No one captures "frenzy" quite like Peter Jackson. With his intertwining use of shaky, still, loud, and suspiciously quiet moments, his filmmaking style can absolutely *define* the emotion of momentarily losing your mind.
With "Dead Alive", he gained much lauding by making a winking schlock movie, a film so revved up on its own excessive fantasmagoria that it eventually burped up an impressively maddened comedy. Jackson had used this kind of soak-'em-with-everything-you-got philosophy before with "Bad Taste" and "Meet The Feebles". Although, unlike "Alive", those two films do not carry the same sort of coherent slapstick that makes Jackson's horror hilarious.
Like all good directors, Jackson realized that, at some point, he had to shake off the fleeting applause and take things to the next plateau. And so he did. In "Heavenly Creatures", his fourth outing, Peter Jackson took the rambunctious glee of his past three films and combined it with a quiet tale of true crime. The amalglam of his jumpy sensibility and the subtle, dark personality of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme (played perfectly by Melanie Lynsky and Kate Winslet) makes for an extrordinarily colorful film. To see his imagination and the lengths he'll go to to re-create the situation of two obsessive teenagers in 1950s New Zealand mesh with the stale, flat reality of how sad these girls lives really were is a marriage made in heaven (or is it Borovnia?). The gray existence they (are forced to) lead is the true villain of them, and the director captures it (see: bathtub scenes) as cinematically as he does their fantasy world escape (the aforementioned Borovnia: expansive, three dimensional home of lifesize clay warriors, unicorns, and jumbo butterflies).
This movie does not act as an explanation nor an excuse, simply as an adaptation of an emotion. When it gets down to it, the true frenzy of "Heavenly Creatures" is the unmoving *love* that two people can have for each other, and the unnecessary graves they will dig to not let it go.
*****
With "Dead Alive", he gained much lauding by making a winking schlock movie, a film so revved up on its own excessive fantasmagoria that it eventually burped up an impressively maddened comedy. Jackson had used this kind of soak-'em-with-everything-you-got philosophy before with "Bad Taste" and "Meet The Feebles". Although, unlike "Alive", those two films do not carry the same sort of coherent slapstick that makes Jackson's horror hilarious.
Like all good directors, Jackson realized that, at some point, he had to shake off the fleeting applause and take things to the next plateau. And so he did. In "Heavenly Creatures", his fourth outing, Peter Jackson took the rambunctious glee of his past three films and combined it with a quiet tale of true crime. The amalglam of his jumpy sensibility and the subtle, dark personality of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme (played perfectly by Melanie Lynsky and Kate Winslet) makes for an extrordinarily colorful film. To see his imagination and the lengths he'll go to to re-create the situation of two obsessive teenagers in 1950s New Zealand mesh with the stale, flat reality of how sad these girls lives really were is a marriage made in heaven (or is it Borovnia?). The gray existence they (are forced to) lead is the true villain of them, and the director captures it (see: bathtub scenes) as cinematically as he does their fantasy world escape (the aforementioned Borovnia: expansive, three dimensional home of lifesize clay warriors, unicorns, and jumbo butterflies).
This movie does not act as an explanation nor an excuse, simply as an adaptation of an emotion. When it gets down to it, the true frenzy of "Heavenly Creatures" is the unmoving *love* that two people can have for each other, and the unnecessary graves they will dig to not let it go.
*****