Meanderings of a Monkey Juggler

Last night was a notable scary fillum night.  Firstly 'twas Nicky's last regular one as she's moving to Cambridge. Second we had a new starter, Rod showed up with mad hair (see his site for details).

Secondly we watched probably the worst (in a couple of ways) fillum we've ever chosen.

But before I begin there's a previous one to review.  Bear invited me over to watch "The Motorcycle Diaries" last weekend.  For those not in the know "The Motorcycle Diaries" was the diary of a young Che Guevara when him and a mate scooted round South America on a battered bike.  The point being he saw poverty and injustice and this hardened his socialist/communist views.  The fillum, however, was a bit vague.  Most of the time Che didn't get to say a lot.  He was a quiet sort and kept his thoughts to himself and his diary.  That's all very well but not much use for a fillum!  It left a big gap that didn't really get filled by the succession of long monochrome shots of the dispossessed and poor they'd met looking mournfully at the screen with quietly dramatic music at the end of the movie.  It looked pretty and the parts about him and friend trying to get off with girls with disastrous consequences were quite entertaining.  Worth a look but not good enough to be worthy.

The second fillum we watched last night was "A Tale of 2 Sisters".  This is a Korean flick about 2 sisters (No!)   One of them had been to a mental institution and the story was her returning to home after leaving.  Cue lots of halluinatory events and some pretty good scares.  The characters were those you'd expect in one of these; the slightly unhinged evil step-mother;  2 nubile girls with lots of shots of their unclad legs (I mentioned this type of thing before); an ineffective father and a scary monster girl in green.  C and L spent some of the time squeaking at the shocks and it was quite good at those.  The twist was reasonably twisty and all ends resolved.  Definitely worth a look.

The first fillum we watched last night was "Visitor Q" by Takashi Miike.  Hmm?  What to make of this oddity?  It was the most disgraceful fillum I've seen in recent times.  A short list of depravities would include incest (father-daughter), prostitution (daughter and wife), drug abuse, mother abuse, random violence, breast squeezing and milking (this made the ladies in the audience squirm like nothing we've ever seen before), rape, murder, necrophilia, adult breast-feeling [blimey that's one heck of a Freudian typo isn't it?  I meant, of course, "feeding"], bullying (including forced defecation, urination upon, firing fireworks at), body cutting up and probably some more.

There didn't really seem to be much story to this.  Visitor Q was the random stranger who just started living with this bizarre family. This led to a marvellous skit where the house was being attacked by the son's bullies.  The dad started filluming the event and describing everyone else in the room "Here's... Well I don't know who that is.  He just started living here".  The best bit of the fillum.  Apart from the champagne cork bit (I'll not describe that as I'll get my site pulled from the net).

Lizzah was bored by it.  Clurb was utterly appalled.  Nicky stayed quite quiet and Rod probably wondered what the hell he'd got into.  An odd little fillum.  Not sure I'd recommend it.  One more bizarreness about it was the thing it reminded me most of was the play "An Inspector Calls".  It has the same basic theme of a stranger entering a dysfunctional family and causing them all grief.  I don't remember a very disturbing happy family at the end of Inspector though.  I think JB Priestley should of put some more depravity in his thing and then the parallels would be much more obvious.

Have fun.