Archive for August, 2010
Snarky Cinema: A Nightmare on Elm Street
This is a movie review, as you might have guessed from the title. I’ll be doing these pretty much whenever I feel like I can be bothered. Occasionally they’ll be newish movies because my college is nice and shows movies a couple months after their release date in the basement of our technology center – for free. Which is good because a lot of these movies I wouldn’t pay to see.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010, directed by Samuel Bayer, distributed by New Line Cinemas)
Warning: If you actually, you know, care about spoilers, well…there are some below. Of course, if you don’t know what’s going on in Nightmare, then you’ve probably been living under a rock. And don’t have an internet connection.
For those of you who have been living under a rock, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a remake of the 1984 film, A Nightmare on Elm Street, which was directed by the master of horror himself, Wes Craven. In the original, a group of teenagers start dying in their sleep in gruesom, creative fashion after a psycho with knives for hands stalks and scares the crap out of them. In the remake, three teens die after they have some trippy dreams where they briefly encounter a creepy guy. Not really scary.
Here’s my main problem with this movie: in the dark theater, with about fifteen other people, as Freddy was running around slicing and dicing people (and I use that pretty loosely because there really wasn’t a lot of violence on his part, and technically speaking he only actually killed four people), I was falling asleep. I will say that again – while watching a movie about people being murdered in their sleep, I couldn’t be bothered to stay awake. The movie was just flat out boring. (Although the night was redeemed by the two guys sitting behind me playing MSTK3000. My personal favorite was when the protagonist of Nightmare said (exact quote) “I don’t know what’s real anymore,” and one of the guys behind me came back with “Well, maybe you should have made a totem, b*tch!” And when the protagonists couldn’t wake up: “Should’ve synchronized your kicks through all four levels, retards!” For those of you who haven’t seen Inception and don’t get those references, you should really, really watch it. I would not be surprised if it got best picture at the Oscars this year. Unlike Nightmare, which was so mediocre that it probably won’t even get a Razzie.)
There are a couple of reasons for this:
1.) While I am grateful that the screenwriters and directors refrained from taking each character and then giving them one trait that they would then ride into the ground for the rest of the movie or until they die (as most horror movies do), the fact is that that would almost have been preferable to the little to no characterization that actually happened in the movie. Almost everybody’s got a trait, yes, but all of the characters are pretty much interchangeable. All of the players are just so darn inoffensive and uninteresting. Nancy (played by Rooney Mara, who has done nothing of note but yet somehow has had her name thrown up in conjunction with the titular role in the Americanized version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), the intrepid protagonist, is an artist and one assumes the awkward shy kid. (She interacts so little with other characters that you kind of have to assume it.) Quentin (played by Kyle Gallner, who was fantastic as Cassidy “Beaver” Casablancas on Veronica Mars), the kid hopelessly crushing on Nancy, has meds that help him focus. Dean (played by Thomas Dekker, who played John Connor on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) likes Kris. Kris (played by Katie Cassidy, who has been in a lot of B-horror movies and was Liam Neeson’s daughter’s friend in Taken) likes Dean and was the one who did a lot of the expositing in the beginning of the film. Oh, and the dude that played Emmet Cullen in Twilight: The Saga of Robert Pattinson’s Hair was in this too. He died. I rejoiced.
All of the actors in this for any length of time are capable of playing (if not dynamic) then at least not-static characters. And yet I spent a substantial amount of this movie laughing at flat line deliveries and really not caring about who died.
2.) There is a fine, fine line between letting tension build and boring your audience with long, would-be tense scenes. Bayer doesn’t even know where that line is, let alone how to toe it. I will say that while I was just about spot on for when a jump-out scare would occur, Bayer did tend to put them in what would (for other people, at least) be slightly off from the expected place in a scene (ie, there is a scene where a character wakes herself up from a Freddy dream and goes to the bathroom to wash her face and wake up and what not, and darn it all if Freddy’s face didn’t appear in the bathroom mirror over her shoulder after she closed the medical cabinet. I was impressed by Bayer’s restraint in this instance. However, thirty seconds later she gets back in bed and I said (out loud) “Have fun waking up next to that face” and thirty seconds later Freddy rolls over and kills her.) This movie is maybe 0.097% jump-out scares and 87.3% exposition and tracking shots through dark hallways. And only 7% teens getting killed (counting the big long fight scene at the end, and (hihglight for spoilers) nobody actually dies during that fight. This is a bad, bad ratio.
