Are All Men Pedophiles? [Netherlands, 2012]

Nine Things about the Movie Are All Men Pedophiles?

1. This is an unusual documentary about the natural attractions that men have to younger girls. It weaves together threads from evolution, religion, psychology, and society.

2. A lot of time is spent explaining that what a lot of people consider pedophilia is really hebephilia (which is attraction to adolescents). This distinction is very important to narrator/director Jan-Willem Breure.

3. There are interviews with victims of pedophiles, and admitted pedophiles.

4. The movie highlights the hypocrisy of western culture, which condemns attraction to younger girls while simultaneously portraying girls as sex objects, especially in the fashion industry.

5. The movie does a remarkable job of walking a fine line on the subject... as much as one can. It seeks to understand the different forms of men’s attraction to girls, without condemning all forms outright. This has caused controversy, and the director has been accused of not having a strong enough agenda, making him kind of suspicious.

6. The movie also makes the case that the fear of pedophilia has gone too far, that paranoia is taking over, and that men and boys are being taught that they are naturally a danger to girls.

7. There is a weird strangeness to the film, due to the way the interviews are edited. The people move and talk in slightly abnormal ways, almost like they were computer generated. It’s very creative, but it’s also very distracting.

8. After the credits, you see director/narrator Jan-Willem Breure give his own answer to the question in the title of the film. It’s sort of a bold answer.

9. This is an interesting, confrontational, and sometimes uncomfortable examination of human sexuality. It leaves you feeling that love and desire are hopelessly uncontrollable, no matter how society tries to structure them.

As I Lay Dying [USA, 2013]

Nine Things about the Movie As I Lay Dying
1. I was in college the first time I read Faulkner’s mysterious, profound, stream-of-consciousness novel “As I Lay Dying”. It blew my mind. I didn’t know people could write like that. I also agreed with the general consensus that it was one of those books that could never be made into a movie.

2. James Franco took on the challenge to make it into a movie. So with a fellow student, Matt Rager, he turned the book into a script. Then he directed it and starred in it, as well.

3. It’s about a Mississippi family in 1930 that is nearly destroyed - mentally, physically, and emotionally - while on a trek to bury their dead mother.

4. In order to capture the unique and difficult style of the book, the film often breaks up into a split-screen form, with the same scene playing from different angles or different times. Sometimes there are two separate scenes playing simultaneously. There are a lot of voiceovers. It uses a lot of Faulkner’s actual writing.

5. Yes, the coffin is built on a bevel. Vardaman's mother is a fish.

6. While Franco is technically the star, and plays Darl (probably the biggest character in the book), this is truly an ensemble cast. The most memorable performance is from Tim Blake Nelson, who plays Anse, the hopeless, luckless, toothless father. His performance is mesmerising.

7. Even though the movie is American, you will probably need to turn the subtitles on, since the dialogue is spoken in an uneducated Southern drawl.

8. The studio that made the movie decided not to release it in theaters.

9. I don’t use the word “masterpiece” very often, but this is one. In it’s own way, it is as mysterious and profound as the novel itself, while also making it (slightly) more accessible.

And you can say what you want about James Franco, but he continues to be one of the only true artists around that can bring unique visions to cinematic reality.

Tiny [USA, 2014]

Nine Things about the Movie Tiny

1. Capitalizing on the “maker” movement and the “downsizing” movement, this is supposed to be a small documentary (it’s barely an hour long) on the recent popularity of building tiny houses, which are houses under 400 square feet. But it’s not really a documentary. It’s a home-brewed screed against consumerism. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I was hoping for a more balanced and informative piece of filmmaking.

2. The movie follows a guy named Chris as he buys a piece of land in the middle of nowhere in Colorado, and builds a tiny house on a trailer. Chris is assisted by his angst-ridden girlfriend, who stresses on what is the meaning of “home”, probably because she wants to move to New York City while her boyfriend is getting ready to leave the entire civilized world behind.

3. Even though the movie is only lasts an hour, it’s about 30 minutes too long. It makes all of its points very quickly, and then repeats them over and over. This is why, in between watching scenes of Chris building his house like an HGTV special, we see lots of pictures of other tiny houses. Lots of pictures. Lots of them.

