Lots of fun, as long as you don’t think about any of the actions taken by most of the characters. Massive plot holes effectively spackled over by a crack team of scenery chewers.
Also: one of those movies that gives away waaaay to much in the trailer. Not everything, and not the end of the film, but still very spoilery. There should be a law that anything used in a trail from anywhere after the first act must be meaningless without context.
Exactly as depressing as you’d expect a documentary about kids living on the street in Seattle to be. From the opening with a 14 year old talking about how much she makes on “dates” and discussing her sexually transmitted infections with a doctor at a teen clinic, to the ending where some kids are in jail and one is dead from suicide, the film is endlessly bleak. The closest thing to a happy ending in the film for any of the kids is when one of them hops a train and leaves.
I loved this movie. It’s funny, and it has a great spin on vampire mythology that I’m fighting very hard to keep from spoiling. By the middle of the movie it’s pretty clear how the story will end, but it’s charming enough that I didn’t care. It’s in French, so be ready to read subtitles.
Also: it wasn’t playing at AMC or Alamo, so I actually had to pay for a ticket. The good news: tickets were only eight bucks! The bad news: parking was ten!
This movie is half the length (and probably a twentieth of the budget) of that thing I watched yesterday, and huge chunks of that are just people walking through the woods, but it’s about a thousand times more interesting. The three main characters- particularly Sam (Lily Collias)- feel like real humans. Great acting all around, but there is one scene in particular that’s the linchpin of the film, and they nail it.
I never watched the original 1979 release of Caligula, but I’d seen parts of it, and I was familiar with it’s history: Bob Guccione (the guy who did Penthouse magazine) hired a bunch of well-known actors and crew to make a version of the story that told a good story without holding back on the sexual aspects, then decided to fire the director and throw in some extra hardcore sex and violence, leading to a movie that most people who worked on it didn’t want to have associated with them.
This is a recut that cuts out the bonus porn and violence, and uses formerly lost footage to make a more cohesive story that includes more acting and less schtupping. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make a good movie. And even without the bonus porn, there’s so much background sex that it loses all meaning. The whole thing is long (about three hours!) and boring. I kept thinking “it must be almost over,” then looking at my watch and seeing only ten minutes had passed.
I realized something about two thirds of the way in: Caligula is the story of a deranged leader of a country that’s gaudy, loud, pointlessly expensive, ponderous, and around for too long. It’s the Donald Trump of art house movies.
It’s an Alien movie. It goes like this:
This is a total fan-service movie, and that mostly works, but there is a specific extended callback that was such a terrible idea that it pulled me right out of the film for a bit. And I thought the Final Boss Monster looked goofy.
Oh, and here’s what I kept thinking when I saw the title:
What a crazy retro block of sort-of-fifties, sort-of-eighties cheese. A new wave noir musical with a lead playing stoicism as blandness. Costumes that Diane Lane can’t keep from looking goofy, and yet Willem Dafoe somehow manages to make black plastic hip waders with no shirt work.
…and Robert Townsend as a backup singer!
…and Ed Begley Jr. as a bum!
…and of course: HAMMER FIGHT!
Look, I only got about three hours of sleep last night; it should be pretty easy for a movie to outwit me.
Not one thing in this movie surprised me. Every plot point is predictable, every joke is telegraphed, every decision a character makes is the one they have to make to get the story to the next point, even if there’s no motivation for it.
…but at least there’s a completely pointless “I got pee in my mouth” joke.
One of the challenges my middle school digital media kids have is making coherent movies. I give them some guidelines to help, including:
Because they’re working on foundational skills, I don’t emphasize another truth that’s important in all creative activities: once you understand the rules, break them. This movie does all the things I tell my students to avoid, and that’s why it works.
Here are the graphics I made for all the films in the order I watched them:
It was funny to watch this collection of old commercials and movies trailers and see what things from my childhood people decided to collect. I wouldn’t normally group together Eraserhead, Meatballs 4, and anti-crack PSAs starring Clint Eastwood, but someone did. Very odd to see the trailer for The Doom Generation and think “Oh yeah, Heidi Fleiss exists.” Also odd to see trailers before a collection of trailers.