Parents (Mainly My Mom).... They Confuse Me

So a while ago (I don't remember how long ago) my brother told my mom about how this kid in his school was wearing a shirt that had something to do with Grand Theft Auto V and she said something that I thought was kind of weird, and that was something along the lines of that because his mom lets him play games like that, he's a naughty kid. Now I have no idea whether or not that is true since I don't know the kid myself, but part of the problem is that playing games like that would make a kid misbehave, which I do not believe to be true unless there is something wrong with them mentally to begin with and that is another story but I kind of had to go "Really?" because this was the same person who got me San Andreas when I was my brother's age. I should also mention that it'll always be dependent on how well the kid can process things like that and some can handle it at earlier ages than others. She has also been hypocritical at times or thinking that one thing was bad while another thing that was objectively worse was fine; example being comparing the sangs Get Lucky to Blurred Lines, which I could get into why I think that argument in incredibly flawed, I'll let it slide this time. The sad thing is that most people acquire their taste in films and music from their parents, either directly or indirectly and I like to think that I got most of my film tastes from my mom while my musical tastes comes from my dad (a little from the others on both) and when it comes to having a difference of opinion when it comes to those things, I like to consider it that they did a good job parenting me, having exposed me to things that they thought were good as long as they were sure I could handle it (which I could for the most part) and I have them to thank for my taste in things, even if it leads me to dislike a lot of theirs in the process. It would be easy to say that, "Oh this has too much swearing or too much violence" and etc., without actually considering the context of things, which is another thing I learned from them. The context of why things happen is important to explain to kids about movies and video games, why one is more inappropriate than the other. This was also part of something the other day when I was watching an episode of Trigun when everybody had to come to the living room to eat and it was episode seven (it was difficult to listen with people being loud and no subtitles) and there was a scene where the kid in the episode who was with the people hijacking the sand crawler had a gun held to his mouth and my mom thought it was a bit much even though nothing happened to him. Now I think she didn't get the context which I could understand if she wasn't paying attention but I wish she would have just let it continue on since it's not like the kids haven't seen that kind of stuff before. But what is the point I'm making here? I'm just here to say that I do love my parents even though it may not seem like it most of the time since they made me the person I am today. I just find it weird that my mom who exposed me to a lot of things as a kid that most would have frowned upon (and I turned out okay for the most part) has turned into kind of a prude similar to that DVD-R Hell episode Brad Jones did on Deception of a Generation. Maybe it is my duty to be the purveyor of that kind of stuff now that my mom no longer wants to do that, to make sure that my brother turns out okay before it is too late.

Top Five - This Movie Is Actually Funny? Awesome.

It is rather hard to say whether or not Chris Rock has had a good career in film, yet there was always this assumption that Rock was a funny person, either from his days as a comedian, his stint on Saturday Night Live, or when he got his own show. I find him to be funny in things like that although aside from a few roles in movies, that humor never really translated. I can never say that I have seen all that much to judge him wholeheartedly, I have enjoyed some of his roles, such as Rufus in Dogma or as JB/Daddy Tang in Pootie Tang, but there are also things like the Grown Ups movies which I don't like at all for being such as black hole of talent or as mentioned from the Penguins of Madagascar review, that series is not something I really like to watch regularly. There was also the unnecessary remake of Death at a Funeral, the original being one of my favorite movies. So it can be said that lately his film career has not been that good, although maybe financially successful. So when trailers for this movie came out, I was kind of intrigued but also cautious due to said track record. Then one of the internet reviews I trust a lot gave it a good review and some others have said good things about it so I thought I'd give it a watch. And what I got could easily be one of the best things that Chris Rock has done in his career so far.

Top Five, which was also written and directed by Rock, follows a day in the life of Andre Allen, a former comedian turned comedy film star who has to juggle many things going on all the while being followed by a reporter almost the entire time, who he begins to open up to about his life. The two of them do start to develop a sort of a connection with one another over the course of the film yet it never devolves into a romantic comedy which I rather liked and I'm glad for. That said, the chemistry between Rock and Chelsea Brown, played by Rosario Dawson, is really good as they are able to switch from the comedic moments to the more serious beats of the story in a rather believable way. The rest of the cast comes in and out, mainly just appearing in a few scenes before fading away, such as Kevin Hart's character as Allen's agent whom I thought would have been more prominent in the film which did kind of make me worry. Not because I don't like him (I don't have enough of a gauge of that to really say) but more due to the prominence he has had in comedic films over the past few years I though it would be overexposure. His time in the movie was funny though, I'll give him that. The only character who does appear in the film a significant amount of time other than the leads would be Silk, Andre's assistant played by JB Smoove, who does get some laughs in the movie. 

A prominent source of jokes in the film comes from the movie that Andre is promoting called Uprize, his first attempt at more serious work where he plays a prominent member of the Haitian slave revolution. Part of it is poking fun at how miscast Allen appears to be in the movie, where the best way to describe it is to pretend that Chris Rock was cast in the lead of Django Unchained and you can get how miscast he would be in that. A sight gag I found funny was that at one of the promotions there was a pamphlet called the Uprize Fitness Kit but I might be one of the few who gets a laugh at that. I should also give some credit for the movie not giving away all of the good jokes in the trailer, at least the one that I saw being the case since there were a lot that were really good. My favorite though might be during Andre's bachelor party where there is a cameo by Jerry Seinfeld and saying too much might ruin it but if the prospect of seeing Seinfeld "makin' it rain" sounds funny to you, then this movie is for you. If you're hesitant about this movie, I'd say give it a chance since it is easily one of the best things Chris Rock has done in years and hopefully it'll be a better movie than you expect it to be. 

Epilogue: I did consider calling this a more conventional version of Birdman since there are some similar themes in it but I was unsure whether or not that is true. 

Penguins of Madagascar - And yes, I saw this movie by myself, by the way

From the title, I admit that was the situation going into the theater this week. I hadn't gone in a while since Nightcrawler and Birdman no longer being in the theater meant that there really wasn't anything I wanted to watch aside from Interstellar again (maybe Big Hero 6), which I had planned to see but missed a reasonable screening time so my mind came back to a recent midnight screening episode on thecinemasnob.com where Brad saw the movie by himself as well and enjoyed it. He also talked about how ridiculous the first two thirds was and how schizophrenic the story was in that period of time, which sometimes would not work but from what was going on I thought it would be nice to give it a shot. I mean he had me sold at animated Werner Herzog, so how was I not going to see this movie?

Another point I should bring up is that the movie series that Penguins of Madagascar comes from is one that I think is kind of okay, but not really worth watching multiple times. Then again, I have only seen the first and third one all of the way through. I'm not sure why I haven't seen the second one all the way yet but it just hasn't happened. It's not like there isn't anything good in those movies, since there really is some good things in them, mainly the penguins. I have also had no exposure to the show The Penguins of Madagascar but from what I've heard, the movie doesn't take place in the same continuity and is pretty much a direct sequel to the third film. That sequence when the penguins decide to leave the circus due to the constant listening of that fucking annoying as hell Circus Afro song (which I can relate to obviously) was a good sign that this movie was going to be a lot of fun. That came after the origin opening sequence, which is where the Werner Herzog thing comes into play. It has the first three penguins, Skipper, Kowalski, and Rico as young penguins going to rescue a lone egg, that ends up becoming their fourth member Private, that strayed from the pack, which has them planning their rescue at the edge of the cliff, where Herzog is watching them with a documentary crew, and Herzog has the guy with the boom mic push the penguins off the cliff for dramatic effect. That had me sold on the movie right then and there.

The plot is rather simple with the penguins having to stop the nefarious scheme of the octopus Dave, voiced by John Malkovich, who you can tell from the way he delivers most of his lines that he is having so much fun in the role. Dave is a really fun villain right from the introduction when he kidnaps the penguins with the help of a vending machine and his plan is to turn all of the penguins in the world into monsters after being outshined by them at the zoo for years. The plot itself is rather simple but it goes into a lot of tangents, which can come off as stupid and pointless in other movies but this one seems to at least keep some form of stability with the off the wall stuff as well, such as the penguins breaking into Fort Knox, the whole North Wind task force that they always run into with Skipper and Agent Classified always at odd with one another, and Private being the cutest one of them all plays into the ending. My favorite part though mainly just for one line being really hilarious is when the penguins end up in Shanghai and end up mistaking it for Dublin, which in itself is a rather amusing scene, and they realize that they have to go to Shanghai since that's where Dave is going, so they ship themselves there and I wish I could remember the line exactly after Skipper pops out and remarks but it has the phrase Shanghai's little Dublin district in it which for some reason made me laugh a lot.

It can be weird to be at a movie aimed at kids by yourself just because it was the only thing there that sounded fine, but to be honest I think this is a really fun movie that a lot of people can enjoy. Is every adult going to like it? No. I liked it though even though it was more amusing that laugh out loud funny. I had a laugh out loud time watching The Wolf of Wall Street yesterday and I knew that I was never going to get that with Penguins of Madagascar. It's a movie that is a spinoff with a group of secondary characters and usually, movies like that don't work all that well but the penguins are entertaining and this one is worth seeing at a matinee or with kids if you have them. It's worth a rental for sure when it comes to digital. I'll probably give this a second thought if I catch Big Hero 6 next Tuesday since I think if it's there, I'll see that or I'll go see The Hobbit film that's coming out.

The Friedkin Connection #3 - Crusing

Coming from a director known for having done a lot of films that were considered controversial for the time, the 1980 film Cruising might be one of those that could be the highest on that list for Friedkin. A thriller about a cop who goes undercover into the S&M scene of gay culture at the time in order to find a serial killer sounds like something that most people would be okay with filming. At the time of filming, protests from the gay community got so bad to the point where a good portion of the exterior shots had to be dubbed due to the amount of loud noises that would be playing and many places didn't allow any filming inside doe to the subject matter. From the sounds of things, it was a miracle that the movie was able to get made in the first place. But after all of that controversy, does that overshadow the film itself to the point where people might be turned off by it, especially due to the PC type of society we live in where any amount of controversy might turn people off? Well, I'm sure you all have had enough of that so let's just talk about the movie itself.

