31 days of nite

germs, guns and steel

2009-08-27T00:54:00.004-04:00

Why hasn't anyone tried to adapt science books for the screen? I don't mean science fiction. Like, why isn't there a film version of The God Delusion? Why hasn't anyone adapted Jared Diamond? I am pretty sure that a film version of The Dragons of Eden would be killer. I think the idea I am having now would incorporate other scientists talking about what they think about whatever scientist i choose to adapt. I am thinking in particular of the section in Michael Shermer's The Borderlands of Science where he examines the work of Carl Sagan mostly through the words and opinions of other scientists. Sagan is a hero to me, a consumer of popular science books, because he was one of the first to articulate science to a generally non-science audience. but how does the scientistic community view him? Some feel that he is a great populizer of science but a bad "hard" scientist. Others think of him as opportunistic and homophobic. I believe that I could turn that section into a film, perhaps something along the lines of F for Fake. maybe some of Shermer's arguments about the nature of human self-deception and how it is so easily exploited by charltans could tie into the themes of F for Fake, such as notions of authenticity and fakery. Wellse explored the material not in a documentary way, but also in a way that isn't quite fiction, either. It's some strange hybrid of the two. I think i could replicate some of the feelings and ideas that Wellse' film explores. Note to self: re-watch F for Fake. And read more of Peter Woit or find someone who can. His work is citical of string theory and Shermer has a section on that in The Borderlands of Science, too.

doubt as a tool for life

2009-08-09T22:41:00.002-04:00

I realized a long time ago that I will always feel this way. Deep, profound doubt is just as relevant as deep, profound belief. And, paradoxically, by not expecting to find truth, you find that you actually are existing in truth at this very second. The only truth is your personal, subjective experience.

THE LIMITATION OF LIBERTARIANISM

2009-07-22T20:37:00.000-04:00

(and, of course, its implications for my theory of practice)

I am down with libertarianism. I get it. People want to rule themselves and don't want a large, faceless governmental agency imposing its own moral framework on them. I voted for Badnarik in 2004, Barr in 2008. But why is it still focused on the idea that small communities are the best way to govern? What's wrong with taking it one or two more levels down, and stating that the individual should be totally autonomous? Why are we afraid of exercising utter control over our own lives? Why should I not be able to make my own, personal laws and monitor my own behavior?

This all, somehow, fits in with my ideal model for clinical psychiatric work. My therapy will begin with the liberation from god, the idea that some supernatural force is controlling your life. But it's going to go much smaller, and it will draw upon Thomas Szasz's idea that the happiest people are the ones who have assumed the most amount of control over their lives. I am interested in the impact of the individual on the social system, and the system's impact on the individual, and this is why I am studying social work and not psychology, but I am ultimately most interested in the equivalent of the cell in systems theory (that is, the individual, and what it means to be a totally unique person in the face of larger constructs). These ideas are not all that new, and probably the model I will end up treating people in will have parallels to existential therapy, but I still think by the time I get around to actually turning my ideas into a workable model for practice it will be something that is pretty original. Libertarianism and its focus on individual responsibility will be central to this; I will encourage people to do the opposite of most mental health treatment, which is to give up control.

At a very basic level, we are all making the choice, with every second of our existence, not to kill ourselves. Albert Camus claims this is the only true philosophical question. I hope to help more people realize this, and my aim is that the more people realize that they are choosing to assert their existence with every breath they take, the less sad those I am treating will feel, and that they will choose to see themselves as happy. Because happiness is a choice. It is not some abstract or concrete thing that you arrive at. You are happy right now, in so much as happiness exists; you just choose not to acknowledge this happiness.

The final goal of my therapy will be to encourage people to write their own set of laws, and then petition the larger government (whatever it looks like 30, 40 years from now) to become their own state. An island onto themselves. The best government is that which governs least; therefore, it makes sense to think that the best government is no government whatsoever.

And this is why I will only be able to really practice on a tiny self-sustaining farm in Vermont.

something i wrote for class

2009-07-21T22:07:00.002-04:00

(I had to do a journal entry type reaction type thing to reading the DSM-IV. I guess most of my classmates are only reading it for the first time? Anyway, I didn't bother reading it because I've had my copy for years now, but I did write a journal entry and wanted to post it somewhere so here it is.)

What bothers me about the DSM is that as I'm reading it, I realize more and more how it is so clearly not based on science. I think rather than empowering individuals with mental disorders, the medical model has taken power away from them and convinced them that strict medication regiments and adherence to psychiatrists is the only way to get better. The DSM has done wonders to get psychotherapy covered by health insurance plans, but it has also lead to an increasing focus on funding, monetary aspects of the therapeutic relationship, constant updates to insurance companies who should, truthfully, really have no knowledge of their consumer's diagnoses and problems. It seems to me this has cheapened or compromised the counselor/consumer relationship. I am not uncertain that a totally private agreement between counselor/consumer is not the ideal situation in which to carry out treatment. Treating therapy as something that someone invests money and time in, I think, may lead to the consumer feeling more fullfiled and more willing to put work in and effect change in his/her life, as it is not a privlege bestowed upon the patient by the faceless insurance company, but rather a professional relationship that the consumer buys into (literally and figuratively). I am interested in the DSM and its contents and I own a copy, but I let it sit on the shelf on my office like an untouched family Bible; mere decoration, a reminder of a world gone by which I never really bought into in the first place.

overheard from my office earlier today.

2009-07-16T20:01:00.000-04:00

"Hey, you wanna go get sushi?"
"Dude. I eat, like, cheese sticks."

feeling nostalgic.

2009-07-16T19:57:00.002-04:00

Do you remember going to see THE OMEN remake the night it came out, driving around the parking lot, hearing someone blasting Iron Maiden's "Number of the beast" and laughing, out loud and at length, because we both loved that song and it was June 6, 2006, and I was done undergrad and we still had plans to maybe take over the world together if we didn't end up resenting each other first. but that's all changed now and you've got a kid and I'm still in school and we talked on the phone the other day and you said you're still feeling anxious but the depression is getting worse, and all i can think is, I told you so. I told you to deal with these things and I tried to help you. but more than anything, you taught me that I can't help anyone and no one wants to be saved by anyone other than themselves. That's our legacy, just the lessons I learned and faded memories for an us that doesn't exist anymore, maybe never did in the first place.

real talk

2009-06-13T01:37:00.000-04:00

I miss my brother a lot. also i am drunk

your mouth my mouth our mouth

2009-06-12T00:42:00.003-04:00

Tonight I sat in a chair and listened listened listened while people talked talked talked for three hours and there was nothing else for it so i listened while they talked some more. I imagined their words streaming out of their mouths in a stream and the words converged, merged, fed like rivers into the ocean and i was struck dumbfounded. Therapy is not a science so that means its an art, but there is no way to portray it in a visual sense so it'll never hang in a gallery. Perhaps one day when I'm famous (joke) I'll get a group of patients together and have an installation at a museum where we'll hold therapy in a public place and not a white-walled office (our frame, or canvas, or whatever) and people can sip martinis and smoke cloves and pay us lots and lots of money, but for now, it's confined to clinics. I listened and listened and listened and wished with all my heart that i could somehow see the soundwaves coming from their mouths, or that humans could hear in color, or something, ANYTHING to let me know that what i am creating will last.

Now I'm in my room smoking in the dark and watching the smoke congregate in the corners of my high ceilings and the smoke is pouring out of my mouth and it's no different than their words except it hangs around a little while longer. does this make sense to anyone but me.

grossly underqualified

2009-06-09T21:50:00.003-04:00

One of the hardest aspects of counseling is that you can't just blurt out the first thing that comes to mind when a person tells you something. Last night in group, a consumer shared a traumatic experience from his/her childhood. I, being a clinician, asked the consumer if the consumer had ever been in intensive therapy, to properly process the emotions and issues attached to this trauma. Consumer states that consumer has been in therapy, once, and the therapist said, "Oh, you'll get over all this stuff in time" and just generally treated the situations (which is to say, the devastating events that effect the consumer's life in every way imaginable) as a stage, something that someone gets through. Well, yes, OK, that's true; most of the trauma from a person's life can be dealt with. But it can take years for a person to get there, and that one time in a therapist's office was enough for this particular consumer to make the decision to never go back.

A peer from the group responded to what I said, and stated, "Fuck the therapy, fuck the counseling, fuck 12 Stepping. You can do that for years, and what'll you get out of it? Nothing. You need to learn to forgive, and only church is going to give you that".

Now, my initial reaction was to tell the consumers that this is bullshit, and that any clergy member who was presented with the types of issues that this person is going through would direct the person to a therapist, because any clergy member knows that some things need to be handled in a clinical setting. My initial reaction was also to tell this person that religions are all phony and were created from hatred and continue to perpetuate generation after generation of hatred, all in the name of love. And also to tell them that god is a lie and that nothing they're really going through is happening anyway. And that I think drugs are OK in the context of controlled intake and that legalizing all narcotics, every single one, would solve a lot of this country's financial, social, racial, and legal problems.

But I can't say that. I can't say that because we're not friends and we are not having a conversation, and I think that's what most people don't realize about therapy. It's a relationship unlike any you'll experience elsewhere in life. Even if I were to share all of my problems with a priest, I wouldn't trust him to not tell anyone else the second we get out of the confessional booth. A therapist, on the other hand, has actual, physical accrediting and legal bodies to answer to, and that should be enough to ensure confidentiality and trust. But this consumer had a shitty experience with a shitty therapist, and that colored every experience and opinion of therapy that the consumer will hold, and then someone else goes and tells them that counseling won't work and only church will save you and the idea is reinforced in the person's mind.

The incident left kind of a bad taste in my mouth, but I couldn't relate that to the group. I just had to internalize it and process it myself, and I realized that I was doing a lot of inserting my own opinion into the mix, my personal opinions on religion and therapy, and that's not allowed. I don't give advice, I don't state my opinion, except when asked to, and I am not your friend. And I'm way too self-aware to know that every person's subjective experience determines how they interpret the world, and so for me therapy works and church doesn't and for other people the exact opposite is true and we're both OK. But it's hard not to say what I'm thinking, and even harder not to say what I'm feeling. And that's the reality of this work. Maybe the consumer could talk to a priest about what happened and that'd make it all better. I don't know.

Here's what I do know:

1. The consumer saw a shitty therapist who gave pat answers to a serious incident that had long-lasting repercussions in my consumer's life. The consumer saw this shitty therapist because the consumer has shitty health insurance provided by the state that only allows people to see shitty therapists in shitty, over-crowded, over-worked offices in the shittiest parts of the city. Clinicians get their licenses and flee from these shitty offices to open private practices in nicer parts of the city, and they accept only private insurances and they counsel housewives about boredom and stress and prescribe tons of medications and MAKE A KILLING. Here's the promise that I made myself while driving home last night, thinking about all of this: when I get my MSW and my license and I set up my private practice, I will continue to take low income consumers and provide them with quality counseling on a sliding scale basis, and I will market my practice to people who believe in the therapeutic process as much as I do, and if i don't make ends meet, oh well, at least I tried. There is no reason for every single person who wants therapy to not be provided with the highest quality experience possible, regardless of income (which naturally goes hand in hand with race). The most highly-trained, best-equipped counselors should not head for the suburbs, they should continue to help the people who truly need it and want it.

2. The counseling relationship ultimately leads to a power differential. I am not allowed to speak my mind or state my opinion. I am also the focal point of the group, the person that consumers turn to when conversation sputters out and the big, scary Silence sets in. I'm expected to always have an answer, or advice, and the truth is, I don't have any answers, and like I said before, I don't give advice. Perhaps evolutionary therapy has a place for totally honest communication between therapist and consumer? Perhaps there is a place for opinion from the therapist, and also the recognition that the therapist is just a person, not some authority figure granted with powers that you don't have.

3. I am a lucky person to be doing the job I'm doing, getting the experience that I am, and I'm also grossly under-qualified. Shhh!

camera

2009-06-09T12:09:00.005-04:00

(Last week I made a promise to myself to start working on my screenplays every weekday. That lasted three days. Now I'm expanding my definition of workweek writing to include this blog, because I think it is important to write each day and to begin to think of writing as a "job" of sorts, even if I'm not getting paid for it yet. the effort to write each day is what's important and i don't think it matters so much whether the writing is on here or towards my screenplay or some other project entirely. So this is all part of an effort to just write as much as I possibly can, like I used to.)

This weekend I stood on a short stone pier at the beach where I spent most of my summers growing up. I didn't go too far out at first, because I am a neurotic person. The thought of stepping too far out on the pier scared me, brought about thoughts of mortality and anxiety and the things that I usually think about, but which seem intensified when facing raging oceans and breaking waves and unforgiving rocks. There was a small tower at the end of the pier, sending out a loud, beeping signal every couple of minutes. I stared at the tower and thought about walking up to it but decided against it. Because I'm neurotic. You know this.

I thought about the poems that I'd read on the beach and considered why it is that I am so afraid. Fear seems to run my life, not to mention in my family; fear of people and places and the unknown and death and everything else. There were quiet Asian families fishing off the side of the pier, and I thought about when I was younger, standing in this exact spot late at night with my father, and we were fishing then, too. I caught an eel, but in my 5 or 6 year old world, eels didn't exist. I'd never heard of them. So my initial reaction was to shout, "It's a sea monster!" My dad evaluated the creature and informed me that it wasn't a sea monster, just an eel. I felt silly asking what an eel is, and I'm sure he felt sillier when he just mumbled a response. "Oh, it's a fish, or...something?"

The ocean holds untold stories, presents the vacationer with new worlds that exist just below the surface. I got over my fear of the ocean early on and have loved the water ever since. But I'm always aware that the ocean is a mystery, and not really meant to house human beings. It is this awareness that colors my every experience. I am aware that it is not just the ocean that isn't meant to be home to humans, but this planet as a whole. We are aliens, or perhaps just vacationers enjoying a place that isn't ours, can't be ours. This planet belongs to the universe, and the universe belongs to no one, least of all us. The universe doesn't even belong to itself, because the very idea of "belonging" is a man-made construct. Property and ownership doesn't exist in nature. We divide up land and we also divide up stimuli received in our brain and label it to make sense of it. And you can take this line of thought further and further until you realize that our every perception is the result of some degree of measurement and interpretation. We are not really existing, just perceiving, and when the brain dies, show's over, folks, drive safe.

I stood at the end of that pier and I smoked a cigarette and I got my camera and just filmed things naturally occurring; a couple of boats drifting through the frame, waves breaking, the tower sounding its signal every minute or so. I went all the way to the end of the pier, fear be damned, and it was wet and slippery but I didn't fall in. I walked back from the pier and found my friend and my love but I was distant the rest of the weekend, as I tend to be, just stuck in my own head and not even sure of what's going on. I remembered when I first got my camera, I googled directions on how to clean the lens because I wasn't sure. A photographer had an online guide to cleaning lenses and stated that oftentimes amateur photographers will not shoot near water or sand or any other potentially camera-harming environments due to not wanting to damage their equipment. The author of the page stated that this results in a lot of great shots never being taken. The author encouraged the amateur photographer to seek out these locales and to take pictures, and if your equipment gets wet, fuck it, buy another. You'll always have the photos that you took, and they could live on beyond the camera, beyond the photographer, beyond the entire history of the universe. I imagine emailing myself a copy of the footage that I shot and that email leaving beamed to a satellite high above the earth, and then being shot back to earth, and there's a digital footprint left there. The digitized information exists between the earth and the satellite and it could exist forever, waiting to be picked up by a receiver anywhere in any point in time. This is comforting to me. And it occurs to me that this is what filmmaking can provide. It can encourage me to step out to the end of the pier, you're not going to fall in if you're careful and surefooted. The camera goes to places that I wouldn't otherwise consider going, but then when I do, it's not as bad as I thought it may be. And you receive beautiful images and they're captured forever and this is what it's all about.

Flirtations with Racism

2009-06-08T22:44:00.006-04:00

1. Today I was giving this dude I work with (similar to me; white, glasses, facial hair, likes punk rock and metal) a ride and when we got into my car i was shocked to see that the music playing was Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us back. I had an instant moment where i freaked out and was like, did I do too much self-disclosure to a co-worker. does he think that i am secretly a black militant, or perhaps a Muslim? I hesitated to turn the music off instantly, and that would be the source of my next freak out. It didn't matter what I was playing; like I said, he was similar to me, culturally and also in terms of pop cultural frames of reference, so that meant he was down with the PE(" now every single bitch wanna see me"). But then I worried that my initial urge to turn the music off revealed the truly racist person that I am. Sure, my brain said inside my head, you'll listen to hip-hop in my car when you're alone, but bring another white person into the mix and you switch to bland jangly indie pop. And then I worried that my initial impulse to switch the music stemmed from my unconsciously thinking that because he is white, he must hate rap, thus making me and him both racist. this is the way my mind works. In the end, I played the first five tracks and switched it. That seemed safe. So am i racist or what?

