I bought a Complete Jean Vigo box the other year — it’s not big, because Vigo only did four (pretty short) films. I’ve watched the most famous ones, L’Atalante and Zero de Conduite, so I thought I’d finish up with the last two.
This one is silent and… kinda odd. I mean, odd in that it seems like Vigo is just going around Nice filming stuff at random. But parts are animated?
OK, there are bits here that seem slightly scripted…
Vigo seems to spend most of the film devising ways to film up womens’ skirts — first while they’re sitting, and then while they’re dancing, and finally he just has them walking across an open manhole.
I’m really enjoying this. Waititi has turned the silly up to 11, and I think it works.
The only annoying this so far is, as usual, the cheap-looking CGI and especially the compositing. Marvel! It’s always this way!
Heh heh heh. Love the helmet.
So the previous movie was a somewhat traditional super-hero movie, but funny. This is a comedy that features super-heroes, which is something altogether different, and I’m totally on board for that.
But… it’s flip-flopping between really really stupid gags (which I like) and then out heroes are killing a bunch of people, and that’s just hard to enjoy fully.
And sometimes the jokes are even stupider (like Thor pouring beer over that axe), and then they’re talking about cancer, and…
Somehow the mixture suddenly got boring.
I changed my mind about the CGI, though. Well, OK, they’re making it easy for themselves by having most of the CGI stuff happen when it’s very dark, which is an old trick. And by not compositing CGI over real stuff, because that’s harder to make look real. But within those constraints, it frequently looks really nice.
This kinda isn’t a very good movie, but there were some scenes I really enjoyed, and some bits here and there I loved, so:
It’s gotten middling reviews, but that’s a lot better than most Hellraiser movies, so…
As everybody knows, they have a very limited colour palette in Serbia.
But now we’re back in the US and they have colour there.
It’s a new configuation!
Tee hee
Then they forgot the colours again, and they’re not even in Serbia.
But … this is like so much better than every Hellraiser movie since the second one, there’s no competition. It’s like a real movie, you know? Good actors, professional cinematography, an apparently intriguing plot that is slowly revealing itself…
I’m sure once everything is clearer, it’s gonna turn out to be really stupid, but so far, it’s really good. Like an old fashioned horror movie.
Uh-oh.
This is still good, but the one mis-step so far is…
the design of the Cenobites. I think they wanted to take it a step further — in the original movies, it was people in leather with some S&M stuff. This time around, they seem to go with flesh sculpting? Which just takes it from “eww!! scary!” to “eh? is that CGI or is it latex?”
The colour grading on this movie is just… excessive.
OK, it was kinda grisly towards the end, but at least it wasn’t torture porn.
That was… kinda good? It could definitely have been more scary, but it was creepy enough. And they managed to make excellent use of what little Hellraiser “mythos” there is — it was definitely the most well-developed movie in that dept of them all.
So… Good job. That’s not an easy thing to do, as all the previous sequels show. It’s not without problems — it doesn’t really feel too long, but it could have been snappier? And the colour grading could have been less boring? But… If I’m rating this on a Hellraiser scale, I have to give this a:
