Little Evil is a horror-comedy movie. Gary’s stepson Lucas had a supernatural power to make horrible thing happen. Gary was told his stepson was the antiChrist, and he tended to kill him in his sixth birthday at six o’clock in order to save the world. When Gary took Lucas out to the water park, and he decided to save Lucas rather than kill him. The truth was that Lucas was not Satan itself but the portal of evil. If Lucas dies, the world will end. Gary saved the child and the world with his love.
The beginning sequence of the movie was shot in a thunderstorm night. The director used backlight to introduce Lucas to the audience. Due to the backlight, Lucas’ face was shadowed, and the audience could not see clear. When Gary moved to live with Lucas, he saw Lucas was on the swing. In this scene, the director used backlight again, creating a great contrast between the sunshine and Lucas. By doing this, the movie conveyed a sense of horror to the audience.
The proximity to the camera in this movie were different. To show the characters’ facial expression, the director mainly used medium close-up shot. These facial expression was not very significant to the whole story. The director only used close-up shot in the water park to show their happiness on the face, and the angry on Lucas’ face when Gary was caught by police. These close-up shots were a symbol of their warmup relationship. The other proximity shots also used throughout the movie, but the medium shot was the most common one in this movie.
The director made effort to control the depth of the shot too. The shot was pretty deep when the scenes happened in outside. A deep-space provided the audience a broad background. When a bad guy was making a deal with Gary on the nunnery, which used to hold the cult rite of killing the evil kid, the shot focus changed from background to the foreground, focusing on Gary and the bag guy. At the same time, the bad guy was saying something about the end of the world, which raised the audience’s curiosity.
The camera angle in this movie was very important to depict Lucas’ character. Low angle was used in the Gary’s wedding. In the video, the tornado was hitting the wedding in a very high speed. With his head down, Lucas was shot in the background of the video from a low angle. The tornado was behind Locas, and everything was flying in the sky, however the child’s hair didn’t move at all. The low angle shot made Locas look extremely powerful and horrible. The director also used eye level angle to shot the children.
In all, this was a funny movie. One thing I want to talk more about the movie was why people always blame the adult rather the child. In this movie, Lucas killed his teacher indirectly, however, it was Gary who was asked to see a therapist. When Gary talked about Lucas’ behavior with his wife, his wife thought the child had nothing wrong and should not be blamed. Is that funny?
I really like the story line, that is so funny! But that is a pity people can only watch this movie on Netflix. This review is so professional and useful. You know what, I will pay more attention to the use of the camera when I watch this movie. Good job!
ReplyDeleteAt the beginning, you may want to warn your audience that spoilers are ahead (since you gave away almost the entire film in the first paragraph).
ReplyDeleteI don't think you necessarily need to give the full synopsis of the movie to say what you need to say about the cinematography since the observations you made don't necessarily reveal anything new about the ending.
While I think the observations you made about cinematography were good, because they referenced places all over the film, it was hard to follow. You don't exactly state a specific theme or main reason why you are making all of these observations either, which makes it hard for me to understand the importance or reason why you are writing this blog post.