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Andy K (10823 KP) rated The Exorcist (1973) in Movies

Oct 14, 2018 (Updated Oct 15, 2018)  
The Exorcist (1973)
The Exorcist (1973)
1973 | Horror
The best ever!
I remember when I was a kid sneaking into the living room and watching 10 minutes of The Exorcist from behind my mother's recliner when I was like 8. Even that 10 minutes messed me up for a long time as a kid. I would have dreams of my bed shaking and wake up sweaty and exhausted.

Not until I was an adult in my 30s did I truly appreciate the perfection masterpiece craft of the film.

Simple, slow burn storytelling. Not the scariest or goriest film ever made. More the idea of the film, how it transforms a young innocent girl into a satanic, cruel, vulgar monster which is the most visceral.

When it was released in 2000 with the "Version you've never seen" I happened to be working as a projectionist at the local theatre when I lived in Oregon. I always used to go into the theatre itself or turn the volume up while in the projector room so I could listen to it while I was doing other work.

It truly is one of my favorite films and is a tradition now I watch it every single October 31st.


  
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Awix (3310 KP) rated Cats (2019) in Movies

Dec 24, 2019  
Cats (2019)
Cats (2019)
2019 | Musical
Here's where I wrinkle my nose up at the Smashbomb scoring system - Cats isn't so much 'shoddy' as - well, it's such a particularly strange film that it's actually quite hard to tell whether it's any good or not. My instinct is to say not: a selection of character actors, comedians and musical theatre stars are CGI'd into human-animal hybrids like something out of The Island of Dr Moreau and hoof and yowl their way through a selection of TS Eliot's comic poems set to music. The plot does a good impression of being absolute gibberish, as the singing cat-people compete to get sent off to the bit of the sky that radio waves bounce off where they will receive a new life, while Idris Elba schemes to rig the contest. It's just weird.

Alternatively, this is a quasi-Lovecraftian surreal Arabesque which, fatally, fails to consider the difference between presentational and representational performance modes inherent in the transference of a narrative between theatrical and cinematic contexts. (i.e., people dressed as singing cats in a theatre can be beautiful and moving; people CGI'd into singing cats in a big-budget movie is more disturbing than anything else.) Jennifer Hudson's maximum-Streep, maximum-volume onslaught on 'Memory' made me want to hide under my seat.