Day 66: Hard Candy

Believing him to be a paedophile and a murderer, 14 year old Hayley (Ellen Page) meets with Jeff (Patrick Wilson) and gets him to take her back to his house. The situation goes from light to dark pretty quickly and, thankfully, not in the way that you expect. (This whole blog is going to be spoilertastic. I know all of them are but really, you should watch the film first.)

There is a missing girl and Hayley knows that Jeff is involved. She initiates their meeting and innocently plays along to his ‘flirting’, and then suggests they go back to his house. Once there, the two drink and he shows her around his studio, where he tries to justify taking pictures of underage models. She made the drinks and she slipped him something to knock him out and when he comes to he is tied to a chair. He thinks it’s a sex thing but she quickly helps him realise that it is not it at all. She goes through his entire house to find evidence that he had something to do with the missing girl’s disappearance and she finds his safe and the evidence she was looking for. He panics and tries to get away but she manages to knock him out again.

This time when he comes to he is strapped to a table with ice on his balls. Hayley tells him that first she is going to shave him and then she’s going to castrate him. He freaks out and pleads with her but she is not to be deterred. She even sets up a camera for him so he can watch. He is convinced she has castrated him but in actual fact it was all just set up to look that way. What she’s really after is for him to voluntarily kill himself and she says if he does, she’ll destroy all evidence of his involvement with the missing girl. Jeff says that he didn’t kill her, he just watched as it happened but that he can tell her who it was so she can go torture him. But she already knew who it was and she has already convinced that man to kill himself, so it’s just him left. After some contemplation he decides to go ahead with it and he steps off the roof of his house with a noose around his neck.

This film is excellent. I wish I hadn’t known the plot before I watched it because I would’ve been gripped, believing it was all really happening. Ellen Page has such dangerous eyes, you totally believe she could do this. Definitely her best acting, I think. Really embodied the role of a girl with some serious psychological baggage.

“I am every little girl you watched, touched, hurt, screwed, killed.”

9/10

Day 51: Inception

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team are employed by very rich people to spend their time in the dreams of others in order to steal valuable secrets. Their newest employer, Saito (Ken Watanabe), is a little different. He wants them to go into the mind of a business competitor and plant an idea. That is so difficult and in order to do so the team risk ending up spending the rest of their lives in limbo. Cobb’s projection of his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), threatens to destroy their mission at every step and it puts the whole team in constant danger.

To be able to see into someone’s mind, to be able to walk through their memories and their experiences and their thoughts, just seems like such a beautiful thing. It’s not about being nosy but more because people rarely tell you exactly what they’re thinking, or if they do, they filter it so it’s better for you to listen to. The ideal for me would just be unadulterated honesty at all times. Truly knowing someone seems close to an impossibility because the distance between who they are and who they project themselves to be is massive. In order to know someone, they have to close the gap. That is it for me, I don’t know a lot of things about me or anyone for that matter but I know that: I want to close the gap.

You know, I thought it would be amazing to be able to dream so well that you could actually have a whole life with someone. Or maybe not even a whole life, but to imagine someone so clearly that it’s almost as if they are there with you. But it clearly would never even touch on how wonderful it would be to actually have it in reality. Like is said in the film, you can never imagine a person completely. People are so complex and their every thought and action is influenced by a myriad of different and sometimes contradictory forces. How could you ever hope to dream of that person in their entirety? Sure, you could make an adequate copy and maybe you’d be happy enough. But it would never be them, not really. Imagination is powerful but it can’t be everything.

In the hotel room, Mal accuses Ariadne (Ellen Page) of not understanding what is going on because she has never felt what it’s like to be a lover, “to be half of a whole”. For me, I don’t believe anyone you are with should be seen as your other half. I think you should be complete yourself so that anyone who is with you gets to share in who you are, not make you who you are. If they leave, does that make you incomplete again? It’s all so fragile, I just refuse to believe that it should be the right way of things. You are not defined by the people in your life, you are defined by you. By being the truest version of yourself. I just can’t believe that people are incomplete and it’s only through being with someone else that they can be whole. That seems so sad.

It must just be the hardest thing when someone you love kills themselves. Especially when they do it right in front of you. Mal completely believes that this world is not her reality and she needs to die in order to get back to where she and Cobb built their lives together. And Cobb put the idea in her head without meaning for it to cause this much destruction and so he feels guilty forever after. He keeps going back into his dreams in order to be with her but he can never get past his guilt, and he does know that she isn’t real and it breaks his heart that he can’t go back and fix what he did. But he does get to return to his home and his children. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a dream or not because he gets to finally be with them again and that’s what he has wanted for so long. This is his reality now.

Leonardo DiCaprio is such a brilliant actor. His eyes just slay me in every film, they are so believable. When I was watching the film, I was utterly convinced he was Dom Cobb and that he loved Mal with a passion I can’t even imagine. You just get lost in his portrayal of his characters and it’s lovely to be a part of.

I always forget how much I love this film. It’s just so beautiful. I love when the café and the street are exploding around Cobb and Ariadne, it’s such a great scene. The whole film is just lovely to watch.

9/10