Tag: X

Pearl (2022) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick synopsis: Trapped on an isolated farm, Pearl must tend to her ailing father under the watch of her mother. Lusting for the glamorous life she’s seen in movies, Pearl’s temptations and repressions collide and she starts killing people, one of which she leaves near the entrance of her house, literally sending her to the Pearl-ey gates.

I actually wasn’t a fan of X, it just didn’t vibe with me. So I went into this with slight apprehension, worried that I might end up being bored very early on. The good news is, I didn’t dislike it for a long time of it. The downside, the longer Pearl went on, the less love I had for it. I loved the stylistic choices, and the performances are incredible. I just, I dunno, at some point I just stopped caring. Once I got past the Wizard Of Oz feel, I wasn’t that engrossed by it. It’s not helped that I didn’t like any of the characters. The titular Pearl is a sociopath, her mother is unbearably cruel, and the projectionist seems a little too date-rapey. Also, they’re not quite despicable enough to be villains. Pearl is driven mainly by her ambition and desires to leave her farm (which anybody who has seen X will know she never does), Pearls’ mother recognises that Pearl is capable of great evil, so she is trying to protect the world from her. So you can’t really truly despise them either. In a film full of colours, all the characters are too morally grey to feel too strongly about.

I think I need to watch more Ti West, as it is possible I just don’t like his writing style. Others do, and I can see why. He writes like a 70s horror writer, so you know that no matter what, it won’t be stupid, and it will take its time. His stuff mainly seems to be very slow burns, which normally I like, but I feel it didn’t really lead to much this time. It’s like watching a car slowly roll down a hill, you expect it to crash at the end, but instead, it just slows down gradually and comes to a stop.

Everybody involved is obviously talented, Mia Goth gives an incredible performance, one scene, in particular, is a master class in acting where she just gives an unbroken monologue to her friend. Tandi Wright is also great as the mother of Pearl, I wouldn’t trade her for another girl. That’s a reference to this song btw, I haven’t just decided on a really weird sentence structure.

Matthew Sunderland gives a weirdly good performance considering his character can’t move, but his eye work is tremendous. There is a definite love for the art here, the fact that Ti West, when he needed an illicit film, didn’t just invent one, or find a random one, he actually showed A Free Ride, which is seen as the earliest American porn movie that is still available for viewing today. It’s obvious he knows his shit, it’s just not for me.

If this was a short film, I’d have loved it. If it actually did more with the concept than the “we have an idea”, I’d have liked it. But as a feature? For a film which features genuine pornography, there’s surprisingly little meat. Also, it’s weird this received a US cinema release in September last year, and a Blu-ray/DVD release in November, yet didn’t come out here until March. Wtf is up with that?

2022 In Film: Day Two (The Bad)

On By troubledproductionsIn Year round upLeave a comment

Films to which I say “oh, I hated them, but……”. Make no mistake, these are not good films. But the people involved have potential to make good ones in the future, if they stop being shit.

Ambulance

Ups: Some good performances

Unique idea.

A few very good shots.

Downs: All the action scenes feel hollow, when cars crash they’re filmed in a way that has no weight to them so you don’t really feel the carnage.

Too much fluff.

Some baffling shot choices.

Best Moment: The split second where Will gets shot. Changes the ending completely.

Worst Moment: A moment we don’t see, we don’t see the beginning of the bank robbery. There’s no sense of planning.

Best Performer: Jake Gyllenhaal. He makes a good sociopath.

Opening: The character needs money because his wife is dying of something (I’m not sure they ever say what). It really unsubtly mentions/shows his war veteran status. All character work, setting up who he is, and his motivations. Also really long and there must have been a better way of doing it.

Closing: One of the brothers dies, the other one lives but is likely to get away with it because the witnesses like him. I mean, yeah, he was roped into the worst parts, and he wanted the money for a good reason. But he still took part in a bank heist and caused millions of dollars of damages. He’s good, but not innocent.

Best Line: You are all gonna have the greatest story to tell at dinner tonight!

Original Review here

Licorice Pizza

Ups: Looks stunning

Wonderful soundtrack

When the characters are apart from each other, they are actually fun to watch.

Downs: Unlikeable characters.

Meandering plot.

He’s 15, she’s 25. That’s creepy. That’s why this film is rated so low for me. It’s a dealbreaker. Otherwise it would be about 2 blogs higher.

Best Moment: The Jon Peters scene. Funny, and completely disrupts the myth of fame.

