One thing the Twilight movies have afforded us is the opportunity to witness the burgeoning careers of several young actors. If a cursory glance at American film history teaches us anything, it’s that it can be tough out there for the young people. (RIP, most child actors!) So from time to time, here on the blog I will be checking in on the other film projects in which the cast of Twilight gets involved. This weekend I watched Summer’s Moon, A.K.A. Summer’s Blood, staring Ashley Greene, the girl we know better as Alice Cullen. It seemed like a natural place to start.Here’s the trailer; be warned that it essentially is the entire movie. I mean, the movie is longer, obviously, but this trailer is basically the whole thing, probably a clip from every scene. The “twist” in this movie is set up so early and hinted at so frequently, when it is finally articulated it isn’t shocking at all anyway, so you don’t have a lot to lose finding it out now:
Greene plays Summer, who is a bit of a rebel. We know this because at the start of the film she’s hitchhiking, which is edgy. A dude picks her up, they exchange some extremely believable dialogue about how dangerous it is to be hitchhiking for a pretty girl, and then the dude tries to get her to blow him. She pulls a gun, points it as his crotch, and tells him to put away his “micro dick” and keep his fucking eyes on the road. She’s a lot of a rebel, I guess. She gets out in some middle-of-nowhere town and proceeds to start shoplifting. I’m really getting a rebel vibe here. The cops start to hassle her, she runs, she meets a guy named Tom who helps her get away.
They smoke some pot, they go out for drinks, they go back to his place. His mom’s place. (It’s a small town.) “So are you going to take me upstairs and fuck me or what?” she says. Whoa now, Alice! Then they proceed to fuck, so we’re clearly outside of S. Meyer’s wheelhouse all ready. That night while they’re fucking, Tom’s mom comes up and kisses the door. Uh, okay? Next morning, Summer gets up early and robs them, but Tom wakes up as she’s sneaking out. He gets all weird and like “you’re not leaving” so she pulls the gun again and then his mom comes out and hits her in the head with a pan.
The IMDb tags give you a real sense of what is going on in this movie.
She wakes up without her pants in the basement, all chained up on a pile of dirt. It’s a little weird that she doesn’t have pants anymore. I guess it’s a little weird that she’s chained up in a basement, but when you watch these kind of horror movies don’t you get the feeling that someone on the set has a checklist, like “okay, we saw a bra earlier, so we have to get some underwear in here somewhere…” The worst movie I have ever seen was called The Slaughterhouse Massacre. Toward the end, the killer is advancing on the surviving half-dressed co-ed, and she tries to crawl backwards over a half-blasted stone wall. Clearly her skirt was supposed to get caught on the wall, but it doesn’t. At first. The girl takes a good 40 seconds or so to make it happen, and the killer literally stands there and waits until she does. Real quality filmmaking, that.
Summer’s Moon is nowhere near as bad; for a movie that looks like it cost about fifty dollars, it’s a decent watch. The really ridiculous dialogue is front-loaded, so they get the worst of it out of the way fast. Tom has Summer (and some other girls) locked up in the basement as part of a “garden”—he calls them his “garden angels.” Okay. Summer tries to get him to let her go, and he says “everybody dies, summer don’t last forever.” OKAY. Early on, Summer asks Tom, “So what is there to be worried about here in Asscrack, Nowhere?” OKAY! A character who appears late in the film takes over the majority of the dialogue; he mumbles in a heavy Cajun accent, so even if he is saying something corny you wouldn’t really know.
From there, plot threads accumulate and drop away whenever the principal character attached to them gets killed. Tom’s father is coming home soon, he apparently is a travelling businessman whose business is murdering prostitutes; Tom reads Summer’s diary, he learns something about her that should be immediately clear if you watch the trailer; The father of one of Tom’s previous victims goes looking for his daughter; Tom grows attached to Summer and starts letting her out of the basement during the day so she can wash floors and shit. None of it really matters. Eventually enough people are dead, so the movie just ends.
Ashley Greene does a pretty good job; She certainly has more to do than she did in the first Twilight film—she swears and steals and is devious and interestingly, doesn’t seem too bothered by incest. Don't get me wrong, Todd Solondz didn't write this thing; it is definitely of one of those “girl who screams and looks hot” roles. Although she doesn’t really scream much. As the film goes on she has less and less to do - for the last 20 minutes or so she has maybe two or three lines, and mostly stands there in a state of shock.
