The theme for this weekend was “Movie Schools You Should Be Grateful You Didn’t Go To”. Brutal, dangerous, awful schools. No matter how crappy your school years were, it could have been worse. You could have gone to one of these schools.
Ben and I were both pretty excited about the suggestions up this week. If we had been able to we probably would have tried to watch all five films, but we’re not completely crazy and went with a more achievable three. We even managed to watch all three and go to a concert and vaguely have a social life. I am counting this week as a veritable success.
Friday night was just the two of us, so we settled down to watch Brick. This was partly because we wanted to watch it, and partly because we had forgotten to buy the other movies beforehand. Anyway; Brick. A Film Noir murder mystery set in a Californian high school. Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is investigating his ex girlfriend’s disappearance and the different cliques that might have been involved in this whole thing.
I wanted to like this; really I did. I liked the concept and the actors seemed interesting enough (Joseph Gordon-Levitt was the main selling point for this, to be completely honest), I just couldn’t get into it. Marc Fennell loves it, which makes me even more disappointed that I didn’t like it because I agree with his opinions a lot of the time. I think my main problem was that, to me, it was really heavy-handed with the detective story aspects. Ok, ok, I get it, he’s a hard done by detective. Yes, that character is the femme fatale who is one of the bad guys but falls for him. Alright already, we get that the Vice Principal is the Police Chief or equivalent. Couldn’t you have been a bit more subtle about it so I am not rolling my eyes every time I recognise the next cliché character role? We stopped at one point so I could rinse out my hair dye and realised once we sat back down that we still had an hour to go and decided we couldn’t be bothered with the second half of the movie. After an hour the characters hadn’t engaged us at all and we didn’t care who killed whom. I really wanted to like this, but even Joseph Gordon-Levitt couldn’t save this for us.
On Saturday we had a concert to go to in the evening so we moved our routine forward and watched Heathers in the afternoon. Veronica (Wynona Rider) is part of a popular group of people called Heather (there are three of them. It gets confusing) and doesn’t particularly like them. Cue Rebel dude JD (Christian Slater) with a penchant for anarchy and, uh, people become less than alive.
(I know this is not the best trailer, but even though it’s a fan made one the official ones basically ruin the whole story so this was the best I could find in that regard)
This movie was so 80’s. In the first minute I could tell it was going to be super 80’s looking and I was not wrong. The hair was big and the shoulder pads not much smaller. Basically the fashion was insane in way that only the 80s could be. It was hilarious in a slightly embarrassing, awkward way, in that I felt bad laughing at some of the things I did because it was pretty much laughing at old fashion that will probably be coming back in fashion soon anyway. Some of the dialogue was painfully awkward (“fuck me gently with a chainsaw!” seemed to be said just so they seemed edgy) but I think I feel that way a lot when people swear in movies. Most of the time it doesn’t feel natural and you can tell that some of the actors aren’t comfortable and it distracts from the film. That was probably my only real negative about this film; other than that it was entertaining and generally a good Saturday afternoon movie.
We rounded out the weekend with Battle Royale. This was the film I was looking forward to the most this weekend. Some time in the future Japan’s economy goes to shit and to battle teenage rebellion the government chooses a high school class at random and transports them to a deserted island. Then they give everyone a weapon (some more useful than others) and give the kids three days to kill each other until there is one survivor. If there isn’t at the end of the third day they are all killed.
There is this strangeness about Japanese films that I love. I don’t know what it is specifically, perhaps their sense of humour, but there have been a number of Japanese films that I have seen that have the same kind of feel to them that makes me sit there, slightly confused and not really understanding what’s going on, but really enjoying it none the less. This was definitely one of those films. Honestly I kinda wished there was more violence than there was. I wonder if that says something about society and media these days that I watched an R rated movie about school kids killing each other and felt like there wasn’t enough violence. Ben found it odd because this was the director’s cut so there were a few sections throughout the film that he hadn’t seen before which kinda explained some things but generally didn’t add much. Then they kinda recapped themselves at the end after the movie had finished, which was pretty odd. We both agreed that it would have been better without the “requiems” that we had already seen, like the theatrical release. I will probably watch this again at some point to see things that I missed the first time around; I have that problems with subtitled movies so multiple viewings generally need to be had.
When looking up stuff about this I found out that there was going to be an English remake of this, but it has been put on hold after the shooting at Virginia Tech (or the similarities to The Hunger Games which has a film coming out soon, depending on where you read on the internet). I think the school shootings thing is a pretty weak excuse to stop making the remake, because it’s not like Virginia Tech was an isolated occurrence; school shootings where happening when people decided to do a remake in the first place, so it seems more like it was because so many people hated the idea that they backed down with a placating reason that makes them look like they care. That being said I am really glad it seems to be shelved indefinitely because I know I would end up watching it and hating it. And subsequently yelling about it in multiple places on the internet. I guess that’s a positive.
So three out of five was a pretty good effort, all things considered! Then again, I don’t think we’re ever going to get through all five in a weekend. The two we missed out on were Carrie and If… I’m wondering if one of them would have been better to have watched than Brick. I guess we’ll never know. Next week is a political theme, so tune in for me possibly ranting about American politics!