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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.169.180.118
Posted on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 - 01:17 pm:   

I hate writing bad reviews - it brings the worst out in you and makes you feel actually bad. It ends nowhere. But Pet Sematary is very bad - perfunctory, in a hurry, half-hearted. It's like someone chose the makers at random from people walking down the street and made them finish it within a tiny time window, and that it would be put out whatever the outcome. I jumped a few times, and the girl gave the role her all and was actually very convincingly otherworldly in one scene, but that's not enough. But I fell asleep a few times, and near the end kept picking up my bag to leave. What kept me sitting there? The feeling that if people saw me leaving who were enjoying the film might feel saddened to see me walking out on something that had been for them fun or scary or whatever. Nuts, isn't it.
Later on I put on The House with a Clock in its Walls, a Jack Black kid's film, directed by Eli Roth' director of the Hostel films. It's not perfect but it makes me feel warm and fuzzy, and it has a kid working black magic to raise the dead, and mystery, and careful pacing, and minimal cgi rampages. Jack Black is so nice in it you want him for your dad. In fact, the film cocoons you in a kind of cotton wool bubble of niceness you want to BE there inside it - always something I like to find in a film, even a bad one, which this technically is. But bad films can be lovely films because you know there was love in there, and that can count for something. I didn't detect any in Pet Sematary.

While I'm here I might as well plug another film, one by Colin Trevorrow, who it seems now has made the best Jurassic Park movie (don't say that's not difficult). The film is Safety Not Guaranteed, a little time travel film in which the time travel doesn't happen till the end, and even then we don't see much of it or even know if it happened or not. It's about people wishing they could put their smushed up lives back together but tootling along not really doing anything about it. The charcaters, again, make you want to be with them longer, and you're sad to see them go. It's not well shot or particularly movie-like but you realise it's doing other things to keep you watching, basically caring about itself, 'mattering'.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 51.37.86.52
Posted on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 - 02:48 pm:   

Thanks for the tip. I see SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED has Aubrey Plaza, who is a favourite of mine at the moment - have a look at her in interviews, she's damned funny, though I haven't seen her in a film yet I think.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.169.180.118
Posted on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 - 08:26 pm:   

I'll look her up.
Confession time; I LOVE Jurassic World.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.233.147.124
Posted on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 - 09:30 pm:   

I haven't seen it, soz!
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.169.180.118
Posted on Thursday, April 11, 2019 - 10:47 am:   

One of the few monster movies where you itch to get to the people talking scenes, because you like them and genuinely care for them.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.169.180.118
Posted on Thursday, April 11, 2019 - 10:50 am:   

About Safety Not Guaranteed - if you could only time travel back within the last twenty years, would you bother?
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.233.147.123
Posted on Thursday, April 11, 2019 - 12:44 pm:   

Yeah I'd go back to 1999. Not excited about it though.
Maybe I wouldn't. Technologically the 2000s were an awkward changeover period from analogue to digital.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.169.180.118
Posted on Saturday, April 13, 2019 - 05:13 am:   

Do you ever 'think' analogue? I always think of it as just sitting in a room doing one thing, or even nothing. Reading, maybe.

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