Oh jesus I wanted to like this movie. I am a big fan of the artists, and shit if this one isn’t made by some kind of artist. I guess the dude is a mtv music video director named Tarsem. At first I thought “Holy shit Tarsem is directing now? I thought he was dead.” Then I remembered I was thinking of Sabu. Tarsem is a different guy.
Anyway this movie is about as pretty as I’ve ever seen when Tarsem lets loose. There are fantasy world imageries of magic horses and deserts and sailboats and the virgin Mary and weird doll people and little skeleton horses and evil clowns tying a dude’s intestines to a music box and etc. These don’t look like any movie I’ve seen before, they are bright and weird and perfectly designed like some kind of psychedelic painting, the ones made by a real master artist not just some hippie that paints mushrooms and mad hatters and hangs them up at the local cafe. I’m talking the real deal.
I mean this movie is great to hang on your wall but it’s not great to sit and watch. Who the fuck cares how pretty it is when all the movie is is a bad episode of Millennium. What it’s about is Eccentric Serial Killer (Vincent D’Onofrio) does Weird Torture Ritual to Young Girls (see Cabin By the Lake review above for similar serial killer shenanigans), gets caught exactly as he has a seizure and goes into a coma. So Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn use virtualistic reality type machines to go into his dream world and try to get him to admit where he has his last victim locked up. But then they just figure it out anyway without his help and then she stabs him and there is a bunch of weird ass shit that happens and then the movie ends and as far as anybody can remember, there wasn’t really much of a story.
The pacing in this movie is not exactly strong. This is one of the movies where the good guy starts killing the bad guy and you think, “Oh, this must be the end part.”
The characterization is also nothing to write home about. There is a couple lines of dialogue where they explain what tragic event in their past caused them to do the job they are doing now. But that’s about it. Jennifer Lopez is supposed to be this great psychologist or something but you can’t stop staring at her lips. I’m pretty sure the lipstick companies helped fund this movie, there is really no other explanation for how distracting the lipstick is. Jennifer really knows how to act but in this one she is just being a model. It works great for the fantasy world where she is more of a painting than a person, but in the real life scenes I would like her to do some kind of talking and emoting in between modelling.
It’s really kind of sad that the movie Seven has now become a whole genre. I thought that movie was pretty fucking creepy. Good job David Fincher. But I don’t want to see the dark shadowy but also hip and stylish but also unexpectedly gruesome serial killer movie of the month. enough with the serial killers hollywood, we get the idea. they are creepy and weird and when you go to the house there is a weird collage on the wall. You have to go out into the sunny desert to find where their hideout is. enough already.
June 25th, 2010 at 2:53 am
After The Cell, Tarsem made The Fall, supposedly with his own money. Have you seen it? It’s kind of like Pan’s Labyrinth meets The Princess Bride, filmed as an extremely long commercial for either perfume, jeans, a trip to India or the newest Björk album or something. It’s pretty and shallow, but it has its moments.