526

(51 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Oh hai Eddie.

http://nerdist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Tommy_Wiseau_in_The_Room.jpg

(Can't wait! big_smile )

fireproof78 wrote:

What about Nero? One of my favorite Trek villains. Joking, I know the issues with him, but as is Red's point, I don't mind it because I like the movie and am invested in the characters.

And that brings one up one of my biggest issues with TFA is the fact that the Republic capital gets destroyed with little comment, save for from Finn. It's Alderaan all over again, except multiple worlds this time. Why destroy the Republic at all if it's going to be a nonissue.

This is where an Attack of the Clones-length film would actually have been warranted. TFA is paced quickly enough that an additional five or ten minutes wouldn't hurt it much if at all, and the confirmed deleted scenes which feature Leia and her aide talking in detail about the political situation between the Republic and the Resistance (the aide was going to the capital in order to request aid against the First Order) would've gone a long way toward shoring up the world-building questions as well as the impact of the big boom.

Writhyn wrote:

Redxavier:

To your first point: Granted.

Overall, most of the world disagrees with my opinion of SW7. I think it overuses convenience to help the good guys. And it overuses the same plot (note: the same THEME does not bother me) from prior movies.

Edit: SW7 could be compared to Abrams' Star Trek films in my feelings.

Star Trek was fun. It also had a lot of Fridge Logic. Lots of "what?" moments. BUT, I enjoyed it so much because the 3rd act was tight.

Into Darkness, for ME, is very much like Force Awakens. Lots of "what?" moments, and the 3rd act is hyper-convenient, pulls its punches, and doesn't really work. Into Darkness fizzles, whereas I don't think Star Trek did. The Force Awakens is more Darkness than Trek.

I don't think it's the same plot at all though. There are the trappings of a droid and a battle station, but as has been brought up in here before, where was the escaped soldier turned good in the original film? How is Kylo ultimately at all similar to ANH Vader in terms of character? And in TFA the rescue mission is a.) intentional and part of the third act rather than the second, b.) doesn't happen in nearly the same way besides a mentor figure dying, which needed to happen anyway. And the droid isn't carrying plans for the battle station, but to find Luke (and where in the original was finding the old Jedi the ultimate MacGuffin?).

There are similar broad strokes, but to call it a remake  or say it's overly dependent on prior plot points is to say that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is just a remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

As for the Into Darkness thing, that just seems like a cheap shot. Nowhere in TFA did we suffer the indignity of watching a scene from a previous movie repeated line for line, shot for shot, because the writers couldn't be bothered. Nowhere in TFA did we experience anything near as "pants-on-head-retarded", to quote Trey, as the heroes accidentally discovering magic blood to rescue the protagonist from radiation poisoning. And unlike Into Darkness, the third act actually had consequences--Finn is alive but we don't know what shape he'll be in, Kylo has just been sealed to the dark side, and Han Solo, most people's favorite character from the films, is firmly dead.

Writhyn wrote:

I don't remember her mentioning being a pilot. I eat my words.

As for ROTJ........................yeah it's not great for several reasons, but for me the emotional resonance in the Emperor's Throne Room scenes carries the entire damn film. If that part of the 3rd act had sucked, yeah I'd have the same problem with it as I have with TFA for the same reason.
If the end battle hadn't been a copy or had been subverted in some way, I would happily overlook all its flaws.

I suppose it just comes down to one's reaction to the forest duel, then. For whatever reason it didn't work for you, for a lot of us it worked like gangbusters in the same way that the Throne Room does. I am curious though, what about that portion of the climax isn't satisfying for you?

Okay, I think you're exaggerating. The forest duel was tense as all hell, plot contrivance has *always* been a part of Star Wars, the final sequence may go on a bit long for some people's taste but it's not completely absurd.

I'm not gonna deny there weren't problems, but there isn't a single perfect Star Wars movie. The original is plagued by a horrible script, Empire has a huge character problem for Leia, Jedi is just straight up bad at a lot of parts. But ultimately the characters and the world redeem those movies' flaws, just like IMO they do here. I'm not saying you don't have valid criticisms of the movie, but to act as if they somehow cripple it is to do it an immense disservice. TFA was a whole lot of fun, and introduced amazing new characters we cared about, which is more than any of the prequels or indeed most action movies these days can say. Was it the best film of the year? No, but realistically was it ever going to be?

I think people, myself included, like to venerate the OT as a perfect shiny thing that can never be touched, but it's not the Holy Grail of film. I think that it's a tremendous achievement that introduced a world that I love and characters who are like family to me while hugely advancing filmmaking craft and working its way into pop culture. It's not this perfect untouchable thing, though, and if anything I think TFA is *less* flawed than ROTJ. For me personally, letting go of this need for everything about my Star Wars to be perfect has made me a far happier person. I still dislike the prequels because they're almost nothing *but* flaws and commit the crime of not being engaging, but I don't feel a need for the OT or the new movies to be perfect works of art anymore. Just to be fun, and feature people I care about, and not be abominably, condescendingly stupid. Just to be really solid, really beautiful popcorn flicks with hints of greater things scattered throughout, which is all the OT really is. And I say all that without my love for those films diminishing one iota.

531

(33 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Jesus, so sorry to hear about this. As everyone else has said thus far, thoughts are with you.

Cross-posted from my blog.

- - - -

✦ ✦  of five

What a mess.

The trailer for Goodnight Mommy had me fairly excited. Here is a situation that, while not the most original horror setup in the book, could very easily deliver a genuinely unnerving experience, a mix of the family tensions of The Babadook or The Shining, the child-driven horror of Let the Right One In, and the in-broad-daylight isolation of The Witch. It’s calculated to hit those primal fears any child has experienced: being all alone and chased by a monster without a parent to help, or worse yet being chased by a parent who has become monstrous. And for the first act, the movie looks like it’s going to hit all those notes. And then, things begin to degenerate at a fairly incredible rate.

Spoilers ahead.

In terms of initial setup, the trailer is fairly accurate. Two boys, living in an isolated house in the middle of Austrian farmland, are greeted by a woman whose face is covered in bandages. She’s apparently their mother, returned from a cosmetic surgery of unknown purpose. But her behavior is different—where their mother was warm and loving, this woman is cold and harsh, and often mentally and physically abusive. As time goes by, the paranoia of isolation sets in more and more, and the boys are increasingly convinced that whoever this masked creature is, it’s not their mother.

