I watched Heavenly Creatures with Chris last night. I was pleased to be able to watch it, as it is part of the film theory class that everyone else in FTV is taking but I am not. Now I will be able to join in conversations about it, if there are any.
The film was bizarre, I must say. The acting from the two girls was very over-the-top, and a bit jarring at first, however I eventually began to accept it and their oddities. It did make the first half of the film quite hard to watch though, as not a lot was happening to distract me from the weirdness. One thing I certainly did like though was the sense of drama created by the shot choices. Jackson never shied away from laying all of drama bare to the naked eye and heightening everything. I loved a lot of the edits as well, most particularly the transitions between scenes. The ending was also amazing in the way that everything was suddenly drawn out, compared to the rest of the film where just about everything was heavily compressed. The tension was electric, and I felt sick to my stomach in the lead-up to the murder, knowing perfectly well it was going to happen, and simultaneously begging the characters not to go through with it. Even after the first strike to the head I still had the slightest hope that they would pull back, which made the rest even more gruesome to me.
The film makes me desperate to make a feature. There are just so many more opportunities for building style, characters and tension in a feature than in a short. Features are so much more complex, and so much more magnificent as a result. I'd love to write one and get to work straight away, yet where does one find ideas?!
The film was bizarre, I must say. The acting from the two girls was very over-the-top, and a bit jarring at first, however I eventually began to accept it and their oddities. It did make the first half of the film quite hard to watch though, as not a lot was happening to distract me from the weirdness. One thing I certainly did like though was the sense of drama created by the shot choices. Jackson never shied away from laying all of drama bare to the naked eye and heightening everything. I loved a lot of the edits as well, most particularly the transitions between scenes. The ending was also amazing in the way that everything was suddenly drawn out, compared to the rest of the film where just about everything was heavily compressed. The tension was electric, and I felt sick to my stomach in the lead-up to the murder, knowing perfectly well it was going to happen, and simultaneously begging the characters not to go through with it. Even after the first strike to the head I still had the slightest hope that they would pull back, which made the rest even more gruesome to me.
The film makes me desperate to make a feature. There are just so many more opportunities for building style, characters and tension in a feature than in a short. Features are so much more complex, and so much more magnificent as a result. I'd love to write one and get to work straight away, yet where does one find ideas?!
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