In the lead role of Steve Burns, the cop who goes undercover, is Al Pacino who does a rather good job at becoming this guy who is forced to explore a part of society that he would not, along with being able to convey how this job is affecting him which more or less is done with subtext, which might be a turn off with this film since it really doesn't explain all that much unless you're actively looking for it. The rest of the cast works too, especially cameos from pre-fame people like Powers Boothe as a cashier talking about what color hankies in which back pockets mean and a blink and you'll miss it appearance from Ed O'Neil as one of the detectives during the interrogation scene, which had to be one of the more out there scenes of the movie. I'll get onto that later but I also have to give credit to Joe Spinell who is fantastic in this as usual but I wish that he had been in the movie more and I didn't realize that James Remar was in this too since I recognized him but couldn't put a name to it.

I do have a major problem with this film though and it does detract from it all and what could have been a really good movie and that is the whole flow of the story. Often times, it feels like plot points are abandoned and brought up at the last possible moment to resolve them a bit. The earliest example of that is the Joe Spinell character , who is one of the first characters introduced in the movie where he and his partner pick up two transgender prostitutes and force them to give them sexual favors. One of the prostitutes tells this to the police chief in exchange for any information regarding the murder case and until the end, the plot point only comes up twice in passing. The first being one of the times the Steve Burns character is in one of the clubs and he spots Spinell among the crowd and the last being the prostitute asking whether or not they figured out which cop it was. The whole undercover plot goes nowhere as well since after the interrogation scene, it just goes into this plot where Burns follows this one suspect and it goes into some of the life of this guy and implies that he is the killer. It's not like I don't like that point, it's just it kind of feels like the story is thrown together which does make the implication in the end kind of not make sense. I get what Friedkin was trying to do but it just doesn't make any sense. Whether or not a longer cut would help the film is anyone's guess but I'm curious what the longer cut would be since one of the more entertaining stories from the Friedkin Connection book was involving the initial screening of the to the film board or studio execs, where he made a cut where he shows the worst things he can (mainly lots of hardcore sex) so that he could get the cut he wants since it'll look less shocking in comparison. The soundtrack is fun though and I wish I knew more about it although it was done by Jack Nitzsche, who also did the non Tubular Bells score for The Exorcist, I'd recommend the soundtrack a lot if you enjoy the late 70's, early 80's punk and hard rock scene. So if I have to say how I feel about this movie, I feel like there is a good movie in this but it just needed to be a little more concise in terms of the plotting to make it work. It probably is my least favorite of his films that I have seen but I kind of think that there might be worse that I'll see, but I'll give it another watch just for the score and the interrogation scene alone. 

Which One Is The Worst Halloween Twist? A Quick Descent Into Stupidity

To start off this post, I think the original Halloween is a classic film but has often been held higher in regard than it has any right to be. Sure the cinematography, the score, and the powerhouse performance by Donald Pleasence are wonderful and add to the movie so well, it's just without those things, it is a generic slasher. That and I prefer the Friday the 13th franchise. Also I wouldn't even put Halloween in the top half of John Carpenter films because most of the others are so much better, such as The Thing, Escape From New York, Assault on Precinct 13, Prince of Darkness, Big Trouble in Little China, They Live, In The Mouth of Madness, and Escape From LA. I probably like The Fog slightly more than Halloween due to the atmosphere of that film being well done but I'm getting way off topic. The Halloween franchise, as we all know, was never really meant to continue with the story of the shape that we call Michael Myers but instead turn into a anthology series, as evidence shows with the existence of Halloween III: Season of the Witch (which I do like a lot) but that plan never came to be. Part of that might have been due to the fact that if that were the case, the studios should have not have made Halloween 2 a direct sequel to the first. But studios love their money and the first one made a lot of it, along with spawning the glutton of slasher films in the early 80's, so that one was made. As for that movie, I think it's fine. Not really noteworthy aside from it being the film debut of Dana Carvey and the stupid plot twist that is the reason I'm covering this: the fact that Michael and Laurie are brother and sister. The stupid plot elements/twists exist in future sequels and when I was thinking about it, a lot of them were really, really dumb and this is coming from the guy who just admitted he liked the Friday the 13th franchise a lot more, which had zombie Jason, telekinetic girl, slug creature and going to space. I thought I'd cover three of the things in the Halloween series that really made me go, "This is just fucking stupid." Those being the previously mentioned brother-sister thing, The Man in Black/Cult of Thorn from Halloween 6, and the beginning of Halloween: Resurrection AKA why that movie even happens after how the previous movie ended. I also thought about the ending of Halloween 4 which (SPOILERS but this whole post will have spoilers so I have warned thee!) ends with Jamie killing her foster mother in a way similar to how Michael killed his sister as a kid. Why that is not here is because for the most part, I think that it would have been a cool setup for sequels although there is that it is ripping off the ending of Friday the 13th part 5 (another movie that I shouldn't like but I do, mainly in the same way I like Troll 2 and Showgirls).

Halloween 2, oh how much of a betrayal you are in terms of continuity. One thing that I don't like about it too is how Doctor Loomis changes his personality almost immediately from the end of the first one, which had him with the look of "I knew this would happen" which does follow with how he saw Michael as being pure evil and thus something that probably could not be killed by normal means. That was changed to "Holy shit! This just happened." and Loomis becomes way too panicky and paranoid to the point where he accidentally kills a kid. But onto that twist. Throughout the film, Laurie has flashbacks which has her remembering how her mom told her that she was adopted but the last one that settles things is that she actually met Michael at Smiths Grove as a kid, which kind of throws the idea that she had no idea who Michael was aside from the story of that first murder out the window along with why was she there in the first place. The worst part was how the twist is revealed in the first place, when Loomis is being taken back to Smiths Grove due to Michael's escape and his investigation. He is with his colleague Marion Chambers, who was with him during Michael's escape, and she is the one who reveals the fact that Michael and Laurie are related. The worst thing about this was that how did Loomis not know this already? Loomis first met Michael fifteen years prior, around the time of Judith Myers' death, as was pointed out in the first film where Loomis explained that he had spent that time trying to communicate with him followed by trying to keep him locked away. Chambers explained that Michael's parents died two years AFTER he was committed to Smiths Grove, which left Laurie orphaned and to be adopted by the Strode family. Laurie was already born during the time of the first murder as well which leaves the question of where she was in the time frame but that will deal with the Cult of Thorn plot line so I'll cover that then. So as to why Loomis had no idea about that connection does make him seem really incompetent as a doctor due to how simple that information was. Sure, Chambers explained that the records of Laurie being Michael's sister were destroyed for reasons but that leaves the question still of who authorized that meeting between Laurie and Michael from the flashback. It could be assumed that it was 7-8 years before the events of the first movie which makes the whole Loomis didn't know thing all the more stupid. Unless it was authorized by Dr . Wynn which again would go into the Cult of Thorn plot. But seriously, this twist was really stupid. Also no matter if you hate the Rob Zombie remake and its sequel, they at least tried to make this twist work better and for the most part, it makes a little more sense but not enough.

Now we get to what most people consider to be one of the worst films in the series, Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers, infamous for the whole Thorn curse being the reason why Michael is such an invincible killing machine. And to be honest, it probably is one of the worst even with the producer's cut but I don't think that the Thorn curse is the main reason why it sucks. That doesn't mean it's not a stupid plot line but looking up some information regarding this film, I think that maybe this movie could have worked since from reading some of the original script, it actually isn't half bad, especially since it could be considered fan fiction due to writer Daniel Farrands having done a lot of work into putting the plot together, expanding on the Thorn symbols' brief appearance in the 5th entry. Yet the script was re written 11 times before the final version so I'll have to read some more of it to see what changes were made and for what reasons. So the whole Thorn curse thing is that its a Druid symbol that represents a demon who spreads destruction, and a child is chosen to bear the curse and is meant to sacrifice the next of kin in his tribe on Samhain. This is how the movie explains it from what I remember and it isn't that bad of an explanation for the supernatural elements of Michael Myers although sometimes it's better not to explain things. There is also the Man in Black, a mysterious figure that also first appears in the 5th film who in the end of that helps Michael escape police custody and as revealed in this film is part of the Cult of Thorn that kidnapped Jamie and impregnated her intending the child to become the next sacrifice. This is where the real problems come in with this plot line. In the movie, they bring back Tommy Doyle, one of the kids that Laurie babysat in the first film and he is staying with an odd lady named Mrs. Blankenship, who is revealed that she was babysitting Michael the night he killed his sister. I don't remember if it was mentioned if she was watching Laurie as well but I am not sure. Maybe some fan theory could explain that but it also mean that either Mrs. Blankenship is a terrible babysitter or that she was aware of the Thorn curse, since she tells the main characters that Danny hears the voice of the Man in Black just like Michael did all those years ago. The cult itself seems rather dumb too to think that they can control Michael which does end up backfiring on them in the end in the theatrical ending mainly (with the cult being killed off really brutally). I thought I had more nitpicks at this but I think there are many people who have done a good job at doing the subject justice and maybe I'll do a follow up on this one at another time.

