back in black

So I have determined that a blog is actually a really good idea for me as long as I keep it up. When this blog was initially started, it was started as a participation grade for an editing class, and in it I posted reviews that I had done for my Reviewing and Criticism class. So while they were unique thoughts, I hadn’t really put a lot of conscious thought into the point of a blog. 

I think I did the initial post where I explain a little about myself and what the aim of this blog is going to be. Well, I’m sure a lot has changed, so let’s start over.

I received a degree from Middle Tennessee State University in May of this year. I have a degree in Print Journalism with minors in Philosophy and English. I like toI  say Philosophy first because it sounds cool and careless, but in all reality I know my English minor is a lot more useful.  

I quit the movie theater where I worked for 4 years and 9 months in August of this year. I had worked there as a staff leader and promotional manager for much of that time. I now work at Coventry Health Care where I’m involved in the thrilling area of Data Management.

I am a lesbian, but it does not define me, that’s why I didn’t point it out immediately. I have a beautiful fiancee, pending legality, named Shelby. She’s got a pretty rock on her finger to make it official. 

I love to read, especially about True Crime, and I love movies, so expect more reviews, though I’m sure they will be more informal

Recently I’ve become extremely interested in the West Memphis Three case (wm3.org) so don’t be surprised if that comes up in my entries a lot.

And that’s all for now.

It’s the time of the season…

It’s that time of year again, and while the senior prom is supposed to be a memorable experience, Nelson McCormick’s movie “Prom Night” fails to be very memorable at all.

            Donna Kempel (Brittany Snow) is supposed to be having the best night of her life, but a sadistic teacher from her past has escaped from jail and has different plans for her and her friends.

            The movie throws the viewer right into Kempel’s tragic history with her teacher, but does not include enough information about why he is so obsessed with her and why he brutalizes her family in an attempt to get to her. 

            The plot makes just enough sense to get through the film, but eventually some of the killings become senseless.

            This PG-13 remake shows very little graphic violence while still managing to offer up some good suspense.  

            However, if McCormick wanted to keep the violence subtle, he should have kept it subtle all the way.  He shows the murders happen, and the results of the murders, but there is very little blood. 

            It is a very talented killer (played by Johnathon Schaech) who can kill so many people with so little mess.

            It would have been more realistic not to show the dead bodies at all.

            The only real blood shown is when the director attempts to make it stylish.  For example, when a girl’s throat is slit, she is merely a blur in the background while her blood splashes onto a wall. 

            An off-screen death shows a man lying in a pool of blood, while all the deaths preceding it had very little blood at all. 

            While the “gore” is appropriate for a PG-13 film, it should have been kept consistent. 

            One thing this film can boast is it’s killer soundtrack.  Pun intended.  Just as this movie is a remake of sorts of the 1980s film, several songs from the time have been modernized as well, such as Ben Taylor’s rendition of “Time of the Season” or Quietdrive’s version of “Time After Time.”  In addition to these are many alternative tunes that move the plot right along.

            Another thing it can boast is the interesting camera angles sometimes used, especially when the SWAT team is called in, and the camera moves through the floors of a hotel while they’re trying to flush the killer out.

            While this movie is full of terrible clichés (the lesbian physical education teacher, the “hot blond” and her jock boyfriend, the intended proposal to a doomed loved one, the mirror scenes, the killer who always walks but always catches up, the dream sequences, etc.), it is still an entertaining enough movie, overall, but mainly for the audience it seems to be intended for – teenagers who enjoy mind-numbing and pointless entertainment.

 

“Look” at what?

Adam Rifkin’s “Look” is a movie about cameras that is made without movie cameras.

            Equally as ironic is the fact that the films main message of “the tape never lies” is conveyed through the use of actors. 

            Writer/director Rifkin has employed almost every camera type but the conventional film camera in his voyeuristic film about a group of people whose lives intermingle on tape.

            The only time a real movie camera is used in this film is when someone is filming a movie-in-a-movie, but it quickly changes to another perspective – a surveillance camera outside of a building, and luckily, the movie does not realize it’s a movie. 

            Even though the film uses actors and not actual surveillance footage, it uses actual surveillance cameras, with all the technical flaws with picture and sound that those types of cameras have. 

This at least gives the film an authentic look and feel, and if one went in not knowing that these were actors, they might be fooled at first into thinking that actual footage was being shown.  However, the acting becomes so terrible and overly dramatic by these unknown actors that it becomes nearly difficult to bear.