2. I'm in the car with a black consumer at work, and i am just randomly flipping through radio stations. I land on a lil wayne track that i like but don't know the words to, so i can't like rap along or anything, so my participation seems perhaps like a stupid white liberal nod to solidarity (again, not saying there is any reason to interpret these events as I have; this is my purely subjective experience, and probably no one thinks I'm racist, and probably I'm not (though actually writing this sentence made me think that, yes, i am racist), so feel free to read this shit for entertainment purposes. I am just a neurotic, self-doubting, everything-else-doubting bro, yknow) and then I go to change the station, hesitate, and then fuck! actually do change it, and then I of course instantly worry that my changing the station revealed my true racist self, earlier when you were both singing along to the song, he was loving you, and then you changed the fucking station. Might as well join the KKK, you fucking RACIST. That's what i heard in my mind. And this is what I am stressing out about, all the time; nothing. And my work has taught me that ultimately most people spend a vast amount of their time freaking out about nothing, and I'm no different, so stop fucking freaking out about nonsense. But once I acknowledge that I'm freaking out about, and then I start to worry that I freak out over nothing, and then before I know it I am freaking out about how I am freaking out about nothing (and even this simple acknowledgment of my freaking out is proof that I know its senseless, but i'm still doing it in the moment). And this is what I love about humans, ultimately: our ability to contradict ourselves. Not every species of animal can do that. our ability to hold two positions in direct opposition to each other, and to argue them both, is an extension of our basic ability to feel conflicting emotions about ourselves, and the world around us. You might not know it but this is a pretty FUCKING AWESOME aspect of humanity and I urge you to start doubting everything, including my telling you how FUCKING AWESOME skepticism is. I am determined to just dive into the gray areas and doubt everything and then start to believe it all and believe none of it all in reaction to the believing and it's beautiful. So what i hope to catalogue here in a series of vignettes about my anxieties about my own racist tendencies. I'll start by stating that I do not believe I am a racist, at all, because I understand race in terms of biological and cultural roots and think that we the only differences that exist between us are purely man-made constructs, and a basic misunderstanding of evolution and biology in general. But maybe I'll feel differently about all this by the time I'm done. (I will never be done)

2009-06-04T23:43:00.002-04:00

DR. REPP (v.o.): All culture and art and godheads and societies are attempts to make something permanent out of life, which is just an accident and an illusion, anyway. We strive, and we worry about it, and we want something, oh lord, something, please, solid in our lives. And then we die and all of time exists in a split second and we never even accept or learn to enjoy how short everything is. How this all could’ve just as easily not happened. We take existence for granted and talk of destiny and fate but the truth? This all could’ve just as easily not happened. And it probably didn’t anyway.

to be mailed with the hair from my mustache that sticks up

2009-03-24T01:16:00.000-04:00

Orlando looked nine feet tall from my place behind the desk. I had been working the job for almost a year but I wasn’t really ready for this. My supervisor is in the room with us, trying to talk to him. His words are tangential, disjointed. In the business we would say that he is “responding to internal stimuli”. He tells us that there is a man in the streets who wants to murder him and he’ll have to do something about it. My supervisor asks why and Orlando tells him it’s because of a girl. “Have you been with this girl?” my supervisor asks. “I smashed it once,” he responds, and my supervisor (brunette, young, from the suburbs) just nods her head and I try to stifle a laugh. A psychiatrist comes into the room and that’s when Orlando leaves. Earlier, when it was just he and I, he stared at me and told me about Iraq. “When I close my eyes all I see are the letters K-I-L-L”. The cops pick him up a few days later and he’s in the hospital.

evolutionary therapy: I

2009-02-17T23:37:00.004-05:00

"Animals in order to survive have had to be protected by fear-responses, in relation not only to other animals but to nature itself. They had to see the real relationship of their limited powers to the dangerous world in which they were immersed. Reality and fear go together naturally. As the human infant is in an even more exposed and helpless situation, it is foolish to think the fear response would have disappeared in such a weak and highly sensitive species. It is more reasonable to think that it was instead heightened, as some of the early Darwinians thought: early men who were most afraid were those who were most realistic about their situation in nature, and they passed on to their offspring a realism that had a high survival value."
--Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Yes, they did indeed pass on to their offspring a realism (that is, the fear response, which I'm gonna call the death urge because this is supposed to be a horror movie blog, after all), and since the men who developed this sense of anxiety about the world would have lived longer than those without it, he would have produced more and more offspring. The death urge would have been naturally selected for and passed on to future generations via genetic information.

Becker concludes thusly: "The result was the emergence of man as we know him: a hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none." I said something very similiar to a very pretty young girl while we sat on the floor on Valentine's Day, but in Becker's quote, I believe that I have found the crux of the idea that I have felt germinating inside me for the past couple of years. I have wanted to be a therapist, but it is becoming increasingly harder for me to reconcile the reality of how most of the people in the mental health field think. They are not scientifically inclined, and it has hurt the development of empirical data to back up most of the claims that the field makes about how it rehabilitates people. There is always a push to legitimize the social sciences, but mental health has been lagging, lagging due to generations of scholars perpetuating Freudian non-sense, hypnotherapy, Christian-based counseling, and the like.

But here, it seems, lies the roots of the idea that I am calling evolutionary therapy. This could become my life's work, I think, and it's based upon a simple premise. All mental disorders (calling them mental illnesses is a misnomer) are rooted in the fear of death, a very real, biological sense of mortality which is unique to humans. The death urge has helped humans to increase their numbers and ensure the ongoing survival of the species, but it has also rooted in us an innate, genetic anxiety. Therapy can help to alleviate this anxiety, but first it must take aim at the ways that humans have naturally selected for the death urge, and the ways that we can healthily deal with it. This involves educating people on biology and the evolutionary roots, of their fears, depressions, anxieties, and psychotic behaviors which have been misunderstood and allowed to take control over their lives. Humans need science and evolutionary theory in order to ensure the continuation of the species. I do not know if this is a new theory, but there has never been a scholarly article written which utilizes the term 'evolutionary therapy'. This may not be new, and it may not even be novel, but it is a beginning of my academic pursuits and, I hope, will offer an alternative to the soft, touchy-feeliness which therapy is often associated. Like the films that I will make because they are the types of movies that I want to see, I am going to develop a new model of social work practice, because I cannot exist and work with the existing one.

uh

2009-02-16T23:57:00.003-05:00

I just found a file on my computer, a text file that I created on 3/2/2008. I do not recall creating this file. I don't remember writing anything. When I opened it, it was a Word Works document consisting of a single sentence, four words:

MARS IS EARTH'S NIGHTMARE

THE GHOST OF THE COMPUTER

2009-02-16T23:16:00.003-05:00

I have reached a point in my purging where I know that it is entirely possible to adopt a perspective merely because it is interesting to do so. There is no way to quantify belief. One can say that he believes in god, and we have not yet developed a physical way of observing that one actually does believe in god, in a material way. We have neurological scanning technology that can visualize the chemical processes at work, but all they tell us is that the individual is experiencing the act of belief. I want my brain to be a clearinghouse for ideas, a sacred ground where all ideas and perspectives are considered equally. My eventual neurological scans will reveal religious beliefs, I suppose. It is quite rational to believe in god despite a lack of physical evidence to support the case. Belief is a conscious choice, a selection of an emotional process over a rational one, and it is arrived at via reason. I will explore all avenues of human thought and expression and life, adopting any belief system as I see fit, believing none, believing all.

Once mankind has accepted that the thing we have chosen to call the soul is really nothing more than our personalities or our collected intelligences, then human thought and discourse can get truly interesting. If we are willing to stake a belief in a human soul, then, why are we not willing to take the same leap to inquire as to the nature of the machine’s soul? It's just as immaterial as the human soul and the odds are about the same of proving its existence. What does an appliance feel? Does a computer have dreams? (See Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs wherein the protagonist tries to create a subconscious for his computer by creating a random folder and interesting random text files of information. What else is the human subconscious but all the information we filter through our brains, all of the clutter that we don’t know what to do with? A computer’s subconscious is more relevant than any theory of a human subconscious, anyway, because we can at least point to an actual folder that is the machine’s subconscious.)

Further food for thought: computer software is dependent upon line after line of binary code, endless sequences of data which inform the technology’s function and usage. It can only do what it is programmed to do. Well. Sounds similar to human coding, DNA, genetics, right? What if human begins are nothing more than the genetic equivalent of a player piano, acting out some predestined, scripted existence? Perhaps our entire lives are already written out in a long strand of genetic coding? More to the point, if humans are willing to believe that we have a soul despite the absence of any tangible evidence to justify our having this belief, then we should be just as ready to believe that our computers have souls, too, and perhaps our houses are haunted by the ghosts of our discarded toys, washing machines, microwaves, and television sets. This will be a key to the initial work that I will produce over the next couple of years, where one realizes that belief in nothing is ultimately belief in everything, since saying that we are all wrong and all explanations for the existence of life are meaningless and lacking is also saying that all explanations are valid and you can freely pick and choose from any existing belief systems, and even create new ones. Nothing is everything and we’re all right because we’re all wrong.

When you open yourself up to the possibility of the ghost of the computer, then you open yourself up to the possibility that artificial intelligence is just as valid as human intelligence. Digital is just as valid as analog, a point that digital filmmaking, which will be the medium through which I express myself until I can afford others, must ultimately make due to the fact that it will be created through digital (that is, pixilated) processes. What we must point out is that digital information is nothing more than a tangible expression of the stuff of the universe; cells and colored light. What we perceive in a film is no less relevant than the stimuli that we perceive in our everyday lives. This is the path to truth, the only way the human line of thought can continue. This leads us to the acceptance that science and religion are really the same things, just ways of explaining the universe, and ultimately are all part of the all-encompassing continuum of human expression and feeling and evolved behaviors. Science is the rational side of life, the order-seeking side, the 1s and 0s binary code of life, while religion points to the supernatural, the part of the human mind that wants to tear structure and logic asunder. Once we see that science/religion, digital/analog are really the exact same thing, we free ourselves to the possibility of anything, literally everything being possible. The ghost of the computer becomes real. So too does the soul of the appliance.

