The Last Movie You Watched

[Munch]

I watched Superman Red son.

It was pretty good. I didn't read the graphic novel so had no prior basis to come off of, and given that I still enjoyed it, a very dark take on everything, both on the well known characters, but also showing the contrasting differences between communism and capitalism and how someone like superman, a character often seen as a symbol of benevolence, being raised on communist ideals, how that effects him.

The animation could have been a little better, I know DC animations can be a little stiff at times but overall the visuals and style were fine.

[Rev. Rye]

This week in The Deep Hurting Project is Shut In, and it boasts one of the most prepostrous twists I've ever seen in a film. It stars Naomi Watts as a child psychologist who lives in the middle of nowhere with her teenage (step)son who, after a car crash, is rendered completely catatonic. And I'll just spoil the twist: he's been faking it. He's managed to fool not only his parents, but also his doctors. I should point out that, in the case of Gypsy Rose Blancharde, doctors were able to tell fairly quickly that she had far more muscle tone than her wheelchair-bound life seemed to suggest, and that was why she and her mother kept moving across the country. In this case, I reiterate that he manages to fool EVERYONE. Not only the doctors who should notice something was wrong, but also his mother, who he has been poisoning somehow without her even noticing that he can actually move.

• Also, the kid from Room is in this, and he plays a deaf kid. I don't know why Naomi Watts would be playing memory games with him, why nobody uses sign language with him, or how he seems to actually be reacting to his mother opening the door in a way that only seems to make sense if he heard her. If someone who works with the deaf can enlighten me as to whether or not this is in any way accurate or if I'm missing something.
  
• Of course the scene where she drowns her kid was going to be a dream. Of course.
  
• So, at one point, Naomi Watts goes out just so we can have a jump scare involving a raccoon jumping out of a pile of wood. Okay, there's a later scare about an intruder, which somehow smashes her car window and it turns out that The Kid From Room just happened to be in it somehow.
  
• They cut to a close-up of the door, which has been locked and cannot be opened, BUT STILL HAS A KEY INSIDE IT.
  
  
  
• Also, the stepson somehow manages to spirit The Kid From Room away. Once again, somehow nobody notices that he can actually move. 
  
• The scene where one of Naomi Watts' patients' father asks her out seems like it was just an exposition dump: shame about how your husband is dead, your son is a vegetable, your client is missing, and there's going to be a huge snowstorm in our neck of the woods. Thing is WE ALREADY KNEW ALL OF THIS FROM PREVIOUS SCENES.
  
• And for that matter, why has NOBODY suspected that there might be foul play in this situation? The kid is gone, people are worried, she's the last person to see him alive, she should be the prime suspect. Hell, this should be the plot of the fucking movie. Instead, it's basically turning into a shitty, single mom version of Ordinary People. Or at least, what little I remember of Ordinary People, because I haven't seen it in donkeys, and most of what I remember involves a dead kid, a family, the North Shore, and Pachelbel's Canon.
  
• And why do I get the impression that nothing that's happening to Naomi Watts isn't actually parasomnia?
  
• He grasps onto her hand, and somehow she doesn't notice that this is a significant change in his condition? I really fucking hope that this is Truth In Television for actual catatonic patients, because this is otherwise a sign of her being really stupid. Or the script, really. Honestly, Naomi Watts does a damn good job in this film. It's a shame that the script is one of the dumbest I've ever seen in a film.
  
• So, apparently, the reason the doctors didn't notice he wasn't actually catatonic was because they were lazy and why the fuck am I getting Jeff The Killer flashbacks?
  
• And how did he even GET all those drugs to use on his stepmother without anyone noticing he wasn't even able to move? I've had some trouble getting prescriptions filled that were legitimately filed and even had some refills left in some circumstances. This part seems preposterous.
  
• Apparently, this movie is predictable enough that the twist that some reviewers could tell that the stepson was faking his catatonia from a mile away. Their decision to give him incestuous motivations, that I did not expect. It just comes right the fuck out of nowhere. The first we see, he's complaining about her, the next time we see him ambulatory, he's ranting about how this was a perfect love.
  
• And why didn't he kill Tom? He killed his Dad, he caused the accident with the hope of killing his Dad. What's different here?
  
• To be fair, I liked the scene where the other shrink decides to rush into the house in the middle of a snowstorm only to get an axe to the chest. Of course, it was much better when Kubrick did it.
  
  
  
• The axe... isn't loaded.
  
  
  It's like they're not even bothering to make the kid's insanity plausible at all.

[Rev. Rye]

A brief short film for you before this week's Deep Hurting Project (which should come tomorrow):





It's a fascinating little piece based on a true story. I like the shades of Jodorowsky in it, but the one thing that's disappointing about this short is the liberties it takes about the actual event:

• This was not the king's 14th birthday. He was more like 24 at that point. This ball was actually the celebration of the queen's lady-in-waiting's third marriage.
  
