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The Pope's Exorcist (2023)
An unintented parody of The Exorcist
Every iconic scene, every element and character trait from the 1973 movie are ported and then exaggerated and blown out of proportions. Even Father Mirren's lovable quip "Thank god my will is weak" when he was offered brandy in the cold weather is transformed into a full-blown drunkard Father Amorth.
The result is an unexpected caricature rendition of The Exorcist with overuse of all the common exorcism tropes, and profoundly weak writing, especially in everything related to the Pope character.
It's a shame because the setup looked promising, with the Vatican intrigue and the abnormal Amorth character. But all that goes down hill so quickly.
I think the makers weren't really going for a parody or a spoof. But cardboard characters, shallow plot and complete absence of any personality conflicts or philosophical themes made it what it is now.
Mother! (2017)
Interesting setup quickly turns into pretentious drivel
The movie starts with an interesting setup: a secluded couple give a weird stranger shelter. The wife has a peculiar sensitivity that is reflected through the house itself, which gave me strong Fall of House of Usher vibe. But then the guest's wife shows up unannounced, and everything goes down hill from there.
Aronofsky destroyed a good setup and any notion of storytelling for the sake of keeping his reputation for being "that surreal director". It's astonishing how this un-story found that much funding, let alone seeing the light.
If you're into pretentious stuff, such as The Lobster, you may find convoluted metaphor plays here and there. But that's just you. There is nothing, nothing, in this waste of human life.
Beauty and the Beast (2017)
Keeping true to the animated classic, and the fact that art is a receptacle of cultural units, resulted in an anti-gay, pro-ISIS, materialistic film!
Believe me, I was as surprised as you are.
1. The depiction of LGBT characters merely for comic relief, and quite distastefully in that;
2. promoting punishing others (and their relatives) for not sharing our beliefs IN THEIR OWN HOME (the Enchantress' punishment of the Prince) is practically what ISIS do in Syria;
3. conflating kidnapping and Stockholm Syndrome with love; and
4. justifying the practice of brainwashing.
All these disturbing themes and elements are what we find in this film, which might have been alright for children in an older time, but is certainly dissonant in our age and time.
On a more cinematic note, Emma Watson appears more like a CG doll. It is as if she was meant to come across as non-human. Her expressions, her smirk, added to her clear and perfect singing voice, all contribute to a non-human impression.
The film is a nice nostalgic material, but its outdatedness and the now disturbing messages it has make up for a very dissonant and conflicting viewing experience.
Dabbe: Cin Çarpmasi (2013)
Compactness and an amazing performance are what make this entry shine in an otherwise extremely limited franchise
Hasan Karacadag uses only one formulaic approach in every D@bbe entry. The same core narrative is told and retold every time, implementing a very limited set of themes, plot devices, and even entire scenes with sporadic, little variations.
Here is how it works. 1) A family member exhibits unusual behaviour. 2) Medicine fails to treat said member. 3) An exorcist is brought in. 4) A "code" is discovered, containing a letter or a number. Solving the code would reveal the most important piece of information, so it usually happens towards the very end of the narrative as a plot twist. 5) Black magic artifacts are discovered. 6) An inhabited house in an otherwise abandoned village provides hope for solution. So a visit is made, by night for some reason or another. 7) The trip to the village is found to be a trap. The real danger is back at home, though, masterminded by humans. 8) The force of nature prevails and everybody who tries to defy it dies. 9) The ending is left a bit open.
The repeated scenes include: - The discovery of an amulet. - The riddance of Nazar talismans. - The mirrors evocation. - The exhumation of a large quantity of ritualistic material, such as animal parts and effigies, at the shock and disgust of family members. - Exorcist says he/she refers treatable cases to medical doctors, but not metaphysical cases. - Arguing with family over medical treatment. - The visit to the village. - The danger both in the village and at home. - Presentation of the director's favourite theory about WWW. - Humans are the transgressors. The metaphysical creatures are justifiably angry.
NOW, what makes Cin Çarpmasi stand out, even though it uses all of these elements, is that it implements it organically and intelligently.
1) Unlike the other entries where information and magical solutions are dumped on the audience by some unjustifiably omniscient supporting character, the characters here investigate and try to find the solution on their own while engaging us in the process. No illogical jumps or narrative gaps.
2) The entire setting is in a displaced village and its surroundings, making the move between locations not only justifiable but necessary.
3) Absolute minimum filling material such as cameras recording nothing happening for 2 minutes. Almost every scene is being used to serve the film.
4) Unlike the other entries, the performance here is actually good. Even very good. Lead actors did a great job.