The movie is completely unsubtle in its hints as to the mother-creature’s nature right off the bat. There’s a crucifix affixed to the boys’ wall that’s conveniently framed in numerous shots, and in a moment about halfway through the film, when the boys flee to town in an attempt to find help, they visit the local priest, the Catholic imagery growing even more obvious. The clumsy nature of this setup has either two outcomes: the movie thinks it is being clever in its foreshadowing rather than blindingly straightforward, or it doth protest too much. It turns out to be the latter—the horror at the heart of Goodnight Mommy is gradually turned on its head, the viewer’s fear for the twins Lukas and Elias slowly morphing into a fear of them and empathy for their antagonist/victim. The first of the movie’s two twists to be revealed—Mommy is indeed who she says she is, the torture the boys have inflicted on her in an attempt to get their real mother back all for nothing—while it takes the wind out of the horror sails, is built to with a fairly effective amount of viewer dread. One scene in particular, in which the twins strap the mother down to her bed and torment her in increasingly shocking ways, is masterfully played, our fear that the mother will reach out and seize the boys bit by bit supplanted by a stunned sort of revulsion at what they’re doing to her.

Unfortunately, the movie can’t support this well-drawn scene, nor can it support the entire twist that it’s built around. The reason for this could have been completely avoided, and it’s almost mind-boggling to me that writer/directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala left it in the film. But they did—it even shows up in the trailer. And because of these thirty seconds or so of footage, Goodnight Mommy completely collapses.

It’s near nightfall. The mother, having recently thrown a tantrum in front of her children, wanders into the woods outside the house, shedding her clothes and walking naked through the trees. Odd, but not inexplicable—until her head begins to vibrate, whipping itself back and forth at a CGI-assisted speed clearly impossible for a mundane human being to achieve. This, coupled with the crucifix imagery, would seem to suggest that, if not a demon, something supernatural must be at work here.

Except…there isn’t. And the movie doesn’t even attempt to offer an explanation as to what the hell the forest scene is supposed to mean as a result.

One of the things that pleases (and frightens) me the most about The Witch, which has a similar and far more disturbing scene of a naked woman wandering alone through the woods, is that it doesn’t even think of pulling the all-too-easy trick so many horror movies do of trying to have their cake and eat it too in regards to the supernatural. The early sequence of the titular witch carrying baby Samuel back to her den, startling in its flouting of the generally accepted tenet that showing one’s monster should be reserved for the third act, firmly shuts down the internet-popular mode of interpretation that relegates every horror movie to the protagonist’s delusions whether that approach is warranted by the film or not. By contrast, The Babadook is an excellent example of taking that tired critical approach and making it work thematically. The monster can be either real or the product of the grief-driven psychosis of the film’s characters; the film’s central metaphor remains the same regardless of which approach is taken, and neither reading diminishes the horror at its core.

Goodnight Mommy tries to make use of both these approaches, which results in a completely incoherent piece of work. Even if it had committed to The Witch‘s brand of horror and rendered the mother an actual supernatural entity, the scene in the woods doesn’t particularly add anything to the film; indeed, it rather scuppers the dread of not knowing, of questioning what exactly this thing that wears a human shape is before it finally reveals itself—the boys’ mother somehow changed? a human impostor? something altogether more unnatural? As it is, a scene that in that scenario would have been tension-draining is utterly crippling. The film wishes us to believe that the boys’ mother always was just that, no alterations whatsoever. However, in having us do so it has to hope we’ve forgotten entirely about her supernatural jaunt. If the directors had rendered it as a dream sequence, something that the boys in their paranoia experience as a nightmare, it could have worked. No such trappings are wrapped around it, however. The movie is broken, and no attempt is made to fix it.

The supremely frustrating thing about all this is that the sixty seconds of screentime that the movie-breaking scene consists of could have been cut entirely without affecting anything. No information of any importance is conveyed, and the film would arguably be scarier without it, the ambiguity of the mother walking off into the dark woods alone far more unsettling than our seeing what she does there. Plenty of Christian imagery is littered throughout the next forty minutes, meaning the demonic red herring is viable without firsthand “proof.” And if the scene was shot for a misleading trailer, which is entirely possible—well, that’s exactly the sort of thing one leaves on the cutting room floor, isn’t it?

And so, the movie collapses in on itself. And while this complete lack of sense-making is its biggest flaw, it’s far from the only one. The third act increasingly relies on silliness in order to move the plot along. A pair of bumbling Red Cross workers take it upon themselves to enter into the family’s seemingly abandoned house and venture upstairs to look for inhabitants simply because the door was unlocked, resulting in a three-minute scene that accomplishes nothing and whose nonsense takes the viewer out of the film. More egregious is the film’s second twist—one of the twins has actually died, and the other in his madness has been hallucinating his presence. A comparison to Fight Club isn’t flattering—that film’s twist is integral to the plot, and the viewer is given a solid twenty minutes to acclimate to the Durden/narrator connection as part of the story they’re being told. Goodnight Mommy, on the other hand, shoves the twist in at almost the last possible moment, its rushed reveal a testament to the fact that the movie really doesn’t need it there. The viewer’s reaction at this point is not one of wonder or appreciation but of tired contempt.

Paradoxically, this flaw of silliness is balanced by a flaw of grimness. The film’s third act largely descends into torture porn, as the boys perform a series of indecencies on the intruder-mother to try to break her spirit. There are some shocking bits and pieces here—one moment in particular, in which the boys crazy-glue the mother’s lips shut and proceed to slice them open again, had me looking through my fingers—but beyond that shock their intent is unclear. Seeing such acts committed by little boys inspires visceral discomfort, to be sure, but to what purpose? The film begins to feel like nothing more than exploitation, and as the credits finally roll the viewer’s primary emotion is deep disappointment mingled with frustration and disgust.

Oddly enough, The Descent, which as of this writing I’ve just watched for the third time (for my family it was the first, and their reactions will certainly feature into my planned analysis of the film), contains far more violence per minute of screentime than Goodnight Mommy, violence far more extravagant in terms of blood spilled and lives ended. And yet it doesn’t feel nearly as exploitative. Perhaps it’s because that film is so perfectly constructed, whereas the flaws in this one are so egregious they encourage the viewer to poke and prod for more. Perhaps it’s because that movie has a lot to say (in a comparatively subtle way) about grief and the titular descent into despair that follows, where this one could say a lot about the mutual fears of parent-child relationships but chooses instead to descend into melodrama and ridiculousness. Either way, a comparison between the two proves that an over-the-top level of gore is not inherently in bad taste; it’s all in how you use it, and Goodnight Mommy doesn’t seem to be interested in using it as much more than a way to keep the audience involved with a shoddily constructed descent into not madness but absurdity.

