Good Ear

Well, there’s not much in terms of vampires. Viggo Mortensen looks like he just stepped out of one of those books at Supercuts with the models displaying various haircuts you can get. But the setting is phenomenal; the sun and golden wheat fields and old two story houses. But besides that, the film explores a theme relentlessly which saves it from feeling like a made up gothic story. The film balances itself upon being romantic and being gothic. But the romantic elements are better than the gothic ones. The gothic serve as more of a subtle backdrop. Because like I said there aren’t really any vampires. He gets the ideas about vampires from his Dad who reads a lot. Death is the monster that we can’t escape from. And we pretend other monsters because we don’t want to face the reality of death and mortality. But there is no escape. And what can we do about it? Nothing. And that’s the note the movie ends on. When Viggo shows up he has as much star power and Marlon Brando. No kidding. He’s perfect, literally perfect. And he shows up a little more than half way through. Plays it perfect. And the kid also is on key. Probably understanding more in order to play this part than a kid probably should. It’s obvious the writer was influenced by Melville. Which is an interesting touch, the Melville elements and the gothic elements being in equal measure. We don’t see somewhat low budget movies like this anymore. This was a very well written script. That much is obvious.

I don’t consider M17 to be a movie. What it is is an Avante Garde play. There is no story really. Just a bunch of actors in too much makeup running around laughing and crying as chaos breaks out intermittently.

If I’m going to compare Rent A Pal to other horror movies it’s going to be near the top of the list. It manages to capture the sort of comfortable feeling that accompanies living in your parents basement. Getting wasted. And watching vhs tapes. And pretending to talk to the characters onscreen. It also manages to capture a persons needs for intimacy sort of creating a problem for the not so ambitious individual. The system is savvy to all of the ways of the human being apparently; man must live in accordance to the system in order to be successful in order to receive intimacy. Why cannot a man be content with just his basement and his television? I want woman! The smoke that drives the fox from his hole. Man joins Army to get woman and woman leaves man when man leaves for Army. This story I like a lot. Man is looking down all day because he is heartbroken and he finds an ied. He learns to love the war torn parts of the world because they look like his heart. He comes home and gets married and turns into one of the old man who insults wife all the time. She never leaves. Reality wins every time. The ending as you can probably imagine is a bit over the top. It’s like someone’s cooking a thanksgiving turkey and doing a great job the things golden brown and juicy but instead of just taking the bird out the oven they leave it in and turn the heat up to 450 burnin the bird. Overall, because of what the movie does do good, I would recommend it.

Well, the story isn’t very good. There’s almost no story at all. Were the developers unfamiliar with the genre? In real thug fashion we pretty much crash land on a planet and immediately start destroying the creatures that live there. No attempt is made to communicate with any life forms on the planet. We have zero friends here and a whole bunch of enemies. Is this due to neglect on the part of the writers ( are video games written like movies?) or have we crash landed into hell and is this game more closely associated with Dark Souls and Dead Space than say No Man’s Sky and Outer Wilds? Essentially this game is a horror sci-fi souls like game but because there’s no interaction with anyone at all and no connection to anything at all we end up feeling like we are running around on a desolate planet and honestly as anyone who has ever spent any time in such a place will tell you it is no fun at all. If you look at say Control ( which this game borrows from quite heavily) the moments of interaction with other people at the bureau are essential. Plus that game doesn’t suffer from an identity crisis like this game clearly does. The gameplay is definitely unique. You have to avoid these orbs that the aliens send at you in rows and columns and shoot the aliens simultaneously with your gun ( in third person). The more aliens you kill in a short time you can get boosts and stuff. You get various weapons to choose from. Good variety. Then there’s the roque like element to the game. You are stuck in a death loop. You die you go back to the beginning where your ship is. You don’t take much with you when you die. Can’t recover anything. All well and fine but in a game like this you get the feeling that the developer chose to make it a this way to compensate for a total lack of storyline. I mean, even Doom has a storyline.

The oblique feminist angle is so atrocious that this movie should come along with a package of tampons.

As a Marvel movie there is a lot here to marvel at. What it needed was a sequel. I think a sequel would have been very successful at the box office. But instead we got a couple of reboots, neither of which is bad, just not particularly good like this movie is. The Punisher is for all intent and purposes dead. Killed by the culture. The creator of it himself is trying to alienate his very fan base. The Punisher is developing into something that he doesn't like, per se. I think that some of the actions taken to sort of weed out potential toxic fans has given the entire thing a bad aftertaste like aspartame. Everyone knows this is a shame.