"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.
Monday, October 27, 2014
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"
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"
Sunday, October 26, 2014
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.
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.
Monday, October 13, 2014
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
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 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.
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