Showing posts with label War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label War. Show all posts
Sunday, 18 May 2014
The Devils Backbone - Lisa's Review
This weeks movie is another Guillermo del Toro movie to find a place in this list. From the start, let me make it clear, I am a big fan of his work. I adore the spanish language, I love the almost poetic nature of his scripts and the beautiful cinematography that always comes from Guillermos movies. This movie is no different in this respect.
The movie is set during the Spanish Civil war in a remote boys orphanage run by the very strong characters of Dr Casares and Carmen who are married. They also employ a caretaker (Jacinto) and a couple of teachers, including Conchita who is involved with Jacinto. As I come to expect of Del Toros movies, the depth of the characters is as strong as usual, as is their scrutiny. The orphanage is a poor one, but it has hidden gold bullion, which is used to back the Republicans. Our story starts off following a young boy, Carlos, being dropped off at the Orphanage (unbeknown to him) by his tutor. It really tugged on the old maternal heart strings when Carlos, upon realizing he's been left behind, runs desperately after his tutors car to no avail. The emotional way this is played out is typical of Guillermo del Toros work.
The movie follows Carlos settling into the Orphanage and finding his feet amongst existing groups of boys and the ever present bully, Jaime. There is much talk amongst the boys of a ghost within the grounds. They refer to it as 'The one who sighs' and everyone seems to be terrified of it. The one who sighs appeared the same day as one of the boys, Santi, disappeared, causing all kinds of speculation within the orphanage as to what happened to Santi. Also on the same day that Santi disappeared, a large bomb fell into the yard and remains (supposedly diffused) large and imposing, stuck into the ground.
There are obviously all kinds of ways we could be taken during this movie. This is one thing I love about Guillermo del Toro, he is far from predictable. His movies are always a surprise and are always thought provoking, deep and engaging. This one is no different. I won't go into any more detail about the movie as if you haven't watched it, DO!! It's obviously sub-titled as it's spanish, but please don't let that put you off. People who have problems with sub-titled movies are missing out on a whole world (literally) of amazing movies.
I stick a big, fat recommended on the arse of this movie. Go forth and watch it immediately! I will leave you with a beautiful quote from the movie:
"What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber."
Friday, 18 April 2014
Jacobs Ladder - Lisa's Review
How do I even start to attempt to review this movie at 11pm on a Friday night. If the following is a convoluted mess, I apologise profusely.
I have seen Jacobs ladder 4 times. Twice in my much younger years and neither time did I understand it, then again about 5 years ago and I finally began to grasp what I interpreted from the movie. I watched it for the fourth time this week in parts. I read something in a movie review for Jacobs Ladder today, which probably sums the movie up very well. It's like trying to decipher Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin lyrics, it's impossible, but you're stoned so you try to anyway, lol.
So let's kick it off with my viewpoint on the movie, I think this is an excellent movie and if anyone reading this hasn't watched he movie, they really should; and they should do it without some over zealous reviewer giving it all away, so I'll try not to give too much away. To be fair it won't be for everyone. If the type of movies you enjoy tend to be 'Rom Coms, Chick Flicks and Action movies', then I think giving this one a miss may be a good piece of advice.
The movie stars Tim Robbins, who was an unknown to me the first couple of times I watched Jacobs Ladder, but I've since seen him in quite a lot, most notably 'Shawshamk Remdemption' as Andy Dufrasne. He stars as Vietnam Vet Jacob, who is having psychological problems after having been terribly injured in action and returning home. He is struggling with the death of his young son Gabe in a traffic accident and the break-up of his marriage. It is intimated that his happened before he left for Vietnam. One thing I will say about the movie at this point is that it can be difficult to work out which interlocking story is the present day. In one life we see Jacob in Vietnam, in another he is married with a son and in the third he is in a relationship with someone he works with after having returning home from the war.
My assumption was that he was married with a son who was tragically killed. His marriage subsequently broke down and he went to war where he was injured and returned home to take a postal job and start a relationship with a colleague. We are party to his flashbacks, both to his married life and to battle scenes. He also begins to have horrific hallucinations, which start to make it very difficult to pick apart fact from fiction.
