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Jun. 16th, 2013 12:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* They have 45% containment on the Colorado fires. 8fingers crossed for continued progress*
* The people trying to deny people of color the right to vote are co-opting the language of the civil rights movement: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/46979745/vp/46419672#52221518
* This horrible abuse of psychiatric patients in Mississippi is all in service of profits for the prison industry:
* Weird Sexist thing a Republican said in Maine, the Daily Beast is attacking the President's CIA pick for wearing shorts and liking Anne Rice, and a teacher has been fired for being a survivor of domestic violence:
* "Restoring Trees to Save the World's Rarest Parrot:" http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/06/130615-cape-parrot-endangered-south-africa-science/
* "A Pocket-Sized Micro House Built To Withstand Severe Weather:" http://www.earthtechling.com/2013/06/a-pocket-sized-micro-house-built-to-withstand-severe-weather/?google_editors_picks=true
* "Superman: Flying to a church near you:" http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/14/superman-coming-to-a-church-near-you/?hpt=hp_t1
Eeeew!
* So, Dead Snow.
First off, I wanted to be really clear that this is an impressive achievement for an indie horror film. While they are at the high end of low budget, they had no real margin. It's hard enough for someone like Peter Jackson with his massive budget and lots of indoor shooting options for bad weather to be shooting outside. Imagine doing that in the mountains in the snow on a script with a minimum indoor scenes that had to be pre-shot, no snowy day back up shooting options, and no real money for over time or extra days. Making this film was hella hard and took serious guts. It also looks pretty good. There are some slip ups. (He still has an arm. I can see it through his shirt! The occasional moment when the make up clearly needed touch up. Occasional weather continuity issues. That sort of thing. We are talking a tiny percentage though.) My theory is that they simply couldn't afford to reshoot and in spots where all the coverage was bad and they couldn't leave it out, they took the shortest cut they could of the best of bad options. Again, it's a tiny percentage. When you consider the massive number of extras in make up, and the huge effort and money involved in fielding them compared to budget size, I'm not blaming them for maybe a total of five minutes or less of bad shots if you lumped them all together. The CGI was fairly unnoticeable, the zombies nasty, the setting gorgeous. This is the bulk of what I wanted going in. I was expecting far, far less. Seriously, I was genuinely impressed by how well they did on these aspects of the film.
But there were problems. Oh were there problems.
Let's start with the characters. I am bad at names, so I will be calling them by descriptors. First off, there are four female characters, but only one of them has a real personality. I will call her Dreads. I actually kind of liked Dreads. Her boyfriend was a shit, but she actually had qualities like empathy, guts, determination, etc.. The other women were pretty much undefined as people. I called these Sporty, Blonde, and "The Other One." They seemed mostly to exist to be paired up with the men, which bothered me.
The men will be here after referred to as "The Cute One," "Bad Boyfriend," "Total Asshole," and "The Little One." I bet you have already spotted the problem with the characters as a group, but I'll charge forward anyway. The Cute one actually turned out to be likeable beyond the cute part. He was brave, competent, and actually gave a shit about his girlfriend. This makes him the Dreads of the guy half of the friend group. In other words, just as I rather rooted for Dreads to not be eaten, I liked him enough to want him to survive even though my narrative sense told me he was doomed. Bad Boyfriend was all red flags for domestic abuse and I hated him with a passion and Total Asshole was a complete waste of skin. When you find yourself rooting for blood thirsty NAZI zombies to hurry up and start killing the "heroes" there is a problem with the narrative. I should never be rooting for the NAZI zombies. Little One had so little personality the first half of the film that I didn't much notice him. Randomly, rather late in the film when things had mostly gone to shit for the characters, the actor seemed to wake up and he became surprisingly charming. I'm giving the actor credit here, and his part was almost as underwritten as the women's. If I had patience to be watching it again so soon, I'd go back and watch to see if I was missing something as far as he and The Other One went, as it good be the two of them had dialog somewhere I missed, but I'm doubting it.
