start - but we soon learn Earth is actually fine, the humans survived, and decided to capture them both, because you know, humans.
We learn that Tucker is Blake's 80-percent fertile match, which probably means that if everything is OK the two can bone and have kids. hoary! Blake is captured, and she learns that she's fertile because she has a period again out of nowhere, and it's time to contact back home to let them know she's ready to pop out kids, so please come and join her, start bone and making babies.
The story around that doesn't fully pick up. Instead of checking out what happened with Earth, the creatures, the sea, the rain, the movie starts focusing on the petty war between the locals and those who crash-landed before, in some sort of a fight about mother earth against evil technology and rich people. I can smell and see this miles away and with every second movie beating the same drums, I yawned away and went to watch something else.
Good start, but this movie is too scared to pick up on what could be more interesting: what's wrong with earth and how to save it. Instead, it's the old good guys against bad guys.
Belladonna of Sadness, 1973 - â â â (contains spoilers)
This review may contain spoilers.
This movie is not fully animated. At least not in the traditional sense. Most of the motion in the movie consists of the camera panning over long strips of paper showing the progression of the story from right to left. This is not to say there is a complete lack of animation. There's enough of that, and though basic, it fits in its elementary - and at times primal - methodology. You'll need to watch this one with an open mind and a healthy dose of patience.
This mechanism is important to how the movie delivers the story. It allows a gradual change in the tone and mood of what's going on. In a certain scene, for example, a crowd of people seems content, but as the scene goes on, the faces shift, the colors darken, and an angry mob emerges. This kind of transition is often reinforced with sounds and colors, another important element of storytelling. The red of passion and violence (of which there is a lot), the pink of beauty, the green-yellow of evil and sickness, and even the black of nothingness for a pause.
I mentioned passion and violence. This movie swims in those. Nudity is not hidden nor implied. drawings of breasts, vulvas, and penes dance on the screen while orgies of all genders and even a couple of animals blend into violent rivers or red. The cliche elements are here: sex is evil (the devil is shaped like a large penis); pleasure is sin; women corrupt. It's all there and might rub certain folks the wrong way. This is also a good point to mention that rape is a part of this movie. If this is a hard line for you in movie watching, I'd sit this one out.
But this movie doesn't dwell on cliches, and just as I was about to roll my eyes, the movie ask something I didn't see coming.
"Who says anger and hatred are ugly," the devil asks Jeanne after she sold her soul to him. The scene is painted with colorful butterflies, while soft bells chime in the background. Jeane lays naked after, having an orgasm of a lifetime. Can such a thing be fundamentally evil? And if not, are we evil for teaching it is? It's an uncomfortable question to ask, and I was happy to see that not only the film didn't shy away from it, but chose it as a focal point. There is no peace without war, and there's no haven without hell.
The movie draws a direct connection to women in the French Revolution, not too long after they were considered to be witches. The fear of men of women is everywhere in this film. There's a woman who wants to have sex with her husband more often but knows contraception is against god. they are too poor to afford to have more kids. She decides to use contraceptives anyway (a gift from Jeanne, who is called a witch at this point) and finds happiness not just for her husband but for herself.
It's not a coincidence that at the end, when the "witch" Jeanne is burned at the stake, it's not a stake at all: it's a cross. She suffered continuously by the hand of the people she worked hard to serve and help with the aid of the devil. These were the same folks who stood silent while she was burned alive.
An interesting question is not "was this woman evil," but the underlying one: is the devil, who helped the woman and through the abilities, he gave her helped the people, evil, or is it god, who's teachings caused such an artifact of beauty good will be destroyed? Are we born into sin, or are the teachings of the priests the ones who turn us into monsters?
There was nothing evil about Jeanne: not at the beginning of the movie and not at the end. Even when she thirsts for revenge and goes after the people, perhaps blamed for the Black Death in the film, one has to recall the nightmare she spent her waking life living. Why wouldn't she want revenge? Wouldn't we? Don't we?