There are glimmers of greatness in Goodnight Mommy, which makes it worse than if it were simply a consistent display of hackdom. It’s tastefully shot, and its three-person cast of Susanne Wuest and Elias and Lukas Schwarz does an admirable job, the boys in particular easily joining the ranks of excellently-rendered creepy children in the annals of horror film history. And individual moments—Elias’ nightmare of slicing his mother open only for cockroaches to pour out, the aforementioned transferring of sympathies from children to adult—are incredibly effective. It’s all the more a shame, then, that the film’s writer/directors couldn’t elevate the rest of its length to meet these moments in quality. Goodnight Mommy has gotten a fair amount of critical praise, with some going so far as to place it among fellow candidates The Babadook, It Follows and The Witch as one of the best horror films of recent memory. I’ve a feeling that, while those latter three will endure, this one’s reputation will fade away ere long. Not only is it not really horror, inexplicable moment of supernatural antics notwithstanding, it simply isn’t built to last in terms of meaning, story, or sense-making.

533

(156 replies, posted in Episodes)

I thought I'd write,
I thought I'd let you know:
In the year since you've been gone,
I've finally let you go
And I hope you find some time
To drop a note

But if you won't,
Then you won't...

And IIIIIIIIIIIIII will
Consider you gone!

Miss you guys. smile (And thanks for the perfect introduction to Ben Folds.)

Really hoping you follow through with the audio-book thing, "The Internet Knows Where I Live" is still in regular rotation amidst my DiF Highlights playlist.

Really minor, but I didn't want to post it in the chat in case it could be seen as a spoiler: just noticed the "Hyperspace" motif is in the background of the opening cue of the soundtrack at 3:05. Never would have noticed it without listening with headphones, super nice touch.

This review was underselling it. I wrote it last night; this morning, I woke up screaming, which has never happened to me before.

Cross-posted from my blog.

When I was still a Christian, I had a severe demon problem. They’d come to me at night, looming in the dark corners of my bedroom, waiting just behind my curtains if only I’d open them. They’d whisper things to me, and I couldn’t make it stop.

I could call to my parents when things got particularly upsetting, when I was younger—I once, at the age of seven, wailed for them because Satan’s voice was in my head. He was telling me to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, which Jesus decries as the only unforgivable sin: “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin” (Mark 3:28-29). I don’t remember, looking back, which was worse; that I could hear his voice in my head, or that if I so much as slipped, so much as had the thought of blasphemy—which, thoughts being what they are, was sure to happen—I would in a stroke be condemned to eternal damnation. At any rate, my parents stayed up with me, and prayed, and all was temporarily well.

As I grew older, however, I no longer had that recourse. We had moved houses, and in our new home my parents’ bedroom was on the opposite end of the house from mine. Running from one end of a vast black expanse to the other, with the stairwell to the basement plunging downward on the left side, was not my idea of a relief from horror. And more importantly, I was eleven, twelve, thirteen, and so on. Parents could not be a source of nighttime comfort any longer.

And so, I endured. I lay there in the dark, and strove to block the voices out, and opened and closed my eyes over. And over. And over again. I prayed a mantra, a litany, in between telling the demons to go away in the name of Jesus, but they never did and I never fell asleep easily.

This was one of the most immediate reliefs of my leaving the faith at age sixteen. Almost immediately, the demons stopped talking. Nearly three years later, and I haven’t heard them since. There are other night fears, to be certain—I didn’t sleep well for months after seeing The Babadook, my toddler nightmares of monsters in the closet raging back to life—but once you’ve failed to believe in God, the demonic largely loses its teeth (as I wrote about in detail in my analysis of demon possession in the horror genre).

When I first saw a trailer for The VVitch, several months ago, I was intrigued. First, because it looked to be a genuinely good horror picture with an excellent premise and a good deal of critical praise. Second, because I was hoping it might be able to provide an exception to the rule of a Christian framework failing to work within an atheistic/maltheistic genre. Third, because I was, on some level, curious. I wanted to see if it would be able to reawaken that deeply ingrained childhood religious terror, my three years of secularism notwithstanding.

Having seen it a few hours prior to the writing of this review, I can say that points one and three were fulfilled admirably. I’m not convinced of point two, but I think The VVitch comes the closest of any piece of religious horror I’ve encountered to justifying itself. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a deeply admirable one and a deeply disturbing one, and I suspect it will grow even better upon rewatching.

The New England folk tale of the subtitle begins with isolation. William (Ralph Ineson), a devout Puritan who takes issue with the way his church chooses to express its faith, is banished from the congregation. Outcast, he makes for the outskirts of the massive nearby woods, taking with him his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie), his prepubescent son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), his maturing daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), the young twins Mercy and Jonas, and the infant Samuel. Before long, there are unsettling signs that the family is not alone—Samuel vanishes into the forest, and Mercy begins telling tales of a child-devouring witch who lives there in covenant with Satan. Grief turns into paranoia, and as the nights drag on the family begins to unravel, unsure if even their faith in God will be enough to protect them from the evil in the wood.

There be spoilers from here on out!

SPOILER Show
The film upsets viewer expectations almost immediately by displaying the witch herself—rather than leaving it up to the viewers to wonder what has happened to Samuel, director Robert Eggers presents the woman’s naked back as she cradles the baby in her arms, before proceeding to do to him exactly what it is we’re told witches do to children. Giving us this glimpse of the titular horror is a massive risk, one that I almost certainly would not have taken, and it pays off immensely. The prominence of the witch’s nakedness reveals one of the film’s underlying themes—the gnawing transgression of sexuality—and its proximity to a deed that almost caused me to gasp aloud (nothing of the actual slaying of the baby is shown, but what remains onscreen is shocking enough) tells the viewer exactly what they’re in for: this movie is going to be about children, and it’s gong to hurt them badly.

