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[Movie] Guardians of the Galaxy

tumblr_n8kmz2Zmen1r426i4o1_500Guardians of the Galaxy is wonderful fun because it has no pretensions about being anything other than goofy, pulpy space opera. It’s unabashedly weird, colorful, and cheeky. And it’s one of those rarest of all animals, a movie where the trailer tells you exactly what you’re going to get:

So yes, if you looked at that and thought hell yeah I want to watch a bunch of sarcastic aliens and a sassy white dude save the galaxy from a guy whose body paint can’t manage to hide his major pout, then you will be very, very satisfied with your movie ticket purchase.

I’ll say there are light spoilers below. Very light. Links mostly go to animated gifsets, FYI.

After one viewing, I think what makes GotG work so well is it has managed to find a good balance between making fun of its tropes and embracing them. (With the leavening mockery most often voiced by Rocket Raccoon.) It would be way too easy for this movie to fall into schmaltzy losers becoming winners by teaming up territory (backed up, no doubt, by a montage featuring Smashmouth’s All Star) if it weren’t for the fact that Peter Quill’s ‘we’re all losers’ speech is punctuated by Drax’s inability to pay attention and Rocket being 100% done with the entire process.

While many of the characters have the requisite angst-riddled background we see in comic book movies, when the manpain starts to get particularly thick Rocket makes the point that everyone has lost someone, and so what? The pain doesn’t make anyone special and you still have to just keep going. (This after having a drunken rampage in which he speaks about his own unpleasant origins.) There’s actually a lot of dark and grit in the setting of the movie—it starts with a young Peter Quill watching his mother die of cancer and then immediately being abducted by aliens whom we later find out were planning to eat him! The galaxy that the team of misfits wants to save is an inarguably scary and dangerous place. But what sets GotG apart from, say, the recent DC movies is that the characters do just what Rocket talks about. They keep living in the most technicolor way possible, and obviously have managed to find joy, hope, friendship, and family.

While I found all of the heroes likable, my favorites were the aliens: Groot, Rocket, and Drax. I know that early on, Groot and Rocket were considered potential tough sells just because they’re very weird when you compare them to the general “conventionally attractive white person” that fills out most of the primary and secondary parts in the MCU movies. Heck, I wouldn’t call Drax conventionally attractive either, even if he looks pretty human. While Rocket’s bottomless well of snark is undeniable, I liked the fact that all of them were very much not human. (Hell, I loved Drax’s inability to understand metaphors way more than I should have.)

And it’s a good thing that the heroes are likable and their coming together as a team has such good chemistry, because it’s those characters that have to drive the movie. The plot is standard “there is a bad guy that wants to kill a lot of people!” comic book fare, and Ronan (the pouty villain) is a particularly unexciting villain from a universe that’s previously given us Loki and Alexander Pierce. Ronan’s best moment is right at the end when he’s being utterly confused by the antics of Star Lord, and trust me, it’s still not much of a moment for him. Nebula felt very underutilized as a villain (though presumably we’ll be seeing a lot more from her in the future), but I appreciated her and Gamora providing the requisite Marvel movie daddy issues.

I swear to god, the entire MCU runs on sass and daddy issues.

GotG has apparently done very well in its opening weekend, and I think it’s well deserved. Marvel’s earned its reputation for putting out fun popcorn movies that don’t actively insult your intelligence while you’re watching them, and this continues the trend. I see in the linked article, there’s even been an uptick in the female audience numbers.

Well, GotG has a female hero, and a female villain, and I’ll say I loved the fact that Nebula was a stone-cold murder machine and not the general evil sex kitten trope. And Gamora was also pretty anti-use your sexy wiles. I could have done with less Star Lord hitting on Gamora (and the bit where Drax called her a whore flat pissed me off) but in the grand scheme of action tentpoles, GotG did pretty well. Hell, the leader of the Nova Corps, Nova Prime, is played by Glenn Close. Marvel’s been giving us better and better female characters of all sorts (though occasionally still fridging them) and the spin-off television show Agents of SHIELD has gone leaps and bounds beyond, with 50% of the main characters being women.

But they can do better. What Marvel has already done only serves to highlight the fact that they are still making a very conscious decision to not do a female superhero-headed movie, and that Janet Van Dyne seems to have been just wiped from the MCU, and that makes it all the more frustrating.

Marvel, we trust you enough that we made a movie featuring a fucking talking tree and a cyborg raccoon explode August box office opening weekend numbers. How about you trust us enough to give us a movie where the center of the poster isn’t a totally ripped white dude?

See also: Chuck Wendig’s totally academic review of GotG, which sums up my feelings completely before I took twelve hours to become coherent again.

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charity movie suffering for charity

Want to make me watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?

You know, the new one, produced by my favorite ever, Michael Bay. Because there is still a part of my childhood that has not been violated. In which all of the turtles look like Shrek.

