Villagemonster Dreams
(Dreams, surreal moments, script ideas and film bites)
One image I’m not getting out of my head after watching the latest Black Mirror is this…
TERRIFYING!
12. Berberian Sound Studio (apart from last 15 minutes!)
11. Young Adult
10. Moonrise Kingdom
9. Exicision
8. Sound of my Voice
7. Dredd
6. Looper
5. Martha Marcy May Marlene
4. Frankenweenie
3.Brave
2. Cabin in the woods
1. Beasts of the Southern Wild
Films I missed but want to see and believe will be pretty good (or maybe not!)
Argo, Life of Pi, Rust and Bone, Holy Motors, Searching for Sugar Man, Paranorman, Smashed, Laurence anyways, In Darkness, The Raid, Damsels in Distress, Dark Horse, Olso August 31st, The Loved Ones, Once upon a time in Anatolia, The Imposter.
Honorable mentions: The Monk, Safety Not Guaranteed, Sightseers, Skyfall, The Hobbit (entertaining, but my god was it padded out), Avengers Assemble (It was cool but it didn’t feel it that much),The Master (ditto), On the Road (ditto), Dark Knight Rises (technically brilliant but yeah, not feeling it…)
Worst films: Silent Hill Revelation, Cosmopolis, Isn’t Anyone Alive?
My favorite tv Shows
1. American Horror Story: Asylum
2. Game of Thrones
3. Walking Dead
4. Parks and Recreation
5. Boardwalk Empire
6. Enlightened
7. Hunderby
Saw the above film as part of EIFF today, and I mostly liked it :d. I was ridiciously excited for it going in , being a big fan of Peter Strickland’s last film Katalin Varga, and it only really disappointed me towards the end of the film.
The sets, costumes, lighting, music and most importantly sound effects all gave the film an awesome 70’s atmosphere not too dissimilar to Tinker, Tailor that kept me transfixed throughout.
And something that surprised me: as well as being unsettling, the film was actually really, truly funny in parts (humor wasn’t a big part of Katalin Varga). There’s a lot of winks and nudges to fans of films like Suspiria, that would have been made in these studios in the first place. The ridiculous descriptions that the sound recordist gives of the scenes we only ever hear- “the two women creep along the secret subterranean poultry tunnel only to find the putrid corpses of the witches” - are hilarious. The tension and uncertainty builds slowly as Toby Jones ’ gentle British sensibilities clash with the gruesome scenes he has to score (he has to stab cabbages, pull apart radishes and smash in courgettes) and with the brash Italians (some really well played escaling conflict).
But in the last act the film became a little too ambiguous for my liking. It seemed to attempt a Mulholland Drive-style reversal which for me didn’t really work…I didn’t really get what the intention was, and felt like Strickland had just used it as a flashy excuse to avoid giving it a real satisfying conclusion.
Still, I had a lot of fun watching the film and would definitely recommend it.
An irony was that, for a film so dependent on sound for it’s atmosphere,during the screening there was construction going on outside the screen. So to add to the diagetic horror sounds we annoyingly had some non-diagetic construction noises!!
A Random but True fact:
“North Americans believed tomatoes were poisonous until 1820, when Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson disproved that myth during a public demonstration on the courthouse steps in Salem, NJ.”
Crazy!
Locked up a cellar door today and thought of this:
“This famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language, of all the endless combinations of words in all of history, that Cellar Door is the most beautiful. “
I checked out three films at Glasgow Film Festival this year, two French horrors (although one is more a thriller/ mystery) ,and a German thriller/drama.
Out of films I saw I would most recommend The Monk, thought it was awesome. I especially wanted to see it because they were filming it near Barcelona while I was in spain, and got a couple of sneaky looks at the production. It’s like a 17th century painting come to life, with extra creepiness. It’s like what a more classy, modern-made version of a Hammer Horror would be like. It’ll be getting a general release in April 27th in UK apparently so you should check it out then :P
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1mVqAZiGV4
The disappointment is French horror Livid , which I had been really excited to see :( . I thought the first hour had a fantastic, creepy build up, and is genuinly intruiging. They do a really good job of setting up interesting characters in a young trainee nurse and her jaded mentor, and they build up the Halloween/ gothic atmosphere really well. But I thought in the second half it just fell apart a bit; they somehow managed to both under-explain and provide too much in the case of the supernatural goings-on.
It also had some major plot holes :/ , like (spoiler alert) if the (non supernatural) nurse was a little girl in the 1930’s, how come she’s only around 40 in the present day?? :/
I get that Suspiria was a major influence, and that they were trying to throw in a range of random supernatural things like that movie. But with Suspiria you always have the core logic that witches were responsible for everything weird going on, whereas here it suggests several different things and never fully explores any of the options.. Are Jessel and her daughter vampires? demons? witches? angels? an improbable combination of all these things??
Overall I thought it was , like The Monk, beautifully shot and very atmospheric. The costume, production and make-up design were outstanding. And I loved some of the little touches, like the homage to Halloween 3 and the fact that Will o’ the Wisps cropped up on the moors and no-one seemed to care too much. But it’s an incredibly messy film. The biggest shame is that they do some great character work at the start and then throw it out the window, and by the end I didn’t care about anyone.