3.) I know I’m spoiled, but I watch a lot of crappy made-for-TV Sci Fi original productions. And while the makers of those movies by and large don’t know how to write dialogue, cast people who can act, direct coherent fight scenes, or create anything resembling a clever or coherent plot line, what they do know how to do, and well, is come up with clever, outrageous, gruesome deaths and ever more interesting ways to throw gore around. As a professionally produced and budgeted project, Nightmare 2010 has no excuses for the pathetic kills in this movie. The stupidest (and funniest) death in the movie was when Kris got tossed around her bedroom like a ragdoll and then got sliced from sternum to navel. I think that they were trying to channel echoes of The Exorcist, but mostly I just thought it looked stupid and was pretty freaking hilarious. There are four deaths in this movie, and not a one of them so much as pays homage to the gore-soaked death of Johnny Depp in the original Nightmare (there’s a minor allusion to it once (and not during a kill), but nothing approaching the original). (*Highlight the empty space if you want to know how he died: He gets eaten by his bed (in his dream, but what happens in the dream happens in real life because every time I get bitten by a zombie or blown up in my dreams or stabbed by a monster I fail to wake up soaked in blood or in little itty bitty pieces or with a ravening taste for human flesh) and then what must be around 50 gallons of fake blood and gore gets regurgitated out of the bed. This scene kind of set the standard for gratuitous gore use until such delights as Saw and Hostel came out. That was a sarcastic “delights” because while I do enjoy scary violent movies, I do not enjoy toture porn which is what the latter editions of Saw and pretty much all of Hostel are.)
4.) Jackie Earl Haley is not Robert Englund (the original Freddy). Usually, I would be able to accept this and move on, but in this case it peeved me greatly. First off, somewhere along the line the decision was handed down that they would try to make Freddy 2010 look more “realistic” as a burn victim. I want to be clear here: the point of Freddy’s face is not to accurately reflect what the flesh and face of a burned man come back to life to haunt your sorry butt would look like. It is meant to scare the ever-loving snot out of you. As my roommate put it after she saw it: “He seriously looks like a mouse.”
You can judge for yourself:
You know who he looks like in this picture? Rorschach, from Watchmen. Which makes sense since Haley played him, too. Rorschach is so crazy awesome. The scenes in the jail...that was...man, those were just beautiful. I like Haley a lot better as Rorschach. In case you were wondering.
You know what I like best about this picture? The angry homicidal glee on his face at the prospect of eviscerating you. That's Robert Englund, btdubs.
These were actually the best pictures I could find out there in cyberland. They don’t really convey the depth of boringness and terror, respectively, that each iteration encompasses.
Haley just doesn’t capture the playful glee that Englund had. That makes me sad. And it makes Freddy a lot less scary.
5.) Today is just rag on Haley and Bayer day. One of the most striking things about Englund’s version of Freddy is that he is funny. (Admittedly, in a really, really dark way.) It’s not so much on display in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), but in the sequels he will be quipping at you as he strangles you with your colon. We only get a couple of quips out of him during the entirety of Nightmare 2010. Granted, those are some pretty good quips, but there were not nearly enough of them.
That’s about it – this movie is just bland.
5/10 – bland
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I Care
If you have ever hurt, please read this. I am here for you.
I am going to be almost completely serious in this post.
This isn’t really for your entertainment; this is for your health.
The other night I was on Facebook and I found one of my friends liked a link that led me to a website called “Six Billion Secrets.”
You know me; you know how I joke that I can’t be a CA (RA, to other colleges) because if someone ever runs out in the hall at four o’clock in the morning threatening to kill themselves I’ll ask them to hasten the process so I can get some sleep and to be nice to the janitorial staff and do it in the shower for easy clean-up.
I can say this kind of thing during the day, when it’s funny. But night is different. It is currently 1:05 AM on a school night, and reading the secrets of what is not, admittedly, six billion secrets (but still a lot) has made me kind of introspective.
What’s my secret? Well, it’s not really a secret (I just don’t talk about it much because it doesn’t exactly come up in everyday conversation), but right around the time when I was in six/seventh grade I hurt all the time. Emotionally, I mean. To a certain extent I felt that way for at least a couple of years prior but didn’t realize it. But in middle school that all came to a head for whatever reason; on numerous occasions I found myself crying for no apparent reason whatsoever. I hurt like hell and I couldn’t think of any reason why I should so I just sat in the dark by myself. Luckily for me (and by extension, everyone who knows me and likes my company), my mom found me crying in her bedroom and asked if I needed help. I said yes.
