Visitor Q (2006)

Director: Takashi Miike Stars: Kenichi Endo, Shungicu Uchida

Review:

When I watch this movie I keep asking "What is this?", "What is this supposed to be?". 

We started with a long sequence of a man having a night with a prositute, who we presumed was his daughter, since we were told by the cue cards. Then we follows his family can witness everyone of the family was being bullied by others: the mother was physically abused by his son, the son is bullied by his classmates, and the father was not successful at work in making documentaries, and in one occasion was shoved a dildo up his ass by some gangsters he was trying to film.

A stranger hit the father in his head with a stone, and the father brings the stranger home. The father came up with an idea of making a documentary out of the real-life bullying of his family, and asked his female co-worker to come along to film his son being bullied. His co-worker dismissed the idea and made him so mad as to strangle her to death while sexually abusing her.

Actually things up to this point was pretty boring, filled with un-appealing sex scenes and people talking meaningless dialogues. Now things gets funny. The stranger squeeze milk out of the mother's breast and the mother got addicted to it, and have to squeeze it until it floods the floor. The father brought the corpse of his co-worker home to fuck. During intercourse he found out that the girl was wet, and shouted, "She got wet! She got wet even though she is dead! It's a mystery! Oh it's shit! It's not a mystery it is shit! It fucking stinks!" The father couldnt get his cock out and the mother helped him by putting them into the bath tub and cover them with vinegar. And later they killed their son's classmates and the family lives happily thereafter.

Clearly this is a movie that deflies all logic so I would not bother with the simple question that why didnt they go to the police about the bullying, or why do the father bring the stranger home, or why the stranger hit his father's head in the first place. But actually most of the time this is boring, so boring that I have to resort on doing other things like checking emails or something. I was not disturbed a whole lot though though the milk scene is pretty gross but I want to laugh rather than gag. And when the credits roll, I still have no idea what the hell is happening.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (2011)

Director: David Yates Stars: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson

Review:

I have been watching the Harry Potter films these few days from the start. I have never been much a reader and would be fallen asleep just by seeing the thickness of the Harry Potter books. Therefore I will express my opinion completely oblivious of what mentioned in the books. The series has been really taken a dark tone, from a family live-action cartoon to a war movie, and yes the whole Deathly Hallow Part 2 is basically a war.

There seems many elements that were supposed to mean something, but actually means nothing. Chekhov's Gun or Red Herring? Like Harry got his wand that is a twin with Voldemort's, but both of them just replace their wands instead, and it never matter if their wands were twins or not. Does it serves an excuse of getting a new wand and paves the way for the Elder wand? But Voldemort can still get the Elder wand just for the power, so the twin wands thing have little contribution to the excuse. And what does their pets do? Ron's pet does later revealed to be Peter Pettigew, but again, all the pet thing just for this plot point in one movie? Oh well.

Malfoy is nothing but a bully, and as the characters grow up, he become a cowardly bully. At the first several movies he does nothing but gives some competitions to Harry. His screentime contracted shorter and shorter as new threats and rivals show up, and in the last few movies everytime we see him he looks sort of crying. The only really evil thing he does was letting the Death Eater into Hogwarts, but I dont know why it takes a whole movie to do it, and that doesnt make him an effective villain at all. And his father is so stupid that I never seen him once win in a rap game of casting spells.

The main surprise that were praised was learning that Snape was the good guy all along, and he only killed Dumbledore to gain Voldemort's trust. But exactly what does Snape do after gaining Voldermort's trust? He followed his order and turned Hogwart's into a school of terrorists, and we never see him aid the Order in any way or betray Voldemort. Hell he even provide the Order's plan for Voldemort in the beginning of Part 1 so that they could be followed. Later he was just killed by Voldermort without knowing that he is a spy. Speaking of the killing, Voldermort kill Snape because to fully acquire the Elder wand one must kill its owner. Why doesnt Dumbledore gives the wand to Snape beforehand so that he can use the Elder wand against Voldermort, which might stand a chance? What was Dumbledore's plan or it is something made up on the spot just to squeeze our emotion?

And in the end something laughably stupid happened. Harry pretends to be dead. Malfoy's mother checks on him and answers Voldemort that he is dead, and Voldemort is so utterly stupid that nobody could just see it for himself or check his pulse or anything. No wonder when Harry gets up he is so angry on his own stupidity. So they have a little Dragon ball style energy beam fight, and they kill Voldemort snake which contains part of his soul, and killed Voldermort. The End. Wait. Why does Voldemort let his snake go so far away now that people hostile are near and conceal the snake in his robe when he is million miles away?

