I saw a bunch of movies this past week, and here are my thoughts. Spoilers ahead!
The Hole is a classic example of how a good story can make a movie succeed even when the direction is average at best. The movie follows four prep school students (two male, two female) as they decide to ditch a school field trip and instead camp out in an abandoned bomb shelter near the school. They wind up locked inside for 18 days, and stuff inevitably happens: tempers flare, food and water run out, love blossoms. The movie tries to pull several mindfucks at once: first, who locked them in the hole? Second, will the characters–other than the lone surviver we see at the beginning of the film–survive? (hint: they wont) Third–oh my fucking god, I knew that bitch was bad news!
It combines the unreliable storytelling of Rashomon with the suspense and mystery of a good film noir, coupled with characters that we start out hating and end up actually caring about (and vice versa). All of the movies I linked to in the preceding sentence are far better films, but The Hole might be worth picking up if you ever want to tell a story. It does a good job of driving home the simple point that inherently interesting situations are–well, interesting.
Silent Hill is loosely based on the classic video game for the PS1 of the same name. The movie follows a young mother as she takes her adopted daughter to Silent Hill, an abandoned ghost town that, as it turns out, actually does have ghosts. It may seem like the mom is a bad parent, but her hand was forced: the kid had been sleepwalking and crying out the name of the town, and it became such a problem her husband wanted to put the kid on psych meds. Turns out the girl was doomed to live in a grayed-out world of fog either way…
The bulk of the movie has the child missing in Silent Hill and the mother running to and from ghostly and ghastly images and beings. Along the way, she meets up with a cop (good person) and a bunch of whacko cultists (bad people). In the end, there’s a lot of spoken exposition.
There are quite a few flaws in this movie, but it’s probably the best movie to date made from a video game. Plus the imagery (lifted from the games) is suitably creepy as hell. I found the ending a downer, though. The mother finally finds her child only for her child to become creepified by joining with the personification of ultimate evil that allowed the psychic hell of Silent Hill to exist. Even better, both of them end up trapped in the alternate dimension of the foggy Silent Hill, which means they will never again see… anyone. (In the game, there are three levels of reality: real life, foggy silent hill, and “oh shit, you’re going to die now.”)
Definitely worth picking up if you’re a fan of the games. And if you’re not a fan of the games–pick up the games. They are amazing.
The Lake House is lame. Lame lame lame. It’s a time travel story in which a couple begin exchanging letters across time (Keanu Reeves existing in 2004, Sandra Bullock in 2006). They both lived in the same lake house, and they both have the same dog. The magic mailbox that makes it all possible is never explained in any way.
Keanu meets/sees Sandra several times in 2004-time, but he’s too something to introduce himself and see what happens to the timeline. He does make out with her at a party, though (which is almost chillingly manipulative, since he knows her quite well, and to her, back then, he was a complete stranger).
The climactic ending comes when Sandra realize that a pedestrian who was hit by a car and killed in 2006 was, in fact, Keanu Reeves! Or his character, anyway. Sandra rushes to the lake house, puts a letter in the mailbox, and hopes–desparately hopes!–that Keanu gets the letter in time before he leaves and gets himself run over and killed. The movie ends with him driving up to her as she waits nervously by the mailbox, wondering if he’ll get the letter or if he’ll die. They kiss. Credits roll. Paradox… completely unexplored.
Lame lame lame lame. Good only if you need something really inoffensive to watch. On the plus side, Keanu has a lot of dialogue/monlogues, and I found his delivery priceless, as usual. So, I guess there really is something for everyone–and to be honest, it’s not that it was bad so much as that it was just… lame.
Monster House–this movie has teeth!
Really. Big, scary, wooden teeth. I loved it. Not perfect, and maybe not even better than The Lion King–a movie with about as much bite as snakes have fur–but still, it’s a good movie, and a great kids movie. The animation style was a nice mix of detail and abstraction, and the characters were way more subtly expressive than is the norm for a 3-d movie.
The movie is dark, too, and I love dark kids movies. Take the awesome The Incredibles, for example. It had pretty scary scenes and adult themes running throughout it, and human beings died! How rare is that? Bambi’s mom, sure. But human-looking things? I think Tipper Gore must vomit all over herself just thinking about it.
Even taking that into consideration, though, I think Monster House has The Incredibles one-upped: towards the beginning of the movie, there’s a sequence in which the main character gets yelled at by an old man. In excruciating detail, we watch as the old man’s expression changes and his strength fails. He collapses to the ground and “dies” –he’d had a heart attack. And so for the first time in an animated movie made for children (I think), we get a ten- or twelve-year-old hero who looks at a corpse (sort of) and utters the words: “I’m a murderer!” Of course, the movie is for kids, not teens, so the old man recovers in the hospital and reappears alive and well towards the end of the movie.
Monster House has a lot of things going for it: it’s funny and fun, and it has that delicious edge that all good things have, especially kids’ things. I highly recommend it.
Also: if you’re a parent and you think I’m harping too much on how great it is for kids to be exposed to slightly dark, edgy films, go watch The Goonies again and remember what it was like to be eight to twelve years old. Kids can handle it, and they turn out better (I think!) if they have a chance to.
And there you have it–four quick reviews of mostly mediocre films. Still, most of them are worth renting at the very least. Enjoy!
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