A Journey Through The Nightmare on Elm Streets

patricia
A great behind-the-scenes shot of Patricia Arquette from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.

This month, Amazon had the blu-ray set of all seven Nightmare on Elm Street movies on sale for like $23. I’d never seen any of them before, and at that price, I figured now would be a pretty good time to do so. Even though the series is quite uneven, it’s an interesting one. Here are my thoughts on each, with very mild spoilers, if any:
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Movies Can Make Any Song Good

volare

I don’t care who you are or what music you typically like, if Step Brothers doesn’t make you fall in love with the song Por Ti Volaré by Andrea Bocelli, there’s something wrong with you.

Aside from being a huge film buff, I’m a huge music buff. Hell, I’m just plain buff. (25/m/nyc/d&d free ;-* ). Basically though, there ain’t a genre of movies or music where there ain’t at least some stuff I dig. And that’s the way things should be. Who are these people who, for instance, ‘don’t like rap’ or ‘don’t like horror’ or whatever? How can anyone be so lazy? There’s tons of different types of horror movies, tons of different types of rap. To write off an entire genre is just lame. It’s 2013, people—if you don’t have eclectic taste, get the fuck outta here.

However, I can understand people not liking something if they don’t have any context for it. If you’ve never heard, for instance, reggae, hearing it for the first time will be a love it or hate it experience—it either speaks to you or it doesn’t. Its context is either hardwired inside you, a sleeping giant in your brain waiting to be woken by the right tones, or the context must be instilled. And to instill said context takes volition—it may necessitate listening to lots of different reggae artists, and various styles of reggae, and reading up on the history of the genre, until something clicks in your brain. Or, you could just fucking watch The Harder They Come.
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Gravity: A Lifetime Movie In Space

Sandra Bullock


Gravity (2013)
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Written by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón
90 min.

Mild spoilers ahead.

Wow. I guess the moon really is made out of cheese.

That was my immediate thought at the end of this movie, as a sea of applause erupted in the theater, or more accurately, an archipelago of applause. In its sparseness, I knew that I was not the only one who felt this way, which was a relief, because after the damn-near unanimous praise this thing had been receiving as of late, I fully expected the hive mind crowd to suddenly and collectively smell my distaste and crawl over the seats, and each other, to come rip me apart limb from limb. Instead, I merely had to endure the requisite long line to exit the theater, and then the long line down the countless escalators leading back to Earth, during which everyone seemed unusually quiet, stuck in their own minds, trying to process their feelings. Not in the way that occurs after a Haneke film or something; this was different. It seemed as though many, including myself, were wondering if they’d seen the same movie that the professional critics and faceless fanboys online had seen.
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Advice Column #11 (10/11/13)

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I’d really like to see a truly scary, yet beautifully put together movie with psychological elements and plausibility, but maybe some surrealism as well. Something like Eyes Without a Face or Suspiria. Where the fear is more from the vibe than from the definable foe and allures me so that I can’t look away from it even while it’s unsettling. — Chloe P.

Editor’s Note (12/4/14): We no longer answer movie questions through our advice column. We answer them in the mailbag segment of our podcast. Send them to Cody@SmugFilm.com and we will answer on the show!
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Strongman: Pitch-Perfect Cinema Vérité

strongman


Strongman (2009)
Directed by Zachary Levy
113 min.

A day after I posted my How To Watch a Film essay, I received an email from the director of this film. He reached out because loved the essay and he’d gone through, with his own film, exactly what I described going through with my film, Rehearsals—people that were ambivalent about it when watching a screener and then blown away in a theater setting.

For a long time, he avoided releasing his film on DVD because he felt that a theater was the ideal setting to see it, and he wanted to do whatever he could to make sure as many people as possible could see it properly. However, he’s recently decided to finally take the plunge and release it on DVD and Digital, and it’s due out this month.

Zach was kind enough to send me an advance copy of the DVD in the mail, which I watched this past week, and let me tell you—this thing is plenty powerful on an average-sized flatscreen. I don’t know that I could even handle this thing in a movie theater. This is one of the most gripping vérité docs I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s no surprise at all that it has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, was on Roger Ebert’s Year’s Best list, and was a New York Times Critics’ Pick.
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