Two-and-a-half years of counseling later I entered 9th grade happy and completely functional. Yes, I am occasionally sad, but I am certainly no longer clinically depressed.
However, those years of pain changed Me. Me as I am today is pretty different from Me in elementary school. Back then I was one of the quieter kids; I didn’t really have anything resembling a sense of humor, and I tended to take things pretty seriously. The whole caustic sarcasm thing developed in middle school. It was a defense mechanism then; it’s just part of Me now. Back then I could get really, really angry at times (for actual reasons – this wasn’t just random anger/depression side effects all the time); now, you have to work really good and hard to get me past the “irritation” stage into full blown anger and rage (although it is, admittedly, pretty easy to get me to the “irritation” stage.) This is because generally I no longer take things as seriously as I once did and ergo can’t really be bothered to get really mad at you for, I don’t know…eating the last M&M in the trail mix. Yes, I will be irritated, but I’m not going to hold a grudge over it past the ten seconds during which I give you my Angry Eye Squint. (To clarify, this is what we call a “generalization” – it means that generally this is true, but that you should not get me started on gaming, grammar, or people who don’t signal when they change lanes. Those are all Serious Business.) So if ever any of you should wonder why I am how I am, most of it traces back to middle school.
I don’t tell you this because I particularly care if you know why I am how I am; while I do like having a high public approval rating, I don’t actually need anyone’s approval or well wishes to validate myself. (Except for my Mommy and Daddy. I’m always going to need their approval. And it wouldn’t hurt to hear it more often.) I bring this up because I know where those guys on Six Billion Secrets are coming from.
If you didn’t bother clicking the link, Six Billion Secrets is an anonymous website dedicated to venting. People with a secret that they can’t share with anyone they know can go on this site and post about how they were molested as a child and can’t function normally now, or how no one knows how much they hurt inside, or how all they’ve ever wanted is someone to care.
My usual response to this is “suck it up, we’ve all got problems,” but that’s probably just the caustic sarcasm talking. Again, it’s late at night, so I’m feeling introspective and serious here.
The fact is, we all hurt sometimes. If we didn’t feel pain we would have no measure with which to gauge our joy; this is essentially life’s currency – it’s a coin with two sides and you’ve got to have both of them. But some of us hurt more than others. Some of us have really, really, really good reasons to hurt more than others. Usually when I hear about how someone wants to kill themselves I think “You know what? Suck it up. I’m still here. You can tough it out, too.” There are only a couple of problems with this thought; one is that chances are in the high 80% range that I would not be here now if my Mom hadn’t found me that night. (While recently throwing away old papers that had accumulated in various improbable places in my room, I found a piece of paper that scared the crap out of me, because it read exactly like a suicide note. I can’t help but think of the “Many Worlds” theory of quantum mechanics, and wonder in how many alternate realities I died almost a decade ago. I didn’t remember writing the note. I burned it.) The second is that I…really didn’t have anything to be depressed about, I guess. Yes, I was genuinely in a world of hurt, but I haven’t had anything particularly horrific happen to me. I haven’t been abused in any way, ever, in my life, and while people that I have deeply cared about have died, every member of my immediate family is alive and by and large well. So not to minimize what I was going through – because it was serious – but there are a whole hell of a lot of people out there dealing with crap I can’t even begin to comprehend. I went to college last year as a freshman and I met some people who, to be perfectly blunt, aren’t nearly as fu screwed up as they should be. There are pretentious wannabe wangsters out there who do need to shut up and get over themselves, but mostly the people out there who post in places like Six Billion Secrets are trying to deal with real issues – without any help.
The thing that annoys me about those posters, though, is when they say things like “I hurt so much and I wish people would see that.” And now I am getting to the whole point of posting on this particular subject:
To posters on Six Billion Secrets, and anyone else I happen to know who needs to hear this: I am a clueless, self-centered, emotionally lacking cynic. I CANNOT SEE YOUR PAIN. Most of the people around you CANNOT SEE YOUR PAIN. I, and those around you, cannot provide support for you if you don’t tell us that you need it. Occasionally you will have the amazingly insightful person who will look at you and “see” your pain. Take a good look at everyone else, though. Most of the time, everybody around you doesn’t even know when they’re hurting, let alone when you are. (Take me, for instance – one of the reasons I know that my problems truly developed earlier than middle school is that in fourth and fifth grade I just kept feeling that there was an essential wrongness in my life. This was actually emotional pain. It didn’t go away until ninth grade.)
To anyone who reads this: I can’t read your emotions. I don’t know if you’re in pain.
So please tell me.