2008-09-21T16:33:00.004-04:00

I stood beneath a tree today with my brother and we talked about how small the tree used to be when we were younger. We looked at its branches and how long they stretched now, and stared at the roots in awe. They too reached out from the base of the tree, like a child becoming an adolescent becoming an adult, moving out into the world, finding out what how it processes and perceives the world. And then I thought about chopping the tree down, and how I could never do that, and how even if I were to take an axe to the thing, maybe the stump that was left in the ground as a reminder of the tree's brilliance would go on existing for thousands of years. The basic matter of the tree would remain in existence into infinity, and so maybe the tree itself would, too. And this lead to me considering the minute, sub-atomic ways in which we are only now learning that the human species receives and processes information, and that in turn forced me to consider that maybe, perhaps, in some way, after the human brain ceases functioning and we die, maybe we still continue taking in stimuli and processing it. It is an extremely biased, anti-intellectual stance to say that the human brain can detect and process every bit of information we receive from every dimension of reality. Maybe the remotest parts of our being, the very smallest pieces of genetic material we consist of, goes on into eternity. Maybe we all get to live forever in ways we never even came close to dreaming were possible and our every anxiety about death and destruction is wholly unfounded. Maybe (probably) we are all wrong about reality and the truth is something that we could never even hope to conceive of (yet). Regardless, it occurs to me that the only way to obtain this knowledge is through science. Religion is static, the most conservative, concrete way of thinking possible, and it is nearing irrelevance. To me, anyway.

Zzzzimilies

2008-09-17T16:54:00.004-04:00

The eternal debate rages on; do people prefer to sleep "like a baby" or "like a rock"? (If you're one of those "sleep of the dead" people you can fuck right off, weirdo.) People have been arguing about this for years, but it's time to settle the score. Travis Martin is setting the deal straight once and for all!

First off, I'm not all that familiar with what babies sleep like (I only sleep next to, like, two babies per year), so it's a little hard to be impartial. But my impression is that babies sleep the sleep of the deranged, waking up every hour, crying, screaming, evacuating their bowels and bladders without a care in the world. In other words, if you sleep like a baby, you sleep like a retard, jack, and I don't want that simile in our lexicon any longer. Who would want to sleep like a baby? Only a sick culture, one that reveres the rights of children above those of adults, one that places a premium on stupid, fleeting youth, could invent such an inane expression. Slept like a baby. As if!

I wouldn't take this so personally if there wasn't a perfect expression floating around; sleep "like a rock". What a lovely turn of a phrase! What a sort of Zen like image to ponder and use in our conversation. Sleeping like a baby is a regression, devolution, a return to the cradle. When one sleeps like a rock, however, one alters their genetic make up entirely and becomes like a rock, unthinking, uncaring, immobile. Peace. Americans don't want to think about negation, deconstruction, about the quiet and solace that comes from nothingness, losing yourself in the abyss. We would be happier if we learned to accept the void. Give up control. Stand in awe before the all-consuming mouth of pure light and color and experience. Allow it to engulf you. Analysis is for the deathbed and the fearful. Step into the wilderness of the soul and be made into something new. This is what I'm doing, and it's the only thing I've tried that brings me any semblance of peace. I want to bathe in white noise. I want to be cleansed by the static. I want to become the void.

I will become the void.

it lives!

2008-09-11T16:54:00.004-04:00

October is just around the corner, and you know what that means. 31 nights of horror films, for the third year running. Last year's writings are somewhere on a message board I never read anymore, but all of the stuff I wrote from 2006 is still archived here (and MANIAC is, i think, the best piece of film analysis I've written. Which is not to say it's any good, or original, or whatever. Just, y'know, saying.)

This will continue to be pretty much just writing about horror and other types of cult cinema, but I'll most likely post some original fiction stuff that i've been kicking around. I am in the midst of finishing my first screenplay and I imagine bits and pieces of that will end up here at some point. But this is all probably bullshit and I'll just continue to write movie reviews for 3 months till I get sick of it. (Again.)

2006 ROUNDUP: INSIDE MAN (Lee)

2007-02-11T14:10:00.001-05:00

Anthony Lane wrote something about BULLETS OVER BROADWAY, the Woody Allen film from around a decade ago or so. He wrote about how Hollywood does not need great pictures, but rather good ones. The staples - the romantic comedies, the thrillers, the period dramas - these needed to be less formulaic, more interesting and unique, and the masterpieces could take a backseat for a little while. Another NYC auteur, this time Spike Lee, takes this notion and applies it towards the crime picture genre, with solid, if not spectacular, results.

It's easy to foget how good of an actor Denzel Washington is, mainly because I've seen so few Denzel Washington movies. TRAINING DAY was, I think, the last one that I watched, and I can't imagine what the one before that was. He is completely cool and collected in this as a hostage negotiator who slowly starts to realize that the bank robbery he's working isn't really a bank robbery at all. Clive Owen is Dalton Russel, the inside man, who knows a lot about the wartime dealings of the head of the board of director's at the bank. Jodie is just sort of there. The show belongs to Denzel, of course, but you probably already knew that. My favorite part was Clive Owen. He spends most of the film with his face covered, but there is a scene where he finds what he's looking for, the thing that'll make him rich and expose a wealthy man for the savage he is, and he pulls his mask off, staring longingly at the thing he's spent so long planning. Owen's face is so interesting, scruffy, deep lines running down his cheeks. Lee shoots it in close up, and it's beautiful.

Things start out with a relatively standing heist picture, people talking about "the perfect crime" and whatnot, but things soon start to unravel and it becomes about something else entirely. Lee can't resist throwing in some references to race relations in New York, and the first filmmaker to overtly reference 9/11 in a film also shows us Foster and Washington acting in front of a large "We Will Never Forget" banner. These touches never really come around to mean anything greater, though, just an everyday occurence in the melting pot.

I had to get on IMDb to check out Clive Owen's character's name, and of course ended up spending ten minutes or so reading the threads that are posted there. A mistake, as most trips to the IMDb usually end up being. While people debate whether or not Spike Lee is the worst director of all time and how this movie "sucks", they all seem to sort of miss the point. INSIDE MAN is a good movie; it never achieves greatness, but it never really tries to, either. It's obvious that Lee has fun with the material, and the cast is also laughably good. It's a solid little heist flick that has some interesting twists and turns. Note: this is coming from a person who typically hates any kind of movie that "twists and turns".

In a larger context, this is exactly what Hollywood needs. Take a look at the top seven films in America, in terms of moneymaking, and then look at their rottentomatoes scores:

01. NORBIT - 09%
02. HANNIBAL RISING - 17%
03. BECAUSE I SAID SO - 07&
04. THE MESSENGERS - 13%
05. NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM - 45%
06. EPIC MOVIE - 02%
07. SMOKIN' ACES - 27%

All studio pictures, all released nationwide in multiplexes from New York, across the flyover states, all the way to LA. If even half of these were as good as INSIDE MAN, then perhaps I'd watch more Hollywood pictures in theatres. Maybe a lot more people would, come to think of it. INSIDE MAN never attempts to tackle any big issues in any meaningful way. It knows its place, and it makes its claim as the little sudio picture that could. That Spike Lee is also releasing documentaries about Hurricane Katrina is important and admirable; he is able to make these documentaries because movies like INSIDE MAN are seen by the larger public. I think it's great that someone like Michael Heneke is allowed to try his hand at a Hollywood picture. The US remake of FUNNY GAMES will be almost certainly be inferior to the original, but the fact that it'll make Heneke some more money, and perhaps allow him to make movies for a little while longer, is worthy of note.

Perhaps what we need are great filmmakers making good pictures, at least for a little while. Just a thought. INSIDE MAN won't make my top 10, but it never set out to do so, either. This is, in its own way, worthy of note.

2005 ROUND UP: COCAINE COWBOYS (Corben)

2007-02-03T17:49:00.000-05:00

Yet another larger-than-life documentary, COCAINE COWBOYS attempts to capture the glitzy, gawdy world of 1980s Miami, complete with a soundtrack provided by Jan Hammer. From the opening credits, what we are seeing is stylized and cool and funny and so very over the top. That it never becomes self-parody is to its own credit. What could have become an exercise in camp or irony instead ends up being a love letter to the times and places.

Perhaps it may strike some people as odd that drugs could be presented in a loving light. While the documentary definitely exposes some of the uglier elements of the drug world (the insane bloodbaths that result from the trade), it also takes care to point out that men like Mick Munday and John Roberts, key figures in the Miami scene, were businessmen, who believed in the philosophy of supply-and-demand. They are providing a service to the people of Miami. The further irony of this situation is that the money they make they pour back into the Miami community, fostering development and commerce where there was once seemingly only blight and ruin. Roberts claims he spent $50 million in Miami restaurants, car dealerships, nightclubs, bars, tailors, and the like. COCAINE COWBOYS never explicitly points the finger at the entire city of Miami as an accomplice, but it does take care to note that there were virtually no cops there until things turned violent.

And, yes, they turn violent. The second half of COCAINE COWBOYS is not until the second half of SCARFACE, as we see the result of such an incredible amount of money being made in such a fast time, and in an unchecked industry. A central figure at this time is Griselda Blanco, who is simply too horrific to be made up. She is linked with the Colombian cartels (as Roberts and Munday and most of the people in the film are) and is said to be involved with some 200 murders. The people interviewed take care to note that Blanco was "the godmother" and she did not fuck around. She had people killed for looking at her wrong. In the film's darkest moments, we hear from her ace, Rivi, that she ordered him to kill a man who had disrespected her son. Rivi and a driver roll up on the guy, shooting into his car, but missing the target. They later learn that there was a 2 year old in the car and that they managed to shoot him. Rivi is terrified, but Blanco loves this, and soon is offering larger rewards for her men to kill the children of people who owe her money. She is, apparently, evil incarnate.

COCAINE COWBOYS, with its neon opening credits and cheesy score, could easily have veered off into parody, but it manages to play everything straight. Through a mix of old news clips, interviews, and re-enactments, we see how things played out through the media and the eyes of the people who lived and trafficked there. Perhaps the greatest strength is the directors allowing the players to tell their own story without injecting themselves into the mix. I guess I'm just sick of the modern documentary style of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock (which was really influenced by the self-involved, docudrama "science fiction" films of my favorite director, Werner Herzog) and find it refreshing when someone, like Billy Corben, has enough faith in the source material and people involved to tell the story. COCAINE COWBOYS may make a top 20 of 2006, not top 10, but it's infinitely entertaining and engaging and an interesting slice of life in a certain place at a certain time.

2006 ROUNDUP: SHERRYBABY (Collyer)

2007-01-31T12:13:00.000-05:00

The night before last I watched APOCALYPSE NOW, and last night I watched SHERRYBABY. They're very different films in many regards, but they also share a couple of things in common. For one thing, they both feature Sam Bottoms. For another, they both, at first glance, seem to be about Important Things, but, by the time we reach the end, turn out to be about people instead. And most glaringly, both films give us people pushed to their absolute limits, and lets us watch as their ends showly fray and they cope the only way they know how.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is Sherry, just out of prison, three years clean from heroin, and left to reside in a women's halfway home. Given the set up, one might initially think of this as a Lifetime movie, but it quickly becomes clear that what you're going to be viewing is a totally different breed of animal. SHERRYBABY is not truly about drug addiction or the things that lead people to seek comfort therein. It is rather about Sherry herself and how her addiction affects her. It is very much a character study, and a wholly unsettling one at that. It becomes clear early on that Sherry is not seeking redemption and that it is not going to be coming to her. She never seems to give up expecting it, however, which is perhaps the film's saddest quality. Sherry expects her five year old daughter to love and admire her, despite the fact that she has been incarcerated for half of her life. She expects to get a job working with children, despite the fact that she is a convicted felon. (She does manage to get a gig working at a daycare center for urban youth, but only after blowing the intake director. The theme of the use of sex to achieve her own ends flows throughout all of the film, and presents us with questions about who is using who.) She expects to remain clean and for her PO to cut her breaks. But as the PO himself says, Sherry does not want to put in the work.

SHERRYBABY is a heartbreaking, emotionally devastating film that never gives us a glimmer of hope, never gives us any reason to believe that things are going to get better. It is not a picture about beginnings and ends, but rather the dull monotony and bleak self-analysis that makes up the majority of our days. There's a lot more to consider here, including whether or not Sherry is sympathetic (I think she is) and what tone the film wants to close on (I want to think it's hopefuly, but I know better). But like Sherry and the film about her, this review is going to remain incomplete, unfinished, because beauty exists in the imperfect, if you're willing to look for it. SHERRYBABY is not for everyone, but it is a film that everyone should see.

EVIL COMEDY IN THE NEW YORKER.

2007-01-30T12:35:00.000-05:00

So, Tad Friend from The New Yorker has put together a piece on Sarah Silverman's new sitcom (which I await breathlessly, lustfully), which he has taken to calling "mean comedy". Ah, Tad? This particular brand of comedy, which Sarah is definitely a purveyor of, goes further than being "mean" and enters the realm of pure EVIL. It is not about just simply lacking sentimentality, but also about debasing the very structure that our country was founded upon. I am a New Yorker fan (Anthony Lane is my favorite film critic), but Friend's claims that Silverman's show is "much the meanest sitcom in years" totally ducks STRANGERS WITH COMEDY and IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA, my two old standbys. And actually, add WONDRER SHOWZEN to that list. While not technically a sitcom, it has to be considered among the single most subversive, vile, completely ruthless TV shows ever filmed. That it is a spoof on children's educational shows only adds to the fun. But I'll have a longer writeup on WONDER SHOWZEN sometime in the coming future. As to Sarah's show, well, it's getting Brian Posehn and Jay Johnston on TV regularly, so it's got that going for it. It is, of course, also Sarah Silverman's, who I am starting to think might be wearing a little thin, but is still bitterly funny in smaller doses. Just the same, I am looking forward to watching the show. More evil comedy can never be a bad thing.

2006 ROUND UP: JESUS CAMP (Ewing & Grady)

2007-01-24T15:43:00.000-05:00

Man. This is seriously one of my favorite documentaries I've ever seen, especially in this post-Moore age of picking a point and hammering it home, again and again and again, never giving the audience a chance to make up their own minds. JESUS CAMP stands in direct opposition to the mold that people like Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore have created, as it is a shining example of simply giving people enough rope to hang themselves. Co-directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady do a beautiful job of allowing scenes to play out naturally. The result is much more damning than anything Moore could concoct with ironic music and hand-wringing liberalism.

JESUS CAMP is a terrifying glimpse into the world of midwestern Christian fundamentalism. The main players are Becky Fisher, the creator of the so-called "Jesus Camp", and Levi, an unfortunate looking boy of ten or so who is intensely devoted to Jesus. I had obviously heard a lot about this film, as it garnered a fair amount of press for a release of such small proportions. It is also a quiet little picture, featuring none of the doom-saying or name-calling that has lead to several blockbuster docs in the past couple of years. JESUS CAMP emerges as a staggering, sedated little picture that aims to the heavens - and hits its mark.

Fisher is downright evil, of this I have little doubt. Word is she approved of the documentary, which goes a long way towards revealing several things. First, it shows that the filmmakers were fair and impartial in their portrayal of her. Secondly, it demonstrates the degree to which she believes. This belief, far from the comforting sense of knowing that some claim, is actually a certain kind of blindness, a belief which shields against logical discourse and scientific fact.

The people who populate the film are smug, sure of themselves, and unwilling to even leave any sort of dissenting voice into their lives. The children are all home-schooled, and the parents are all more than willing to show them videos which mock science and evolution. Every summer, they send the kids off to Bible camp, where they sing, read scripture, and are brought to tears on a regular basis by mean-spirited adults who want to tell them they are flawed, they are evil, they are sinners, and they are fallen. This doesn't resemble my childhood memories of lounging by the Atlantic Ocean or going camping with friends. I myself was raised in a Christian household, which also acknowledged that a world existed outside of my church and our religion. When young Levi says that interacting with non-Christians makes him uncomfortable, you get the sense that he has not had this same chance to experience the larger world, a world which the children in the film tell us is corrupt, morally bankrupt, and sinful. Again, these are children. The words they use can come from no other source except for their parent's own mouths.

The parents, for their part, deny "forcing" religion on their children, but it's hard to imagine a ten year old saying that she needs to be aware of when "I'm dancing for the Lord and when I'm dancing for the flesh". Perhaps the film's greatest lesson is the way in which we guide our children to be who we want them to be, irregardless of the fact that they are small and easily-manipulated. A key scene sees Fisher ask "Who here thinks God can do anything?" We see a mother pull up her daughter's arm, and then her son's arm, when neither of them were raising their hands. The mother physically forces the children to profess their faith. It is telling and it is chilling.

Perhaps JESUS CAMP's greatest strength is the way in which it debunks the argument that the Moral Majority, or the Christian Right, or Christian Fundamentalists, or whatever, are simply religious people and are in no way politically-motivated. After a week filled with seven year olds speaking in tongues, of being told that if Harry Potter were a real person, he would be in hell, of not being allowed to tell ghost stories because they don't glorify the Lord (of being told, in short, that children are naturally bad and in need of the strictest of supervision in order to become good, Christian people), Fisher and her co-horts bring out a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush and the children pray for him, wildly, frantically, with fervor. They also weap openly and loudly against abortion and pray for a more Christian government. Fisher, at the film's end, has a talk with Air America commentator Mike Papantonio, and makes the claim that there is nothing political about the camp, that they are simple people who want to share their faith quietly. The gloating image of the publicly disgraced Ted Haggard, who at the time of filming obviously believes himself to be nearing the White House at some point in the future, is haunting and hilarious, a grim reminder of the fact that these people have much darker intentions than they let on. They want to control this country (they pledge allegiance to "the Christian flag", after all). Fisher ultimately denounces democracy itself, stating that it is doomed to fail because it demands freedom for all.

If I can resort to mud-slinging that the film never demeans itself with, Becky Fisher is shown as a distinctly lonely, embittered person who spends all of her time around children, hugging and screaming at them. She lives alone, seems to have no husband or children of her own, and is almost certainly a closeted lesbian. I, personally, can't wait for her to be caught freebasing with Brazilian transvestites, or some such career-killing scandal. The only thing more rewarding than Haggard's fall from grace will be her's.

This is a staggering, heart-breaking work that stands as one of 2006's absolute, undisputed best pictures, a crushing depiction of childhood being taken from children and of the ways in which adults will warp the young to meet their own goals. Amazing movie.