Anyway, the whole, "I'm having a hard time caring if most of these people are eaten by NAZIs" is a problem for the film. This is not a special problem of this film. I've commented on it on numerous occasions as it's frequently a problem with the horror genre. Generally, they but some people in the group you want to see killed for being total douches, but if there are not enough likeable characters, you lose jeopardy. In this case, they separate out Cute Guy and you are totally rooting for him, but Dreads that pretty much leaves Dreads with the main group until Little One start becoming likeable fairly late in the process. It messes with the dramatic tension to have so little jeopardy compared to the number of characters in the film, if that makes sense.
And then there is the question of the NAZI zombie's motivation. (There's a sentence I never thought I'd type). While I suppose your NAZI zombies can have two motivations instead of the one, it seemed muddled. Having them have one motivation in the beginning and then switching so clearly to a different one mid stream was a problem because it got me asking a whole lot of awkward questions that made the whole thing fall apart. This is clearly meant to be brain candy. Violent brain candy, but brain candy. Having me thinking as hard as I ended up doing about the bits that didn't match up and the plot holes really took me out of the moment.
There were things I liked about it. Really there were, but it's definitely a hot mess. Also? Nearly everyone involved in making this seemed delightful on the extras and I wish them all well in future endeavors.
* So True Blood is back, but I'm having a hard time drumming up any enthusiasm. It's nice to see Rutger Hauer working, even if what he's doing is terribly obvious. I am so sick of so many of these plot lines. Apparently, I completely forgot like half of the things from last season, mostly through running out of fucks to give and not thinking about anything in there for the intervening year. Arline is usually plain annoying, but it was so nice to see her telling off Andy. I'm down to mostly caring about Lafayette, Terry, and Tara; and Tara's situation is so fucked and the shittiness of the way everyone treats her is making it hard for me to engage at this point. At least we got some mostly naked Alcide, and some sexy Eric shots. No naked Sam or Laffayette, alas. Yep, I'm mostly in it for the beefcake at this point. I'd love to see Tara beat the shit out of most of them at this point, but I don't see that happening. Sigh. I think the shark has been jumped at some point.
* The Clutch:
* The people trying to deny people of color the right to vote are co-opting the language of the civil rights movement: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/46979745/vp/46419672#52221518
* This horrible abuse of psychiatric patients in Mississippi is all in service of profits for the prison industry:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
* Weird Sexist thing a Republican said in Maine, the Daily Beast is attacking the President's CIA pick for wearing shorts and liking Anne Rice, and a teacher has been fired for being a survivor of domestic violence:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
* "Restoring Trees to Save the World's Rarest Parrot:" http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/06/130615-cape-parrot-endangered-south-africa-science/
* "A Pocket-Sized Micro House Built To Withstand Severe Weather:" http://www.earthtechling.com/2013/06/a-pocket-sized-micro-house-built-to-withstand-severe-weather/?google_editors_picks=true
* "Superman: Flying to a church near you:" http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/14/superman-coming-to-a-church-near-you/?hpt=hp_t1
Eeeew!
* So, Dead Snow.
First off, I wanted to be really clear that this is an impressive achievement for an indie horror film. While they are at the high end of low budget, they had no real margin. It's hard enough for someone like Peter Jackson with his massive budget and lots of indoor shooting options for bad weather to be shooting outside. Imagine doing that in the mountains in the snow on a script with a minimum indoor scenes that had to be pre-shot, no snowy day back up shooting options, and no real money for over time or extra days. Making this film was hella hard and took serious guts. It also looks pretty good. There are some slip ups. (He still has an arm. I can see it through his shirt! The occasional moment when the make up clearly needed touch up. Occasional weather continuity issues. That sort of thing. We are talking a tiny percentage though.) My theory is that they simply couldn't afford to reshoot and in spots where all the coverage was bad and they couldn't leave it out, they took the shortest cut they could of the best of bad options. Again, it's a tiny percentage. When you consider the massive number of extras in make up, and the huge effort and money involved in fielding them compared to budget size, I'm not blaming them for maybe a total of five minutes or less of bad shots if you lumped them all together. The CGI was fairly unnoticeable, the zombies nasty, the setting gorgeous. This is the bulk of what I wanted going in. I was expecting far, far less. Seriously, I was genuinely impressed by how well they did on these aspects of the film.
