I "Loved It" Monsters

Monsters is an amazingly quiet and calm sci-fi road trip movie that is a must see. 

            Monsters is not an extravaganza of action at all, like, there is hardly any; it’s a sci-fi drama. It was compared a lot to District 9, though why I do not know. Yeah, they both involve aliens . . . and that's about where the similarities end. If you felt District 9 had too much action and too much aliens then check out Monsters, a well done and suspenseful sci-fi drama.

            Monsters asks a lot of the audience. You go in knowing there are aliens, you go in expecting aliens, and you don't really get them. I mean, they're there, but the movie is about the people, the couple trying to get across the border. I can see how people think of it as a metaphor for immigration and such, but look hard enough into anything and you’ll find something symbolic, whether it’s really there or not. The whole argument about emigrants isn’t as easy as “they want to cross the border”. There’s economic reasons. I’m pretty sure if the people could, they’d stay at home and work and not opt to try and cross any border illegally for work and money. The people in Monsters want to get back home. I see nothing that makes it a metaphor for people crossing the border illegally. The girl want's to get home and the guy just basically wants her to get home too so that he can be done with her.

            On the way they gotta deal with these large monsters. And that one sentence is about the equivalent of the amount of monsters you’ll see in this movie.

           

            The movie doesn’t need to have monsters all the time, not a lot of special effects or anything like that. A movie called Monsters, however, does rather create the expectation of seeing monsters. It’s hard to blame the advertising because there weren’t a lot of monsters in the preview either, but still, the movie is called Monsters.

            And I say all of this because the movie is a good movie, it’s just that – like my wife (my wife gave up on it after awhile. She really liked District 9 but was bored with Monsters). – people will miss out on this movie because it’s not what they expect. It’s difficult to be in the mood for a Monster movie, sit down and shift gears during the movie. It’s almost an hour into the movie before you get any Monsters, and even then it’s not really much at all. The beginning is great and really hooks you, but again it does more damage than good because the rest of the movie is nothing like the beginning, no gun shots, no crazy camera, pretty much no action. It’s a great opening but it continues the set up for disappointment. Monsters is a great movie, one that many won’t see because they’re expecting monsters through the whole movie, or they won’t stick with because they’re expecting monsters through the whole movie.

            And then the ending. Holy crap the ending of Monsters was like, lean forward in your chair and say: "Wait a minute." The ending is like the whole movie, quiet and calm, but such a holy shit moment. The ending of Monsters doesn't baby you, it doesn't drive into your head an explanation for what’s happening, it just does its thing and hopes you’re smart enough to put two and two together. If you’re not, then fine, the movie ends with no resolution and you probably won’t like it, if you do get it, then the movie ends in a pretty cool way.

I "Didn't Like It" Mandy Lane: and see if you can follow my stream of consciousness on this one.

What can I say about All The Boys Love Mandy Lane other than it is a slasher movie.

            Nothing new or particularly interesting about it, in fact I almost gave up on it, and probably should have. On the border of “Didn’t Like It” and “Liked It” this movies falls just this side of “Didn’t Like It”. It’s like The Last Stand of 80’s horror movies. (That’s not a good thing.) I don’t get the feeling that it was trying to do any sort of nod towards the 80’s horror movies other than the fact that it was pretty much a straightforward slasher movie, the likes one would see from the 80’s, as opposed to anything after Scream that would have any sort of edge to it or originality (though even the Scream movies would eventually lose all of that as well).

            So I take this movie as it is, a slasher movie, one we’ve seen many times and one of the lesser well-made kind. The movie and acting are all about what you’d expect, it’s just the story itself isn’t very good.

            I get that Amber Heard is pretty, but in this movie I do not get why all the boys apparently love her. There is nothing presented to us that stands out as an explanation for the fascination with her. To be honest, the more I watched the movie the more I found the other blonde girl more attractive, and still the more I watched again I realized that the other girl was the better of the two actresses. Whitney Able is her name, and I don't know if it was just that Amber Heard was really bored filming Mandy Lane or what; maybe she knew this wasn't a good movie so she didn't really put any effort into her character, either way, Whitney Able was acting, she was working, and in the end you're rooting for her character to make it more than you are for Amber Heard's.

            I looked Whitney Able up after the Mandy Lane movie and found that she was the girl in Monsters . . .

            How a girl who goes from Mandy Lane to Monsters is not more popular than a girl who goes from Mandy Lane to say: Syrup, is way the fuck beyond me.

           

            The problems with Mandy Lane stretch from the horribly obvious to the horribly impossible. Example: A girl is killed by shoving the barrel of a gun into her mouth so far that her mouth snaps open, like it breaks her jaw. It’s graphic and you see it, briefly, but it is there, and the girl goes limp. Next scene her mouth is fine, though they did manage to put a bit of blood around her mouth to show that – though she has miraculously healed herself almost entirely, she was still hurt there once just seconds ago.

            The other problem is when the one guy has his privates passionately kissed by a girl until he reaches his peak moment of happiness? Not sure if you can get what I’m saying – like she used her mouth on him in a way that would make one think that they were married, but not like for a long time married, like newlywed married, you know? Anyway, he’s feelin’ good because the ending of the thing the girl was doing was happy, right? So he goes back into the house and immediately starts hitting on Mandy Lane again! This is total bullshit. Dude would be so chill and at least need a few minutes before he was all horned up again. I was a teenage boy once, I remember how horny I was, and I remember . . . well, let’s just say I had a lot of parties that no one else was invited to except for me, and afterwards I just wanted to lay there (mostly in tears). Sure a while later I was ready to go again, but not the time it takes to walk from outside a house to the inside.

            I should also talk about the almost-kiss in the bathroom between Mandy Lane and the Monsters girl. It was very well done, suspenseful and sexy and all that, but certainly not worth sitting through this movie for. But Josh, had they kissed, would it have been worth it? Nope.

            Mandy Lane is not a good movie, unless you like unoriginal slasher movies, in which case check it out!