Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
When you are not supposed to understand a movie
I finally decided to watch Hard Candy. The best review I could find still misses to see the elephant in the room.
If you think that the movie didn’t give us enough insight to understand Jeff, the supposed predator, then the simple answer is: You’re not supposed to understand Jeff, unless you are a pedophile. I didn’t understand Jeff either, but he did enough mistakes to reveal himself as dangerous and sick.
So whatever happens to Jeff is, in a way, justified. There’s even that revelation scene where he thanks Haylay, the supposed victim, for showing him what he truly is. Become what you are, as they say.
I imagine Hard Candy to be the ultimate shocker for pedophiles. It should be required viewing, as it would be interesting to see their reactions. I kind of expect that those who fully understand Jeff might reach the same conclusion as he did, or at least feel guilty enough to change. Perhaps that’s the only intention of the movie, as I seriously doubt it was meant to be entertaining. In that sense, Hard Candy is more than a mere exploitation movie and certainly not comparable to torture porn.
I definitely need to watch out for more Ellen Page movies. I did not like her in Juno (probably because I did not like the movie at all), but this time her performance was stunning. Might be that Patrick Wilson acted better (or simply had better scenes; anyone else thinks he and Tom Hardy could be brothers?), but I think it would be unfair to expect a then 17 years old to be an accomplished actress. Although there is the fear that she might already had her best moments. If I think of Inception, her performance was nothing special, sadly.