The film does have several cool filming techniques used, though, such as the car in the parking lot shown in elapsed-time, and the fast-forwarding of insignificant parts, because the point is, of course, that everything is caught on tape.  This, however, does not make everything interesting.

The locations in the film that had several cameras (which were usually labeled) could show different angles, making this movie at times look like it was filmed with a regular camera. 

The only real magic in this movie is done by the editor, Martin Appelbaum, who put this film together in a way that keeps your attention and doesn’t get too tedious and boring.  Luckily, the viewer doesn’t spend a lot of time with just one person.  It jumps around from camera to camera, person to person, story to story.

In addition to many different surveillance cameras in many different locations, the film also uses such capturing devices as an ATM camera, a hidden “nanny” camera, a police dashboard camera, a camera in an interrogation room, a “sky cam” and even a cell phone camera.

This film begins by informing the viewer that the average American is caught on film 200 times a day – an eerie message.

Then, camera-by-camera, the viewer is introduced to the people who make up the rest of the movie, all of which are seemingly unrelated, but become connected as the story unfolds.

That is, if you can call this a story. 

The plot does not seem to go anywhere with some of the characters, such as the womanizing department store manager, who is shown having intercourse with several different female employees in the storeroom. 

The viewer then learns a fact about him that is rather depressing, and that is the end of that.

Maybe the message here is that you can be caught in the most intimate of acts, though these acts were hardly intimate if one were to think about it. 

The viewer also sees a high school girl humiliated when the truth comes out about her false accusation of a forced rape, and is then prompted to expect the worst about a woman and child who were kidnapped (in unrelated incidents).

Some of the character’s stories were conclusive however, such as the gas station clerk saving the day, and the end of a secret gay relationship.

It just seemed that some of the characters suffered the consequences for their actions, while others did not.  Maybe this was a point the film was trying to make — you might not get caught doing something wrong, but there’s always that chance. 

            At the end of this film, when momentarily provided with a sort of sense of relief, it then turns into a ridiculous, sickening joke.  This film is not one that works well with the light-hearted ending it provided. 

             As creative as the idea to film with surveillance cameras was, this would have worked better as a documentary, not a work of fiction.

            “Look” fails to give us a good view into the lives of these made-up characters. 

           

I Shudder to think why anyone would make “Shutter.”

Shutter = The Ring + The Grudge.

Same revenge plot.

And of course we stole it from a Japanese movie again.

Terrible. 

The Other Boleyn Girl

Screenwriter Peter Morgan is no stranger to royal scripts, earning an Oscar nomination for writing “The Queen” (starring Helen Mirren) and also penning the Emmy-winning “Henry VIII,” so he was the go-to guy when it came to adapting “The Other Boleyn Girl,” a Tudor-era drama from the bestselling book of the same name, written by Phillipa Gregory, for the big screen. 

            Though it must have been difficult to cram the contents of a nearly 700-page book into a single two-hour movie, it seems that not enough attention was paid to certain historical events, such as King Henry VIII’s split from the Catholic Church, which is only given one brief scene.  The overall sense is that many important details were left on the pages of the book.

            The main drive of the plot is the rivalry between Anne Boleyn (Natalie Portman) and her sister Mary (Scarlett Johansson) as they battle for the affection of King Henry VIII (Eric Bana).  When the rumor spreads that Henry’s Queen Katherine cannot bear him the son he desires, their father Thomas Boleyn and their scheming uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, devise a plan to make one of the sisters his mistress in order to provide him with a male heir.           

            The King briefly falls for Mary, but Anne is not about to step aside and uses manipulation to convince Henry to both send Mary back to the country with his illegitimate child and annul the marriage with his wife Katherine, in order for her to become the Queen of England. 

            Most people are familiar with the beheading of Anne Boleyn, but this film offers more insight into how and why it happened, assuming that the details of the historical characters and events have not been changed too much in order to fit the dramatic narrative.

            Out of the three leads, Portman certainly gives the most powerful performance.  She plays her character in a way in which the viewer does not know whether to hate her or feel sorry for her.  She is certainly a devious character, but seems to be a product of her scheming family.  Johansson, on the other hand, plays the good girl, and as a result, she does not have very many interesting scenes, or at least scenes that are only half as interesting as Portman’s. 

            Eric Bana does a decent job of playing Henry VIII.  Well, he looks good at least.  He does not have very much to work with, and throughout most of the film just stomps his feet and walks angrily throughout the castle corridors.  He’s a selfish and unlikable guy, but it’s appropriate to the character. 

