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I won't be doing a film a day anymore. I missed yesterday's film and so obviously the run has ended. I'll still watch films and write about them from time to time but what has been happening shall be no more.

Day 197: Doodlebug

In a tiny apartment a man armed with a shoe is chasing something around the room, desperately trying to kill it.

Shot in black and white, the man’s evident suffering seems even more intense. The ticking of the clock is oppressive and the ringing phone is intruding on the scene. He looks like he has been chasing this creature for a while and he is reaching the end of his sanity. Finally he manages to catch it and we see that it is a smaller version of him (and it’s also in the process of chasing an even smaller version of himself), he strikes and seems happy at finally catching it. But just behind him we see a larger version of his own face that then kills him. Despite clearly knowing that it is a smaller version of himself that he’d be killing, he just seems happy to have finally done it. But then he’s trapped in an infinite loop - he will always be killing himself over and over. He most likely knows this, and from the stress we can see earlier, it’s clear he isn’t against ending it for whichever version he has to.

This is an early film from Christopher Nolan, and it has quite a student-y vibe. But that doesn’t make it any less interesting or thought-provoking. If you could end your own suffering but you would incur the ultimate loss, would you?

7/10

Day 196: The Rescuers Down Under

A child is kidnapped by an evil poacher and the Rescue Aid Society step in to help.

The golden eagle is terrifying, let’s not be daft here. She doesn’t speak (unlike the rest of the animals?), she just squawks, she’s horrifically massive and she has demon eyes. I’m pretty sure she’s evil in bird form. But despite all that, the boy becomes friends with her and tries his best to save her and her eggs even though he is in danger himself. He’s not alone though, Miss Bianca (Eva Gabor) and Bernard (Bob Newhart) are on hand to help. I liked that Bernard became more sure of himself as the film progressed and it led to him finally being able to propose to Miss Bianca. They’re a sweet couple and they seem like they’d have a really interesting life together.

7/10

Day 195: The Full Monty

Unemployment hits Sheffield and in order to make some money, six men decide to strip.

The men of the town are out of work and desperate for money. Although they each have motivations outside of earning some extra cash. Gaz (Robert Carlyle) wants to earn enough to be able to see his son. Their relationship is a bit rocky but it seems like his son comes to understand that his dad is doing the best with what he has. Dave (Mark Addy) is feeling insecure in his relationship and although he is reluctant to take part in the dancing, his wife helps him see that it’s perhaps a good thing for him to do. Gerald (Tom Wilkinson) can’t provide for his wife in the way he used to and is humiliated at being stuck on the dole. He can dance though and so he enjoys his time teaching the guys to dance and taking part himself. The men bond over the time spent training and it gives them the boost they need during this hard time.

I quite like this film. It seems like the kind of thing that could potentially go on.

7/10 

Day 194: Hotel Transylvania

Dracula (Adam Sandler) has created a hotel that no human can find so that the monsters have a safe space to stay. He’s preparing for his daughter’s birthday and everything is going according to plan until a human shows up and falls in love with his daughter.

Apparently you only get one ‘zing’ moment in your life. ‘Zing’ is referring to the moment when you know you’re meant to be with this person. They are ‘the one’, essentially. I thought this idea of ‘the one’ was dying out now but it’s still alive and kicking in films. I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps it’s just easier to make a love story sound epic if it’s the big one, rather than knowing that you’ll meet lots of people who could potentially be the one. I’m not sure if I believe that Johnny (Andy Samberg) is Mavis’ (Selena Gomez) ‘one’. She has been cooped up in the hotel for 118 years and the only interaction she’s had is with monsters who are much older than her and they all have dull (according to her) tastes. Along comes this young guy who tells interesting stories and she thinks he’s the one. But if someone else had wandered into the hotel and done the same thing, would she have thought they were the one? Or was it something particular to Johnny? I think she just wanted to escape and he represented the place she wanted to escape to. I could be wrong, who knows.

This was actually kind of enjoyable. I mean, it’s not exactly memorable or gripping but it’s an easy film to watch. It’s the classic story about an over protective father who has to come to terms with the fact that his daughter is growing up and will be living her own life. But with a monster twist.

6/10

Day 193: Deep Impact

A comet is found to be heading directly for Earth and its impact will have devastating consequences unless it can be diverted away.