2006 ROUNDUP: IDIOCRACY (Judge)

2007-01-23T19:45:00.000-05:00

I saw Mike Judge's first film, OFFICE SPACE, in theatres with two of my girlfriends. (That sounds awkward, doesn't it? They were girls who were my friends, not like I was fucking both of them. I wanted to fuck one of them. All through middle school, actually. And high school. Ah, young lust.) We couldn't get into RUSHMORE because it was rated R, but we got into OFFICE SPACE. I was sort of disappointed. A couple of years later, all my friends "discovered" it on DVD and soon they were saying, "Heeeey, Peter" and "I'm gonna show you my O face." I still never got the hype, but watching it again recently, it struck chords with me, office drone that I currently am, which were previously only hinted at.

IDIOCRACY is a bit of a letdown, as well, or at least it is upon first viewing. What is so maddening is that it has the feel of a film taken from its creator too quickly and left inthe care of a butcher. IDIOCRACY hints at brilliance, and even achieves it in the dialogue, but the editing and pacing is convoluted and pulls the rest of the work down. Nonetheless, it is an ambitious, viotrolic work, penned by Judge and Ethan Coen, set in the year 2505, when American society has reached previously-unheard-of levels of stupidity. Luke Wilson plays Joe, a private in the Army who is frozen (alongside a prostitute played by Maya Rudolph) as part of a cryogenics experiment. Joe is exceedingly average in every regard, making him the perfect person to test the technology out on. But he's forgotten about due to a series of misadventures, and instead of being frozen for one year, he's left on ice for 500.

2505 is populated by dunces, cretins, and trash, who speak a mix of redneck slang, ebonics, and varying grunts. IDIOCRACY gives us devolution, the process of man unmaking himself by his own stupidity and inability to adapt. The film makes the conceit that man rules the world simply because he is too dumb to know when he should not be breeding. Overpopulation and a general numbing of the masses, by way of TV, fast food, and the ineptitude of America's leaders, gives us the world that IDIOCRACY creates. There is a Violence Channel, which features a show called "Aw, My Balls". Someone named Dr. Lexus states, "your shit's all retarded, and you talk like a fag". Joe is eventually placed on trial for failing to pay a hospital bill and because he does not have a UCP tattoo which are mandatory for the 2505 citizens of the country. He is sentenced to jail, and easily escapes, because the guards are idiots. Later, he is found to be the smartest man alive, despite the fact that at the beginning of the film, in 2005, we are told he is of merely average intelligence.

How do we end up here? Water is replaced by sports drinks ("It's got Electrolytes!"), which are used to feed the nation's crops. A character exists named Judge Hank "the Hangman" BMW. Dialogue consists of nearly incoherent strings of expletives and neanderthal taunts. There are no museums, no books, and Starbuck's sells HJs. What is probably scariest of all is that IDIOCRACY's America does not seem all that different from our own, just greatly exaggerated and blown out of proportion. The number one movie in 2505 is called ASS, and it's exactly what you think it is. The number one movie this week in 2007 is STOMP THE YARD, a movie where the world's problems are seemingly solved with dancing. The pieces are all in place for America to turn into the idiocracy. You can see it in AMERICAN IDOL, in THE DA VINCI CODE, in George W. Bush.

A friend told a story about how after the World Trade Towers were knocked down, they found all of these rats that were eating asbestos, and everyone figured they would die. But somehow, the rats managed to adapt to the asbestos and process it as food. Now, this particular friend has a tendency to embellish (OK, to lie), but his point was clear: consider what we consume on a daily basis, and how this affects us. Consider how many people don't even think about this, and the idiocracy does not seem so absurd after all. It is, after all, simply taking a time machine to our current situation. It is America c. 2007 taken to its extreme end.

Despite its satirical elements, IDIOCRACY is ultimately a failure in the technical sense (aside from the performances, which require little of the actors, but are essentially serviceable). The entire thing feels ripped up and glued together, perhaps by a citizen of the idiocracy. It is clear why Fox did not want this to play in theatres. It, of course, hilariously spoofs Fox News, but it also has the damning feel of a rushjob. As to whether this is Judge's fault, the editor's fault, or Fox's fault, I cannot say, but the end result is that of a flawed masterpiece. Which, of course, makes it endlessly interesting and worthy of debate. But it doesn't make it one of the best of 2006. Sadly.

2006 ROUNDUP: LADY VENGEANCE (Chan-wook)

2007-01-22T21:59:00.000-05:00

"Living without hate for people is almost impossible. There is nothing wrong with fantasizing about revenge. You can have that feeling. You just shouldn't act on it."
--Park Chan-Wook

LADY VENGEANCE completes the loose "revenge trilogy" which Chan-wook began with SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE (2002) and OLDBOY (2003), but odds are, you already knew that. I have only seen OLDBOY, but I've been meaning to get into MR. VENGEANCE for a long while now. While LADY VENGEANCE never reaches the soaring heights that OLDBOY attains, it does come close in its own right.

The guiding theme of the film (and, really, the very best revenge pictures) is the ultimate futility of revenge as means to an end. In our lives, we will encounter pain that feels unbearable and final. Sometimes, that pain will be caused by other people. We may believe that we can alleviate our own suffering by passing some of it onto others, by making them share in our misery, but, in the end, it is a pointless quest. In the end, by letting our rage guide us, we become no better than the people we sought revenge against. That's also a central theme in LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and CARRIE, all classics of the revenge film sub-genre.

LADY VENGEANCE is the story of Geum-ja Lee, incarcerated for 13 years for a crime she did not commit (but did assist with). The events concerning her framing and capture are best left unknown to the potential viewer. (An aside: I typically don't give a fuck about revealing spoilers to people, but Chan-wook's films are ones that should be seen with as little knowledge of the films as possible. Thus, I make exception here.) LADY VENGEANCE unfolds in a non-linear fashion, unraveling slowly and revealing itself in subtle ways. While in jail, Geum-ja is granted the status of an angel, as she looks over the other, weaker female prisoners and takes them under her wing. She is well-liked by the guards and the Korean media. But quickly, we realize that her motives are not altruistic, and that she has a plan in mind for when she is released.

What sets LADY VENGEANCE apart (as well as MISS .45 and I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE and the KILL BILL pictures) is that the main character is a female, seeking revenge on a male character. It never really becomes a feminist parable, though, as Geum-ja is too singular, too focused on her particular goal, to make any sort of comment on gender. But the fact that she is a female cannot be avoided or ignored. Females are treated horribly by males in this film (but females also treat other females cruelly, as well), and, in the end, the males get their come-uppance. But, again, once revenge is had, what becomes of the seeker? When you define yourself according to one goal, namely the ending of another human's life, how do you define yourself once you actually achieve that goal? LADY VENGEACE offers no answers, no resolutions, just raises questions and gives us one great, bloody climax. This will probably make my Top 10 of 2006.

2006 ROUNDUP: UNITED 93 (Greengrass)

2007-01-19T16:33:00.000-05:00

I avoided this one for a long, long while. I recall the evening of 09/11/2001, lying in bed trying to process everything that happened that day. I recalled everyone saying, "It seemed like something out of a [Michael Bay] movie." This, of course, meant that the day's events would make perfect fodder for jingoistic CGIfests motivated purely by profit. I made my decision to never see a film about 9/11. And then I went and saw one five years later, and it was a lot better than I thought it would be.

I am in no way a patriot. I wouldn't serve this country in war and I actively dream about living in Europe or Canada. I cried while watching UNITED 93. Not just once, several times. It is a work of restrained beauty (yes, beauty) that takes a clinical look at the day's events. It is also, when necessary, extremely violent, as any story about 9/11 must ultimately be. The distanced approach to the material is juxtaposed with shocking acts of violence. Avoiding both cliche and explanation, Greengrass presents us with just the facts, as they happened, and because of this, he comes very fucking close to re-creating the utter confusion and senselessness of 09/11/2001. It is an extremely scary, extremely emotional place to be. It is a film that everyone should see, but that you're going to have to force yourself to watch. One of the absolute best films of 2006.

EVIL COMEDY - A PRIMER

2007-01-17T10:16:00.000-05:00

Around the time that BORAT came out, critic Victoria Alexander stated that, "Evil comedy, a new genre, has arrived". She's certainly right, in that BORAT qualifies as evil comedy, but what he fails to realize is that the genre, which is really more of a sub-genre, has existed for a little while now. I don't know exactly what the definitions for qualification are, or what fits into the category, but I've been considering these things for a couple of months now. I've also been thinking about what my favorite comedies of the 2000s are, and I'm realizing that more and more of them could be considered Evil Comedy.

STRANGERS WITH CANDY debuted in 1999 on Comedy Central, and I never really caught onto it. I think I was still a little too young. Besides that, still being in high school, maybe the material hit a little too close to home. After all, it's easier to laugh at the stringent caste system that is public education when you've got a bit of distance from it. Now, five years out of high school and with a more refined sense of taste (and a copy of the complete series on DVD), I realize that STRANGERS WITH CANDY is perhaps the meanest, most brutal, least sentimental comedy series ever aired.

