Quote:
Originally Posted by Professor S
Inception: Perhaps the most brilliantly conceived movie so far this century, and one of the top ten "smartest" movies ever made.
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Care to elaborate on the conception of the film a bit further?
I just watched
The Last Exorcism. Like Paranormal Activity, this film will require you to:
A) suspend your disbelief
B) let the film take you on a ride
C) be okay with a minimal number of special effects
D) be open to ambiguous endings
All-in-all it might be a cut above Paranormal because it did not depend on cheap scares.
Not-sequitur: At the very least, The Last Exorcism got me to read some reviews. In one of the reviews Owen Gleiberman pointed out that The Last Exorcism would likely be compared to the number one exorcism movie of all time,
The Exorcist. He alsos notes that in
The Exorcist the emmergence of female sexuality was conveyed (via crucifix masturbation nonetheless!), which ties into the emerging feminist themes of the 70s . Interesting stuff.
Source:
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20415539,00.html
Quote:
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So what does the devil look like in The Last Exorcism? I'd be the Antichrist if I spoiled it, but I will say that the movie, directed by Daniel Stamm from a script by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland, with Eli Roth serving as producer, is a nightmare vision of the rise of Christian fundamentalism. It's about the dark side of piety — the cultish wrath that can emerge out of the high and the mighty. At the center of it all, once again, is a teenage girl's gnashing madness. The original Exorcist came out a few years after the feminist revolution kicked into gear, and Linda Blair's she-devil expressed our primal fear of a newly furious, newly empowered, and newly sexualized generation of young girls, the first that seemed to be channeling wanton forces far beyond their control. The best thing in The Last Exorcism is Ashley Bell's performance: She knows how to make rage the flip side of innocence. Especially when the camera follows her into the barn, and we see how those animals really died.
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Seriously though, it is AMAZING the amount of social commentary that gets embedded into horror. Next to comedy I think horror is the deepest genre as far as film is concerned.
I actually loved The Last Exorcism, I thought the movie was moody and brilliantly shot. To take a page from the Professor's book (
) I think the conception of the film was brilliant. I thought the ambiguous ending was more hit than miss, and I am still trying to piece together what happened.