It seems like it has Hostel-y aspirations, but the torture-porn elements are downplayed. Summer is locked in the basement, but nothing really gross or violent happens to her there. When violence does happen, most of it happens off camera, which makes at least one scene oddly reminiscent of Funny Games. Again, if you’ve seen the trailer, you see the one scene of really shocking violence, which is plenty gross and maybe 30% as good as a really similar scene in House of The Devil. In the “making of” featurette on the DVD, the director says four or five times they were “not making a horror film”—they were taking horror elements and making…some other kind of film. It’s not really clear what they were making instead.
Speaking of the “making of” thing—it is extremely troubling to watch. They keep cutting back to the filming of the final sequence, and the director and the rest of the crew have clearly not planned anything. They keep talking about what shots they could do and pointing out possible continuity errors—they appear to just be trying out a bunch of random shit. It reminds me really of what I looked and sounded like when we were making Righteous TV, a sketch show I wrote in high school. We really had no idea what we were doing either, but that’s okay—we were in high school. You can see the actors getting a little frustrated and confused as these guys improvise their way through their movie. It was shot in fifteen days—incidentally that's only ten fewer days than the shooting schedule of Memento, but you didn’t hear Christopher Nolan bitching about it as much as these dudes do.
There’s a minor detail on the featurette that is sort of interesting, though—as they prep for one of the basement scenes, Ashley Greene is lying on the pile of dirt getting makeup applied, covered in a blanket (I guess if you spend several scenes in a movie sans-pants they give you a blanket between shots. You can’t buy class.) and listening to an iPod. I don’t know if that is some kind of method acting deal or if she’s like the kind of actress that doesn’t let anyone speak to her between shots, but that’s not the kind of thing you normally see. Curtain getting pulled back, or whatever.
The other thing to address is the title, one word of which has clear relevance to the film. The title character is Summer. The moon, on the other hand, really has nothing to do with it at all. Well, Ashley Greene also stars in New Moon, so there’s that. The original title was Summer’s Blood, which is actually relevant, for reasons you can easily figure out if you watch the trailer. So I wonder why they changed it? Hmmmmm.
[Click to enlarge] This dude is onto them, but may be reaching at bit.
When ad-men do this sort title-switch, what do they think is going to happen? Do they think people are actually going to be confused and think it has something to do with Twilight? The audience for Twilight is young girls—this movie, with its (admittedly tame) sex scenes and bloody violence and torture-porn aspirations and swearing (plenty of “fucks” and at least one “cunt”—points for that! Have you noticed that “cunt” is slowly creeping into the zeitgeist?) is aimed at guys slightly younger than me. It seems like any hope for cross-pollination is sort of futile.
It also occurred to me that this film’s main characters have the same names as the main characters in (500) Days Of Summer (the main female character’s names are both played up by the title, even) which is a film I really disliked. Obviously, (500) is the better film (it had a theatrical release anyway) but really, it isn’t. I haven’t really met anyone who dislikes it as much as I did, but I looked at that film as kind of a failure of imagination. The premise was interesting, the idea of breaking up the days of a relationship and showing them in random order, but if you see the film you know that doesn’t really happen. Occasionally it seems like Marc Webb forgot that’s what he even was supposed to be doing.
(500) also has three or four really creative sequences which are great, but the rest of the movie doesn’t live up to their promise. People who defend this movie always cite those scenes, which add up to about ten minutes. If the movie was just those ten minutes it would have been fine! But there is a lot of other movie in there!
I don’t understand how you make a movie like (500) Days Of Summer in a post-Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind world without doing a rapid-fire sequence of days in the relationship between Tom and Summer: Day 50, Day 271, Day 480, Day 3, one after another after another (think of the way ESOTM slowly builds in intensity until you’re seeing just a barrage of heartbreaking images—Joel driving home with David Cross and his wife from the beach party). I spent the entire movie hoping for a sequence like that, or at least a continuation of the promise made by some of those early creative sequences, and nothing like anything happened. (500) was a dirge. I spent the last 40 minutes just hoping it would end. Don’t think I didn’t try to like it; I actually bought it on a semi-impulse, just assuming from the film’s pedigree that I would love it. Instead I got Eternal Sunshine-light, Michel Gondry on a bad day.