One of Jacobs comrades meet up with him to discuss the hallucinations he has also been having since the war. Soon after he is killed in what appears to be a tragic accident. At the funeral, Jacob meets up with more old comrades who also allude to having similar experiences.
From here we follow the disintegration of Jacobs sanity and the movie gets pretty trippy. I will say though, the way the movie is shot and the soundtrack do convey the feeling of the movie and the complete unraveling of this mans sanity.
It seems there is more to his war experience than he was aware of. It is in his discovery that the movie attains its name.
For me, this is a very intelligent, thought provoking movie that anyone who likes a bit more than the usual crap that Hollywood spit out should watch. Hey, if you've seen it years ago, watch it again. I learnt something new each time, or maybe with age my interpretation changed, who knows, but, either way, go watch this. Highly Recommended.
Saturday, 7 September 2013
Come And See - Will's Review
And to our latest season of movies "TimeOut London's 100 Best Horror Movies"... And it's not off to a great start; this is neither a Horror movie, nor particularly good!
Reading around, this movie has overwhelmingly positive reviews, and I'm honestly stumped; that said, I usually find that 'award bait' movies are dull but beautiful; and this, for me anyway, falls into that category.
Only a 'Horror Movie' insofar as it deals with the Horrors of War (so 'Drama' then), it has some wonderful shots and superb acting, but is more a sequence-of-events than an actual story in any meaningful sense.
It's a WW2 drama about a young Belarusian lad who goes looking for (and finds) an abandoned gun, in order to join the resistance army against the invading Nazis, losing his innocence, and his mind, in the process.
It's also unbelievably slow, meaning that you feel every second of its 2hr10min running-time.
It's not the popular opinion, but: Avoid.
Reading around, this movie has overwhelmingly positive reviews, and I'm honestly stumped; that said, I usually find that 'award bait' movies are dull but beautiful; and this, for me anyway, falls into that category.
Only a 'Horror Movie' insofar as it deals with the Horrors of War (so 'Drama' then), it has some wonderful shots and superb acting, but is more a sequence-of-events than an actual story in any meaningful sense.
It's a WW2 drama about a young Belarusian lad who goes looking for (and finds) an abandoned gun, in order to join the resistance army against the invading Nazis, losing his innocence, and his mind, in the process.
It's also unbelievably slow, meaning that you feel every second of its 2hr10min running-time.
It's not the popular opinion, but: Avoid.
Sorry for the short review but... well; dull movie.
Saturday, 28 January 2012
Faces of Death - Will's Review
This is one of the most infamous titles on the DPP list, and I was shocked to learn that Lisa had never heard of it - I thought that we had all gone to school with at least one 'hard' kid who claimed to have seen it!
It made it's name (and schoolyard notoriety), by reporting to feature scene after scene of actual death - I remember seeing a copy in a video rental place where I used to rent horror movies using my fake NUS ID that said I was 3 years older than I was) and reading the box, which goes out of it's way to imply that it is utterly genuine - I was stunned; I couldn't believe this would be allowed, but I also wasn't sure I wanted to see it, and rented
In the intervening years, it has piqued my interest a few times; enough to have read up on it, but not enough to actually track down an uncut copy and watch the thing.
Until that is, I decided to work my way through the whole "Video Nasties" list...
Although it is unquestionably sensationalist (Look at the title for god's sake, and its hosted by a "Dr. Gross") but at times it does a bloody good impression of an earnest documentary. Indeed, split into sections (accidents, nature, suicide etc.) I could almost see BBC Three making a series out of it!
But for the fakery…
David Attenborough recently got in hot water by splicing footage of captive polarbears with footage of wild ones; so I dread to think what Ofcom would make of showing a real suicide jumper fall to their death, before cutting to a fake messy body…
In-fact, almost every close-up human death in the movie is fake, and often obviously so.
A lot of them feature impossible camera angles; during an attempted rescue of an amateur potholer, for instance, the rescuer is filmed from below as he descends to where the victims fell, as though the ‘documentary’ film-makers had asked that the rescue be put on hold, while they sent a camera man down to get a better shot, some feature multiple angels where we should be able to see the other cameras, and one scene features a middle-eastern beheading, supposedly filmed by a Canadian tourist… and features multiple angles and well-framed shots on a pro-grade camera!
