The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: the final part of the Atlas Shrugged trilogy. And, as mentioned before, each film changes out the entire cast and halves the budget. So, how badly will this adaptation fare?

• So, we now know who was John Galt: a man who responded to an attempt at a more equitable distribution of the means of production by vowing to stop the motor of the world. And by that, we mean he basically told the world he was going to take his ball and go home. And by his ball, I mean pretty much anything that kept the world going. And this is meant to be heroic.
  
• So, Galt's Gulch apparently has this sort of Hunger Games technology that keeps the rest of the world from knowing what it even was.
  
• Well, that was surprisingly tender of a romance for something from Ayn Rand.
  
• Why do I get the impression that regulation isn't the only thing keeping an X-ray tablet from being invented?
  
• So, is Ragnar Danneskjold going to actually do anything? And since when is the Costa Concordia a freight ship?
  
• So, the elites of the world are on strike, but they have no demands and have no expectation of getting the rest of the world to see things their way, which, if I recall, runs counter to the entire point of a strike. Also, the world is going through a major crisis because the most important people are gone, and they say they left nothing behind.
  
• And, of course, they use Bitcoin, because why the fuck wouldn't they? And without the Internet, apparently.
  
• So, what exactly is Ragnar even doing living in the Gulch? And wouldn't this create a plot hole about what he was doing fucking over intersea commerce while he's basically living a shitty Libertarian equivalent to a Hallmark Movie?
  
• You know, maybe it might have been a good idea to elaborate on some of the scenes in the montage.
  
• Why does the incompetent Jim Taggart have so much power? Because of patriarchy?
  
• So, wait, do you expect to let Dagny back in or not? Is it going to be easy to find it or not? Why is the decision for Dagny to leave the Gulch so convoluted?
  
• And this business talk has devolved into meaningless buzzwords. 
  
• And John Galt has decided to try and rejoin the real world. And engage in unusually consensual sex for an Ayn Rand book.
  
• So, it looks like John Galt's speech has been scaled down to a bit less than five minutes, and if you have autoplay on for this video, the next one is a reading of the full speech, which is 195 minutes:
  
  
  And it's honestly a mystery how a speech like this is actually inspiring. The actor has zero charisma and is basically gloating that he's taken the people the world depends on, and he's not really offering much of an alternative. He's not even saying it in an eloquent way, and we even get a taste of the eloquence they removed from the film as a title in the end.
• Watching the president try to offer John Galt power in the wake of massive protests against him is downright surreal to me less than six months after seeing Trump try to cling onto power in the face of the obvious fact that he lost the election.
  
• And it's strange to see Tim Brooke-Taylor as a torture technician.
  
• "The End" "No, it's the beginning." An ending line so trite they used it TWICE>
  

So, next week is probably going to be a horror movie, and here are my options:

• Alone in the Dark, wherein The Reverend finally looks at a film by Uwe Boll.
  
• Apartment 1303, wherein Hollywood strings together a bunch of ghost movie cliches and calls it a J-horror film.
  
• Bear, wherein a bunch of idiots try and fail to outsmart a bear who's obviously just a guy in a suit. 
  
• Haunting of Sharon Tate, wherein some exploitation filmmaker decides to piss over the grave of Sharon Tate.
  
• Jurassic Shark, wherein giant sharks can swim in rivers that are apparently supposed to be an ocean and they shill for a local microbrewery.
  
• King of the Lost World, wherein the Asylum rips off King Kong.
  
• Shark Exorcist, wherein they film a shark movie in Nashville.
  
• Transmorphers, wherein the Asylum decides it can't tell the difference between Transformers and The Terminator.
  
• Werewolves of the Third Reich, wherein Josef Mengele and Ilse Koch run a concentration camp, are married, and there's barely any werewolves until the last fifth of the film.
  
  

[Foxaèr]

Thunder Force

In a world where supervillains are commonplace, two estranged childhood best friends reunite after one devises a treatment that gives them powers to protect their city.

[Foxaèr]

Things Heard & Seen

An artist relocates to the Hudson Valley and begins to suspect that her marriage has a sinister darkness, one that rivals her new home's history.

[zwanzig]

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020). Very disappointed and angry. I have been wanting to see this for a while.

 Terror grips a small mountain town as bodies are discovered after each full moon. Losing sleep, raising a teenage daughter, and caring for his ailing father, Officer Marshall struggles to remind himself there's no such thing as werewolves.

That's a fun concept, you know? 

But then most of the narrative with Marshall was consumed by the equivalency made between his alcoholism and the allegory of hunting down this monster that's killing people and his denial of it being anything other than a human man. I thought it'd be a dark comedy ala The Dead Don't Die (2019); it wasn't. The worst part is that without a quirky music choice(you know the kind, like Drowning Mona, to let you know that yes, these people are assholes but it's funny because it's absurd) the increasingly frequent angry outbursts by Marshall don't come across as quirky or funny in their absurdity. He's a huge dick to literally everyone and it makes him unlikable.

I get it. They wanted to lean into the "alcoholism=werewolf hunt" thing they were doing. So, his outbursts as the film goes on, are actually supposed to heighten our concern for his fracturing stability. Except, from scene one, he's short, he yells, and he blusters. Again, the only thing I can think is that it was intended to be humorous, that he's the "uptight guy" who cartoonishly rants at folks about petty stuff. But without that music that lets you take it light-hearted, instead, it's this guy with a short fuse abusing everyone. 

Tl;dr :: it had a tone problem. And by the by, the plot is very run of the mill. 