This is all to say that I enjoyed Summer's Moon more than (500) Days of Summer. I know that's like comparing Zooey Deschanel's apples to Ashley Greene's melons (yes, I just wrote that), but I think when you are reviewing films you need some kind of metric. So when for future reviews in the The Biterion Collection I will rate entries according to whether or not they are better than (500) Days of Summer. This one is. Does that mean you should see it? No, probably not.
They smoke some pot, they go out for drinks, they go back to his place. His mom’s place. (It’s a small town.) “So are you going to take me upstairs and fuck me or what?” she says. Whoa now, Alice! Then they proceed to fuck, so we’re clearly outside of S. Meyer’s wheelhouse all ready. That night while they’re fucking, Tom’s mom comes up and kisses the door. Uh, okay? Next morning, Summer gets up early and robs them, but Tom wakes up as she’s sneaking out. He gets all weird and like “you’re not leaving” so she pulls the gun again and then his mom comes out and hits her in the head with a pan.
The IMDb tags give you a real sense of what is going on in this movie.She wakes up without her pants in the basement, all chained up on a pile of dirt. It’s a little weird that she doesn’t have pants anymore. I guess it’s a little weird that she’s chained up in a basement, but when you watch these kind of horror movies don’t you get the feeling that someone on the set has a checklist, like “okay, we saw a bra earlier, so we have to get some underwear in here somewhere…” The worst movie I have ever seen was called The Slaughterhouse Massacre. Toward the end, the killer is advancing on the surviving half-dressed co-ed, and she tries to crawl backwards over a half-blasted stone wall. Clearly her skirt was supposed to get caught on the wall, but it doesn’t. At first. The girl takes a good 40 seconds or so to make it happen, and the killer literally stands there and waits until she does. Real quality filmmaking, that.
Summer’s Moon is nowhere near as bad; for a movie that looks like it cost about fifty dollars, it’s a decent watch. The really ridiculous dialogue is front-loaded, so they get the worst of it out of the way fast. Tom has Summer (and some other girls) locked up in the basement as part of a “garden”—he calls them his “garden angels.” Okay. Summer tries to get him to let her go, and he says “everybody dies, summer don’t last forever.” OKAY. Early on, Summer asks Tom, “So what is there to be worried about here in Asscrack, Nowhere?” OKAY! A character who appears late in the film takes over the majority of the dialogue; he mumbles in a heavy Cajun accent, so even if he is saying something corny you wouldn’t really know.
From there, plot threads accumulate and drop away whenever the principal character attached to them gets killed. Tom’s father is coming home soon, he apparently is a travelling businessman whose business is murdering prostitutes; Tom reads Summer’s diary, he learns something about her that should be immediately clear if you watch the trailer; The father of one of Tom’s previous victims goes looking for his daughter; Tom grows attached to Summer and starts letting her out of the basement during the day so she can wash floors and shit. None of it really matters. Eventually enough people are dead, so the movie just ends.
Ashley Greene does a pretty good job; She certainly has more to do than she did in the first Twilight film—she swears and steals and is devious and interestingly, doesn’t seem too bothered by incest. Don't get me wrong, Todd Solondz didn't write this thing; it is definitely of one of those “girl who screams and looks hot” roles. Although she doesn’t really scream much. As the film goes on she has less and less to do - for the last 20 minutes or so she has maybe two or three lines, and mostly stands there in a state of shock.It seems like it has Hostel-y aspirations, but the torture-porn elements are downplayed. Summer is locked in the basement, but nothing really gross or violent happens to her there. When violence does happen, most of it happens off camera, which makes at least one scene oddly reminiscent of Funny Games. Again, if you’ve seen the trailer, you see the one scene of really shocking violence, which is plenty gross and maybe 30% as good as a really similar scene in House of The Devil. In the “making of” featurette on the DVD, the director says four or five times they were “not making a horror film”—they were taking horror elements and making…some other kind of film. It’s not really clear what they were making instead.