Worst Moment: After telling Alana “say yes to whatever a casting agent says”, Gary then gets annoyed when she says “yes” to being asked whether she’s okay with nudity. He then goes full incel and shouts at her that it’s fucked up that she won’t show him her tits, but is willing to show them on camera. She then shows him them. So he’s an asshole, and she’s an idiot.

Best Performer: Sean Penn. He’s not in it much, but he’s so sleazy when he is.

Opening: They meet. There’s not much to it really. Would have felt more natural if he wasn’t 15, and she wasn’t an adult.

Closing: They run together and kiss. Yay, the adult and the child are now able to be together.

Best Line: Fuck off, teenagers!

Original Review here

Men

Ups: Technically, it’s very good.

Smart ideas.

Looks incredible.

Great performances.

Downs: I much prefer narrative.

Very unsubtle.

A bit anvillicious.

Best Moment: When you realise her attackers are getting the exact same injuries her husband had when he died. Sooooo smart.

Worst Moment: Rory Kinnear as a small child. It looks weird.

Best Performer: Jessie Buckley.

Opening: Harper travels to a holiday home. There are some things which could be standard but are instead really creepy shots.

Closing: Batshit insanity. Can’t sum it up.

Best Line: “what is it you want from me?” “your love”

Original Review here

Minions 2: The Rise Of Gru

Ups: Weirdly good opening credits. Very Bond-like

It is much better than the first one.

Downs: For one thing, the timelines doesn’t work out.

Can’t contain the momentum over a long period of time.

Does anybody want this?

Waste of supporting cast.

Best Moment: The opening credits.

Worst Moment: The plane sequence, a bit too silly.

Best Performer: Taraji P. Henson

Opening: A villain steals a map in the 70s. Just an excuse for cheap puns. Some of which did make me lol though. Then leads through to a character called Wild Knuckles (terrible name), who steals something, then gets betrayed by the villain group he’s with. Does a good job of setting up the villains.

Closing: The person you thought died, didn’t. He was never referenced in the other films so I assume he died like 5 minutes after the events of this film.

Best Line: “Call your mom, it’s ransom time” “She might pay you to keep me”

Original Review here

Unhuman

Ups: The line “What in the upper-case fuck?” is one I’m going to have to steal.

Oooooo pretty colours.

Downs: The directing could be better, there’s a conversation at the start which is weirdly shot, with some editing decisions which are definitely conscious choices, but seem like mistakes.

The bus crash itself is well shot, but there’s one a moment in it where someone bashes their head on the chair in front and it has no impact at all, but she gets a broken nose.

Should be gayer. That may not make sense, but watch the trailer. That makes it seem like it will, at the very least, have some degree of non-straight sexuality to it. But it doesn’t.

Best Moment: There’s a great split second moment where a guy is handed a menstrual pad to pass over to someone with a broken nose to help clean up the blood. The pad is new and in an unopened box, but the guy still acts with utter revulsion. I don’t know where that was the actors decision or the directors but it’s really smart.

Worst Moment: Whilst the mid-point plot twist is pretty cool but depends on things happening exactly as they do. So if you think about it for more than a single second the whole thing falls apart.

Best Performer: Brianne Tju.

Opening: Really happy joyous music over a blumhouse logo. Unexpected but fun.

Closing: Everyone who survived is back on the bus, the teacher turns out to have survived. The two villains then get recruited by an anti-drug crusader.

Best Line: “Let’s just hope we hit a racist so we don’t have to feel bad”

Original Review here

X

Ups: Is well aware of what it is and what it’s trying to do.

People who like it, will really like it.

Downs: Very cruel to the characters.

Just not my kind of horror movie. That’s the biggest issue. I can talk about a lot of my issues with it, but my biggest one is it just wasn’t for me. Like how I never vibe with Rob Zombies work for some reason. Some just don’t gel with my horror sensibilities.

Best Moment: Pearl pleading with her husband to have sex with her. Very sweet.

Worst Moment: Same moment, but the fact it was met with disgust and laughter by some of the audience in the screening is kind of bleak. “ewwww, old people want to have sex”

Best Performer: Jenna Ortega

Opening: A group drive to a house, planning to make porn. Could have slipped in a few more Texas Chainsaw references, or get rid of it.

Closing: One of the cops finding a camera, “what’s on there?” “probably some fucked up horror movie”, END!

