THE INNOCENTS
THE INNOCENTS
February 19 and 20 2010, Netflix Watch Instantly
Hey, my first experience with this online feature - it's totally groovy, I must say, and I hope I can make it through a couple more before my subscription runs out (as it must; it is doing my life no favors. I love my televisual media but it is far too easy for it become pretty much my entire life. Getting stuff from the library is a much more measured and sane way to go about it).
Anyway, I don't know where I got the idea to watch THE INNOCENTS - I don't know if it was a kindertrauma recommendation, or a Deborah Kerr movie, or the fact that it's about as spooky and gothic (and full of extremely weird sexual subtext) as it gets. Truly, this film is absolutely astonishing, and I wish I'd seen it ages and ages ago, preferably when I was 12 or 13 and would have picked up on the twisted sex angle as well as happily drowning myself in the overwrought gloomy darkness of it. But seeing it now is pretty damn fine. I should say I'm resentful that it's not better known, or else my ignorance kept me from it for so long. No longer. It's officially in my rank of favorites.
I enjoyed the more recent retelling of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, THE OTHERS, though there's no way that admittedly beautiful color picture could come close to the awesomeness of the classic black-and-white. The visuals in this film are simply incredible - good old old-school in-camera effects craziness to artificially create contrast and grain on the film itself. It works like the dickens. Add to that great performances from the aging Kerr and the two kids at the center of the spooky tale (some of the twisted sexuality comes from young lad Martin Stevens, who talks like a man thirty or forty years his age; and the hysterical screaming from Pamela Franklin, who would go on to a proper adult scream-queen career, is what I imagine as the screaming of the lambs to which Hannibal Lecter refers), some bitchin' 19th century costumes, and a lot of bizarre movements at the edges of the frame, and you've got yourself a brilliant, fucked-up ghost story of the type that they just don't seem to make anymore. Wait - they never did make films like this in the first place. THE INNOCENTS is one-of-a-kind.
February 19 and 20 2010, Netflix Watch Instantly
Hey, my first experience with this online feature - it's totally groovy, I must say, and I hope I can make it through a couple more before my subscription runs out (as it must; it is doing my life no favors. I love my televisual media but it is far too easy for it become pretty much my entire life. Getting stuff from the library is a much more measured and sane way to go about it).
Anyway, I don't know where I got the idea to watch THE INNOCENTS - I don't know if it was a kindertrauma recommendation, or a Deborah Kerr movie, or the fact that it's about as spooky and gothic (and full of extremely weird sexual subtext) as it gets. Truly, this film is absolutely astonishing, and I wish I'd seen it ages and ages ago, preferably when I was 12 or 13 and would have picked up on the twisted sex angle as well as happily drowning myself in the overwrought gloomy darkness of it. But seeing it now is pretty damn fine. I should say I'm resentful that it's not better known, or else my ignorance kept me from it for so long. No longer. It's officially in my rank of favorites.
I enjoyed the more recent retelling of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, THE OTHERS, though there's no way that admittedly beautiful color picture could come close to the awesomeness of the classic black-and-white. The visuals in this film are simply incredible - good old old-school in-camera effects craziness to artificially create contrast and grain on the film itself. It works like the dickens. Add to that great performances from the aging Kerr and the two kids at the center of the spooky tale (some of the twisted sexuality comes from young lad Martin Stevens, who talks like a man thirty or forty years his age; and the hysterical screaming from Pamela Franklin, who would go on to a proper adult scream-queen career, is what I imagine as the screaming of the lambs to which Hannibal Lecter refers), some bitchin' 19th century costumes, and a lot of bizarre movements at the edges of the frame, and you've got yourself a brilliant, fucked-up ghost story of the type that they just don't seem to make anymore. Wait - they never did make films like this in the first place. THE INNOCENTS is one-of-a-kind.