Month: September 2014

Locke came out a few weeks ago but something about the title or the dvd cover just bugged me. Based on name and cover alone, I figured it was some sort of slow crime movie. Had to push it back. Too much energy to appreciate a slow crime movie.

The reason I finally decided to give it a shot is because I saw The Drop, and gosh darn it, Tom Hardy just keeps impressing me with the roles he has produced. He isn’t just some guy who can bulk up and do action scenes. He is an actor, so I want to see the man act.

Well, it turns out this movie is much better defined as drama. Not drama crime, not drama thriller, just straight up dramatics.

“Hell, I’d watch Tom Hardy just driving a car and talking on the phone.” – Locke’s director

Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) is a construction foreman who lives and works about 90 minutes outside of London. It is late, another hard days of work, prepping for a huge cement pour job the next day. The biggest in all of England really. A lot of things can go wrong and he is one of the most qualified men to handle it.

You see, Ivan is a hard worker. He has been doing this job for a nearly a decade, he is reliable, a nice guy, a stand up citizen, someone who could do no wrong. His wife and son are waiting for him at home to watch a football match. But as he leaves work, he is heading for London, not for home.

You see, Ivan had a moment of weakness. Seven months ago he had a sexual relationship with a woman. It was incredibly uncharacteristic of him, but it happened. Even though he barely knows her, she is in London now undergoing a premature birth. So now he is trying to make things right. He is going to be with her and see the birth of his baby.

During this time, he had to email that he won’t be in at work tomorrow, one of the most important days. He has to call his wife and tell her of what is going on. He has to call the hospital as the woman is all alone and has no one else to talk to but him. And he has to help the work operation go off without a hitch with a lot of bosses getting mad at him.

The other characters are voiced by Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson, Andrew Scott, Ben Daniels, and Tom Holland. But you know, we only get one face.

You will get no diversity in pictures from this movie. NONE.

At least from my point of view, Locke was everything that Cosmopolis wanted to be and more. Cosmopolis felt like a weird fantasy film thriller thing, with a lot of it taking place in a limo. It suffered from vagueness despite the good ending.

Locke takes out any vagueness and lays everything bare on the table in front of you, like one of those Nantaimori models.

Technically a type of bottle movie, but also a sort of one man show. Other movies like Buried or Brake feature one man as well, but those men are literally trapped in boxes versus Locke where he is trapped in a sort of moral quandary. The character Locke is very clear with his convictions and unwavering with his goals, and you can’t help to respect that despite his dickish act of betrayal.

It is hard to feel so attached to a character normally, but when truly watching this film you will feel like a silent passenger in the car with him. It is an extremely morally resonant film and one where you won’t necessarily know how to feel by the end.

Belle is one of those indie movies that makes a lot of noise early in the year, yet usually gets ignored when it comes time to award season.

Not saying this film is deserved awards or anything, that is just when it was released. A nice indie number that is indeed not about Beauty and the Beast, but instead, racism in the victorian era. Ah yes, the Victorian era, where women wore corsets and giant dresses all the time, and men wore…I guess mostly regular clothes. And wigs!

But this work of fiction, based on books, is also pseudo historically accurate. Namely the character Lord Mansfield was actually Chief Justice of England during the time of the movie and presided over several cases that are relevant to the plot. Sweet. But the rest is just guesstimated fluff. I love fluff!

Despite the picture, this is also not a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood.

Dido Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) was born in the West Indies and she is a mulatto. Her mother was a local, but her father was of the English Royal Navy (Matthew Goode) and he has decided to claim her and take her to England. Because he is at sea all the damn time, he places her in the care of his uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson) and his wife (Emily Watson), even though she is BLACK and they are distinguished members of society.

But they get over it, kind of, and raise her as an aristocrat with her cousin Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon). However, she is still slightly shunned by society and not able to play all the reindeer games. Like when it comes time for suitors, she is told she cannot interact with the other gentleman as none of them would find her desirable.

Also at the same time, Lord Mansfield is ruling on a case involving a ship who threw slaves overboard out of necessity to survive, running low on supplies. They echoed it as similar to throwing cargo overboard and want to collect the insurance on their haul. His ruling on this and the events surrounding it could change Britain forever and some people think that having Dido around might influence his decision.

We also have Sam Reid as a young freedom feeling lawyer, Tom Felton and James Norton as brother suitors of varying tastes, and Miranda Richardson and Penelope Wilton as…other people.

I guess I would conclude Belle is a good movie, just one that is pretty darn predictable. Oh sorry, I am concluding before I describe.

Yes, Belle is well acted and I felt good by the end. But a lot of the movie just felt like Victorian filler in the middle. The plot is literally finding suitors for a few ladies. Is this a Jane Austen novel in secret?

Which is my main complaint. Not that predictability is a necessarily a bad thing, but if I kind of know what to expect the entire movie and it follows the path pretty straightforwardly, what is the point? It should have a lot of stuff going on for it in the middle to really make up for that fact.

And it has a few unique events to be sure. Well acted, as I already said. Outfits are nice, message is nice. But I kind of just expected something more. The film itself was incredibly safe.

Philadelphia in the 1970s was a rough place. The Flyers were winning Stanley Cups and beating the Russians (literally). A lot of bruisers and quite a few cruisers.

We also had the MOVE organization, which was a black liberation group founded by a man named John Africa. In fact, everyone had the last name Africa in the group. You can guess the reasons why. They were kind of Amish in away, just wanting to form their own community and raise their kids in a “natural” way.

Unfortunately, members of the Philadelphia Police Department frequently crashed their lifestyle and came to blows with the group (Also literally), which is why we have this documentary in the first place. Let The Fire Burn pieces together news stories, court records, and committee meetings to tell the story of the MOVE group clashing with the police from the 70s to the mid 80s. It does it without a narrator (where transition and background details are shown via text on screen only) and without modern interviews retelling the events. No, only things that were recorded before and after the events immediately.

And what this documentary does is tell the horrifying results of a few stand offs and a climatic end that you wouldn’t be able to guess. Unless you look at the title of the movie and put two and two together.

Ohhh. They must be talking a bout the fire burning a joint. Because of stereotypes.

And (not?) surprisingly, Let The Fire Burn is a powerful, eye opening, and awesome documentary. Shit. I wanted to multi task during parts of it, but I found it hard to put away. Some of the interviews with members of the MOVE group were just so well put together it is hard to find fault with anyone. Anyone outside of the Philadelphia Police Department that is.

I think what I found most surprising about this documentary is how it took this movie for me to learn about this subject. This seemed like a really big event, with really big consequences and holy shit why the fuck had I never heard about it before? I was angry almost that I just learned about it. I was angry with what they decided to do at the end of the last “showdown” and I was of course angry with what happened in the aftermath.

Let The Fire Burns is a great documentary that I recommend to everyone to watch. I don’t want to give anything away, because there is no way I can do the documentary justice. I also feel like it was incredibly unbiased, giving just the facts and just the news and committee meeting footage. Fantastic movie, horrible event.

Of all the movies coming out this week, The Drop was the one I was most excited for (Outside of Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt? but who knows when I will get to see that one!). Mostly because I didn’t have to see a trailer for it at all. Not a once. I got to go in mostly blind and just see what kind of story it would give me.

Exciting! All I knew was the main actors, setting, and some sort of thriller maybe.

So, to make sure no one gets to experience it like me, let me tell you about the plot and stuff!

It also features some guy who you might really want to see in movies before it is too late.

“Ain’t sayin’ no names or nuttin.”

Although they didn’t explicitly tell me the setting, I can almost guarantee this one takes place in Boston, in a drop bar. What is a drop bar? Well, a lot of illegal money changes hands in the city. Gambling, hookin’, drugs, you name it. Not the type of money you can just deposit without drawing questions from the tax man.

In order to keep the money safe, it is stored at a different bar every night, a huge network of them. Very few people know which bar will be before the day of and it is seemingly random. It helps prevent theft of that money and keeps the bars in check too.

This movie is about one of those bars, a drop of cash, and the people who work there. Namely, Bob (Tom Hardy) the kind and slightly slower bartender and his Cousin Marv (James Gandolfini), the owner/former owner.

It also features a neighborhood lady Nadia (Noomi Rapace), a kind of weird maybe ex (Matthias Schoenaerts), the mob (Michael Aronov), a detective on the case (John Ortiz) and a puppy. Yes, a damn puppy.

The puppy is of course secretly key to this whole damn thing.

This one was it. This is the last movie that James Gandolfini will ever appear in, as the only other thing with him in it not released is apparently a part in some never picked up pilot for Criminal Justice. And I think he went out on a good one. Enough Said was only okay, but The Drop? This is a good movie.