But there were problems. Oh were there problems.
Let's start with the characters. I am bad at names, so I will be calling them by descriptors. First off, there are four female characters, but only one of them has a real personality. I will call her Dreads. I actually kind of liked Dreads. Her boyfriend was a shit, but she actually had qualities like empathy, guts, determination, etc.. The other women were pretty much undefined as people. I called these Sporty, Blonde, and "The Other One." They seemed mostly to exist to be paired up with the men, which bothered me.
The men will be here after referred to as "The Cute One," "Bad Boyfriend," "Total Asshole," and "The Little One." I bet you have already spotted the problem with the characters as a group, but I'll charge forward anyway. The Cute one actually turned out to be likeable beyond the cute part. He was brave, competent, and actually gave a shit about his girlfriend. This makes him the Dreads of the guy half of the friend group. In other words, just as I rather rooted for Dreads to not be eaten, I liked him enough to want him to survive even though my narrative sense told me he was doomed. Bad Boyfriend was all red flags for domestic abuse and I hated him with a passion and Total Asshole was a complete waste of skin. When you find yourself rooting for blood thirsty NAZI zombies to hurry up and start killing the "heroes" there is a problem with the narrative. I should never be rooting for the NAZI zombies. Little One had so little personality the first half of the film that I didn't much notice him. Randomly, rather late in the film when things had mostly gone to shit for the characters, the actor seemed to wake up and he became surprisingly charming. I'm giving the actor credit here, and his part was almost as underwritten as the women's. If I had patience to be watching it again so soon, I'd go back and watch to see if I was missing something as far as he and The Other One went, as it good be the two of them had dialog somewhere I missed, but I'm doubting it.
Anyway, the whole, "I'm having a hard time caring if most of these people are eaten by NAZIs" is a problem for the film. This is not a special problem of this film. I've commented on it on numerous occasions as it's frequently a problem with the horror genre. Generally, they but some people in the group you want to see killed for being total douches, but if there are not enough likeable characters, you lose jeopardy. In this case, they separate out Cute Guy and you are totally rooting for him, but Dreads that pretty much leaves Dreads with the main group until Little One start becoming likeable fairly late in the process. It messes with the dramatic tension to have so little jeopardy compared to the number of characters in the film, if that makes sense.
And then there is the question of the NAZI zombie's motivation. (There's a sentence I never thought I'd type). While I suppose your NAZI zombies can have two motivations instead of the one, it seemed muddled. Having them have one motivation in the beginning and then switching so clearly to a different one mid stream was a problem because it got me asking a whole lot of awkward questions that made the whole thing fall apart. This is clearly meant to be brain candy. Violent brain candy, but brain candy. Having me thinking as hard as I ended up doing about the bits that didn't match up and the plot holes really took me out of the moment.
There were things I liked about it. Really there were, but it's definitely a hot mess. Also? Nearly everyone involved in making this seemed delightful on the extras and I wish them all well in future endeavors.
* So True Blood is back, but I'm having a hard time drumming up any enthusiasm. It's nice to see Rutger Hauer working, even if what he's doing is terribly obvious. I am so sick of so many of these plot lines. Apparently, I completely forgot like half of the things from last season, mostly through running out of fucks to give and not thinking about anything in there for the intervening year. Arline is usually plain annoying, but it was so nice to see her telling off Andy. I'm down to mostly caring about Lafayette, Terry, and Tara; and Tara's situation is so fucked and the shittiness of the way everyone treats her is making it hard for me to engage at this point. At least we got some mostly naked Alcide, and some sexy Eric shots. No naked Sam or Laffayette, alas. Yep, I'm mostly in it for the beefcake at this point. I'd love to see Tara beat the shit out of most of them at this point, but I don't see that happening. Sigh. I think the shark has been jumped at some point.
* The Clutch: