Peripheral

I don't think I would call this horror, although there is some horrible stuff here, it is more along the lines of a dark sci-fi, quasi dystopian thriller. It is a seriously flawed modern sideways take on "Videodrome", and reminds me a bit of the absurdly stupid "Await Further Instructions", it is better than that hackneyed piece of junk, though there are several similarities with that film. It certainly shares a lot of the flaws of "Videodrome", and unfortunately it has even more flaws. While the acting is very good in "Peripheral", the story is threadbare, and that is fine except we learn very little about this book that sparked youth riots, and I really feel that was an important thing to explore more. Take out the 5 minutes of useless sex scenes and go a bit into the history of that book, the most we get is that it was drug fueled and that she wrote it on an old typewriter, this just isn't enough to explain the fanatical response of one of her fans(whose response the Bobbi's book is pretty over the top). I really feel we needed to know what in her book made her feel this way? Even in "Videodrome", it's clear inspiration, we see what is causing the protagonist and his girlfriend to spiral into madness and more.

This is not a spoiler. Bobbi seems to be the by-product of a bad book deal, I think this is inferred in the subtext, she was a junky as well, so she very well may have squandered her money on drugs, I don't how see some people didn't get this from the film? Again, there were things here that do not merit more explanation. How many people have been the victims of bad contracts or wasted their earnings on partying and drugs? A LOT. This is absolutely inferred without a shadow of doubt throughout the dialog in the film, it just isn't explicitly said.

"Peripheral" has a very dark vision of the media and how it manipulates both the creators and the consumers. There is a lot of unexplained stuff here, though I don't actually think explaining a lot of those things would have benefit the film other than what was prior mentioned. What also would have benefit the film was cutting down the overly long sex scenes, seriously, there are two and they drag on into infinitum. There was genuinely no need for this, they went on for several minutes both and I found myself skipping them because they really had no need to be this long(I always skip sex scenes anyway if they are more than a few seconds and explicit at all). One of these is what is essentially a quasi technological date rape scene. I get the metaphor here, and that is fine, but it just dragged on and on, I kept skipping 10 seconds to see when it would end, and it seemed endless.

In the end, I thought it was an interesting movie though highly flawed movie. It is a bit obtuse, it doesn't explain much explicitly, by the end you really don't understand most of what is real and what wasn't, there are a ton of metaphors here, maybe too many. Though I suppose that was the point, and given the metaphors and surrealistic aspects, it would have been beneficial if the surreal aspects were pushed more to the forefront, and again, if we had more of an explanation of why her initial book was so influential. It is pretty explicitly stated why they want her to write more books by the end, and this again is an obvious commentary on how media manipulates and hurts people, and it shows this in quite explicit, yet metaphorical terms. This movie is actually better thought out than people are giving it credit for, but if you don't like strange movies and thinking a little and piecing things together, you will hate it.

This is yet another movie that really isn't as good as the writer intended and nowhere near as good as it could have been. So many writers these days have really, really good concepts and ideas to get across, but they get so caught up in being unique or Avant-garde that they end up making their work completely incomprehensible.

This movie had a great idea to convey how the lines between human creators and technology are being so blurred these days and how the corporate control of creative endeavors is destroying the creativity that should be inherent to the process. The beginning and ending of the movie did a good job of forwarding those ideas in an effective yet unique way. The problem was the entire middle half of the movie which made little to no sense even with drugs factored in!

Ever since the 1960s, there has been a growing number of writers, especially young writers, who have gotten the idea that leaving the audience with more questions about the movie when it is over than they had when it started is somehow a good thing. This. Is. A. Lie. You can have an excellent movie that leaves you with many questions, but if you are walking out of the theater or turning off the TV and are still wondering what in the hell the movie was about, the writer has done a BAD JOB OF WRITING! I know there are people who will be very opposed to my opinion, but the thing is, it is not just my opinion, it is the opinion of almost every person on this planet who is not trying to be a pretentious jerk by saying that people who don't "get it" are just not intelligent, deep, or special to understand.

Writers need to learn to write WHOLE stories, stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end so that when the audience has finished the story, they can actually tell what it was about. Can writing schools please start teaching that again? Because I am really tired of watching movies with really great ideas that completely fail to come together because the writer never got past the idea stage, but still somehow made it into a movie.

I was quite intrigued by this bizarre and rather abstract piece of cinema. I enjoyed how it was written. I would have preferred more of a cyberpunk city setting to really sell it but I had fun watching it in a rather 'cant look away' curiosity. Reminded me a bit of 'Hardware' meets David Cronenberg meets David Lynch. Would I rewatch it? Probably not. But for a free one time watch as a cyberpunk fan it tickles a curiosity and has its merits, albeit nonsensical, absurdist, abstract or hallucinatory at times on purpose. Definitely better than your average cheaply written schlock. Would at least recommend!

Young London based writer Bobbi Johnson (Hannah Arterton) is so skint that she can't pay her bills. She likes to write old school by using a typewriter but her publisher convinces her to use a state of the art computer that features artificial intelligence, and so her nightmare begins. Quite an interesting story, very strange at times but thankfully I was able to stick with it and make sense of the ending. Very much in the vein of David Cronenberg and his movie Videodrome, with a splash of David Lynch. In one scene she is raped (?) by the computer, reminded me of Evil Dead but with wires and leads instead of tree branches and vines. The small cast all do a good time, nice to see Jenny Seagrove. Not a movie that I'd watch again but it isn't bad.

Really weird in a David Cronenberg meets Bernard Rose kind of way, this low budget Brit movie has its merits and is worth watching if only for its 'what the hell was that all about?' feeling you get at the end. Good cameo from Tom Conti who probably came in from a long lunch to do the scene.