Soylent Screen fans: Are there any?

[urbpan]

Hey, just because the BBT site is down for repairs doesn't mean I'm going to let my deadline slip.  In order to keep posting my movie reviews in a timely fashion, I up and created a soylent_screen livejournal.  Please feel free to friend my new film critic sock puppet.  I'll be posting my next review soon--tonight or tomorrow morning--but in the meanwhile I've stocked the archives with classic Soylent Screen.  It's all low budget, foreign, indie, and unknown horror, fantasy, and sci-fi; none of my ranting about piece of crap Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale movies.  Not yet, anyway.  Once the BBT site comes back, I'll go back to posting there, but at least for the meanwhile, this is even more convenient for lj users who want to read my crappy and sometimes funny reviews.

Comments

[smallerdemon.livejournal.com]

Excellent! You KNOW I am reading every one that have posted in the past since I've whined about the virus thing. :)

Plus, I am a big movie fan (check out bnatters to see my movie obsessions - I am more of a "movie going event" weirdo, but I love movies too) so I really enjoy your reviews.

[morgi.livejournal.com]

I take it you didn't like The Prestige either.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

To be fair, each has made terrible movies separately, but, yeah, I did write about the prestige:

Magicians are jerks. That's the take home message of this high profile period piece. They are jealous, ambitious, and petty, and don't care who they hurt in order to perfect their craft and defeat their rivals. Thuggish Christian Bale and whiner Hugh Jackman leave a trail of crushed birds and severed fingers on their quest to outdo one another in the competitive field of prestidigitation. Then there is David Bowie as Nikola Tesla, adding a science fiction element that is fascinating to look at, but ultimately stupid.

The first two acts of "The Prestige" are entertaining enough. You know how when movies are turned into television series, what's captured is the middle third? The characters strive to reach some goal, or deal with some situation, which is settled one way or another by the end of the movie, but in the television series goes on forever. Felix and Oscar are mismatched roommates eternally, Buffy fights vampires long after high school, The MASH unit stays in Korea for 8 years longer than the actual Korean war, and so on. I'd love to see this done with The Prestige. The Professor and The Great Dalton try to out-do each other every week. They each go to one another's performance in disguise, sabotaging the other's trick. They steal one another's assistants, kill their friends, mutilate audience members, and in the end a lesson is learned and everything goes back to the way it was at the beginning. Of course this would deprive the viewer of the BIG SURPRISE ENDING. Which, frankly would be fine with me; it wasn't until the BSE that I was sure I was going to use the word "stupid" in this review.

The BIG SURPRISE ENDING is a problem with a lot of movies. While some do okay with it: The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects; just as often it ruins an otherwise fun movie: The Village, Fight Club. (Fight Club would also be good tv series. Every episode a bunch of guys beat the snot out of each other in secret, go around playing pranks on society, and steal human fat from liposuction clinics to make soap to fund it all. Some fun is had, lessons learned, we go back to the way things were at the beginning and do it all again next week. All without the idiotic BIG SURPRISE ENDING which made no sense.) The Prestige goes one better: it has two BIG SURPRISE ENDINGs, one for each jerk magician.

We see the story through their eyes, as they each read the other's stolen diary. Nested flashbacks reveal their behavior, ranging from regrettable to deplorable. They lose bits of their souls with each misdeed their obsessions drive them to. Finally the escalation is taken to the last, worst place, and before the curtain can fall on their lives, they tell us the secrets of their best magic trick. And that's where it gets really really stupid. I'm trying desperately not to reveal any spoilers, but as in Fight Club, it's impossible to discuss how stupid it is without at least referring to a revealing plot device. Last chance to stop reading. And once again, since we have two unscrupulous magicians who will do anything to beat the other, there are two stupid secrets to their tricks.

On the one hand, you have the physically impossible. Yes, that's right, through the magic of Bowie's Tesla, one magician has been given a machine which performs real magic. A machine which would revolutionize industry and manufacturing, redefine the laws of physics themselves, and bring on a new age of science, and it's used for a cruel magic trick. "But Jef, you idiot," I can hear you saying, "this is a science fiction film." Not until the last 20 minutes it isn't.

On the other hand you have the audience-insulting script trick of The Concealed Character. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, abracadabra! A character that you had no idea existed was hidden before your very eyes! Let me show you in yet more flashbacks where this character was--why he was everywhere! The audience should have cared about him all along, but you had no way to know he was there. Pulled one over on you didn't we?

At its best, cinema is a kind of magic. But The Prestige is just a trick.