Speaking of actors in the movie we are talking about, what in the fuck Tom Hardy? His voice is so weird and unique in this movie. Once the opening narration started, I imagined it belonged to anyone but Tom’s character, but there you go. Whether it is accurate to the area, I don’t know (or give a fuck). It was interesting and it really seemed to work.

The story itself is a slow moving one and one that seems worth the wait. Arguably, the characters are all just so odd or weird on their own that even though it is not a comedy, the bizarness of the situation and accents kind of make it amusing. You know, in a darker or weird way.

Despite it wrapping up the story pretty nicely and being unique, I think I’d want some more of this setting. Fuck it. Give me a sequel.

But then again, in a year I might forget all about this movie. Hard to say. Yay Tom Hardy.

Studio Ghibli has made a lot of movies and most people would consider them to be a big deal. More importantly, their main director Hayao Miyazaki has created some of the best, most financially successful and well known anime movies to come out of Japan!

I have only seen a handful of their movies and only reviewed one before (The Secret World of Arrietty), so I am not an expert on the subject. But since it is the internet, expertness is just a click away.

Either way, The Wind Rises is now most known for being Miyazaki’s final film, finally ready to retire. This was released barely last year in 2013 for like a week to make the Academy Awards and then released for real barely in February. Needless to say, this is another one that took forever to see. But I guess they have no rush since it totally didn’t win Best Animated Picture. Sucks to not go out on a high note, Miyazaki.

Which is probably why he made a movie about objects that go so high.

“Wait a minute,” you might be stating quite boringly. “Does that tag on the bottom of the page after the review is over say Biography? This is an animated movie!” Why yes, person who reads the tags before the review. This is a pseudo biography of Jiro Horikoshi (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an airplane engineer for Japan who designed some sweet planes before World War II. Yes, the war where Japan used planes to fuck up parts of America.

It starts with tiny Jiro who wants to one day be a fighter pilot. But with his poor vision, he realizes he would never be allowed to fly one. That is when he does research on plane manufacturers and begins to dream about Giovanni Battista Caproni (Stanley Tucci), an world renowned plane designer who tells him that making the planes is far more exciting than flying them. That planes should be beautiful creations and not war machines. He tells him that and oh so much more.

Well, with hard work and perseverance, Jiro becomes kind of awesome at planes and engineering. He gets accepted into a top program in the field and meets his sarcastic and always joyful friend Honjo (John Krasinski). He eventually gets a job with Mitsubishi where is boss Kurokawa (Martin Short) is a strict tiny man, but one who knows Jiro has what it takes.

Oh, Jiro was also involved in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. That is where he meets young Nahoko (Emily Blunt) who, wouldn’t you guess it, has some effect on him later in life too?

Other famous people are Mae Whitman who voices his younger sister, and William H. Macy, who is surely someone important because it is William H. Macy voicing them.

“Less pew pew pew and more zoom zoom zoom!” – Paraphrased movie quote

Given the majority of Miyazaki’s work dealing with fantasy and the bizarre, it is quite odd to find a movie that is set so firmly in reality. I mean, a biography? Set in Japan? The only strange things that really happen in the movie are when Jiro is dreaming, where anything goes anyways. I can’t tell you how factual the film is, but it seems to paint a realistic picture of society and of Jiro. Even the smaller details I appreciated, such as Jiro and Honjo smoking. A lot. Many smokes were had in designing and school, and they didn’t ignore that just because kids might watch it like Disney did with Saving Mr. Banks. He didn’t whitewash history despite Japan’s tendencies to do that (especially from that time period).

As always, the animation is also absolutely beautiful and showcases how great these types of films can be without CGI. Fucking talent right here.

It tells a story about love and reaching your goals, but I do feel like parts of the film tend to drag. I also decided as an experiment to watch it dubbed with the same English subtitles, because sometimes there are big differences. For the most part it kept with the same theme, but there was one scene where it mentioned someone had a kid in the subtitles and completely ignored it in the English dub version. There might have been more stark differences that I missed, but holy crap, did they get rid of a kid in the dubbed version? That’s like animation murder.

It is a fine movie on its own right, but The Wind Rises was clearly not the best animated movie of last year. It is a fine send off for an established director and I tip my fedora in his honor.