Speaking of the “making of” thing—it is extremely troubling to watch. They keep cutting back to the filming of the final sequence, and the director and the rest of the crew have clearly not planned anything. They keep talking about what shots they could do and pointing out possible continuity errors—they appear to just be trying out a bunch of random shit. It reminds me really of what I looked and sounded like when we were making Righteous TV, a sketch show I wrote in high school. We really had no idea what we were doing either, but that’s okay—we were in high school. You can see the actors getting a little frustrated and confused as these guys improvise their way through their movie. It was shot in fifteen days—incidentally that's only ten fewer days than the shooting schedule of Memento, but you didn’t hear Christopher Nolan bitching about it as much as these dudes do.
There’s a minor detail on the featurette that is sort of interesting, though—as they prep for one of the basement scenes, Ashley Greene is lying on the pile of dirt getting makeup applied, covered in a blanket (I guess if you spend several scenes in a movie sans-pants they give you a blanket between shots. You can’t buy class.) and listening to an iPod. I don’t know if that is some kind of method acting deal or if she’s like the kind of actress that doesn’t let anyone speak to her between shots, but that’s not the kind of thing you normally see. Curtain getting pulled back, or whatever.
The other thing to address is the title, one word of which has clear relevance to the film. The title character is Summer. The moon, on the other hand, really has nothing to do with it at all. Well, Ashley Greene also stars in New Moon, so there’s that. The original title was Summer’s Blood, which is actually relevant, for reasons you can easily figure out if you watch the trailer. So I wonder why they changed it? Hmmmmm.
[Click to enlarge] This dude is onto them, but may be reaching at bit.
When ad-men do this sort title-switch, what do they think is going to happen? Do they think people are actually going to be confused and think it has something to do with Twilight? The audience for Twilight is young girls—this movie, with its (admittedly tame) sex scenes and bloody violence and torture-porn aspirations and swearing (plenty of “fucks” and at least one “cunt”—points for that! Have you noticed that “cunt” is slowly creeping into the zeitgeist?) is aimed at guys slightly younger than me. It seems like any hope for cross-pollination is sort of futile.
It also occurred to me that this film’s main characters have the same names as the main characters in (500) Days Of Summer (the main female character’s names are both played up by the title, even) which is a film I really disliked. Obviously, (500) is the better film (it had a theatrical release anyway) but really, it isn’t. I haven’t really met anyone who dislikes it as much as I did, but I looked at that film as kind of a failure of imagination. The premise was interesting, the idea of breaking up the days of a relationship and showing them in random order, but if you see the film you know that doesn’t really happen. Occasionally it seems like Marc Webb forgot that’s what he even was supposed to be doing.
(500) also has three or four really creative sequences which are great, but the rest of the movie doesn’t live up to their promise. People who defend this movie always cite those scenes, which add up to about ten minutes. If the movie was just those ten minutes it would have been fine! But there is a lot of other movie in there!
I don’t understand how you make a movie like (500) Days Of Summer in a post-Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind world without doing a rapid-fire sequence of days in the relationship between Tom and Summer: Day 50, Day 271, Day 480, Day 3, one after another after another (think of the way ESOTM slowly builds in intensity until you’re seeing just a barrage of heartbreaking images—Joel driving home with David Cross and his wife from the beach party). I spent the entire movie hoping for a sequence like that, or at least a continuation of the promise made by some of those early creative sequences, and nothing like anything happened. (500) was a dirge. I spent the last 40 minutes just hoping it would end. Don’t think I didn’t try to like it; I actually bought it on a semi-impulse, just assuming from the film’s pedigree that I would love it. Instead I got Eternal Sunshine-light, Michel Gondry on a bad day.
This is all to say that I enjoyed Summer's Moon more than (500) Days of Summer. I know that's like comparing Zooey Deschanel's apples to Ashley Greene's melons (yes, I just wrote that), but I think when you are reviewing films you need some kind of metric. So when for future reviews in the The Biterion Collection I will rate entries according to whether or not they are better than (500) Days of Summer. This one is. Does that mean you should see it? No, probably not.
1 comment:
I watched this last week and thought it was alright. There was a definite incestuous vibe within the first 5 minutes. I didn't think Tom was very intimidating until he started killing people then it just seemed really out of place. Even though I knew he was her brother all along, I kind of wanted Summer to end up with Tom only because I wanted her to save him from that family. He seemed like he could have been a decent guy if his parents weren't around.
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