I didn’t know what this was when I
downloaded it.
I don’t even think I downloaded it.
I think I picked this up during a media exchange with my friend Josh.
I had picked up a 3T external drive and spent a night at my friend’s house porting over the contents of his 1T drive onto my 3T because we like a lot of the same movies and I figured it would save me a lot of time downloading movies and ripping DVDs from my collection.
The reason for this is that I decided to go all digital.
On a 3T external drive around the size of Dashiell Hammet’s The Big Knockover I can store an entire roomful of DVDs. I don’t just mean a roomful of DVDs neatly lined up with the spines out on shelves. I mean a room of DVDs stacked floor to ceiling like shopping bags full of shit in a hoarder’s house.
I had wanted to do this for a few years, but I had to wait for technology to catch up with my imagination and the price of everything I needed to come down a little. Now I have a flat screen TV twice as big and half as heavy as my old flat screen Sony, an old laptop with a broken screen hooked up to that through an HDMI cable for downloading movies and decoding DVDs, and my 3T external sitting pretty next to it with 6,000 movies on it last I checked. I’ve got a wireless mouse and a remote control with rechargeable batteries and I watch whatever I want whenever I want to watch it.
I’m not trying to encourage you to go all digital.
I’m not trying to encourage you to cancel your cable and your Netflix and stop renting DVDs from Redbox or buying DVDs and Blu-rays in stores.
Someone’s got to keep paying to watch films and TV shows so that the people that make them can keep making them and studios can continue to make exorbitant profits from producing films and actors can continue to make ridiculous money for playing make believe. So keep doing what you’re doing.
I’m just saying that I have wanted to go all digital for a while and I did and it’s awesome.
I still love film.
I don’t mean movies, although I do love movies too.
I mean film stock.
I love the feel of it. I love the smell of it. I think that there’s nothing like watching a film projected off of 35mm film through a big old projector in a darkened theater. At least not yet.
Digital media is catching up fast. But it’s not quite there yet.
I love watching a movie in a movie theater with a big bucket of butter-flavored lubricant liberally slathered on top of it. But I also love watching a movie in my boxers in bed.
I’m going to miss actual film stock when it’s phased out, which, let’s just admit, is inevitable.
But until that happens, certain films I’ll put on shoes and pants to see off of a 35mm print in a theater and certain movies I’m perfectly happy to watch in the comfort of my home.
So I’m not completely against contributing financially to the production of films.
If you make a great movie and I illegally download a copy and I really like it, I’ll go and watch it in a movie theater too.
Or, here’s an idea.
Stop making your films available for bootlegging.
There’s a lot of film-makers that regularly cruise the torrent sites and politely request that their films be taken down because bootlegging their films is hurting them personally and I’m glad that they do.
I’m never indignant when I want to watch a film and I can’t find a copy available for download for free. If I want to watch something badly enough I’ll find a way to watch it. If that means paying to see it in a theater, fine. If it means hanging out with someone that has Netflix for a couple hours, then fine.
Or, develop a DRM that can’t be hacked. Yeah, right. Good luck.
Technology advances exponentially, kind of, and any DRM has about a year before some well-intentioned hacker figures out how to crack it and then it becomes a matter of personal conscience.
Does this make me a prick? Maybe so.
If you’re reading this and I stole one of your movies, e-mail me, and I’ll PayPal you $5.00.
Okay, what I’ll actually do is PayPal you $5.00 when and if this film review game starts generating revenue. I’m always interested in any sponsors or advertisers that want to throw me some money or some free films to review. But I can’t promise you a good review.
Oh, you’ll get a “good” review. The review itself will be well-written, spelled correctly, and grammatically respectable for the most part. But I can’t promise you a positive review that you’ll be able to pull quotes like “Action-packed thrill ride!” and “The scariest horror movie you’ll ever see!” and “I sold my integrity as a reviewer for free movies and advertising revenue!” like most review sites.
“Thanks for rambling about stuff that has nothing to do with the movie that this post is supposed to be about!” you may be saying to yourself, either inside your head with that voice inside your head that hopefully sounds like the way you imagine your voice sounds, even though it sounds different whenever you hear it played back from a recording, or out loud if you’re by yourself and there’s no one around to ask you who you’re talking to, and if so, you’re welcome.
I didn’t like H20dio (original title) or Hate 2 0 as it was retitled for English speaking audiences.
There were things to like about the film and I’ll get to that.
But overall, I didn’t like it.
First off, it’s almost impossible to get through.
The title sequence is the p.o.v. from the prow of a boat rocking in the ocean as the sun glimmers on the rippling water, behind an island that we are presumably imaginary going to since the camera is the avatar of the audience as a reverbed and delayed guitar reminiscent of Neil Young’s score for Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) echoes lazily around and the titles slowly fade in and out in the sky.