Created by Paul Dinello, Amy Sedaris and Stephen Colbert, the show satirizes after school specials as it follows 46 year old high school freshment Jerry Blank, who identifies herself as a "boozer, user, and loser". She is hideously ugly and has a dark and troubled past. The average after school special would thus turn her into an inspirational story, someone who turns their life around and realizes the inherent beauty of the world. STRANGERS, though, gives us Jerri's insides, and they're even more bruised than her outsides. She is a cruel, self-centered racist who likes "both the pole and the hole" but also cracks homophobic jokes and cooks up drugs in her bedroom for the pretty blonde future soriority girls to OD on.

STRANGERS pulls no punches in brutalizing high school life, but it's often the adults who are the cruelest. Teachers and administrators seem to view students as nothing more than means to realizing their own abandoned dreams. STRANGERS shows us how people are so easily victimized, but also how people will allow themselves to be victimized in order to seek validation or self-assurance. People are co-opted, certainly, but they're also eager to be co-opted, just so that they feel like they belong to something or are a part of something. STRANGERS is just as unsympathetic towards the victims as it is towards the aggressors. It is sick and twisted and so blackly funny and just utterly ruthless and unsentimental.

Perhaps the only show currently to go as far down this road is FX's IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA. Maybe it helps that I've spent a great deal of time in the shithole city that the show is set in, but I realize what an absolutely miserable place Philly is, and how hilarious it is that people are so proud to be from there. The characters that populate SUNNY are the exact kind of people who would brag about the city they call home. The four main chracters are Charlie, Dennis, Dee, and Mac, who play four part-owners of an Irish bar. They are best friends, but they're also constantly exploiting and manipulating one another. Each episode sees some combination of the quartet divising ways of cheating the others out of money, prestige, humility, or some other equally valuable comedity. Along the way, they commit arson and welfare fraud, supply minors with alcohol, lie about having cancer, spew racism and homophobia at the drop of a hat, lie about being molested as children, ingest copious amounts of alcohol, anabolic steroids, and Elmer's glue, go America on everybody's asses, and run for public office. The list of people they offend is all-inclusive, but the show never seems purposefully edgy. It more has the feel of a bunch of guys goofing around, telling jokes in their shitty apartment, getting high. In other words, it's something more organic than calculated.

But that isn't what we're talking about here. SUNNY is evil comedy at its best, perhaps even funnier than STRANGERS. Each of the four characters is utterly self-obsessed and has no motivations outside of their own betterment. They are mean to their friends and they're all unlucky in love and life. Dee and Dennis obviously loathe their father, Frank (played by Danny DeVito), who only wants to get closer to them. Charlie and Mac are determined to get closer to Frank, who hates them, but also seems them as perhaps the children he always wanted. In other words, everyone is seeking validation and self-worth from everyone else. People are exploited endlessly and relationships mean absolutely nothing. The show's highlight is in "100 Dollar Baby" from season 2, when Mac and Dennis convince Charlie that he's a future underground fighting legend. The show has a training montage, set to "You're the Best Around" by Joe Espozito from that classic 80s story of underdog hope and heroes, THE KARATE KID soundtrack, but the training montage consists of Dennis and Mac drinking heavily and hitting Charlie with heavy blunt objects. Charlie, for his part, eats steroids, cries heavily, and has a nervous breakdown on screen. The imagery, juxtaposed with the schmaltzy song, illustrate the true, black heart of the show; a perversion of something pure and innocent (the 80s underdog story). Motherfucking EVIL.

Danny DeVito is also a producer of RENO 911!, the excellent Comedy Central series which has now reached four seasons. It was created by a lot of the people involved with THE STATE, chiefly among Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant. While RENO is certainly not SUNNY or STRANGERS in terms of the darkened tone, it perhaps surpasses the other two shows in terms of sheer volume of mean-spirited comedy. The difference is the way that the show is hued. RENO presents us jokes about (male and female) rape, incest, pedophilia, crystal meth, lost dreams, and crushed hopes, but it always does so with a smile on its face. The sherrifs from RENO remain optimistic even while they're sobbing. The show also has moments of hope and moments where we're supposed to sympathasize or identify with the characters. (A quick note: in no way am I saying that these facts are bad or that they hinder the show. I am merely suggesting that they ultimately keep it from the level of Evil that SUNNY and STRANGERS attain.)

Just the same, RENO just may be the funniest of all three of these shows. If I had to pick a favorite episode, it'd be "SARS Outbreak", where Brian Unger portrays Reading Ron, a fallen children's TV show host. He's airing on public television, and he takes a backseat to the stuffed talking animal who he co-stars with. He's also a former cocaine addict who lost his big house when the family took off. He has hopes of capturing some uplifting footage to show to the kids at home, but what he's given are the sheriffs talking about prostitutes (or "buckets") performing fellatio on Puerto Ricans, mothers dying while rollerblading and holding their babies, and, of course, rape. (Rape was at the forefront of LET'S GO TO PRISON also, which was co-written by Lennon and Garant.) The sheriffs want to give Ron some footage he can use, so they orchestrate a cat on a roof that they must save. Junior (Garant) climbs up on the roof and rescues the cat, while Reading Ron talks to the children on TV about cops and cats. And then the cat scratches Junior, and he drops it into a woodchipper, sending blood splattering on the side of the house. The sheriffs stand around, stunned, and Reading Ron has a nervous breakdown on camera. Hilarious, sick stuff.

Pretty much episode has things of this nature, but it's all balanced by the fact that the sheriffs all seem to like one another. This lends the show a warmer edge, but it also detracts from the ultimate EVIL of it all. CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, Larry David's amazing HBO series, is in a similiar vein. Larry is constantly being screamed and swore at by strangers and friends. He is complely self-involved and selfish. However, he also has a wife who stands by him despite it all, and his friends do things to help him out. Larry, also, is basically a good guy; he's just hopelessly self-centered and neurotic. This is in direct contrast with the characters who populate SUNNY and STRANGERS, who are self-centered, neurotic, and not at all good people. This ultimately sets it apart from CURB and RENO, both of which never seem to go as far as SUNNY and STRANGERS so gleefully do.

I have the first season of WONDER SHOWZEN to watch in the coming weeks. From the two or three episodes I have seen, it is perhaps the evilest of Evil Comedy. I am utterly excited to finally see it.

2006 ROUNDUP: THE PROPOSITION (Hillcoat)

2007-01-16T09:06:00.000-05:00

THE PROPOSITION is a blood-soaked, gnarled, Australian take on the American Western written by the always-awesome Nick Cave and directed with style and grace by John Hillcoat. The action is visceral, the tone is analytical, and what emerges is a study of violence, guilt, and morality, and the ties that bind us together and, in the end, tear us apart. Cave takes the general themes of the Western (imperialism, the imminence of death, the search for redemption and definition) and applies them to the British settlement and "civilisation" of Australia. American Indians are swapped for Australian Aborigines and the Outback replaces the western US deserts.

This is a work of extraordinary restraint and outbursts of horrific violence. It is very much a meditation on violence and pain and sadness, but the contemplative mood is tempered by a sense of impending, looming doom. Guy Pearce portrays Charlie Burns, a member of an infamous family of Australian outlaws who slaughter a family and are targeted for termination by the incoming lawmen. Ray Winstone is Capt. Morris Stanley, charged with bringing peace to the savages and wild criminals who populate the Outback. Winstone is an absolute revelation; he's morally conflicted in that he realizes that Charlie and his fourteen year old, possibly-retarded brother, Mikey, are not the sources of evil in the family, and so when he captures them both, he gives Charlie a choice: kill his older brother, Arthur, and he and Mikey are free to go. If, however, he doesn't bring Arthur back by Christmas day, then Mikey's going to the gallows. Charlie sets out to find his brother and the remaining members of the "family", along the way encountering an awesome John Hurt as a bounty hunter and a group of Aborigines who put a spear through him.

Charlie's saved by his brother and the family, and so his moral quandry grows deeper. He knows in his heart that Mikey should not bear the brunt of the family's punishment. He also feels a deep loyalty to Arthu, all the while aware of the fact that he should be punished for his sins. Charlie, of course, is also dealing with his own guilt around the murder of the family (which included a pregnant woman). We watch Charlie weigh his options and choices and try to figure out which bond is strongest, which one he would least enjoy severing. It is a terrifying process, and the end result is a bloodbath of righteous vengence and gore. No one is saved in the end, and no one's hands are clean of blood.

Stunning visuals and audio (including music from Cave) that leads us down a nightmare path even as the film remains grounded firmly in reality. The cast, in particular Winstone, Danny Huston, Hurt, and Dave Wenham, is exceptional. This is without a doubt one of my favorites frmo 2006, maybe even top 5 on the year.

2006 ROUNDUP: RUNNING SCARED (Kramer)

2007-01-15T20:18:00.000-05:00

RUNNING SCARED is a film that I enjoyed a great deal and which I believe would not exist were it not for Quentin Tarantino. It inspired perhaps one the worst discussion threads I have ever read (and imagine that, it's from the IMDb) and it stars a horrible actor, Paul Walker. It has Chazz Palminteri playing essentially a version of every role he's ever played and it features little kid actors promimently. To call the plot inane and absurd is to make a gross understatement. It is also to ignore completely the purpose of the film and the charms that it does contain.