From there, what we’re given is a slow-burn descent into madness highly reminiscent of The Thing, but even more disturbing in the context of a family turning on itself rather than a group of men falling apart. This is one area in which the film’s trailer is misleading—it depicts the family as a cold and unloving one, whereas in the film itself Ineson’s patriarch is a warm, devoted father who has a deep love for his eldest son and daughter, which makes his gradual disintegration even more affecting. His performance is matched by those of newcomers Anya Taylor-Joy and Harvey Scrimshaw, who manage more nuance and feeling in their roles than many adults could. Combine the audience’s sympathy for their characters with the horrors that are inflicted upon them, and the result is some of the most deeply upsetting moments of horror art in recent memory. To be quite honest, I’m stunned the film got away with some of them at merely an R rating.

SPOILER Show
Caleb is on the cusp of sexual awakening. The film makes a point to let the camera linger on Thomasin’s chest a few different times when the two of them are together, emphasizing the perversity that the religion of the day assigned to lust; the hints of incestuous flutters are required to make us feel the revulsion that was part and parcel of sexual attraction in the film’s 1630 setting. When the witch is shown for the second time, it’s in the guise of a provocative young woman who lures Caleb to her as he wanders, lost, through the woods. What follows was shocking to me as an adolescent male—I can’t imagine a parent’s reaction to the image.

Subsequently, a naked Caleb returns home, seemingly possessed of an evil spirit. As he begins going through the requisite contortions and yowls, his family gathers around him and prays frantically, and he himself begins to shriek the name of Jesus until it appears that his faith has won the battle. However, in an astonishingly acted shot that goes on and on, his tearful confession of love for his savior morphs into a twisted parody that is barely subtext, his voice rising to a woman’s high moan as he begs for the Son of God to kiss him on the mouth and embrace him again and again. When he dies shortly thereafter, it’s a mercy.

This scene, along with an earlier moment in which Caleb, alone and desperate in the woods, repeats a prayer over and over again, is the one that struck the closest to the bone for me. It made me remember all too well the nights of lying in bed, alternately too scared to open my eyes and too scared to close them (if I may paraphrase another famous film of witchery) praying over and over again and failing to dispel the fear. For the religious person, this may be the worst fear of all: the fear that belief alone is not enough, that prayer will do nothing to ward away an enemy who seems far more potent and seductive in its terror than a far-away benevolent God ever could.

SPOILER Show
It’s only the midpoint of the film, however, and Thomasin comes to the fore as matters fall apart at an even faster rate. The amount of violence the film is willing to show rises as the tension does likewise, with a few particularly well-chosen images leaving impressions on the brain that are hard to scrub away. By the time things draw to a close, Thomasin is alone, stranded with the ebony goat Black Philip, whose ominous appearance has been a constant throughout the film. She enters the barn with him, chills run up the viewer’s spine. . .and then, for a moment, horror evaporates.

Alas, just as The Exorcist chose to spell out to its viewers that the same Pazuzu whose statue appeared in the opening scene is what holds possession of Regan, The VVitch chooses to bring the devil himself into the narrative. We never see him directly, but it’s clear who he is, and it just. Doesn’t. Work. The sense of mystery collapses, the horror of the unknown becomes the horror of an identifiable quantity, and the same question that always arises in such circumstances does so here: if God so clearly isn’t present here, why is his Adversary?

What follows this, however, is an ending that is perfectly shot and skin-crawling in the literal sense of the word. And while it’s unfortunate that

SPOILER Show
His Infernal Majesty had to show up, rather than the titular witch being the one to fill the role,
the movie’s 1630s setting makes even this almost work. Eggers makes a point to have a troubled Caleb question his father following the disappearance of Samuel: if we are all born in sin, and he was not yet baptized, isn’t he in hell? William has no answer for him. The God of the Puritans was a deeply capricious, terrifyingly distant deity, one whose salvation one could never be assured of and whose hellfire was a constant threat. If He is the God of The VVitch, the whole movie can be seen as a particularly perverse test of faith (and indeed William namechecks Abraham and Isaac later on in its running time). The family has been exiled from their congregation to test their loyalty to their heavenly father, and each and every one is found wanting.

There are two readings of the film’s final scene, each as valid as the other.

SPOILER Show
A graphically naked Thomasin, her covenant with Satan made, stumbles into the wood and watches as a circle of equally naked women chants a praise to their father below, before ascending to the tops of the trees. Firelight dancing across her face, Thomasin slowly begins to rise as well, and we cannot tell if the laughter on her face is that of madness or that of freedom. The Satanic Temple certainly believes it to be the latter—they infamously partnered with A24 to promote the film before its release—and they have a fair amount of evidence to support their case, with the entire film’s nightmare treatment of pent-up sexuality serving as prelude to Thomasin’s glorious sexual release and rejection of Puritan paranoia. The various evils that lead to this moment might seem too heavy to justify this interpretation, but the film does ask the question: if the God of this world could allow such terrible things to happen to those who want nothing more than to serve him, is Satan truly more evil in comparison?

Ultimately, the other reading of the film’s ending—

SPOILER Show
that the witches are indeed abhorrent and Thomasin’s embrace of her sexuality is the final step on her path to damnation
—while it would seem to better fit the worldview of the film’s religious players, is the more disturbing of the two. It was rightly pointed out to me before I saw the film that witches are one of the only cultural groups that are still widely considered fair game to demonize, with most people drawing no distinction between Wiccans and neopagans and the Satanic monsters of old campfire stories—and not bothering to do the five minutes’ research it would take to reveal that the two are completely different (not to mention the fact that the latter never existed). Not only could The VVitch lead to a renewed Satanic panic in religious viewers and encourage them to dehumanize modern witches, it paints a revisionist view of history in which Satanic witches did indeed exist and thus justified the presence of witch hunts and burnings. It’s a troubling moral issue, and while the subtitle A New England Folk Tale encourages the viewer to remember that it’s really “just a story”, such things tend to get thrown by the wayside when religious paranoia comes along.

The ramblings above haven’t even begun to touch on the film’s cinematography, which is stark and haunting, its score, which takes cues from The Shining‘s use of Penderecki’s Utrenja and is incredibly effective, or its screenplay, which according to a mid-credits interlude takes much of its dialogue from period accounts and is archaic without sacrificing intelligibility. I’ve also hardly done justice to the issue of sexual repression vs. sexual liberation within the film, which could easily form its own essay. That said, at 2,300 words consisting largely of spoilers, this writeup has gone on longer than it deserves. And so, I end on this note:

The VVitch is not a perfect movie. It has not, as of this writing, affected me as viscerally as other recent horror films (The Babadook) or impressed me with its utter lack of problems (as does The Descent). However, I’ve the feeling I’ll have trouble sleeping tonight. Partly because I’ll be dwelling on numerous of its images, unable to get them out of my head. And partly because, for ninety minutes, it put religious fear back into my brain in a way I haven’t experienced since I deconverted. It’s an enormously impressive effort, will launch its director and actors onto equally impressive careers, and has indeed earned its place as one of the finest, most deeply unsettling pieces of horror art in the last decade. If that means I’ll be regressing to my seven-year-old self under the covers tonight, the movie has damn well earned it.

