Star Wars V & VI

Its one of those classics I never got around to watching. I started with episode V, which I kept in mind is the equivalent of starting with The Two Towers for LOTR. I tried starting properly with A New Hope before but never managed to get through twenty minutes.

The comparison with other sci-fi can't be helped. It does bear similarities to Star Trek, from the lightspeed travel (warp mode in Trek) to the charismatic all-American lead (though Kirk easily embodies both Han and Luke). Though its science is not as well thought out or as captivating. At their cores the two stories are about different themes, so the comparison is not apt. Star Wars is a very traditionally American underdog story (the Death Star is basically British, the allegory is pretty obvious), whereas Star Trek is really Utopian sci-fi, all about exploration and curiosity. I daresay Star Trek is much more universally appealing, especially to the female gender.
So Star Wars is not about fantastic new worlds or mind blowing technology. But its politics are not nearly as intricate as in say, Dune. Its a straight-forward story of a rebel force overcoming all odds and defeating the big evil dictatorship. And honestly its a bit of a mess between the explosions, unconvincing shoot-outs and Luke's inner struggle.

The biggest plot points have long been spoiled for me and for pretty much everyone not living under a rock, so the main 'twists' were no surprise at all, making the movie lose all suspense. I blame that for not even wanting to pay attention to the sixth and most exciting installment of this universally acclaimed series.

Filmography-wise Star Wars gives off that pirate-y feeling. The Jabba the Hut sequence was fantastic. The designs made some memorable characters, from Vader to Yoda to R2D2. The Ewokese really left something to be desired though, looking like furbies and speaking like racists mock-imitating Asians.

The almighty Empire, brought down by these furbies.

Sidenote:

Why do most sci-fi favor either icy freeze-your-arse-off planets or scorched barren desert planets? Are there no in-betweens? Like moderately-weathered pine forest planets or all manners of climate Earth-like planets?

Also I know its an old movie,, but I don't recall seeing acting this stilted way into the 80s.

The sidekicks are not as endearing as the film makers think. Chewbacca's gurgle got repetitive and annoying real fast. Not to mention it never added anything to the film, only wasting time as Han second-hand interpreted the gurgle for the audience. The two robots were less so but getting there at the end of two hours.

kindly STFU

Vader's theme is absolutely kickass, no arguments there.


So all in all, this franchise never delivered the enchantment it promised. Maybe its because I watched them out of order (1, 3, 5, 6), or because I never finished the entire series, but at this point I have no intention to.

Osama

A raw and heartfelt portrayal of women's lives under Taliban rule, Osama (2003) is purportedly the first film filmed entirely in Afghanistan after fall of Taliban. Directed by Siddiq Barmak and starring first time actress Marina Golbahari.

Plot:
After years of warfare, Afghanistan is full of widowed families. Under Taliban rule, however, homes without males are homes without livelihood. In a society where women are not allowed to go out in the public without being escorted by a man, a widow struggles to provide for her young daughter and elderly mother. They hit rock bottom after the hospital she works in closes and the last of her patient dies. In desperation the grandmother recalls a story in which a boy walks under a rainbow and becomes a girl. They decide to cut the young daughter's hair and have her pretend to be a boy.
She gets a job at a teashop and lives in fear of being discovered everyday. Her fears are elevated when a Taliban recruiter rounds up all the boys around town for training and religious education. Her femininity becomes increasingly exposed. It seems her position would be jeopardized after an elderly educator calls her a nymph during absolution (a ritual to clean the genitals). The other boys tease her ceaselessly until a beggar, her only friend, comes to her rescue. He gives her the name Osama, perhaps to inspire some measure of fear and respect by association.
Eventually she is found out due to her untimely menstruation. She is sent to some sort of guru/judge and given to an old man as a bride. When she arrives she finds out the man already has four wives, all of them kept under lock and key, and says the man ruined their lives. In a demonstration of his cruelty, he takes a string of padlocks and asks Osama to choose her own prison lock as a wedding gift. The last scene shows the man performing his absolutions, probably after he has 'ruined' Osama's life.

