#ngl ill never get over how anyone on no mans land is white its a fuckin desert planet :sob: but well wolfwood is consistently drawn

[hafula]

people who make wolfwood white so incredibly perverse

#bumåbaba #ngl ill never get over how anyone on no mans land is white its a fuckin desert planet :sob: but well wolfwood is consistently drawn #with darker skin. stop whitewashing him or die #three guns #return of the three guns tag

[roughentumble]

so i finally got to finish white rabbit and it was Bad. its bad film scoob

to get more detailed, and possibly i just wasn’t paying close enough attention to this first point, but, it’s something so basic that it should be pretty clear to the audience unless you’re messing with it on purpose, the timeline is absolutely confusing as heck. how long did harlon and julie know each other? i have NO IDEA. i legit am convinced it was only 2 days. i just can’t.... possibly conceive of it being any other increment of time? but also that still doesn’t make sense to me because things escalate So Damn Quickly. his bully bullied him literally right before summer, then summer ends and he insists he’s Changed and that all that stuff In The Past is something he’s improved about himself now that he’s Matured?????? wHat???? also there’s something very abrupt about the film’s timeline. we see one or two scenes with harlon as a child, then only scenes of him in a very specific summer in a very specific year(i.e. the year that he either violently shoots up his school, or dreams about violently shooting up his school, more on that later tho) which isn’t INHERENTLY bad, but... you didn’t get this... the film is striving to explain how things build up and build up and build up inside a person, why things go so wrong, and why we have school shootings(or at least, ONE explanation why some kids engage in school shootings) but you don’t GET a sense of things being built up. the whole film felt like a bunch of choppy scenes spliced together

and it didn’t really...... harlon’s hallucinations felt like such a small PART of the film, they were SO scattered and didn’t really. i dunno. it just didnt all click together in any coherent or meaningful sense. the whole film is so odd, poorly handled, and disjointed that i’m having trouble writing coherent thoughts about it. 

julie was, altogether, a shallow character who was literally a manic pixie dream girl. she stumbled into his life twice, the first time changing him for the better(in some ways, he does stand up for himself for the first time after kisses him), the second time using her own personal growth that all took place OFF-SCREEN and with barely an explanation thrown out there, TO TRY AND FIX HARLON AGAIN like she’s JUST a catalyst for his own growth that’s all she is, and she’s a shoddy one at that. she doesn’t feel like she belongs in the film at all, she feels like she was in an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT film and somehow managed to step through a door and land in this town somehow. she’s weird, she’s poorly-written imho, she’s distracting, she takes up time that COULD be used to actually give... literally any character any personality at all, even a little

oh yeah, nobody has any... personality. they’re all like these cardboard cutouts, the stereotypical abusive redneck dad, the stereotypical shitty siblings(fun fact! i literally forgot he had siblings, throughout the entire film i just kept forgetting, and i only remember now because a different review mentioned them! fun), the tired and slightly overbearing but ultimately caring mother, the bully, the sniveling friend, the angry shouty parents of the sniveling friend who seem to have no source for their anger they just Are Mad Now, the girl who waltzes into Main Character’s life and shakes things up, the Crazy School Shooter who Hears Voices From His Violent Comic Books! everybody is like every other character ever, and even when shoddy writing starts putting them on a different path, they just head down... that same cliche path anyway, even though it makes no sense for them in context, like the world’s shittiest roller coaster

for example, the school shooting ending had NO buildup. it was last minute, went by real fast, had NO real stressor to speak of, it just... literally didnt make sense. harlon wasn’t an exceedingly angry child, he wasn’t overly-programmed for violence by the way his parents raised him... and yet, just like he’s been locked onto the rails, just cuz he Hears Voices so this Must Be A School Shooter Movie, he just stands there while the tracks take him from point a to point b

also, the entire film felt like nothing more than a grocery list, loosely detailing all of the every reason you ever ever ever hear that anyone ever does A Big Bad Thing, without any real deeper understanding of any of those things. like. it felt so... the entire film felt sterile. everybody was a standee on a track, rolling up to one another and saying in a SIRI-esque voice “HELLO. HERE IS REASON NUMBER 284 WHY I WILL BE SAD LATER. BEEP BOOP DEPLOYING SADNESS” before calmly being carried away by the motor. 

plus the ending is a total cop-out. the beginning of the film includes what is obviously harlon getting ready to shoot up the school, plus some voice-overs that don’t make sense yet, which is fine. sure. plenty of films make use of devices like that. then at the end, when he shoots up the school, it eventually ends on very similar footage from the beginning, with some teeny tiny details changed here and there, but... like, was he thinking about shooting up the school before going in to do it, or was he dreaming it, or did he shoot himself and now he’s in purgatory, forced to revisit his crimes at the hands of his evil bunny overlord...? it was ambiguous in the exact way a film like this should NEVER be ambiguous(or at least, not unless you’re way better than these people at writing >:// )

all of this being said, i do want to make a specific note that i liked the actors. i think they did a great job. i liked watching nick krause(harlon), i liked watching Sam Trammell(the father) struggle to bring nuance to such an awkwardly written role. honestly, sam’s character was easily the most robust one in the film, since he was abusive but he did love his kids and had moments with them where things WEREN’T bad, and moments that made it clear that he was trying, he just didn’t know any better and lived in this environment that stifled any and all change and personal growth, but at the same time he was never excused for his abusive behavior. sam trammell did literally awesome at is and he was quite possibly..... 1.5 whole dimensions. incredible

anyway, back on topic, i believed ryan lee as a bullied child-- did i like the writing for him, or how things were edited? no. but his acting, his tears, his emotions that he brought to the performance were MORE than satisfactory. 

the one i’m most hesitant to speak about is britt robertson(julie). like, on one hand, i just straight up... did not like julie. or rather, i would’ve been fine watching a film about julie, she seems nice and interesting(what lead her to her downward spiral of drugs and alcohol and attempted suicide? was she mentally ill, or were there outside stressors? what did she go through to heal the way she did over just one summer? what about that night was so bad for her that it caused her to go to rehab/a mental hospital? did she decide to on her own, or did her father make her?) but she’s barely touched in the film, barely given any space to feel anything, and so i find her presence, quite frankly, annoying. she should have been bigger or not there at all. but she was there, and she wasn’t bigger, and the writing really did not care about her feelings or motivations in the SLIGHTEST. and there’s only so much you can bring to that, acting-wise! the scene where she nearly dies in the field with harlon, when she’s talking about praying and how she never gets an answer, i BELIEVED the tears in her voice. she sounded visceral and honest. at the middle/end, when she came back and truly wanted to help harlon? the way she acted when the shooting was happening? i mean, i didn’t like the WRITING for her character, but i liked the emotions she managed to put into these scenes

and like. i know i’m skipping back here a bit, but nick krause did Good man. i thoroughly believed at least 97.25% of his emotions. i didn’t understand his motivations, and there were certainly flat and emotionless moments aplenty, but mostly they were born out of poor writing, and not actor shortcomings

the actors were not the problem. i would 100% see a movie just cuz nick krause was in it(if only to see if his acting only looked good in comparison to the script he was handed)

honestly i can’t really sum it up much better than these guys did, ngl

white rabbit was boring and shit and i hated it but im probs gonna give it a thumbs up cuz netflix was created by the devil himself and also i wanna see other films like it so. i suffer

#white rabbit tag #It Was So Bad Scoob