538

(85 replies, posted in Off Topic)

On the one hand it makes me sad because it basically destroys any half-hopes we might have had for a Hannibal revival, but on the other...OMG Star Trek is in the right hands. Between this, Amazing Stories and American Gods, it's gonna be quite the year for Mr. Fuller.

Cross-posted from my blog.

Hail, Caesar! is not my Coen Brothers movie. I’m a huge fan of film and moviemaking, but I don’t have enough of a personal connection to the Hollywood of days gone by to fully appreciate the sort of love letter this film is. Hell, I only own four DVDs of films made pre-1960 (Gone with the Wind, It’s a Wonderful Life, Rear Window, and Vertigo, for the curious). However, it’s a movie made with so much overflowing love and attention to detail that I couldn’t help but find myself swept up in its many charms. It’s comparatively fluffy compared to the Coens’ prior effort, Inside Llewyn Davis (which is, for the record, my Coen Brothers movie), but that’s hardly a detraction.

The plot, in brief: Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a fixer for Capitol Pictures, is caught completely flat-footed when Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), the Heston-lite star of the studio’s Biblical epic Hail, Caesar!: A Tale of the Christ, disappears from his dressing room in the midst of the shoot. While it initially appears to be merely another of Whitlock’s infamous benders, complications quickly ensue: Whitlock has in fact been kidnapped by a group of Communists determined to reform the studio system. Add to this volatile situation an in-over-his-head cowboy actor (Alden Ehrenreich), a pregnant and unmarried actress (Scarlett Johansson), and the fact that several of the studio’s movies are turning out to be utter duds, and Mannix is most definitely going to be working late.

In many ways, Hail, Caesar! is a cousin of sorts to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. Both are love letters to their respective eras, both are built around increasingly convoluted plots, and both feature a myriad of truly delightful bit parts by extremely talented performers. But where Inherent Vice fuses its incredible fun with a healthy dose of unease and paranoia (which is only fitting, considering its post-Altamont setting) and ultimately depends on its plot’s remaining utter nonsense, Hail, Caesar! is content to remain a mostly uproarious romp and to come together in a (comparatively) tightly-knit conclusion.

The element the two have the most in common is their surprising sense of decency. Joaquin Phoenix’s perpetually stoned “Doc” Sportello is incredibly endearing because, in a world that is recognizably steeped in the tropes of noir despite its drug-filtered era, he refuses to play the typical cynic—he is a genuinely good (if often befuddled) man who goes out of his way to make sure things end well for every wayward figure he comes in contact with. Similarly, the key figures of Caesar are not Clooney’s Whitlock but Brolin’s Mannix and Ehrenreich’s Hobie. The former, while he takes no nonsense and occasionally resorts to less than orthodox methods to accomplish his job, is at the end of the day a family man who is plagued by self-loathing due to his inability to give up smoking and spend time with his wife and kids. He also deeply believes in the nobility of his work—one of the movie’s funniest scenes is also one of its most moving, in which Mannix rails against the perceived cynicism of the film industry and insists that what he is helping to create is art worth making and worth seeing. Hobie, meanwhile, is a mildly talented kid who realizes exactly how lucky he is to be working where he is and does not take any of it for granted. He’s played as the butt of the joke early on in the film, but as its running time continues we grow to respect him for his commitment and his humility.

It is these two, then, along with the uniformly gorgeous cinematography of Roger Deakins and the gloriously pompous score by Carter Burwell, that form the solid core of an otherwise delightfully flighty piece of work. Famous faces flit on and off of camera and are each in their turn excellent, especially Ralph Fiennes as a put-upon director of manners forced to work with Hobie’s cowboy style and Tilda Swinton as a pair of sister-journalists competing for gossip readership. There are several occasions where the film stops dead to spend two or three minutes simply watching an entire scene play out as it’s shot on the soundstage, but rather than slowing the movie’s manic momentum these moments captivate the viewer with how good they are. Chief among them is a song-and-dance number featuring Channing Tatum and his band of sailor friends lamenting the lack of dames aboard a naval vessel—not only is it a pitch-perfect spoof, it’s a genuinely marvelous piece of staging and choreography, with the directors refusing to take half-measures simply because they’re poking affectionate fun at their subject matter. The same applies to the titular Biblical epic—it’s a grotesque likeness of Ben-Hur played for broad laughs, but is all the funnier because it nails the look and feel of the self-important sword-and-sandals pictures of the day. The film isn’t necessarily interested in saying anything thematically significant about the various pieces to which it pays homage, but the manic joy that the Coens and their collaborators take in recreating Hollywood’s golden days, warts and all, is so infectious that in the moment this doesn’t particularly matter.

It’s odd, considering the sweep of its parodic scope, that “slight” is a word I’d use to describe Hail, Caesar!, but it’s not meant as a criticism. After the deeply melancholy Inside Llewyn Davis, it’s clear that the Coens wanted to sit back and have some fun with a bunch of talented collaborators, and in this they succeed with full marks. And hey, as Birdman demonstrated, madcap movies about Hollywood are often rewarded come Oscars season. That movie has more philosophical pretensions than Hail, Caesar!, but their scattered nature ultimately works against that film rather than for it. This one isn’t trying to win Best Picture, but taken for what it is it’s an awfully amusing way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

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I'll echo Fireproof and say there are actually quite a few I haven't listened to simply because I haven't seen the films. Which is fun, it means even though the show's over I still have lots of new DiF to listen to as I watch new films. big_smile

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I tend to avoid Trek 09--it's one of the few movies I can successfully turn my brain off to enjoy, and Brian's incessant nitpicking and shitting on things that don't deserve to be shit on get frustrating.

Also, I tend to fast forward the color grading debate in the Malariathon. Sleep was little and tensions were high, I get that, but the lack of sentence-finishing and one side's talking past the other just get intensely irritating.