4. The movie also interviews other “tiny housers” while they wax romantic about their life perspectives. They are earnest and friendly, but they come off sounding a little smug and pretentious. They give us nuggets of wisdom like:
“The world gets a lot bigger when you’re living small.”
“The whole world is now my living room.”
“I wanted to be larger than the small person that I needed to be in my big house.”

5. Very little discussion is given to the problems of tiny houses, such as storage, occupancy, and privacy. And only once does the movie acknowledge the elephant in the room: Chris admits that there’s a weird irony in what he’s doing. He loves open spaces, so he bought some and built a house on it. But if everyone did that, there would be no more open spaces left.

6. I think it’s funny that one of the gurus of tiny housing lived for a decade in buildings of less than 100 square feet, but then broke down and bought a 500 square foot house to live in with his family. He has another tiny house in his backyard.

7. One thing the movie never really touches on is the psychological makeup of these tiny housers. A lot of them are the crunchy granola types. But Chris literally wants to live on a 10 x 12 foot slab of wood hundreds of miles from other people. He’s determined to do it whether his girlfriend stays with him or not. That’s really interesting, but it’s never explored. Probably because it’s his girlfriend doing most of the filming.

8. The movie tries to make you feel bad if you don’t want to be like these people, or if you are not in a position where you can do it (like if you have kids). And in case you don’t learn the lesson that tiny houses are a wonderful, natural state of being, the film ends with an aerial shot of Chris’s house surrounded by grass, trees, and a rainbow.

9. This movie is mildly interesting, but a lot of it is nothing more than personal home movie footage, and doesn’t really explore the topic like I was hoping. Perhaps most critically, the movie backfired on me. While I was neutral on the topic before I saw this, now I find that the fad of tiny housing is kind of silly, creepy, and hypocritical.

Apocalypse Now Redux [USA, 2001]

Nine Things about the Movie Apocalypse Now Redux
1. I saw “Apocaypse Now” for the first time when I was in college. And I didn’t totally get it.
I understood it intelletually, but I didn’t totally get it.

2.It was made in 1979. But in 2001, director Francis Ford Coppola did a complete re-edit of the film, and he added in almost an hour of footage that was cut from the original version.
Now I get it.

3. If the saying is true that “war is hell”,then this is the tourist route. It’s a gonzo, trippy, epic Vietnam war masterpiece. I don’t even know how this movie got made.

4. It’s about an ex-soldier named Benjamin Willard, that obviously suffers from PTSD. He talks about his disastrous attempt to regain his old life, only to return to Vietnam to hunt down a renegade colonel named Walter Kurtz, and kill him.

5. Most of the movie chronicles Willard’s experiences before he even finds Kurtz.

6. The picture of Vietnam that is shown to us is of a morally desolate landscape where no-one is usually in charge. If someone is in charge, they are insane.

7. Vietnam is a place where sex is negotiated for gasoline, soldiers take acid to make their tour more enjoyable, and special forces soldiers become gods.

8. The cast of the movie contains many actors who were famous at the time, and some that would become famous later - like Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall, Lawrence Fishburne, and Dennis Hopper.

9. Vietnam was a unique chapter in American history. “Apocalypse Now Redux” is a unique, depressing, insane chapter in American cinema. Love it or hate it, you won’t forget it.

Berberian Sound Studio [Britain, 2012]

Nine Things about the Movie Berberian Sound Studio

1.This mindbender is a movie about making a movie. It’s partly a drama, and partly a tribute to the giallo films of the 1970’s. It’s by a fairly new director, Peter Strickland.

2. It’s about a shy, introverted foley artist (that’s the guy in charge of sound effects in movies) named Gilderoy that makes a trip to Italy to work on a film that he thinks is about horses. Gilderoy discovers the movie is actually a horror movie, and he is responsible for making the torture and killing scenes sound realistic. This does not sit well with the more peaceful nature of Gilderoy, and he has trouble doing it.

3. The producer and director of the horror film are rude, egotistical, and sexist. Their behavior gets progressively worse. The horror scenes get more extreme. Gilderoy is feeling more stressed and uncomfortable. 