(Why should you want me to watch horrible movies? Well, for one, money goes to charity. For two, you’re sadistic bastards that like making me suffer. And for three, I then write things like this.)

I wasn’t actually even thinking about this one, just because of scheduling fuckery. Bay’s TMNT comes out on August 8. I am literally flying to the UK on the evening of August 7, and will not be back until August 19. The earliest I could conceivably see the movie would be that evening, whilst terribly jetlagged. Not that I’m saying that’s a bad thing, more just pointing out that the movie will not be quite so fresh by that point. Or I could wait a couple days until after my foot surgery on August 21, at which point I won’t be able to drink, but I will be on vicodin. So yeah.

Anyway I’ve now had four different people ask me if I’m going to watch this one and review it, despite the aforementioned scheduling issues. And I don’t mind the requests, I really don’t, since I like helping worthy causes get money. It’s more I only just did T4 and I’m going to be late on this one, so I feel kind of bad asking people to open their wallets again so soon.

THEN AGAIN, Y’ALL ARE ASKING ME TO SUFFER, THIS DAMN SOON.

So here’s the deal.

If you all donate at least $300 across the following charities, I will go see TMNT by August 24 and blog about it. Possibly while having a bad trip that involves Shrek and pizza and oh god why. And you guys get a discount because I will be seeing the movie so late.

If you donate $450, you get the scans of the handwritten notes, as per Transformers 4.

Charities:

As always, honor system. If you donate, contact me via social media, e-mail me, or leave a comment here to be counted. (You’ll get an acknowledgment from me if I see you.)

PROGRESS: $300/$300

Get it to $450 and you get handwritten notes!

A GIANT THANK YOU F*U TO

  • Jess: $100
  • Chris Berry: $50
  • Thomas Pluck: $20
  • Laura Simpson: $50
  • Keeley: $80
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movie science fiction

[Movie] Snowpiercer

There is a basic level of surreality you have to accept when you approach this movie, similar to when you watch a Terry Gilliam or Jean-Pierre Jeunet film. (I can’t believe it’s coincidence that one of the characters is named Gilliam.) There are things that happen that don’t necessarily make sense outside of a sort of dream logic. But if you can accept that, the experience is intense and rewarding.

Snowpiercer is gorgeous and disturbing and a bit heartbreaking. Just the way it was filmed was beautiful. Every car of the massive train has its own distinctive color palette and environment, which I loved. It goes from claustrophobic filth in the rear of the train to strangely 50s-esque, to technicolor futuristic to heartlessly gearpunk. And while there’s quite a bit of violence in the film, it’s brutal rather than titillating. People who get hit once with an ax go down and stay down. (Well, mostly.) Characters come out of the mid-film meat grinder utterly shell-shocked.

(And considering the movie I saw before this was Transformers 4, I appreciated the visual coherence among the complexity all the more.)

The plot for the movie sounds deceptively simple when summed up: Geoengineering that attempts to counter the undeniable threat of global climate change goes horribly wrong, throwing the world into a life-killing ice age. Humans take refuge on a massive train that is effectively a closed ecosystem that never ceases moving, making an entire circuit of all the continents once a year. There is a strict class system enforced with religious fervor, based on the original ticket bought by the passengers. The tail of the train is basically steerage, controlled brutally and fed on “protein cubes” with the cars becoming increasingly high class toward the engine. Curtis (Chris Evans) working with Gilliam (John Hurt) foments a rebellion and attempts to take control of the engine so they can demand equal treatment for those who live in the tail.

As you can imagine, this movie is very specifically about class, and about the way the poor are controlled, abused, and used by the wealthy. It’s also very much about the structures put in place by the wealthy in order to maintain that control—in this case to a Machiavellian, mind-bending degree. But the most pointed and brutal scenes of the movie are really the ones that involve children, both the way children are indoctrinated from an early age, and the way the children of the poor are ultimately meat for the gears of society.

The next time someone says that science fiction—nay, good science fiction—can’t or shouldn’t be political, I invite them to sit down and watch Snowpiercer. Then take a big swig from their swimming-pool-sized movie theater cup of shut-the-fuck-up.

I can’t begin to say how grateful I am that Bong Joon-ho dug in his heels and fought to keep his cut of the movie intact. If you’re one of those lucky people who live in a city where Snowpiercer is showing on its limited release, drop what you’re doing and go.

(For an excellent analysis of Snowpiercer as a movie about capitalism, see here.)

And a few SPOILERS now: 

Continue reading “[Movie] Snowpiercer”
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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.

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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!

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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.

Continue reading “[Movie] Maleficent”
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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.

Continue reading “Godzilla 2014 (Oh look, another movie about white men.)”
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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:

Continue reading “[Movie] Under the Skin”