Cross-posted from my blog. I began this piece intending to generally review Blatty's novel and by extension its film adaptation, but I'm intrigued enough by the philosophical quagmire that is a Christian framework of demonic possession within a genre that is essentially atheistic that I decided to focus solely on that issue. The theology of horror is something I want to write about further in future, so this was a good test run for seeing if my ideas have any merit.

* * *

An infernal nuisance: The Exorcist and the problem of demonic possession

Next to Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Haunting of Hill House, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist is probably the most important horror novel ever written. It and its more famous film adaptation near-singlehandedly ushered in the Horror Boom of the 1970s-80s, a period that permanently raised the horror genre’s place in public consciousness and gave us authors such as Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Clive Barker. The entire subgenre of demonic-possession story was also brought to popularity by the book and the film, and has never since gone away (even The Babadook, an otherwise classically monster-in-the-closet tale, can’t quite escape its influence). It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of the story’s two versions to the genre of horror and to popular culture in general. Which is why it’s a shame that both are deeply flawed, and the novel in particular simply isn’t that good.

Let me qualify the above by saying that the novel still merited three stars out of five as my Goodreads rating. Fun is a large factor in how I rate certain books, and it’s undeniable that Blatty’s novel is indeed quite a bit of fun. Even given all its flaws, it moves at a tremendous clip, and while it never scared me it did have me turning pages at a pretty tight rate. It, like books by Michael Crichton and Jack McDevitt and others like them, is a great stress-reliever; one goes into it knowing exactly what they’re getting and leaves feeling solidly entertained. But where Crichton’s Jurassic Park or McDevitt’s Polaris are also successfully told stories, The Exorcist is merely fun. It lacks a coherence and an internal logic, and this paucity of sense draws attention to itself at all the worst moments.

I can’t place the blame for this solely on Blatty, because these problems are not, by and large, with The Exorcist in particular but with the concept of demonic possession as a whole. It simply can’t be made to work in a piece of horror art, at least not the specifically Christian conception of possession that pervades nearly every such story. Below, I lay out a brief critique of the numerous problems for demons in horror literature, beginning with problems specific to The Exorcist before broadening my approach to the Christian framework of demonic possession in general.

Problems Inherent to The Exorcist‘s Depiction of Possession

The largest problem in The Exorcist that is created specifically by Blatty is involved in the incredible coincidence required for the plot to come about in the first place. Both the novel and the film open in the midst of an archaeological dig in Iraq, with the titular exorcist, Father Lankester Merrin, as our viewpoint character. Merrin is disturbed to discover that one of the artifacts that has been unearthed is an amulet bearing the likeness of Pazuzu, an Assyro-Babylonian wind demon. The priest, who has apparently beaten Pazuzu once before, senses that another showdown is imminent, and promptly vanishes before indeed reappearing in the final act to assist Father Damien Karras in driving the demon from the body of horrifically possessed little girl Regan MacNeil. Ignoring the straining of credulity required to believe that Pazuzu would have fled across hemispheres to possess a little girl who just so happens to live in the same location as Merrin’s Catholic cohorts, his ties to the old priest introduce huge internal problems to The Exorcist.

First of these is the damage that the desert opening does to the story’s atmosphere. One of the elements present in The Exorcist that became integral to the horror boom is the familiarity of its setting. Stephen King especially would learn from this, setting nearly all of his novels in a set of small towns in the state of Maine and never departing from the city limits; the same can be said for Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (which itself borrows heavily from King’s ‘Salem’s Lot) and countless other novels and films of the Horror Boom. Even today, the tactic hasn’t grown stale—placing an alien horror in the midst of an otherwise completely “normal” and familiar environment is a tremendously effective device for making a story’s central evil a much more invasive and paranoia-inducing threat than it otherwise would be. Unfortunately, Blatty undermines his own stroke of genius in this regard by deliberately opening his novel in a conspicuously exotic setting. The sense of scope this lends the narrative, though it leads to some very pretty shots in the film adaptation, is precisely what is not needed—it collapses the otherwise claustrophobic invasion of the mundane by the supernatural in a manner that cannot conceptually be recovered from.

The second problem caused by Blatty’s introduction of Merrin and his foe is the confusion it adds to the story’s internal mythology. The spirit that possesses Regan is very clearly one that fits the Christian conception of a demon (which, as is discussed below, brings with it a whole host of its own problems), answers to such biblical labels as the devil and Legion, and has a particular dislike for crucifixes and holy water. Identifying it as the Assyro-Babylonian Pazuzu, however, takes what is otherwise a purely Christian enemy and hopelessly muddles it. Are we to assume Pazuzu is lying, adapting itself to a Christian culture’s fears in order to better exploit it? Did the Assyrians and Babylonians identify as a god an entity that is in fact nothing more than one of Satan’s host (we’ll ignore all the problems of cultural disrespect this entails)? If we were given one of these answers it would at least partially repair the damage, but Blatty never attempts to offer an explanation for the cultural cross-pollination. Pazuzu simply transforms into a Christian demon, and in doing so renders The Exorcist a mythological scrap-heap.

The final problem caused by the story’s opening is one of effective horror. In this regard the film is perhaps the worse offender, in that it explicitly shows Pazuzu’s silhouette behind Regan after Father Merrin is killed by his efforts to save her. This explicit labeling of the story’s shadowy antagonist deflates a huge portion of the fear and tension that have built up prior to the silhouette’s appearance; it takes what has (in the film) been up to this moment an unidentified enemy and explicitly gives him a name and identity. The old truism that the unknown is more frightening than the known holds true here, and we find we can’t be nearly as scared of Pazuzu now that we see him as a concrete entity. In the novel, which unlike its adaptation names the demon in its opening pages, no such climax-interrupting revelation comes; and while Blatty’s text is technically the more egregious breaker of rules due to its presenting its villain’s identity up front, the impact of this flaw is felt less due to its not coming in the midst of such an important scene.

Problems Inherent to the Christian Concept of Possession

Without even considering its impact on horror specifically quite yet, the Christian conception of demon possession is inherently problematic as concerns motive. If we are to accept the Christian definition of a demon as a former angel now fallen and ruled by Satan, the actions of a demonic possession cease to make any sort of sense when considered in detail.

