"Stop. Don't do this to yourself"
Dec. 12th, 2006 03:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jchrisobrienTonight there's an office party, and today I got my new phone. The weekend was more of the usual, so no need to get into details there. The dinner party was pleasant last night, even though my (out of context) quote raised some hackles. Hey! While I'm on a roll, let me dive into another controversial subject.
I didn't find this film as hard to sit through as Mishak did. I did start to get annoyed with Ellen Page after a while (in a much better roll than she had in X-Men: the Last Stand), but that was mostly rooted in my wanting her to "get ON with it, already". Small criticisms, really. The premise is a man brings an underage girl home to listen to music and photograph her. She ends up drugging him, and tying him up. The rest of the film is spent with her interrogating and torturing him, to get him to confess to the rape/murder of another minor. The film is not graphic, everything is left to your imagination, and the acting conveys the horror much more than simply showing it to you would.
I had a conversation with Heatray once, when we talked about how torture is wrong, regardless of who does it, and for what reasons. Whether you're interrogating villagers in Chad, or terrorists in Gitmo, torture is an evil thing. The movie doesn't make a moral judgment on what Hailey (Ellen Page) does to Jeff (Patrick Wilson). Hailey clearly believes that what she is doing is just, yet she is by far the more brutal character on the screen. Jeff's initial actions are very sketchy, and bringing home an underage girl is pretty inappropriate. If Hailey is correct, then Jeff has done some horrible things.
What he does is only hinted at, and suggested. In a more mainstream movie, you would have more direct evidence of what Jeff did, but that would change the entire feel of the movie. It would make it easy to hate him. Hard Candy unfolds in a way where you learn about Jeff's character piece by piece, sympathy and fury overlapping as each new clue is presented. It's only at the very end that you learn all the information, and even then you are left wondering about some things. One thing is clear to any Firefly fan: Hailey has definitely read her Shan Yu.
The movie doesn't make any attempt to defend Jeff's actions, and Hailey shoots down his excuses and comments one by one. What it does show is that even a "monster" is closer to being human that you'd think. It's easy to paint a picture of a psychpath, or a serial killer. They're crazy, evil, they must be put down. What Jeff does is evil too (whether it's pedophilia or murder), but he seems human. It's only after all his lies and delusions have been stripped away, that you get to see the Real Jeff. You get a brief glimpse on the roof, then one last plea, then back to the Real Jeff.
I highly reccomend this movie, and also The Woodsman with Kevin Bacon, though perhaps not together in the same sitting.
I didn't find this film as hard to sit through as Mishak did. I did start to get annoyed with Ellen Page after a while (in a much better roll than she had in X-Men: the Last Stand), but that was mostly rooted in my wanting her to "get ON with it, already". Small criticisms, really. The premise is a man brings an underage girl home to listen to music and photograph her. She ends up drugging him, and tying him up. The rest of the film is spent with her interrogating and torturing him, to get him to confess to the rape/murder of another minor. The film is not graphic, everything is left to your imagination, and the acting conveys the horror much more than simply showing it to you would.
I had a conversation with Heatray once, when we talked about how torture is wrong, regardless of who does it, and for what reasons. Whether you're interrogating villagers in Chad, or terrorists in Gitmo, torture is an evil thing. The movie doesn't make a moral judgment on what Hailey (Ellen Page) does to Jeff (Patrick Wilson). Hailey clearly believes that what she is doing is just, yet she is by far the more brutal character on the screen. Jeff's initial actions are very sketchy, and bringing home an underage girl is pretty inappropriate. If Hailey is correct, then Jeff has done some horrible things.
What he does is only hinted at, and suggested. In a more mainstream movie, you would have more direct evidence of what Jeff did, but that would change the entire feel of the movie. It would make it easy to hate him. Hard Candy unfolds in a way where you learn about Jeff's character piece by piece, sympathy and fury overlapping as each new clue is presented. It's only at the very end that you learn all the information, and even then you are left wondering about some things. One thing is clear to any Firefly fan: Hailey has definitely read her Shan Yu.
The movie doesn't make any attempt to defend Jeff's actions, and Hailey shoots down his excuses and comments one by one. What it does show is that even a "monster" is closer to being human that you'd think. It's easy to paint a picture of a psychpath, or a serial killer. They're crazy, evil, they must be put down. What Jeff does is evil too (whether it's pedophilia or murder), but he seems human. It's only after all his lies and delusions have been stripped away, that you get to see the Real Jeff. You get a brief glimpse on the roof, then one last plea, then back to the Real Jeff.
I highly reccomend this movie, and also The Woodsman with Kevin Bacon, though perhaps not together in the same sitting.
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Date: 2006-12-13 04:11 pm (UTC)Jeff distanced himself from his actions and feelings towards children. Hailey did the same thing at the end of the movie. "I am all those little girls you downloaded, tortured, raped, killed." If there's not Hailey, there's no person doing the torture. But she does exist. She is a girl who tracks down and tortures a small subset of people. She is a predator too.