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lunabee34Spoilers abound!
ETA: *cries* I'm trying to do that thing where you white out or black out the really spoilery bits and I am screwing it up! Plz to help me? Thank you, Elizabeth.
Fat Girl
You all will remember how much I hated Anatomy of Hell directed by Catherine Breillat, you can appreciate how ecstatic I was to realize I'd put another movie of hers in the Netflix queue. Fortunately, Fat Girl is actually a good movie. Breillat does an amazing job of exploring budding sexuality, sibling rivalry and love, family dynamics, gender and teenaged sexual politics. I loved the characters and the actors and the dialogue was wonderful. Really awesome movie until in the final ten minutes, it shifted into another movie entirely. In the final scene of the movie,
an axe murderer comes from literally out of nowhere and kills the protagonist's sister and mother and rapes her in teh woods. WTF? I felt so cheated. I'm guessing Breillat was trying to make some metaphor that's beyond me but I DID NOT GET IT! All throughout the story, Anais keeps saying that she doesn't want to lose her virginity to someone she loves, and that ends up being true, but WTF? *flaily hands*. Ideas on this ending?
Night Porter
I freely admit that Josh and I fastforwarded the last 30 minutes of this movie because we got so bored, stopping now and again if it looked something interesting might be happening on screen. Alas it never was. This should have been a good movie. It should have intrigued me, and the potential was always there, just beneath the surface, but the dialogue was so crappy and the delivery so ridiculous that I never could believe I was watching a serious movie about anything. Visually the movie was astonishing and arresting and disturbing: young Jewish girls on a carnival ride being picked off with a shotgun from the ground by Nazi soldiers; the female Jewish protagonist in most of the Nazi uniform, bare-breasted and so emaciated I'm surprised they allowed the actor to get that thin; an impassioned ballet dance; and the most shocking image for me is the female protagonist forced to her knees in front of her captors and his first two fingers inserted into her mouth, but ultimately, and again, I don't quite get what's going on here. I understand that this is meant to be a psychological exploration of Stockholm syndrome and the intricate and horrifying ways that pleasure and pain can become inextricably bound together in trauma situations and also an exploration of power and sadism and masochism. But it's not a very good one. How was this received when it first aired? Anybody know? Anybody else have any opinions?
A Dirty Shame
This was a funny movie. It had some laugh out loud parts, but overall I was pretty much meh about the whole thing. I can't quite put my finger on what made the movie not as awesome for me as it was for Josh (who loves it) because I adore camp, but I felt like all the actors were trying too hard in every scene. I dunno.
Jackass 2 deserves no cut for spoilers. This is one of those movies that made me ashamed of myself because it amused me. Why should I find really stupid people hurting themselves so hilarious? I was sincerely afraid I had become a 13 year old boy at some point. LOL Some of the grosser scenes had me shielding my eyes and the final scene where one of the Jackasses dresses up like a Muslim man made me really really uncomfortable and not in a "holy shit that dude is letting that snake bite his dick" kinda way. I was surprised by how homoerotic the movie is and by how cognizant and celebratory the actors are of that fact. (So where's the fandom for this? Clearly my shame knows no thresholds.) Also, I was struck by how different Johnny Knoxville seems than the other actors. He's not dumb. He's clearly getting off on the pain and the danger. He's crazy in a way I don't think the others are. I mean, the guy seems impervious to pain. *shakes head* I don't know what to make of him. It's almost mesmerizing to watch him (the others not so much). Thoughts?
Fat Girl
You all will remember how much I hated Anatomy of Hell directed by Catherine Breillat, you can appreciate how ecstatic I was to realize I'd put another movie of hers in the Netflix queue. Fortunately, Fat Girl is actually a good movie. Breillat does an amazing job of exploring budding sexuality, sibling rivalry and love, family dynamics, gender and teenaged sexual politics. I loved the characters and the actors and the dialogue was wonderful. Really awesome movie until in the final ten minutes, it shifted into another movie entirely. In the final scene of the movie,
an axe murderer comes from literally out of nowhere and kills the protagonist's sister and mother and rapes her in teh woods. WTF? I felt so cheated. I'm guessing Breillat was trying to make some metaphor that's beyond me but I DID NOT GET IT! All throughout the story, Anais keeps saying that she doesn't want to lose her virginity to someone she loves, and that ends up being true, but WTF? *flaily hands*. Ideas on this ending?
Night Porter
I freely admit that Josh and I fastforwarded the last 30 minutes of this movie because we got so bored, stopping now and again if it looked something interesting might be happening on screen. Alas it never was. This should have been a good movie. It should have intrigued me, and the potential was always there, just beneath the surface, but the dialogue was so crappy and the delivery so ridiculous that I never could believe I was watching a serious movie about anything. Visually the movie was astonishing and arresting and disturbing: young Jewish girls on a carnival ride being picked off with a shotgun from the ground by Nazi soldiers; the female Jewish protagonist in most of the Nazi uniform, bare-breasted and so emaciated I'm surprised they allowed the actor to get that thin; an impassioned ballet dance; and the most shocking image for me is the female protagonist forced to her knees in front of her captors and his first two fingers inserted into her mouth, but ultimately, and again, I don't quite get what's going on here. I understand that this is meant to be a psychological exploration of Stockholm syndrome and the intricate and horrifying ways that pleasure and pain can become inextricably bound together in trauma situations and also an exploration of power and sadism and masochism. But it's not a very good one. How was this received when it first aired? Anybody know? Anybody else have any opinions?
A Dirty Shame
This was a funny movie. It had some laugh out loud parts, but overall I was pretty much meh about the whole thing. I can't quite put my finger on what made the movie not as awesome for me as it was for Josh (who loves it) because I adore camp, but I felt like all the actors were trying too hard in every scene. I dunno.
Jackass 2 deserves no cut for spoilers. This is one of those movies that made me ashamed of myself because it amused me. Why should I find really stupid people hurting themselves so hilarious? I was sincerely afraid I had become a 13 year old boy at some point. LOL Some of the grosser scenes had me shielding my eyes and the final scene where one of the Jackasses dresses up like a Muslim man made me really really uncomfortable and not in a "holy shit that dude is letting that snake bite his dick" kinda way. I was surprised by how homoerotic the movie is and by how cognizant and celebratory the actors are of that fact. (So where's the fandom for this? Clearly my shame knows no thresholds.) Also, I was struck by how different Johnny Knoxville seems than the other actors. He's not dumb. He's clearly getting off on the pain and the danger. He's crazy in a way I don't think the others are. I mean, the guy seems impervious to pain. *shakes head* I don't know what to make of him. It's almost mesmerizing to watch him (the others not so much). Thoughts?
