Exploring humankind's unsettling capacity for evil, this darkly twisted drama plays upon the power of supernatural fears and everyday horrors. Each season brings back familiar faces, but they're playing different characters in an all-new setting. Season 2 of this horror anthology brings new characters and a new location as Jessica Lange returns to portray the administrator of an East Coast mental institution for the criminally insane in the 1960s.
I love the concept of recreating a total different scenario with the same cast as season 1. It works almost like a theater company performing different plays, and somehow you feel the actors are getting to know more about how to work with one another. This season was in a way far scarier than the first one, in the way people were far more twisted, mentally dark, and it used the fascination of the darkest sins to make us feel uncomfortable about humanity. Nevertheless, the characters are explored in various ways, and play with the humanity in each of them, or even play us into believing one thing and twisting it into another. The set for the second season is also far more interesting that in the first one, and the performances pushed to more extremes, to our very pleasure. It is a great second season, even better than the first one.
A Boston family makes a new start by moving cross-country to Los Angeles ... only to find that their new home might already be "occupied." As the house's dark secrets come to light, creepy characters come out of the woodwork. Exploring humankind's unsettling capacity for evil, this darkly twisted drama plays upon the power of supernatural fears and everyday horrors. Each season brings back familiar faces, but they're playing different characters in an all-new setting.
This is a very particular way of looking at haunted house. The beginning of the season was giving you great scare, but it would seem that the producers were more interested in getting to know the monsters, and somehow unveil the real monsters, who don't correspond to the cliches of monsters. The story twists in itself making you less and less fearful, and more interested about what really happened in that house. The performances are great, the characters completely and sometimes absurdly realistic. You might even think of the series as a comedy. Anyway, hard not to spoil the suspense. I got into watching the next one right after!
The classic tales of Dracula, Frankenstein, Dorian Gray and more are woven together in this horror series set on the dark streets of Victorian London.
To be honest, aside from the aesthetic, the series isn't very interesting. It is pulling all the strings of the masterpieces of British literature and culture, piecing it like doctor Frankenstein, and the result is a little scattered, with intense scenes, no sense of humor and a heavy weight story that now has all the strings interlaced and stuck together in a huge mess. Could have worked still, but the characters are not interesting enough, and Eva Green is too much Eva Green in any movie, which tends to be tiresome. My only curiosity now is to see where the Egyptian lead of the very beginning is going, with the unleashing of a combination of gods, and the last tale of vampire that has been released just before the end of the season.
After crash-landing on a desolate planet, a pilot and her passengers, one of whom is a convicted killer, must find a way to survive in a hostile environment while fending off a race of carnivorous aliens that has begun to stalk them.
Of course, this is a scary movie, and my taste for it is quite limited. I watched this movie because of Claudia Black, period. The result was quite interesting, since I had to hold on to my fears, and just suffer through all the surprises. On the other hand, I quite enjoyed Vin Diesel's performance, which made me forget about all the horrors of the film. The way Riddick is portrayed, he actually carries the movie in an unusual way, you basically want to stick to him, Vin Diesel's Riddick is definitely the safest way to get out of this mess... Which usually is more random in horror movies, where either you don't know who is the bad guy, or you stick to the wrong guy who winds up killed and have to find a back-up safe guy. :)
with Brad Pitt (The Tree of Life, Moneyball), Mireille Enos (The Killing), Daniella Kertesz, Eric Weston, David Morse (The Hurt Locker), James Badge Dale (The Grey, Shame, Flight, Iron Man 3), Elyes Gabel, David Andrews (Fair Game), Michiel Huisman, Julian Seager, Fana Mokoena, Pierfrancesco Favino, Peter Capaldi
A U.N. employee races against time and fate as he travels the world trying to stop the spread of a deadly zombie pandemic. As the undead hordes gain strength across the globe, governments topple and Earth stands on the brink of total social collapse.
From the director of Quantum of Solace, the Kite Runner...
I don't know how this guy, Swiss German director, did the stretch between finding Neverland, the Kite Runner and World War Z.
I haven't read the book, although all my dear gueeky friends loved it, and thought the movie was an awesome adaptation. All I could think about was Contagion, 28 days and The Happening. =
Three quotes make the movie, the first is from a young doctor of MIT theory about nature, the doc from the lab, and some Brad Pitt line about ABM, always be moving... The overflow of human body is mesmerizing, with almost a soul of its own, the opening where you figure out at the same time as Brad Pitt what is going on... The rest has weakness, the perception of the UN, the countries, the politics, the humanitarian, it is all stereotypical and deranging...
When scientific explorers unearth an artifact that points to the origins of humankind, they're pulled into the unexpected adventure of a lifetime. But if they falter, the very future of their species is at stake.
From the director of Alien, Robin Hood, Body of Lies, American Gangster, G.I. Jane, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise...
