Mark's Talk

Calvaire (The Ordeal)

Survival horror for the art house crowd, Calvaire has a unique oddness that drives its deranged story straight into the eyeballs of viewers. The horror here is in the insanity of the captors and the atmosphere of the area where the main character is stranded.

If you want silly excessive gore, this is not your movie. If you want a captive survival horror narrative that dares to flirt with believable mental illness and bothers to use the camera and cinematography to tell the story as much as dialogue, this is it.

This is middle of nowhere backwards crazy people done to a perfect chime; look no further for your pigfucking scene needs. I hereby declare that I believe this film is superior to "Deliverance".

"Most fucked up" highlight: the village dancing around the piano

The Last Man on Earth

A Certain Kind of Death

This is a superb documentary, not interested in probing its subjects (indeed no documentarian or film crew member is ever heard from) but instead settles to observe. The people interviewed seem to be allowed a free forum for their thoughts, like the director told them, "just do what you would normally do and help us understand what your job requires you to do".
"Faces of Death" can totally suck on it because this crew ALSO got LA county morgue access, and they got just as awesome footage as you guys did, cept it wasn't all heavy handed and laced with shock value like the FoD series. This is a film that shows what is - what a modern pauper's death and burial looks like, exactly. Not much sentimentality, just what we find out about the person from recovered legal forms or papers left in their houses. We first meet these people as decaying remains. The camera is not afraid of dead bodies, even extreme cases and bodies left to decay as long as most of these are usually much more severe to look at than other corpses. So there are many things here you may not want to see in our bubbled modern world, and that luxury is afforded to you because of the people who work for coroners and mortuaries. This movie shows us exactly what these jobs entail; the best example in the sequence in which bodies are prepared for cremation and then cremated. It's a beautiful naturalistic filming technique and the result is pure reality. This is what life, and death, are really like, and it may take a hell of a lot to watch this. But if you're a sick objective fuck like me, you're just going "those are some great shots of blood filled body bags" or "look at that...died on the shitter. Probably what'll happen to me. I better make some skydiving arrangements ASAP if I get bowel cancer instead of waiting around my shitty apartment and making mounds of 'gonna die' documents."

Fausto 5.0

A step above the typical horror movie; this is more accurately described as a surrealistic/existential thriller. The most remarkable thing about this movie is that it is engaging, it whips by and leaves the viewer wanting more. The pace is incredible, the rendering of Mephistopheles is unforgettable, odd, and distinctly without religious trappings. Actually, that is another quite remarkable thing about this film that it avoids religion altogether and instead approaches the Faust story as one man's degrading and distorting vision of life. Not as gory as it is said to be, but extremely atmospheric and included gore is pleasing and effective. This film assumes the audience's prior knowledge of the Faust legend, as some plot events may seem arbitrary, illogical, or unjustified (particularly the end may not make sense) when it is in fact representative of the details in Goethe's and Marlowe's Faustus and Faust respectively. You don't have to be familiar with those texts though, a quick synopsis review on wikipedia will do to give you enough plot knowledge for this. Not at all a disappointing version of Faust, but indeed a very modern and effective rendering.

The Dark Knight

Join with the other AGENTS OF CHAOS and UNFRIENDS OF BATMAN to rip on 'The Dark Knight' at http://www.flixster.com/conversa
tions/1100974

Don't tell me all you fansters are *really* that satiated by this movie? Surely, it's the drought that has left you all suffering from dehydration (and delusions that this is a "great" movie as opposed to "acceptable").

Masterpiece?!?!?!?!?!!? why so serious fanboys?