moments is a short film by chris cronin. it's kind of a musical, although there aren't any songs, just dancing. it's basically about this guy who seems to be perpetually part of someone else's romantic moment and the story is him trying to find his own 'moment'. it's a simple idea that's well presented - you get it right away and that's important in a film that's only five minutes long.
what's really striking about this film is the production values. the dance numbers are great and look really professional, but also it looks like everyone on screen is involved in the production. in a lot of shorts, the filmmakers don't really have the budget to close off streets or use dozens of extras, so scenes either end up looking sparse or it's obvious the filmmakers are stealing shots of members of the public to use as unsuspecting extras. in this it looks like they must have closed off half of London and hired a hundred extras, which i'm sure isn't the case but they really pull off that sense of creating a whole world in front of the camera.
the other thing i really liked is how beautiful they make london look. i go to london a lot, it's not that beautiful. mostly it's busy and dirty and grey. so to see london looking like the set from a golden age hollywood musical is amazing.
the one criticism i have is that i was expecting some kind of twist on the idea, whereas it actually kind of plays out exactly as you expect. that may just be me though as i'm so used to seeing shorts that set up a premise then twist it at the end.
otherwise i think this is a fantastic little film and definitely worth five minutes of your time. i guarantee it will put a smile on your face.
i am a little bit in love with the step up films. i suppose it;s the kind of thing you'd call a guilty pleasure, but i don't feel that guilty about it. the thing that attracts me to them is that the stories are always centred around these characters who have pressure to do something safe and boring with their lives, but really they want to be doing something different. i can relate to that.
so i'm a bit behind because step up 5 came out last year and i'm only just catching up with the fourth one. this one is a bit of a departure in that the usual dance crew competing in a competition storyline had been changed...actually no, they're still trying to win a competition. what's different is that it's a youtube competition and they're trying to get the most hits from performing the best flashmobs. while this doesn't have a huge effect on the story (there's still a classically trained dancer who needs to incorporate street dance into her repertoire so she can impress the judges at her school or whatever) it does change the dances quite a bit. rather than the usual aggressive posturing and the crew on crew contests where it's impossible to tell who's winning, the dances are more original and stylised. there's a fantastic sequence in an art gallery with neon lit ballet dancers.
the story itself disintegrates over the course of the film. at one point looks like it's going to deliver a really serious political message, but it never really follows through with this and the crew drop their revolutionary stance the moment money is mentioned. there are some truly ridiculous moments too, but overall you can't watch a step up film without smiling and ultimately it's about the dancing, which in this film is amazing.
i was in a westerney mood after playing call of juarez so i decided to watch the lone ranger movie from like, last year? the year before? can't remember, but i missed it at the cinema and then promptly forgot it existed.
i didn't enjoy it all that much. i mean, the end is good, but it takes quite a while to get there with numerous problems along the way. i mentioned a while ago that if i came across anything i didn't like all that much i wasn't going to write a review at all. there's too much negativity online as it is as there's no point me adding to it. so like i did with chill i thought i'd talk a bit about me instead. the problem is i've been drinking so this may go horribly wrong.
the lone ranger is quite appropriate for what i want to talk about, in that it's about someone who wears a mask. my profile picture is not my face and my name is not paz. i hope most people would have assumed that already and this isn't a huge surprise. i have reasons.
in my last year at uni i wrote my dissertation on youtube, how it had evolved and where it could develop in the future. it had kind of a negative vibe because in all honesty i didn't get youtube back then. i was, and still am, really into films and couldn't see the attraction of the short form video diaries that youtube mostly seemed to exist for. i was interested in the portrayals of reality on youtube though, from an academic point of view - how by showing you five minutes of their life a vlogger can give you a totally false impression of who they are. then again, some videos i've seen have been entirely too honest, uncomfortably so. the thing is, i was watching so much youtube in my research that gradually i did start to get it. i went from curious observer to casual fan to obsessive fan and finally i started making my own videos.
no, i have not been entirely honest about my desire to start making youtube videos. it would actually be a return, not an initiation. i did, at one stage, have my own channel. i hadn't made many videos and they weren't great, mostly just film reviews and stuff, pretty much like i do here but on camera. i'll admit that i was overambitious, that i wanted to become zoella overnight and used to obsessively watch my view count and tweet endlessly for new subscribers, so maybe for all my analysis and research i didn't get youtube after all. but i was enjoying it. i was really happy that year. i was in love, i had a group of really great friends, i was really enjoying my studies. i had no fucking clue what i wanted to do afterwards but back then it didn't matter. i'm talking about this like it was decades ago, but it was like a year and a half, it just seems like a lifetime to me.
i started to get these weird comments on my videos. they weren't nasty or anything, just odd at first. this one person, no profile picture and a meaningless string of letters and numbers for a name, starting posting on every video i uploaded, sometimes more than once. then it became clear it was someone i knew.