Just imagine that. Spend four minutes imagining that.
A boat gently rocking side to side in the water as the sun warmly glints and sparkles on the rippling surface of the ocean, the sound of the waves gently lapping at the sides of the boat, and a relaxing guitar playing some variation of Neil Young on valium or if that fails, find Mazzy Star’s Fade Into You and put that on and imagine a boat gently rocking side to side in the water as the sun warmly glints and sparkles on the rippling surface of the ocean, the sound of the waves gently lapping at the sides of the boat, and a relaxing guitar playing some variation of Neil Young on valium or if that fails, find Mazzy Star’s Fade Into You and put that on and imagine…
Did you fall asleep?
Because I sure fucking did.
Three times at least.
Three different god-damned times I tried to watch this movie and fell the fuck asleep.
But if you make it through the title sequence, in the world of the film, three or four or five, I forget how many perfectly forgettable attractive European women with ESL accents get off the boat. Wait, it’s five. Not that you’ll care, but there are five of them.
They’re embarking on a retreat for I don’t fucking care how long, but it feels like forever, and for some of them [!!!SPOILER!!!] it is. The purpose of this island retreat is for these uninteresting well off women to participate in a purifying water fast and to bond and hang out in an airtight room and talk about what it’s like being a well-off white woman and what a pain in the uterus it is having periods and make-up and nail polish and shoes and clothes and bad hair days and ponies and fairies and angels until all of the oxygen is replaced with the estrogen pouring out of their every pore and they die. At least the first two parts of the preceding sentence are true and it just feels like you’re watching the third. There’s character development, I guess, where the women all share their fuzzy warm and cuddly dreams about well-off white woman self-actualization. Travel and meeting the right guy and having children and a nice house and nice cars and pets and planting flowers in the garden and baking cupcakes and finally having the courage to be an artist and paint paintings that shouldn’t be painted and all sorts of other stereotypical well-off white-woman “dreams”.
Did you fall asleep again?
Come on! Stick with me here. We’re almost done.
The women are pretty much interchangeable except for their faces and hair styles. They’re all fair-skinned beautiful olive-skinned white women. One has dreads. One has a pixie cut. One has pin-strait chin-length hair. One kind of looks like Euro Rose McGowan. And the last has reddish hair and wears her bangs clipped to one side with a hair clip. Guess which one is the crazy one? I’ll give you a hint. You don’t care.
It’s not like they’re the Spice Girls and you can pick your favorite one.
Sporty and Ginger and Baby and Sneezy and Dopey and Bashful and Lion-O and Tigra and Man-At-Arms and Shipwreck and Roadblock and Snake Eyes and Stormshadow and Megatron and Optimus Prime, and, wait, I’m not sure those were all Spice Girls. But maybe they should have been.
And speaking of Spice Girls, “Baby Spice”, really?
I get the marketability of the whole slutty teen jailbait thing, it’s not the kind of thing I’m into since I don’t want to have sex with children, but I get that some people do and should be castrated, but am I the only one that thinks that having a Pedo-Spice was in bad taste?
What the fuck is wrong with this world?
Anyway, since they’re all interchangeable it’s difficult if not impossible to care about any of them.
It’s easier to have a strong opinion about which is your favorite Smurf.
Mine would probably be Grouchy Smurf. I hate everything.
Being on a water fast makes them start to go loopy and this gives the director a chance to stretch his directorial legs in a bunch of surrealistic dream sequences. The dream sequences are somewhat interesting in comparison to the rest of the film but completely unnecessary and stylistically indulgent. Cool to watch, sure, but they feel more like music videos than narrative and do nothing to move the story forward.
Everything technical about the film is decent. The set design, the lighting, the composition of the shots, the color timing. It’s a well-made film. A well-made film about five boring European ladies with ESL accents that I couldn’t care about.
One problem with the film is pacing. The entire film seems to be shot in either slow pans or dolly shots from left to right or slow dolly shots or slow fade transitions or slow dissolves or slow focuses in and out of the scenes. All of this is competently done, but about as boring as jerking off a rubber dick and just about as productive.
Can I recommend this film?
Yes.
If you’re looking for something beautifully shot and about as exciting as watching a minute hand move around a wall clock to put on in the background to help you fall asleep, you could do worse. This film is much better for that express purpose than any of the many interesting, engaging films that you could watch while trying to fall asleep.
You don’t have to worry about getting distracted by what’s happening in the film because nothing much happens. You don’t have to worry about getting interested in the characters or accidentally getting interested in the dialogue because most of the dialogue is just sounds coming out of boring pretty faces and about as important as the almost omnipresent guitar to furthering the plot.
If you want to watch a film about a bunch of ladies bonding, watch The Descent (2005).
At least something fucking happens in that film.