            The supporting actors do well, also, including Jim Sturgess (“Across the Universe”), who plays Anne and Mary’s brother George, and who has a delicate and heartbreaking scene when he tells Anne he cannot help her conceive a child, and the usually efficient Kristin Scott Thomas (who plays the Boleyn mother, Lady Elizabeth). 

            None of the characters stumbled over the dialogue, which sounds too modern too often, and is not the Victorian, hard-to-understand style that one would expect in a picture about this time period.  Maybe that’s a good thing however, as it kept the film simple enough to follow without questioning what the characters said or meant.

            The film is directed by British TV veteran Justin Chadwick, and is full of too-quick cuts and jerks throughout.  He has gotten adequate work out of his cast, but only that.

            The film is full of rich costumes by two-time Oscar-winner Sandy Powell, and excellent production design by John-Paul Kelly.  But these are not enough to save the film, which lacks in storytelling just when the plot begins to thicken and become dark.  By the time Mary says, “I’ve seen enough” in this playing-with-facts movie, so has the audience.

             

           

            

Monsters Don’t Cry

I watched the movie ‘Monster’ today.  (Stars Charlize Theron in a very unattractive but brilliant role … so much less graceful than I’ve ever seen her, but playing it out perfectly).  I would not say this movie completely glorified Aileen Wuornos, in fact, the complete opposite.  However, that really humanizing moment when she spares the life of the speech impediment guy … that just bothered me.  It was like “here you go, she’s not going to murder EVERYONE, just the real douche bags.”  Then, later in the movie, she kills that nice guy who really intended to help her out.  Why even bother to give her any credit?  Why focus on that survivor at all.  She had a lot of survivors.  She was a prostitute since she was 13.  So why focus on this one survivor in the middle of her serial rampage?  What was the point?  Was I supposed to sympathize with her?  I understand that she was raped and beaten by the first guy she killed.  That doesn’t justify her other acts.  It makes me think of the movie ‘Boys Don’t Cry.’  Now, that movie was a lot different.  It focused on the victim’s tragedy rather than that of the killer.  However, Teena Brandon (aka  Brandon Teena) was not a stand up citizen.  I understand his (her) death was extremely tragic, but I also watched the documentary about him, and he was very deceitful.  Brandon Teena was no martyr.  Aileen Wuornos was no hero. 

There Will Be ‘Blah.’

So, I agree that Daniel Day-Lewis certainly deserved his award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, but seriously, what was the point of “There Will Be Blood?”I understand that it is a story about greed, and the ‘blood’ is both figurative and literal, as Daniel Plainview stomps all over everyone to get to the top.   But I sat there thinking, should this really be a 3 hour long movie?  With how much they left out skipping years at a time, would it have really hurt to leave out a little more?I was never entirely bored, and I still find myself quoting Plainview (“I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!”), but honestly, to have a 3 hour movie that ended like this one, with no real conclusion … I felt like I wasted my time. I’m not going to deny that the film definitely has strong points.  A fine debut from the kid who plays Plainview’s son, not to mention what should have been an Oscar-nominated performance by Paul Dano (“I am a false prophet.  God is a superstition!”)  I just don’t see what they were trying to show with the film.  Any ideas? 

problem:

When will people learn that things like this spawn things like this?  (Links will open in new window).  I mean, it’s not really the same, but once you learn the motive in the movie Untraceable, you can’t help but think, “Yeah, I’d be pissed off too.”  It certainly does not make what the killer did ok, and I’m not trying to justify it in any way (because some of those things were just sick … the whole thing made me think of the Saw franchise — how gruesome can you get?) but the first link is how things like that begin. 

This is slightly unrelated, but Se7en was on tv the other day, and I couldn’t help but think that’s really where movies like Saw began. Again, how gruesome can you get? That’s the key.

blog, blog, blog blog blog blog

This is probably a good idea.  As long as I keep it up.  I always have a lot on my mind.  Once I’ve sorted some things out, there may be some entries of substance here.  Keep a look out! My main focus will probably be about movies and how they impact the news, or vice versa. Like Billy said in the movie Scream, “Movies don’t create serial killers, movies make serial killers more creative!” Ever since I saw that movie in the 5th grade, I’ve always been interested in how one thing can affect another, positively or negatively.  Art imitating life imitating art.  Is it an endless cycle?