Return to Silent Hill made me really mad

hey how's it goin

Spoilers for Return to Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2

I wouldn't exactly call myself a Silent Hill 2 fan. I've never played the game, and I don't think I've even watched a full playthrough on YouTube. But I know enough about it, and know enough people who love it, to know that Return to Silent Hill is dogshit. Hell, I don't need to know anything about Silent Hill 2 to know it's just a bad movie.

I know that having Mary be tied to the cult in Silent Hill is an extremely bad choice. Part of what makes Silent Hill 2 interesting is how disconnected it is from the story of the first game. James is just a Guy, and Mary is just a Lady who was His Wife. The fact that the actress who plays Mary and Maria also played Angela was an extremely bad sign. Again, I have not played the game, but I know Angela's story, and that it means a lot to a lot of people. Also, one of the few things I do love from Silent Hill 2 is the shitty little girl named Laura who calls James a fartface, and watching the movie I was getting really annoyed that she had been turned into a generic creepy little girl in a creepy old dress with a creepy gross doll.

they made her boringgggg

And then, of course, there comes the big reveal that most people, including myself, hated, which is that Angela and Laura are both "aspects" or "versions" of Mary. This is revealed in an extremely funny flashback where James goes to Mary's grave and the headstone says "Mary Angela Laura Crane." Laura is a representation of Mary's childhood, while Angela represents the implied sexual abuse Mary has gone through. Which means that for Angela, it's not that James can't save her because he's not supposed to, because it's not his place. He can't save her cause she's not a person. I think that sucks!!!

Not only that, but this reveal makes Maria's whole existence make no sense. The whole point of Maria is that she looks like Mary, that she's a sexy hotted version of Mary who was, well, born from a wish. Maria is an interesting character because she's not real, and she kinda knows it. She's Mary and she's not Mary and that's her character. What's the point of making Angela and Laura also Mary? It doesn't add anything, and just makes Maria feel pointless. If they were gonna go this route, they might have well combined Maria and Angela as characters, since they're both Mary anyways.

There's a ton of things wrong with this movie. I haven't even gotten into how it justifies James killing Mary in a way completely antithetical to the game that makes me wonder if Christophe Gans even played it. He did, he loves the games! So how did this happen Christophe?!?! All this movie has is some occasional fun imagery, and also I liked the guy playing Eddie because he was the only one who got kinda goofy with it. Giving the Mannequin a giant ass was really funny. Bad movie!

thoughts about If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

*dr. coomer voice* hole.

I watched If I Had Legs I'd Kick You last night and I liked it! I think it executes what it was trying to do almost perfectly. Rose Byrne should get that Oscar. It was beautifully made and horrible to watch and that's why it's good. I think my main problem with it is that the daughter sucked too much.

Hear me out. That little girl was not the problem. The problem was the lack of support Linda had from everyone around her, the pressures put on mothers, the spiral of guilt and shame, etc. There's a very powerful scene where Linda confesses she had gotten pregnant early in her and her husband's relationship and gotten an abortion. Now, with all the stress caused by her daughter's medical issues, she wonders if she "got rid of the wrong one." Obviously, that's an upsetting thing to think and as the audience we are supposed to think that's shocking and sad. Problem is, I think it was too easy for people to come away from this movie thinking "Y'know, maybe she was right." Because oh my god, this movie took every opportunity it could to remind you that this little girl was annoying and frustrating. Stuff like the plot line with her wanting a hamster and immediately changing her mind when she realized the hamster was biting her and wasn't going to love her right away. Metaphor's clear, right? The daughter is the rodent for Linda. It's not that Linda has realized she doesn't want a child. She said it herself. Linda doesn't wonder if she should've gotten a second abortion. She wonders if the first child would've been easier to raise, easier to love. She thinks she wasn't meant to be a mother, but that's not because she doesn't love her daughter. It's because being a mother is hard, and having to do so much of it all on her own, with challenges an average mother doesn't even have to deal with.

I think my issue is that the movie didn't make it clear enough that she does, in fact, love her daughter. There were maybe two scenes, before the end of the movie, that showed camaraderie between the two of them. People came out of the movie thinking the daughter was hard to love because the daughter had bad vibes and was a little monster and not because Linda has people all around her telling her what she needs to do to love her daughter correctly but never how to do it, never giving her a hand. The doctor tells her, you need to get your daughter to a certain weight in a week, but not how. She doesn't give Linda advice on how to get her daughter to eat, how to explain to her daughter why this is important. Just do it. Just do better. Figure it out. That little girl was not the problem but I think the movie made it a bit too easy for people to leave the theater thinking she was. It's like they missed that last scene. where we finally see the daughter's face. That's the bit that finally made me cry. Rose Byrne and Delaney Quinn look at each other with such tenderness. Linda tells her daughter that she'll be better, but the heartbreaking thing is that after all this, she still doesn't know how. But maybe now, seeing her daughter's face, seeing a person, for the first time in the movie, she has realized she's not in it alone. In that last moment, the daughter is the only person who has helped her with anything. (Well, besides A$AP Rocky I guess.) Maybe, going forward, they can be a team.

