brianericdrake

Surrealism is great, horror can be fine, dark humor is always pretty okay for me. But this thing ... absolutely unwatchable. It's like the director/writer wants to smash your skull in with a sledgehammer, over and over and over, and then dance on the goo. He evidently hates his characters and sure seems to hate his audience. The amount of over-the-top torment he pours on his lead character is numbingly revolting. There is not one moment, not one line, not one frame, where anything funny, mildly humorous, passably witty, or decent, or even remotely human happens (not to mention that you can't understand 90% of Phoenix's mumbling). Every character is a psychotic catastrophe. I guess the filmmaker thinks that's funny, and I guess a good part of his audience thinks that's funny, too, which depresses the hell out of me. This movie might make you never want to watch another movie again. I'll need days of media-fasting to clear this muck from my palate.

Turned into a pretty darned good movie. They cut a bit, changed some of the scenes around, and added quite a lot for Phyllis Diller, but she's so perfect in the part that one doesn't mind. Milo O'Shea is perfect as Zero, Julian Glover is wonderfully warped, Sidney Chaplin in his brief role captures it. The other bits added in don't distract from the meat of the heartbreaking story.

This is one of the great American plays, Expressionism through the American lens. I saw a production by Hystopolis with puppets, it was a dream come true. During Mrs. Zero's scene-long harangue, she disappeared behind a screen to undress and multiple mouths appeared around Zero's poor head, keeping up the endless tirade.

Anyone who comes here looking for your typical brainless zombie action is obviously unfamiliar with Jim Jarmusch. This is a quiet, rather tranquil zombie movie, and it's hysterically funny. The "meta" bits add to the hilarity. There is some gore, but the joy is the writing, the blandness of the characters lackadaisically confronting apocalypse, the casualness of the nonsensical explanations, and how no one reacts with the stereotypical shrieking panic that makes most such movies meaningless to sit through. Not to mention seeing Bill Murray as an action hero, and all these glamorous big names dressed down to homely nobodies.

Look, I've read the original Middle English poem, it's one of the great works of English lit, but what the heck is this movie doing? Most of the dialogue is incomprehensible (because it's mumbled and hissed and reverbed and badly recorded, not from the diverse accents - almost none of which make sense for either England or the period). It's set in the Middle Ages, so of course we have the clichéd ubiquitous mud and darkness - there's almost no color in this thing, the Green Knight is grey-black (hello, he's the Green Knight, symbol of rebirth in winter, why is that so hard to figure out?), most of the scenes are so dark I can't even make out what's going on. Believe it or not, the Middle Ages were not all mud and darkness! People wore brightly colored clothing! Plants grew! The sun shone! (Note: Neither was the world sepia-toned before 1990, for any filmmakers out there.) I was really hoping they would treat this great story with respect, but it's just another uncomprehending, incomprehensible, pretentious, slow as molasses muddle.

BTW, there's a nice school opera based on the poem, by Richard Blackford. It actually sticks to the story and offers some lovely music. And it runs less than an hour.

This is indeed something to look at, the graphics are interesting and certainly different, though everything seems to be shot through a muddied filter. But the plot! What a dull mish-mash of clichés. Snotty teenager yells at mother, wishes she was dead, mother immediately suffers some undefined illness, which leads to a dream-quest where the girl is searching for something that will supposedly save the mother, but that actually has absolutely no bearing on the "real world" scenes. Worse, the dream mother is basically the monster out of Coraline, right down to the spider references and big black eyes. I don't know much of Gaiman's work, but all of it seems to have the same recycled plots and characters. He evidently has some issues. The tacked-on happy endings (there are two) are so trite as to be downright embarrassing.

And let's face facts, Jim Henson Studios should stop trying to make feature films that don't have muppets. Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and this are not just pretentious but really cringe-worthy and, in a way I don't care to explore, icky. They should start producing international puppetry festivals again like they did in the late 1990s. Those were incredible.