Qt3 Movie Podcast: Jigsaw

You’ll never guess which one of us is the Saw expert.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2017/10/30/qt3-movie-podcast-jigsaw/

Super spoilery article here, but I found this summary pretty accurate.

The best way to know if you’re going to enjoy this film is to try to imagine that you’re watching a really bad, but really expressive magician perform a complicated trick. The magician is, again, bad. So he keeps threatening to lose you with every vain attempt he makes at revealing things, and/or diverting your attention. But he keeps pulling weird stuff out of thin air, like bloody saw blades, a plunger needle with hydroflauric acid, piano wire death traps with a simple lever mechanism, and some random workbench implements too.

Also, this magician’s not content with staying on stage. He’s in the aisles, and grabbing you by the lapels as he tells you stories that give significance to these improvised murder weapons, I mean magical props. The magician’s stories are strange, because they’re about tenuously related events, like his nephew’s motorcycle accident, a fatal purse-snatching, an infant’s death, and many other odd goings-on.

Finally, when he gets to the climax of his bit, the magician takes the stage again, and yells at the crowd for ten straight minutes. He’s trying desperately to explain how everything he just showed you is in fact related, even though he’s also inadvertently revealing that he was hiding some crucial details until this show-stopper finale. So he’s ranting, and screaming, and suddenly, bam: an explosion of activity that kind of makes sense, but not really. Are you not entertained?

“Phenomes?” Phonemes.

Aw come on. I do love the mental image of a government office where those little garden statues work collecting money from the taxpaying public.

-xtien

“Just because someone is dead doesn’t mean they don’t have a voice.”

After the disaster that was The Snowman, I couldn’t make time for Jigsaw. Glad to hear you saw Happy Death Day though, hope it gets the full podcast treatment.

Did you see it? I want to know if Jessica Rothe is good in Happy Death Day, or if it’s just that I’m crazy about her in La La Land.

-Tom

Oh, she was was amazing! Lots of cleaver stuff in the film. The montage/music sequence worked especially well for me. I went into it not knowing anything and expecting a typical slasher, what a great surprise.

I see what you did there.

-xtien