A Nightmare on Elm Street: revamped wes craven conceit with really skinny suburban teens, including beaver from veronica mars season 2 mostly
if writing reviews on this blog is my duty to myself, then i have been failing at my duty lately. i apologize for the radio silence...i saw hot tub time machine and REALLY didn't know what to say. plus there were performances to be in.
but i'm back, for a nightmare on elm street. this probably isn't going to be long.
surprise, this wasn't a good movie. rather vapid teens might have had issues, but then the whole thing becomes prosaically clear due to a hearty dose of child abuse and a metaphor about menstruation...bah. i mean, there's the "the evil was us all along" tradition of horror movie-alia, and then there's the "set 'em up, knock 'em down" theory of horror-making--this definitely fell into the second category. the evil actually was evil, and the teens were all ten pounds underweight, and you didn't really care about any of them, and the mechanics of the horror wasn't explained even a little.
i get the feeling that michael bay has forgotten what it's like to have bad things in his life. it's probable that i'm being an insensitive bastard in saying that--but judging from this movie, it's also possible that michael bay doesn't exist, but is instead a computer-generated logarithm that churns out directorial decisions based on a complex system of adjusted profit margins, and the pictures you see of him standing next to shia leboeuf (sp?) on yahoo omg (heh heh, not that i ever go on omg or look at celebrity photos [i'm lying through my teeth--bring on the olson twins' fashion mishaps! show me jessica alba grocery shopping with her baby! i am a bad person to feed the paparazzi industry so]) are actually of shia leboeuf (sp?) cleverly manipulating a poseable cardboard cutout of a handsome older man. it's possible that michael bay, in learning to cater to the statistical desires of the populace, has completely lost his understanding of the human soul; it's also possible that he just shuts off his soul while working, and manages to retain his wonderful, caring humanity by completely eradicating any trace of it from his movies. i'm going to go with the second one; i like it better.
and, you know, i wouldn't ask him to change. a nightmare on elm street was stupid, not scary, and wide-ranging in its derivativeness (robert duncan and his partner jess sprang to mind in the opening credits [requisite high-brow joke--i'll start pointing these out]; paranormal activity definitely got channeled in the asian dude's video blog). it was a juvenile treatment of a terrifying yet trendy subject, what with the abuse of the children coming to fruition in some really stupid pick-up lines from melty-face, who didn't seem to know how to treat the subject of what he'd done to nancy any more effectively than the screenwriters did--a fact that could have actually been treated really interestingly if, as aforementioned, anyone involved in the movie had known what to do with the abuse backstory (nancy screaming "noooo" at some polaroids for about two seconds? i'd call her whole reaction to the repressed memory thing...i don't know, "underwritten," maybe? especially considering the amount of time the movie spent hacky-sacking teens around. yes. time mismanagement: definitely the main thing that was wrong with this film. [that last, hopefully, read as sarcasm.])
but it was harmless. maybe. i mean, it was entertaining. probably. i mean, i enjoyed it. i probably would have enjoyed it more if i'd seen it at home with my friends, because then we could have made fun of it openly and honestly, as opposed to in the theater, where you don't want to ruin someone else's quality moviegoing experience...
ha ha, sorry. it was really bad.
i did like beaver-from-veronica-mars. i like him in stuff. nancy didn't seem like she had a chance, nor did other guy. i felt like the blonde girl was paying way too much attention to what position her mouth was in. i mean, at a certain point you have to give it up, blonde girl. people's mouths do sometimes relax, no matter how pretty they are. i mean, for the sake of realism...
again, who am i kidding? this movie was bad.
plus, if you didn't wear massive amounts of eyeliner to bed, you wouldn't get raccoon eyes every time the horror showed up. yeah. chew on that, america.
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