Oh and even better: why not make a Horcrux out of a tiny object and threw it into the center of the ocean, so that there is no possible chance for anyone to find it at all?

Overall, the Harry Potter movies are okay and I like it to a degree that I watched every single one of them. As for the final movie, I must say up to Snape dies I like it. The Hogwart's siege reminds me of The Two Towers (2002), which in my regard is the best castle battle of all time. Although when the character dies I does not have much feeling maybe because they have so little screentime. After Snape dies, everything went stupid, and the ending is so generic that there is nothing to talk about.

Female Trouble (1974)

Director: John Waters Stars: Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce

Review:

Comparing to the notorious Pink Flamingos (1972), John Waters' Female Trouble (1974) is relatively unknown. However I found Female Trouble more hilarious and enjoyable, while Pink Flamingos at times went a little bit too gross. Also it is incredible that the whole theme and style bears uncanny resemblance to Almodovar's movies, with all those drag performance, tacky woman and campy clothes. Yes it is preposterous comparing the master of bad-taste trash films to the master of arthouse cinema, but that is the genuine feeling that I have. It is almost a parody to Almodovar, only made earlier of the target it is making fun with.

The movie follows the live of Divine's character, Dawn Davenport, beginning from her high school life. She was too different from a normal rebellious school girl, bullying others and eating on class. On christmas day she verbally fucked her parents and left home just because they did not give her Cha Cha Heels for present. 

"Get off me you ugly witch! I hate you! Fuck you! Fuck you both you awful people! You are not my parents! I hate you!"

She ran off from the house and fucked with a driver than was passing by (played also by Divine himself). Davenport was pregnant, and gave birth on a couch all by herself and bite off the umbilical cord with her own mouth. How does she live through the pregnancy, given that her market being a prostitute would be limited, I do not know. But hey this is trash film. Logic does not apply here.

Biting off the umbilical cord.

She live her life as a thief with two of her friends. They introduce her to a private beauty salon own by Mr & Mrs Dasher, which marks the beginning of her descend to insanity, and it is hilarious every moment of it. Mr & Mrs Dashers has a really twisted sense of beauty. Davenport was disfigured by her ex-husband's aunt for getting divorced and drove her husband away. Mr & Mrs Dashers considered her melted face beauty and take a photoshot before calling the ambulance. 

Davenport poses for a photo before committing a crime: hitting her daughter with a chair.

They also have the crazy theory that relates crime with beauty, and encourages her to perform different criminal acts in front of the camera. They kidnapped the aunt for her to chop off her hand in return the favour of giving her such "beauty", and inject eyeliner into her bloodstream. Davenport, after all these flattering, was getting hysterical. She screamed happily after strangling her daughter to death right before going on stage for a nightclub act.

I do not know what Davenport is doing for the nightclub act, other than being pure hysterical. She was jumping, bouncing, putting raw fish into her mouth and on her crotch, and tearing a book into pieces. I could not stop laughing because everything was so disjointed and utterly stupid. At last she went berserk and shot the audience.

"Ah hahaha!! She's finally dead! Oh I think I'm ready to go on now!"

Davenport was caught and brought to court. Now it is everyone for themselves, and the Dashers denied everything but pointing the finger to Davenport. Davenport was sentenced to death, but she was so fucked up that she thinks the electric chair is the highlight of her career in the show business, and even gave a speech for it. Some people maybe consider the death scene sad, but I still found it funny. 

The whole movie is a laugh riot, but with cheap sex and bloody murder. It is true that it is not as shocking as the Pink Flamingos, with scenes like eating dog turd, that is what make it easiler to laugh along with. The most shocking scene in here would be seeing (supposedly) Divine's dick, which I do not know it is special effect or not, it looks like nasty infected. It's a constant flow of stupid events and keeps you interested with the dumb plot rather than hating it.

Starship Troopers (1997)

Director: Paul Verhoeven Stars: Casper Van Dien, Jake Busey, Michael Ironside, Clancy Brown

Review:

Human versus alien bugs. That is basically it. I saw it when I was 13 or 14 and got my kicks of action out of it. Roger Ebert called it an bloody gory movie for kiddies, but as I re-watch it today in my 20s, I disagree. Starship Troopers (1997) is a much deeper than it appears to be.