Hum... Difficult to say anything... Perhaps I should let it marinate a little bit longer... I was mesmerized by the beauty of our "Engineers", the landscape, the technology, the departing ideas (a mix of search for existential answers and immortality), the art of the other planet, the planetarium, even the ship itself. I believe if Ridley Scott hadn't been the filmmaker of Blade Runner and Alien, he would have taken much more liberties in developing a philosophical background to his story, he would not have tried to connect this latest Blockbuster to the successful sci-fi predecessors.
Now here is my other thinking: I believe producers are afraid to loose their audience in a movie that has to serve a mainstream purpose, and by building a no-brainer, they just happened to have lost their credibility of the reviewers, those same ones who could be a substantial reason for the movie to be crushed. Fortunately, I believe people don't read reviews anymore, so it won't matter so much to the producers.
But honestly, this movie smells so strong of a commercial attempt to create a Prometheus 2, where of course the answers we are all looking for will not be developed either.
Now, why the movie who had the smartest campain ever in history of cinema can fail so vividly in being smart itself. A friend of mine said as a joke that when the producers saw the movie for the first time, they freaked out and created a campain that would defy the imagination to create a big enough buz that the movie would be successful in the box-office no matter what.
Now one wonder, how come the movie was launch at different dates all over the world. They would have launched it at the same time, people wouldn't have been able to read the negative reviews coming from... France in my case (I acknowledge it didn't stop me from going to see it on the opening day in New York...) So the viral campaign they did was brilliant, launching two videos that were completing the movie, without being part of it. First a Ted Talk with no real tip on whether this is serious or advertizing, the bright idea being having an arrangement with Ted Talk (Ideas worth spreading), so it would really look real.
The next idea in the same line was to create an add, which would launch the first humanoid, David, explained by David himself. The logos at the end would suggest that it would be produced by a company named Weyland Corp. and distributed by Verizon.
The characters are very much tools for the action to continue, it is definitely not character driven, contradicting the viral campaign in a way. They are not attaching, they almost come and go in a random way, again, to keep the action going. They are trying to develop better the character of Elizabeth Shaw (Noomie Rapace) but somehow, it is more about what she is going through than how she feels. The same for the other characters, their relationships are not building up, they don't know each other at the beginning, they still don't know each other at the end.
About the "Engineers", from the first shot, they create a mystery, about their existential journey, when you see a ship leaving the planet while one who is staying is taking a poison that destroys him. When we finally have an interaction between one of them and the humans, there is nothing to bring to the story except then again destruction, action, and of course a limited dialogue that is made in an incomprehensible language so we are left aside.
My guess: a little bit of the mysteries launched in this movie are going to be explained in the next one, but a good movie part a good series has to be a stand-alone story, which you want to watch for itself, and in this case, it doesn't work, it is just a very long teaser (not even a trailer).
Now I am not going to mention the end of the movie and how ridiculous it is, I don't think there is a need to spoil the surprise...
Watch the trailer (the official one this time):
Watch my animation-interpretation of the opening scene:
with Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Descas, Florence Loiret Caille, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Raphael Neal, José Garcia, Helene Lapiower, Marilu Marini, Aurore Clément, Bakary Sangare
Modern-day cannibalism is more like a disease du jour in this tale of Parisian seductress Coré, a woman with a cerebral malady that forces her
to combine libido and appetite. A chance encounter with a honeymooning American husband who suffers the same affliction leads to a gory rampage. Vincent Gallo and Beatrice Dalle star in this gruesome yet stylish thriller that explores the link between unchecked sexual urges and society's moral decay.
My first movie of Claire Denis. I didn't know I was in for a ride! I don't think I have ever seen a movie that was graphically stronger. It is supposed to be a movie about desire, illness, sexual repression, but what remains are the missing pieces on bodies and the red, this red that is growing, everywhere you look. It feels like the two characters could almost be human at some point, and then they become primitive, monsters. I know you are supposed to read the movie as a parabola for mental illnesses, and quite oppositely, how sex comes back to the primitive instincts, but this movie was too sick for me. I saw "White Material" from the same director with a great apprehension, which was sad in a way, because the gory aspect of "Trouble Every Day" is not representative of Claire Denis' work.
"Two crew members are stranded on a spacecraft and quickly - and horrifically - realize they are not alone. Two astronauts awaken in a hyper-sleep chamber aboard a seemingly abandoned spacecraft. It's pitch black, they are disoriented, and the only sound is a low rumble and creak from the belly of the ship. They can't remember anything: Who are they? What is their mission? With Lt. Payton staying behind to guide him via radio transmitter, Cpl. Bower ventures deep into the ship and begins to uncover a terrifying reality. Slowly the spacecraft's shocking, deadly secrets are revealed...and the astronauts find their own survival is more important than they could ever have imagined." IMDB
Interesting movie. Your expectations are shifted little by little in the movie. It could be an horror movie, a science fiction movie, anticipation... But it is not only. Of course it reminds a little bit of the first Alien, and more and more of Solaris. It may not be a masterpiece but has its point.
