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{"id":67,"date":"2012-04-26T22:20:00","date_gmt":"2012-04-26T22:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2012\/04\/67\/"},"modified":"2012-04-26T22:20:00","modified_gmt":"2012-04-26T22:20:00","slug":"67","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2012\/04\/67.html","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

LITTLE SHIVERS<\/b>: Short movie reviews, mostly of B-horror. <\/p>\n

Pontypool<\/b><\/i>: Canadian town\u2019s destruction by zombie virus chronicled by its weird local radio station. This does a really good job at making the threat scary without showing you too much. If you like the high-concept summary, \u201cLanguage is a virus which makes people zombies,\u201d you will probably like this; if the premise leaves you cold I\u2019m not sure the movie will work for you. I really liked it. The one jarring moment is the racist Lawrence of Arabia<\/i> adaptation by local schoolchildren (?). I could come up with some reason for this\u2013art can drive us apart and strengthen our worst impulses\u2013but that seems too heavy, so really, I just don\u2019t know why that was there. <\/p>\n

The Howling<\/i><\/b>: Ultra-sleazy \u201980s flick about werewolves at a hippie resort. Does exactly what it says on the tin, plus extra sleaze. Sort of awesome in an \u201cI don\u2019t actually recommend this\u201d way. <\/p>\n

Oleanna<\/i><\/b>: David Mamet, a college parable which is about feminism\/political correctness on the surface, class and how education and language reify power disparities underneath. (Language is the villain again!) When you describe it like that it sounds like something I\u2019d like, but the two characters are both horribly grating and one-note, and the actors recite lines rather than finding a way to inhabit Mamet\u2019s aggressively-stylized dialogue. <\/p>\n

The Dark Hours<\/i><\/b> and Creep<\/i><\/b>: I\u2019m linking these two for reasons I\u2019ll get to in a moment. At first glance they seem pretty different. The Dark Hours<\/i> is a stylized, very art-directed home-invasion horror\/psychological thriller, very slightly comparable to Black Swan<\/i> if that\u2019s a recommendation for you, starring actors I\u2019d never seen before. Kindertrauma reviewed it here<\/a>. Creep<\/i> is a movie about some kind of killer or creature living in the London subway system, with basically normal visuals, starring Franka Potente. <\/p>\n

Both movies\u2019 protagonists are privileged white women whose social\/class power over other characters becomes a major issue in the narrative. Both women are shown from the beginning in fairly unflattering moral lights: Creep<\/i>\u2018s buzzy city chick is a bit self-centered, whereas The Dark Hours<\/i>\u2018 psychiatrist is openly cruel and arrogant. <\/p>\n

Creep<\/i> gives you glimpses of working-class, hard-luck, or homeless characters, and gestures at their backstories in ways which make them seem like they could be interesting. But the movie itself really doesn\u2019t seem to care about them. They exist basically as props in the main character\u2019s journey\u2026 which, since it\u2019s a journey where she gets to learn about How the Other Half Lives, means that the movie (and especially its big ending visual) comes across as fairly cheap and self-praising. Poor people exist to teach rich girls life lessons about how poor people exist! <\/p>\n

The Dark Hours<\/i> forces a much tighter audience identification with its main character, not only by keeping us firmly within her POV but by constantly challenging us to figure out which of her distorted perceptions is closest to reality. That\u2019s part of what made it work much better for me than Creep<\/i>. It\u2019s also crueler to her\u2013she doesn\u2019t learn her lesson\u2013and the psych patients under her control have their own agency instead of just reacting to her decisions. (I mean, they appear to have agency, anyway. Like I said, you can rarely be sure what is real.) This movie was tense and very sad, and succeeded in making me care about its awful main character. You can also take it\u2013especially the final \u201cgame\u201d between the doctor and one of her patients\u2013as a ferocious satire on psychiatry; or, conversely, as a window into how healing and honesty can look like brutal, absurd nonsense to a damaged mind. It\u2019s a movie which works on a lot of levels, the simple ones of fear and visual interest and the complex ones of shifting meanings.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"