Testing123
9d ago
I'm 100% with you on horror trailers. The ads before Obsession and Hokum were almost all horror and I was having the same realization, plus they tend to give away way too much of the plots. If I want to see a movie due to the director, premise, or reviews, I try to avoid the trailers entirely.
I saw people bring up the Silent Hill comparisons to Hokum too, and it definitely feels like there's video game DNA in the film, though just as much Resident Evil 1 as Silent Hill. Without spoiling anything, most of the movie takes place in a single building and there's a lot of dealing with locked doors and the structure lay out (even with a map), plus there are some weird puzzle solutions that feel like video game logic.
I like Oddity too but Hokum is better. Similar odd directing styles, but much more budget in the latter to play around with. The Irish setting of Hokum (and Oddity) also gives it a nicely different atmosphere than the typical American haunted house bullshit (like the endless Conjuring knock offs).
Testing123
9d ago
I think we're in the Second Horror Film Renaissance.
Periodically, a new movie comes out and it gets endlessly and hyperbolically glazed on Reddit, in large part due to some combination of annoying group think and botting. I think Obsession, which just came out, is one of the rare films that earns all that stuff. I think it might be one of my favorite horror films of all time. Great premise, great execution, goes in unexpected directions, probably the first time I've seen a movie where the presence of a character makes my chest feel tight throughout the whole movie. It has flaws, but it's so good that I didn't even notice them until after it was over.
Hokum came out last week. It retreads ground horror fans have seen a million times, but it has some of the best tension-building I've ever seen. If it weren't for the really annoying overabundant jump scares, it could have been great, but it's still really good, with a 40 minute stretch of near perfection in the middle.
Next week we get Passengers, which looks alright, and the week after, we get Backrooms, which is A24 and looks really damn cool.
If "Second Horror Film Renaissance" doesn't take off as a title, then either "Young Horror Renaissance" or "YouTuber Horror Renaissance" should. The director of Obsession is only 26, and the director of Backrooms is 20! Both were Youtubers, as are the Philippou brothers (Talk to Me and Bring Her Back), and Zach Creggor (Weapons and Barbarian) used to be a sketch comedy guy, which is pretty much the precursor to YouTube.
I think that's possibly an accurate description of the innerworkings of progressives, but I also think that's an excessively Culture War-brained perspective.
In Bruges isn't about whether murder or prejudice are morally permissible. At its core, the film is about guilt and the potential for redemption through a dual character study of Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson). I think the main questions the audience is supposed to struggle with is whether Ray can be redeemed and try to find happiness after living an evil life which culminated in him accidentally shooting and killing a child while shooting and killing a priest, for money.
Ray's racism and fatphobia are played for laughs and fill out his characterization. They indicate that he is gruff, prickly, generally uncaring of others, and he likely comes from a lower class background where such beliefs are normal and tolerated. The film implicitly acknowledges that Ray's prejudices are morally wrong while also casting them as very minor sins against his more serious crimes. A small part of his redemption arc is apologizing to a dwarf who he carelessly insulted earlier in the film.
Or to put it in your terms, pricing Ray's history of murder and penchant for racism is the point of the film. The viewer (and Ray for that matter) are trying to price them in relation to his potential for redemption.
What my prior post was mocking is the idea than a modern culturally left-leaning American finds it more difficult to sympathize with someone who makes casually racist statements for fun than someone who kills people for money and murdered a child. Both of those factors are presented as flaws in Ray's character in the movie, but the film clearly intends for the latter to be much worse than the former, as I think any ethically sane person would. The podcast hosts inverted their moral focuses because they, IMO, have broken progressive values that raise the evilness of bigotry to the stratosphere. Basically, they have terrible pricing models for rating the evilness of actions.
And I get that if I actually sat down with the hosts of Unspooled and asked them, "do you think that saying 'nigger' is worse than murdering a child?" they would come to the same conclusion as me, but that only further highlights how far their progressive values take them from ethnical reality.
EDIT - Also, the idea that being against racism against fat black women is taking a stand in the modern culture is extremely culture war brained and kind of nuts. Vanishingly few people in the US are anti-fat black women qua fat black women, and the few that are have no political power and don't listen to podcasts co-hosted by the head film critic at the Los Angeles Times. If the hosts talked about In Bruges in this way to signal their contemporary cultural war position, then that is a sad condemnation of their world views and I wished they would just get back to understanding the film on its own terms (which, to their credit, they eventually do).
Testing123
27d ago
I remember listening to a podcast where two (older, white, liberal) hosts were talking about the movie, In Bruges, and they both discussed how the movie can be tough to watch these days because the protagonist, who is supposed to be likeable and sympathetic, says a bunch of racist, fatphobic, and retardphobic (?) things. And then one of the hosts had a moment of clarity and verbalized that the protagonist is also a literal hitman who murdered a child, which is substantially morally worse than making a joke about fat black women.
I've seen it and liked it a lot! A very unexpected surprise, loved the premise procedural execution of it, and the basement sequence is amazing.
I'll throw an Irish recommendation back at you - Double Blind (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14729020/). Phenomenal cinematography for such a low-budget and self-contained film.
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