Halloween Resurrection is the worst film in the franchise. No doubt about it. It is a rather pointless film especially considering how the previous film, Halloween H2O, ended with Laurie decapitating her brother. And they retconned that immediately in the sequel by saying that Michael disarmed a paramedic and had him take his place so Michael could leave the scene of the crime, meaning Laurie killed the wrong person. The reasoning behind his escape is ridiculous since why would Michael need to do that? And sure, the paramedic's windpipe was broken so he couldn't speak but in the end of that film, if that were the case, why didn't the paramedic just take the mask off? I don't think Michael thought that far ahead to think to make the mask stick to the guy's face. There is also the fact that how did no on notice Michael out in the open considering that he should be covered in severe burns from the events of Halloween 2. I don't know if I should forgive the fact that he should be blind as well due to his eyes being shot out which I think people would have taken notice to as well. The previous sequels also didn't take that into consideration (Halloween 5 had that moment with Jamie trying to communicate with him which has Michael taking off his mask to reveal his eyes) but H2O threw out that continuity so whatever. Another point that has to be made is that wouldn't this have given him the perfect opportunity to kill Laurie due to him being is disguise and not having to wait all the time that passes (which was apparently 3 years) and I can forgive Michael for not looking for Laurie for the 20 years prior to H2O but Resurrection just really seems all the more pointless because of it. And with Laurie being killed off right away in that one, the rest of the movie doesn't need to happen either since what is the real point now that he killed his sister?

So what is the verdict? Which Halloween plot twist/element is the worst of them all? That's easy, it's Halloween 2's brother-sister twist. Sure the thorn curse is dumb for a lot more reasons for many people but at least the writer thought that through and took some of the hinted elements to make something out of it, although it did fail (mostly due to Joe Chappelle rewriting the ending on set and changing a lot of the plot around) yet it had some things to cling onto unlike the twist in 2 which seemed like an afterthought. Resurrection is probably a worse betrayal but the movie itself is rather pointless and should be erased from the minds of everyone who has seen it. Hopefully this doesn't turn out to be a controversial post since this was just something I thought of that would be fun to write. So to sign off, wow was the Halloween franchise really stupid.

What The F&@#? or Is This Really That Bad? #2 - Showgirls

I haven't done one of these in a long while, mainly due to not really knowing what movies I should be covering and recently, I thought that maybe it shouldn't be limited to films on this series. This will be apparent with hopefully my next post, which will be a music album and a pretty notorious one at that. But we'll leave that for another day since we've got a really fun movie to talk about right now. That being the 1995 Paul Verhoeven directed, Joe Eszterhas penned Showgirls. I avoided this film for quite some time due to the amount of hate the film had garnered, yet I had grown a slight appreciation for the director recently, having fallen in love with Robocop and really enjoying Total Recall. So when I wrote my review for Interstellar a few weeks back, I decided that I'll put the movie on in the background which in hindsight ended up being a mistake since Showgirls is one of those movies where it is kind of a masterpiece in all of the wrong ways, the kind of movie where you expect everyone involve to never work in the film business, or at least not in any big budget system again. And I can see why when I look at it. It could almost draw a parallel to Troll 2 in it's incompetence (maybe not that bad but both movies are still enjoyable) with the acting just being so off in a way that is hard to explain. Elizabeth Berkley as Nomi Malone is the prime example of this, making her easily the best and worst thing about this movie. Part of that does come from how she is probably topless in 70% of the movie and she looks rather attractive minus the times where she just looks as if she's really trying way, way, way too hard. This being like the lap dance scene or the most ridiculous sex scene ever (with Agent Dale Cooper, of all people) that add to this aspect, where all of her movements are strange to look at, making them all the more captivating. Also have to give props to this movie for the phrase "Everybody got AIDS and shit."

But what about the plot of this movie? To put it simply, it follows Nomi Malone who hitchhikes to Las Vegas to make it big, going through many hardships all the while doing whatever she can to make it to the top. She gets abandoned at the start of the film, getting her feet back on track when she befriends Molly, who works with a show at the Stardust Casino called Goddess, which leads to Nomi being introduced to the lead of said show, Cristal Connors. Cristal does many things to humiliate Nomi due to her being a stripper and believing what she does is nothing more than prostitution, angering the latter every time it is brought up. The forms of humiliation include the earlier mentioned lap dance, the dance audition and an appearance at a boat trade show where Nomi is expected to offer herself up to whoever wants it. This leads Nomi to try and take the top spot from Cristal at any costs. That is kind of the most simple way I could put this without including a lot of other plot elements that come and go throughout. And again, the acting from everyone is so weird and off that I'm not sure whether it's intentionally bad or not. The dialogue doesn't help things at all as it reads like a gigantic melodrama which depending on who you hear it from, was Eszterhas' and Verhoeven's intention for the thing. I could see that maybe, due to how a lot of Verhoeven's American films are, including the two I mentioned in the beginning and from what I hear about Starship Troopers. I really don't know where else to go with this one other than if you haven't seen it and you like films that could be called "so bad they are good," watch this as soon as you can. I also heard about the commentary track of this is also worth a listen to and I'll catch it when I can but this movie was so much fun when I saw it that it might turn into a regular watch or at least I'll put it on when I'm doing something else so I can have it in the background.

I apologize for this being shorter than expected but I haven't done this series in a long while so I have to work on it a bit. Maybe my next one will be better and for those who are curious, I'll be covering the 2011 Lou Reed - Metallica collaboration Lulu.

A Review of Interstellar... an almost immediate reaction

The trip to my local theater is one that I like during the warmer seasons since the closest distance I can get from a bus stop to the theater itself is a few blocks away so walking isn't that bad. But now it has gotten to the winter months and the temperature has dropped rather quickly when last week it was actually decent weather and this week its been really fucking cold so even a little walk will leave me with my feet and hands cold and numb. Why do I mention this? Because it will probably make my trips to the theater less common for a while especially in the Oscar Bait season since there are some movies that I really want to catch such as Big Eyes and I still haven't seen Nightcrawler yet since it never plays at the time I'm there and I don't want to stay there any later than necessary since I don't want to miss the bus and have to walk all the way home. It will make all the times that I do go much more worthwhile though yet I wish I had a ride I could depend on or at least someone to see some of the movies with especially the bad ones so it'll make some fun riffing. But onto the movie for today. Interstellar was one of those movies that I was looking forward to all year and I would have gone to the preview screening the theater was doing if I had a ride since there was no way I was going to get a bus ride at the time the movie would have ended.

This is the most recent film done by director Christopher Nolan, whose previous work doesn't really need to be mentioned due to the amount of praise his work has gotten over the years. The story had been one that Christoper's brother, Jonathan had been working on years prior and the film originally had Steven Spielberg in the director's chair, which having seen the movie makes some of the story decisions make some sense especially as we get to the ending. It is hard to look at the plot of the film along with the scope of the picture and not compare it to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that is well known for being the apex of a science fiction film that pushes the boundaries of what the medium can do. Since I have not seen 2001, I really cannot compare the two films but from what I have heard of it, I think that while Interstellar might be invoking that type of film but it is more trying to appeal with the mainstream or maybe not trying to be artsy for arts sake. The basic gist of the film is that a future Earth has turned into a more larger scale version of the Dust Bowl era of America and food is running out fast so an underground NASA sends a team of astronauts to find the next refuge for humanity. Inside of this plot is the story of a father and a daughter, Cooper and Murphy. Cooper is made the pilot of the trip to a wormhole where there may be some planets that humans can survive on. Doing so, he leaves his family behind, which aside from Murphy includes his son Tom and father in law Donald. Murphy deeply resents her father's decision to go and grows to hate him over the passing years that he is gone, all the while working at NASA in her adult years trying to figure out how to get the space stations that the rest of the Earth will take to whatever place they find.

The first thing that I can praise almost instantly is the special effects which are beautiful to look at, especially since a lot of them were done practically which is insane in this day and age. The production design of the planets that the crew of the Endurance go to, mainly the ice covered world where Dr. Mann had been hibernating. There is also the beauty of Gargantua, the black hole where the planets that they travel to are orbiting. I don't know how much of the stuff that in the film is scientifically accurate but it really seems as if the production crew did their homework on many accounts and hopefully any mistakes that are caught do not take away from how powerful the visuals are. The best highlight I might have to give is the score by Hans Zimmer. It is really hard to describe how it made me feel but it seemed to always be able to perfectly encapsulate the moments that are going on in the scene at the time. Some have complained about how the score drowns out the dialogue sometimes but I really could not tell all that much even though I consider myself hard of hearing at least in my left ear.

As for the story itself, I thought it worked rather fine although maybe some of the most Spielberg like moments in the film do kind of stick out although not necessarily to the point where it detracts from the film too much. There are also some moments where it does get a little sappy but a couple of moments like that do work, such as when after visiting a planet where an hour there is seven years in Earth time, Cooper comes back to the Endurance and watches video logs his family made over the 23 years that had past due to the trip. This might get into spoiler territory so be warned but something that did kind of annoy me was the whole arc of Dr. Mann, who was described early on as being the best of what humanity had to offer and was the one to lead off the initial Lazarus missions to go to the planets and figure out whether or not they were suitable. When Cooper and the crew get to him, they find that he had been hibernating in stasis with no date of release set so he had essentially planned to never wake up due to how hopeless his situation had become. Yet when he is rescued, he no longer wanted to do the noble thing and almost sabotaged the whole plan B that Professor Brand had banked on from the beginning. The climax does get into a level of strangeness and confusion that it does feel like as if it would have fit nicely in 2001 and will probably leave me thinking a whole lot about it for quite some time. And then there is the ending after that, which might be the most Spielberg like moment of the entire thing, which is where most of the criticism draws from and for the most part, I really have no idea what to feel about it. I'm not sure if I actively disliked it or didn't mind it at all so I'll have to give it another go and see if it works or not. Maybe it does since there is this theme about love that continues throughout which could play into the plot as a whole. Again, I'll have to watch it again to see how my thoughts change the second time.

Overall, I can say that this movie is fantastic. It is by no means a perfect film and there are some things that I might look back and go "This doesn't work as well as I thought," but it is worth seeing it in the theater and despite its flaws, the almost three hour run time really doesn't feel that long. All the actors do a great job as well and for the most part I could predict that there are going to be some oscar nominations. I'm sure that the visuals and the sound will get nominated for sure and probably win a few. Where this ranks among the years best remains to be seen but I'm sure it will be somewhere in the top but Birdman really looks as if it'll take the top spot. I really should do a double bill of Birdman and Interstellar. Throw some Nightcrawler in there and it'll make a great day at the movies.

The Friedkin Connection #2 - Rampage

At the beginning of his career, Friedkin filmed a documentary called The People vs. Paul Crump, which followed a death row inmate whom at the time Friedkin thought was innocent and made the film in hopes that it would lead the courts not to kill Crump. It ended up working and the documentary ended up leading the way to the future filmography of its director. The subject of the death penalty and whether or not its use is justified is something that Friedkin has mixed opinions on in his life, being very much against it during the early stages of his life but currently sees that in some situations that it is the only option, which plays into the movie that I'll be talking about today, Rampage. Originally filmed in 1987 and only screened in Europe due to distribution issues until about five years after the fact, the film follows different groups of people who are involved in a case focused on the serial killer Charles Reese. One side is the prosecutor Anthony Fraser, who wants Reese to get the death penalty for his crimes despite being against it at first. The people trying to defend Reese seek to figure out if he was in a right state of mind during the killings or not.

The internal struggle of Fraser going against his own beliefs in terms of capital punishment does start off wavering as early on in the film, he visits the crime scenes, the one that convinces him to push for the death penalty being at the house of a family of four, the Tippetts. The father and one of the sons, Gene and Andrew, come home after a visit from the dentist to find the mutilated body of Gene's wife Eileen and the other son missing. I have to give credit to that scene where Andrew walks into the room where his mother's body is and starts screaming since that was really unnerving and even though we never see the body, it just feels a little more unsettling than expected. This was not the first group of killings though as Reese attacked the neighbors the day before yet Fraser seeing the surviving members of the Tippetts dealing with the circumstances and relating to the situation somewhat due to having lost his daughter a couple of months prior which also adds up to more of what convinces Fraser to want to get the punishment he believes the killer deserves.

Now lets get to the killer himself, Charles Reese played here by Alex McArthur, someone who I never really seen in anything before or since and from the looks of his filmography, it's kind of easy to see why. I could say that with pretty much the entire cast of the movie aside from Michael Biehn. who I'm sure a lot of people know who he is and for good reason. But there is something about McArthur that really does something with his character that I don't know how many people could have made it work as well and that is he is no matter what he does, he appears as quite a normal person in spite of the situations he is in at the time. He gets into small talk with a bunch of guards as he;s being transported like water cooler discussions between co workers. Another thing that makes this work so well is just how he plays it so we never get a real gauge of whether or not Reese is mentally unstable or he is aware of the situation and knows what he is doing. In other movies that do this, it is often where the killer does play it where he is pretending to be mentally unwell and it plays off as a twist ending of sorts and this movie doesn't really do that.

I mentioned before that the movie was filmed in '87 but did not get a US release until '92 due to distribution issues and when the time came for that US release, Friedkin did some re editing and changed the ending. I watched the '92 version so the ending I got was one that I am unsure what to think since I know what the original ending was but its one of those things where it could go either way maybe. I might have to give a lean towards the original due to how it did follow up on a piece of dialogue where Reese admits to some guards that he hopes that the courts find him guilty so that he won't have to sit in prison for the rest of his life. The revised ending does something else which is kind of interesting yet kind of anti cathartic as well.

There is also something that I want to bring up as well and that is the aspect ratio of the movie. I have no idea if that was the way it was intended to be or it was a fuck up on someone and I don't know who but the version I saw was in a 4:3 TV like format which did make me wonder if this was originally filmed as a made for TV movie, which really wouldn't be too far against Friedkin's alley since he did start off working on TV and even had two films after this that were made for TV (those being Jailbreakers and his remake of 12 Angry Men) but it did make things feel a little off since this did get a theatrical release and I'm curious what was done with the aspect ratio. But either way, I wouldn't put this as being a great film. I'd consider it good with a lot of parts that work really well and is worth watching just for Alex McArthur's performance and wondering why he never went anywhere afterwards. Out of the films I've seen of Friedkin's, its probably in the bottom but I've only seen six of them so far and I really love most of the others. So what will the next one be? I kind of wish it could be Cruising since I really want to see that so badly but maybe I'll do something more current, maybe the one that I was writing before this one but didn't finish, The Hunted. Or if you guys want me to talk about The Exorcist yet again, I'll do that.

No, the next one of this series will be The Hunted for sure.

Why I Don't Use A Rating System (Out of Laziness, Really)

To start off, I do get why rating things for reviews, either using 1-10 or F to A+, exists since it is perhaps one of the most simplest ways that one can look at a preview of said review and get some sort of expectations as to why a person thought that way towards the reviewed material. It works well when for the most part, one can agree with the reviewer as if each others tastes were similar enough where it could be a safe bet that if they liked it, so will you and vice versa. And yet it can often lead to a lot of backlash where the people who look at it go, "Why did movie A get score X when movie B got score Y?" either thinking that the score should be higher or lower. Honestly, I could just say that I am being lazy and that I why I don't use a rating system (and if I had to pick which one I'd use if I had to, it'd be a F to A+ type since the number system does have a flaw where most people will consider a 7 to be average, and below that the movie or game is terrible. I guess that could apply to the star system that below 2 1/2 stars could be called terrible). There is also the thing that came to mind when I watched a video about film criticism done by internet reviewer Chris Stuckmann (the link for the video if you are interested http://youtu.be/wJdfJVyDEQE) where he talks about how a ratings system can be sort of arbitrary and he brought up how he rated two completely different movies an A+ yet one is still better than the other, because the ratings applied to the specific genre so they are A+ movies in the specific genre but don't compare the same when put against one another. It also explains how certain movies on top 10 lists Chris has made where even though he gave movies higher grades than the ones on the list, it just depended on his feelings for the movies at the end of the year. And that might explain sort of why I choose not to use it for the time being, at least for the time I am doing written reviews (I don't know if or when I'll do video reviews). It can be a pigeon hole I guess for when you give something a grade for how you feel initially about a movie and when you look back at it, your opinion might change and you'll go "Why did I give this movie this score?" I think it's just better to say what I thought and whether or not the movie is worth watching or not. I might implement a score at some point but not for the time being.

The Raid: Redemption vs Hollywood's Highway to Hell... A Reflection

So it took me a while to get to seeing this movie for the first time, which is weird since I was always going like "This movie looks great and I should see it as soon as I can." I just didn't come up to do so until this Friday when I decided to go to Best Buy for the first time in quite a while, more so looking to see if there was any good anime on bluray for cheap (which wasn't the case this time, so I'll have to rely on the internet and online shopping for that sort of thing) but while I was there, I saw that there were some movies on sale cheap and one of them was The Raid: Redemption for $10 and I was like "Okay, let's finally see what all the praise this movie was getting was about" and I bought it yet didn't watch it until later at night. But when that time came, I kind of have to say that this was one of the best action films I've seen in quite a while. It was really intense and the fight scenes were really well choreographed and shot just as well to make every moment of action just as amazing as the previous one. So it's easy to say that I really enjoyed this movie and it'll probably be on a regular screening in my home when I feel like I'm in the mood for some straight up action. Whether it'll remain being one of the best action films of all time remains to be seen, although I do think that the lack of story might bring down the quality a little but what it lacks in story it more than brings in intensity.

While looking up some information regarding the team behind this, such as it's director Gareth Evans and the actors who do the large amount of the fighting in the movie, it was brought to my attention the one star review that the late Roger Ebert and a follow up article he did in order to defend his opinion on the film called Hollywood's highway to Hell. Now I know that there was more than one person who didn't like this movie or didn't think that the movie was as great as a lot of people thought it was and there will always be times where you can disagree with a person about things like this, I'm just the kind of person who would rather know why someone does or doesn't like something over the fact that they like it or not. So I read the article and for the most part, he did bring up some good points, such as the previously mentioned lack of story and character development which makes most of the characters nothing more than meat puppets to get pummeled on and killed, along with wondering if making a movie that can be generic but amazing at that is more than enough. That little bit brought up how Drive was advertised as a Fast and the Furious clone, which could have been much farther from the truth, leading to a woman to sue the distributors for how misleading the trailer was.

While I agree that Drive is a better movie than The Raid is for sure and he does have a point about how genre film shouldn't mean that it can just rely on just being good at the one aspect and have nothing of substance to back it up, sometimes you just need to be in the mood for something that is just pure action to just have some fun and even today there aren't that many action films that can have some entertaining sequences like The Raid. I could mention how some reviews of his could be hypocritical where he give a movie a negative review and a movie that is similar a positive one but I am not really interested about getting into a tirade about that. All I can say is that not every film has to be the best film that has ever been since what is the fun in that? Also is there even enough talent in film making for that to even be a possibility? Now having taste in film is a picky thing, as there are films that can be similar that each bring their own different feelings of each but there is a limit to how that can be. For example how how Halloween got all of the praise in the world and yet almost every slasher since has been criticized for being just a clone or being incredibly inferior. Yet when I compare the original Halloween to say Friday the 13th Part 2, there really isn't all that much different between the two aside from slightly better cinematography and a catchier soundtrack, yet Halloween 2 tried to be more like the slashers it inspired and didn't do all that well with it. All I can leave on now with this topic is The Raid: Redemption is good at being what it is meant to be: a solid action film. And I'm okay with that.