More on the internet:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765815/
I don’t even think I downloaded it.
I think I picked this up during a media exchange with my friend Josh.
I had picked up a 3T external drive and spent a night at my friend’s house porting over the contents of his 1T drive onto my 3T because we like a lot of the same movies and I figured it would save me a lot of time downloading movies and ripping DVDs from my collection.
The reason for this is that I decided to go all digital.
On a 3T external drive around the size of Dashiell Hammet’s The Big Knockover I can store an entire roomful of DVDs. I don’t just mean a roomful of DVDs neatly lined up with the spines out on shelves. I mean a room of DVDs stacked floor to ceiling like shopping bags full of shit in a hoarder’s house.
I had wanted to do this for a few years, but I had to wait for technology to catch up with my imagination and the price of everything I needed to come down a little. Now I have a flat screen TV twice as big and half as heavy as my old flat screen Sony, an old laptop with a broken screen hooked up to that through an HDMI cable for downloading movies and decoding DVDs, and my 3T external sitting pretty next to it with 6,000 movies on it last I checked. I’ve got a wireless mouse and a remote control with rechargeable batteries and I watch whatever I want whenever I want to watch it.
I’m not trying to encourage you to go all digital.
I’m not trying to encourage you to cancel your cable and your Netflix and stop renting DVDs from Redbox or buying DVDs and Blu-rays in stores.
Someone’s got to keep paying to watch films and TV shows so that the people that make them can keep making them and studios can continue to make exorbitant profits from producing films and actors can continue to make ridiculous money for playing make believe. So keep doing what you’re doing.
I’m just saying that I have wanted to go all digital for a while and I did and it’s awesome.
I still love film.
I don’t mean movies, although I do love movies too.
I mean film stock.
I love the feel of it. I love the smell of it. I think that there’s nothing like watching a film projected off of 35mm film through a big old projector in a darkened theater. At least not yet.
Digital media is catching up fast. But it’s not quite there yet.
I love watching a movie in a movie theater with a big bucket of butter-flavored lubricant liberally slathered on top of it. But I also love watching a movie in my boxers in bed.
I’m going to miss actual film stock when it’s phased out, which, let’s just admit, is inevitable.
But until that happens, certain films I’ll put on shoes and pants to see off of a 35mm print in a theater and certain movies I’m perfectly happy to watch in the comfort of my home.
So I’m not completely against contributing financially to the production of films.
If you make a great movie and I illegally download a copy and I really like it, I’ll go and watch it in a movie theater too.
Or, here’s an idea.
Stop making your films available for bootlegging.
There’s a lot of film-makers that regularly cruise the torrent sites and politely request that their films be taken down because bootlegging their films is hurting them personally and I’m glad that they do.
I’m never indignant when I want to watch a film and I can’t find a copy available for download for free. If I want to watch something badly enough I’ll find a way to watch it. If that means paying to see it in a theater, fine. If it means hanging out with someone that has Netflix for a couple hours, then fine.
Or, develop a DRM that can’t be hacked. Yeah, right. Good luck.
Technology advances exponentially, kind of, and any DRM has about a year before some well-intentioned hacker figures out how to crack it and then it becomes a matter of personal conscience.
Does this make me a prick? Maybe so.
If you’re reading this and I stole one of your movies, e-mail me, and I’ll PayPal you $5.00.
Okay, what I’ll actually do is PayPal you $5.00 when and if this film review game starts generating revenue. I’m always interested in any sponsors or advertisers that want to throw me some money or some free films to review. But I can’t promise you a good review.
Oh, you’ll get a “good” review. The review itself will be well-written, spelled correctly, and grammatically respectable for the most part. But I can’t promise you a positive review that you’ll be able to pull quotes like “Action-packed thrill ride!” and “The scariest horror movie you’ll ever see!” and “I sold my integrity as a reviewer for free movies and advertising revenue!” like most review sites.
“Thanks for rambling about stuff that has nothing to do with the movie that this post is supposed to be about!” you may be saying to yourself, either inside your head with that voice inside your head that hopefully sounds like the way you imagine your voice sounds, even though it sounds different whenever you hear it played back from a recording, or out loud if you’re by yourself and there’s no one around to ask you who you’re talking to, and if so, you’re welcome.
I didn’t like H20dio (original title) or Hate 2 0 as it was retitled for English speaking audiences.
There were things to like about the film and I’ll get to that.
But overall, I didn’t like it.
First off, it’s almost impossible to get through.
The title sequence is the p.o.v. from the prow of a boat rocking in the ocean as the sun glimmers on the rippling water, behind an island that we are presumably imaginary going to since the camera is the avatar of the audience as a reverbed and delayed guitar reminiscent of Neil Young’s score for Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) echoes lazily around and the titles slowly fade in and out in the sky.