The first of many questions: why possess a human being at all? Blatty’s novel makes a vague comment about Pazuzu’s desire for a warm body, but this causes more problems than it resolves. To begin with, there’s no compelling reason as to why a demon would want to inhabit a body. Even if the Gnostic revulsion for the physical that still pervades a good deal of Christian theology is cast aside, there’s not a particularly large list of advantages for a former angel of God in possessing a meat-puppet. Not only does it seemingly substantially limit the demon’s freedom (rendering it firmly corporeal rather than able to flit throughout the world as it pleases, unable to utilize supernatural powers beyond vague object-moving and other such parlor tricks), it traps it in a body subject to damage, decay, and eventual death. The latter apparently isn’t much of a concern to Christian demons, however—indeed, rather than slowing those processes they attempt to hasten them! Regan is emblematic of a typical Christian possession in this regard, practicing self-mutilation, regularly shitting and vomiting on herself, and growing increasingly sickly. Even if a demon could for whatever reason take enough pleasure in inhabiting a body to regularly attempt to do so, deliberately wrecking its new home and providing it with generally miserable physical sensations rather than pleasurable ones is utterly nonsensical.

The other major question raised by Christian demonic possession: what is the demon’s goal? Presented outside of a Christian framework, possession doesn’t have to make sense; an unknown entity’s goals needn’t be limited to a certain theological system. A specifically Christian demon, though, is automatically saddled with an agenda, one that possession doesn’t seem to suit very well. Causing pain and misery to God’s creatures is a commonly given answer, but if so possession is hardly the most efficient way to go about it; surely using one’s telekinetic powers to, say, collapse a bridge or tear several people’s hearts from their chests is more effective than simply causing one little girl to mutilate herself and shriek obscenities? In The Exorcist, Father Merrin speculates that perhaps the demon possesses a victim in order to drive others to despair; if this is the case, it rather resoundingly backfires, with Pazuzu’s possession of Regan driving her firmly atheist mother to seek spiritual guidance. And if, as is commonly held among Christians who believe in demonic possession, it is impossible for one inhabited by the Holy Spirit to be possessed, isn’t it far more likely that possession would indeed frequently convince unbelievers of the power of the supernatural, rather than causing believers to doubt their faith? Once again, The Exorcist fails to provide an answer, and in this case is not alone.

More interesting than this sort of plothole-picking, though, are the implications that arise when Christian possession is the fuel for a horror novel. It’s my firm contention that all horror, or at least all successful horror, is essentially atheistic or at best maltheistic. This is not to say that horror stories cannot have happy endings (though it’s usually best that they don’t), but those happy endings cannot be obtained through divine intervention. The existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God irreparably undermines the central philosophical conceit of horror—that humans are nothing more than thinking meat, that we are alone in a completely uncaring if not actively malevolent universe, that if anyone is going to save us it must be ourselves (and even the odds of that are inconceivably slim). Once this kind of God is brought into a narrative, it ceases to be horror and becomes nothing more than fantasy, no matter how gruesome its details.

This presents a rather titanic problem for demonic possession stories, at least ones that rely on a Christian framework. We can either bring in God as literal deus ex machina to save the day, rendering our story a completely unsuccessful horror tale; or we dispense with God altogether, which retains a horrific atmosphere but begs the question: what the hell are Christian demons doing in a world without a Christian God?

The Exorcist chooses the latter option. None of the Christian rituals or invocations of Christ’s name desperately hurled at Pazuzu by Merrin and Karras are ultimately effective—they affect the demon not one whit, and Merrin, the perfectly pious saint, dies in the midst of attempting to drive it out. It is only when Karras, furious, demands that Pazuzu come into him, willingly rejecting God and embracing the demonic, that the enemy is beaten; he enters the priest, who promptly hurls himself through a window and down a flight of stone steps. This (if we ignore the book’s sequel, which I’m completely comfortable with doing) apparently kills Pazuzu (yet again bringing up the question of why the hell demons are so keen to inhabit mortal bodies in the first place). It’s a triumph, but rather an empty one; in order to achieve victory, Karras is forced to address the demon on its own terms, rather than relying on a God who is at best unresponsive and more likely simply isn’t present. The film emphasizes this; where the book depicts a priest delivering hasty last rites to the dying Karras, the adaptation shows him breathing his last before even this can occur.

In choosing this ending, Blatty makes the proper aesthetic and philosophical choice, denying any chance of an all-powerful deity saving the day. Unfortunately, in doing so he exposes the inescapable problem of utilizing Christian possession in horror: why does demonic possession occur if the demons’ foe is both good and all-powerful, and if He does not exist what are the demons doing running around in the first place?

* * *

The monumental status of The Exorcist can’t be denied, and its merits, while they’re of a distinctly potboiler quality, are substantial. That said, it remains an essentially unsuccessful story due both to Blatty’s own choices and the constraints of the mythology upon which the novel hinges. As evidenced by its immense influence and popular appeal, it’s an undeniably powerful tale, especially in its film adaptation. Unfortunately, much of its power comes from one’s own religious belief and the accompanying terror of the forces of Satan. Once that’s left behind, fear starts to unravel in the face of questions—and those questions ultimately can’t be recovered from.

We should get Alex Ruger in here to hit us with some composer knowledge.

I agree that the score just isn't as memorable as any of the previous six. That said, I'm amazed it's as good as it is considering how old Williams is and how many ideas he must've run out of. I was saying for a while before Williams was announced that I would've liked to see Giacchino take it rather than the old maestro, but at the same time having one last hurrah with him in the form this trilogy is wonderful even if he's not as melodic as he used to be. And really, if we're being honest, not a lot of the original music for AotC or RotS was very melodic anyway. Each had one great theme (Across the Stars, Battle of the Heroes) and a lot of other music that was really nice without being particularly identifiable (ignoring the chopped-up TPM cues).

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I walked into Carol expecting it to be easier than it was. I expected a tearjerker—it’s a lesbian romance that takes place in the 1950s, after all, and that’s not something that’s going to end well. I expected an emotional catharsis that left me walking out of the theatre feeling drained but also uplifted by negative emotion, if that makes sense. Instead, I walked out confused. Carol is a film that, at first, seems to hold its viewer at a distance, cold and impenetrable.