4. Eventually, his reality begins to crack. He starts to become detached, and the boundaries of his life get fuzzy. And then, well, it’s hard to explain what happens next. He seems to slowly become fictionalized. His life transforms, in bits and pieces, into the movie he’s working on. I think.

5. While the movie being made is a horror film, we never see any of it.The director of the real film, Strickland, reverses everything. Instead of seeing the various tortures and murders being depicted, we just witness the ways in which the various sounds of it are created. This makes the movie quite educational.

6. Fans of 1970’s Italian giallo directors like Argento and Fulci will appreciate the camera work and the soundtrack of this movie (and the one in it).

7. As you might suspect, this movie is all about the sound. Pay attention to how and when sound is created, used, and repeated. They provide one of the few clues to what is actually going on.

8. It’s hard to say if the movie actually means anything, or if it is just a “Twilight Zone”-ish head scratcher. If Strickland is trying to say something deeper about movies, or life, or whatever, it probably comes from the fact that the killers in giallo films stereotypically wore black gloves and a trenchcoat. Look for where that shows up in this film.

9. This is an impressive film for the director, who had only made one film before this, with his uncle’s inheritance money. It’s a creative, strange tale of movies and madness. And lots of garden vegetables.

ReGOREgitated Sacrifice (USA, 2008)

Nine Things about the Movie “ReGOREgitated Sacrifice” (USA, 2008)

1. The second in Lucifer Valentine’s “Vomit Gore Trilogy”, this is the sequel to “Slaughtered Vomit Dolls”. In case you needed one.

2. It’s made for a niche audience into extreme and violent fetishes, including vomit fetishes. It’s also made for people who want to learn how far they can push themselves into watching extreme fetishes.

3. As for the almost non-existent plot, it seems to be the continuation of the death of Angela Aberdeen, the sweet girl who was abducted and turned into a devil-worshipping, bulimic prostitute. But it also seems to be a bloodier and more traumatic remake of “Slaughtered Vomit Dolls”.

4. There’s a strange tribute to Kurt Cobain towards the end of movie.

5. The camera and audio work provide a slower, more methodical assault on the senses than the first film. This makes it simultaneously more interesting and more difficult to watch.

6. I wish I could dismiss the film as being a pretentious, boring piece of crap, like the “August Underground” series. But I can’t. There is something going on here that I can’t explain, but which is disturbingly compelling.

7. The depiction of the psychological outlook of the abducted girls being used as sex slaves is hauntingly authentic.

8. The sadism and sexual torture in this film are… noteworthy. There are things done in this movie that are so bizarre that you wouldn’t believe it even if I described them to you.

9. If you have the slightest question about whether you should see this movie, then you shouldn’t. You can’t unwatch this movie. It’s made by a psychologically unstable person for a psychologically unstable audience.

Amores Perros [Mexico, 2000]

Nine Things about the Movie Amores Perros [aka Love’s a Bitch]

1. This movie is the first of director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Death Trilogy”. Don’t take the word “death” literally here - there are different kinds of death. 

2. It consists of three separate stories in Mexico City that intersect in one random, life-changing moment. 

3. The first story is set around the dogfighting culture. A young man is obsessed with his sister-in-law, and attempts to win her away from his brother who is an abusive, small-time criminal (this story was Gael Garcia Bernal’s first film role, who is one of the best actors to come from Latin America in a long time).

4. The second story is about a supermodel and her secret boyfriend, who is cheating on his wife. When things go bad for the supermodel’s career, and her dog gets trapped under the floorboards of the apartment, the stress on the couple reaches a breaking point.

5. The third story is about a homeless man who collects stray dogs, follows people around the city, and sometimes shoots them. When he collides with people in the other two stories, he begins to question what he’s doing.

6. The script is engaging and well-constructed; the choices a character makes in one of the stories cause consequences in the other stories. But none of the characters ever actually meet each other. It’s like a chain of dominoes that you didn’t even know was set up.

7. Dogs play a significant symbolic role in each of the stories, and serve as metaphors for the deeper themes of love, loyalty, freedom, exploitation, and violence.