Our hero joined to army for citizenship, and on his video call to his parents, his hown town, where his parent was, was hit by alien bug invasion. The video cut off due to supposedly weather, but as we see our hero walks away from the camp, we have the whole incidence known as an alien attack and casuality count. Our hero have walked for several steps and that would take no longer than a minute, and they got the whole truth and make a propaganda about it? It obviously symbolize the federal government have conspired it to gather the hatred for motivation of invasion.

Propaganda in minutes after millions have died, and they did not know about it beforehand?

The federal government sends infantry troops in to invade the planet. Why? As it happens the future I assume they got nuclear weapons, and with the strength of nuclear weapon we have now we could destroy a whole planet if we wanted to. We didnt for the modern wars since we still have to live on this planet and for humanity reasons. Well we do not live on the alien planet and they are bugs so humanity reasons does not count, why couldnt they just nuke the whole planet with automatic spaceship? Resources. Government sends living human for reasources. That's how cold humans are.

Infantry is necessary "because they cant push (the nuke) button if you disable your arm.". You believe that?

The hero's girl/slut got really high score in mathematics. She became a starfleet pilot, a real bad pilot. "Oh not Ibanez again. She's crazy.", a passenger of her flight exclaimed. But no she is not crazy, she is just a woman, and we all know woman cant drive. First she almost trashed her fleet into the docking bay on her way out for no reason, and got her fleet nearly in collision with a meteor since she changed the route. Okay the meteor was un-expected for everybody but it definitely is her fault for letting it getting so close when she was in space which the radar would have detected it from a thousands miles away, while she spending her time on flirting with her senor. Her senor said "You know what I want.", and they were almost kissing. Great. That's how she got her role as a pilot, as a whore. That's how corrupted the government is.

Couldnt you have seen it earlier, with nothing else in space....?

Later our hero's girlfriend died, and have a space funeral. Why would she have a space funeral when thousands and millions of people died and went into oblivious, since if they all have a funeral it would not be done until the next millennium. God this government is corrupted. And when our hero heard there is more casuality for victory (of resources), he welcomed it with comfort. That's an alarm of mass brainwash people!

Why does only she got a ceremony?

Ok so in case you havent got it I was kidding. This movie sucks. But it does have it's own good. As I have mentioned: Human vs Alien bugs. That's it. That's what you expected, and that's what you got. The special effects looks good and it's a good blend on minitures and CG. It gots some organic feeling that tells you there is some real things there, and got the CG on something hard to create in real life even in small size. It's quit un-necessary to show the things happened in the boot camp but it got some exciting action on the bug's planet.

Michael Ironside is in this movie, and I really like this actor. He is so exaggerated evil in the Scanners (1981), that it is hard not to love him. What a pity that his career was ruined by Highlander II (1991).

So it has a theme of violence philosphy going on, and does violence solve everything? Well it does solve something but not everything. Does the movie try to tell us anything? About violence? About our arrogance as the only being with vast intelligence? Well at least it tells us to save some blood for the brain, and not to lend your only source of defence towards a whore.

Why wouldnt you use the knife yourself rather than let the chick escape and get back to her ex-boyfriend?

The Tree of Life (2011)

Director: Terrance Malick Stars: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken

Review:

To be honest I havent even heard of the name Terrance Malick until The Tree of Life (2011) won the Palme d'Or of the Cannes Film Festival 2011. After a little researching he is fairly unknown and has only directed a few movies before. The whole affair gets dramatic when Terrance Malick was banished from the festival due to his Nazi comment, but won the prize afterall. Does Cannes give him the prize to show how im-political the festival is? You'll be the judge.

So I went to see it, fully aware of people's comment of it being boring, having no clue what's going on, and dont know what the plot is. Firstly there is no plot. There is even no character. The whole movie is about a life. The images of universe would represent the state before we were born: somewhere in the universe, maybe some kind of spiritual existence, and then life forms as microscopic organism. Then we see birth, as an infant child and learning to walk. As the movie progress life complicates. We have emotions: jealoucy, hatred, sorrow. We goes through death, have problems with our father, financial difficulties. It was not a story but an attempt of show us and remind us what life is. From as simple as trees, grasses, water, to as complex as human relationship.

Some criticize the movie of having no new throughts about life. I would have to say it has to be this way. We all have our own reasons of being as complex as we are. The point that we all agree is we cant go back to the way of a child. That is why most arguing dialogues are muted. The reason does not matter. It just try to remind us how simple it used to be, and how irrational we was. The viewpoint is generic since we all goes through the phases of doubts of our parents love and dislikes of our father. It is not a perspective but a display of different impacts that each adds to our complexity of life.

