Pick up the phone, Darkness
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Last night the Sugar Bowl wasn't very exciting and I didn't have any money on it. Someone suggested we go to see a movie. We tried to think of everything that was out and shouted out our choices. The consensus was, Darkness, the movie. I didn't even remember seeing any previews for it. I wanted to call the theatre to find out what it was about, but all I got was a recording. They could have at least looked at the poster and explained the pictures to me.
Darkness, the movie, was a really scary movie. It cuts to the heart of human fears like many other movies have managed to convey. It can be compared to how The Village plays on your innate fear of monsters in the forests, how Home Alone reminds you that there are scary things in your father's medicine cabinet, and how Eye of the Beholder invokes the fear that the the director of that movie might use the ticket money to make more movies like it; Darkness, the movie, plays on a fear every American shares: Foreign people.
Just like real life, this entire film places an American family at the center of the universe. They are surrounded by thousands of foreign people while they are trapped on "Multicultural Island". The son in the movie at one point asks his dad why they had to be there. His father gracefully replies, "Because we had no choice." This movie features a mysterious French grandfather, an English electrician who is not able to fix electrical problems caused by ghosts, an Italian macho hunk trying to nail Anna Paquin, and an old Polish pedophile who will stands in the rain for hours with his binoculars trained on Anna's upstairs window. There is also a Frenchman who saves the dad who is having a heart attack behind the wheel of his car, but he only does this because it's required by the Samaritan laws.
The camera spends most of its time following the sometimes lovely, Anna Paquin. She is the envy of Hollywood for being the only actress who can look pretty and mentally handicapped at the same time. The latter becomes more and more apparent as the film progresses. Anna brilliantly recites her contrived lines at the correct moments including:
"That can't be!"
"You'll never get away with this!"
"We have to get out of here!"
and, "Perhaps we will find the answers in the Necronomicon."
The rest of the movie she whiles away the hours of horror by swimming at the local natatorium, leading on her Italian boyfriend by promising sexual favors if he paints the entire house, and screaming for no reason.
I certainly learned a lot from this movie. I learned that snakes can lay eggs the size of an ostrich's, parents do not care if their children are cutting their own necks with colored pencils, and that when you get right down to it, nothing beats watching a lunar eclipse on the TV.
P.S. Please help this guy find Anna's Email address. And not the fake ones this time. I'm sure he has a nice little tunnel in all set up in his basement for her to live.
posted by Ghengis @ 8:52 PM,
