Review of "Hard Candy" and "Monday"
Hard Candy (2006)
IMDB Link
The best movies are based on difficult subjects. It requires us, as the viewer, to have our boundaries pushed to the limit, and the best of them will have us rethink and challenge our usual way of thinking. Hard Candy picks up such a subject, and then drops it, because it is apparently too difficult for the director to handle.
It starts off good, proving that the director was on the right track, with a creepy relationship between a handsome, 30 year old photographer, and a 14 year old girl that he has met on the internet. They make their way to his house, where someone gets drugged and tied up. Except in Hard Candy, it is not the girl, but the man.
It seems like it could be a fun twist, and that’s what I thought, except what seems like a good idea can turn out differently once plays on screen. Hard Candy is exactly like that, it having so many problems, that you lose site of the movie.
The director seems to want to do so many things at once. He wants to be controversial and unique, but not enough to actually break any boundaries. He teases us at the beginning and tries to put the older man (the pedophile) in a more sympathetic light, but a cop-out at the end destroys every thing the director built before it, whereas he simplifies the whole story. And the 14 year old, as a character, is full of flaws, not as a actual person, but as a character in the movie, meaning it was written very badly.
When a movie is about an older man and a young child, and for us to grasp the complexity of the situation, one of the things we need to understand is the youth of the child. When the child is shown to be physically strong, can be psychologically manipulative, and too smart, then she stops being a 14 year old, and merely becomes a badly written character in the movie. Without the innocence and youth, the complexity of pedophilia is removed.
A good castration scene, for those looking to squirm, but nothing else to remember this movie by.
2/5
Monday (2000)
IMDB Link
If there is anything the Japanese are good at, it is strange. I find a lot of Japanese movies ground-breaking, but not really in a good way, more like in an experienced, confused, almost psychopathic way. These guys aren’t breaking boundaries because they are creative geniuses, but usually because they have no idea what the rules are.
Monday is another such movie, one that moves between strangely brilliant and, well, just plain strange. It starts with a man waking up in a hotel room. He is not sure how he got there, and throughout the movie, he slowly remembers events that have gotten him to this spot. His first flashback is a funeral for a friend of his.
The main character, and the other calm, cool, suited Japanese businessmen sit quietly while the mother and sister of the departed cry. Someone mentions that the head (in the coffin) is facing the south, while it is supposed to face the north. So, they all get up, and turn the coffin around. As that problem is resolved, the sister gets a call from a doctor, who tells her that they have accidentally left the pacemaker in the dead guy’s body. And as the doctor is busy, they have to cut the wire themselves, otherwise the body will explode once it gets cremated. Our main hero is given the job of cutting the wire, due to him having a hobby of model planes.
Not a great day to start one’s week.
And that’s how most of the movie plays out. Weird little encounters, of which some would have a comfortable place in a David Lynch movie (a quirky and laughing weird palm reader would feel comfortable in a Mulholland Dr. bar).
Yet, a strange movie can not exist merely on its strangeness. There has to be that something else, and Monday doesn’t have it. Especially, in the last 30 minutes, the movie really fails. It changes from a hilarious dark comedy to a moralistic tale of guns, violence, and alcohol. While, it still remains tongue in cheek, it still is too long for us to tolerate it.
3/5