I know that all but a couple of you would never really think of me as the kind of person that would want to listen to your problems. This is partly my fault. I know that I come off as a mildly psychotic sociopath, but the truth is that even I don’t know how much of that is a holdover from defense mechanisms I developed to cope way back when. The thing is though, that there are a couple of people out there that have confided their deepest, darkest secrets to me; for some of them I was the only one they trusted enough to talk to or I was the only one they could talk to. You don’t know who they are and you will never hear it from me; in fact, none of you knew that people confide in me because aside from telling you to talk to me, right now, you will never here me talk about who talks to me about this kind of thing ever again. Your secrets are safe with me. I won’t tell anyone if you ask me not to.
But please, talk to me if you’re hurting. You may think nobody cares. You are wrong. Even if nobody else in your life cares, please know this – I care about you. If you have directly gotten this link from me via Facebook or me telling you about it, then you are one of the people I care about. You know what? Even if you are just some random person on the internet, I care about you. Everyone deserves to have somebody who would miss them, even you. Especially you. And if you have nobody else I will be that person for you. (On a related note, this is not an invitation to stalk me. I care about you in a completely platonic way; the fact that I care about you is not to be construed in any fashion such that you interpret this to mean we’re in a relationship. I have watched L&O: SVU a time or two, in case you were wondering. I am not afraid to rip your throat out with my teeth if you approach me on a dark night from behind without identifying yourself.)
Anybody out there – anybody at all – if you need to talk, I will listen. I can’t give you advice in most cases, because I tend to have a very limited repertoire of techniques for dealing with my own problems, let alone yours, but I can at the very least give you a shoulder to cry on and a friendly ear and put you in touch with people who can help you better than I can if you want me to.
I cannot stress this enough – I care. Please trust me enough to tell me that you are hurting. My Mom knew that something wasn’t quite right with me, but even she – somebody who lived with me and had known me my whole life – had no idea just how bad I was hurting. I don’t live with most of you, and I don’t know most of you deeply enough to know when something is wrong. I know it takes a lot of courage to ask for help, but believe me that it is so, so much better than the alternative.
I know I’m not always the most approachable person on the planet, so if you need to, shoot me a Facebook message – it’s easier to ask for help sometimes if you aren’t doing it face to face. If you aren’t Facebook friends with me, leave a comment with your e-mail address (all comments have to be approved by me in order to be posted where everyone can see them, and I will not post a comment with your e-mail address, so this is completely confidential. I would post my e-mail address, except I kinda don’t want that on this public of a forum. I trust you people but not the bots from dAtE H0TT gUys dot com.) If you aren’t hurting but you are one of those insightful people who knows someone who is and you need help or need to vent, please tell me. I will listen.
I am here for anyone who needs me. And, if any of you are wondering, no, I’m not hurting right now. There are a bunch of people I know who care about me – who would miss me if I am gone. If ever you are wondering if anyone would miss you – I would.
Also, please don’t have existential crises at four in the morning.
But please, please come find me if you do. Even if it is at four in the morning.
I care.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )Miscellaneous Musings: On Lab Safety Discussions and ACS Videos
I am a science major. Therefore I have to take sciences classes which require me to work in what is known as a “lab” setting. Here, on a weekly basis, I behave like an adult while working with potentially dangerous chemicals and refrain from doing stupid things that could kill myself or others.
Unfortunately for me, this means that every single lab I take requires me to listen to what is essentially the same spiel about safety in the lab (the only differences from class to class is which safety rules the professor chooses to emphasize; what they choose to emphasize is a good indicator of how stupid previous lab sections have been.) Now that I’m a lab proctor (this means that when the professor isn’t in the room I have the task of making sure that nobody does anything for which the school could potentially be held liable) I get to listen to the safety spiel even more. (Except then I get paid to listen to it. I’m not going to ruin the message here by mentioning how TOTALLY AWESOME that is.)
“But Carla” -you might ask- “don’t these safety spiels convey important information that is necessary to keep everyone safe?” Yes. Yes they do. AND THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING. Yes, I do believe that some people should die. Anyone who has ever chatted with me when the subject of Ahmadinejad, Roman Polanski, or people-who-don’t-signal-when-they-change-lanes came up knows this about me.
