Let The Right One In

"I'm twelve. But I've been twelve for a long time."

I heard about the Swedish vampire film right before it came out in the states. I didn't know that it was also a book, but more on that later. I remember desperately wanting to see it, but I just never got around to it. I even rented it on iTunes for a month without watching it. It wasn't until early July 2010 that my friend Kate recommended we watch it on Netflix Instant. My roommate Graham joined us. I was excited to see it, but I figured that, like most movies, there would be one or two things that I didn't like.

WRONG.

As the end credits rolled, I said words that I don't say often. I shouted, probably three or four times, "That movie was SO FUCKING GOOD." I was astonished. Kate had seen it before, but the entire time Graham and I kept reassuring each other that we were enjoying it so much. Every attack, every subtlety, every badass shot was met with explosive approval in the forms of screaming laughter. I haven't been so sure of a film's overall bodacity since Graham and I watched Un Prophete earlier this year (review to come SOON!). I honestly couldn't believe that a vampire movie could make my heart hurt so much with a romantic story that's perfectly coupled with brutal scenes that would horrify us if it were any other movie.

Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) is a skinny, pale weakling who gets bullied by your typical snide, evil twelve-year-old assholes. He dreams of revenge but can't muster the courage. One day, he gets a new neighbor, a girl, Eli (Lina Leandersson). She assures him they can't be friends, but they eventually get acquainted through the help of a Rubik's Cube (it's not extremely obvious, but the film takes place in the early 80's). Their bond becomes stronger, and as Eli's advice rubs off on Oskar ("Hit Back. Hard. Harder than you dare"), Eli's secret becomes more apparent. She needs blood to live, which is bad news for a few select citizens in the town. As the movie progresses, the stakes for both Eli and Oskar rise as their affections grow. I'm not a spoiler, so I won't say more than that.

I watched the movie for the second time only a few days after the first time. My friend Melissa (who is an incredibly smart movie watcher) expressed interest, so I sped home and streamed it for us in my den. It might seem too soon for a second opinion, but I think that speaks to the allure of the film. After the first viewing, Graham said, "I can't stop thinking about it. I'd watch it again right now."

Instead of trying to find something I didn't like about it, I just watched it again. And i loved it just a much as before. No twist, no shocking revelation. I thought that once again, twice in a row, I had seen a perfect movie. In my opinion, of course. I throw that word around sometimes, but there are few movies that I really think are all out perfect, and this is one of them.

One thing that you must know is that you need a good pair of speakers for this movie. For one, the score is incredible, taking a risk by composing it with so much, and at times maybe too much drama. It starts with a sprawling crescendo of strings that become very, very loud. But as Eli and Oskar get closer, so does the music. A small piano part rings through every touching moment. It works because, as few scores do today, the music feels like its being sung by the frame, by the situation. It reminded me of Up at first listen, a soft, subtle tune that has to mean someone's in love. Also, the sound scape is very detailed, very close to everyone's clothes and spit. Eli's vampyric eating noises are fascinatingly disgusting.

This film isn't a horror film, it's a romance. Plain and simple. You could call it a horror/romance, but that's really just an attempt to widen the audience. It has some scary parts, but the thing that makes this movie work is the adolescent love. This age, 12-15, has always been my favorite age when it comes to stories of love and growing up. Those years are so formidable, so painfully wonderful, human and vampire alike. Though Eli is an old soul, she is still "twelve, more or less." She's bound to be treated as such, and Oskar sees her only as the cool new girl next door. As they get closer we know he'll have to find out (that's no spoiler), but by that point we know he won't care one lick.

Leandersson, much like Ivana Baquero from Pan's Labyrinth, has such a classic, natural beauty about her. She has such an old face, something so unquestionably mature. Melissa gets a gold star for her comment after Eli's first words. She said, "Her voice is so old!", and that's no mistake. After shooting, the director chose to dub all of Eli's lines with an older actresses' voice. It sounds strange, but I dare you to find one line where it doesn't sound 100% natural. You would honestly never know if I didn't just tell you (or if you had never read Wikipedia). Meanwhile, Oskar's bad haircut and uberpale complexion complement Eli's withdrawn charm so well. It just baffles me that two eleven-year-old actors can have so much more chemistry and maturity than most adult leads.