I had the unfortunate bad luck to miss Chef when it first hit theaters in May this year. I was living in a place that didn’t get too many limited releases, and once I moved to a place with them, it had already left most theaters, or was still an hour away. So it took a lot longer than I would have liked, but at least I beat the DVD release. Aka, getting to see it when it was hitting the cheater theater cycle.

The reason I really wanted to see it is that in a summer with so many giant block busters, the trailer made this one seem a lot more realistic and honest. It also helps that it secretly had a lot of actors I enjoyed, many of which who had starred in big block busters.

Not to mention I heard it was a movie about cooking, where they actually featured a lot of cooking. Not calling out any names or anything.

Hey! A kid too! This would appeal to the Disney crowd! That and the heavy cursing!

This is a movie about Carl Casper (Jon Favreau) who has been cooking food longer than some people have been alive. Hell, I have been writing reviews longer than some people have been alive. If anyone is younger than this website and reading it, congrats, you are very advanced for your age. He has been working at the same restaurant for awhile too, under the owner Riva (Dustin Hoffman). They have butt heads a lot recently, Carl wanting to constantly change the menu and experiment and Riva thinking that people come in expecting a certain taste. Carl wants to change the menu because famed LA food critic Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt) is coming in to give them a new rating.

Well, when everything starts to not go as planned and Carl seems to get angry at everyone he needs a change of pace and stat. His ex wife (Sofia Vergara) keeps telling him he should start a food truck so he can be his own boss. He just has to borrow money from her ex husband before him (Robert Downey Jr.). Jeez. But hey, if he goes somewhere new, his old line cook Martin (John Leguizamo) promised to join him. And if the food truck can bring him closer to his son (Emjay Anthony), as the two have drifted over the years, then it is even better.

He just has to first figure out how to use the dang internet and that twitter thing, and figure out why everyone is so interested in his truck in the first place. Also a wild Scarlett Johansson and Bobby Cannavale appear, so they should be noted too.
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“What the fuck is the internet?“

Despite knowing a little bit about the movie, I still found this movie to be full of surprises. Some big names have pretty small roles in the movie and some of the character choices were surprising, even by the ending. But in the end, really, it is a movie about following your dreams, family, and food.

It actually took me a little bit to recognize Sofia Vergara in that her voice wasn’t completely exaggerated like it must be in Modern Family. Jon Favreau when he was wearing the bandanna looked like The Amazing Johnathan which was just weird. John Leguizamo I had to assume was actually Michael Pena because Leguizamo hasn’t been in anything great since…well, almost forever.

Speaking of food. This movie features a lot of food, a bit more varied early on pre-food truck, but darn it, they show a lot of food prep and more importantly people eating it. Which is important in this genre.

It was all decently funny and cute at the same time. There weren’t any hugely dramatic or crazy moments happening throughout, just an appropriate sequence events after the critic bundle early on. That was refreshing. A lot more comedies rely on outrageous antics to carry the plot, but this one keeps it relatively simple.

Overall, Chef is clearly the best cooking related movie of this year so far.

With The Maze Runner coming to theaters, I believe this is the 143rd young adult novel turned into a film. It is also the 87th dystopian novel. And the next half movie hasn’t even come out yet!

Needless to say, the trailers at least looked a bit entertaining. However, I also knew this book series had 3 or 4 books in it. There is no way at the end of the book the guys are still in this giant maze thing, right? Like. The later books have to deal with something else.

That worries me. I feel like without knowing a lot about it, the story can’t possibly go anywhere. It’d be like having a sequel, but having nothing similar to the first but the characters? I don’t get it. Well. Maybe their could be a bigger and badder maze. Or maybe they can introduce more women to their society.

Because the only penetrating that happened here was through this hole.

Elevator shaft. Darkness. Open sky. Big group of men. Sounds like my idea of a party.

However, for poor Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), this looks like a nightmare. He is in a field with a small wooded area. And of course surrounded by lots of dudes and giant towering walls.

Not only that, but they have a few rules. No hurting others, do you part, and never go into the maze. What? A giant maze? What is even more infuriating about those rules is that he gets hurt quite a few times in the first day, by many people, most notably the asshole Gally (Will Poulter).

Either way. They are stuck there. Once a month a new boy comes up with supplies and that is all they know. The doors to the maze close at night too, with scary creatures on the inside. So they best bet is to figure out the maze and escape but only when it is daylight.

