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charity movie suffering for charity

Transformers 4: I am drunk and I must rage pee

So this is kind of a giant excuse and an explanation. You see my first pee break in this movie, which is approximately 17 hours long and composed of jackahammers and CGI, I had to pee. And realized there was still an hour and fifteen fucking minutes fucking left in the fucking movie. Came back to my seat. Put in another order because I was not nearly drunk enough for this shit. Order card said:

refill Pibb

refill lemonade

refill iced tea

another Rocket milk shake and mexican chocolate

because f____ man how the f_____ is this movie another hour long I need more alcohol pray for me

Yes I literally wrote that (including the line instead of the full f-bomb) on my order card. The waitress grabbed it, looked it over, and whispered, “Yeah this movie is really long, isn’t it?”

So I’m kind of too drunk right now after consuming two beers and two very alcoholic (I think it was extra alcoholic because they took pity on me) shakes in a bit over two hours. Too drunk to write something to coherently express how this movie made me feel. It’s really just one giant rage pee. So I will write you your thing tomorrow, you bastards. I earned this one for charity, that’s for sure. And while I’m trying to hammer my anger into actual words rather than a primal, Nicolas-Cage-esque scream, I will scan in the ten and a half pages of hand-written notes I took which become increasingly difficult to read the drunker I get, but you’ll get the idea.

Tomorrow.

But I will leave you with a few subtitle ideas that would have been much more appropriate than Age of Extinction.

Transformers 4:

  • Longing for the Radically Feminist Days of Megan Fox
  • This Is What an Aneurysm Feels Like
  • An Overly Long and Creepy Virginity Metaphor
  • Magnets: How the Fuck do They Work?
  • A Bud Light Movie in Every Sense
  • Who the Fuck Is Grimlock?
  • Not Even Texas Deserves This
  • Fuck This Movie
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movie

[Movie] So I was right about Maleficent

Warning: talking about rape again.

Or rather, the way I interpreted the wing-removal scene in the movie. Angelina Jolie has confirmed that it was very deliberately indicative of rape.

Now Jolie has confirmed that the scene deliberately echoes the too-familiar beats of the date-rape narrative. “We were very conscious, the writer [Linda Woolverton] and I, that it was a metaphor for rape,” Jolie said during an interview with BBC Woman’s Hour.

There’s another quote right after this one in the article that’s worth emphasizing, I think.

Jolie had spoken forcefully at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, on Tuesday, demanding an end to rape as a tool of war. “It is a myth that rape is an inevitable part of conflict,” she said at the Summit. “There is nothing inevitable about it.”

I think the way the movie staged the scene is very in line with what Jolie said there. It’s very clear that Stephen’s decision to cut off Maleficent’s wings is a very, very deliberate one. He went out to meet her already prepared to do something terrible. He made a conscious decision to drug her. He made a conscious decision, when he couldn’t bring himself to kill her, to still do something that hurt her in a very fundamental way. Stephen chooses to do this because he wants power, and the crown. It in no way something that was destined to happen from the beginning of their relationship, or even because he threw in his lot with the humans.

And it’s sad that it feels very unusual for a movie to depict rape as something that isn’t just about the “heat of the moment” but rather a choice on the part of the attacker (either pre-meditated or a snap decision) to hurt someone. We’re still getting fed the bullshit rape fantasy where it somehow turns consensual partway through more often than I care to think about.

I have to take extreme exception to one thing the article says, as a throw-away:

Maleficent may have muddled messages—the fact that Maleficent’s entire motivation as a villain is rejection by a man is not a great feminist message—

Are you fucking serious? Did we not watch the same movie? Did you just forget the part where the entire previous paragraph of the article is about how Stephen cutting off Maleficent’s wings is a fucking rape scene? Now, if we want to gripe about her entire motivation for villainy being about what a man has done to her, okay then. That’s definitely a legitimate complaint. But raped by a man and rejected by a man are not even on the same plane of existence.

