Double Feature! Prevenge and The House that Jack Built

Reviews by Paris

The opening scene of Prevenge has the proprietor of a pet shop invading the main character's personal space, whispering innuendo filled statements about the animals.  She struggles to maintain a uncomfortable smile though the conversation until he invites her in the back room to see his personal 'collection.'

Then there's the scene in the middle of The House that Jack Built, where the titular Jack is standing above a cowering woman yelling at her about the tragedy of being born male.  Men are after all blamed for all the troubles and are never viewed as victims.  Then he sexually mutilates her.

Are these two scene emblematic of the contrasting viewpoints of the same subject matter handled by the two movies?  Not really.  In fact these movies don't have a lot in common other than I just wanted them back to back.

I had thought about how one movie is about a woman struggling with grief and turning to violence and revenge, egged on by whispers from her unborn child, while the other is a man, reveling in his life of violence relating with with glee and comparing himself to the greatest artists of humanity.  The murdering mother-to-be in her story is performing a personal task, for her family.  While the man, a loner that rejects family in the harshest way possible, sees his life stretching beyond the physical existence, and feels he is deserving of heaven itself.  A scope of fiction glass ceiling if you will.  The woman relegated to home and the man out to conquer the stars.

But probably not.  More likely these are just two movies, with two very different stories to tell.

Or at least one has a story to tell.  The other is just a collection of conversational vignettes designed to sound intelligent and profound stringing together scenes of depicting seeminly moronic women that are essentially asking to be killed, by a character that has the same face in the scenes, but does not share mannerisms or a way of talking.  Is this even the same character?  And these conversations try to sound profound, but range from vacuous to utterly abhorrent.

One of the movies thinks that if it throws enough references to art and history like paint in an imitation of Pollock the viewer might mistake it and count it among the ranks of great art, but the paint on that canvas flakes away if you even glace at it hard enough.  The other is about the hardship of your life leaving your control because of the child growing inside of you, and how that is a terrifying thing every mother goes though.  Moments of chalk drawn animation and pretending your previous movies are part of a grand vector of art stretching back through various genocides is both disgusting and stupid.

I will let you decided which one is which.

 (I actually liked both quite a bit, but Jack is possibly the most abhorrent movie I have ever seen)