Hostel 2
Last night I had the misfortune to watch this film. I haven’t seen the original and frankly don’t want to. My brother hired it and I was semi-forced to watch. The film has a real reputation for opening a new can of worms as far as horror is concerned. However, the gripes I have with this movie are not particularly over the Guignol but rather the horror movie cliches/rules that were being adhered to religiously.
Take the three chicks, you know immediately which ones will be killed; I.E. the one’s that try/succeed in getting laid. Sex = death in horror movies. Then you have the wafer thin portrayal of eastern Europeans. Are Americans that afraid of Slavic types? Here they are, across the board, characters straight out of a 1950’s vampire movie. Including some very heavy eyebrows, sexy yet evil thin model type chicks, local straw haired inbred’s, etc.
Unlike the original, the main killers’ back stories are also highlighted. Here the “rich” yanks are in Europe to chop up girls so that they get a thousand-yard stare when on the golf course or taking to the wife. Quite sad. Such stares often come from you being the person surviving ordeals, not the one causing them.
Anyway more cliches abound when they actually get to the murder acts. It seems the yanks just don’t have the balls for this job, in contrast to the smilingly evil Europeans who make a real meal of their work in the most shocking of ways (you have to see the film to understand how many jokes were in that last sentence). So whilst the poor girls do die in gory, bloody and frankly unimaginative ways (especially the one in the poster who I last saw in Devil’s Advocate), it is all so unrealistic in setting that it effected me about as much as, say; Blade did. Ridiculous evil is not actually frightening only gross. Much like the terrible Jeepers Creepers, where, once I had realised that the bad guy was simply a monster, the whole thing stopped being frightening in any way.
Real fear comes from normality, The Wicker Man being a great example. Pass this one over, not scary, just sick. 5/10.
Basho
Technorati Tags: horror movie, hostel 2
I have recently become embroiled in a very heated community debate regarding headshots in airsoft. I am going here present the full force of my argument and sound a call for what I believe is the most important change needed to the sport; the mandatory wearing of full face protection.
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Right at your Door has issues. Of course, being a film with a limited budget, it stays away from effects laden shots and instead focuses in on the two main characters. Married couple Lexi and Brad. A shame then that it picks characters with ZERO in common, who are quite unbelievable as a married couple. Sometimes films have done this on purpose. Take the brilliant “The Edge” where Anthony Hopkins and Elle Macpherson are portrayed as married. There the ‘anti-chemistry’ sets up the entire plot of the story and that Hopkin’s victorious rite of passage for the character. Here, it becomes a mess. It is difficult to even care about the overarching terrorism plot as so little of it is shown to us. We see no results of the bombs and the camera very rarely strays away from Brad. A device that was supposed to increase the sense of isolation, but actually just make use wonder what the hell is happening elsewhere? The essential question the films asks is “Would you let in your other half when the radio tells you to bar the doors from a virus? And what are the consequences of the action?”
Moreover, significant medical plot holes infect this film and there are many MANY strands of story that go nowhere such as the man locked in with Brad that he doesn’t know and the small black kid his wife picks up. Even worse was the introduction of a man, Rick, who seemed to offer some sort of plot twist but just literally disappeared. The plot instead tries very hard to draw you away from the slightly obvious incident that later decides the ending and lays us up for a ham fisted and decidedly cruel twist.
This ending left me cold. As by avoiding the characters from learning anything in the entire movie the film only manages to horrify you by showing you the brutal necessity of the survival of the many against the lives of the few. For me to be engaged (and it isn’t hard) characters must show that they care in ways other than just screaming. Perhaps lessons from Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs) are in order?
One big pile of fail. This film scores a mediocre 6.
A brilliant movie from the online comic Indexed
Can the truth of life really be shown using PowerPoint?
Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent PowerPoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand ‘association-chain-massacre’. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable TV, emotions and hamsters.
Even though this man is blind, he paints. Well. Better than most people who have sight. Through this struggle he has found himself and when you watch this clip listen to the part where he said that he tried it with nothing to loose. In his journey, he learned that to create art involves a total allowance for failure. One must be able to risk the painting going astray, and either ignore that risk, learn to use the fear to drive you onwards, or; as this guy does; be blind to it. Literally and figuratively.
More than being an artist, he clearly shows that with the courage to pick yourself up of the floor: anything is possible.
This is a bug found in the old S.T.A.L.K.E.R. alpha; if you hold down the “repair car” key, the car quickly accelerates to near infinite speeds.
Then something very cool happens.
