movies recently seen

Clerks was just about as entertaining and profane as I remember it being. Well worth revisiting.

The Mothman Prophecies reminded me why I don't really follow mainstream Hollywood films on these sorts of topics. Some fairly eerie premonitions of terror diluted by a clunky attempt to build a romantic sub-plot and big-ticket disaster sequence that squanders all the weirdness away in favour of senseless visual kicks. The dialogue is painful throughout, serving all too often to spell out in far too many words what any reasonably smart viewer has already figured out. I hate these stories that end with whatever strangeness that has been invoked resulting in a crescendo of frantic destruction and then stopping at the point beyond which, presumable, normalcy can be restored (Stephen King specialises in this sort of thing). Bullshit. Normalcy doesn't just reconvene itself after something like that, how would these people carry on after their lives have been touched by something so big and weird, do they become reclusive paranoiacs like Leek, or self-promoting conspiracy peddlers like some 'real' mothman-encounterers, will they retreat to the backwoods and start some sort of lepidoptera-worshipping cult of Psyche? One of the reasons Vertigo is so brilliant is that it starts off by showing us a likely consequence of having your sanity threatened that badly.

Let The Right One In may not have the stark, haunting power of Martin, but as a vampire flick that chooses to remain well within its genre instead of deconstructing it, it's a rather effective narrative, sad and sweet and horrifying at the same time.