Get Out

Vampire Owl: This reminds me of the first two words Dracula uncle told me. It is nice of them to make a movie titled the same.

Vampire Bat: You are talking about what happened when you applied for apprenticeship with the wrong biodata.

Vampire Owl: Yes, I wasn’t trained in vampiric language at that time, and messed it up.

Vampire Bat: You could have just used the universal blood language at that time. It was an official language too.

Vampire Owl: I was just glad that I could get these two words from him without thinking that much about the same.

Vampire Bat: It was all that you were looking for?

Vampire Owl: Well, we are all satisfied with what we have, aren’t we?

Vampire Bat: Yes, we are happy with what we are, and what all exist for us.

Vampire Owl: It is something that we need to to teach the humans.

Vampire Bat: Unfortunately, even after being just mortals, they learn nothing about what could face them in the afterlife. The Lego movie characters know better.

[Gets three cups of evening tea with a piece of mango cake].

What is the movie about? :: A photographer named Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) and his girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) have been in love for a few months, and they decide to visit her parents at a far away place, in the countryside, where they own a huge area of land of and property by the side of a lake. Chris is a little bit concerned about meeting her conservative parents because he is black, and her parents seem to be having a white legacy going with her grandfather having lost to Jesse Owens in front of Hitler during the Berlin Olympics of 1936. But the parents seem to be happy with their relationship, Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford) and Missy Armitage (Catherine Keener) welcomes him to their home as part of their family, even though his brother Jeremy Armitage (Caleb Landry Jones) does come up with some strange remarks which they don’t mind that much.

So, what happens next in the movie? :: The servants at the house who are black, act rather too strange towards him, with Walter (Marcus Henderson) and Georgina (Betty Gabrietl), both doing strange things and also talking as if there is some hostility in the air. Chris has a strange feeling about the happenings at the place, and has a walk at night, during which he is hypnotised by Missy who is a psychiatrist, after which he feels no desire to smoke. He also seems Walter and Georgina doing some strange things, and Jeremy even tries to put a headlock on him, making him really uncomfortable. There is an annual gathering supposed to happen at the place too, during which a lot of guests seem to have special interest in him, except for the only black man in the group, Logan King (LaKeith Stanfield) who also acts strange. He talks about the same to his best friend, Rod Williams (Lil Rel Howery) who asks him to get out of there.

And what is to follow with a twist of events? :: Chris also meets a man called Jim Hudson (Stephen Root), who is blind, but appreciates his work with photography, as he has his assistant who describes them to him. With all focus on him only, Chris asked about how it feels to be an African-American, but he passes the question to Logan who seems to have a certain problem answering the question, and when Christ tries to take his photo, gets angry, asking him to get out of there. Logan, bleeding from his nose, seems to feel better after a session with Missy, and Chris keeps narrating the happenings to Rod, who tells him that those people there might be brainwashing the black people with Missy’s hypnotizing ability, and keeping them as slaves, or even sex slaves, which at first seems funny, but Chris realizes that there is more to this strange behaviour of the people than what meets the eye.

The defence of Get Out :: The movie has its viewers feeling that there is something coming, right from the first sequence itself, and it keeps throwing something again and again on the way, to make sure that the audience is kept excited about what is to come. There is a big mystery ready to be revealed, and throughout the movie, there is the feeling of weirdness and danger which is nicely reflected through more than one character. The early feeling of waiting for the suspense to reveal itself has its replacement in the form of thrills and a certain amount of horror that get stronger by the end. We know that there is something eerie about it, but then we realize that there is even more to come as the movie progresses towards the end. There is tension that is shown between the characters here, and there is something like a rising intensity about it – we feel that this movie is getting better and better towards the end, as we know that something unexpected is to happen, and things are going to go bad for the protagonist, and then towards terrible.