A note about this chemistry. Their relationship is expressed through pure honest-to-god subtlety. They don't just tear off their clothes and go at it with wild pre-teen passion. No, they keep their distance, they get excited when they touch hands, they hug like they don't know how to, they make mistakes, they get mad, they don't say what they want until they need to say it. There's a scene where Eli is sitting cross-legged on the jungle gym as Oskar runs up to greet her with the solved Rubik's Cube that she flirtatiously left behind for him to find. Oskar is so excited to see her, but more importantly, we're excited to see them again. As she shows him how to solve it, she slouches down with concentration. Like every boy who has ever had a crush has done, he snatches a longing, exploratory gaze at her profile. He sees every hair on her head, follows every strand right back to her eyes, not listening to her explanation because he's just so captivated by her. That's real emotion, that's as real as it gets.

There is a vampire element to this story, trust me. There is a whole set of adults who each feel the effect of Eli's murderous hunger. She attacks ferociously and without pity. She eats and slurps like a lion on a gazelle. Local authorities get involved, and there is one especially cool scene where you get to see how Eli gets her blood without having to do the killing herself (she has an older man who helps her by selecting proper victims). These parts do carry their weight in the film, just as equally as Oskar's bully troubles. Every scene, no matter how slight, moves the action forward. We see Oskar lifting weights so he can get big to fight the bullies, but why do we really see him lifting weights? Answer at the end of the show.

I wish I could find something to criticize about this movie but I really can't. After two viewings in four days, I still want to watch it again. I want to live in their world, to have an awesome girlfriend who tells me to defeat my bullies while blood drips from her chin. I want to speak Swedish, a language that's right up there with Portuguese with it's hypnotizing rhythm. I want to watch it again and again.

There is, however, something I can criticize. Such a great movie that's loved by so many people, a movie that has a 97% on the tomatometer, is apparently not good enough for American audiences. The studios are once again out of ideas, so they decided to go ahead and remake it and title it Let Me In. The trailer feels like it's going to focus way more on the darker, action oriented side of it. The trailer has one of the worst lines ever that tries to pull you in: "She will keep you safe, she will keep you close, she will keep you forever." Pathetic. The film will most likely be scored with the typical growing percussion that lies under 95% of mediocre movies released today. And even though Chloe Moretz of Kick Ass and (500) Days of Summer fame is very cute and could easily be a vampire that 12-year-old's could fall in love with, it's just not the same. It isn't trying to be, but it's trying to be something worse, something less than, something to turn a buck for the Halloween audiences.

Will I see Let Me In? Short answer: no. Should you? I don't really think so. You should see Let The Right One In. Because it's a movie that was clearly made with a lot of love. It's a movie written by the author of the book, who instead of rewriting his complicated novel, chose a more concentrated, simple path that could translate extremely well to the screen. You should see it because that takes courage. Because it's in a foreign language. Because the casting is so spot on that the Americanized casting will be sure to just make the kids cute, not beautiful. Because this movie is truly original, and the remake will most assuredly be anything but.

Because I've never heard anyone say a negative thing about it, and I doubt you will either.



By Brad Moore

The Hurt Locker

I first heard of The Hurt Locker on the Jimmy Fallon Show, strangely enough. I am not a avid watcher of this program, but the allure of the Roots got me to watch one night, and his guest happened to be Anthony Mackie, who plays Sergeant JT Sanborn. Mackie was also sporting Philavania's famous "Ill" shirt, reppin' Philly and easing his way into my heart as a fellow lover of Philly (and The Roots, who he was enamored by).

I heard while watching the show that it had been getting terrific reviews and tons of praise. When I saw the poster at the movie theater, the biggest review shouted out to me: "A NEAR PERFECT MOVIE." Really, how could I turn it down, especially when I hadn't heard nearly anything about it. Obviously no one could predict it would win Best Picture later that year, so I thought it was just an independent movie that had gotten to the AMC chain somehow.

After the first viewing at the AMC Neshaminy 24 theater in Bensalem, I was pretty pleased. My heart was racing, and I felt like it might have been the most intense movie I had seen in a long time. My brother and his friend were less impressed, calling it "forgettable." The movie left its mark on me, but I did have one complaint from the get go: the ending (DON'T WORRY NO SPOILERS).

Without saying anything about the ending shot or its significance to the film, I will talk about the choice of music. If you want to know two ways to take me completely out of a movie, know these: 1. Have an awful last shot (like the freeze frame at the end of Slumdog Millionaire), and 2. Fill your movie with butt rock (which might happen to the American remake of Let The Right One In, but more on that later). The Hurt Locker was devoid of non-diegetic butt rock for the whole movie until the very last shot, where a song blasts that sounds like a combination of Three Doors Down's "Citizen Soldier" with some middle-eastern women singing incredibly loud over the rumbling butt riffs. One of the only fails in this movie is this song at the end. At least, that's what I thought the first time.

