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maplemoodTwo extremely different movies, both of which I've been wanting to watch for a while:
The People Under the Stairs: My very first memory of this movie is a friend who'd seen it already recapping it for my sisters and I when we were all around seven or eight; her description scared the pants off me and I still have no idea how or why she managed to watch it.
Now that I've finally seen it, The People Under the Stairs didn't scare the pants off me, but I did find it both effectively creepy and effectively goofy, and Fool is exactly the kind of brave and resourceful kid horror protagonist that I would have wanted to be back when my friend first told me about the movie. For most of the run time he's obviously terrified, but his spirit is never broken, and there's a cool element of puzzle-solving to his story, too--watching him figure out and learn to outsmart the Robeson's traps is genuinely fun.
The Stairpeople--and Alice and Roach, by extension--hit a good balance between scary and pitiable. Alice comes the closest to being entirely pitiable, with no bite, but she has her moments of creepiness and/or bravery, and her last confrontation with Mommy is especially awesome. Fool's character arc is (very, very obviously, and not in a bad way) modeled after the Fool figure in tarot, but Alice's has the structure of a fairy tale (even with her name, I kept thinking more of Rapunzel or Sleeping Beauty than Alice in Wonderland, but I also haven't read Alice in Wonderland in years, so I could be missing the obvious!). And the ending is pure bonkers wish fulfillment, which is exactly what these characters deserve.
Jodorowsky's Dune: It's wacky and sometimes clunky and the sequels go from really really good to really really unbearably nuts, but Dune is one of my favorite sci-fi novels (with the caveat that I haven't read much sci-fi) and when I heard about Alejandro Jodorowsky's unproduced, psychedelic, Pink-Floyd-scored movie adaptation, I knew I had to watch the documentary covering it.
So I did. But by the time I did I already knew enough about the project that I was looking for something deeper than an overview; I'd have loved getting into the nitty-gritty of casting different characters and more exact details about the plot (since it's pretty much completely different from the book's). There are some great bits about casting the Baron Harkonnen (Orson Welles!), Paul (Brontis Jodorowsky, the director's son, who trained in martial arts for something like six hours a day, every day, for years!), and the Padishah Emperor (Salvador Dali!), and the snippets of plot we do get are AMAZINGLY bonkers, even compared with, you know, the book Dune, which never goes light on bonkers. Still, it was mostly info I'd picked up before, so I guess I just wish I hadn't waited so long to actually watch it.
Jodorowsky comes across as mostly passionate and lovely and endearing...and then drops a couple metaphors that don't exactly reassure me about certain accusations swirling around him. So there's that. The documentary is mostly uncritical about the lengths he went to make the movie (see: having you kid train six hours a day every day) and his vision for it (more than 10 hours long)--it implies that it's all soulless Hollywood executives' fault that we never saw this Dune. But whether it means to or not, I think it does paint a portrait of the guy as carried away by passion pretty much beyond the point of reason, and how that affected both himself and the people around him.
The People Under the Stairs: My very first memory of this movie is a friend who'd seen it already recapping it for my sisters and I when we were all around seven or eight; her description scared the pants off me and I still have no idea how or why she managed to watch it.
Now that I've finally seen it, The People Under the Stairs didn't scare the pants off me, but I did find it both effectively creepy and effectively goofy, and Fool is exactly the kind of brave and resourceful kid horror protagonist that I would have wanted to be back when my friend first told me about the movie. For most of the run time he's obviously terrified, but his spirit is never broken, and there's a cool element of puzzle-solving to his story, too--watching him figure out and learn to outsmart the Robeson's traps is genuinely fun.
The Stairpeople--and Alice and Roach, by extension--hit a good balance between scary and pitiable. Alice comes the closest to being entirely pitiable, with no bite, but she has her moments of creepiness and/or bravery, and her last confrontation with Mommy is especially awesome. Fool's character arc is (very, very obviously, and not in a bad way) modeled after the Fool figure in tarot, but Alice's has the structure of a fairy tale (even with her name, I kept thinking more of Rapunzel or Sleeping Beauty than Alice in Wonderland, but I also haven't read Alice in Wonderland in years, so I could be missing the obvious!). And the ending is pure bonkers wish fulfillment, which is exactly what these characters deserve.
Jodorowsky's Dune: It's wacky and sometimes clunky and the sequels go from really really good to really really unbearably nuts, but Dune is one of my favorite sci-fi novels (with the caveat that I haven't read much sci-fi) and when I heard about Alejandro Jodorowsky's unproduced, psychedelic, Pink-Floyd-scored movie adaptation, I knew I had to watch the documentary covering it.
So I did. But by the time I did I already knew enough about the project that I was looking for something deeper than an overview; I'd have loved getting into the nitty-gritty of casting different characters and more exact details about the plot (since it's pretty much completely different from the book's). There are some great bits about casting the Baron Harkonnen (Orson Welles!), Paul (Brontis Jodorowsky, the director's son, who trained in martial arts for something like six hours a day, every day, for years!), and the Padishah Emperor (Salvador Dali!), and the snippets of plot we do get are AMAZINGLY bonkers, even compared with, you know, the book Dune, which never goes light on bonkers. Still, it was mostly info I'd picked up before, so I guess I just wish I hadn't waited so long to actually watch it.
Jodorowsky comes across as mostly passionate and lovely and endearing...and then drops a couple metaphors that don't exactly reassure me about certain accusations swirling around him. So there's that. The documentary is mostly uncritical about the lengths he went to make the movie (see: having you kid train six hours a day every day) and his vision for it (more than 10 hours long)--it implies that it's all soulless Hollywood executives' fault that we never saw this Dune. But whether it means to or not, I think it does paint a portrait of the guy as carried away by passion pretty much beyond the point of reason, and how that affected both himself and the people around him.