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; less on-screen real deaths can only be a good thing, but the movie kind of sets itself up to be lose/lose on this score: Real deaths, and I’d be somewhat appalled by it, fake deaths, and we feel lied to!
Please use the comments bellow only to comment on this post - to write your own review, please comment on the main post for this movie.
It made it's name (and schoolyard notoriety), by reporting to feature scene after scene of actual death - I remember seeing a copy in a video rental place where I used to rent horror movies using my fake NUS ID that said I was 3 years older than I was) and reading the box, which goes out of it's way to imply that it is utterly genuine - I was stunned; I couldn't believe this would be allowed, but I also wasn't sure I wanted to see it, and rented
In the intervening years, it has piqued my interest a few times; enough to have read up on it, but not enough to actually track down an uncut copy and watch the thing.
Until that is, I decided to work my way through the whole "Video Nasties" list...
Although it is unquestionably sensationalist (Look at the title for god's sake, and its hosted by a "Dr. Gross") but at times it does a bloody good impression of an earnest documentary. Indeed, split into sections (accidents, nature, suicide etc.) I could almost see BBC Three making a series out of it!
But for the fakery…
David Attenborough recently got in hot water by splicing footage of captive polarbears with footage of wild ones; so I dread to think what Ofcom would make of showing a real suicide jumper fall to their death, before cutting to a fake messy body…
In-fact, almost every close-up human death in the movie is fake, and often obviously so.
A lot of them feature impossible camera angles; during an attempted rescue of an amateur potholer, for instance, the rescuer is filmed from below as he descends to where the victims fell, as though the ‘documentary’ film-makers had asked that the rescue be put on hold, while they sent a camera man down to get a better shot, some feature multiple angels where we should be able to see the other cameras, and one scene features a middle-eastern beheading, supposedly filmed by a Canadian tourist… and features multiple angles and well-framed shots on a pro-grade camera!
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; less on-screen real deaths can only be a good thing, but the movie kind of sets itself up to be lose/lose on this score: Real deaths, and I’d be somewhat appalled by it, fake deaths, and we feel lied to!
Although there are plenty of real bodies – graphic autopsy shots, piles of holocaust victims, row after row in a morgue, body parts scattered everywhere after a plane crash, drowning victims… there’s more than enough here to keep fans of rotton.com and it’s ilk happy! And it’s these scenes that have sent the body count soaring…
On the animal front, the film-makers show us what David Attenborough does not as a snake is devoured by piranhas (upsetting, I love snakes, but interesting in a national geographic way), we get the ‘highlights’ of a dog-fight, fur-seals are clubbed and skinned, worst-case (or outdated) slaughter house footage is presented as the norm, and a cow is killed Kosher style (for my money, properly preformed Kosher butchery is worse than properly preformed Halal butchery), and there’s the Monkey Brain scene, in which a real, obviously terrified monkey is clamped into a table, and has his face smacked with foam hammers, before an obviously fake monkey head is switched in and cut open so that ‘tourists’ may eat it’s brain!
Then there’s the just plain left-field bits. If you went to school with one of the aforementioned ‘hard’ kids who claimed to have seen this, I bet they never mentioned the 3 minute lecture on the evils of littering, or the speech about how cancer is probably man-made and we all need to eat better did they? No sir! I’ll also be they neglected to mention that the final section of the film tries to sell us on the idea that ghosts are real, before implying some guff about reincarnation and ending with a montage of wildlife pictures, flowers and images of babies either!
I also got annoyed at “Dr. Gross” continually claiming to have witnessed most of these thing in person, but we never see him in the footage.
All in all and odd film, that should have board and repulsed me, bur didn’t do much of either… Cutting the animal scenes would have tightened the running time, removed the most offensive parts, and, for all it’s flaws, made this one strangely watchable.
WARNING: Usually purchasing the cut UK UK
Body Count: 180+ (mostly lined up in morgues or open graves)
Boob Count: 6 pairs (including 2 deceased old pairs)
Animal Body Count: 50+
Most Memorable Death: Fake electric chair.
Please use the comments bellow only to comment on this post - to write your own review, please comment on the main post for this movie.
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