recent movies I watched

[thesalmonofdoubt]

America sniper

Mixed feelings about this. Kinda went in deliberately avoiding knowing anything about it before watching just to get the untainted experience and form an opinion naïve of any external influence. Walked out really enjoying the movie trying to imagine what it was that everyone else was finding so offensive and figured it probably had something to do with the obvious patriotic one sides flavour to it all. And it was all that. There was no depth to the conflict or the reasons for why the soldiers were over there doing what they were doing but also didn't feel this was the actual point of the movie and kinda assumed it was a story told from his particular perspective rather than supposed to be a commentary on war or the actual conflict. In that respect, its hardly mind blowing to think that this particular seal enlisted because he felt that his country was being attacked and that 911 was the metaphoric straw and everything was being presented with that bias and that this was intentional.

Then I figured I'd give the controversy a bit of a read and ended up agreeing with much of the substance of that simply because there were things that I was simply not aware of regarding the actual facts of the story that were included not so much to tell the story from his perspective, but to influence our perspective - which is different.

I don't really give a shit whether the actual number of kills he had were exaggerated or not or whether the nun did or didn't give the boy a grenade launcher, I'm happy to give these things a pass in the name of story telling if that's the extent of it, but it really wasn't. They whole cloth invented a number of evil brown people (Notably - the butcher and Mustafa) that seemed to serve no purpose but to present the a-rabs as border line insane evil Hitler types to drive the movie narrative (rather than the individuals narrative) that we're all over there to save these guys from some sort of home grown evil.. Watching the movie, I naturally assumed that these were actual individuals and this was simple story telling, seems this is not the case and it changes pretty much everything. If they were going to take the time to invent characters to create some sort of narrative outside of Mr Sniper, then this would have been an excellent time to juxtapose his narrative rather than re-enforce it.

So - Enjoyed watching it when I watched it but discovered it really was just another piece of bog standard American propaganda.
If I hadn't read the critiques - I'd have given it a 7.5. Downgrading that to a 6/10 given its still a pretty interesting character study if not an actual slice of life.

The Babadook
Oddly enuff, despite this being a local production and much like Predestination, I've never even heard of this at all before it was mentioned in a few comments on this board. Even more strange is that despite it being an Australian production, its not actually available on Netflicks here - I had to actually VPN into the states and access American content to watch it.. So, way to go Mr Australian film industry.

Dead shame it received no promotion here and seems to be better known outside of Australia cos its really very very good. The long and short of the story (without giving anything away) is that its essentially a horror/psychological thriller. Single working mum raises her child alone in Adelaide. The father was killed in a car crash taking the mum to the hospital to have her child, and this adds quite a lot of subtext to how the whole story ends up playing out.

Anyways - child has clear behavioural issues and finds himself progressively ostracised from both his peers and eventually has a knock on effect on his mum who finds herself increasingly disenfranchised. One fine day the boy finds a children's book called "The babadook " which the mum begins to read to him before discovered the content is a bit unbalanced and knowing her child has a predilection towards obsessing, abandons the story half way thru - which sends the kid into a fit of rage. Kid obsesses about the book regardless and the fun begins.

Fucking loved this movie - it feels fresh in a genre that desperately needs fresh. Its got depth, is nicely filmed and quietly directed without any of the obvious "startle scare" shizzle. Not sure if I'd consider it a true horror and its nice that it doesn't fit all that neatly into a specific category. The child (despite only being around 6 or 7) delivers a remarkably authentic performance - I'm gonna give this a solid 8/10 for what they did with limited resources and within a genre overwhelmingly bloated by crap, cheap scares and CGI. Definitely worth a watch.