All things perfect and poisonous

So the horror movie challenge is totally off the rails now. The movies seem to be drifting further away from horror all of the time. I'm mostly just chasing my own interests, which often lead to oddities that can easily be classified as horror, but I'm not feeling well and have become too weak to resist the charms of Tom Hardy and Gael Garcia Bernal. Actually traditional horror films hold very little interest, but I greatly enjoy psychological horror and thrillers so I couldn't stay away from Dot the I once it was described as an erotic thriller. Erotic + Gael Garcia Bernal + Tom Hardy + flamenco dancing; oh my.

Well, it was romantic and a little twisted and a bit sexy, but sadly, not horrific and mildly disappointing. And I don't care! The love triangle that develops at the first of Dot the I is hot and when the triangle is revealed to be a fraud, created as part of an emotional snuff film that Carmen has unknowingly found herself at the center of, the film suff…

I had planned on going a little further back into the history of cinema, but this group of films are all from the 1970s.

Patrick is an Australian movie that was prominently featured in the Ozploitation documentary Not Quite Hollywood. In my effort to watch all of the films referenced in Kill Bill, vol. 1, I had overlooked Patrick. It was stunning to see just how much the hospital scenes had borrowed from this rather obscure film. But in actuality, while one can see echos of KBv1, Patrick is a very different film.

Patrick opens with him electrocuting his mother, i.e. toaster + bathtub. After this opening, the rest of the film is centered on Kathy, the nurse who cares for Patrick. He has been in a coma since the accident and stares straight ahead. She is told he is brain dead, but becomes convinced that he is communicating with her using telekinesis. While this is far from the best piece of horror cinema I've seen, it is a fascinating one. And Patrick is a bit unsettling, the …

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The horror movie challenge has been derailed, but this isn't really a surprise. I often don't have the time to watch one movie/day and the weekends have been rather busy lately. Now I have several work related meetings to prep for that I anticipate with further dip into my free time. Gone are those days when I had very little to do at my day job and no friends to spend time with when not at work and I'm not complaining. In fact, I'm surprised at the number of movies I have managed to see by day 14.

Jigoku (1960) was a little slow and completely dumbfounding, but as illustrated in the above still, it looked amazing. Having just been to Never Let Me Go, a film that director Romanek admits to basing the look on classic Japanese cinema, I was pleasantly surprised to have stumbled upon another film shot in a similar perspective that that used by Ozu. These early Japanese films are shot from a low angle and I hadn't picked up on that, but then it became …

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Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go, is among the most emotionally powerful books I've ever read. Never Let Me Go is set in a boarding school, where the children are special. As they are being instructed to create art and take care of their bodies, they are told only the bare minimum about life, especially their purpose in life. Unlike regular people, the children at Hailsham have a very specific purpose. Their future is determined for them and set in stone, but the children don't really understand what this means.

In the novel, this premise is slowly revealed only with the discoveries of three friends, Kathy H, Tommy, and Ruth as they grow up in this unusual world. Never Let Me Go is science fiction, but not at it's emotional core. The heart of the story in within Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth and is in fact the most epically tragic love story I have ever read. Knowing that the soul of this story isn't about the alternate present day reality of the …

Sometimes, it is almost as if American culture is so distasteful and alienating that sometimes, I dream of exodus. As I spend an inordinate amount of time alone, it is easy to forget just how at odds my own point of view is with the culture as a whole, but occassionally, something happens which makes it difficult to ignore. Major elections are the biggest reminder of just how divergent my values are, but occasionally a memorial day screening of a George Clooney movie does the trick.



I went to The American knowing little about the film, other than it was directed by Anton Corbijn who made the stunningly stark and beautiful Ian Curtis biopic, Control. I was immediately struck by the quiet of the picture. The opening scene perfectly set the tone for the following acts, with Jack (Clooney) walking with a lover in a perfectly silent, snow covered landscape, until violence suddenly erupts, leaving Clooney's character alone to travel to a place to lay low. This quiet continues throu…

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I apparently have no clue what a horror movie is. Or at least, when the challenge rolls around and I take the leap and attempt to watch 31 horror movies, I suddenly feel as if I have no idea what that means. There are times when it is obvious that a movie is horror; Friday the 13th, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Once I dive into the challenge, I begin to question whether the movies I'm seeing really count.

This year, I've seen Buried, Carrie, Clean, Shaven, Nosferatu (1922), Scanners, Sisters, and I sell the Dead. Nate protested Sisters, saying DePalma's movie about a pair of disturbed Siamese twins isn't a horror movie. And he has a point, but how is one supposed to choose movies without having seen them before to really know whether they are horror? Especially since I'm only using the challenge to catch up on movies that I should see because they are classics and to re-watch a few others that need to be revisited. But picking the movies …

Day 3, of the October Horror Movie Challenge and already, it's time to change strategies. Apparently, when I pick a horror movie, I can REALLY pick them. I think it is safe to say that if we keep going, Nate and I will have PTSD by the end of the week.

So far the tally is 3 films, 2 first viewings.

We started today with Carrie (1976), which we both had seen previously, but not for many years. I hadn't remembered the lascivious male gaze or the overt misogyny. But this might be the elements that gives the film a surprisingly authentic depiction of High school experience. there were plenty of times when I would have loved to have gotten rid of the entire school in a giant ball of fire.

But the movie that neither of us had seen before was Clean, Shaven. This film caught my attention three years ago, when I attempted to complete the challenge, but never managed to get my hands on it during October. So I rented it this October and between it and Buried, I don't think Nate …

Don't you hate it when a film really says something and makes you want to talk about it, but you never can find just the right words to do so. A month ago, I saw The Social Network at an advance screening and have been thinking about just how brilliant the portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg and the creation of facebook is done. I knew that I needed to see the film again in order to really collect my thoughts, since it was severely underlit and the pace was so quick that it was difficult to reconstruct the sequence of events after.

But now that The Social Network has opened, the professionals have been busily writing amazing things. I think Jim Emerson has succeeded in seeing the same film I did in the same way. I totally saw that The Social Network is a film about class and privilege in college as well as a character study of someone who is ultimately unlikable. And I gravitate toward these prickly people.

Jim Emerson: The Social Network: Communicating in code

I've only attempted the October Horror Movie Challenge once and didn't quite complete it. I believe I came in at 29 films, with most of them being new to me and all of them were feature films. I'm already off to a late start, since Friday, I had planned to see Buried after work which just didn't work out, due to long work day and nasty headaches.

But on day 2, I finally went to my first horror movie of October. There were some questions as to whether Buried is horror. According to IMDB.com, it is not, but I couldn't imagine that any movie that is set in a coffin already buried in the earth wouldn't qualify for the October challenge. So, I drug Nate out to Buried today, when he actually was in the mood for a romantic comedy.

And I'm pleased I did. I was very curious about how this movie could even be made, but it worked and was quite an intense study of fear and claustrophobia. Buried was a very dark movie as the camera never strays from the interior of…