We experience the events through different characters. There’s the journalist who wants to make it big but then is shaken by what’s going to happen. There’s the kid who was the person to actually discover the comet. There is the shuttle crew who are attempting to destroy the comet before it reaches Earth. In these films, the crew who are trying to stop the comet (or whatever it happens to be) are always really brave. They accept that they have to sacrifice themselves (spoiler! The film was out in 1998 though, there’s no excuse for having not seen it) to save their families and everyone else and they do it without any fuss. When they’re saying goodbye to their families it just breaks my heart. How do you even begin to say goodbye to the person you love? Nothing would seem like enough. But I suppose it would spur you on because you'd know that they were going to be safe.

I really love this film. And all disaster films, really. I know they’re cheesy and whatever but I just don’t care. They make me sad. Partly because of the sadness of what’s happening but also because people can end up being so lovely and it’s sad that it’ll end. I had more to say about the film but all the crying has kind of knackered me.

9/10

Day 192: The Blair Witch Project

Three students head off into the woods in search of the Blair Witch and end up hopelessly lost.

I’ve never seen this before but I’d heard all the hype about it. And I have no idea why people find this film scary. Like, at all. I’m the easiest person to scare and yet I didn’t find this scary. Well, there was one scene that freaked me out a bit (when Michael was facing the wall) but that was it. It was interesting to see their descent into fear but that was about it. I hate the handheld camera thing, it’s just never done well and it bores me.

4/10

Day 191: Horrible Bosses

Three guys really hate their bosses and decide to kill them.

They’re totally clueless and racist, thinking they can walk into a bar full of black people and hire someone to kill their bosses. After failing to get a hitman, they decide to just do it themselves but they balls that up too. I can’t even find the energy to write about the film, it’s just not that interesting and I didn’t really find it all that funny. It wasn’t an awful film but I wouldn’t watch it again. The bloopers were funnier than the film itself.

5/10

Day 190: Detachment

A substitute teacher tries to stress to his class the importance of thinking for themselves. And a failing school is plagued by loneliness and struggle.

Each of the characters feel alone and undervalued and they’re aware that it’s unlikely to change. Meredith (Betty Kaye) is a student and she’s quite creative but her father dismisses her photography and wants her to work harder and lose weight. After a few of Henry’s (Adrien Brody) lessons, she wants to open up to him and share how she’s feeling. But she can’t and she eventually kills herself at school. There’s no one she can talk to and she can see no way out of how she’s feeling. The film uses parents’ night to hammer home the absence of parents in the lives of the children; not a single parent shows up for it. If they’re not willing to make the effort to hear about how their children are doing in school then they’re clearly failing to take an interest at home. Teachers can only do so much, children need their parents to play an active role in their lives.  

Henry meets a very young prostitute and he lets her stay in his house. He cares for her without being condescending and she comes to be less aggressive and more trusting. They buy each other gifts and make breakfast for each other and they grow quite comfortable together. But Henry has difficulty forming any kind of attachment and he knows she can’t stay with him forever, so he phones a foster care facility to come and take her away. She’s devastated, as is he, but it seems like it was good for her.

In class, Henry stresses that the kids have to think for themselves and to form their own opinions. To rely only on what you’ve been told for your understanding of the world is to become insignificant. You have to question everything and read as much as you can. The teachers aren’t to blame for what goes on in schools, they’re just doing the best they can with what they’ve got. There needs to be more freedom for expression so that the kids can find out who they are. I understand there has to be some rigidity in the curriculum but if you make every student learn the same things in the same way with no allowances for individuality then you end up with children who have no interest in what they’re learning. And in fact, I’d say they’re not learning anything, they’re just memorising enough to pass exams. There’s too much importance placed on grades and not enough placed on learning, so all the joy goes out of it and that’s why you end up with so many young people killing themselves over exams.

Really liked this film and how it highlighted the loneliness and insignificance felt (at some time or another) by everyone.

8/10

Day 189: Pooh's Heffalump Movie

The gang decide to capture a heffalump but tell Roo that he can’t come with them because it’s too dangerous. Roo wants to be treated like a grown up so he takes off to capture a heffalump all by himself.

Much like with every Pooh film, there’s something to be learned. The gang only know terrible things about heffalumps and they think they’ve even got horns. The heffalumps have heard of Pooh and the rest and have also only heard bad things. Both sides are scared of each other but after spending some time together they realise there’s nothing to be scared about. Forget what you’re told and take people as you meet them.

I’d forgotten how much I love Winnie the Pooh, although I do wish I’d watched the one where they try and save Christopher Robin from being trapped in a skull. Eeyore was not in this enough. He’s my favourite.