This makes the film extremely compact despite its 2hrs running time. It is also worth mentioning that even though the film is using a pattern very similar to The Last Exorcism, it manages to achieve an identity of its own with a rich background story and more emphasis on the mystery.
Recommended with no doubt.
Dabbe: Zehr-i Cin (2014)
An example of how a director falls from heaven to a dark pit. Awful film.
After an amazing entry (Dabbe: Cin Carpmasi), Hasan Karacadag decides to use the same repertoire and plot devices in a different setting, and fails miserably. It is eerie--he uses almost all the main themes and elements, minor and major, that it seems as if he had run out not only of ideas, but common sense as well.
The story is shallow, the dialog is tedious, the entire cast consists of cardboard characters with no development at all, and every single performance is either flat or campy. Cinematography looks cheap as well.
There is nothing to look for in this film, even the fans of the metaphysical element will find its inclusion rushed, half-cooked, and unnecessary to the story.
Was Karacadag forced to make this abomination of a film? Was it written and directed by an amateur fan of the franchise? I would not know. But it surely has been a very quick and short journey from the heaven of well-crafted film-making to the just-another-entry-for-sales dark pit of oblivion.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Despite the excessive runtime (a few minutes shy off 2.5 hours) there lingers a strange feeling that everything has been rushed up in a way.
This is quite a long film. The premise and plot are both simple and straightforward. Save Waltz (Landa), there is nothing at all worth mentioning when it comes to performance, except perhaps Laurent (Shosanna) in a few of her scenes, especially the restaurant confrontation with Standartenführer Landa where she managed to form a living driving force only with her eyes and facial expressions.
Pitt (Raine) kept a cowboy accent and an annoying Marlon Brando imitation to the bitter end. Brühl (Zoller) played the classic méchant chevalier with an extra layer of innocence up to his last scene.
Music is nostalgic with many homage pieces, a characteristic of Tarantino's work.
At least two stand-off's occur to satisfy the director's passion for pasta; the first one is a three-way (Chapter Four) and the second one is a hit-miss-hit (Chapter Five.) Now I have to watch the film one more time when it goes on DVD to form an opinion on the cinematography and décor work. However, as far as it goes for a first watch, I cannot but fail to find any possibility for this title to achieve any honours (except for Christoph Waltz)-- there is almost no memorable pieces in the dialogue, and the performance of many actors sealed the film's fate, especially the flat performance of Pitt-Brando and the secondary high-ranking characters, notably Gruth (Goebbles) Wuttke (Hitler.) The other Germans did put up a not-so-bad performance though.
For a final verdict: An extremely boring, very Tarantino 'loan-y' film, with emphasis on tics, accents and speech patterns over any intelligent or comprehensible dialogue. Lukewarm, straightforward flat writing which favours in-scene slow tension-building over the overall progress of the story, again in a usual Tarantino style. The assassination scene (Chapter Five) and its build-ups turned out quite nicely though, in a genre-blending manner.
3 out of 6 (for Waltz' and some of Laurent's performances and the assassination scenes. The remaining 4 points to the 10 mark are reserved for cinematography.)
Chakushin ari (2003)
Miike going mainstream, again!
A very visually-pleasing traditional J-Horror flick, with Miike's signature criticism of the state of family and domestic decaying, without delving deeper philosophically nor psychologically of course.
What makes most of the Japanese horror film industry appealing is its capability of delivering suspense and actually building a compelling atmosphere while not relying much on seat-jumpers and Hollywood scares, as well as keeping up with non-linear time-line, fragmentation, and other experimental techniques. Such characteristic, sadly, have been gradually abandoned and tolerated with as the exposure on the US market grows.
Acting was campy, which is a very strange yet amusing aspect in almost all of the Miike Corpus (except for Oudishon, perhaps, with its pleasing cast and the legendary Ishibashi Ryo.) What speaks in Miike's work is in fact Miike Takashi himself and his visionary talent. Such genius could be seen from the fanatic extravaganza media frenzy in Natsumi (Fukiishi Kazue)'s arc, notably the live exorcism scene.
Rich cinematography and decent sounds. Clever deployment of the ring-tone device worked positively for progressing and building up without being overly redundant and jejune.
Dark Water (2005)
By far, the only Hollywood J-Horror port I have seen to ever surpass its Japanese original.
Both Connelly and Ariel Gade (Ceci) put up an interesting performance with so much chemistry, even though Connelly had had lost a considerable amount of weight to the point of having a Native-American visage, which contributed to a bizarre out-of-place atmosphere.