Just imagine that. Spend four minutes imagining that.
A boat gently rocking side to side in the water as the sun warmly glints and sparkles on the rippling surface of the ocean, the sound of the waves gently lapping at the sides of the boat, and a relaxing guitar playing some variation of Neil Young on valium or if that fails, find Mazzy Star’s Fade Into You and put that on and imagine a boat gently rocking side to side in the water as the sun warmly glints and sparkles on the rippling surface of the ocean, the sound of the waves gently lapping at the sides of the boat, and a relaxing guitar playing some variation of Neil Young on valium or if that fails, find Mazzy Star’s Fade Into You and put that on and imagine…
Did you fall asleep?
Because I sure fucking did.
Three times at least.
Three different god-damned times I tried to watch this movie and fell the fuck asleep.
But if you make it through the title sequence, in the world of the film, three or four or five, I forget how many perfectly forgettable attractive European women with ESL accents get off the boat. Wait, it’s five. Not that you’ll care, but there are five of them.
They’re embarking on a retreat for I don’t fucking care how long, but it feels like forever, and for some of them [!!!SPOILER!!!] it is. The purpose of this island retreat is for these uninteresting well off women to participate in a purifying water fast and to bond and hang out in an airtight room and talk about what it’s like being a well-off white woman and what a pain in the uterus it is having periods and make-up and nail polish and shoes and clothes and bad hair days and ponies and fairies and angels until all of the oxygen is replaced with the estrogen pouring out of their every pore and they die. At least the first two parts of the preceding sentence are true and it just feels like you’re watching the third. There’s character development, I guess, where the women all share their fuzzy warm and cuddly dreams about well-off white woman self-actualization. Travel and meeting the right guy and having children and a nice house and nice cars and pets and planting flowers in the garden and baking cupcakes and finally having the courage to be an artist and paint paintings that shouldn’t be painted and all sorts of other stereotypical well-off white-woman “dreams”.
Did you fall asleep again?
Come on! Stick with me here. We’re almost done.
The women are pretty much interchangeable except for their faces and hair styles. They’re all fair-skinned beautiful olive-skinned white women. One has dreads. One has a pixie cut. One has pin-strait chin-length hair. One kind of looks like Euro Rose McGowan. And the last has reddish hair and wears her bangs clipped to one side with a hair clip. Guess which one is the crazy one? I’ll give you a hint. You don’t care.
It’s not like they’re the Spice Girls and you can pick your favorite one.
Sporty and Ginger and Baby and Sneezy and Dopey and Bashful and Lion-O and Tigra and Man-At-Arms and Shipwreck and Roadblock and Snake Eyes and Stormshadow and Megatron and Optimus Prime, and, wait, I’m not sure those were all Spice Girls. But maybe they should have been.
And speaking of Spice Girls, “Baby Spice”, really?
I get the marketability of the whole slutty teen jailbait thing, it’s not the kind of thing I’m into since I don’t want to have sex with children, but I get that some people do and should be castrated, but am I the only one that thinks that having a Pedo-Spice was in bad taste?
What the fuck is wrong with this world?
Anyway, since they’re all interchangeable it’s difficult if not impossible to care about any of them.
It’s easier to have a strong opinion about which is your favorite Smurf.
Mine would probably be Grouchy Smurf. I hate everything.
Being on a water fast makes them start to go loopy and this gives the director a chance to stretch his directorial legs in a bunch of surrealistic dream sequences. The dream sequences are somewhat interesting in comparison to the rest of the film but completely unnecessary and stylistically indulgent. Cool to watch, sure, but they feel more like music videos than narrative and do nothing to move the story forward.
Everything technical about the film is decent. The set design, the lighting, the composition of the shots, the color timing. It’s a well-made film. A well-made film about five boring European ladies with ESL accents that I couldn’t care about.
One problem with the film is pacing. The entire film seems to be shot in either slow pans or dolly shots from left to right or slow dolly shots or slow fade transitions or slow dissolves or slow focuses in and out of the scenes. All of this is competently done, but about as boring as jerking off a rubber dick and just about as productive.
Can I recommend this film?
Yes.
If you’re looking for something beautifully shot and about as exciting as watching a minute hand move around a wall clock to put on in the background to help you fall asleep, you could do worse. This film is much better for that express purpose than any of the many interesting, engaging films that you could watch while trying to fall asleep.
You don’t have to worry about getting distracted by what’s happening in the film because nothing much happens. You don’t have to worry about getting interested in the characters or accidentally getting interested in the dialogue because most of the dialogue is just sounds coming out of boring pretty faces and about as important as the almost omnipresent guitar to furthering the plot.
If you want to watch a film about a bunch of ladies bonding, watch The Descent (2005).
At least something fucking happens in that film.
More on the internet:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765815/
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