Fast forward to after its won the statue. This must have been March, the last time I had seen it was the summer before. I downloaded it from my PS3 so that me and my roommate, who had also seen it before, could enjoy it in a more private, pot filled setting.

Veterans have often cited the movie as being good for a movie about the Iraq war, but not so good at getting everything accurate. Mark Boal penned the script after following a bomb squad around Iraq for some time, later fictionalizing events that could happen in the lives of these soldiers. It's certainly not a bad thing to do this, people do it all the time with war movies. It can't always be a history lesson, and director Kathryne Bigelow doesn't want it to be one. It's supposed to be an account of the most personal moments these soldiers go through on the battlefield, but after a second viewing I found it difficult to detach myself from the occasionally implausible scenes this movie has to offer.

The biggest one being the car scene. Actually both car scenes. In one scene, Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner), the fiery doesn't-play-by-the-rules kind of soldier, removes his headset while trying to disarm a car bomb. In another, he has a showdown with a car that almost hits him on a deserted street where an IED could very well be hiding.

I've never been in the military, but I have read enough about the war and watched enough documentaries on Soldiers to know a few things. One thing is that in the car-bomb situation, the leader would NEVER EVER EVER remove their headset. Safety is always their first option, and that kind of pigheadedness is the kind of shit that can get you in a lot of trouble, people won't trust you, and they won't want to be under your command. Also, in a situation where the Americans have deserted a street because of the fear of an IED, and a car out of nowhere comes speeding towards you with intent to kill you as you walk the streets alone, well, that's just a one-way ticket to the morgue. I'm not saying that soldiers kill just anybody, absolutely not, but in this situation I find it very hard to believe that the soldier wouldn't fire a single shot at the oncoming vehicle, even after it stopped. If you get within a certain distance of some transport vehicles you can get shot at, and this situation is no different. It's war, this is no time to be a cooler version of Jack Bauer.

These scenes may not be realistic, but they do serve a purpose. You see, nothing much really happens in this movie. It's so suspenseful because you keep thinking, "This is the scene when they get blown up," or something along those lines. But for the most part they go day to day encountering situations that are dangerous but usually let them live to see another day (otherwise it'd be a short movie). These scenes need to be here to add tension, conflict, drama, and the first time I saw it I didn't notice it at all. I thought it was just mega-intense writing. But after a bit of an obsession in the fall with PBS war documentaries, they just seemed unrealistic. I wanted to enjoy them more, but I just couldn't shake it.

This is really the only thing I didn't like about it after my second viewing. The camera work is superb, taking so much advantage of the current obsession with uber-slow-motion shots (World Cup anyone???). The sound design works so well, and the editing makes your heart jump at the twitch of an eye. You never know what's going to come, as recent warfare often reminds us that death comes quickly and unexpectedly often with IEDs, roadside bombs, suicide bombs, etc...

One more thing resonated after the second viewing. One shot, this one shot that I loved so much the first time I saw it. No, it's not the big explosion in the beginning, or the one at the end, or anything in between. It's this shot:




It's a shot that captures so much in it's context within the narrative. A wall of food, a wall of food, and he has no idea what to get. It's the shot I was waiting for the whole movie. It sums up the entire veteran's conundrum. The return to normalcy after being somewhere that isn't normal at all to their standards. The feeling of emptiness even when you're surrounded by all of this surplus, and the bitterness that bites back. It might be the most accurate shot of the entire film.

All in all, the second viewing left me more disappointed than the first, but I still feel like it's a movie worth seeing at least once purely for the suspense. It'll be hard to one-up The Hurt Locker when it comes to suspense, but I eagerly await the next film that convinces me to stay in that theater so I can ride every scene out, only because I can't look away.

And hopefully in 25 years, Bigelow will sign off on a non-butt rock version of the film to be distributed internationally, freeing us from the shackles of mediocre rock music. A boy can dream, can't he?

By Brad Moore

What This Is All About (featuring Jack Nicholson)

Welcome to "On Second Thought", the movie review blog where anyone can review any movie! After the second time they watch it, of course.

Movies are awesome, an it's especially awesome when you see a movie you love (or totally hate) for the first time and it just blows your skull out of the water. Because let's face it, good and bad movies alike leave a lasting first impression. The first viewing can sometimes be the least biased you'll be towards the film. But what about the second time?

I've often found that the second viewing can sometimes be way more satisfying than the first. I'm surprised that more critics don't take the opportunity to provide second opinions of films, so this blog will hope to fill in that gap.

I'm trying to figure out how to get anyone to post whenever they want. Maybe they should just email me. So I guess if you want to get something posted, e-mail me at bradmoore1990@gmail.com

More to come as this thing gets rolllling.