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movie

[Movie] Riddick

So, I’m really glad I didn’t bother seeing this movie in the theater. I’m now regretting even paying for it on pay-per-view. Because it actively pissed me off as I watched it. Let’s just do this bullet point style:

  • It was obvious from moment one that the only reason Riddick found the alien puppy was so that, eventually, the now-grown alien dog could join the large crowd of people in Riddick’s fridge. Painfully telegraphed. I’m also not sure what it says about these movies that they’ve gone from fridging women to fridging dogs. Hopefully they saved the puppy a spot in the fruit drawer.
  • Dahl. Fucking Dahl. I just couldn’t even with this character. The at times painfully wooden mercenary woman started off showing how strong she was as a female character by punching the crap out of the dirtbag mercenary. That’s fine, I can get behind that, since it does kind of make sense with the mercenary thing. But then Santana the dirtbag spends the rest of the movie until his death being increasingly rapey at her until Riddick kills him. And bonus for the fact that Dahl clearly states she “doesn’t fuck men.” Maybe this means she’s a lesbian. Maybe she’s just asexual. Maybe she just wants them all to back the fuck off. But then Riddick says that he’s going to go “balls deep” in her because she asks him to. The only thing that kept me from punching holes in my TV in anger was that this did not actually happen, thank goodness, though I was sorely tempted when she basically straddled Riddick in the course of rescuing him at the end and he slid his hand over her butt. (Sure, maybe it was a joke between equals where she was basically going Nope, still not for you. I could have gone with that, up until the butt-touching.) With each movie, the female characters have become progressively less fully realized just to make more room for Riddick being a power fantasy. It’s incredibly disappointing, particularly when you think about how freaking awesome Fry was in Pitch Black.
  • If I cared less about Papa Johns’s desire to get revenge for his son (killed in the first movie) I might stop breathing. It was incredibly unconvincing. (And then he comes back for Riddick…why?) Also, this left me with the strong desire to order a pizza. Damn you.
  • I guess the weird alien monsters were trying to move us back to the good ol’ days of Pitch Black, but these were even more ridiculous, and not in a good way.
  • Incredibly ridiculous scene with motorcycle-ish things. Very motocross. Much silly. Such adolescent fantasy. Wow.
  • In this movie I learned that a Brazilian wax is apparently the way of the Necromonger woman. I did not need to know this, and yet now I do.
  • The cheese factor of the action and dialog has gone from cool and fun to cringe-worthy. I left Chronicles of Riddick in spasms of roleplaying nerd glee over the whole “I’ll kill you with my tea cup” line. And I rewatch this movie often. It’s still good stuff. This movie lacked the minimum level of cleverness. It felt more like it was trying to be a cheap knock off of its own greatest hits. We’ve been here before, and it was a lot more enjoyable the first and even second time around.

It’s difficult for me to define the difference (aside from the ever worsening treatment of female characters) between Chronicles of Riddick and Riddick, that makes the first delicious cheeseball fun and the second an exercise in frustration. With each movie the writing has become less focused, and the characters have become progressively less fleshed out. And then by the time you get to Riddick, it’s not even really a movie any more, it’s just basically the uncomfortable experience of watching someone’s wanky, adolescent, misogynistic power fantasy put on film, where Riddick is the paper cut-out stand-in with biceps to die for.

All I can think is that if I’d ever written fanfiction with this level of flat wish fulfillment, fans around the internet would have ripped off my head and shit down my neck all the while endlessly screaming the words “Mary Sue.”

It’s not fun any more, Riddick. Go home.

Categories
movie science fiction

[Movie] The most disappointing thing about Edge of Tomorrow is its title

Couldn’t you have come up with something better for a title? Really? I felt like I should be seeing an episode of Star Trek. Or perhaps Lady Gaga would appear at any moment, wearing disturbingly avant garde yet somehow still sexy robotic battle armor with unbelievable high heels, and belt out a song while pyrotechnics go off in the background.

Come on. The book this was based on was titled All You Need Is Kill. That’s an awesome title. Why not just stick with that?

Complaints about the title aside, I actually really liked this movie. Which surprised me, since I had read the review from Strange Horizons and went in all braced to reach the same kind of frothing rage levels to which Oblivion originally drove me. Which couldn’t be good for my blood pressure, but these are the things I do for you people. But I was pleasantly surprised, and I’m not sure if I will ever find it in my heart to forgive Tom Cruise for making me like him again, even if just a little.

The shortkey for Edge of Tomorrow‘s plot is “Groundhog Day as military scifi with an alien invasion.” Which is not inaccurate. Though Groundhog Day displayed a notable lack of powered battle armor that caused people to run like they were about to shit in their pants. And an even more profound lack of Emily Blunt’s arms. And I hope we can all agree that from this day forward, all movies should be required to give at least two full minutes of screen time to Emily Blunt’s arms.

