The Guest (or, Don't Ruin the Fucking Movie)

Here's a fun story.

I know some people who, during a movie, will complain about the lack of realism in a particular scene. "He wouldn't be able to walk with that leg wound" - "nobody could survive that fall". What nobody mentions, however, is that if there is someone enjoying a film for what it is, there is no iota within them that gives a hot shit about whether or not anyone believes it to be true, and I'll tell you why.

Unless you're aiming to portray a story realistically, or stay true to real-world source material (ie. military films which are based heavily on true events, or stuff like Before Midnight, or human dramas which rely more heavily on accurate emotional representation), it doesn't matter that the gun's magazine holds too many rounds or that the main character shouldn't have used whiskey to clean her arm gash.
If you go into many action, thriller, or horror films, expecting to be dazzled by how real they are, you've come to the horribly wrong place.

Film is a storytelling medium. Realism is largely unimportant, provided that the story is well-told. That's why fairy tales exist. Leprechauns aren't real, but that doesn't make it any less fun to chase the end of a rainbow.
If you moan about realism during the movie, and I'm there watching and enjoying it, you're shitting on my rainbow.

This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't such a tectonic shift in the viewer's thinking. I don't mind when individuals, who are clearly displeased about the choice of entertainment, express that displeasure consistently and with meaning. But usually, when someone points out that something is terribly fake, they haven't complained about anything up until that point, when there is likely very much that should've irked them. Suddenly, the moviegoer has noticed something that they've selectively isolated as a film-ruining mistake, and needs to make sure the world knows that they're no longer on board. Why? It's unlikely that a room, or theatre (for the worst offenders) full of people will share in that very specific element of the experience that made you so upset. You've essentially singled yourself out, and for reasons about which you only care.

However, it doesn't end here. Although the person in question believes that their complaint is valid, this is very seldom the case; more often, they choose to take issue with something that either is universally impossible, or of no consequence to anything else. Do you really think that there's a Rambo somewhere in the Kenyan badlands who can magically avoid thousands of bullets, being shot by hundreds of men, simply by running really fast and licking his biceps a lot? Would you prefer that he die in the first fifteen minutes of the movie, in order to conform with your idea of how it should've happened? What kind of movie is that, and why are you such a jerkoff?
If I'm watching a movie about ghosts, and there's a ghost, and you say, "Look at that awful CGI! that ghost is clearly not real", not only have you made yourself look idiotic (by assuming that anyone thought that was a real ghost), but you've somehow created the most unnecessary expectation within yourself. Was the director supposed to hold a seance, summon a spirit, and then negotiate with it for a film contract? In what world do you live, where that ghost could be real, and therefore evokes such great disappointment in you when it doesn't look real enough?
Usually it's an unspoken understanding that we're all here to watch a story being told, no matter how farfetched it is. It wouldn't be a good story otherwise, you dick fucking face. If I wanted to watch a documentary, I would've put that shit on.

Recently I watched a movie called The Guest, which is one of the best things I've ever seen in my life. Potentially, this utopia in which I exist, where this film is a masterpiece, could be ruptured by someone who expects it to be an accurate portrayal of real life. If you are this person, I feel terrible for you, because you've missed the boat completely. You know a filmmaker is good when he understands that it is his vision. He can make his own rules, and create a universe wherein anything can happen if he thinks hard enough.

You can't make your own personal rules for art, and be subsequently perturbed when others don't abide by them.

Don't shit on my rainbow.

Horror Genre's Ups and Downs

Last month (if I'm correct, far too lazy to check), I posted an article detailing my interests in the horror movies being produced this year. Emerging not only partially disappointed by the titles mentioned (if you want motivation to remove your own eyeballs, go ahead and throw on Wrong Turn 5 one afternoon) but disenfranchised and unenthusiastic about what I've yet to see, I couldn't help but turn my gaze toward the plethora of films riding the coattails, or better put, playing the market created by such popular genre flicks appearing lately.

Oren Peli, director of just about everything I've liked wholly in the past half-decade (that's a blatant exaggeration, so don't call me on it) continues to do things that bring a mild elevation to the sides of my talk-hole. Unfortunately, in a great display of universal balance, the world must continue to preserve my apathetic frown by showing me things that, to a certain extent, drain the faith I had in the film industry.

I haven't been pleased with any alien-related films since The Fourth Kind and, on a lower level, Super 8. Being a proprietor of cranial fantasy and great hopes/dreams in favour of hostile galactic exploration (in other words, visitations from monsters from beyond my long-armed reaches), imagine my excitement when hearing about Dark Skies, an alien abduction story slated for February. Upon viewing the trailer, however, I was alerted to the definite and probably discouraging idea that we'll all bear witness to the return of what I call the "neighbourhood misunderstanding" concept. Often in films, in order to add another layer of story to an already fairly-yet-not-quite-complex-enough arc, many directors will introduce the difficulty of explaining a supernatural situation to a close-knit or friendly group of neighbours. There are only a few destinations on this avenue, the most common sometimes involving a police report filed by a nosy carpool mom, or in this case, a hospital visit that rapidly turns into evidence of domestic violence. I have little patience for characters who refuse to take the time to study the circumstances more closely in order to make a more informed and fair decision, and I believe this is what we'll be seeing here.

In other news, V/H/S was half-good and half-bad upon retrospect (though I think I mentioned that already), and I'm beginning to give independent and low-budget films less and less benefit of the doubt as time wears steadily forward to my demise. I'm growing tired of attempting to convince my cohorts to ignore the poorly post-produced blood splatters and stock screaming, in favour of immersion and suspension of disbelief. In the back of my brain, that nagging feeling of accidental farce continues to haunt me. That's scarier than the ghosts.