Livid
Taking the middle ground is Beats Being Dead, a German thriller/ romance. I thought I’d check it out because I saw the trailer and thought it looked interesting, being a teenage romance set against the man hunt for an escaped murderer. And it is pretty interesting, actually, although way too slow in parts, and some of the conflict between the lovers is way too drawn out. But it really captures that whole summery romance feel and just the pure hormonal craziness of being an impulsive teenager and not caring about what’s going on around you, I thought. It’s one part of a loosely connected trilogy, but I didn’t catch the other 2 films.
Beats Being Dead
So I’ve got a bit of a cold at the moment, and I’m starting to think it’s responsible for the MENTAL (more than usual) dreams I’ve been having.
First, last saturday night I had a dream in which is was running down the stairs of this really tall tower. I had this little ginger kitten in my hands, and as I was running I could hear this horrible snarling from behind me. When I go to the bottom, I was there was a big four poster bed beside the tower door, so I crawled under and hid beneath it. Looking out, I saw this vicious, mental looking black cat come running out the door to the tower, and run off. I thought I was safe from it, but then I heard a hissing behind me. I tried to look around but then I felt a sharp pain in my side, and looked to see that the cat was like clawing me and biting my ribs. Then…I woke up, gasping, covered in sweat….and realised I was gripping my rib cage really tightly in the same place the dream cat had ‘bit me’.
Wierd enough (I put it down to the fever of the cold), but then on monday night I had another animal attack dream. This one started off with me wandering through the village where I’m from when suddenly a crocodile emerged from the bushes and started chasing me down the street! I was really scared, so I ran into the local shop, locked the doors and told eveyone what happened. No-one beleived me, so I decided to look out outside. I opened the door a crack to see, and saw that the crocodile had gone…but that there was now a snake outside! The snake saw me open the door and tried to get in, but I shut the door on it…several times actually. And this just made it madder and madder. Eventually I accidentally let it get in…and then I started freaking out. i ran to the far end of the shop and climbed up on top of the counter, thinking the snake wouldn’t be able to get me…But it appeared out of nowhere and jumped up into the air, landing to sink its fangs into my thigh! I screamed, and that was the end of the dream. Then when I woke up, again I had a bit of a pain where the dream snake had bitten me, like I’d been squeezing my thigh while I was sleeping…e
At last but not least , (but I don’t know if it actually counts as an animal) I had a dream the other night whwere I was cleaning a cupborad out at home. I opened a board game box to check the contents, and the chestburster alien from Alien jumped out right at me and bit me on the shoulder!
So yeah I’d like the animal attack dreams to stop now please XD. I haven’t had a series of terrifying dreams like this since the time I had dreams of a horrible Invasion of the Bodysnatchers-type scenario, where people I thought were ‘on my side’ kept turning ‘evil’ and trying to grab me :/.
This is a random post just based on an image I can’t get out of my head. I read David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas over the Christmas break , just because I wanted to read the book before the film version by the Wachowskis and Tom Twyker comes out later in the year (if you haven’t read it,do so!!). It’s a really interesting book, both in the way its written, and themes and messages it contains if you care to look for them. Thinking back to reading it, one thing really surprised me. When I started out reading it, I flicked through the different sections, and just from seeing the way that the middle section, ’ Sloosha’s Crossin’ ‘, was written, I presumed it was going to be my least favorite. It’s set in a sort of futuristic tribal society on Hawaii after there has been a big global apoacalypse and people have got primitive again, so the protagonistic writes in a thick, primitive slang. However, once I got to it and read for a while, I started to get really into it, and thinking back now I think it might be my favorite section.
Part of this has to be because of the fact the devil character that pops up to tempt the protagonist Zachary is called Ol’ Georgie….and my mum’s boyfriend is called Geordie…So I kept imagining my mum’s boyfriend popping up in the jungle and acting all devilish and sinister….and ended up actually pissing myself laughing as I read several times, just cuse I had the image in my head. XD
I loved the part about Ol’ Georgie wanting to scoop out people’s eyes with a ‘warty spoon’ XD. That, and the fact he’s often dangling from tree branches, perching on rocks etc., put this totally organic, gnarled kind of image of him in my head. The things that kept popping up were Pan from Pan’s Labyrinth, and also Baba Yaga, as illustrated in Hellboy. I really hope that if Ol’ Georgie pops up in the film adaptation of the book, he’s depicted in a similar sort of way. That would be coooool :P.
Was having a flick through Glasgow film festival programme to see if there was anything interesting, took one glance at this picture and decided I need to see this film (a French horror called Livid) :P. It just has that combination of beauty, horror and weirdness that can be found in most of my favorite films. I’ve no idea if the film will stand up to this picture…but it did a good job of selling it to me!
I also really want to see This Must be the Place, (with a glammed-up Sean Penn in a really wierd-sounding plot) but I know its getting a release generally in April…I’ll see if I can wait :P.
I may also have to go check out The Monk tho…It was filming near Barcelona while I was living there and sounds very intriguing and quite mad, being based on a old gothic novel and all .