Anyway, the plot.

Due to a MacGuffin, Tom Cruise (named Cage, as a nod to Keiji, hero of All You Need Is Kill) repeats the same day over and over again. Rita (Emily Blunt) had the MacGuffin until recently, but lost it for reasons that I’ll call good enough to pass. She works with Cage and a scientist who is the only person who believed her when she was repeating days to try and stop the alien invasion.

For the most part, it works. If you can accept the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey that goes on, the movie is actually a lot of fun. Cage dies a lot, and a lot of those times involve Rita shooting him in the head to reset him because he’s just fucked up that badly in his training. There’s snark, and some highly amusing deaths that made me laugh out loud. It was internally consistent with what it did, didn’t belabor the days repeating once the audience had gotten the point, and so on. The pacing was good, there were twists, I liked it.

Honestly, I have only two real complaints, which are a bit spoilery:

  1. Considering Rita makes it very clear early on in their partnership that she is so incredibly disinterested in having sex with Cage that it’s not even funny, I really could have done without the bit of romance that got thrown in there. I feel like it should have been more than enough for Cage to have a deep, mutual friendship with Rita, considering they’re literally the only two people on the planet that understand what the other person is going through. I consider it a small mercy that the actual bits of romance took up very little screen time, but I sure rolled my eyes when it did come up.
  2. The last five minutes. What the hell, man. Just. What the hell. It was precisely the expected cowardice we see in most films like this, where a potentially meaty ending gets completely short circuited by the desire to see the hero survive triumphant and get the girl. This ending also completely circumvents the MaGuffin rules (the timey-wimey gets way too wibbly-wobbly at this point) that have been faithfully obeyed throughout the entire rest of the movie, which made it extra annoying.

I came out of this really liking Rita as a character, by the way. For all that she was inextricably tied to Cage since he was the one with the MacGuffin and not her, I feel like throughout the film she was the force really pushing him along and keeping him moving. While he had to live day after day to choreograph their way through various scenarios, she hung ferociously on to her goal the entire time and kept pushing him. In the two occasions where he very overtly tries to “save” her to her face, she refuses to accept it. At the end, she even firmly tells him that neither of them are making it out alive and gives him a look that clearly communicates suck it up, cupcake. I really liked her. And her arms. But mostly her. (Also, I appreciated that the movie managed to refrain from making her a sex object except for pretty much one shot, which I will forgive because her arms. You don’t understand. I want to run away to the mountains and marry Emily Blunt’s arms.)

Tom Cruise did a credible job as Cage, leaving the scenery largely ungnawed. I personally felt like he did a good job of depicting (in perhaps uncharacteristically subtle ways) when given a chance just how the endless cycle of life and death was messing with him. It wasn’t nearly as explicit as what we saw in Groundhog Day, but it was there.

Smarter and much more internally consistent than your average big budget scifi/action tentpole, Edge of Tomorrow has left me pleased when I thought I wouldn’t be. But goddammit, that means I’m going to have to give Tom Cruise yet another chance. Curses!

Categories
feminism movie

[Movie] Maleficent

Going to start this one off with a disclaimer, which is this:

I am not an original dyed-in-the-wool Maleficent fangirl. I do not have a massive ladyboner for this Disney villain the way quite a few of my friends do. So I’m taking this movie as itself. It’s been well over a decade (man, probably closer to two) since I last watched Sleeping Beauty, so all I really can say about the original animated lady of menace is that she sure had some style. 

TL;DR: I have absolutely nothing to say about how this movie relates to the character as seen in Sleeping Beauty. So please don’t yell at me.

All right.

I really, really liked this movie. Even more than I expected to, and I was already looking forward to it.

Angelina Jolie? Fucking amazing. I am already so in love with that woman I could write odes to her (non-enhanced) cheekbones, so this did not surprise me. She made a stylish Maleficent, from menacing to downright intimidating even when she was being “good.” And man, those contacts she had. Holy crap, her eyes.

Other than Maleficent, Diaval (Sam Riley), and Stephen (Sharlto Copley), there wasn’t a lot to most of the characters. I found the three pixies particularly grating. There were some odd pacing issues, and the movie seems to kind of get lost and meander during the second act until it remembers where it’s going and launches into the third.

