Dredd & House At the End Of the Street Pre-Reviews

The tagline reads, "It's not haunted. It's not cursed. It's worse."

Of all the films coming out this weekend, at least two of them are good: Dredd and House At the End Of the Street (I just haven't been able to see all them yet). Again, as usual, as you know, etc., however you want to phrase it, I'm not a good judge of entertainment value but that's not what you come here for; I can say with confidence that Dredd is anti-socialist and House At the End Of the Street, for those of us who can't stand President Obama, is exceedingly cathartic because it validates our pain and the way liberals make fun of us for not liking him!

This scene demonstrates some sophisticated writing and how the film makers know our emotions and thoughts have been manipulated by the media and our peers. Because of the way a viewer identifies with characters in the narrative, we, like Elyssa (Jennifer Lawrence), are drawn in because of our compassion and don't realize the truth until it's too late.

When I say, "cathartic," I don't mean film makers will take your hand and speak sweetly to you about everything he's done which has upset us so much, but I do mean, as in Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, that piecing together the events and characters, we can see a commentary or, as the film itself puts it, we can see "the secret, the face" that's hiding right in front of us.

When the trailer for Dredd was first released, I was confident it would be a pro-capitalist/anti-Obama administration film; then, just this morning, seeing how the vocabularies have shifted, and the means socialists have employed to create their arguments, I suddenly feared that MaMa (Lena Headey) would symbolize capitalists and the drug slo-mo would be an indictment about consumer appetites, while Dredd as "judge, jury and executioner," might be making a case for Obama to become a total dictator; I am happy to say that's not what happened, and MaMa is, instead, symbolic of how the government in a socialist society keeps people dependent upon it (rather how we saw the agents in The Bourne Legacy being kept on their meds, even after they had been viraled off some of them).

Lena Headey as MaMa in Dredd. Even though the film is only an hour and forty-five minutes, it's about thirty minutes too long: it's very similar in all aspects to The Raid: Redemption, which was excellent, yet Dredd lacks the intense physicality of the martial arts fights that gave The Raid so much bite, relying, instead, on gun power which gets old after awhile, but was still good, for example, it's impossible not to notice MaMa's scars, and her face should be juxtaposed for comparison against Dredd's face which is covered throughout the whole film.