Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

"It's always the same and it's always different."


Director: John McNaughton
Sneak Reviews Man: Can I help you?
Anna: Yes, we're looking for something scary. Creepy. And Scary. It can be trashy, too, if you need. Mainly just, scary.
Sneak Reviews Man: Oh. La la la. I have just the thing. Not trashy in the slightest. It's called Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
Anna: Yes please.
Sneak Reviews Man finds the DVD in question. The DVD is rented.
Anna (watching movie ): Oh my.


I'm not a person easily phased by yr average mass/news media explicits. I keep my mind pretty open as well as my eyes and if I haven't seen it, read it, heard about it, or (my god!) experienced it myself it must really be something. This movie sounds (and was) interesting, entertaining. Just like Ripperology sounds (and is) both interesting and entertaining. Or maybe like those shouts coming from your neighbor's window. Or anything you read on snopes.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is what it is. Meet Henry. Hello Henry. He's young and a desaturated handsome. There is something very void at his surface. I thought of it like watching The Joker in The Dark Knight, knowing somewhere in your retinas that it is actually Heath Ledger under there, but also that Heath Ledger is dead. Let's follow Henry into the late morning, from diner to car to mall to Chicago suburb, cutting frames periodically to reveal the dead bodies of several woman, left in different ways in different places. Back to Henry. Oh, what a nice woman he's tailing. And that's just the opening credits.



If you shoot someone in the head with a .45 every time you kill somebody, it becomes like your fingerprint, see? But if you strangle one, stab another, and one you cut up, and one you don't, then the police don't know what to do. They think you're four different people. What they really want, what makes their job so much easier, is pattern. What they call a modus operandi. That's Latin. Bet you didn't know any Latin, did you kid?

Make-Out with Violence (2008)

"Dead is the present tense."

Director: Deagol Brothers

My restless anticipation for this movie to be at my fingertips was probably equal to what I've now simply decided to call a bout of "Watchmen Syndrome". Most anticipatory. When I finally got a copy in the mail, I didn't quite know what to do. You see, friends, my last name is sprinkled about the credits of this film. For the past four years (or more) or so, I've been catching snippets up from Hendersonville, Tennessee where not so distant (and yet quite distant) relatives and their friends have been working arduously on this movie. I'm pretty sure a computer crashed at one point and they fixed it using their own blood.





Marked a "Rushmore meets the Exorcist... Weekend at Bernies meets Solaris."

Here is a list of things to say because I can only think in list right now.
--I thought it was brilliant.
--Most quotable.
--Most Ridiculous Soundtrack.
--Grand Jury Award at the 2008 Atlanta Film Festival
--Ron Tibbett Excellence in Filmmaking Award at the Memphis Indie Film Festival
--Most Best.

Okay, I'm biased. But if you know me and you do not feel creepy contacting me (and by that I mean, you have the means to do so and would feel comfortable doing so) you better do so so I can show you this movie. Or you should contact them. Here. Or here. If you are a distributer you should buy it for as much as your heart tells you to and spread the awesome to the masses.

Eagle vs Shark (2007)

"I almost came as a shark actually, but then I realized an eagle's slightly better."


Director: Taika Cohen


If this movie asked you out on a date, you would say yes.
It would probably have a blog, and blog about you and the date afterward.
You could graph your giggles and cringes on a sinusoidal graph.

We all saw witnessed the pubescence of the bright, quirky romantic-comedy awk-fest, shuffling down the hallway of movie high school, aware of its hair and lips and mannerisms. I'm talking over-saturated color, 80's fantasy t-shirts, bold wallpapers, mumbled slang.

(On that note: http://www.dharmarose.com/stores/store_fantasy.html)



Of course, Eagle vs Shark was really entertaining. Really. Really. Obviously. Of course! It made me laugh, made me uncomfortable, made me hurt, made me smile. (I will confess, the hardest I laughed was when Jarrod reveals his mother died because she was "kicked in the head by a cow"). Really, the main thing that kept the film from slipping into "another Napoleon Dynamite" or "funny like Juno" or "bizarre like Me and You and Everyone We Know" was the accents, the culture. God bless New Zealand. Oh, and the soundtrack is beach-day catchy-nice (whatever I mean by that, it's positive). And the sleeping bag stop-action is great. And the animated apples. Ha-ha-ho-hum.

Terrible quality, but:


Oh. And it really doesn't help that yours truly has an entire ventricle of her heart reserved for Flight of the Conchords.

The English Patient (1996)

"New lovers are nervous and tender, but smash everything. For the heart is an organ of fire. "

Director: Anthony Minghella
Adapted from The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

It has been a while since I have read a truly beautiful novel -- poetry disguised as non-linear, adventure dream-fiction. It has been a while since I have watched a modern blockbuster, especially one so romantic and Oscar-popular (9, including Best Picture, mister). The English Patient certainly quenched the drought of both. The novel came to me through several adamant recommendations, and I finished it over the course of three or four sleepless nights, head propped up by pillows in an empty bathtub. For some reason this detail adds considerably to my experience with the novel--strangely comfortable, cold, and cushioned in from all sides. The experience was delicious, delirious, a culmination of all the qualities I adore in reading fiction. The novel was romantic and tinged with darkness, but strayed from details and a general tone that could warp it sappy or hackneyed. It's books/films like this that keep the cynic in me at bay, at least to the point where it can sleep nights. Similarly, the film tugged at the heartstrings and the mind. In the context of war, where every win means a loss for someone lands away or hiding next door, no character is simple, shading solely good or bad. The characters are accurate adaptations, possessing both real and fantastic qualities. As it is 92% of the time, while I preferred the book leaps and bounds over the movie, both works were truly enjoyable.

I'll spare summarizing the book's plot because it's far to lovely and intricately blanket-weaved to get anywhere in a modest paragraph without stripping it of what it's worth. Of the movie I'll say that the author's presence on set certainly maintained the idea well, but significant plot points have been both cut and added to make the film more filmy ( I suppose to relate the four main characters a bit more, in a cyclic-like manner). Aesthetically, my god. It's gorgeous. DVD Director commentary described the film in two ways, half of it being the work of a watercolorist and the other half the work of a graphic designer. This contrast was established in changes in time, between the 1944 scenes at the monastery and the earlier Almásy memories in the desert. It was recorded that editor Walter Murch made over 40 time transitions in the film. Minghella wanted to "make the past urgent" because it holds the central significance in the film, and the bright, crisp heat of the desert enhances this effect startlingly well. The Italian countryside, drifting on the other end of the color scale, honestly appears as if the violets, greens, and browns melt water-like into one another. This use of a shift in color and tone is a break from tradition, given that the usual method is to make the past more iridescent and dream-like and the present more clear and dry-crisp.

Feelings

I feel like this has been a long weekend. I feel like going to sleep. School feels like giving me a lot of work. I feel like I have a precalc exam on Tuesday. I feel like I have an extensive presentation on The English Patient due Wednesday (the book aaandd movie, so keep yr peepers open for a post on that ala Rashomon in the near future). My feelings told me that The English Patient was pretty good, book better than the movie but thats the way most of the time.

I feel tired, and a bit like somebody's shot me in the arm.

Exhibit A:

Le Samouraï, Jean-Pierre Melville

I feel like my mind is going.

Exhibit B:

2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick

I feel like a vegetarian in Ukraine.

Exhibit C:

Everything Is Illuminated, Liev Schreiber

I feel like once I get my act together this place will be thrivin' again.

(Still excited about) Watchmen (2009)

The Author kills time and proposes potential storyboards to her pal John one Wednesday afternoon: