p e n g u i n d e v i l

In looking over the movies I’ve been eyeing lately, I’ve decided that when looking at a movies rating in some general website, the following tends to be true:

Movies rated all 5’s are going to be boring

Movies rated all 1’s are going to be lame

Movies rated all 3’s will probably be watchable, if unmemorable…

Movies with Unnatural 3’s, meaning half the ratings are one star and half are 5 stars.. That is where the goodies lay!

Okay, they don’t technically have to be all ones and fives, but the kind of movie that a big chunk thought it was a masterpiece and another big chunk thought was terrible. To some extent, I think that there is an art vs entertainment issue with movies. Even Scorsese broached the topic recently when saying that superheros movies weren’t films. Well, a Film geek might say so but, in reality, movies are films, just like novels are literature. Not “only the good ones”. However, that doesn’t delete that fact that people should keep in mind… Many movies are just that, filmed depictions of something… But some movies are purely for entertainment, and some movies are just plain art. There’s nothing wrong with one of the other, and they don’t need different names. Transformer? Not art but purely entertainment (well, I don’t find them entertaining at all, but that’s what they’re for)… The Lighthouse, Not entertaining but art. They are for the same thing. You don’t watch The Lighthouse for screams laughs and special effects, and you don’t watch Transformers to ponder, tragically, the human condition… But they’re both legitimate movies, and films.

I was thinking about it a couple of weeks ago when put my last movie on here (How It Ends) and then when I was looking at The VVitch in preparation for ordering The Lighthouse, and then just now I watched Midsommer.

I also watched The Lighthouse in the last two days, but I’m not going to get into that now. A great film! But not one I’ll recommended to anyone. A dark, brooding cess of the human condition… A true “guy movie” in all the wrong ways. But it’s great and I’ll certainly be watching it again! Not as much as I’ll re-watch The VVitch, which has become one of my favorites of all times, but at least a couple more times.

Midsommer. Now that… Art plus entertainment… After the fact I read some reviews at CommonSense media and it was quite, not eye opening. More “putrid excess and gore” Excess, unexplained and inexplicable (what’s with everything needing to be explained? It’s a movie!), terrible, worst, etc etc. Firstly, I didn’t think it was gory at all… But aside from that, it was great! Lame and douchy guys, a woman with too much baggage piled on her, a research trip that is not at all what it seems… It’s not often that you see a movie that in, in essence, a story of some anthropology grad students going on a trip to Sweden to see a ceremony. At times they are a bit too naive (“run like hell and don’t trust anyone!!!!” should have popped into their heads sooner)… But it all works.

The setup seems to involve so many of the classics tropes of pagan festivals, all done in clear daylight with brilliantly white and shiny clothes. The antagonists are hardly antagonistic at all (unless you find people who are perpetually positive and blankly smiling and singing to be a bit unnerving) … I love the village, the buildings, the art (Siv’s house blows me away), when things get druggy and confusing and anxious, you can really feel it… I loved the end. Really. It totally put a smile on my face, which was the first smile I had in the whole movie.