Original Review here

X (2022)

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick synopsis: A group of people try to film a porn movie at a cabin belonging to an old couple, who strongly oppose the idea and decide to show their thoughts on the matter by writing a strongly worded letter to the local council. No wait, they murder them.

If you are thinking of watching this, go see it at the cinema. Not because it’s particularly great and you need to watch it immediately, but because the title means it’s going to be a bitch to find on a streaming site.

Let’s get one thing out of the way; this is not for everybody. It’s heavily focused on sex and violence, so unless you’re comfortable with both of those things, you won’t like this. It doesn’t shy away from the violence, and it doesn’t shy away from the sex. The whole thing feels slightly grubby, which is something that works in its favour. This isn’t a modern film, it’s a 70’s throwback in terms of style. It does work a lot of the time, and Ti West is a talented enough director that you never forget the time period that it’s set in. Now, as anybody who read my review of Censor knows, I love my throwback films. Especially when it comes to horror. And I don’t shy away from films about sex and killing people (I mean, one of those things is my favourite thing to do on weekends). I also like films about film-making, and am not afraid to see them going weird, as seen in Black Bear). So in some ways, this film was designed for me, yet I’m not that fond of it.

Part of that is because of how it sometimes utilises the throwback style in terms of film-making. The gimmick of “it’s edited like a 70s film” actually kind of gets in the way sometimes. There are far-away shots that don’t really tell us anything, and moments where it cuts to something for a second and then cuts back. It’s jarring, but not in a “horror movie making me feel unsettled” way, but in a way “this was edited manually and they botched it”. So it feels less like a throwback love letter to a genre, and more, just incredibly dated.

My main issue though? The same issue I have with a lot of modern horror films. The same issue I had with The Gallows, Unfriended, Don’t Breathe, Escape Room 2, Fantasy Island: I don’t like the characters. They’re annoying, selfish, not that likeable. So when they die, you’re not sad, or emotionally affected at all. If anything, you’re relieved.

The only slightly sympathetic character is one of the killers. She has a tragic backstory and her motivations do kind of make sense, although it’s never clarified exactly why that drives her to murder. She doesn’t get as much focus as the other characters though. The film spends so much time developing doomed characters, and not the location. At one point one of the characters finds the rotting corpses of a naked man in the basement, and someone else finds (presumably) his car in the lake (in a delightful shout-out to Psycho). Those things are glossed over really quickly. Was that person the only one? Or do they have a long history of this? The film comes close to answering this. One of the characters escaped the couple, and overheard them talking about throwing a body in the river. The actual ending of this is in the trailer, one of the cops finding a camera, “what’s on there?” “probably some fucked up horror movie”, END!

So, is she the reason the police are there? If so, why aren’t they draining the lake? If not, then why are they there? There are no houses nearby for people to have overheard the commotion. Really, they’re there to bookend the story, but it’s done quite poorly. Just full-on ape the ending of Psycho and show the car being retrieved, and then news footage of the discovery of bodies, to let us know this wasn’t a one-time thing, they’ve been doing it for years. I mean, think of the shot that ends From Dusk Till Dawn, where the camera pulls out and you realise the bar is not only built on an Aztec temple, but there are hundreds of vehicles there, all of them belonging to drivers who didn’t survive previous nights there. It’s not talked about often but it’s one of my favourite ending shots because it provides a history to everything, it shows that this has happened a lot before, and we’re just lucky enough to see the ending of a story that’s been being told for years. It hints at hundreds of untold stories just like the one we witnessed, only with unhappier endings. As opposed to this, which ends with nothing of substance.

I think it tried substance, there’s a preacher being shown on the television throughout, and at the end, it’s revealed that the main character is his daughter, who ran away to star in porn. A reveal that changes………..absolutely nothing. It doesn’t change what we think of her, or the situation, or anybody else in the film. It adds absolutely nothing outside of irrelevant backstory. It might as well have ended with “And that house where all the murders happened? It used to be a slave ranch”. It’s like, “yeah, and? Who gives a shit, that’s not relevant. Stop padding your word count”.

None of this takes away from the unarguable talent of everybody involved. Mia Goth continues to usually be the best thing in every film she stars in. Jenna Ortega has a great “final girl” quality (as anybody who watched the new Scream can testify), Martin Henderson has a strange, slightly Matthew McConaughey-esque quality to his performance.

So in summary? Maybe see this, some of you will like this a lot more than I did, and some of you won’t. It just wasn’t for me.