Its cinematography reflects this mood. The 16mm film it was shot on casts a haze of grain over the proceedings, characters’ faces fogged by swimming particles. Chemical color grading lends a subtle sepia tone to every image, evoking both times gone by and the chill of New York in wintertime; there are next to none of the popping hues or warm tones typical of hot emotions. Its most impressionist moments, with bokeh hanging in the background and raindrops smeared on the lens, are reminiscent of paintings or snapshots from a dreamscape. It’s utterly beautiful, but it’s not the kind of beauty that lends itself to ecstatic feelings; it’s muted, melancholy, as if seen through a car window in the midst of a drizzle (which, indeed, is literally what happens in several scenes).

Similarly, the film’s characters hold each other at an uncomfortable distance for a good portion of its runtime. Anyone who walks into Carol expecting its titular character (Cate Blanchett), an upper-class woman in the midst of an ugly divorce, and Therese (Rooney Mara), a young photographer who works in a department store to pay the bills, to go through the typical motions of falling into friendship and then love is going to be disappointed. Most of their interactions in the film’s first half are stiff and self-conscious, with Carol attempting to seduce Therese but being horribly obvious about it and realizing how horribly obvious she is, and Therese markedly uncomfortable and bemused by this stranger’s attempts at what she initially perceives as friendship. Early on in the film I chalked these interactions up to an awkward screenplay, but eventually I began to realize what director Todd Haynes was doing.

“I don’t know what I want,” Therese says, weeping, in a crucial scene late in the film. “How could I know what I want if I say yes to everything?” As this revelation hit her, it also hit me. Carol is not a movie about love, it’s a movie about selfishness. Carol romances Therese not because she’s in love, but because she desperately needs an outlet for the welling emotions she’s suffering due to the stress of her divorce and the possibility of her husband taking her daughter away from her out of spite. Therese responds to Carol not because she loves her but because she’s infatuated and because she’s possessed of a chronic inability cause trouble for anyone. Carol’s husband uses their daughter as leverage not because he loves Carol and wants her back but because he needs to possess her. And so on and so forth. It’s a quietly devastating study in just how wrong things can become when relationships start to crumble.

Not to say that Carol is an awful person, or that her relationship with Therese isn’t moving. The moment in which Therese realizes what Carol feels for her and decides that she feels something too is quietly beautiful, the consummation that comes immediately afterward shot in such a startlingly intimate way compared to the rest of the film that it feels transcendent. And both women are ultimately victims, living in an age which views their feelings as nothing but depravity. But while the film doesn’t blame the women for their unfortunate circumstances, or consider their attraction at all wrong or unhealthy, neither does it present their story as an easily-swallowed tragic romance. It’s off-putting to have these expectations completely turned on their heads, but the film is far better for it, taking what could have been trite and neat and turning it into something far more disquieting and thought-provoking.

Ultimately, while the film is named after Blanchett’s character, it’s Therese who is its heart and soul. The meek, frightened vulnerability with which Mara plays her is arresting, especially when contrasted with Blanchett’s confidence and maturity. Each performer would deserve a Best Actress win, for the film couldn’t have happened without them. They bring an essential element of humanity to the movie, one that otherwise could have been lost in Haynes’ chilly visuals despite the ultimate humanity of the screenplay. It’s for Mara especially that I’ll be returning to this movie, her film-misted visage a spark of hope and beauty in a great work of art that’s very much concerned with the latter but not often with the former.

If Starkiller were the focus of the climax I'd be more inclined to agree, but it's not. It's the characters we're concerned about, and that forest duel is incredibly tense for that reason. The climax is about Ren, Finn and Rey and where they're going as characters, Starkiller is just an excuse to get them to that point.

As for the bad guys being stupid: even ignoring the fact that superpowers in the real world enjoy doing the same thing over and over again and being surprised when it doesn't work, the First Order being stupid in this regard makes sense. They're slavishly imitating and idolizing the old Empire, flaws and all. Does that make the movie perfect or fix the fact that another giant ball is a dumb idea? No, but I just don't understand someone saying Starkiller ruins the entire movie for them when there's so much goodness in the rest of it.

@BDA, just a minor point--Phasma isn't actually dead yet, Kennedy has confirmed she'll appear in VIII. So hopefully she'll take a level in badass then.

See, I just don't understand where you're coming from when you say it takes all its influences and synthesizes them into something new. That's exactly the opposite of what it does--it simply regurgitated its influences verbatim. Like I mentioned in the review, in description after description it simply pulls stuff like "It was like this thing from x movie" or "It looked like a Cylon", etc. Star Wars is absolutely indebted to its influences, but there's a huge amount of invention going on at the same time--the sheer visual creativity at play in the OT is one of its chief delights. I can enjoy that visual inventiveness and worldbuilding without having any knowledge of Hidden Fortress, but if I were to read RP1 without any context for the stuff it's referencing I would have absolutely no idea what the fuck things look like the majority of the time because it uses pre-existing works as a crutch rather than a foundation.

To address your point that there's a difference between good writing and good storytelling: I absolutely agree, and Tolkien is a good example. However, RP1's bad writing directly feeds into bad storytelling. For instance, when describing his girlfriend, the protagonist talks about how she made him a better person, opened his eyes, and in general "changed how I see the world". Does the book bother to actually show you any of this through their interactions? No, we're simply told it happens in spite of the fact that the protagonist remains basically the same character throughout the book. Cline's sloppy writing leads to sloppy storytelling which, to use the cliche, tells us an arc has happened rather than actually organically, plausibly showing it.

None of this is an attack on your love for the book--you liked it and I didn't and that's fine. I just genuinely don't understand what you mean when you say the book was magical, wholly new, or in any way a synthesis of influences rather than something that uses them as a crutch.

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Oh shit, I completely forgot that Malick's  The Voyage of Time is due in 2016. I know there wasn't a lot of Tree of Life love around here but it's one of my favorite movies so I'm rather pumped.

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Looking forward to The Revenant, The Witch and Anomalisa, myself. Granted, two of the three are already in limited release but I'm not in the location to take advantage of that. Couldn't even tell you why I want to see The Witch, exactly, but I'm on a big horror kick and I tend to trust Drew McWeeny's opinion.

The prequels also have Anakin using the Force to survive podracing despite being untrained. And Obi-Wan's training for Luke amounts to little more than what Rey had from Maz--a brief lecture in the nature of the Force and its binding effect on life, plus a vague "Stretch out with your feelings!". Plus, again, Rey had just gone through being mind raped by the Force, which while twisted is its own sort of demonstration.

Plus, honestly, screw the prequels in that regard. The Force is magic, and George trying to bind it up with hierarchy and rules and such was one of the worst aspects of those films.