8.There are a lot of graphic depictions of dogfighting and other cruelty to animals. Iñárritu was heavily criticized for this, but he wanted to give an honest depiction of the underground economy in Mexico City, which includes dogfighting.

9. “Amores Perros” is an examination of different forms of love, and different ways that love can cause chaos in life. It’s a smart, original drama that makes you care about the characters. And in the end, it makes you reflect on your choices, and how those choices may impact people you’ve never even met.

Slaughtered Vomit Dolls (USA, 2006)

Nine Things about the Movie “Slaughtered Vomit Dolls” [USA, 2006]

1. This vile, experimental film is the first of a trilogy.
98% of people don’t need to see this movie. They don’t even need to know that it exists.
1% of the population will be turned on by it, which probably means they need to seek psychiatric help.
1% of the population may be able to distance themselves from the content of the film and look at it from a cinematic and cultural perspective.

2. There isn't really a plot. I think it's about a cute little girl that grows up and becomes a pretty young woman. Then she becomes a prostitute that dedicates her life to Satan. Then she becomes bulimic. Or something.

3. The visuals and audio are distorted and upsetting. Jump cuts and strobes seem deliberately intended to cause seizures. Dialogue is slowed way down or played in reverse.

4. There are scenes of people being slaughtered and dismembered. We see one extended sequence where a woman’s eyeballs are slowly dug out of her head.

5. Between the scenes of torture and killing, we get to see people puke. Not fake movie vomit. They make themselves actually vomit onscreen.

6. In another scene, a woman gets her arm cut off and then she is handed a guitar, like she is supposed to play it.

7. The movie gets more unpleasant from there.

8. At first I thought the movie was just pretentious. But as I kept watching, unable to make myself turn it off, I realized that it passes way beyond pretentious. For such an obviously low budget, the movie has an undeniable, if shockingly ugly, power.

9. This is transgressive cinema at its peak. It seems determined to assault your psyche until your mind either recoils in instinctive, visceral disgust, or else breaks through to a zen-like place where it can emotionlessly witness the horrors that humanity can dream of.

V/H/S 2 [USA, Indonesia, 2013]

Nine Things about the Movie V/H/S/2

1. In 2012, “V/H/S” was released. It was an anthology horror film, about some people that break into someone’s house in the middle of the night. They find a room of VHS tapes, and one person stays behind to watch the tapes, which turn out to be “found footage” horror films. There was about 10 minutes of interesting material in the wholemovie.

2. Here’s V/H/S/2”. It is an anthology horror film, about some people that break into someone’s house in the middle of the night. They find a room of VHS tapes, and one person stays behind to watch the tapes, which turn out to be “found footage” horror films. There is about 5 minutes of interesting material in the whole movie..

3. The first story is about a guy that gets a video camera for an eyeball, which lets him see dead people that move his video game controller and teapot. He meets a girl that got an electric ear, which lets her hear dead people, including her fat uncle. She has to take her clothes off to get him to leave. Together, they meet other dead people, who are mean.

4. The second story is about a zombie attack. Now, you might think that a zombie attack, told from the point of view of a camera on a zombie, would be interesting. But you would be wrong.

5. The third story is about a cult that waits until a documentary crew arrives before they go on a murderous rampage and give birth to a demon. The story makes absolutely no sense, but it’s the best story of the whole movie just because it has the most gore.

6. The fourth story is about a group of teenagers that like to have sex and masturbate. But their fun is ruined when aliens invade their house and start killing them. This time, we know the whole terrible story because a camera was attached to the family dog.

7. This movie underscores the problem with “found footage” horror films. Everybody needs to be filming everything at all times. People need to have cameras in their eyes, on their bikes, on their helmets, in their clothes, in their house, in their car, and on their dog. And they need to all be filming 24/7. And once everybody is dead, someone has to find all the footage and edit it together into a story.

8. If you think the “Paranormal Activity” films are documentaries, this movie might scare you. Otherwise you will laugh at the cheap effects, the cheap scares, and the cheap acting. Characters will think of the stupidest thing to do, and then do it. Not to mention the fact that each story barely has a plot, anyway.

9. This movie proves that “found footage” horror films have not only jumped the shark, they’re not even in the water anymore.