Sunday, April 23, 2006
This hill sure is silent!
You know how much of a whiney blowhard I can be so here's my basic summation:
Opening - Lame but thankfully quick
First half - Almost gold
Second half - Mostly bullshit
Ending - Dumb as fuck
AND NOW SOME DETAIL LOL
Roger Avary's script is problematic. To the core. The dialogue ranges from passable to heinous, getting worse and worse as the movie drags on. I accepted Sharon screaming "Silent HILL!!!! SILENT HILLLL!" in the very first scene though that is a dumb-shit way to introduce the name of the movie and town, I even accepted Dahlia's and Cristabella's cryptic asswiping. But how on Earth did Silent Hill get me thinking about Monty Python & The Holy Grail? When a crew of terribly dressed bums scream "BURN THE WITCH! BURN THE WITCH! (Yeah!) BURN HER!"
Roger Avary needs to goddamn listen to what real people are saying so he can get a feel for how people talk (see Rules of Attraction. Or don't.
). No one's writing acclaims about Silent Hill the Videogame's hokey dialogue but in a film...... GOD. I feel the movie would've been far more effective had it been silent. Okay, if that's too much to ask, mostly silent (Hill lol). There's a lot of unnecessary quipping. "Look, there's a room behind this painting." Yes we can see that. Don't tell us the obvious. "We need to go to Room 111." Yeah, we figured that out. "Use this to swing back over here!" YEAH, WE KNOW, FUCK. No one else wanted to punch Cybil everytime she opened her pixie-headed maw? She's perhaps the guiltiest stupid quip quoter with "What the FUCK was THAT?" and "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!" and worst of all, the line that just had to be repeated for some reason, "Mother is God in the child's eyes." So fucking what. Let us do the analyzing. Ellen Ripley didn't right out say "I am a badass lioness crusading for the safety of my adoptive kid." ...Right? Hm.Avary forgot some very, very basic screenwriting do's and don'ts. Though I feel Matrix 2 got away with it because of the philosophuck nature of its narrative Silent Hill has no excuse for its Architect scene. Everything was overexplained and was already hinted at earlier in the movie, and yeah, actually managed to be more convoluted than the original game. How could Avary make an even bigger clusterfuck of the original by merely explaining it MORE? I haven't a clue. And was there a reason that fade-to-white lasted longer than it should've other than to piss me off?
Characters and their motivations were BLEH except for Rose who was pretty much spot-on, she even had a Heather-esque appearance. Sure, she's a fanatical mother, nuts enough to make a deal with the devil. Okay, fine. What about her marriage with Chris? Poor useless ol' Chris? Why abandon your husband - who seems to care a LOT for his family even if he IS a bumblefuck - for adopted demonspawn? I think that could've been worked on... Cybil has no real reason to be around other than to make sure there's a gun in the movie and to give us more of a reason to hate those dastardly cultists when they barbecue her. But those cultists should'nt be there anyway because they're annoying and stupid as hell.
So why are all these useless characters hanging around making things worse? Because there needs to be MORE! MORE MORE MORE. It's not a live-action MOVIE unless there's a LOT of SHIT to PUT UP WITH. Silent Hill does NOT need to be 127 minutes long. There's a terrific movie in there somewhere but they just had to pad it all up with bullshit. Cut out Chris and Officer Gucci and the film doesn't suffer. Cut out the Cybil character or at least make her tolerable and give her something to do and the movie can ONLY improve.
Cut out the annoying cult and are you missing anything? Not really, a reason isn't even given for what they're doing besides BURNING WITCHES YEEAAAAHHHHHH. If you really wanna know why they're so fucking annoying it's because Cristophe and Avary wanted to throw a Bush metaphor in there. Seriously. It's all but confirmed by Rose's accusation of Cristabella "using fear to control you!" and Avary himself in the latest Script magazine. Gans apparently said something like "Silent Hill will expose the cult mentality of the United States!" So, yeah, you're not watching Alessa ferociously eviscerate cultists with barbed wire tentacles. You're really watching a French director and liberal jackoff screenwriter eviscerate President Bush/the sheeplike masses/Roger Ebert with barbed wire tentacles. It's insulting, disgusting and over-the-top. Since when is Silent Hill about gratuitous fatalities?