[Foxaèr]

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020). Very disappointed and angry. I have been wanting to see this for a while.

I remember liking that movie. Jim Cummings was also in Thunder Road. You probably wouldn't like that one either. His brand of humor is certainly unique.

[Foxaèr]

I was not impressed with Things Heard & Seen.

The quote from the beginning should have been a clue:
“This I can declare: things that are in heaven are more real than things that are in the world.”
― Emanuel Swedenborg

As this review states:
It’s safe to assume any movie that opens with a quote from 17th century pluralistic-Christian theologian (and big time spiritualist) Emanuel Swedenborg has a lot on its mind......

Yet, at the end of the review, there is this:
But while the movie keeps returning to the idea of death as a bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds, it never finds a way to connect the two sides of the story it’s telling, which ultimately defangs them both.

In other words, don't bother watching it.

[Foxaèr]

In the mood for some fun animation, so The Mitchells vs. the Machines

A quirky, dysfunctional family's road trip is upended when they find themselves in the middle of the robot apocalypse and suddenly become humanity's unlikeliest last hope.

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project, in commemoration of the 76th anniversary of the Soviet Union winning the Battle of Berlin, and my managing to find a first edition of Lifton's The Nazi Doctors, I'm going to take on Werewolves of the Third Reich. And, as someone who's kind of a beast in this area of history, I'm looking forward to tearing this movie a new asshole.

• GodDAM, those American soldiers' accents sound fake as shit.
  
• So, how does drinking equal loving your enemy?
  
• Well, so far, it looks like this is just going to be a low-rent version of the tavern scene from Inglourious Basterds. And, bear in mind, that was probably the slowest part of the film.
  
•  As laudable a goal as killing Nazis is, I'm more than a little disturbed, partly that Uncle Sam's willing to put someone who's clearly so unstable in the Army, and partly that they're finally making the Inglourious Basterds pastiche more blatant.
  
• I'm not 100% about that, but I think the term is "Verpiss Dich!" and not "Fick Dich!" At least at this point in time, when American media hasn't saturated Europe's media.
  
• Why is Auschwitz an abandoned high school?
  
• Wait, Ilse Koch is working with Josef Mengele? Didn't they work in different camps? Like the nickname "The Bitch of Buchenwald" would suggest?
  
• And why are they still using sewn-on patches and not tattoos? Of course, I suppose the work-shy/asocial types identified by those triangles might be ideal medical subjects. And why are the prisoners still speaking German while Koch is speaking English? Or is that supposed to be Polish?
  
• Is there a reason Hitler's trying to talk through a speech impediment? I don't think his meth addiction ever got that bad. That said, I suppose it makes sense that Hitler, as drug-addled as he would be by that point, would entrust such a program to Mengele, who was, by this point, a Nazi scientist even the other Nazi scientists had zero respect for.
  
• "Why are you doing this?" Honestly, this scene has been going on long enough that I don't even know why the SS officer who sounds like a drunk Grover is forcing the scientist to blow his head off, even though they have everything they need to make more of the serum.
  
• And why is the framerate suddenly so shit? And why is the only sound a royalty-free tremolo guitar cover of "House of the Rising Sun"?
  
• I've been about a third of the way through this movie and only now have I managed to find a scene that connected to any previous scene.
  
• Why does the US uniform look more at home in the UK?
  
• And now we're plagiarising from Full Metal  Jacket?
  
• And the soldier's using Briticised pronunciations? Lemme guess, he's either me, or he's a British actor pretending to be a Yank.
  
• And the Nazi posts quotes two of Dirty Harry's catchphrases in as many sentences. 
  
• Huh. Evidently Mengele and Ilse Koch were married this whole time. Even though Ilse Koch's actual husband was an important part of her crimes, y'know, in Buchenwald. 
  
• Huh. High-ranking Nazi officials listened to Bessie Smith, even though the blues is almost certainly nowhere near as Aryische enough for the standards of Nazi ideology. I would never have guessed.
  
• Oh, look, it's 66 minutes in and we finally get a werewolf in this werewolf movie. 
  
• And apparently, Ilse Koch isn't the sociopath she was in reality, since she sobs at the prospect of mercy-killing her former lover-turned-werewolf, giving him the chance to kill her.
  
• Also, that werewolf makeup is clearly a latex mask. 
  
• Somehow, I only just noticed now that the four main US soldiers have beards. I'm not counting that against them, but I'm almost certain the American military would. 
  
• You Nazi Fuck, Punk Off!
  
• So, Ilse's a werewolf now? 
  
• And there's a bomb all of a sudden, Why not?
  
• Being a shit-shoveling farmer becomes a lot more bearable when you moonlight as an abortionist. 
  
• Okay, in fairness, it's honestly satisfying to see Mad Dog kill Josef Mengele instead of him just stroking out while swimming. Why the gang's back together after all this time is a riddle for the ages. 
  

You know, the sad thing is this is fairly decent by the admittedly very low standards of the Deep Hurting Project.  So, it looks like a kid's movie's up next: a choice between Bands on the Run, Disco Worms, and Zoo Wars. Now I'm off to check and see what's still on Prime this month.

[zwanzig]

Gretel and Hansel (2020)

I...liked it. The ending had an uplift to it, turning it into a fantasy/fairy tale rather than a horror film. However, I loved the imagery and aesthetic choices and I thought the plot was pretty well done. As far as a horror about a young woman being seduced by magic and powerful dark forces, The VVitch (2016) did it better.

[Angrboda]