Saturday, June 16, 2012

THE WOMAN IN BLACK (2012)

Do you like earth-shattering booms that'll shake your speakers right off the wall? You like high-piercing screeches so loud that it'll make dogs two counties over soil themselves? How about jump scenes so goddamn startling that it'll make the cat sleeping in your lap jump up and rip your face off ? If you answered "Yes." to any of those questions then do I have the movie for you! It's called THE WOMAN IN BLACK and it's about a young lawyer sent out to a secluded estate to clear up the paperwork/will of a woman who just died. Bad News Bears for him though because the house is haunted!

At first, it's just random sounds that could be attributed to the wind or maybe birds, but soon enough things escalate to eardrum exploding crashes that sound like somebody detonated an nuclear bomb in your backyard. Alternate that with scenes of crusty phantoms standing around looking sinister and you pretty much have the entire movie. I liked the first 20 - 30 minutes, it had a nice build-up, the house looked creepy and a sympathetic character was created out of the widowed Daniel Ratcliffe, but once the ghosts started showing up there was nothing. Just boom, shriek, jump scene and repeat until end credits.

Worth watching, I guess, if you're easily amused and don't mind the sound of the Space Shuttle coming through your wall every five minutes. If you need me I'll be in my room watching THE SHINING.

Part 2 - The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death (2014)

Friday, June 15, 2012

A DANGEROUS METHOD (2011)

A DANGEROUS METHOD does a nice job of telling a story but to me as a viewer who's not an expert on Carl Jung, Sabina Spielrein and Sigmund Freud I felt like this film was only scratching the surface of the story and the relationships between the three main characters.

The film opens with Spielrein being committed to a psychiatric hospital. Her doctor is Carl Jung and I don't really know how psychiatric hospitals work, but for some reason Spielrein kinda becomes Jung's assistant or something. Time passes and Jung becomes friends with Freud. The friendship seems to be strained from the very beginning because Jung married into money and Freud is jealous(?) of Jung's extravagant lifestyle. Jung also begins an affair with Spielrein which you would expect to be superhot, but it's not. It's not hot in the least and on top of that, the fuck scenes probably don't even add up to 2 minutes total.

I wanted to like this film and while I didn't dislike it I really had no feelings towards it at all. Overall it was a bland, disjointed and boring watch that I will never repeat. Skip it and read the Wikipedia pages on the three instead. I found the one about Spielrein to be especially fascinating. Her husband was murdered during Stalin's Great Purge in the late 1930's and she, their two children and 27,000 others were massacred by Nazi pussies at Zmiyovskaya Balka on August 11/12, 1942. Holy fuck, humans suck.

AMALFI: REWARDS OF THE GODDESS (2009)

Japanese kidnap/political thriller (filmed entirely in Italy) about a Japanese diplomat who gets involved with the case of a young Japanese girl kidnapped two days before a big political summit. His bosses are all butthurt at him for getting involved when he's suppose to be working on protecting the summit but he stays on the case anyway.

Ehh, AMALFI was mildly entertaining, but it never really grabbed my attention. None of the characters were very likeable, the story was too predictable/safe, the kidnappers were pussies and it seemed like everything just fell into place to solve the crime. Worth watching, I guess, if you're really bored, but as for me I'll never watch it ever again. Even the presence of the superhot Erika Toda from the DEATH NOTE series didn't ease my apathy for long.