Frankly it would be pretentious to say this movie is not boring. It is. The universe image can be cut shorter and I could not figure what the dinosaur scene adds. I have some idea of getting what life is long before human influence, but I am not sure. Also Brad Pitt and Sean Penn does not have real function but to trick people in. Especially Sean Penn, which actually gets nothing to do or say but walking around. Would it still won the Palme d'Or if some unknown actor plays the part of Brad Pitt and Sean Penn?

I do not hate this movie, but I may not watch it for the second time. I think I do get it, but I think there is better movies this year. I makes me think of my relationship with my father, but having a hard time to get into the whole god thing since I aint Christian. Afterall, the Cannes festival is more or less political biased. 

Repulsion (1965)

Director: Roman Polanski Stars: Catherine Deneuve, Ian Hendry, John Fraser

Review:

There are very few directors that have been into movies since the 1960s who are still delivering to this very day. Roman Polanski is one of them and from all directors I could think of, he is the only one. Repulsion (1965) is his earlier work that bought him into international notification. 

In 1960s, when the terms like schizophrenia and OCD were lesser known to the general public, people fear of what those mentally disordered people perceive. Repulsion sets the formula for the psychedelic film about mentally disordered to come. Psycho (1960) was also about the mentally ill, but it never see things in the perspective of the insane, but Repulsion follows the mind of the disordered almost like a conscience stream.

So the flows goes like this: first it shows the audiences all the elements that haunted the lunatic, and then gradually the protagonist witness surreal things happening around him/her. The happenings grows stronger and stronger, and more unrealistic. Finally some normal people invaded and discovered that most of the surreal hauntings were only happened in the protagonist's mind.

In Repulsion the protagonist is a girl who is very depending and attached to his elder sister. She works in a grooming house, in which her workmate is female, and her clients are females. Male invaded her world when her elder sister had a boyfriend, which occasionally stayed overnight. She could not handled it, and when her sister were away for vacation, she really gets into her mind.

The films shows she both repels and fantasied of being abused. She dreamt of being raped, in which we could tell it was her nightmare. But later we see her put on her lipstick and lied on the bed, almost being prepared of the imaginery rapist. She is also a mysophobia, in which she would gag over an unwashed cloth, but could do nothing about a dead rabbit taken out of the fridge because she was so traumatized by her fantasies.

What is so scary or thrilling about the scenes? Well Repulsion does lost her charm due to age. As we were mostly understand about mental disorder, we could tell right from the start that the protagonist is having a psychotic episode. You know fairly well that what is real and what is not, which kills some of the thrills about wondering whether it is truely happening or just inside her head.

However, in the 1960s, it is truly an inspirational and influencial film, that the whole theme became a cliche nowadays. Dont get me wrong I absolutely love the genre of surrealism and illusions, and to get to the root, watching Repulsion is compulsory.

Cinema Extreme #3 - The Human Centipede (2009)

Director: Tom Six Stars: Dieter Laser, Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie

Review:

This is the first time I watch this movie myself, but I have heard others talk about it and watched somebody made fun with it, I am really biased with this one. This is that kinda movie that base on only one concept, and the shocking value does not last long, especially when I have known it so long before watching it.

The Human Centipede is about sewing people's mouth to other's head, so he can only be fed on other's feces. It is gross, but when you get over it, it doesnt any other thing to show for.

The plot is simple. A crazy doctor want to connect three people ass to mouth. He did. He played around with them after the surgery. Two policemen came to investigate about missing persons. The three people try to escape but failed. The leading piece killed himself. The doctor had a fight with the policemen and all of them died. The last piece died from eating shit for a few days apparently. The middle piece was left alone crying. The End.

Why does he want to make the human centipede? What was he trying to accomplish? It was never fully explained other than his pride of being a good surgeon.

To stretch the above to a hour and a half movie would need to insert pointless scenes that creates no tension at all. Like we see one girl tried to escape, dragging her unconscienous friend also. How would she even leave the house without notice, and how would there even be a movie if the Human Centipede was not realized? How would the audience expect there is the slimest chance for her to escape? So towards the end the leading piece stabbed the doctor with a scalple, which available for him all the time. What is he waiting for before, and why he did not finish the doctor off I have no idea. And naturally I also have no clue on why he committed suicide when the doctor crawling to him wounded, given he is the least suffered of the three.

The concept is shocking and gross at first, but gets boring quickly and the doctor is so laughably stupid that it really helps you get over with the whole ass-to-mouth thing. So is this extreme cinema? Many people considered it is, but I have doubts. Actually it's even kinda funny.