17 January 2012

16 Jan - "What's with all the bullets?"

Priest (2011)
dir. Scott Charles Stewart (Legion, 2009)

CAST
Paul Bettany (Iron Man 2 (voice), 2010)
Karl Urban (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, 2002)
Maggie Q (Live Free or Die Hard, 2007)
Lily Collins
Brad Dourif (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 2003) 
Cam Gigandet (Easy A, 2010)
Alan Dale (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, 2008)
Christopher Plummer (Must Love Dogs, 2005)
Stephen Moyer

I'm so behind on my posts, so I'm going to divide and conquer and try to publish 2 every day, the most recent movie I watched and the least recent, and so hopefully everything will converge upon The Return of the King (as one does) in a few days and then I can move on with my ho-hum life and this foolish attempt to record my emotional development through the mediator of cinema. If this were a movie, I would have just spoiled the symbolism by explaining it with a voiceover. Soorry!

So, yesterday Cora had a bunch of her german friends over for dinner and Cillian and I watched Priest. I was pleased when he suggested we watch a movie because I'm just terrible at navigating large groups of people. Especially when it feels like everyone else likes each other a little bit more than they like me (Some people are able to successfully avoid this kind of scenario their whole lives, or else I'm just overanalyzing everything). I said we should watch something I've already seen before, in case it's hard to pay attention, so I suggested The Fifth Element, but I guess Cillian doesn't like that movie because he put on Priest, which I think would have been hard to follow in a dark movie theater with an acceptable sound system. On Cora's laptop, it was near impossible. Luckily there was a really tidy recap at the climax, where the villian explains the whole sequence of events for the stupid audience members, like me, who haven't been able to put it all together on their own yet. I finally understand why action movies always have that, now.

I found the premise to be delightful. In a post-apocalyptic future organized underneath a totalitarian clergy, one member of the elite warrior-priest caste goes rogue to take on a vampire scourge that has kidnapped his estranged daughter. That's some L33T science-fiction, right there. In this sotry-world, the future is very wastelandy, which is not an unreasonable assumption, especially if someone Fs us all over and drops a nuke somewhere. Yes, the future is a dark and desolate place, but nevertheless our Hero must fight to protect it.

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