I just don't like that, when the movie ends on the daughter's smiling face giving Linda actual, genuine hope for the first time, people still came out of the movie hating that girl. And I don't think the movie wants us to hate her, I think Mary Bronstein would read what I've said here and agree with me. It's kind of like Fight Club I guess. Is it the movie's fault that despite every point it's trying to make, people still think Tyler Durden is awesome and aspirational? Nah. But also maybe? It's complicated. I don't know. Too many people see children as whiny, squawking little objects. The movie knows that's not how it should be but a whole lot of people were not convinced. Frustrating.

 

Weapons buried its gays but that might be okay

This is a repost of something I original posted on Medium because I can't think of a blog today okay thanks.

me and who

BIG BIG SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE

Weapons is a good movie and I liked it a lot. It made me laugh, it made me tense, I thought the performances were great, I wish some of the night scenes were better lit even though they were very well directed otherwise. The main theme that stuck with me was how, in a society that claims to do everything it can to protect the children, many people have difficulty seeing those children as independent, smart human beings whose thoughts and feelings should be taken seriously. I spent 2024 working as an after-school teacher, so that’s something that’s been on my mind a lot, and I really love how Weapons tackled the subject. I also get why people didn’t like the movie. The structure of the movie can throw off the pacing for some, it’s tonally inconsistent, and let’s be frank, the scary old lady horror trope is annoying, and Zach Cregger’s used it in both his movies. And there’s one complaint I’ve seen a few times now that I want to dive into a little bit, which involves another trope, Bury Your Gays.

According to TV Tropes, “This trope is the presentation of deaths of LGBT characters where these characters are nominally able to be viewed as more expendable than their heterosexual counterparts. In this way, the death is treated as exceptional in its circumstances. In aggregate, queer characters are more likely to die than straight characters. Indeed, it may be because they seem to have less purpose compared to straight characters, or that the supposed natural conclusion of their story is an early death.” Now, I have complicated feelings about TV Tropes as a website, and sometimes I feel like it’s done more harm than good for media literacy online, but that’s a pretty succinct, straightforward definition. But here’s the thing. Part of the reason I’m still so bitter about Tara’s death in Buffy the Vampire slayer is because I think that whole storyline kinda sucked. Her death felt unnecessary because the build-up was poorly written.

For so many people, including myself, Willow and Tara were one of their first examples of a complicated, interesting, and loving queer couple in any media. If Willow had been straight, and her boyfriend had been killed, I’d still think that was a frustrating and annoying plot decision, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as upsetting as what we got.

In an interview with the LA Times about the ending of his show “She-Ra and the Princesses of Power,” Nate Stevenson said, “I can’t see another gay character die on TV for the moment. Maybe one day we can have a tragic gay romance again, but that has been, like, the only norm for so long. So for a little while, you do have to kind of accept more of a limited set of tools.” Now, it’s been five years since that interview. Has enough time passed? Maybe for some, but not for others. Which is why the fate of the gay couple in Weapons struck such a bad chord.

On one hand, there are some very positive aspects to the portrayal of Marcus and Terry’s relationship. They’re the only healthy couple in the film. Their home is bright and sunny, a relief from everyone else’s depressing lives. They spend their free time sharing seven hot dogs and watching gross nature documentaries. This is very good. Then Marcus gets possessed and brutally beats Terry to death. This is not good. In a way, it’s similar to my previous example about a hypothetical straight Willow. Weapons is a horror movie. It’s gonna get grim, and it would be extremely upsetting to see anyone forced to murder their partner. They’re gay, though. So it’s worse.

But why are they gay? Was it a thoughtless desire for representation that Zach Cregger didn’t consider the implications of? I don’t think it’s that simple. When Gladys showed up on Marcus’ doorstep, knowing Justine is suspicious of her, there was no logical reason for her to do what she did. It actually made her own situation worse. After months of going radio silent, she makes a perfectly normal guy kill his husband and go on a rampage through town in the exact same pose as the missing children. Gladys could’ve just had Justine killed in the car, but she’s spiteful, she’s dramatic, she’s camp like that. Also, she’s a bit homophobic.

Maybe not homophobic exactly, but I think Gladys has a particular bias against them. She could’ve chosen anyone in town as her energy source, but she specifically chose Alex’s parents, in order to gain full control of him, and then the rest of his class. She loves to take advantage of the heteronormative nuclear family. A couple that not only doesn’t have children, but is biologically incapable of producing them, is completely useless to her. This felt purposefully written, to me, and I liked it. It still sucked to see a man bash his husband’s head in.

There seems to be an almost even split between queer fans of Weapons who could and couldn’t get past this plot point. And I think that’s a really, really good thing. It means we’re getting closer to that future Nate Stevenson was talking about. We’re not there yet, but I hope one day, there‘ll be so much queer representation on our screens that gay people will die and it won’t mean anything at all. That’s awesome.