The movie was pretty enough, but could never quite decide if it wanted to look realistic or be overtly cartoonish. I think either style can work just fine (even cartoonish does all right mixed with live action if the movie just jumps in with both feet) but never being willing to commit to one or the other or draw lines between the two realities of the film didn’t serve it well visually. I found myself wishing there was less cgi. A lot less cgi. Particularly when they were in the fairy lands, pretty much everything was computer generated and some of it just…didn’t quite make it out of the uncanny valley, I think. (And missed a golden opportunity for some gorgeous puppets and practical effects.) Or maybe it just looked a little too fake. I found the miniaturized pixies disturbing. They just did not look right in some fundamental way that really bothered me. Score was all right but nothing to write home about.

So, not the best offering I could have hoped for. Honestly, Snow White and the Huntsman did a much better job visually, I think.

What really made me like Maleficent was the story itself, and I found several aspects of it very interesting:

Going to cut this now for major spoilers.

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movie science fiction

I am sorry you were held captive in a windowless basement in 2013

I was going to rant about this on Twitter, but bleh. Quick blog post is easier: The Sad State of Modern Sci-fi

Short summary: They do not make amazing scifi movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey any more. CGI is ruining everything. There hasn’t been a good (in this case defined as thoughtful and intelligent) scifi movie since Moon in 2009.

Mr. Forward: I am extremely sorry to hear that last year, you were held captive in a windowless basement by evil, scifi-hating orcs and thus not allowed to go to the theater and see Her or Gravity (which relied heavily upon cgi). The former, I’ll note, won a richly-deserved Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The latter won several Oscars, including taking home Best Director for Alfonso Cuarón. (Now, to be fair, Mr. Forward’s post is from February 14, 2014, so he couldn’t have known this would happen.) I am also saddened to hear your subterranean prison did not have pay-per-view, and thus you were incapable of accessing Europa Report–a movie that was not without its problems, but was still an extremely solid offering for the genre if your requirements are thoughtful and intelligent.

And you’ll note here, I’m just sticking with the hardest scifi I can find. Go into softer scifi and you get Under the Skin. If you want to expand out toward fantasy, I can offer quite a few more movies that definitely deserve to be called thoughtful and intelligent in 2013, including Byzantium and Only Lovers Left Alive.

2013 was an incredible year for genre film, any way you slice it. While most of what I named were smaller, independent films, Gravity had a lifetime domestic gross of ~$274 million, not too far behind 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s inflation adjusted lifetime domestic gross of ~$297 million. Those numbers ain’t anything to sneeze at.

I guess you could dismiss the films I’ve named as not good enough in relation to the examples you hold up. It’s probably true that they’re never going to make another film like 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that’s okay. That film already exists, and has held up through time. Let the filmmakers of today make different films and seek the answers for different questions. If Her and Gravity are insufficient in your eyes, I’d question if you’re defining good scifi cinema as thoughtful explorations of big questions on film, or as thoughtful explorations of big questions on film that precisely  fit your personal taste. At which point you lose my sympathy if your taste is so narrow as all that.

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movie

[Movie] X-Men: Days of Future Past

I don’t actually have too many major thoughts on this movie, other than gosh it was a nice gift to all us Charles/Erik shippers. (/cough) It was explodey and colorful and pretty much everything I’ve come to expect from one of these movies, which is in some ways good and in some ways bad. I thought it was well-shot, the soundtrack was…all right but I won’t run out and buy it like I did for X-Men: First Class. No complaints about any of the actors. This movie definitely takes the promise (and apology) of X-Men: First Class and delivers on it.

