A horror-fan coworker recommended this, so I changed my stance on not watching MNS films to give it a shot:
My previous stance is rejustified.
Acting is good. Cinematography is good. Direction is… serviceable. But story, structure, script, message?
Absolute fucking horseshit.
This movie reminded me of Frailty in the way the twist ending pissed me off, except this one doesn’t even have a twist ending.
The premise of this film is: Violent religious fanatics are causing the apocalypse, so… capitulate.
Like I said, it’s horseshit. If you’re interested in films that examine the end of the world and faith versus reason in a way that won’t make you want to smash your tv, I suggest The Rapture with Mimi Rogers.
I was trying to link to the section on Private Eye’s spoof characters, one of which is the archetypal Daily Telegraph letter writer Sir Herbert Gusset.
Those names and references have spread though so it might not have been the Eye.
It’s sad that it’s taken so long for someone to make a movie of his life… Of course, I think it pretty recently that someone turned one of his novels into a film…
Oh, I’m aware… I was just saying that someone should have turned some of Baldwin’s work into a film well before Jenkins did it… My someone was not meant to diminish his work, but to note how lacking hollwyood is and has been in the past…
I get that, as I said, it was a statement on the general lack of films based on Baldwin’s work prior to Jenkins. Someone meaning it took him to do that as opposed to hollywood seeing the value in Baldwin’s work long before.
I had questions… here are some spoilery discussions of the film which try to put it into perspective…
But I dunno… it still left me with a weird sense of unease about the film that I’m not sure why I have that reaction… I felt similar at the end of Ex Machina… like it felt like an attempt to criticize misogyny, but failed in some fundamental way? I just can’t put my finger on why I feel that way, though…
