Friday night - 2012. Start the night off squashing into a building packed with terribly cool and overly hormonal teens making that sucking, tongue clicking sound of disgust as the "SOLD OUT" stamp keeps going over the New Moon movie times - "Ugh, like, what do we do now?!?!?"... but I digress...... so in line, get the tickets - head to the theater and sure enough - this theater is packed too - I am assuming it is the parents of said teens, but this is just the story I make up in my brain for shits and giggles. So - find seats - sit down and realize, yes, I am going to have to spend the next three hours next to the woman who wore too much perfume for her first date with the guy who keeps getting up and down (sir, there are medicines that can help you with that going/growing problem) and above the guy who likes to talk through movies - I know this because he turned around and said - "Hey - do you like to talk in movies, cause I like to talk in movies!"...great....
Movie starts. Well - you can pretty much forget about any outside distractions in this movie. WOW. To say this movie is visually stunning is an understatement. And loud - but good loud - like you are so invested in the visual and sound that you have no choice but to pay attention to the screen. There is no mind wandering here. Now - the story can be terribly predictable and somewhat schmaltzy, but you expect that in a Hollywood epic like this. I forgave the schmaltz because of all those beautiful sequences that were brought to life on screen - I can only imagine how amazing this would have looked on an IMAX. I am not giving anything away here (see movie poster above) - there is one sequence where my prediction that California will eventually fall off into the ocean does just that. It starts with a man opening a car door and you see the asphalt crack and it leads you on this 15 minute journey as the movie slowly pulls back the audience perspective - crack leads to houses crumbling, leads to city blocks crashing, leads to neighborhoods sinking, leads to cities disappearing, leads to final shot of California slowly slipping under the foam of the Pacific Ocean. Like WOW - I am not sure I took a breath during that sequence - WOW. The movie ends with this happy resolution music and I turn to my husband and say - "what the hell is the happy music for?!?!? WE ARE ALL DEAD?!?! How is that happy resolution??!?" This minor meltdown leads to laughter three rows up and three rows down... I guess I like to talk in movies too.....Sunday night - Precious.
Precious - Precious - Precious - Precious.
No - I didn't see it four times - not sure I could. Just as the visually stunning moments of the impending doom in 2012 made me sick to my stomach, this movie made me sick to my stomach with disgust. Disgust at the reality that abuse - evil abuses - as shown in the movie Precious happen everyday in homes all around us. Children everywhere suffer in pain with no idea that a better world exists and that they are in fact precious. There are moments in this film that had me gasping, grabbing the armrests of my seat and trying to get up in shock of what I was witnessing. And I wish I could say that they had over dramatized some of these moments with "dramatic liberties" but that was not the case. There was a great amount of truth in the everyday casual manner that dialogue was delivered and the verbal blows that cut so deep. It hurt deep to hear another human being in the process of being verbally whipped into submission and oppression. It stung your eyes to see the emotional scares and baggage this young woman carried as a result of her hopeless situation. Tough to watch, but well worth the journey. Two movies - one weekend. One movie about changing the world one person at a time, one movie about changing the world by wiping it clean. I am not sure which of the two was the least overwhelming.
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