Thoughts:
This film seeps hopelessness throughout. There are a lot of negative themes, including oppression, discrimination, abandonment, loneliness, loss of innocence, resignation, and most of all, utter despair.
A little girl, hung in a well, with blood trickling down her legs and crying her heart out for mommy while surrounded by hostile men and indifferent boys. Its pretty much despair personified.

Despair Personified.

Osama is not a Mulan. She's obedient and shy, a girl through and through. Sometimes she came across as way too passive. She does virtually nothing to help herself, calling for Espandi every time. She can't even begin to make the effort to be a boy, and who can blame her?  She is only a child, as the film reminds us with poignant scenes:

I suppose the actress is to be commended. She has scarcely ten lines throughout the film and must convey most of her character through expression alone. I lose track of how many times she cried, but it was heck of a lot.

Things that struck me:
The most heartbreaking moment of the film is when poor Espandi, infinitely street-wise and independent, cries as he watches his friend being chased down and arrested by a swarm of Taliban instructed boys. He can't save her this time. In another world, perhaps, their friendship could have turned into something more. Espandi is played by Arif Herati, who according to IMDB can manage get by now a days in Afghan, a reminder that the glamour of acting and the big screen is very much a first world by product.

The Afghan landscape is coarse, broken, and lends a special bleakness that compliments the film subject. That is not to say its not beautiful.

Rapist/Husband performs absolution. Somehow forms a beautiful picture

TL;DR:
A desperate family dresses up their only daughter as a boy to make livelihood under Taliban Afghan. Its a unique and saddening story of a childhood and girlhood lost.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

A re-vamp of the slasher classic series, Freddie Krueger comes to life once again stalking the kids on Elm Street.

Plot:
The same as the original movie. Teenagers begin to have nightmares about a guy named Freddie coming to kill them. These dreams are quite real, and when they die in their dreams, they die in real life. A few realizes this and desperately tries to stay awake. When they are so tired they start having micro naps Freddie starts chasing them around in a fun blend of reality and nightmare. Turns out that the kids' parents kept a secret from them. When they were in kindergarten, there was a kind gardener who loved playing with them. But the kids started showing up at home with bruises and cuts in strange places. The parents mobbed up said gardener into an abandoned factory and burned him alive.

In the original Freddie was merely a child killer, but in our new racy age he's the pedophile he's always meant to be. Apparently 80's audience couldn't handle it so Wes Craven had to keep his plot point until now. Somehow pedophilia is a crime less acceptable than infanticide. This country is mad.

Thoughts:
Creative kill scenes. The guy's got a scissored glove and man does he put it to good use. Overall not very scary for a horror film. The most off-putting scare wasn't even Freddie, but a traditional shot of a dead girl in a body bag. The old ones weren't scary either, and some argue this movie's actually more terrifying than the original. If so I can't imagine how the original series were billed as horror for so long. I'm a fan of American non-terrifying horror films though (Jeepers Creepers is a favorite). They're always satisfyingly gory without being traumatizing.

Unlike his brother Edward, Freddie had a better use for his scissorhands

I haven't watched the original so I can't make any comparisons. This movie is enjoyable enough on its own, though it won't provide any good scares. Its decent, with decent effects, decent acting, etc. Nothing remarkable.

Other things:
Oh my God I love his voice! I don't know what digital wizardry they did to Jackie Earle Haley's voice but I love it! If only Watchmen had done the same for Rorschach. Freddie's voice is not so much creepy as downright captivating and dare I say it, sexy. I'm not sure they were playing that card with Freddie, I mean after all, he's a pedophile covered in 3rd degree burns, but that's the effect they achieved.

It doesn't help that the guy's really, honestly funny! I know some think his one-liners campy, but all the ones in this movie (and there were quite a few) were lol material. I always thought the Nightmare series were pegged as absolute horror, and was unprepared for the zingers. I ended up enjoying the film a lot more than expected, almost as a comedy. Freddie was wasted as a gardener.