they started to mention things in the comments; things about me and my friends. the comments didn't mention any names but they would be specific about physical characteristics, like 'the blond one' or whatever. this made me think it was someone watching me and my friends but then occasionally there would be a mention of something personal. not like a secret, but something you wouldn't know unless you knew me in real life. there wasn't anything malicious or threatening about the comments and a lot of them were still nonsense, but there was enough truth for them to be a bit fucking creepy, and there was clearly some agenda there. so i took a break from youtube, and then i went away.
it was a family holiday - me, my dad and my brother. we went to the states for two weeks. i'm not sure how dad could afford it but i think he was having some sort of crisis. he was insistent on us spending 'quality time' together, and that meant we couldn't take our phones or even check emails in internet cafes. he thought this would be good for us, but for me it was the worst thing that ever happened.
when i got back everything was fucked up. the random commentor (let's call him/her a troll because that's what they were and let's go with he because it seems most likely) had somehow hacked into my account. he didn't upload any videos, but he commented on others, leaving the same weird comments but in my name. he emailed my friends, sent them messages on twitter, using the same passive-aggressive tone where he wasn't being overtly malicious, just a bit weird. worse than that, he started flirting with one of my male friends, an ex boyfriend. i think this ex wanted to get back together (in fact, i know he did) because despite the odd tone he responded, although sometimes i think maybe he was hacked too. anyway, the troll sent the e-mail chain on to my boyfriend and that was that.
like i said, everything was fucked up. you think things like this will be easy to sort out, but even the friends who claimed to believe me never really acted the same way around me. my boyfriend didn't believe me at all, and that kind of hinted that maybe it wasn't meant to be anyway, although sometimes i wondered if there were other emails that he'd maybe deleted from my sent items, things that were worse than the ones i'd read.
the timing was fucked anyway. uni was over, most of my friends were moving away including my now ex boyfriend. i couldn't face moving back home and i loved brighton so much i decided to get a job and stick around.
i deleted the videos. i deleted all my tweets, set up a new e-mail account, deleted everything that the troll had touched. then i started again, with a stolen profile picture and a name i like more than my own.
that's why i haven't posted any videos yet. i don't really want him to find me again. i'm sure he's gone away or just doesn't care, the damage is done now. but it still feels too soon.
i'm not sure even posting this was a good idea. i don't know, i've had too much to drink and i'm in on my own on a friday night. i watched a movie i didn't like and i have no one to complain to except people on the internet, and i'm still a little bit scared of people on the internet.
i mentioned a while back i had started playing call of juarez, a game from 2006. i was 14 when it was released (so much has happened since then!) but strangely it doesn't feel that all old. the graphics aren't great and the control system is a little clunky, but unlike a lot of games the story got me hooked and i played it straight through in a couple of weeks.
so it's basically a western about this guy, billy candle, who returns home after failing to find the treasure of juarez. he gets into some trouble in town and when he runs to a nearby ranch to hide he's framed for the murder of the family who live there. one of the victims happens to be the brother of reverend ray mccall, a slightly insane gunslinging preacher who will stop at nothing to do the right thing by god. the player alternates between billy on the run and reverend ray tracking him down.
what really makes call of juarez work is the variety in the gameplay. this isn't just a basic shoot-em-up - there are fist fights, chases on horseback, mountains to climb and tombs to explore. whenever the game verges on being repetitive, it changes things up. there are differences between the two characters as well. billy's sections are usually based around stealth and exploration while the reverend ray sections are mostly about killing lots of people.
billy's levels were my favourite, particularly the one where you have to find a way up a mountain using your whip to swing over crevices. there's also a cool tomb raider-esque section at the end, complete with attacking spiders.
i know red dead redemption is the definitive western game, and rightly so, but in a lot of ways i preferred this one. i do like a good story though, and this one really worked.
vasalisa is a short horror film by lora pendleton. it's kind of a tough one to write about because really the atmosphere created by the sounds and the images is more important than the story, but there is a narrative here about a woman searching for a witch.
the filmmaker employs some really interesting techniques to tell the story. the film is shot in a mix of colour and black and white, and is also full frame rather than widescreen, which makes it feel quite claustrophobic and acts as a nice contrast in the open air scenes. much of the film takes place outdoors, with well chosen compositions that sometimes reminded me of maya deren's meshes of the afternoon (yeah, i studied film theory at uni, deal with it. on a serious note if you haven't seen meshes of the afternoon you should check it out - it's one of the most influential films ever made and it will only take 13 minutes of your time). added to this is a surreal soundscape that creates a feeling of unease throughout.
but despite it's artistic touches this is a horror film and i found the images of the witch, particularly the early flashes, quite disturbing. when the witch finally reveals herself it all gets even more surreal and you're not sure whether she's doing something bad or not, which i think was the point and it's refreshing to see something that allows you to make your own mind up about the ending. the final sequence brought to mind another film i really liked, rob zombie's lords of salem. i know that film divided people but i thought it was amazing and i often find the combination of straight horror imagery presented through an arthouse lens to be really effective.
the one thing i could do without were the still frames as they took me out of the story a bit due to the change in aspect ratio, but other than that i loved it. also, there were no other cast or crew members credited so i'm assuming lora pendleton did everything herself, which is a pretty amazing achievement considering how good it is. if you're into horror or surrealism or both and you have 7 minutes to spare you can check it out below.