A Review of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

When I saw the trailer for this film, I was hooked yet I had no idea of what this movie was going to be about. I think the thing that made me want to see it the most was that it was starring Michael Keaton, an actor that I really like and haven't really seen him in much in a while (at least in movies that I have seen since he was in the remake of Robocop). It is really difficult to say whether or not I had any expectations of what this movie was even when I looked up a brief synopsis. The only real thing I could get from that little tidbit was that Keaton's character, Riggan Thompson, was kind of a exaggerated version of Keaton himself, a guy who got his big break starring in a series of superhero films but afterwards was never really able to make that transition into something more substantial. Riggan decides to do something different by writing, directing and starring in a play adapted from a work of writer Raymond Carver's, who had turned out to be the reason why Riggan wanted to become an actor in the first place.

One thing that I should talk about right away when it comes to this is the camerawork and editing, since the whole movie, aside from a few moments, looks as if it is all shot in one continuous take. With all of the movement on screen and the length of the scenes, this had to be one of the most challenging things to do (or at least do well) and it is not the kind of shots where you can really tell where the cuts are, such as if there is a black screen that last for a few frames just to disguise it. Due to how well the camerawork flows from this kind of trickery, the people who work on lighting and stuff really had their work cut out for them since even a little amount of mess up could screw up the flow. For things like this as well, the actors have to get a ton of credit for being able to perform as well as they do in all of that time that the scene is going on.

The acting itself is really wonderful as everyone seems to be at their best in this movie. Keaton is fantastic playing Riggan, a man whose desire to not be forgotten has manifested into some sort of delusion where he appears to have some sort of power to manipulate the world with superpowers and reeks of desperation as the play has left him broke, leaving him in an all or nothing type of situation. There is also Edward Norton, another actor who can be really good but I also haven't really seen him in much either lately, maybe being even more of an exaggeration of his real life persona as Mike Shiner, an actor who can only feel alive on stage and will do anything to improve his work even if he alienates everyone around him, which does lead to a lot of the film's humor due to his not give a fuck attitude when it comes to things outside of the play. Zach Galifianakis also does a really good job playing Riggan's lawyer/friend Jake, who wants the play to succeed at any costs (although maybe not to the extent that Thompson goes to at the end of the movie, which I will get to later). The rest of the cast does great as well, such as Emma Stone as Riggan's daughter Sam who works as her dad's assistant and Naomi Watts whose character Lesley is also a first time Broadway actor who really does not want things to screw up.

What I guess is the main theme of the story is how people just want to find their place in the world, to leave a mark or to make a difference at a point in their lives, which is the conflict that follows Riggan throughout. He does have a voice in his head, a manifestation of Birdman, speaking to him that tries to put him in his place and remind him of the real reasons why he is doing this, not because he believes that he can be good at this but that he wants to have people notice him again. That drive does come to a halt on many occasions like in a scene where he and his daughter get into a fight where she tells him that like the rest of the world, he doesn't matter, which deepens his feelings of irrelevancy. There is also where he comes by an article which has Mike being interviewed and taking Riggan's story about Raymond Carver as his own, which Thompson believes is taking away the spotlight from what is supposed to be his own passion project.

Another thing that manages to get some sort of humor is all of the times that the scene at the end of the play, where the lead confronts his wife having an affair with another man and proceeds to commit suicide after lamenting about how he doesn't exist, which does make the play itself more of a personal story to Riggan than expected since both he and the character he plays both feel a sense of isolation and no sense of place in the world and having no way to deal with that. But back to the topic, each preview screening ends up becoming a mess for multiple reasons, such as Mike getting into a drunk tirade or Riggan being locked out of the theater with only his underwear and a wig as his clothing. There is always this sense throughout that the play could fail at any moment which is exacerbated when Thompson meets up with Tabitha, a theater critic who doesn't like him and has her mind set on giving his play the worst review imaginable no matter what the outcome turns out to be, just to spite Riggan and everything she believes he stands for.

Which comes to the ending (SPOILERS btw), where now no matter what he does at this point, Riggan is going to fail due to the power that Tabitha has as a critic. This leads him to brandish a real gun on opening night for the climax of the play, where he tries to give it everything he has, knowing that this will most likely be the last performance he gives. He also has the idea where he might have his last chance at relevancy, if he is able to give the audience the most realistic way to portray a suicide on stage by actually trying to kill himself, so even if the play turns out to be a failure, that moment will always be remembered. After that, the audience is so dumbfounded, wondering whether or not he actually did it yet they applause it with a standing ovation. It turns out though that he missed his shot, only shooting off his nose and the play turns out to be a success. This was pointed out to me by someone else who watched it that it felt kind of out of place for the movie and that the ending turned out to be too happy. I can kind of see that and yet this does remind me of another movie that had a similar type of ending situation, that being Taxi Driver, which also has some similarities to Birdman when given some thought. Taxi Driver at the end, after Travis kills off Sport and the other guys at the underage den of prostitutes to save Iris, leaving him mortally wounded, has something more upbeat where Travis is treated as a hero and garners some praise from the community even if he really is not a good person at heart, just the circumstances paint him as one for the time being, leaving one to wonder if the end of that movie is really the dying thoughts of Travis. Riggan does have somewhat of a similar story, where instead of becoming a tragic martyr of the acting craft, he is praised for his acting style, dubbed "Super Realism" and is showered with the attention he has desired since the beginning of the movie. That last minute though could lead to that this could all be a delusion of Riggan's right before he dies but I might be laying on the Taxi Driver comparisons a bit too much.

So what is with the subtitle The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance? If I had to say, maybe it could apply to Riggan and his delusion of how he wants to believe he is compared to what he knows he really is but maybe I am thinking about this too much. All I know is that this is one of those movies that comes once in a long while that kind of reinvigorates the desire of the art of film and why we as an audience watches movies. I know this is one of those that might be one of my favorite movies ever and easily my favorite of the year so far. I would like to know other people's thoughts on the material to see if people like it as much as I do.

The Depths of Pretension #7 - Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pt.2 Nightmare Fuel Week)

"Salo is the anti-happiness. The anti-joy. A look at true sadism with beautiful landscaping." This line was my introduction to what would be the last film of Pier Paolo Pasolini who was killed shortly before the film was to be released into theaters. And for the most part, that could really be the best way to sum this movie up. It does have it's roots in the presumed to be lost work of the Marquis de Sade and Dante's Divine Comedy with its four parts being named after the circles of hell, such as the Circle of Blood, yet it has the backdrop of 1940s Italy to play off the depravity of four fascist libertines towards the end of the second World War as they kidnap eighteen teenage boys and girls whom become the victims of their twisted desires. I mentioned this before but I have watched this movie before yet my experience with that was strange since I watched a version that wasn't subbed or dubbed so I really had no fucking idea what was going on yet I could appreciate how well the film was shot. Might be the only thing that might make people watch it unless they can stand some of the visuals that are in this. And since I started this blog series and because the only person who follows this blog recommended that I should do a post on this, all I can say is.......

Throughout this film, the libertines (the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate, and the President) collect their victims in a way that makes them nothing more than livestock, meant only for their own personal use. This can come either through all of the sexual perversions that go on, the verbal abuse that the Duke especially gives out, mainly to the females of the group, or even in the finale of the film where the ones who do not fit their criteria or broke the rules are killed in brutal and disturbing manners. Also in one moment of the film where the victims are carted around the estate like dogs, fed as such and when one of them refuses to demean themselves in such a way, they are whipped repeatedly. The most notorious aspect of this film though, is the amount of coprophagia or for lack of a better term shit eating, and how stomach churning those scenes are. Even the bluray cover of the film is one of these moments, which is more subdued in its nature than compared to an early DVD cover but it still might not be the most appealing thing to look at.  I also have to speak of the book, where the libertines write down the names of those who disobey the rules, those being such things as crying, unable to satisfy their masters sexually, even one of the boys is put into the book for wiping himself. This whole film can amount to just watching these four people along with a group of soldiers and guards dehumanizing this group of young teenagers for their own sick pleasures. Not much of a plot to speak of.

And since this has no plot, it can be easy to call the movie boring. That might actually makes the film a whole lot more effective in conveying it's bleak and nihilistic tone, and perhaps for the reason that might be troubling for a lot of people: that being how can a movie that involves continuous rape, torture, coprophagia, and murders that get more depraved as they go on can make it's audience bored. It can be one thing to have a movie like this that is meant to shock with its subject matter yet there is this sense of watching all of this happen, having no real attachment to any of the victims, connecting more to libertines who for the most part are heartless and soulless, the worst that humanity has to offer. It is rather painful to feel nothing in this situation. Sure,  we have slasher films for example that take pride in being nothing more than watching a man in a mask killing off teenagers and those are enjoyed by the masses who are not attached to the victims, mainly because those movies make the audience want to see them be killed off in amusing ways. Salo doesn't have that. There is no attachment at all and that might be the scariest thing about the whole movie, that people do things like this for no reason at all and that the audience should understand and relate to that.

Is there more subtext hidden in the movie itself? For the most part, I have no clue. I have heard of things that Pasolini had said he put into the film in interviews, such as that the shit eating was a metaphor for the reliance on mass produced foods and things such as that, yet I am unsure as to whether or not believe that all of those things are true or it can come from over analyzing the movie, which might be common for a movie such as this. I am not that aware of the going ons of Italy and its higher positioned leaders during the time of the second World War or I guess the reign of Mussolini so I do not think that I am one to really understand the subtext if there is any.

I really don't know what more to say about this movie. It's fucking Salo. I guess one thing that might be easy to wonder is what would have been Pasolini's follow up to this. Prior to Salo, he had done three films that grouped as the Trilogy of Life whether or not that was his intention, and maybe this was the beginning of another: the Trilogy of Death. It was also interesting to hear about the mood of the filming, which for the most part was rather upbeat, which might have been the only way this could have worked. All of the cast had a good time even with all of what was going on, all of the things that were being filmed. I don't know what to make of that, just like the movie as a whole. It is a wonderful movie to look at when it focuses on the scenery, even if it does share some of its bleakness with the desaturation of colors, removing most signs of life and hope from the film. I don't know if I will even convince myself to watch it again but I know that it'll stick with me for quite sometime and maybe even question things about myself that I don't think I should.

