Thursday 15 October 2015

And that's why I always go into battle with a big heavy frying pan

My Maja and I went to see Crimson peak - SPOILERS AHEAD, BEWARE - probably a slightly more scary movie than what we usually go see, but to be perfectly honest, i really liked it. Not my top 50 liked it, but liked it a lot more than, say, the Martian. The Martian was so awfully praised and hyped and everyone thought it was so funny and well done and I never got that - I didn't think it was funny at all and when it was supposed to be lonely and desperate it was action and narrative and when it was suposed to be super scientific, it was pedestrian. And I hated Jessica Chastain there, she is always so fucking bland. 

Not here, though. Here she actually reminded me of, what's her name, that crazy actress that always ends up killing someone or herself screaming and crazy eye ... Eva Green. She was cold and beautiful and a little bit costume-driven (costumes here!), but still, you could instantly tell there's something off about her, you just didn't know what. Unlike Tom Hiddleston, who is so scrawny and anemic looking - you could see there's something off and you could instantly tell he's his sister's puppet. Plus most of the time his face is half-lit, which is code for shady character. Mia wasikovska is always a Gem and she plays a clever but lonely heiress that moves to the mother of all shitty mansions ever: a Cumbria hellhole, barren and moist and windy and... shitty, I am telling you. What the fuck was the architect thinking, building something like that? Architects know less than nothing about statics. The house is always sinking, because the ground is clay, the wooden bits are rotting and the iron bits are rusting and the stone bits have red clay oozing down ... There are also some gruesome CGI ghosts in it, but they don't really do much other than jump-scare. They try to help, but suck at it. The movie would be fine without them.

In the end I didn't really get all of the story. I got the part where the two, brother and sister, seduce a naive rich girl - though their tactics could get a little less desperate, considering they've done it three times by now - and they need something from her. turns out it's as trivial as money and of course the brother and sister are lovers. This has been done a few times, so it was slightly predictable. Also predictable the brother actually falls in love with the girl and the sister loses it. Less sense made the backstory, in which the kids were kept locked in the cellar and their mother was .... Dunno, in some parts of the story she is abused and plays the piano, in others she's a monster and she ultimately gets killed with a meat cleaver to her face. The sister is then taken to an asylum, but they reunite and he tries to industrialize the mining of their red clay. They need money so they seduce heiresses... Which then they poison with arsenic over time and... dunno, bury them in clay tanks or something. I didn't get that part. There is also a baby, but I don't know whose baby it was, because one of the ghosts nurses it and none of the women are supposed to have had sex with the guy, so it could be the sister's, saying it was born deformed... 

It ends fairly well, almost happily, at least for blonde Americans. The girls' avatar is a butterfly, so it shows she's grown out of her naivete and will thus become a far better writer than she was only on her imagination. Her punchline when she offs the sister is adorable, having finally picked up a shovel instead of a potato-peeling knife. They they leave and that's it. I'd have burnt the house to the ground.  






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