7/10

Day 188: Mean Creek

Five kids decide to play a prank on a bully but it gets out of hand and they must decide what they’re going to do.

The bully, George (Josh Peck), beats up Sam (Rory Culkin), and it seems to be a regular occurrence. In order to get back at him, Sam’s brother and some of his friends decide to play a prank on George. They invite him out for Sam’s birthday and they go out on a boat. The plan is to play Truth or Dare and eventually dare George to strip and jump in the river, at which time they’d take off and he’d have to run home naked. But once they actually get to talking to George, most of them end up seeing that he’s not all bad. He has his problems and it’s clear he just wants friends. They want to go back on the plan but Marty (Scott Mechlowicz) wants to stick with it. It eventually leads to a fight on the boat and George provokes Marty by talking about his father who killed himself. He just keeps pushing and pushing and so Sam’s brother knocks him overboard to make him stop. Then I’m not really sure what happened. It looked like he couldn’t swim and then he hit his head. They try to save him but it’s too late. They’re all involved because they planned this and they all played the game despite knowing how it was going to end. Marty takes charge and says they need to bury him and act like nothing happened. They do it and take off home but the rest of them can’t let it go and so they decide to come clean.

Trying to get back at the bully isn’t a bad thing in itself. Sure, it doesn’t really achieve anything but if you’ve been bullied, it can help you feel not quite so helpless. And the prank itself wasn’t exactly that awful. They could’ve decided to hurt him rather than just embarrass him, so I think it was a relatively tame prank. It was good to see the side to George that explained his behaviour and the effect it had on the kids. It made sense that they’d not want to go through with the plan after getting to know him a bit and, after he makes aggressive comments, it makes sense that they’d want to play the game after all. They understand why he does what he does but the comments still hurt and they want to get back at him. If he’d been saying those things to me, I’m not sure I’d be able to stop myself from pushing him in the river too. I think it’s interesting that even though we can understand why someone would act a certain way, we’re still hurt by it.

7/10

Day 187: Run Lola Run

Lola’s (Franka Potente) boyfriend needs 100,000 Deutschmarks in 20 minutes or he’ll be killed. She runs off and does her best to get him the money in time.

We’re given three versions of what could happen during those 20 minutes. As Lola is running past various people we see snapshots of their future. In the different versions, she meets them in slightly different ways (bumps into them in one but just misses them in another, for example) and so the snapshots of the future are not the same. This seemingly minor encounter with a running stranger has an effect on the people's lives, even if it would seem ridiculous to think it would be significant. The point being here that our interactions with others can have consequences that would’ve been impossible to foresee. We don’t know how our behaviour will affect other people and so it’s important to be aware of that, I’d say. Obviously you can’t be completely aware of everything but I think we could all do with being a little bit more considerate (just a generalisation there, maybe some of you are super considerate already?). When people are scared or upset or annoyed they have the tendency to try and lash out and cause the most damage. You can’t take back something once you’ve said it and you can’t ever go back to a time when you didn’t say it. And it’s rarely ever worth saying. There's a line from 'The God of Small Things' by Arundhati Roy which I think fits here, "That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less." 

I really love this film. It’s so trippy and disorientating. The fast pacing, flashing images, interesting music, and shock scenes all add up to a great viewing experience. I always find it really interesting when you consider how things could’ve gone if you’d done something a little different, and so this film is perfect for that.

8/10

Day 186: ParaNorman

Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee) can talk to the dead and everyone in town finds him massively inconvenient. When an old curse threatens them all, he does his best to save them despite being terrified.

I always hate when people just dismiss bullying as something kids do and so it doesn't really need to be taken seriously. Norman was lonely and every day he had to deal with people making fun of him because of something he couldn't control. His family aren't supportive at all and he doesn't really have anyone to turn to. Even though he is the town outcast, he still does whatever he can to help them. I know he's not actually real but I really liked Norman. People can be so awful to each other but I like that some people don't let that stop them from doing good.

7/10

Day 185: Lilo & Stitch

An alien built to destroy crashes on Earth. He’s adopted by an orphaned little girl who is about to be taken away from her sister. Cry-fest.

Stitch just wants to belong somewhere. Lilo looks after him and won’t give him up and he realises that he belongs with her. He wants to have a family and now he has one. The film manages to be depressing, lovely and funny all at the same time and I love when films can do that. I’m really glad I finally watched it and I will definitely watch it again.

8/10

Day 184: The Little Girl Who Lived Down The Lane

A lonely 13 year old will do anything to protect her home and her secret.