I’m just going to say right here and now: If you are in a college level science course, this means that at some point you have passed high school or gotten a GED. This means that you have, at some point, demonstrated that you have the ability to read, write, and follow basic instructions. It would also imply (since this is a requirement of graduating high school in most states) that you have had, at some point, a science course, where you would, at some point, have already been told all about lab safety. THEREFORE – at this point in your life, if you think that it is an acceptable practice for you to eat or drink things that you have made out of chemicals that came from bottles with skulls and crossbones on them, nature is telling you and everyone around you that you need to die. Your genes are not fit to be passed on. If you are that monumentally lacking in common sense and basic reasoning skills at this point in your life then there is no way that any of your other genes can make up for the abominations that you have released or will release upon this world.
Yeah...just...yeah. I'm a fan of early season, diabolical-take-over-the-world Stewie, but really, he's just gay now which is kind of an old joke. Chris is the posterboy for this principle, and let's face it - Meg is a butt-monkey.
Another thing – does the American Chemical Society just not make safety videos anymore? And by anymore I mean for the past thirty years or so, because I have yet to see a safety video that did not proudly display ’80s fashions or ’80s scripts.
I only bring this up because the safety video I saw today for my organic* chem lab featured such amazingly well-acted and deep, thought provoking characters as “BURNadette” and the Academy-Award nominee, “REXPLOSION!” See what I did there? I capitalized the punny parts of their names. And put an exclamation point on the end of “Rexplosion” because he’s the kind of guy that would stick that on there. Oh God I want to shoot myself.
In fact, that video starts off with an anonymous college freshman who eventually gets a name (which I forgot, because honestly, who cares?) walking calmly and sedately into a college science building. I would like to state for the record that he gives absolutely no indication that he is suffering from severe mental illness, which is weird because he has a psychotic LSDish hallucination thirty seconds later. Also, I would swear that he was wearing pink lipstick.
In this hallucination, our dear freshie who I’m just gonna go ahead and call “Freddy” (fun fact: Freddy is the name of one of my roommates’ fish; it is also the name of the protagonist of the movie I am going to watch sometime this week, who bravely defends moviegoers against terminally stupid or promiscuous teens – I am, of course, referring to my good friend and colleague Freddy Krueger, although I firmly believe that Jackie Earl Haley just can’t compare to Robert Englund) witnesses the Emmy-award winning duo “Burnadette” and “Rexplosion” discussing something or other (I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were saying so much as I was listening to a fake accent that would make Bela Lugosi snap and go on a killing spree and watching the unbelievable overacting that would make Shatner weep with envy) while waiting for some dude who had the word “mess” in his name, so I guess he would be the anthropomorphic personification of cleanliness and good tidings. The best part of this whole scene is the billowing fog effects and the red lighting that makes it look like a scene out of Little Nicky. Or the parts of Little Nicky where Hitler gets the pineapples shoved up his…face. Hi Mom! Hi Dad!
Freddy snaps out of his reverie when he is approached by a female chemistry professor who is altogether far better looking than any female character from an ’80s production has any right to be, and then they go off to her office wherein she awkwardly tells him a bunch of stuff that he will be told again when they have the safety presentation for his lab. AND BOTH CHARACTERS KNOW THIS! Or should know it. Common sense would dictate that. Of course, common sense was not something heavily on display in this movie…
Anyway, that part of the movie is pretty normal and straightforward and doesn’t advocate the use of hallucinogens, but it’s too little too late. I’m sorry, ACS screenwriters – I can’t take anything you say seriously after that. You thought you could connect to kids via this…thing? Clearly you people are seriously lacking in judgment and good taste, and I shouldn’t take anything you say at face value. Will behaving in the lab responsibly really keep me safe? Will my goggles actually protect my eyes better from chemical splashes than my Batman-like reflexes and eyelids?
I don’t know anymore.
I just don’t know.
*I realize this footnote kind of ruins the impact of that elegant ending statement, but I wanted to mention that there is another (better) safety video – that does not drive its intended viewing demographic insane via hum’rous skits involving desperate-out-of-work actors – for the gen chem labs. The highlight of this video is when the narrator goes something along the lines of
“If you spill corrosive chemicals on yourself, get in the safety shower immediately.” All this over a video where a guy gets spilled on
and then starts taking off his shirt in the safety shower while (and this is important) the guy who spilled on him looks on. Then, “Take off ALL your clothes – don’t let modesty be the cause of serious injury. Your lab director will make sure the other students leave so you have privacy” – this over footage of a pile of growing clothes. The last thing to hit the pile? The dude’s underwear. Then the video immediately cuts to the same guy in the shower (sans clothes) WHILE THE GUY WHO SPILLED ON HIM IS STILL RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM. The narrator is a liar. And this video has homoerotic undertones.
Things I Like and Other Miscellaneous Musings 