(no subject)
Jul. 11th, 2003 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aslanti am baking a peach & blueberry pie. it is starting to smell quite nice. i got to use the rolling pin that i bought at the antique store in wheeler, texas. ahh...domesticity on a rainy, lazy friday.
k and i went out to dinner last night at a bertucci's in harvard square. oh dear god it was the worst meal of my life. disgusting. i thought at least a chain restaurant would have passable clone dishes of normal food, but my pork chops were covered in a hardened, red, oozing layer of tomato sauce and was surrounded by "garnishes" that had obviously all come out of cans since they all smelled tinny. the lighting was awful and the booths were uncomfortable and the waitstaff were either very new or very bad. caveat gustator.
then we went to see '28 days later', which was a very difficult film to see. i had not read any critics' reviews about it, and i only vaguely knew what it was about, before. it is shot in low res-feel digital and some of the effects they were able to acheive with it was amazing. i appreciated the camera work, which avoided horror movie cliches like showing the attacker's-eye view; the audience was mostly as surprised as the characters were, in that there was never truly a manipulative moment in which the camera made obvious to the audience an attack on a character in one of those long, manipulatively suspenseful "don't go down that hallway!" moments. the rage virus that emptied out england in the movie made all the infected people move very very fast, which in this film was even scarier because it seemed they were moving faster than the film could capture, although if there were any digital effects to achieve that, they were subtle to the point of invisibility. visually, it was beautiful in its spare, apocalyptic feel, although the content scared me very badly. it is very brutally violent, and there was a subplot involving rape (although it never happens) of an underage girl that was frightening. it was generally unpredictable, plot-wise, which was nice. this is not a date movie. i had to bury my face in k's shoulder at several points, but the chaotic and brutal subplot about rape made me not want to be touched ever, ever again. it is probably the first movie i have seen that made me want to leave the theater, but i couldn't get out of my chair because the visuals were too stunning.
i do think it was grossly misrepresented by the tv trailers. the trailers tried to reframe some key shots & scenes in a very american-horror-movie fashion, using jump cuts and sudden bursts of sound in a way that was totally uncharacteristic of the movie's actual content: it was effective precisely because it was not produced or filmed in an american movie world - the vague familiarity of london and the strangeness of something as simple as a grocery store made it all infinitely more intriguing than it would have been if it had taken place in an american city. i highly recommend it - i loved 'the ring' but i thought '28 days' was even better. it was nice to see a scary movie for once that does not involve a manipulatively creepy child skulking around (the ring, the others, sixth sense, et al). the post-epidemic world was very realistic, i thought, and the plot manages to handle both the fighting-off-zombies aspect and the how-will-we-reconstruct-the-world aspect of its fictional world.
.
k and i went out to dinner last night at a bertucci's in harvard square. oh dear god it was the worst meal of my life. disgusting. i thought at least a chain restaurant would have passable clone dishes of normal food, but my pork chops were covered in a hardened, red, oozing layer of tomato sauce and was surrounded by "garnishes" that had obviously all come out of cans since they all smelled tinny. the lighting was awful and the booths were uncomfortable and the waitstaff were either very new or very bad. caveat gustator.
then we went to see '28 days later', which was a very difficult film to see. i had not read any critics' reviews about it, and i only vaguely knew what it was about, before. it is shot in low res-feel digital and some of the effects they were able to acheive with it was amazing. i appreciated the camera work, which avoided horror movie cliches like showing the attacker's-eye view; the audience was mostly as surprised as the characters were, in that there was never truly a manipulative moment in which the camera made obvious to the audience an attack on a character in one of those long, manipulatively suspenseful "don't go down that hallway!" moments. the rage virus that emptied out england in the movie made all the infected people move very very fast, which in this film was even scarier because it seemed they were moving faster than the film could capture, although if there were any digital effects to achieve that, they were subtle to the point of invisibility. visually, it was beautiful in its spare, apocalyptic feel, although the content scared me very badly. it is very brutally violent, and there was a subplot involving rape (although it never happens) of an underage girl that was frightening. it was generally unpredictable, plot-wise, which was nice. this is not a date movie. i had to bury my face in k's shoulder at several points, but the chaotic and brutal subplot about rape made me not want to be touched ever, ever again. it is probably the first movie i have seen that made me want to leave the theater, but i couldn't get out of my chair because the visuals were too stunning.
i do think it was grossly misrepresented by the tv trailers. the trailers tried to reframe some key shots & scenes in a very american-horror-movie fashion, using jump cuts and sudden bursts of sound in a way that was totally uncharacteristic of the movie's actual content: it was effective precisely because it was not produced or filmed in an american movie world - the vague familiarity of london and the strangeness of something as simple as a grocery store made it all infinitely more intriguing than it would have been if it had taken place in an american city. i highly recommend it - i loved 'the ring' but i thought '28 days' was even better. it was nice to see a scary movie for once that does not involve a manipulatively creepy child skulking around (the ring, the others, sixth sense, et al). the post-epidemic world was very realistic, i thought, and the plot manages to handle both the fighting-off-zombies aspect and the how-will-we-reconstruct-the-world aspect of its fictional world.
.