american mary is probably one of my favourite horror films in recent years so when i heard jen and sylvia soska were making see no evil 2 i was on board, even if i hadn't enjoyed the original all that much.
story is there's this serial killer dude, jacob goodnight, who was killed at the end of the first film but comes back to life to torment the staff on the night shift at the city morgue. who also happen to be having a party that night.
the thing is, i have a bit of love/hate relationship with slasher films. i love horror films and the slasher subgenre is very much part of that but considering how many slasher films there are it's surprising how few of them are actually any good. i think there's a misconception with slasher films that it's all about the gore and the murders, but that's never really appealed to me. if you take halloween, to me that's always been a film about suburban isolation rather than a film about a psycho killing people. the key scene is the part where jamie lee curtis knocks on the door of a neighbour and no one answers, because it says that for all our desire to be friendly and cordial to our neighbours really we all just want to hide ourselves away and let people deal with their own shit. the really good slasher films, the really good horror films even; they're about something. they're films about ideas and real life fears and stuff that's messed up about the world we live in. that's what makes american mary so great, it's a film about the human body and how it's seen by different people and how gender plays into that - it's amazing.
anyway, i'm rambling. the way i see it, when you make a genre film (not that i would know) you have two options - either you make the best possible version of a film in that genre, or you try to do something new with it. see no evil 2 mostly goes with the first option and does it really well, but there are some surprises in there too.
the first thing the film gets right that so many slashers get wrong is that the characters are likable. i'm so tired of watching a bunch of obnoxious teens talk about themselves and their stupid problems until they're killed off. here, all the characters come off as interesting with their own character arcs, so that when things kick off i really cared about what happened to them and wasn't just waiting for them to die. the relationship between danielle harris (horror royalty) and kaj-erik eriksen (very cute) is particularly well played. that's the other thing - the performances are great. no one is phoning it in. katharine isabelle (american mary herself) stands out as always, but considering she has a rather thankless role she manages to turn it into something interesting and has the most fun with it. the thing about liking the characters is that when they do things like staying behind in the spooky location to help each other out, i didn't think 'you fucking idiots, get out of there' i thought 'yes, you do need to go back for them!'. i believed it. what the helps this works is a slow build-up, so no one dies for like the first 25 minutes. this gives the audience time to get to know the characters and it really helps. the only film i've seen in recent years that pulled this off as well as this was the first cold prey movie (you should check it out if you haven't seen it).
once things do kick off the soska sisters really make the most of the location and their antagonist. there are lots of steadycam shots down long corridors, ,which really reminded me of similar shots in the suburbs of haddonfield. they manage to make the empty morgue seem suitably labyrinthine without losing a sense of geography.
there are interesting themes running through the film too. much is made of the fact that danielle harris's character ran away from being a doctor because it was too hard, and her journey in the film is not only about overcoming fear but also about deciding to stop running. there is an interesting parallel between this and the character of jacob goodnight, a man tortured by memories of an overbearing mother and someone who despite his immense physical strength lacks the emotional strength to challenge his past.
there is also big surprise at the end which i won't go into, but carol clover would be impressed.
i'm not sure this is up there with american mary for me, but it is a really well made film with a tight script (by two brits, nathan brookes and bobby lee darby) and stands out as one of the best in its genre so i really recommend checking it out.
the guest is about a family who lost a son in iraq or afghanistan or whatever, then this guy david turns up claiming he served with their son and ends up staying with them, hence the guest.
on the face of it the guest doesn't seem all that unique. whenever a stranger turns up and seems too good to be true, you kind of know there aren't going to be any real surprises. but the guest is kind of brilliant, in a neat, really enjoyable way. director adam wingard infuses the film with his usual awesome stylistic touches which elevate the experience, and simon barrett's script is a wonderful portrait of a family in crisis. the four family members are so well-drawn and so easy to empathise with that much of the joy of the first half of the film comes from watching david sort out their problems. the situations are very well crafted, with david often taking on impossible odds only to sort out the problem with a few well chosen words or occasionally a single punch. like i said, i knew from the beginning that something would be up with him, but i badly wanted david to be legit, and while the script is part of that it's mostly down to one essential element. dan stevens is amazing in this film. david fits the definition of a psychopath - someone with no empathy, incapable of feeling remorse, and has to emulate what he thinks of as human behaviour in order to fit in. this last part is what stevens pulls off so perfectly. he presents david as a robot that has been programmed to say the right thing, but he infuses him with just enough humanity that as a viewer you're never quite sure whether he's a psychopath or not. other things that are awesome - steve moore's carpenter-esque score is amazing and there are some great songs too. also, the final set piece takes place in a neon-lit horror maze, complete with an enter the dragon style final showdown in a mirror room. any film that ends in a hall of mirrors wins points. overall, this is one of the most accomplished films i've seen in recent months and definitely worth checking out. it was just released and you can rent or buy it most places, so go do that. you won't regret it.
