Hard Candy
Okay, here goes.
“You use the same phrases about Goldfrapp as they do on Amazon.com … busted! By the way, I. Hate. Goldfrapp.”
Ugh. This review became a mess and I apologise in advance ‘cos it’s reached that point now where I just have to tidy it up, publish, and move on, lol. There’s too much to say on this one, and I knew there would be, hence how long it’s taken me to get around to seeing it. Alas, I just don’t think I have enough wits about me to compose the quality of review I want to deliver here, nor the nerve to say a lot of the things I think I want to say. I’ll save my notes and maybe they’ll come in handy in the future.
What it all comes down to is, this is a great film, a challenging film, a lot better than I expected and probably secretly wanted it to be … I think I kind of wanted it to piss me off for some reason, such is the subject it tackles and the way it appears to go about it. I want to look at it and say, “oh, great – yet another tale that perpetuates the idea that all men are molesting monsters, that the internet is the tool of the devil, and that all young girls, even precociously headstrong teens, are more fragile than dodo eggs.”
But while, sure, it managed to annoy me just as much as I expected at the start, pandering as it certainly seems to to Daily Mail / Dateline NBC types, eventually I managed to open my eyes wide enough to realise that, albeit subtly, the movie was also dealing in the other extreme too; while it barely even considers the smarter, greyer, actually more likely scenarios that lie in the middle of the vast topic it touches on, in the end I had to admire the fact that in the end, neither of the main characters was much of the devil or angel the movie at turns paints them as. Ellen Page’s Haley is as psychotic and knee-jerky (there’s a great moment when she’s searching for the guy’s porn and you truly see the fear on her face that she might not find any) as she is morally justified, just as Patrick Wilson’s Jeff is far from the unfortunate victim of circumstance most people with half a brain will start the movie kind of wanting him to be.
Somehow, towards the end, it just clicked with me and I just began to seriously dig the extremes of the whole matter. Whether I like it or not, it got to me, and got me in more of a muddle over the reviewing process (as is probably horrifically evident) than expected (and frankly, I expected to be stumped). I’m not dumb enough to ignore a movie that affects me that much just ‘cos I didn’t want to like it and probably will take a while to watch again. Though I’d recommend Little Children, The Woodsman, Chris Morris’ “Brass Eye” special, a little reading about the badly fluffed UK police Operation Ore, more, I can’t deny, this is a pretty brassy, peculiarly cinematic considering the subject, piece of work that, no matter what end of the argument you reside on, needs as open an approach as you can muster.