Having the story taking place in a bleak East River island proved to be wise and worked to provide more events and characters-wise alike. Take the janitor for instance; it is very much unlikely to find such failing apartments or even such careless janitors in Japan, let alone being corrupt deep-outside to the point of driving everyone paranoid, including the viewers, from the moment he appears on cadre. The same goes for the utility worker and generally the majority of the extras. On the other side, the Japanese original had all those characters in rather secondary roles, almost to the point of not affecting the storyline at all.
The abyssal bleakness and gloominess of America's East River, New York, with its cold-hearted on-screen people aided in drawing compassion with the helpless, yet struggling, Dahlia Williams and her cause.
The climax and ending were far better than those found in the original Nakata Hideo version.
The Prestige (2006)
Slow pace compensated with great cinematography and a unique third act.
Throughout the first act we discover that the narrator had been deliberately misleading us. The same thing happens throughout the second act. Using the concept of magic tricks, we may think of those first two acts as 'the pledge' and 'the turn.' Everything is cruelly revealed with the third act, 'the prestige,' and a bleak, ungodly finale. Angier is severely punished, while Borden brutally destroys every single hope he had ever had.
Bale did not do a good job; all monotonous, even in his supposedly highly emotional master scenes, which leaves one bedazzled, unable to classify the actor when compared to some decent performances in The Machinist and even a few scenes in Equilibrium, while having dreadful appearances in The Batman new releases for instance.
Johansson is a superfluous eye-candy, perhaps due to an unbalanced character. Caine reprises Paul Giamatti's Inspector Uhl's character from The Illusionist (2006) (they even have a very similar visage, which also goes for Johansson and Jessica Biel's appearances to some degree.) Bowie was captivating as the famous Nikola Tesla.
Jackman was the undisputed star, missing only in one line where he cites, "I don't care about my wife," which is supposed to be an excuse not to sympathize with him, but that is, perhaps, a matter of paperwork after all.
This is a very intriguing adaptation that deserves being watched again and again.
Chakushin ari 2 (2005)
One intriguing, surprisingly decent sequel.
It is strange indeed how people dismiss sequels on the sheer basis of them not being 'distant' from their original! And to top it off those very same people repeat over and over that the only sequel that could surpass its original is Godfather II.
Talk about shamelessness.
Chakushin Ari 2 is a very powerful example of such cases. Even for a Miike Takashi fan such as myself, I cannot but bow to Renpei's unique entry.
Renpei Tsukamoto's style, at least here, does very much remind me of M. Night Shyamalan. It should be noted that I find it quite uneasy to endure 90 minutes of Shyamalan's viewers-are-mentally-challenged- and-my-mission-is-to- sing-them-a-lullaby 'technique', which, thank god, is not the case with Renpei. Rather, he uses Shyamalan's dream-like/fairy-tale atmosphere mixed with the harshness of classic Greek tragedies, as well as 'hidden' complex personae for his characters. Renpei also pays homage to the infamous Franco-ish nature-loving crossover, which sucks! Daira Minako provided an intriguing screenplay where each character's actions end up uncovering aims that might even contradict with what had appeared on-screen (note Ho's character as Nozoe Takako's husband). This device is taken to the extreme with the vengeful Li Li, whose reaction to others' compassion towards her past life ordeal is a merciless, cruel indifference(!), together with an utter hunger that makes her accept even replacement sacrifice.
Beautiful Mimura, with her cute accent, puts up a so-so performance, occasionally tainted by J-Horror clichés (one of them felt as if it had been ported scene by scene from Honno Gurai Mizuno Soko Kara) and the annoying turn-slowly-to-scream-at-some-ghastly-presence. The most noteworthy of all though was Yoshizawa's performance as Kyoko's boyfriend-- he could actually create something good out of a god-awful, flatly-written Hollywood-style character.
Seto Asaka (Nozoe Takako) was mediocre, while all the others were extra-ish more or less.
Plot devices taken from the original, i.e. the ring-tone and blue-skin ghost appearing in unlikely places, were used almost to the point of perfection despite the apparent excessiveness of the former.
The plot itself felt a little distracted and moved a little out of control as the Taiwan act starts; however, it soon manages to tie its knots and form a satisfying narrative. Ending was brilliant in a way, even though it clearly shows that Renpei wanted more space for his vision to be realised, and hence it is more of a cliff-hanger rather than an open ending like in the original.
Summing up, this picture is one of the most artistically-satisfying "mainstream" J-Horror titles, clearly surpassing its initial entry while introducing a Japan-made cross J-Hollywood taste to the genre.