The Depths of Pretension #6 - The Virgin Spring (Part 1 of Nightmare Fuel Week)

So for all of you people who have been waiting for this since I posted the list of movies that I was going to talk about, posting five of these over five days talking about some of the most dark, depraved and disturbing films the Criterion Collection has to offer, I'm sorry for the wait but I'm sure you could understand why I might not have been looking that forward to this. I have seen two of the movies beforehand, those being Salo and House, and I really am looking forward to seeing The Virgin Spring, the movie I'll be talking about today since it is my introduction to the works of Ingmar Bergman, I can kind of imagine this being a little hard to do starting off with what can be described as the arthouse version of The Last House on the Left even though this one came first but with that description, this one sounds like it would be a lot of fun to watch. To get introductions out of the way, this 1960 Academy Award winning film (for Best Foreign Language Film) has it's roots in a 13th century medieval Swedish ballad Tore's daughters in Vange where three highwaymen kill three women of a couple whom they meet and try to sell the clothes they stole from the bodies which gives away the deeds they committed and the father kills two of them, leaving the third alive to ask about why they would do such a thing. The movie does borrow the names of the parents of the daughters, Tore and Karin although only the father in the film takes their name from the ballad while the daughter here is named Karin.

Let's get things going here and say that I really thought this movie was really.... I don't want to say good in the traditional sense. Maybe the better word would be effective in how it does a rather good job of making someone uncomfortable, mainly in the scene where the herdsmen rape and murder Karin. There is something about the swift nature of it that makes the whole thing all the more disturbing, like as if the herdsmen only saw her as an object that should be defiled and destroyed, the way they do it lasting only about a minute or so although the buildup does take a while which does add more to the unsettling nature of it. I could compare this to The Last House on the Left and its scene where the two teenage girls are raped and murdered because in that it is more dragged out, allowing it to show more of the brutality of the actions that the criminals are committing and for that movie, it does work (aside from the out of place comedic moments which makes the movie tone deaf in places) and kind of shows off the harsh nihilistic nature of the criminals but to get back to The Virgin Spring, I do find the swift action a lot more brutal and nihilistic since it makes the criminals really seem as if they do this sort of thing because they can or maybe for no real reason at all. Although one of them does feel guilt about the action, the young child of the group who becomes sick at the table of Karin's parents who have taken them in for the night, and might actually have been the only one of them who figured out whose farm they were at before they all are killed.

The movie also does have a lot of religious subtext in it (I could be using that word wrong) in how Karin's family is all Christian aside from Ingeri, who is apparently her step sister who worships the Norse god Odin (which is the opening of the film of her calling to him). This could be showing the changing times that were occurring with the beliefs at the time, switching from paganism to Christianity. Ingeri's beliefs also play into her guilt later in the film as she blames herself for what happened to Karin since she called to Odin out of hatred towards her, jealous of how Karin is still a virtuous virgin while Ingeri is pregnant and while it isn't given whether or not she knows who the father is, she seems to be left alone as a pariah of the family. There is also Karin's parents, Tore played by Max von Sydow, a Bergman regular who is as fantastic and intense as usual and Mareta is played by another Bergman regular Birgitta Valberg, who they themselves do occupy different types of believers. Mareta is more of a devout Christian who takes it very seriously while Tore is more lax about his beliefs. They do love Karin with all of their heart though, even when Tore wishes Mareta would be more stern with her, kind of going into the opposite of their religious beliefs compared to how they parent their daughter. There is also the ending when they discover Karin's body, occurring after Tore kills the herdsmen, and he becomes wrought with despair and guilt over how God could allow his daughter to die in such a manner and how he was able to enact his vengeance upon her killers, leaving him unable to understand yet he still asks for forgiveness and promises to build a church on the spot for payment of his sins. And then there is the titular virgin spring which pops out right when the parents take hold of the body and a stream of water comes from the dirt, which they use to wipe off the dirt from her face.

The scene where Tore kills the herdsmen is rather brutal as well even though he does kill them off rather quickly too. The first one is killed with a butchers knife and that is done quickly, yet the second murder is really quite intimate as he uses his bare hands while having the guy lie on top of a fire. The youngest one is killed off quickly as well, after which Tore really snaps out of his rage and comes to terms with what he had just done, staring at his bloodied hands with disgust and wondering whether or not what he had done was justified even under the circumstances. To get off topic, the first half hour does a lot to introduce the family and Karin, showing how she is a nice yet naive girl along with being really pretty and having her parent's affection. I really enjoyed the part where Tore comes to check on Karin before she leaves and they have a somewhat playful conversation where it can be seen how much he does care for her and maybe that if the situation that occurs later that he might actually convince himself to enact acts of vengeance. The actress who played Karin, Birgitta Pettersson, I looked up and I'm surprised she didn't act in more films, having only done another Bergman film, The Magician, beforehand and I think only one other movie after and I wonder why since there is that quality that she has that I can't explain, yet she was able to sell her character well.

Here is the end of the first post of this Nightmare Fuel week and for the most part, it started off rather easily even though The Virgin Spring is not an easy film to watch yet I am looking forward to watch more Ingmar Bergman films. Tomorrow's post though..... is fucking Salo...... thanks, my only follower "thumbs up"

The Depths of Pretension #5 - The Great Dictator (the short one)

Let's get this out of the way quickly: Charlie Chaplin is considered by many to be one of the greatest talents to have ever been put on film and many of his films could still be watched today with the same amount of awe that not many films of the early 20th century can say. As for myself, until this series, I haven't seen any of his films. This has given me some ample opportunity to do so due to the amount of Chaplin films on the Criterion Collection and that has lead me to do something about it where I'll at least try and cover some of his movies every once in a while and to start off this arrangement, I'm going to go with his first true talking picture, the 1940 film The Great Dictator.

From the title and the era that the movie came out in, it could be very easy to figure out what the movie is about, mainly how it is at heart satirizing Nazi Germany and Hitler, which came to Chaplin to go through with it after repeated viewings of Triumph of the Will, which helped him get into the mannerisms and character of Hitler. I do not know all that much about the rest of the production but it was also made aware that Chaplin himself had said that if he had heard about what was going on with the concentration camps he would not have made the film. But getting back to the movie, I am not sure if I'll be able to judge this fairly since the age of the film and my unawareness of the type of humor in the movie might not be to my taste or that I might not really get it but it'd be worth expanding my film vocabulary.

Because of what I said before, this will probably be a short post since I am not sure really what to talk about with this one. I did find parts of it funny, like with the scientists showing Hynkell their inventions and having them fail rather hysterically along with Hynkell's speeches in gibberish German but some of it I didn't get. Maybe it has to do with my tastes in comedy changing constantly over the years and not really having a center to grasp onto but I did like that it was able to convey something serious throughout and especially during the last half hour or so. The ending speech that the barber gives at the end is really good which does add to the historical significance of the movie and for that, I am glad to have seen it. I might give it another watch sometime soon and see if there is more I can talk about it at that time but for now I'm not sure what to get at and I am sorry for not being able to talk about it more. Hopefully the next few days will bring up something more substantial as it will be really interesting to get into.

The Friedkin Connection #1 - Killer Joe

As you have all been aware and since I spent two post so far talking about one of his movies, I really like William Friedkin as a director (despite the fact that I probably have been spelling his last name wrong) and thought that maybe I should talk about his movies in more of a simplified manner than trying to be a pretentious asshole and have a ton of snark and snobbishness in my words. As for the order of the movies, I think I'll have no specific order in which I'll cover them, just letting whatever which movie I feel like talking about be the one that I'll post. I'll probably avoid his documentaries since I have been reading his memoir from which the title of this series comes from, they were made just for the masses and were not really something he considered his own work aside from The People vs. Paul Crump but I probably won't cover that either since he doesn't like it all that much anymore from the sounds of things. I might cover some TV work he's done, such as Nightcrawlers from the 1985 version of The Twilight Zone and the 1997 version of 12 Angry Men, but for the most part I'll be talking about his theatrical releases, starting from the 1967 Sonny and Cher movie Good Times to today's topic, 2012's Killer Joe

His most recent release to date, Killer Joe is Friedkin's second collaboration with playwright Tracy Letts (the first being 2007's Bug) based off of the latter's first written play which premiered in 1993. It can be hard to say what I was actually expecting when I first heard of it through a top 10 list of an internet reviewer I really love listening to, yet the 20-30 seconds of his thoughts made me really want to find a copy of the movie and it took a little bit of time but I finally got my hands on it and sat down and watched it. That initial viewing was something of a fever dream, where I often didn't know how to feel since there were moments in the movie that were really funny, some that were tense, and some that were gruesome. It took me a lot longer that it should have to realize that the movie itself was intended to be a black comedy, which is strange since I do enjoy black comedy a lot. The most bare bone plot description I could give would be that a drug dealer owes some guys money so he hires a hitman to kill his mother for the insurance. Shit goes really fucking wrong soon after, hilarity and terror ensues, the kind of thing that Friedkin has been doing for many years.

