The Lorax (2012)
I was dubious about the movie adaptation of this iconic Dr. Seuss book, but decided to check it out anyway against my better judgement. And it was truly awful. Terrible writing (especially the musical numbers) and just lazy filler. The fact of the matter is, this is a children's book that doesn't really need to fill up a whole 90 minutes. And if you DO want to make it last 90 minutes, the filler should be interesting, fun, well-written and beautiful. In fact, the writing was so bad here that I was almost offended; how dumb do they expect the intended audience is? I don't care if it's targeted to children. Don't talk down to them, especially when you're trying to deliver a fairly serious message about environmentalism.
Ugh. Just terrible.
1.75/5.
...
Lovely Molly (2011)
After watching this movie I went online to read a few reviews and it turns out that I'm in the minority here; I actually like it quite a bit. I found it creepy, well-done, and genuinely disturbing.
A lot of the complaints was that it wasn't "original," but as I've said in the past, I don't have an issue with a derivative movie as long as it's well-done. And I thought that
Lovely Molly was very well-done. Gretchen Lodge as the titular Molly was completely believable and sympathetic as well as honestly just horrifying as she descends into madness. There are also some odd non-sequitors but they didn't seem to bother me as much as the critics. Also, people seemed to be bothered by some of the purposeful ambiguities, but I'd prefer to draw my own conclusion over a neatly-wrapped resolution. I liked the climactic ending, and thought the epilogue was genuinely creepy.
The few critiques I have is that sometimes the sound was a bit distracting, both music and the high-pitched type of beep you hear when your ears are adjusting. It was also a bit distracting to go from handheld POV shaky cam to third-person POV shaky cam. I have to say, though, that this movie was a head and shoulder above Sánchez's previous solo effort
Seventh Moon (which didn't really have relateable characters and even though the camera was third-person it was too damn shaky to see anything at all, seeming more like a cheap trick than actually building tension).
I can understand why people were bothered by it I suppose, but all in all if modern horror evolved and this wound up being the "worst" end of the modern horror spectrum, I'd be a very happy horror viewer.
3.75/5.