The claws of flaw :: The humour doesn’t work much, and it also gets pretty much violent in the end, something which we weren’t expecting that much considering the first half. We do look at the huge amount of critical appreciation, and expect something even bigger, like a masterpiece, but we will only get this movie – on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie manages to have an approval rating of 99% based on 269 reviews; it is something that we don’t see that often, for things tend to come down a few days after a movie’s release. Metacritic has adjusted with an 84, but something like 99 is what keeps the expectations at a top level. People who have no understanding of the movie’s basic premise will find some trouble too. There is the certainty of some missing logic, with the way the movie becomes something not that natural by the end, which will raise some eyebrows here and there. If you are expecting the twist to be like The Skeleton Key, you are in for a surprise, with doctors and medical science being attached here, even without that much of a deep explanation.

How it finishes :: With Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams staying strong as the leading actors, we have a movie to look out for, right here. It is a flick which is not that well-known around here with a rather unknown cast for our audience, and not much of a title that grabs attention, but there will be a lot of fans for this one from here later, that is for sure. The opinions on this one are going to be divided here though, as the racial stuff is not going into the roots with our audience – maybe the caste would do if we make a similar movie here. The movie seems to reflect how things are, when we see another person as “the other“, as someone who really doesn’t belong to our group, and there are some people who pretend to accept them, even though they really don’t. People are such good actors in real life these days, aren’t they? We see so many of such people in this flick, and then there are others who just hate those who are different – the world still needs change for sure, and you see the need stored right within, with a smart horror thriller here. At the same time, lets hope that the viewers take something out of this movie and be better towards the others, the different, those who are not like everyone else.

PS: Check out the review of the latest release, Sunday Holiday.

Release date: 24th February 2017
Running time: 103 minutes
Directed by: Jordan Peele
Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Lil Rel Howery, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, Stephen Root, Catherine Keener, Betty Gabriel, Marcus Henderson, Erika Alexander, LaKeith Stanfield, Stephen Root, Geraldine Singer

@ Cemetery Watch
✠ The Vampire Bat.

Finding Dory

Vampire Owl: You remember what I had told you earlier, right?

Vampire Bat: You keep telling me so many things of no significance. Which of them are you mentioning here?

Vampire Owl: About finding Nemo the fish!

Vampire Bat: Yes, it was one of the best animated movies of that time.

Vampire Owl: Well, I am talking about us helping to find this Nemo boy.

Vampire Bat: You went to find a fictional fish out of an animated movie?

Vampire Owl: It was a competition in Finding Nemo Extended Vampire Edition.

Vampire Bat: And you found the fish in the end?

Vampire Owl: No, we found some Mackerel and Sardine instead. We had them for dinner.

Vampire Bat: So, the time was well spent. It is good to have happy endings.

[Gets three cups of masala tea with the Book of the Undead].

What is the movie about? :: We see the little fish, Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) with a short-term memory loss getting separated from her parents. She asks many other creatures of the sea about her parents, but due to her memory problems, she is not able to connect well enough to direct them to where she came from. This turns her into an orphan, and also recluse until she finds Marlin (Albert Brooks) and his son Nemo (Hayden Rolence) during an adventure to find the missing boy who was captured by scuba divers. After this long and successfuly journey, she has joined Marlin and Nemo, having forgotten about her past and the lost parents for some time. But at some point, she does have a certain flashback coming to her, and remembers something, which she decides to chase, in an attempt to get herself back to the family.

So, what happens next? :: In this journey, she doesn’t go alone. She is accompanied by her partners of the last adventure, Marlin and Nemo. But this journey not that much of a peaceful one, with them immediately being in danger. With Marlin blaming Dory, she swims to the surface, only to be caught by the staff members from the Marine Life Institute which is nearby. There, she is placed in the quarantine with a tag. There she meets an octopus named Hank (Ed O’Neill) who wish to go to an aquarium in Cleveland rather than live in the ocean, a life which he detests. Therefore, he decides to help Dory in exchange for the tag which would help him to live the life that he wished to. At the same time, Marlin and Nemo are planning to rescue Dory from outside, and for the same, they come up with a rather strange idea. With time running out, can Dory find her parents, and can Marlin and Nemo find Dory in the end?

