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Post by Denethor on Apr 27, 2010 20:35:36 GMT -5
Close Your Eyes.Another from my little windfall of cheap videos. This one was a better film than the last one, with more interesting characters and better plot complexity. It was in keeping with the occult-horror theme of most of this haul, though this time the rubric wasn't angels and demons but murder with secret occult practice. Plenty of juicy misuse of familiar occult diagrams and symbols! Scary abandoned churches! Who could ask for more? Set in England, so if you like British accents this one's for you. Basic premise: a somewhat discredited hypnotherapist (a backstory develops) encounters a police detective who knows a little girl whose hidden memories get the doc all involved in the investigation of an occult-themed string of child murders. He gets in plenty of trouble with the authories, the media, his wife, and of course the murderer. Good enough to not give many spoilers. Bonus: the wife is acted by a pre-Eowyn Miranda Otto. The film is apparently also known as "Sleep Doctor", if I have that alternate title right. It's listed on Ms. Otto's page on IMDB if you want to make sure. I'd give it a solid B for its genre, which is of course not art-flick sophisticated or action-drama tense, but since when have those things mattered?
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Post by Denethor on May 7, 2010 22:04:21 GMT -5
Sleep Dealer.
Mexican cyberpunk. Eighties feel. If you're a cyberpunk fan at all, you need to rent this. It's got indie-level special effects - passable but unspectacular - but it doesn't make those low-budget errors where people try to get too ambitious and leave you with obvious blue-screening or bad costumes or the like. It stays within its technical bounds.
And it makes up for the special effects thing with - get this - the story. Basically there's a country kid whose land is parched due to a dam that was put up just before he was born; because of water shortages and a major plot development I won't spoil for you, he has to go into cyberpunktown to get a job. The jobs in cyberpunktown involve getting implants so you can jack in (they don't use that term) and work at distant jobs in the U.S., for the most part the same types of jobs you find recent immigrants doing today. It's dangerous; if there's a power surge or something, you could end up blind or comatose or dead or whatever. (On the plus side, it probably beats taking your real flesh into a modern meat-packing plant, so...) They also have a market website sort of thing where people can upload their memories and sell them for education or entertainment, in a kind of hellish blend of Facebook, YouTube, and eBay. The story has a romantic subplot of course, but it integrates well with the main plot and doesn't compete or interfere with it. There are a lot of excellent scenes where the view switches between the "virtual" world, the real one, and the world as seen on a computer or on T.V. Main plot developments are mostly done this way; it blows shaky-cam right out of the water.
There are a lot of little details they attended to that make it more real: for instance, the technology the kid's family uses in the country is more like today's, whereas the technology he finds in the city is more cyberpunky and futuristic. It looks exactly as it would if you contrasted the technology used by real people who are isolated or on a budget with that used by those who live near/can afford the latest greatest thing.
Oh, of course there's a sex-using-the-technology scene. I suspect that is a legal requirement in a film of this type. But they do a good job with it.
It's in Spanish with subtitles so most of us will have to actually look at the screen rather than reading or working at the same time, but it's only about an hour and a half, and it grabs your attention well the whole time.
A-/B+
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