• The king's brother was not so much evil (at least, not on this occasion) as blind stinking drunk. Apparently, he came in carrying a torch and really wanting to get a good look at one of the wild men, whose costume caught fire when a spark hit the wildly flammable costume.
  

The real story is honestly really fucking intriguing and I'm not sure the dialogue-free style would have done it justice. The previous summer, King Charles VI suffered a severe mental break. Looking at the stories, it looks like he got heatstroke on one very hot summer day, shortly after a friend and advisor was almost killed, and it started with a planned invasion of Brittany and ended with an incident in August where he charged and drew his sword against his own knights. He killed four men before his chamberlain subdued him. Shortly after this, he fell into a coma for a few days. Eventually, he got well enough that he was back on the throne. However, they were aware that his mental state was still not up to snuff. So, there was a regency council set up to actually run things, and King Charles basically became part of what would now be called "the idle rich." The doctors advised his court to "be careful not to worry or irritate him .... Burden him with work as little as you can; pleasure and forgetfulness will be better for him than anything else," so, well, he had doctor's orders to focus on frivolities  while other people actually did the work. It seemed to be working for a few months... and then, Queen Isabella's lady in waiting got remarried.

The traditional celebration for a widow's remarriage at that time was a ball, with people getting blind stinking drunk, and what would be called a Charivari. Drunken parading with lots of loud, discordant, music. As part of this, King Charles and some friends decided to dress as "wild men," hairy savages claimed (in fiction or fact, I'm not too sure) to be living in the woods. To simulate this hair, they put flax soaked in resin on linen rags, which were sewn onto them. Flax, it should be noted, is really fucking flammable. Knowing this, at this point, torches were banished from the hall. For a few minutes, they "capered and howled "like wolves", spat obscenities and invited the audience to guess their identities while dancing in a "diabolical" frenzy." And then, his brother, the Duke of Orleans, entered, incredibly loaded and carrying a torch. And, of course, it became la Bal des Ardents, the ball of the burning men. Four of the six "Wild Men" burned to death. One chronicler said "four men were burned alive, their flaming genitals dropping to the floor ... releasing a stream of blood" and fucking Hell is that Metal imagery. Two of them survived. One of them had the sense to jump into an open vat of wine and stayed there until the flames were extinguished. The King was the other one who survived, and this time, it was because he was far away from the other dancers, and his aunt (who was 9 years younger than him, oddly,) managed to smother the flames with her massive dress.

Of course, remember that, before this, King Charles was in a very fragile state mentally. The fuck do you think that seeing several of his friends burned alive before his eyes would do to him? He had some severe attacks of insanity for the rest of his life. Later that year, he had a break severe enough that he forgot his own name, the fact that he was king, and who his wife was. The nature of the madness kept evolving. A few years later, he was convinced he was St. George and again forgot his own wife and children (but not his court). He was known to run wildly throughout his palaces and it was common for his servants to close up the entrances so he couldn't leave. Eventually, he even had a period where he was convinced he was made of glass and had to have iron rods sewn into his clothes to make sure other people didn't break him.

And how fascinating a film about this would be!

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

'Spenser: Confidential'.  Based VERY loosely on the Robert B. Parker novels.  Mark Wahlberg as a former cop who, on his release from prison, decides to clean up police corruption in Boston and clear a friend's name.

I've seen worse films in this genre. Wahlberg is a cut above the actors usually cast in roles like this. Nice to see Winston Duke out of his Wakanda gear.  Alan Arkin playing what he always plays these days - the irascible old coot.

OK fight scenes, not-too-unbelievable action scenes, decent writing.  Chief complaint is that Peter Berg seemed unsure about what kind of a film he wanted to direct.

5.5/10

Boru

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project is Nazi Overlord, the Asylum's answer to the movie Overlord, basically with the exact same plot involving a group of American soldiers on an isolated mission and discovering Nazi zombies, except that, apparently, according to TVTropes, it does nothing with the premise until the last 20 minutes. And even then, they're only on screen for two minutes. Shit like this made me seriously wonder if this could be the worst movie in the Project once I decided to add it. Then again, I hadn't seen Kiara the Brave at that point. Let's find out if it lives up to the hype.

• For most of the film, as mentioned before, the zombies aren't even mentioned. So, instead of strictly being a no-budget Overlord, for most of the runtime, it's basically a no-budget Saving Private Ryan, except nobody can act, and we're following the character dynamics of a small squad of soldiers who don't even have distinct personalities. And the sound mixing is kind of shit so some of the dialogue is pretty indistinct.
  
• Are they using thin Times New Roman as their subtitle font.
  
• India Eris? This sounds like a very unlikely name for a British scientist in WW2.
  