Stuff that made me happy:

  • While I wanted more Mystique, I loved the fact that the plot ultimately hinges on her. And not just on her, but on the choices she makes of her own free will. The plot easily could have gone that bullshit place where, say, Mystique was captured and she had to be rescued or something, but it didn’t. That made me happy. Also, while at times it felt that Erik and Charles were trying to frame things as some sort of choice between them, she ultimately made her own decision and walked out under her own power. I appreciated that immensely.
  • Loved all the new mutants.
  • I actually really liked Quicksilver and I’d been kind of dreading him from the moment I saw the costume design and seriously what the fuck was his hair. But the whole bit of the movie that involved him was excellent, and fun, and I loved how they also did the special effects for it. The entire prison break subplot was definitely my favorite part of the movie.
  • Peter Dinklage was excellent as Trask (and as Mystique pretending to be Trask on one occasion). He does a very banal sort of evil well and makes an excellent villain. The movie also never went the cheap route and explicitly tried to make his actions about his dwarfism. Also, excellently tailored suits.
  • So much epic bromance with Charles and Erik, and in two different time periods. It was lovely, and the four actors involved were amazing, leaving absolutely no on surprised.

Stuff that really could have been better:

  •  I think they did Mystique’s makeup/costume differently for this movie than First Class, and I can’t say I liked it. In close-ups, there was a weird lack of texture to it that just bothered me.
  • For all that I loved them, we didn’t get to see much of the new mutants. And most of what we did see involved them getting slaughtered. And considering that most of the cast diversity was seen in that group, that made me very sad.
  • And because of the above point, Mystique was functionally the only developed female character in the film. And she was awesome, don’t get me wrong, but I still found that immensely disappointing. There are just so many amazing women in the X-Men universe.
  • Still not over the fact that they decided to have Wolverine go back in time instead of Kitty. Yes, they came up with a reasonable(ish) bullshit reason to do it within the movie plot. But still.
  • Wish that there’d been a bit more actual 70s in the costume and set design, or maybe I’ve just got the wrong idea about what the 70s looked like since I wasn’t actually alive back then. It just didn’t seem nearly colorful enough in that sense.

All in all, I’m feeling pretty optimistic about the next movie, which definitely puts this one way ahead of X-men 2. (Before the credits had even started rolling on that one, I’d already decided I wasn’t going to see X-Men 3.) And it’s going to be Apocalypse! Which could be… interesting. Cautious optimism. Here’s hoping we’ll get more of the amazing female mutants than just Mystique next time around.

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movie

Godzilla 2014 (Oh look, another movie about white men.)

I have a lot of feelings about this movie. A lot of feelings. Spoiler: Many of them are not terribly positive. Just so I can mentally organize this, I’m going to split it into parts.

NOTE: for the purposes of this long, long rant, I will be using Gojira to mean the original 1954 Japanese movie as released in Japan. And I will be referring to the monster as Godzilla when not specifically in that movie because it’s the generally agreed-upon romanization.

Also, there are spoilers throughout. But get real. If you go to this movie, you’re not watching it for the plot.

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movie

[Movie] Chef

Which should be subtitled: Or: 115 minutes of unrelenting food porn; if you don’t leave the theater prepared to murder a hobo if it will only get you a cubano, you are either the most self-controlled vegan who has ever lived or dead.

So that is the first thing you need to know about Chef. It’s a nearly two hour ode to food. But it’s so much more than that. Considering that most mainstream movies these days are still very much about being dark or edgy in some way, where there’s angst and tragic pasts and manpain everywhere, movies that very conspicuously avoid those things really stand out to me. Because you can look at the characters in them and think yeah, I know someone like that. Or yeah, that’s me. The characters feel so much more rich for it, full of an ordinary kind of life that makes them feel infinitely more real than the overemphasized caricatures with which we basically get inundated. Characters grow and change and learn lessons and no one has to have a melodramatic run through the rain or throws dishes on the floor or flees in slow motion from an explosion.

The plot itself is something you could imagine happening in real life–chef loses his job (okay, the melodramatic blow-up at the food critic is perhaps a bit over the top, but hilarious) and decides to start a food truck. Picks the truck up in Miami and drives it back to California with his son and his line cook. And on the way, it becomes a love letter to the landscape, food, and music of the Gulf Coast states.

It’s a movie with a lot to say about creativity–both the kind specifically involved in cooking and the arts in general–and criticism, and how art is supposed to touch peoples’ lives in a very personal way, and does so without ever getting into navel-gazing territory. It has a lot to say about relationships, about being happy and fulfilled, heck, even about social media. (Though regarding relationships, the only bit in the movie I didn’t like was the last three minutes, but that was for very personal reasons.)