The movie's second half was already suffering from a botched pace and ridiculous plotting. Let me see if I got this straight: Cristabella offers to help Rose for some reason. Then sends her to "the demon" who turns out to be Alessa, someone who REALLY has it out for Cristabella and the cult. After the shittiest monologue ever heard by human ears Rose BRINGS Alessa RIGHT to Cristabella. IS... IS CRISTABELLA RETARDED? Well, yes, yes she is, but sending some stranger directly to the aid of your worst enemy is not only the dumbest fucking thing ever it's also the dumbest fucking way to rush a movie to its grisly, outrageous, atrocious end.
At this point Avary and Gans do follow an important film rule which is to show the audience something they never saw before. Alessa's barbed wire massacre is something I won't soon forget but that doesn't make it any less horribly tasteless. It's the worst offender of the "MORE MORE MORE" mentality of the film. Gans promised us "elegant horror." Silent Hill's climax is anything but. This was slasher shock schlock more suitable for Even More Anacondas: There's a Copperhead in My Cooch. It was embarrassing.
And of course, the obligatory depressing/confusing ending. Fitting for a Silent Hill movie I suppose but still unsatisfying. Is Rose warned what's at stake for her when she makes the deal with Alessa? Because she DOES what Alessa wants, causes the death of a bunch of awful people and fulfills a demon's revenge wish yet she's... punished with the Foggy World? I don't get it. And once again, Chris gets shat upon.
The very very very end was the last thing I liked. I felt pretty bad for Chris, even if I felt worse for myself =\ but the last lingering shot on the bush - wait, was it a ROSE bush? - is the first and only organic thing we see, perhaps the only time we ever see the color green. It was a nice, very David Lynch thing to do.
So what else did I like? If you're foolish enough to have read this far might as well find out!
Introducing Rose in her underwear was a great touch. Not because of the odd amount of skin revealed in the first few seconds of the flick but because it brought Ellen Ripley to mind (again), as if the movie was invoking the horror history before it. But y'know I'M THE ONLY PERSON TO EVER THINK THAT so that doesn't matter. But Rose was pretty solid overall. Anyone got a theory as to why she suddenly wears red at the end?
The title card was fantastic, the logo with the floating snow/ash... the snowy scenes were gorgeous. The whole movie is a visual and technical marvel, a FEAST of frightening and disturbing imagery, even if none of it is really scary. And the MUSIC. Ecstatic, except for that piano music whenever Alessa/Sharon shows up, they used that three too many times. >:
The first half of the movie is, save for a few hiccups, spot-on shot-for-shot Silent Hill. Once she wipes that ash flake off her face the movie clicks , becomes a beautifully faithful recreation of the first game's first moments and it's awesome. The siren, the radio, the rain, the girl running away, the bloody gurney, the camera angles, the Gray Children... the movie peaks right there for me. That's when it's perfect and frightening.
The stride continues at the school, Rose in handcuffs is a great touch, and Chris "feeling" her was pretty cool/sad. The siren, the darkness... anytime the darkness comes (in the first half) I'm right there with the movie. Pyramid Head's entrance was appropriately intense even if he was merely fan service and served next to no narrative purpose whatsoever... except for killing Anna... who also served no purpose aside revealing just how retarded the cultists are. Who's the worst Silent Hill character? Anna or Jasper? At least Jasper had chocolate milk.
There's a terrific movie in Silent Hill somewhere. Its obvious Gans and Avary respect the material but all we get is the overlong, self-indulgent version they wanted to see.
# posted by magusart @ 12:48 AM 
