Maybe Go See This: The Rite

Saturday night, Dave and I had plans to go see The King's Speech. I had originally wanted to go see The Rite, since in my mind any horror flick is preferable Saturday night entertainment than an art house movie that has major Oscar buzz around it and will probably play in our local theatres for a million years.

And since The Rite combines an exorcism theme with Anthony Hopkins (these are a few of my favourite things), I wanted to go.

As of Saturday, however, The Rite was rating a dismal 17% on Rotten Tomatoes (now down to 16%!), and Dave said he wasn't up for it. So, The King's Speech it was.

We live a whopping 5 minute drive from Hamilton's fine downtown core, where we like to go to catch movies. Being that close has a bad effect on me: I usually figure that so long as we're leaving the house around the time the movie's supposed to start, we can fly down the street and be there before the opening credits. So there we were, almost hitting downtown at 8:33pm, and I turned to Dave and said:

"Did you turn the stove off?"

It's been so brutally dry here, that we've been boiling giant pots of water during the day to make sure that the air in the house is hydrated. Otherwise, my eyeballs shrivel and our skin is dry and flaky and you can't touch the cat without setting off a massive static electric charge.

Dave wasn't sure if he'd turned the stove off or not, and the vision of a house fire in which everything we owned and our two beloved pets went down in flames filled my mind. So we turned the car around, came back to find that the stove was indeed turned off, and headed back downtown just in time to catch The Rite.



If you're reading this to decide whether or not to see this movie, I would suggest this litmus test: do you like horror movies, and are you fascinated by the idea of exorcism? Do you want to spend some time looking at a film with a slightly mellower, lower key, and therefore different take on devils, possession, and the role of the exorcist? Then yes, go see it.

If you don't much like the genre and you don't have tons of experience with the idea of exorcism and you thought The Exorcist was stupid, then, uh, you might want to see The King's Speech instead.

Details and spoilers below the fold.

Go See This: Inception

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

Basically, I don't have much to say about Inception that Roger Ebert didn't say already. I'll just add that it's been a crappy summer for movies, and people, if you want to have your brain massaged, stretched, and messed with in a most delightful way, this is your chance. It's really, really nice to know there are people making films who don't think we're all dumb.