But I think what I loved the most was how real it all felt in comparison to the movies I’m used to seeing. Like I said, you could look at any one of those characters and believe they were a real person that you could run in to around the corner. Beyond that, I loved the fact that it had an R-rating, and the only reason for that was because the word fuck was used so often–because you can’t have a believable kitchen without the f-word. I loved that there was so much Spanish in the movie, and none of it subtitled, in the kitchens, used by Chef Carl’s ex-wife Inez, used by his line cook Martin. That’s not something that happens often in mainstream film either. And I loved that there was no “darkest hour before dawn” moment, that a guy and his ex-wife managed to have a great friendship, that there was an amazing scene where the kid just got to sit there and look mortified that Carl and Martin were singing along to this song while driving down the highway:

Movies like this remind you that life has its own tiny dramas, but at the end of the day it’s a journey and you just get on with living it–and there is nothing boring about that. Life is rich and amazing and full of laughter and beauty and love.

This movie is fucking awesome. You come out of it just feeling good about being alive. You should go see it. Plan to get a cubano after.

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movie

[Movie] Under the Skin

7dcMy reaction to Under the Skin, summed up by well known philosopher, critic, and Hero of Canton, Jayne Cobb.

Because I am an adult and make excellent life choices, I decided to see this movie at 2230 on Sunday, even knowing that it would mean getting less than five hours of sleep before work on Monday. Because I’d heard wonderful things about it, and I have yet to see something that involves Scarlet Johansson that I haven’t loved to pieces. And the concept behind the movie also sounded so interesting–psychological thriller about an alien stalking Glasgow and doing terrible things to unsuspecting human men until she discovers some inner well of humanity? Sign me up.

I have no idea now, why people are calling this movie a psychological thriller as opposed to horror. I’m guessing because (at least in America) it’s not horror if it doesn’t involve jump scares and copious amounts of blood. Well, I don’t watch a lot of horror movies because I don’t really like either of those things all that much. But they also don’t really tend to leave me feeling fucked up for hours and days afterward. I claim Under the Skin is horror because it managed to fill me with existential dread for well over a day and kept me from sleeping. The last movie that did that? Kairo. The original Japanese horror movie, not that shitty American…whatever it was.

There is nothing about this movie that wasn’t fundamentally disturbing. Scarlet Johansson spends a lot of time staring at the world with dead eyes…except when she’s attempting to lure a hapless (and completely lonely) man to her exceptionally creepy and very water-damaged house. I can’t tell you precisely what happens to the men because it’s never explicitly stated, but it starts out with naked, boner-sporting fellows sinking down into a bottomless pool that the alien simply walks across like it’s solid, continues on to them being sucked out of their goddamn skins so literally there is an empty fucking skin floating in the water, and ends with what sure does look like ground meat and bonemeal slurry going down a chute.

The dialog is minimal, which only leads to the feeling of complete unease. The score is not going to win any prizes for beauty, but it does what it’s supposed to do with efficiency, which is make the audience feel intensely unsettled at every possible moment. The score was composed mostly of sustained chords, which were incredibly discordant and became less so as the alien experiences her shift in personality. The movie takes its time with long scenes, not terribly unlike the alien walking slowly backwards as she lures men into the dark room where they’ll ultimately get turned inside-out for the the crime of just really wanting to fuck a pretty woman. (A pretty woman, I’ll note, doing one of the least sexy strip teases that has ever been put to film.) It’s long, and drawn out, and at times you want to beg it to have mercy and just. Fucking. Stop.

But it is, by the way, fucking gorgeous. Large portions of this movie could easily act as a tourism advertisement for Scotland; forests and shorelines and the countryside all have their moments to shine. Except for the bit where the take home message seems to be: Come to Scotland, it’s a magical place where you might be picked up by a woman in a molester van and then get liquified after 24 hours of terrifying captivity on a bottomless swimming pool.

One thing I found interesting was the amount of nudity in this movie, which surprised me considering the R-rating. Full frontal nudity of both the male and female variety, and much of the male variety involved erections. But I think it’s because I’m used to an R-rating meaning lots of violence. That’s the American way, right? And there is really very little actual violence in this movie, for all it involves men getting sucked out of their own skins. There’s one really horrible scene at the end–an attempted rape that leads to something even more awful–and the rest of it is disquietingly non-violent and unsexy both. This movie refuses to offer you relief from the horror of what is happening by making it titillating in the slightest.

Continue on if you don’t mind spoilers: