3rd blog migrating reviews from my spacehey to here. Warning, I, for some reason, review 3 movies in a row about animated birds.

House of Leaves Review

Hello, this is my hopefully return to reviewing after being in a kind of mental haze for the last 2 or so weeks, This time on House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. 

House of leaves is a complicated thing to review, as its story is rife with meta commentary, told by an extremely unreliable narrator, and is also potentially non-linear in nature. I will do my best to provide a brief synopsis: House of leaves is about Truant, a bacchant (in spirit, doesn't actually follow the god) whom discovers an essay review of the movie "the Navision records" while exploring the apartment of a recently deceased old man. From there he sets about transcribing the manuscript interspersed with his own thoughts and life. Only one problem: no such movie seems to exist, and as he begins to transcribe the book... strange, perhaps evil, things begin to happen.

This book, despite my high enjoyment, is hard to recommend. This is due to how HARD the book is to read, it is not a casual read. The indexes at the end are needed for a complete picture of the story, there are times you'll be reading text upside down, turning the book around and around to read the text, and of course having to put together a story that is told almost entirely indirectly.
Example: 

 The actual contents of the book kept me reading the whole time, and you slowly begin to care much less about the Navision records and much more about truants story. There are a few times where the story slows down a little bit, and during those times it can be a bit of a slog. But this is few and far between, and for the most part this is a fantastically paced experience as long as you're willing to put in the work to read and decipher it. I will repeat though: the index is NOT optional, you have to read it to understand what is happening.

Overall I rate this book a 4.5/5

SPOILERS SECTION:

This, like all my reviews, has been written without any outside information of the book, no, thus all the ideas within this could go against common consensus, or even be wrong. I like to read outside opinions after I write my own down, as to not taint my initial thoughts.

in House of leaves I had just as good a time uncovering the story as I did reading it. Given this, I'd like to use this first part to simply tell what I think the story is, rather than describe what I did or didn't like about it:

In the beginning, we are essentially led to assume that Zampano may just be cursed. The scrawling manuscript, the half eaten cats, the deep gouges in the floor next to where he died (get to that later) even the nailed shut windows, these are not the actions of the average person. I assumed, at first, that the big reveal would be that Truant, and perhaps anyone that reads the records, are cursed some haunting unseen beast, ready to torment you into nailing your own windows shut and drive you mad. However, while it is possible that the manuscript has some supernatural properties, it seems more likely that Truant simply has an underlying psychosis that was triggered by his obsession with the records. This is of course supported by his mother, who clearly had periods of psychosis. Coming in and out of lucidity as she writes letters to Truant. This reality is slightly obscured by the fact that Truants writing remains considerably more lucid than his mothers, even in the depths of his psychosis during the second portion of the book. Overall, I believe this is a story of truants psychosis catching up with him, triggered by an obsession over a manuscript and a search for truth, and slow recovery during the end of the book. This is the core story, The story of the navidison records is important in the context of building horror, and to accent Truants recovery with that of the navidison family (maybe the house really does exist! maybe the hallway really is there, maybe truant isnt mad.) and to lead us astray from the truth.

With that said though, there are many things that this explanation cannot account for. Why WAS there big gashes on the ground next to zampanos corpse, why did he have books in the freezer, what made him go mad! and most of all: why was he writing about a movie that doesn't exist. He is the biggest mystery of the book, and one I don't really have a good explanation for. My best guess is that he too was likely caught up in some form of psychosis? or perhaps his blindness simply made him go about life differently. Maybe nailing the windows shut was an act that served only to keep a draft out, he couldn't see out them after all. Who knows, I don't, maybe a second read would do me good down the line.

So yeah, that's what I think the story is, now onto my thoughts on that story, mostly just misc/ uncategorized thoughts.

I REALLY like truant, I love how highly intelligent and well read he is, and how that contrasts his growing madness, sometimes even pushing it along, his comments near the beginning about how unreliable photos/videos are now with the advent of photo manipulation was super interesting (to say nothing of AI). His unreliable nature makes the whole book a mystery, and as I said before, I really liked putting the story together after the fact. Reading the last pages of the book of his journal, figuring out that they were all entirely out of order, and then rereading everything in order was a treat.

I also liked learning about this fake movie, while it wasn't, in my opinion, the main focus of the movie, watching the "monster" from the backrooms slowly bleed into Truants real life was cool. It almost felt like I had watched the movie by the end of it. I know there are deeper meanings to this part of the story but I truly had a hard time viewing them outside of the context of truants story, I don't know if this was intentional or not. To expound on this: I think that the Navision records are a parallel to truants mental state, the House is truant and he is the House.

I enjoyed the fact that the book had a "happy" ending for everyone, fake and real. While nobody came out unscathed, most people made it through. Except those who could not leave the past for a better future. Actually that may not be a good way to put it. Except those who... could not learn to grow as a person. Maybe that is the best way of putting it. Thinking of Lude and holloway here. 

I do want to talk briefly on the most enigmatic and confusing character of the book: the minotaur. This character is seemingly the "monster", both in the real world and in the manuscript. It is alluded that anyone who learns of this beast ends up going insane. It is also my only theory as to the giant scratches in the floor, if this monster is real, then it may be what killed Zampano, it may also be why he tried to conceal its presence from the manuscript, it may also have been hunting Truant for awhile before he "moved past" the house and escaped its clutches. 

There is obviously a lot I am yet to pickup on, this book is very meta, and I'm sure there are a lot of subplots that I am left unaware of, however I think I need to move on from this manuscript, lest the madness infects me too.

Migration Review

Hello everyone, time for another review! this time of the movie "migration". This will probably be a pretty short one, simply because I have very little thoughts about it, not that it was trying to be a very thought provoking movie. I also watched it piss drunk, so that also contributes.

Migration is about a family of ducks that do not migrate, their father is a helicopter parent who is constantly worried about the safety of his family, and so he refuses to allow them to migrate with the other birds in fear of them getting hurt. One year, at the behest of his wife and kids, he begrudgingly accepts to migrate. Hijinks ensue.

Overall score: I am no longer ranking things numerically!

So what did I think about this movie? quite literally almost nothing, this was as classic as an illumination in-between-minions-sequal-265 as it gets. But I do have I guess some memorable aspects that I'll outline here:

The story itself mostly just follows the family with some wacky side characters as they travel through the world, so lets start with them. The family dynamics between the ducks is cute, they clearly love each other which I appreciate (it isnt a case of "damn my bitch wife" or "my stupid dad is stupid" or "my kids are RAMBUNCIOUS and EVIL") like they are very much just a non-perfect yet improving family. While this is inoffensive to the point of bland, its also SO lacking in typical tropes I was kind of surprised. Though I will say, because of the fathers prominence, as its mostly his mental journey, we don't see a lot of personality from the rest of the ducks.

The side characters are equally just OK, but I would dare to say a notch above the typical wacky illumination B-cast. I say that because for once there really wasn't a terrible gimmick character that made screentime unbearable, the parrot was fun, the pidgin was scrappy, the crane was "oh wow she is actually very nice" etc. So yeah, wahoo for slightly better B-cast.

I straight up dont remember the music, so dont even ask lol.

Finally: the villain, who was.... a copy of the Free Birds villain, he is a chef who REALLY wants to kill these damn ducks for some fucking reason, cause they freed his parrot I guess, I dont know. He was a McGuffin villain and I didnt care about him either way.

Visually the movie was good, as most illumination movies tend to be. It looked nice enough, again, very safe and bland, but hey for a movie about migrating ducks you dont really need to be redesigning cinema. 

Chicken Run review

Hello! I'm back again working through my review backlog. Today is another light one: Chicken Run.

As previously mentioned I have abandoned the idea of numerically ranking things, at least in one concrete number. I may return to numbers if I can solidify a good set of different categories. Onto the review.

Chicken run is a claymation film from the same studio as Wallace and Gromit, this is pretty easy to tell simply based on visual flair, but the humor is also similarly dry. The movie follows a plucky (get it) chicken named ginger who lives in a chicken coup with a group of other chickens. The plot, as you may have guessed, centers around her attempts to escape the coup before any more of her friends are killed. Suddenly, when a circus chicken seemingly flies into the coup, Ginger's escape attempts change.

Chicken run, I am happy to say, is a movie that was clearly made by a passionate team. This makes sense, given how damn time consuming and personal claymation is, but it is always nice to see a movie that was clearly born from a passion and solid idea.  I will also say that it is a surprisingly DARK movie, though no death is shown on screen, chickens are shown being taken into the shed to be killed when they stop laying eggs, and it isn't just minor side characters, named characters also die! I was pretty surprised to see such a dark twist. Though the idea of "farm animal trying to escape" or even the trope of one of them dying to show the severity of the situation isn't new, the topic is usually covered by the fact that the animals don't know they are going to be killed, usually thinking they are going to "x paradise" (this even happens in migration!) while grinning. What I'm trying to say is that is that the trope is usually played off as a joke, while in this movie it is treated as a very real threat to the birds, and something they think about often. They know they will be killed when they stop laying eggs, and even trade eggs amongst themselves to make it appear as if they are all still laying. While I'm prettyyy sure it was intentional, if it wasn't this reads as a major holocaust allegory.

Luckily most of this movie is focused on the escape attempts, though there is very little outright comedy in the hijinks, as I said before, this movie relies heavily on dry wit humor.

MAJOR SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT

This movie was a pretty damn fun watch, I really enjoyed pretty much all of the characters and especially that of Ginger and rocky, Fowler was also pretty entertaining. The villian, Mrs. Tweedy was properly intimidating and scary, which was appropriate for the surprisingly serious setting.

I did find it weird that seemingly all chickens were actually highly intelligent, yet also seemingly undetected by humans? Mrs. tweedy makes it clear that the idea of collaborative hens is stupid to mr. Tweedy, yet often they show the two villains finding the inventions of the chickens! I don't know, just felt weird lol. The major conflict of Rocky lying about knowing how to fly was comparatively fine, though boring compared to the rest of the film in my eyes. The final battle/ happy ending was nice, showing tweedy being blown up by the machine was certainly entertaining. Overall, what i found most interesting was the fact that realistically the villains weren't exactly villainous from any perspective other than the chickens - - I mean culling non-layers is fairly standard practice, was the movie criticizing farming livestock? If not I mean it was certainly doing that for me.

The music, again, was alright. I don't remember any standout tracks, it was a good orchestral mix and fit nicely within the scope of this film.

Generally all around this movie was quite ok! I enjoyed it just fine, I may even rewatch it, if nothing else it's a great movie to watch on a first date and then talk about (as I found out first hand) Thanks for reading.

Free Birds Review

Wow, I have been on a bird-movie-related kick recently. All of them having very similar themes! Worst part is this wasn't intentional lol.  

I wanna mention that I watched this on a 20 mg edible, meaning I was pretty fucked up while watching it, but it also means I have disproportionally high thoughts about it on account of me being fucked up, lets talk about it.

This movie is fucking weird man, the plot is hypothetically a cliche but by bringing time travel into it, it just.. makes is so much stranger. Additionally, this movie is shockingly competent at times, especially the first half, and I really don't think its just because of the edible.

Free birds is a movie about Reggie, a turkey who unlike his peers knows of the impending doom that thanksgiving brings turkeys. Just before he is to be killed for thanksgiving dinner, he becomes the pardoned turkey, leading to a cushy pizza eating life style in a presidential suite. One day while living this cushy life, he is kidnapped by Jake, another turkey, with a mission: TO GO BACK IN TIME, AND GET TURKEYS OFF THE MENU! and thus shit happens.

Spoilers for fucking free bird ahead, so if you actually care about the plot to this movie, stop reading here.

Some general stuff: Music, I dont remember it, at all, I can't even remember if the movie had music, that is how whatever it was. Voice acting was surprisingly ok but for some reason a couple of the native American turkey's sounded like they were recording out of like.. their house instead of a studio for some reason. animation quality is fine, the actual time machine sequence was fun! the hunters design was very surprisingly competent, everything else was very generic 3d animation with cartoon style.

Ok, I kinda wanna talk about this in two halves, the half before they travel back in time, and the half after. Because this movie tanks in value after that first half. 

Half 1:

So while I was watching this movie I was obviously thinking about the classic "why are turkeys able to form a society, and why dont humans notice?" this is somewhat answered by the answer "because turkey's are stupid." which, to be honest, I can simply live with, it isn't like they are building anything or whatever, so that's fine. Getting onto the president and his daughter picking out the turkey, we get some pretty good lines from the little girl, some actual laugh out loud moments (maybe definitely due to the edibles kicking in). After they get to the basecamp though, the daughter and president are essentially phased the fuck out which I thought was strange, I mean we literally only see the president one more time and the daughter NEVER again, to the point that reggie takes over her room. (fan theory he killed her in cold blood). The pizza guy was pretty good too. Once Reggie is kidnapped by jake, the entire time travel break in and guards scene was actually legit good, like very competent in a lot of ways, surprisingly so! to the point that found myself thinking "wow I'd watch this part even not-high", the jokes landed, the animation hit, the cuts were good, sound mixing etc all damn 8/10 material. The time machine STEVE was legit more good comedy. Special shout out SPECIFICALLY to the scene where they actually say "go back in time to get turkeys off the menu" the scene is fine on its own, but high as shit and waiting for that specific line? me and my buddies actually fucking lost it, tears, truly. 

Half 2:

Once Reggie and jake actually go back in time, this movie starts to suck, for a lot of reasons. To be honest there is a lot I could talk about here but I'm just going to point out a few key things I thought were lame. Firstly: almost all the turkeys were designed to be playing off architypes from other movies. Reggie's love interest Jenny and reggie himself had a Rango (a legitimately fantastic film) thing going on even down to the fact that Jenny had a "shocking" aspect when she got stressed (lazy eye) just like Bean's "freeze", we had these two stupid ass fucking birds, a redbird and a tiny turkey who were trying to Pedro and Nico from Rio. Those who weren't ideas stolen from 2011 animated films were just boring architypes. It made the movie lose a lot of its personality it had built from the first half. Secondly AND WHAT STUCK OUT MOST TO ME I had to question why half of these damn characters were even on screen! there was this long hair turkey who had like 3 scenes yet did nothing, who was he! why should I care! the little latino bird, equally pointless character, I literally do not give a fuck about him, actually I actively disliked him. Then there was the turkey - chicken hybrid bird. I don't even remember his name and frankly he is SO unimportant that I cannot find an image for him on google. I LOATH this character, he gets 5, count em, 5 SOLOS SCENES with 30 + seconds of screen time per section. he gets nearly 5 minutes of screen time in this movie, an entire 1% of this film is spent on this stupid character with absolutely NO point. He has no dialogue, he just goes "ha cha cha", he doesn't actually do anything, he doesn't push the plot along, I simply do not fucking understand why he exists OTHER than MAYBE to fill a 5 second timeslot in the trailer like some sort of film mascot. I know this is a lot of charged emotions for this bird but if you watch the movie maybe you'll understand.

The bastard bird in question.

At the end of the day this movie is so utterly basic its hard to hate or love, there are some very competent parts and then there are some very non-competent parts. For what its worth, it got some laughs out of me. I guess. 

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