He just has to become a runner first if he really wants to help. But it up to the “elder” Alby (Aml Ameen) and Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) before that can happen.

Also there is Ki Hong Lee as the best runner, Blake Cooper as some fat reject comic relief kid, Kaya Scodelario as a girl who comes and messes things up, and Patricia Clarkson as a mysterious woman.

This dude I know named Adam blames everyone on women though, so who knows if we can take his word for it.

First of all, The Maze Runner made fantastic use of its time. Just a little bit under two hours and every minute seems to count. Either for world building, character development, or continuing the plot. Awesome. We are also not given some shitty exposition at the beginning or end to explain things. It just tells the story through the characters.

I thought the special effects were pretty rad as well. The spider creatures in the maze were pretty unique and a bit scary at times.

And overall? Pretty dang entertaining. I would even describe myself as someone who is interested in the future movies. I would read the books, but it will probably take them another 5 years to get the other 3 books out (the last one split into three parts or some bullshit probably), so I will wait a long time for that.

But it wasn’t perfect of course. You can watch the trailer and find that out. A character utters “What if we were put in here for a reason?”

No. No fucking way. Really? You don’t remember a thing from your past but you wake up in an elevator with a bunch of other people who were put in there one at a time? AND THERE MIGHT BE A FUCKING REASON? Just die. Seriously.

Yes. I will rage over a line as bad as that one.

There were other errors as well. I noticed at least once where items just disappeared that a person had and was just forgot about I guess. Not the best dialogue choices.

The movie is definitely a bit darker and more entertaining than I expected. So yeah, let’s do more.

In trying to watch at least one documentary a week, I get a bit excited when I get to see a newer documentary, freshly released and ready to take on the world.

Mission Blue came out mid August as a Netflix Original Documentary, which of course meant that it was immediately available to watch. Not running around the indie markets and festivals for a year first.

And hey. I like Netflix original stuff sometimes. Or at least I think I would, if I had seen anything outside of Arrested Development or House Of Cards (just season 1, shh).

Mission Blue is the new Orange Is The New Black.

Mission Blue is a very very simple documentary. It is about Sylvia Earle, a woman marine biologist from the mid 1900s and on who helped change the science around the world. She was certainly a pioneer in the field, being at one point the first person to go beyond a specific depth in the ocean, and even living in an underwater research facility for a few weeks.

And where is she now? Still doing science job stuff. Yay old people!

More or less, this documentary was made after a TED Talk in 2009 of the same talk, where Sylvia had a very simple idea. She wants to set up protected ecosystems and environments around the world’s oceans where no commercial development or farming can occur. No bullshit, just fish and fish accessories.

And hey, it is a good idea. Sure. Why not. Like national parks. As long as I can still eat my fish and power my car, then you know I am definitely fine with that.

Outside of this novel idea, we just get to see a lot about Sylvia’s life and accomplishments, what she is doing now, and bad stuff happening to our oceans.

Overall, Mission Blue was interesting, but just felt like a bio piece on a person. I guess documentaries can be used for that purpose, but it makes most of this feel like an hour episode of some show that probably exists on the Biography Channel.

Nothing about this was super elite quality wise or showing me that much that I haven’t seen before. But it was exciting seeing James Cameron, because James Cameron raises the bar significantly by being in this documentary.

Found footage films get a lot of hate. So much that now when any movie is filmed by a character in that movie, that is what it is called regardless of the reason. Most of the time it is a simple style reason. But because The Blair Witch Project was first, that places this silly title on to the genre. Then people get nitpicky, especially if no one finds the footage. I had to note in my review of Into The Storm that just because it was camera, doesn’t mean that it was found footage, but hey, people still raged.

For what it is worth, it looks like As Above, So Below night be a found footage standard horror film too. Found Footage films that are true to the word are annoying, because they usually mean no survivors. Knowing there is no survivors can be annoying. Back in the day, lots of people survived horror films. More and more recently they seem to want to make it one or no survivors.

Oh well. Hopefully based on the setting it is at least full of history?

And hopefully this is the biggest hole in the movie.

I guess it is based on history. History…and magic!

Scarlett (Perdita Weeks) is a young archaeologist and scholar, with several degrees. More than one would expect for someone so young. Her father helped pick out her career path and was big in the field. However, some say he went mad trying to discover the true location of the Philosopher’s Stone. That’s right. They want immortality.