"I'm your boyfriend now, Nancy"

TL;DR:

Slasher film in every sense of the word. Watch for evil burn-victim Rorschach!

Cube Zero

Cube Zero is a 2004 Canadian horror film directed by Ernie Barbarash, the third of the Cube series.

Synopsis:

A woman wakes up in a metal room with nothing but a sparse military/prison uniform on her back and the memories of her abduction. Soon strangers come in through one of the round people sized holes on each of the six walls, all seemingly in the same predicament as she. The name of the game is survival. They crawl from one room to another to find an exit, an answer. Each room is more than likely to be equipped with something deadly, and there's no sure way to tell. Their best method is 'booting', tossing in the heavy duty shoes they wore in the hopes of activating any boobytraps.

Boobytraps. Basically the highlight of this series is the various ingenious and often gruesome deathtraps in each room. Off the top of my head there's death by exposure to extreme base (saponification), death by fast acting flesh eating bacteria, death by microwave.... It's all pretty magnificent to be honest, all flesh-dripping and bone-melting. Definitely the best part of the film, probably the only part worth praising.

Death by steel strings cutting you to pieces

Does saponification really happen like this?

And the prize for 'winning', escaping, is to end up on top of a heat vent, life and death hinging on that age old question:

"Do you believe in God?"

Watching our heroine struggle through the tunnels are two cube technicians. They have no memories either, but they know they must do their job or risk the wrath of those 'above'. One of the technicians develop an attachment to our heroine, and decides to go in the Cube to help her. The 'above' send some men in black and a 'pimp' boss guy to rectify the situation. So begins our hero and heroine's race against time to save themselves.
Against all odds, they escape, because our hero's conveniently a proper genius.

Once outside a game of unfair chase ensues in the beautiful green foliage of native Canada. The military guys tranq our hero and leaves it unclear whether the woman escaped. When he wakes up again he's strapped to an operation table, ready to be lobotomized. Apparently he signed away his life years ago to the government and became a test subject of some huge complicated psychological study involving elaborate death chambers. Apparently everyone who's in the cube signed such a contract, and 'deserve' to be there.

Our hero screams, the screen fades, and he wakes up an idiot in the Cube with a few new people.

The end! Or is it?

Thoughts:

This film makes it seem like Canadians are all conspiracy theorists. Why the government would carry out such a pointless and expensive psychological experiment is beyond me. Maybe the rest of the 'Cube' series explain this better, but I was completely unsold on the concept. The set up of the 'main' characters were also lacking. I just couldn't care less about the woman or her daughter, or whether it was a real memory or a fake one, which was the notion they were trying to instill I'm sure.

Kinda looks like a washer

This movie was strangely less claustrophobia inducing than I expected. The rooms, or cubes, were nice and spacious, modern and clean. The most claustrophobic thing about it was the ending, in which our 'hero' gets a lobotomy and becomes trapped in the Cube again. See now its not the Cube that's imprisoning him, its his own mind! It was completely oppressive and hopeless and really hurt its rewatch values. Call me a wimp but the notion just makes uncomfortable on a basic level. Death is death. Torture is torture. Demoting someone's consciousness and identity until they can't even seek death if they wish? That's true horror.

Canada doesn't even have the death penalty. Is this series some form of repressed expression?

They'll have you believe its science fiction - it isn't. It's an excuse for gore, which I'm happy with.

Also this:

Hello, I think I'm on the wrong set.

This guy's suppose to be some supervisor/boss's lackey. He's bizarre to the point of being surreal. He's a complete caricature, so out of place he could be spliced in from the seedy alleys of some B-grade gangster flick (or a Lynch movie). I mean a diamond/mechanical eye? Really?

TL;DR:
Its like a lower budget version of SAW, less psychological but no less gimmicky. Gory enough.