The casting is one of those things that really does make the movie a lot better than it has any right to be, since in the eyes of most critics of the play, the characters barely make it past the stereotypes of Texans of the like, which I think Letts has agreed on and attributed that to how it was his first play. Let's start with the highest profile person in the movie, Matthew McConaughey as Joe Cooper. I was probably with the majority of people who saw the guy as being part of the ilk of rom-coms that plagued the cinemas throughout most of the past decade or so and didn't really think he was all that good. Although the past few years, that opinion has changed since he has gotten more serious roles such as this one and for the most part, this role does allow him to play off of people's expectations and go into more darker territory as a detective who moonlights as a hitman. He does a fantastic job here and while I haven't really seen much of his work since, it does make one look forward of what he has in store. Which could also apply to Emile Hirsch as well, who in this movie plays Chris, the character who pretty much sets up the entire going ons of the film. The character does come off like an ass for the most part, whose only redeeming quality is that he deeply cares for his sister (maybe a little too much as I'll get into later) which might be enough since the movie is about how he owes people money and he wants to kill his mom. This role at times could amount to "Chris gets beat up on a regular basis, really fucking badly" especially in the climax of the movie which is one of my favorites in a film. Yet Emile manages to, like I said in the beginning, elevate the material he has to work with and makes the character more interesting as we can see how coming up with a plan without really thinking it out makes things really easy to get fucked up really quickly.

This paragraph I am going to dedicate specifically to the actress who plays the role of Dottie, Chris' sister and later Joe's love interest, Juno Temple. This was only the second movie that she was in that I saw (updated: she was in The Dark Knight Rises but I'm not counting that since she was barely in it), the first being Mr Nobody, which is one of those movies that is really hard to talk about due to how it goes off into a ton of directions and the themes are really hard to describe in a compelling way, which is why I have yet to write about it. She managed to make a huge impression on me in that movie though and I do look forward to her future work, having only seen her in a bit part in Lovelace since. Reading The Friedkin Connection section regarding the making of this movie brought to my attention two other actresses that were initially cast in the role before Bill saw the audition tape Juno made, those being Ellen Page and Jennifer Lawrence. The first one I could kind of see why since she had done a lot of dark work such as Hard Candy yet for some reason she dropped out after only two days. The latter was the most surprising and from the memoir, she was really committed to doing the movie, having gotten off the buzz she had from Winter's Bone yet before she has become the huge star she is today. Trying to see her in the role, it could have worked and probably would have rendered the whole recent scandal regarding leaked photos kind of useless. Yet in the end, I could only see Juno playing this girl. She just makes it easy to see Dottie as being a pure innocent, someone who has managed to either be naive to whatever goes on with the plan yet never seems as if she has some sort of learning disability/ She is an outsider even among her family which does make her future relationship with Joe make sense since he too is an outsider due to his job after hours. It is really hard to make someone appear naive yet not stupid, for lack of a better word, yet it works well here.

The rest of the cast does a good job. Thomas Haden Church as Ansel, Chris and Dottie's dad, really does a good job, acting as sort of the straight man role, the guy who see all of this ridiculous stuff happen and reacts the way that perhaps the audience themselves are, yet sometimes he has this sort of "I'm too tired of this shit" aloofness that does add a lot of the humor to a lot of situations. And then there is Gina Gershon as Sharla, Ansel's second wife, who really does a great job and really sells one of the most notorious scenes of the movie (Chicken leg. Just chicken leg.). Watching the movie again, it is shown a lot that Sharla does have a lot more going for her than she lets on and turns out to be at least one step ahead of Chris. Gina was cast in the film to make up for the fact that Letts really wanted her in the play but due to the commitments that would entail, that never went through but at least she got to be in this and the wait was probably worth it.

I really don't want to get into too many spoilers here since it is a black comedy at heart, it would give away a lot of the humor and I don't want to be the jackass who does that sort of thing, so I'll just get into one of the things that I found really interesting and worth talking about: the relationships Joe, Chris and Dottie. Early on in the movie, Chris arrives at his dad's trailer, asking for his sister to open the door to let him in, after being kicked out of his mom's place (which I didn't get the first time. Stupid moment, I know). After a couple of scenes, where the plan is introduced, Chris has a dream of his sister standing naked in the middle of the tiny hallway, followed by a karate pose. I kind of see this as him having this sort of deep seated incest inklings toward his sister which comes from how she is the only person in his family that he can depend on and that cares about him. This feeling of love does play later when they meet Joe and have no way to pay him in advance so he decides that he'll take Dottie as a retainer, which Chris is immediately against yet relents since he can see no other way to get the job done. The first meeting between Joe and Dottie goes along well yet she still feels used a bit when a date is set up between the two so that they can get to know each other better, yet they manage to get over that. The date scene is one that I am struggling to figure out whether or not Joe was using Dottie in that situation or that he is just as nervous as she is. I think I can go with the latter especially due to an exchange between the two where Joe asks how old she feels she is, she says thirteen and he says me too. An earlier scene had Dottie admit to Sharla that there was a boy she knew in school that she was in love with and he with her despite never actually doing anything together, calling it true love. Since that was the only time she had been in love prior to that date, that exchange could mean that the two of them really did begin to love each other. This does hurt Chris a lot, especially after the plan turns out to be a wash and the only thing he can do now is run away and he wants to take his sister with him. She wants to go with him, yet she wants to be with Joe as well. The climax has this conflict as well as the two men are trying to get her to do what they want. There does seem to be a lot more going on with this pseudo love triangle than I can go into at the moment and I think I've gone on long enough.

Due to my lack of knowledge of the film making process, I don't think I'll get into the details of Friedkin's directing but for the most part, it is just a great film to look at. The pacing also works really nicely, expanding on a play that only had one setting. It also does make me wish that movies didn't have to do so much little things just to cut down to get the rating down. Why I'm saying this is that Killer Joe was released with an NC-17, most of the scenes that would have revisions for a future R rating release coming from the climax, and for that reason, the movie got a limited release which is quite a shame. Yet, there is something to be admired at how Friedkin really didn't feel the need to compromise his work to fit the questionable workings of the ratings system even at his age. He is a man that has his regrets, things that he didn't work on or do, yet he has no desire to follow anyone's plan but his own, only picking the kinds of movies that he wants to make, that interest him deeply. I hope that he still has some more in him and that one day, I could meet him and maybe just have a five minute talk about anything but his work just to kind of get away from the tedium he probably experiences. So, this is where I leave off this section and hopefully, the wait for the next one won't take too long and it won't be the movie that you are all expecting I'll be talking about since I already talked about it twice.

Recording Music With Terrible Equipment - My Failure As A Musician

I think that for most of my life, I always wanted to play music. Most of it stemming from the period I grew up in as a very young boy, that being in the mid 90s to I guess the mid 00s (at least until I was 12 or 13 maybe) since I had listened to a lot of the more popular rock music at the time, good and bad. The band that made me really want to go into playing an instrument was probably Green Day, a band that I still love to this day, having grown up with Dookie and listening to American Idiot for quite a while. An experience that I kind of regret not going into all that much was getting CDs by The Clash and Jane's Addiction and not really giving them much of a chance (and I really wish I had those now) since I think my playing style might have gone slightly different if I had.

Also it was when I got my first guitar and like most kids my age, I sucked really badly and got discouraged easily and when I moved to live with my mom, I didn't play it again for at least three years. I got it sent back to me and even though the guitar I had was kind of a piece of cheap crap, I played it for quite a while trying to at least get used to playing. After my first job during the summer before my senior year of high school, I bought myself another guitar which was only a slightly better quality one that is the one I still play to this day. I tried my hands at all kinds of genres, from folk to metal and even a little bit of jazz thrown in there, and my skills somewhat improved to the point where I could consider myself an amateur player. I knew kids in school that played instruments but never really got the chance to do anything with them since we usually never shared the same tastes and up to this point, I have never played in a band once. I almost tried out for one but couldn't figure out how to get there on my own yet I am a fan of theirs anyway and I wish them luck in the future.

And since it has become difficult to get likeminded people in my area in a band for some reason, I tried my hand at recording stuff I've written on my own. Which is a pain since I own just two guitars and an electronic drum set and my only way of recording is through a microphone hooked up to the computer. I also have a tendency to forget a lot of the stuff I came up with so this becomes a problem easily. A few tracks I have are just guitar tracks that are terrible quality in both the sound department and songwriting. I consider them mostly experiments that could be improved upon greatly if I had people to work with. Alas, that hasn't come yet.

I really wish I could find people to play with even if it's only for a few weeks or something because it does get rather repetitive to play stuff all alone without having anyone to really criticize it and help to improve my playing which is kind of why I gave up playing for quite a time and thought of switching to a different instrument. I would rather just have a couple more instruments and just mess around with them since I do prefer experimenting with sounds. Since I have commented before that my favorite band currently (and probably will be forever) is The Cure and part of it is the sound as a whole is really interesting to listen to since there are so many layers of instruments that usually play just a single figure over and over again yet they keep adding on to it and make it all sound pleasing consistently. It is kind of what I really wish I could get at but I don't consider myself that skilled at all. I really hope that one day I do. But what I plan to do right now is just experiment with this crappy recording setup and see how I can make it at least sound somewhat decent and maybe record some material of my own again. This rant went by rather short, sadly.

An Actual Review - The Hunt

So it's obvious to say that sexual abuse on a child is a terrible thing and that no one should have to go through the ordeal of finding out that someone you knew for quite a long time did things like that to your child. Yet it is one of those things where a simple slip of the tongue can completely ruin someone's life as is the case for The Hunt, a 2012 Danish film directed by Thomas Vinterberg, who was one of the founders of the Dogme 95 movement in film making. The character of Lucas, played here by Mads Mikkelsen, lives in a small town where everyone knows each other and has struggled a bit over the past few years after his divorce from his wife along with wanting to be with his son. He works at a local kindergarten where for the most part, he gets along with all of the children and at one point in the beginning starts up a relationship with one of the workers named Nadja. One of the students that he is rather close to is Klara, the daughter of his best friend Theo, and it is with her where this problem arises. After an interaction where Klara kisses Lucas and is scolded on the matter, she throws a fit where she lets slip some wording that she took from her older brother and his friend that the director of the kindergarten, Grethe, takes as a sign that Lucas sexually abused her.

