Sunday!
The new thriller flick “A Quiet Place” does something fairly extraordinary in the same way that Don’t Breathe did back in 2016 (no, I’m not talking about giving away the store in the trailer). The movie relies heavily on fiddling with one of the two senses that movies have to play with.
Don’t Breathe played with the whole “sight” thing by making the implacable antagonist of the movie blind and thus unhindered by complete darkness while the protagonists of the movie were sighted and the antagonist used this to his advantage. So the audience was sitting their seats holding their breath and not making a sound in unconscious sympathy.
A Quiet Place does something vaguely similar with sound. The implacable antagonists of A Quiet Place hunt based on sound as well. “If they hear you, they hunt you”, the tagline goes. So the thriller portions of the film involve the protagonists being silent (or, at least, quieter than the ambient noises made by the outside world) and they communicate via ASL or different colored lights as they try to avoid the predators chasing them.
So, of course, there are scenes where the antagonists are close by, like, *REALLY* close by and the audience is hoping and praying that our protagonists don’t make a sound and, once again, the audience sits in their seats, holding their breath, and living and dying (sympathetically, anyway) with every noice louder than anything in the environement.
It’s a pretty sweet trick, actually.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
i watched the Prestige which was good and stressful. I read a comic called Blue Hand Mojo which I would recommend strongly, especially if you are into noir / devil-at-the-crossroads-aftermath stories.
Mostly I’ve been far down the rabbithole of really silly podcasts done by really smart people. I think my current favorite is Unaccompanied Minors, which is a bunch of grown-ass women playing an RPG set in the dreaded world of …. Middle School.
It makes me laugh so hard.Report
PS a close second is the Babysitters’ Club Club, in which two men who genuinely read and loved the books as children reread every last one of them and discuss in great and overwrought detail (like sometimes > 1hr per book) while making fun of each other relentlessly and making fun of the books only when the books deserve it.Report
Saving through against pimples.Report
@leeesq Haven’t hit that particular one yet, but I expect it’ll come up!Report
Just watched The American, a movie from 2010 that has been sitting on my hard drive forever but which I’d never watched. It’s…interesting; if you don’t mind slow-paced movies it’s a tight little character piece.
I’ve been reading the Dune series this year and currently I’m about two-thirds of the way into God Emperor. It’s certainly one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read. Also, it’s definitely got some stuff that…well, let’s just say that marks it as written by a middle-aged white guy in the 60s and 70s, if you know what I mean.Report