Well, after going to Iran and finding out some Rosetta Stone like artifact that would allow her to decipher a code, she heads back to Paris where the one and only Nicolas Flamel died. Rumor has it that Flamel achieved immortality by being a cool alchemist and discovering the Philosopher’s Stone, which also made him super rich! And since then people have wanted to find him or find the stone to get some of that wealth action.

Scarlett isn’t doing it for money. She is doing it for science. Along with Benji (Edwin Hodge), a man who wants to make a documentary on the search, and her good friend George (Ben Feldman) (who can also translate some stuff for her), they are going to scour Paris looking for it!

But, below Paris? That means the Catacombs! Which have only been partially explored still. It is really easy to get lost down there and lose track of where you are going. Would be scary without a guide to get them to where they need to go. Like Papillon (François Civil) and his two friends (Ali Marhyar, Marion Lambert)! They know those catacombs and the superstitions behind them.

Pro Tip 3: Crawling on bones is probably not bad luck.

For what it is worth, only parts of this movie could be considered found footage. Multiple cameras and people with cameras dying, you are going to have cameras being left behind. So technically someone can find those.

I also thought at times things were pretty scary. Based on the score and framing you can tell when something spooky was about to jump at you, so I might have looked far to the side of the theater, or behind me to make sure no one was about to jump on me in real life. Going to a theater in the slums that is a real fear.

Also, at times the movie felt a bit intelligent. They were doing a lot of smart things, which is good because the two main leads are supposed to be smart characters. So that is nice. A lot of leaps of logic by the end though.

As Above, So Below was a strange movie. It was interesting in that it was unique and felt more like a thriller early on. I had some scares. By the end it was pretty dang crazy and felt harder to follow. Everything they were doing made sense, sure, but as to why it made sense is the bigger question.

Overall, a good use of the “found footage” and an okay movie.

When I first started the two Nymphomaniac movies, I figured I would just watch them back to back, get all four hours done with and have a unique, if not disturbing, experience. After all, the original movie is 5.5 hours and was split into 2 two hour movies for practical reasons. A lot hit the floor.

But if you remember my Nymphomaniac Vol 1 review, you might recall that I just needed a break. I couldn’t do it right after the other. Just intense subject matter with a lot of themes on top of it.

I figured enough time had past though, possibly way too much time. Had to read an outline of part 1 before I watched Nymphomaniac Vol 2. Make sure I was in the right frame of mind and all, you know. But no matter how much prep I thought I had before delving back into this story, I certainly now know it could have never been enough.

I am reusing the same first picture too, damn it. We determined

The story continues right where it left off in part 1. But Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is going down a much darker path now that she finds herself in relationship with Jerome (Shia LaBeouf). At least Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard) is still there to hear here story, not judge her, not get excited, and offer advice as to why people or she acted the way they did.

Darker path indeed. We have some hard stuff in here. Mostly due to her issues with her relationship with Jerome, she lost the good feeling down there and really wants it back. Sure she accidentally also had a kid. But responsibilities aren’t important. Getting that urge back is.

So she started to experience a lot of new things. Strangers of another language barriers and BDSM mostly. So much went down that it of course affected her parenting and lead her to support groups, and eventually using these skills she has learned through the years to help shake down people for cash.

But maybe there is a reason for all of this. Maybe things are going to start finally looking up.

Also still featuring Christian Slater, along with Willem Dafoe, Mia Goth and Jamie Bell.

This one was actually the safer of two potential images.

Just like my last review, let’s just say that this movie is hard movie to talk about. After all, a lot of this is about her experiences and it is a continuation. I don’t want to give things away, as I know most people who read this review wouldn’t have seen part 1, but since this is a continuation, part 1 knowledge is necessary.

I felt very uncomfortable during several scenes, but also found these darker plotlines a bit more interesting than the first volume. I am sure I gasped at more than one occasion, staring in disbelief at others. So much shocking material, but the movie itself isn’t just a shocker meant to put you on guard. There are deeper themes and elements going around to make sense of the chaos.

And shit. You know what? Life is hard, is the basic theme of the movie. No matter your position in life and circumstances, you will have faced hard experiences and hopefully you can over come them.

I think it ended on a strong, if not shocking final two hours, and am glad I didn’t leave super disappointed like Melancholia.