Hard Candy
I can’t wait to see Ellen Page in Woody Allen’s film for next year. I think she has grown up considerably since her days of “Juno”, and even more so from “Hard Candy”. She was definitely no Natalie Portman who excelled in “Leon”, but maybe her director just wasn’t that great, it’s hard to say. In any case though, “Hard Candy” is actually a hard pill to swallow, and Ellen Page showed a lot of potential.
At first, I loved the film. I was highly interested in the director’s “music video” style with dynamic camera moves and close-ups of the characters’ faces, and the dialogue was pretty awesome. While Ellen Page was playing the nice, precocious girl who seems hungry for… adult stuff, I was impressed at how well both actors pulled off these roles and how nicely they played on the cliché of what kind of people go after young adolescents, and what kind of nymphets they pick. Then she turned out to be evil, which was pretty exciting. About an hour into the movie, it became suspenseful because it wasn’t clear who would be winning this game of power. And then, for some strange reason, the film deteriorated drastically. Both characters suddenly lost depth and just screamed in a somewhat monotonic voice, you never even got to know anything about the girl. Watching the slightly improbable, strangely written ending was just a pain for the sake of wanting to know what happens at the end.
At the end of the day, I thought the premise of the film was pretty awesome, and mostly at the beginning, it was interestingly scripted and well-directed, but later on, something about the film made me wish it was more. More consistent story, more developed characters… something.
My theory: After all that twisting and turning in the beginning everyone, including the movie, was tired and they just gave up trying to be interesting? :O
Hahahaha, but I actually thought this was a typical case of “tried too hard”. The killer loli was a little bit too evil XXXD And at some point, the movie just made no sense?
Nod nod! Nod!
I absolutely loved the beginning and was immensely disappointed by the ending too. Kammerspiele begin to suck, if the denouement doesn’t fill up to the expectations of the viewer.
Oh, and the sentence “I fucking hate Goldfrapp” fits perfectly to Ellen Page! XD
“I fucking hate Goldfrapp” was so, so awesome! This is perhaps the best example for why the beginning of the film was great, and then it lacked lines precisely like these. The strangest thing is – I don’t like Goldfrapp and when she suddenly said that she hated them too, I was extremely happy! Hahahaha.