• So, most of the movie is set in Romania. While, for much of the war, it was an ally of Nazi Germany, two and half months after D-Day, King Michael I staged a coup against dictator Ion Antonescu and demanded a ceasefire with the Soviet Union. The timeline is unclear, and since there are no English subtitles and the dialogue could be a bit hard to understand at times, there is still a possibility this takes place sometime between 6 July and 23 August 1944. That said, my gut instinct tells me it doesn't. If it takes place after, this mission shouldn't be necessary.
  
• The People with the Black Crosses? Are the Nazis seriously so alien to the farmers of Romania that they can't just say the name?
  
• During a slow spell, I checked Wikipedia for more info. For what I think is the first time in Deep Hurting Project history, I found:
  
  
  Seriously, the film not only does not have a page on Wikipedia, but for the two cast members listed on the front cover, Tom Sizemore and Dominique Swain, it's not even mentioned in their filmography, and Swain's includes a film entitled, I shit you not, Sharkansas Women's Prison Massacre and it still has its own page. Somewhere out there, there is a Sharkansas Women's Prison Massacre fan laughing at Nazi Overlord!
• It's been barely 30 minutes and there've already been two lovingly shot scenes of strangulation. Who directed this movie? Cheryl/Carol Tunt from Archer?
  
  
  
• There's apparently a crawlspace in the cave. I checked just to make sure that it isn't a recognised term in spelunking for passages just narrow enough to crawl in. As far as I can tell from googling, it isn't.
  
• I think they try to make a pun with "Eris hier?" and "Er ist hier." This doesn't really work, since, if I remember my German from 10 years ago, "Er" is the masculine pronoun not applicable to India Eris, who is female. The correct pronoun would be "sie." What's weirder is the guy responding "of course she's here," uses the pronoun "es," which means "It."
  
• Also, there's a scene where one of the guys threatens a maid during a raid on a German castle.  Thankfully, it doesn't end with said guy demanding she scream and ensure the mission goes horribly wrong just because he's too much of a monster to keep his sexual sadism boner in his pants at the worst fucking time.
  
  
  
• Well, Dominique Swain is clearly phoning in her British accent. Nice to know she's one of those starlets whose career petered out because she's just not that good an actress. 
  
• Is she seriously using the fucking "Velveteen Rabbit" defense as her backstory for why she's turned to mad science?
  
• Okay, it was more like 57 minutes than 70 before the zombies started to show up. I strongly suspect that the zombies are still going to have about two minutes of screentime.
  
• And how the fuck is creating a zombie virus going to help the Aryan race? It's not like they're going to figure out a way for it to be succeptible only to the untermenschen and have the Aryan race exempt.
  
• Ordering someone to not drink the water when it's being poured into his mouth? That's kind of counterproductive, don't you think?
  
• And apparently they created robotic crickets that spread the T-virus.
  
• And it looks like not only do the zombies have about 2 minutes' screentime (but not by much), they do little more than jut shamble around and eat one of the Not-ADIs that spread the virus. You know what, fuck it, here's a better zombie movie idea: Gay Zombie Teen Beer Run (loosely based on a True Story, and by true story, I mean a joke Henry made around 7:40 of Part 3 of Last Podcast on the Left's series on Jeffrey Dahmer.) In it, the protagonist is a gay teen zombie (who is probably black, since most of Dahmer's victims were POC, and black in particular during his zombie phase) whose mission is to figure out how to buy some Miller Lite (while his brain is barely functioning because, well, zombie) for his boyfriend, the serial killer who turned him into a zombie, so he can get his ass tore back and create more zombies out of Milwaukee's gay teenage population. 
  
• They couldn't use the Jews they were in the process of exterminating to use as guinea pigs for their zombie experiments... even though they were doing exactly that with inmates in Auchwitz.
  
• Quick question, does a woman wearing nothing under a slip count as going commando? I'm asking for a friend. And while we're on that, why did she feel the need to go into another room to remove her dress when she was going to take her slip off in front of the soldiers anyway?
  
• And fucking hell, dude starts vominting locusts and the Nazis win.
  

Overall, it's not the worst movie I've ever seen. It had some potential if the people at the Asylum bothered to give a shit.

[veoli]

Theory of Everything (10/10) my all time favorite film.

[energizer bunny]

A Violent Separation

[BrokenQuill92]

Candyman I’m so excited for the new sequel/reboot! Let’s do this shit!

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Planning to see "Bloodshot" this weekend or next.

[Duty]

Candyman I’m so excited for the new sequel/reboot! Let’s do this shit!

I disagree, I'm sorry to report - the original three Candyman films are virtually flawless in their awesomosity IMO and a "reboot" of this nature can SURELY only be a disappointment in the style of the IT remakes. I dearly hope I prove to be mistaken, but there it is.