There are SPOILERS for both movies reviewed here.
Heavenly Creatures – If I hadn’t known this was based on true events, I would probably have thought it to be some kind of conservative panic. I mean, two teenage girls who prefer imagination to reality and might possibly be gay turn out to be murderers? But it did happen, the murder of Honora Rieper by her daughter Pauline Parker and her best friend Juliet Hulme in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1954. The details seem to be quite close to what’s shown in the movie, too; Peter Jackson made more obvious changes to Lord of the Rings. This seems to be a mostly sympathetic portrayal of the two girls, while still acknowledging their mental illness. It’s a recurring theme that nobody really knows how to treat either their physical or mental ailments, and while we’ve gotten better about the former, I’m not entirely sure about the latter. At least we don’t officially consider homosexuality a mental illness anymore. Kate Winslet plays Juliet, which I believe is her first film role, and is in the same position of a rich girl messing around with a poor person that she’d have a few years later in Titanic. The general idea behind the murder, that Pauline thought killing her mother was the only way she’d get to travel with Juliet, even though there were multiple other reasons that wouldn’t have worked even if they hadn’t been caught, seems to be an example of a weird phenomenon I’ve come across a few times. I’m not that knowledgeable about it, but I think it might have to do with Schizo-Affective Disorder, the idea that doing one thing will make another unrelated thing come true. Her mom wasn’t even portrayed as particularly unreasonable. The scenes that took place in the fantasy world had kind of a creepy quality about them, because the people they were writing about and role-playing were shown as human-sized versions of the clay figures they had made.
The real-life Juliet, whose name was changed to Anne Perry, went on to write, strangely enough, murder mysteries. She died this year, while Pauline is still alive but apparently laying low. The Simpsons episode “Lisa the Drama Queen” was largely based on this movie, although there wasn’t any murder. Lisa’s one-time friend is even named Juliet.
I also found it an amusing coincidence that, not long after watching this, I saw a mention online of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comics, when the Fourth World is what Juliet called her version of Heaven.
Brawl in Cell Block 99 – Vince Vaughn plays former boxer Bradley Thomas, who begins the movie getting fired from his job, then learning that his wife is having an affair, and responding by ripping apart her car with his bare hands. Then, when he calms down, they decide to have another baby. I’m not sure of the rationale here, but that kind of sets the tone for the rest of the movie, where the gritty, brutally violent aesthetic definitely takes precedence over a plot that makes sense. Bradley goes on to work as a drug runner, and is busted by the cops when working on a job with some members of a Mexican gang, whom he turns against when things go south. He’s sentenced to seven years in a medium security prison, and while he’s there the gang kidnaps his wife, and tells him that they’ll maim his unborn child unless he kills a guy in the worst cell block of the maximum security facility. So he gets into fights with guards and other inmates, and is promptly sent first to the other prison, then to that particular cell block. Apparently there was no question of sending him to a different prison entirely, or punishing him in some other way. And when he gets to the titular Cell Block 99, he finds out that the guy he’s supposed to kill presumably doesn’t exist (although this bit of information is relayed quickly by a possibly unreliable narrator), and he’s just there because the crooked, sadistic warden, played by Don Johnson, lets members of the gang inside to torture him. It seems really convoluted, but I guess it doesn’t matter too much. Bradley is an extremely effective and remorseless fighter, at one point beheading a guy by stepping on his neck. He’s a mostly sympathetic character, doing most of what he does to protect his wife and child, but at the same time prone to unnecessarily excessive violence. And while I haven’t been to a maximum security prison, I at least hope the broken glass all over the floor and warden who repeatedly electrically shocks a prisoner for fun are exaggerated for effect.
VoVatia 