The rest of the movie follows Lucas (and later his son Marcus) as he becomes a pariah of the community as he is fired from his job, no one believes him aside from his brother and that side of his family, and his former friends become extremely violent throughout. Even when he is proven innocent due to inconsistent information from Klara and the other students who their parents think were also victims, the community does not let go of it's grudge and perhaps becomes even more violent. Eventually at the end though, Theo does realize that Lucas is innocent and after a year has passed, everyone at least has accepted the fact that he is innocent, although where the ending is concerned, someone still sees him as a pedophile.

An overarching theme of this story that is prevalent throughout is that everyone in the town trusts the word of the young Klara without giving it a second thought and not considering that maybe she just said something wrong. There is a point where Klara's mom is trying to talk to her about it and when she admits that she didn't tell the truth, her mom makes her believe that she was and this was probably the case for the other kids who came out and told everyone that Lucas sexually abused them too. They preach that children don't lie, especially about things like that and for the most part, I do agree with that but the movie also showed with a later scene where Klara goes to see Lucas and is shown to now believe her own lie, that kids are easily persuaded or manipulated (in this case, unknowingly) since at that age, they have no way of knowing how to think for themselves. To be honest though, as much as it is hard to see any of the people that do terrible things to Lucas in the movie, knowing that they are in the wrong, it is really hard to say that in that situation that I would not do the same thing. Maybe not to the extent that they go to, but even though I would think that I would be willing to give my friend the benefit of the doubt that he might be telling the truth, like the characters said, why would a child lie about that? The paternal instinct would override any sense of willing to work things out in a civilized manner but hopefully in that situation, I would not become that violent (and hopefully so would the rest of the town).

I'll get into SPOILERS here for a moment so if you are interested in watching this, do so before reading this paragraph. At the end of the movie, the main group of people that Lucas called friends are altogether with him and his son to celebrate the latter's recently acquired hunting license and they go out to hunt deer. Lucas sends his son out to his stand in order to get a good vantage point and he is left alone to look for his own target, when all of a sudden one of the other hunters shoots at him, barely missing him. Due to the sunlight shining in his eyes, Lucas is unable to identify the attacker who manages to reload his gun yet chooses to leave him alive. There was this lingering feeling of discomfort at the presentation of Marcus getting his family's gun passed down from generations as some of the guys in the room looked at Lucas as if they still do not trust him, leaving the sense that because of the accusation, the stigma of it will probably never leave him no matter how many times it has been dis-proven. And since the attacker is never identified, Lucas will always be looking among his friends and the rest of the community with the knowledge that at least one of them still views him as a sick man and wants him to pay for his crimes, even if he is innocent.

The Hunt is the most pure example of how something as simple as someone saying the wrong words put together can destroy someone's life quite easily and watching Lucas go through all of the things proved to be rather a heartbreaking experience on watching an innocent man being shunned from everything that he had worked so hard to get at. This could have been easily melodramatic in the way that would be a made for TV movie that would be on the Lifetime movie network or something along that, yet the direction, the writing, and acting elevate it into something that can tackle the subject matter in a way that does not pull any punches or talk down to the audience or turns the townsfolk into villains despite all of the things that they do. It is rare that a movie can make me feel the amount of emotions that this one did, that made me really think about from the perspective of everyone how it is difficult to see that anyone was making a mistake in their decisions. I could not recommend this movie any more than I can right now so if you haven't seen it yet, go watch it right now.

The Exorcist and The Mystery of Faith

I know that I brought this movie up in another post that is very recent but as that post entailed, I bought The Exorcist and watched that thing that night, late in the dark of the basement room I sleep and practically live in, and really enjoyed it for perhaps the same reason I think I did as a kid since it really is not a horror film or at least it isn't intending to be, it is more like in the vein of a psychological thriller which is kind of the horror type movies I have grown to over the recent years. Movies that don't necessarily have a lot of blood and gore or throwing as many nameless characters to get slaughtered, but where it has a slow build where the main focus is the story and the characters that allow itself not to shock (or at least not always) but to have this feeling of angst and dread permeate throughout, sticking inside of someone's mind for years to come. I'll get into those movies more in detail in a future post since that isn't the real focus of this one so back to the movie. I had a lot of things that I remembered about it but some things I had forgotten was how slow and methodical the movie was, where it takes a little over a half an hour into the film before something that pertains to the possession sinking in occurs or even the fact that the exorcism doesn't happen until the 1;30 or so mark. I could go on and on while  kind of kick myself for not buying this movie sooner since it really has become one of my personal favorite movies (which is pretty much my entire Bluray collection up to this point, the DVDs are filled with good movies and some so called guilty pleasures).

After watching the movie, I kind of grew an obsession with it and watched through all of the special features that were available and part of it did kind of involve what William Friedkin's interpretation of what the message of the movie was, which he described as being about the mystery of faith. That got me thinking about the movie all the more and what was really the focus, that the thing that people most likely remember about the movie, the possessed Regan MacNeil and the exorcism, was looking at it the wrong way. Throughout the movie, it does show a lot of the going ons of the MacNeil's, with Chris being an actress who is working on a movie in Georgetown who has to deal with her daughter's changing personality out of the blue, initially through a lot of medical tests (another thing I had completely forgotten yet might be one of the more cringe worthy moments of the movie) but there is also the amount of time that is put on Damien Karras to the point where the story might be about him and what goes on with him throughout the film.

The amount of time spent with Karras is the reason why I completely agree with the whole mystery of faith angle, since in the beginning of the movie, he is losing his faith due to the deteriorating health of his mother and the fact that he moved away from her due to his work and rarely sees her. Eventually, his mother dies and it leaves him struggling with himself since he still goes through his duties in the church yet feels as if he is lying to himself while trying to deal with the regret of thinking that he had been the main reason why she died in the first place. It isn't until while later, after he had been interviewed by Detective Kinderman regarding the death of Burke Dennings, the director/boyfriend of Chris MacNeil, where he actually meets the girl, who at that point was taken over completely by the demon Pazuzu. Since he is a psychiatrist along with his faith being diminished, he is skeptical of what is going on, only going to see her again later to record some evidence due to how scared Chris was with what was going on, which was coming from a nonbeliever (which I'll get to later). Part of what gets to him though is that the demon knows what is going on in his head and plays around with it, either through the changing voices to people that he saw like the homeless man and even his mother, to the point where it could be said that the real purpose of possessing Regan was to break Karras by the worst means imaginable. So later on, Father Merrin comes into play to perform the exorcism and the whole time, the demon is more focused on Damien and even poses as his mother for a moment to get at him even more. And then the end happens, with Karras sacrificing himself and is left dying while confessing his sins to Father Dyer, which could signify that the whole experience had brought his faith back.

There are a few scenes that aren't focusing on Karras that do kind of go into the mystery of faith angle as well. The first one I'll mention is the one that turns out to be the breaking point of Chris to where she realizes that the only solution might be an exorcism, and that is the scene with the cross and the "Let Jesus fuck you" line. In some of the interviews, the writer of the book and screenplay William Peter Blatty wrote that scene that way for a purpose that is stated rather well and that is he needed to come up with something that would convince a nonbeliever (Blatty sees Chris as an atheist which might be more stated in the book but it could just be pure agnosticism in the movie or I'm reading that wrong) to actually realize what needed to be done. The scene needed to be powerful enough to make someone who puts all of their faith in science and technology that this was beyond the mortal coil and it works since what could be worse for a mother than to see their daughter mutilate themselves with a cross and them forcing themselves on her. I'll go into one more and it is something that I only got when listening to the commentary track and that is when Father Merrin is about to begin the second round of the exorcism after kicking Karras out due to his realization that he couldn't handle it. In the movie, Merrin takes nitroglycerin pills due to his heart condition that might have been caused by the previous encounter with Pazuzu years prior, and right before he enters the room again, he is in the bathroom taking another pill with the realization that he most likely will die in that bedroom no matter the outcome. Back to the preparation, in the commentary Friedkin told Max Von Sydow to perform the prep scene in a way where he was also giving himself his last rites in the process due to knowing that his life would be cut short very soon (and it does). It gives that scene a lot more to it than I initially gave it since it also does play into faith and that the demon was trying to break everyone in the house along with Karras. Merrin is more stoic at this point than Karras is since his faith was not wavering  like the latter's was and that scene could also mirror the sacrifice Karras gives in the end as well.

I would not want to get into my own personal beliefs since I think that if I did, the people who read this would probably get the wrong idea of my interpretations of the film. But I can talk about Friedkin's since I'm not the guy but I've heard him talk about it a lot in interviews. He considers himself agnostic, filming The Exorcist as a believer (mainly in the news story that the book was based on) and his philosophy amounts to a line from Hamlet that I wish I could remember exactly what it was. It was something like "There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt up in your philosophy" but I might have written that wrong just now. I can get behind that and it does kind of figure into why he views the movie as a meditation on the mystery of faith. Faith really does have a bad reputation due to its connection with religious beliefs but limiting faith to that is a disservice. Faith can amount to having a belief in something that you think to be true without any knowledge whether or not that would be the case, which in itself can either be broken or enforced when one were to learn new things that might contradict one's previous beliefs. The main characters, mainly Chris and Damien, all have times in the movie where their faith in whatever they believe in is broken and there is always that struggle of what to do afterwards with all the pieces remaining. It really is a mystery and the questions that could be asked from viewings make this movie more able to stand the test of time along with elevating it beyond what could be nothing more than just pure shock and that has to be a credit to the dual vision of Blatty and Friedkin in order to put out the best film they could, hopefully having future generations watching the movie and getting their own interpretations of it while still being able to enjoy it.