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Film Discussion => The Vault => Topic started by: Lottery on February 13, 2015, 10:31:23 PM

Title: Crimson Peak
Post by: Lottery on February 13, 2015, 10:31:23 PM
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Wiki: Set in Cumbria, in a crumbling mansion in a largely rural and mountainous region of northern England in the 19th century, young author Edith Cushing (Wasikowska) discovers that her charming new husband Sir Thomas Sharpe (Hiddleston) is not who he appears to be...
IMDB:In the aftermath of a family tragedy, an aspiring author is torn between love for her childhood friend and the temptation of a mysterious outsider. Trying to escape the ghosts of her past, she is swept away to a house that breathes, bleeds...and remembers.

Directed by Guillermo Del Toro
Written by Guillermo del Toro, Matthew Robbins and Lucinda Coxon
Starring Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain and Charlie Hunnam
Release Date - October 16, 2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3_gvBTjUhY

Title: Re: Crimson Peak
Post by: jenkins on October 16, 2015, 06:55:08 PM
i bounced from Goosebumps to Crimson Peak and it made me uncomfortable. because Goosebumps reminds the audience the horror genre is ridiculous and our attraction to the genre stems from our private emotions, then Crimson is R-rated and it's completely fucking serious.

this movie is good at violence and by the end of it i was a little mad at myself for how i chose to spend my time, but also this movie in every way is not my cup of tea
Title: Re: Crimson Peak
Post by: Jeremy Blackman on April 27, 2016, 11:22:34 AM
What a colossal failure of a movie. There is not one single surprise in the whole thing. The plot, characters, and even the visuals are unimaginative. It's shocking that the same person could have made Pan's Labyrinth. This is a pale shadow of an impression of a fading memory of that film.

The "ghosts" are presented in plain CGI. "Yep, that's an animated thing" was my reaction. The cliche horror music is laughable, because it has nothing to enhance. It's depressing to see how all the work that went into this film, all the effort spent trying really hard to make things creepy and scary, amounted to nothing in the end. This is a movie that reminds you how hard it is to make movies.

Jessica Chastain's performance is especially sad, because you can tell she thought she was in a much better film. Her intensity lands with a thud and isn't even campy enough to be enjoyable.

And yet, Jim Beaver somehow emerges unscathed...

BTW, the only effective moment is in the trailer (1:25).
Title: Re: Crimson Peak
Post by: modage on April 27, 2016, 09:36:16 PM
Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on April 27, 2016, 11:22:34 AM
There is not one single surprise in the whole thing
C'mon, even if you didn't like the movie there is no way you saw the sink coming over the razor blade! That scene is amazing.

Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on April 27, 2016, 11:22:34 AM
The "ghosts" are presented in plain CGI. "Yep, that's an animated thing" was my reaction.
They were augmented with CGI but the ghosts were actually a hybrid of practical fx/makeup/digital!

https://twitter.com/RealGDT/status/660144805175914496?ref_src=twsrc^tfw

Also: I loved this movie.
Title: Re: Crimson Peak
Post by: Jeremy Blackman on April 27, 2016, 10:14:23 PM
Quote from: modage on April 27, 2016, 09:36:16 PMC'mon, even if you didn't like the movie there is no way you saw the sink coming over the razor blade! That scene is amazing.

Fair enough; that was clever. But I didn't love the scene. Showing the violence so explicitly just made me think about behind the scenes stuff. Like how did they create a half-destroyed human head that was good enough to put on camera for so long?

It was gross instead of horrifying. When there's a scene of brutal violence on Game of Thrones, yes, we'll see a guy's head pop open, but that's not followed by a close-up lingering shot of the gore. And that's not followed by a body identification scene that shows us the same thing again.

Quote from: modage on April 27, 2016, 09:36:16 PMThey were augmented with CGI but the ghosts were actually a hybrid of practical fx/makeup/digital!

It's even stranger to me, then, that with all that work, they somehow ended up with inert cartoons.

I think I found the ghost from that Twitter link, at 1 hour 5 min. And you're right, you can tell this one has a strong practical foundation. But why does it have no effect on me? It's not threatening; it's just a curiosity.

That's about when I was really turning against the movie. I wanted to love it, I was trying, but eventually I was like... oh, okay, this is it?

Maybe I reacted so badly because there was so much buildup (takes them 40 minutes to arrive at the house), and the rest of the film feels like the air being slowly let out of a balloon.

Nothing surprising or horrifying happens at the house. The only threatening ghost (which is honestly very good) appears at 2 minutes 50 seconds. And from there, we slowly learn that the ghosts are red herrings, in that all they do is warn us about how scary the humans are. And yet, the movie goes on in direct conflict with itself, pumping in more and more dramatic music, as the ghosts become less threatening. I don't know how this could be more conceptually disastrous.
Title: Re: Crimson Peak
Post by: Alexandro on April 28, 2016, 08:42:12 AM
Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on April 27, 2016, 10:14:23 PM

...we slowly learn that the ghosts are red herrings, in that all they do is warn us about how scary the humans are. And yet, the movie goes on in direct conflict with itself, pumping in more and more dramatic music, as the ghosts become less threatening. I don't know how this could be more conceptually disastrous.

This notion of ghosts as warnings has become a kind of cliché. Del Toro has used it before, The Orphanage, The Ring (don't remember too much about it but that was it, right?)...I don't know, it seems like a solution I've seen plenty of times and one I was hoping this film would spare me. But no...

There's no denying the love and care that went into making this film, but it fails as drama too. Chastain is a goddess and she makes this fun to watch, but I had a feeling of "ok, this is it" during most of the film.
Title: Re: Crimson Peak
Post by: RegularKarate on May 03, 2016, 12:17:39 PM
It wasn't THAT bad.
I didn't LOVE it, but it was a beautiful movie and felt like the kind of classic ghost story I used to love.