Harsh Candy
March 24th 2010 19:53
Ellen Page and Patrick Wilson
To bite a "Hard Candy" (2005) is to neglect dental health and to "want" to chomp it is motive enough. Such need reminds me of children who'd ignore all the dental problems just for the taste. And the continuous manufacturing of teeth torture for capitalizing on temptations. Connection? Here we have a film that centers on a sexual-predatory of a metrosexual photographer and an innocent 14-year old as the damsel in distress. But she's not exactly our typical Little Red Riding Hood.
She sucks the perverted popsicle with clenched teeth throughout this movie, until her saliva makes him all the more frail and battered. Clearly, we're dealing with a little girl who passed the marshmallow test. She meets him on a chat-room and types, "NOT A BABY, I keep telling you." The guy answers, "I'll have to see for myself."
...Indeed.
The film stars Ellen Page (Hayley Stark) and Patrick Wilson (Jeff Kohlver). Hayley is the next door naive girl who loves Goldfrapp and the kind that feels drunk but resilient enough to keep pouring herself a punch. Jeff is nowhere near Dirty Old Man in Chatroulette fame. From the way he looks, he seems to have digested every metrosexual guidebook written by Michael Flocker. He dresses sleek, drives a terrific car, and his house screams bauhaus-minimalist. I have to say that the set of this film is eye candy. The modern interiors captivating. I'm like transported to Robin Williams' beautiful interiors in "One Hour Photo"--also a film about a twisted photographer. Now I'm curious.
Thank God I saw this one on Christmas Eve and not on a tourist bus. If I saw this halfway down a road trip to route 66, I'd easily conclude B-Movie. But not when you experience the joy of eavesdropping to this film's dialogue. It transcends throughout the movie like a whiplash conversation in a chat room, the part when the webcam's on and first impressions go down the drain. I love the way the dialogue maintains the aura of keeping-up with punch lines and wise words... Only this time, a scalpel waits.
I related to this because I have trolled and messed-up with some unsuspecting strangers in chat rooms during college daze. Though, the idea here is to bring such fanciful mediocrity into an extreme encounter. Manipulative? Naturally. Who isn't manipulative with strangers? If there's a weakness to this film, it's clearly the message--unless you're ultra-serious about finding context clues within the Juno-esque cross-examination.
In the book "Writing For Story", Jon Franklin writes: "Negative lessons are painful and inefficient and the intelligent reader has learned to put a rather small value in them." So if I sit back and ponder about Hard Candy's moral, I couldn't find any except that there's more than meets the eye. Nevertheless, don't take my word for it... See how this psychological BDSM affect you. As far as the suspense goes, it strangled me by the neck for many reasons. One of them is that it took me back to that afternoon when my bicycle squeezed my testicles.
Ouch!
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