The defence of Finding Dory :: There is nothing much being lost from the first movie in this second one. They have once again made a simple, touching movie with enough humour to keep you going. It is also an amazingly beautiful world under the sea, with so many creatures and plants; the life forms under water immediately catching our attention, and we want more and more. There is cuteness all around, and kids will love it more than anyone else, along with someone with a kid’s heart. With each character being remembered and loved for one thing or the other, the Finding Nemo effect is carried over to this movie – if you haven’t watched the first movie, there will be absolutely no repetitions, and there is the chance that you will love Finding Dory even more. Well, it has been so long, and there is more possibility of you having forgotten a lot of the first movie by now; still there is the certainty of the essence being always there in the mind – Finding Nemo was that good.

The claws of flaw :: One thing that this movie follows correctly without doing anything special is to do what Finding Nemo did, and up-to an extent, repeats the same, just like the title suggests. Maybe the fishes going missing and being found is quite natural in the sea community. This is surely a step down from Finding Nemo, because we were always expecting more, to have the sequel come up with new ideas and move forward, or maybe even make the franchise better with second one. Instead, this one chooses to have the blue fish being lost instead of the orange one, and therefore the short-term memory loss is with the lost fish rather than the saviours. This is certain to make one wonder if the next movie will be Finding Marlin – we see that there is a huge world under the sea with so many creatures around, and these immense possibilities need to be explored; otherwise the franchise can’t raise the bar.

Soul exploration :: Finding Dory is all about going on even with disabilities or whatever comes in between in your life. There is the need to find a way, and our protagonist here finds it despite always being on the back foot. Alone or with the help of her friends, she never backs down, and moves on to achieving her target – it is more of a risk in our world full of chaos compared to this little world of fish; but there is no success without trying. Finding Dory asks us to go on, forgetting our limitations, and achieve what seems impossible to many others in the society. With Dory being the protagonist, it is the kind of extra inspiration that we have here, and it is what makes this movie better. What we need is more of the motivation, and all the support that we can get, and not that which we keep asking for and not receiving. All these makes Finding Dory another inspirational movie with different characters in a different world.

How it finishes :: The level of Finding Nemo was so good that it surely deserved an even better sequel. But Finding Dory happens to be almost there, and will work for all kinds of audience with its simple tale and nice humour, as well as those lovely animations and a wonderful world. The level of animated movies have improved, and it no longer remains how it was when Finding Nemo released in 2003. If you consider the two movies which battled so hard for the Academy Award for the Best Animated Film, Moana and Zootopia, there is so little that differentiated the two, and we just can’t stop loving them both. Then you look at the years before, and see Inside Out, Big Hero 6 and Frozen, and you see the level – along with Kung Fu Panda and its sequels, this franchise also needs to make sure that there is no going the Ice Age way – there are five movies, and rather too many of them going a step down each time. Finding Nemo won the Oscar, and Finding Dory never came close.

Release date: 17th June 2016
Running time: 97 minutes
Directed by: Andrew Stanton
Starring: Ellen DeGeneres, Albert Brooks, Hayden Rolence, Ed O’Neill, Kaitlin Olson, Ty Burrell, Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy, Idris Elba, Dominic West, Bob Peterson, Kate McKinnon, Bill Hader, Sigourney Weaver, Alexander Gould, Torbin Xan Bullock, Andrew Stanton, Katherine Ringgold, Bennett Dammann, John Ratzenberger, Angus MacLane, Willem Dafoe, Brad Garrett, Allison Janney, Austin Pendleton, Stephen Root, Vicki Lewis, Jerome Ranft



@ Cemetery Watch
✠ The Vampire Bat.