Rynn (Jodie Foster) is very mature for her age and she is well educated. She studies at home which serves to isolate her further from the people in the village. When asked about it by the boy she trusts, she says that at school you are told what to think and don’t get a chance to develop as yourself. That’s definitely true but I think she did want to go to school. The only problem would’ve been that kids there would’ve asked too many questions and might have wanted to come ‘round. She spent all her time trying to keep her secret and it would’ve been far too stressful having any sort of friendship with anyone. After a local boy helps her she tells him everything. Within a day or two (it’s difficult to know the exact timeline) he tells her that he loves her and she asks him to never leave. The events in the film spiralled out of control pretty rapidly and so it would make sense that their romance would be fast as well. Especially since he helped her bury some bodies. They’re pretty much joined for life.

Jodie Foster has such a serious face and she was really good in this role. So much happens in such a short space of time and I think it was a good idea to do that because it helped to focus on the stress and fear that Rynn would’ve felt and why she was pushed to act the way she did.

7/10

Day 183: Fallout

A young boy is killed on an estate in London and the police are having trouble finding enough evidence to arrest the boy responsible.

It would be easy to paint Emle (Charles Mnene) as the killer and if you were to hear of Kwame’s (Lanre Malaolu) death in the news, you’d most likely see it as black and white as that. But the film gives an insight into Emile’s actions and the behaviours of a lot of the people in that area. At one point, Dwayne (Aml Ameen) is going to kill Emle, not because he necessarily wants to but because Emle called him a liar and so he has to protect his reputation and not appear ‘soft’. People just want to get by and having grown up there, they know that the best way to do that is to not come across as weak. It turns out that Emle’s girlfriend, Shanice (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), told him that Kwame had tried to chat her up. When Kwame runs into Emle and his friends, he just tries to get past without causing a problem but he knows something is going to happen. Emle’s friends push Emle into chasing him and it eventually leads to Kwame being stabbed. Emle couldn’t just let him go, he had to make sure everyone knew that he was with Shanice and he wouldn’t take kindly to anyone trying to get close to her. He is haunted by the stabbing and it causes problems for him. I think the important thing here is that he didn’t necessarily want to kill him but that the circumstances couldn’t allow for anything else to happen.

I thought the film was really interesting. I’m not sure I liked the character of the cop who was originally from that estate and who came back to work on the case. It makes sense that he’d be angry being there but he is so unforgiving towards the kids. He does say that he had to put up with kids like that when he was growing up so obviously that would’ve been a difficult time for him but he would also know that they weren’t solely to blame. The acting was great and I liked the way the story developed.

8/10 

Day 182: Martha Marcy May Marlene

A young woman escapes a cult and is taken in by her sister who she hasn’t seen or spoken to in 2 years. She is finding it difficult separating her life now and the time she spent in the cult, and it causes her to become more paranoid.

The film continually splits between Martha’s (Elizabeth Olsen) time now and her memories of then. We see how she accepted the things that happened and how she became one of them. Early on during her stay with them, she wakes up to find the leader raping her. Afterwards, one of the other women tells her that it was a beautiful thing that happened and Martha seems to accept it. And later she takes one of the new girls to the leader and drugs her, so the same thing will happen to her. Some of them go into the homes of rich people during the night and steal things, and she joins them. It seems like she enjoys feeling like she belongs and ‘finding her role in the family.’ But after she witnesses a murder, she decides to escape.

Martha calls her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), and she comes straight away to pick her up. She hasn’t seen her in 2 years and she is obviously worried about what happened to her but Martha doesn’t want to talk about it. Lucy and her husband are quite well off and they have a nice house. During her time in the cult, all of the members shared clothes and grew their own food and shared in the everyday chores. Martha can’t stop herself from judging the abundant wealth that Lucy has and she makes it clear that she thinks it’s not the right way to live. She doesn’t want to return to the cult, however, and she becomes increasingly more paranoid and believes that they are coming for her. The way the film ends, we’re not sure if she has really managed to escape or if she’ll be taken back.

We’re not given much information on Martha’s life prior to the cult but it seems like she was very unhappy. Her relationship with Lucy is very tense. Lucy feels guilty about not being there for Martha when she was younger and is trying to make up for it now by taking care of her. Martha is terrified of being alone and when Lucy tells her that she’s going to take her to get help, she lashes out. The lack of background we’re given was quite interesting because it allows you to make up your own. We don’t know what led her to the cult but we can fill in the details, perhaps even considering what it would take for us to end up in that place ourselves.

7/10