JMann
Joined Apr 1999
Welcome to the new profile
Our updates are still in development. While the previous version of the profile is no longer accessible, we're actively working on improvements, and some of the missing features will be returning soon! Stay tuned for their return. In the meantime, the Ratings Analysis is still available on our iOS and Android apps, found on the profile page. To view your Rating Distribution(s) by Year and Genre, please refer to our new Help guide.
Badges2
To learn how to earn badges, go to the badges help page.
Reviews14
JMann's rating
As far as where this one sits on the film map, it's somewhere between Belle de Jour and Tinto Brass's Caligula.
The most important credit Pasolini's setting of the Canterbury Tales deserves is for its dismissal of the usual on-screen morality. Such candor seems essential to the nature of such a narrative (being much more appreciated than the stifled decadence of Keir Dullea's Marquis de Sade or the early Warhol/Morrissey efforts). This is most effective because the film also depicts the baseness and depravity of the late Middle Ages. Everyone's fornicating or trying to fornicate everyone else, with lots of potty humor thrown in just to make sure that it wouldn't be taken too seriously as a foray into art-house pretensions.
On all other counts, it's overblown and a bit sluggish, with an especially disappointing outcome au montage son. And non-professional actors are much less effective in adding a dimension of realism than they are in inducing a sense of self-mockery. The imagery is shamelessly ribald although not extreme, and the storyline is far from seamless. Far from Pasolini's best, although perhaps a good preparation for the far more intense Salo.
The most important credit Pasolini's setting of the Canterbury Tales deserves is for its dismissal of the usual on-screen morality. Such candor seems essential to the nature of such a narrative (being much more appreciated than the stifled decadence of Keir Dullea's Marquis de Sade or the early Warhol/Morrissey efforts). This is most effective because the film also depicts the baseness and depravity of the late Middle Ages. Everyone's fornicating or trying to fornicate everyone else, with lots of potty humor thrown in just to make sure that it wouldn't be taken too seriously as a foray into art-house pretensions.
On all other counts, it's overblown and a bit sluggish, with an especially disappointing outcome au montage son. And non-professional actors are much less effective in adding a dimension of realism than they are in inducing a sense of self-mockery. The imagery is shamelessly ribald although not extreme, and the storyline is far from seamless. Far from Pasolini's best, although perhaps a good preparation for the far more intense Salo.
The effect was weak, at best. I saw it while the hype was still a buzz, during its first week of release at the arthouses and well before it shot into Multiplex City.
It's been compared to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which, in spite of the schlocky production, is genuinely a much scarier and more disturbing film. Where we had an overweight man wearing a grotesquely hewn leather mask, placing screaming girls on meathooks and sawing through brush after his last survivor, Horror Redefined now has us shaking in our boots from bundles of sticks and circles of stones. I suppose that means that in the new world of what is scary, a circle of visciously screaming bumpkins trying to force the corpse of their dead patriarch to drop a hammer on a bound and defenseless girl's head is no match for casual-drug teens spewing language that would make Lenny Bruce blush.
Unfortunately, the 'innovation' of horror and fright coming from the unseen had been developed long since-- and, as in Maupassant's stories of anguish (1887-90), expressed more eloquently.
The cinematography gives rise to either motion sickness or boredom, and the production is so vapid as to be beyond belief. It is certainly a promising student film effort, but hardly one that deserved such attention.
In sum, the most frightening thing about The Blair Witch Project is that a considerable portion of the film cognoscenti seemed utterly convinced that it was a groundbreaking cinematic achievement.
It's been compared to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which, in spite of the schlocky production, is genuinely a much scarier and more disturbing film. Where we had an overweight man wearing a grotesquely hewn leather mask, placing screaming girls on meathooks and sawing through brush after his last survivor, Horror Redefined now has us shaking in our boots from bundles of sticks and circles of stones. I suppose that means that in the new world of what is scary, a circle of visciously screaming bumpkins trying to force the corpse of their dead patriarch to drop a hammer on a bound and defenseless girl's head is no match for casual-drug teens spewing language that would make Lenny Bruce blush.
Unfortunately, the 'innovation' of horror and fright coming from the unseen had been developed long since-- and, as in Maupassant's stories of anguish (1887-90), expressed more eloquently.
The cinematography gives rise to either motion sickness or boredom, and the production is so vapid as to be beyond belief. It is certainly a promising student film effort, but hardly one that deserved such attention.
In sum, the most frightening thing about The Blair Witch Project is that a considerable portion of the film cognoscenti seemed utterly convinced that it was a groundbreaking cinematic achievement.