RUNNING SCARED is described by writer/director Wayne Kramer as a patchwork of childhood fairy tales and the crime pictures of the 1970s. It is also very clearly designed to stun, shock, and thrill the audience into a kind of resigned numbness. Anyone who has been tattooed knows what it's like to have a needle rubbed over your skin for several hours at a time. Over time, the pain becomes a dull, irritating throb that only really hurts when new portions of the skin are being tattoed. RUNNING SCARED is over-reaching and tries its best to take on a variety of social issues, including child abuse, prostitution, police corruption, backyard meth labs and child predators. It solves all of these issues with the barrel of a gun. It is very much a continuation of the right wing vigilante wetdreams of John Milius and Walter Hill. The fact that it was made (and widely released) in 2006 is amazing and daring.

Hyper stylized in the style of David Fincher, the film is audacious, sometimes ridiculous, often cartoony. Standing in contrast to this is grisly, realistic violence that sends plasma flying across the screen. Kramer seems to want to hint at some subtext about it being a dark children's fable, but it's bullshit. RUNNING SCARED has nothing to say politically or socially. Characters spew ethnic pride and racist and homophobic rhetoric, little kids shoot adults, and the body count rises and rises and rises. It is trash of the highest order, but it is pretty to look at and never takes itself seriously. Which is ultimately refreshing. Even Walker, as afore-mentioned, a terrible actor, plays his role well, simply because it demands no emoting, nothing real or authentic, simply rage and fear and the knowledge that if you ever stop moving, you're dead. RUNNING SCARED attacks social issues with a gun rather than meditation because it realizes that slowing down is not an option. It is a homage to methods that I find personally detestable, but I also understand that it exists as fantasy and must be accepted on its own terms. In its own way, it exhibits style to burn and a rugged sense of individuality. It is very nearly a comment on the action genre, but in the end, prefers to be about nothing. Perhaps I find this admirable; perhaps this is why I enjoyed the movie. Clearly not 2006 Top 10 material by any stretch of the imagination, but it is unique in its own way.

KARAOKE REPORT 001 - 01/12/07

2007-01-15T16:52:00.000-05:00

SONG #1 - "Let's Get it On" by Marvin Gaye: I had previously been informed by Nate that he was the new white soul singer at karaoke since I have not presented since October or so, and this just didn't sit well with me. I think that this proved I am still the king of Motown in this mostly-white, suburban town. Shows them! Pelvic thrust count: none, I think, amazingly.

SONG #2 - "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley: I was inspired to tackle this one for the first time over the summer, after an episode of IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA the night before featured it prominently (and hilariously). Brandie dared me to do it again. I think that I do it pretty well, except that I get into imitating Astley's voice (which I think I do pretty well), which is probably kind of irritating to those watching with fingers over their eyes. Pelvic thrust count: too many to fit on two hands.

SONG #3 - "It's Tricky" by Run DMC: This one I sang with Krista as a duet. It was the third or fourth time we've done it together and probably was the best of them all. It's hard to keep up with the rhymes but I know the song pretty much inside and out at this point, so it's getting easier. Did a bit of improv, breaking out a sort of call-and-response section with "WHAT!"s while Krista rapped. Pelvic thrust count: none.

SONG #4 - "She Don't Use Jelly" by the Flaming Lips: I have been meaning to do this one for a couple of months now, but every time I would put in a request, they would do last call before I would get called up to sing. This time it worked out, and I was in fact pretty good at it. Coyne's deadpan vocals are sort of hard to do but I think I was OK. There were howls from the crowd for this one. Pelvic thrust count: one or two, probably.

SONG #5 - "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails: Sung with Krista and Jody and one or two other people over the course of the song. I always feel ridiculous doing this one because it really just is the repetition of obscenity over and over and over, which I honestly never really noticed when listening to the song. Pelvic thrust count: more than pelvic thrusting, I at one point mounted by friend Billy's face and gyrated. I wasup to I think around ten shots of mezcal at this point, as well as a couple of gin and tonics and an entire shaker of dirty bong waters.

BONUS SONG #6 - "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen: This was done a capello after last call. It was started by my friend Brian after they refused to do another song. We got pretty much the entire bar to sing along. I did mouth guitar and the opera parts. You missed it, maaan.

Just when I think I'm out...

2007-01-15T16:49:00.000-05:00

So, in the time since I last wrote, I have, in chronological order:

01. started therapy,
02. gotten my first tattoo,
03. watched a shitload of movies,
04. broken up with my girlfriend,
05. embarked on a weird sexual friendship with said girlfriend.

That about takes us up to the here and now. I decided that I missed writing about pop culture stuff and so I think that I will begin writing some stuff again. I've been catching up on 2006 films that I missed or are just opening around here, as is customary for the January month, and I've been watching and re-watching some old stuff that I want to process outside of my own head.

So, let's begin.

CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (Deodato, 1980)

2006-10-31T23:49:00.000-05:00

CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is the first film that I have been unable to finish watching. I had, of course, heard a lot about it. It's supposed to be the most banned, most violent film ever committed to film. The catch is that the more egrarious violence is made against animals. A real, living turtle is beheaded, then ripped apart and eaten. A muskrat is knifed. A monkey gets decapitation. A snake is stamped and has its head cut off. Naturally, how you feel about hunting and killing animals might color your view. But several things can't be argued: the animals were eaten after they were killed. Second, the animals were real and had no choice as to whether or not they participated in the film. Animals are not rational creatures, so they cannot possibly make the choice to be murdered on screen. Does the absence of logic make killing OK? If so, what if one were to film the murder of a retarded child, or a person in a coma? These people are incapable of making rational decisions, just like a monkey. Does that make it OK to film them and make money off of their exploitation? Furthermore, are you (am I?) a hypocrite for eating meat and having no problem with it whatsoever? (The answer, of course, is yes, I am a hypocrite, and I'm only offended by the killing of animals when I am forced to see where my food comes from.)

The mere fact that these questions can be drawn from a horror film proves that there is a point, there is meaning behind the violence. I am perfectly willing to admit that. What I cannot do is sift through the footage, objectively, and attempt to attach said meaning to it. I have found the limits of what I can watch. One one hand, this is comforting to me. On the other hand, the image of a turtle being mudered is etched on my mind forever now. I have never been affected by a film like I have been by CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST.

Look: when I was six or so, my family raised rabbits. They had baby rabbits. My friend and I were playing with the baby rabbits in the backyard one day, and we were having them run through a tube from one end to the other. In my naivete, I picked up the tube with a rabbit inside of it, and ended up breaking the bunny's neck. I killed it. I didn't even really have any concept of death up until then. I stared at the rabbit and understand that it did not exist anymore, that there was no life in it and that that was because of me. I've had a moral objection to killing ever since then. I was a vegetarian for several years during college. I eat meat again, now, and I have a guilty conscience because of it. CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, in other words, made me think about things that I would prefer not to think about.

Halloween night is always kind of a letdown. When you're a kid, you've still got the actual trick or treating to look forward to. But when you grow up, you don't have a single thing to look forward to, unless you're going to a Halloween party, and who's going to have a Halloween party on a Tuesday night? (In 2008, though, watch out!) I went to the bar for a bit with my girlfriend and met a few friends, had a couple of "spooky" drinks, and then got some burgers. Later, we'll fall asleep watching HALLOWEEN on AMC for the third time this month. As a child, I used to make haunted houses with my friends. Never content to just take the kids through the basement and stick their hands in cold spaghetti, we'd have Slayer tapes blasting in my friend Jeremy's basement, and we'd have them go through the entire house. One of my friends had a demon mask with a tongue sticking out, and so we included a scene with two male monsters making out on a table, in order to educate the kids on the fact that homosexuality is genetic and even occurs in monsters. We also got one skinny kid to hide behind a refrigerator and shake it from side to side, screaming. The effect was that there was someone trapped inside, shrieking to be left out. The highlight was a little kid's dad freaking out and ordering us to "TURN THE LIGHTS ON, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!"

I have decided that next year, I will make a haunted house with some friends. Why should the 10 year olds have all the fun on October 31? I still feel sick when thinking about CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, and I imagine I'll continue to feel sick about it for the foreseeable future. That comforts me, and I am now ready for October to be over. I've watched enough horror flicks for one month. BORAT should be a good palate cleanser.

TWO EVIL EYES (Argento/Romero, 1990)

2006-10-30T09:43:00.000-05:00

Was driving home the other day and I realized that I hadn't watched or reviewed a single Romero film for this project. Odd, as he's my favorite horror director, and maybe my favorite director in general.

This is a two piece (is anthology the correct term if there's only two parts?) film with one part directed by George A. Romero and one half directed by Dario Argento. Both were taken from Poe short stories. The Romero part ("The Facts of the Case of Mr. Valdemar") was pretty much just there, more like an extended TALES FROM THE CRYPT episode than a Romero social parable. There's a cheating wife waiting to collect the fat inheritance check from her soon-to-dead-husband. Hubby gets hypnotized and when he dies, he's still under. Dude never knows he's dead or something, and soon the wife hears thumps coming from the freezer they stashed him in. Hijinks go down, and, like a TALES episode, everyone ends up dead.

Argento's half, "The Black Cat", is pretty great, though. Harvey Keitel is in it, giving a fine paranoid, manic performance as a crime scene photographer whose girlfriend finds a black cat which Keitel is convinced is about to kill him. Classic Argento psychlogical terror here, with great stylish camera movements and Keitel actually strangling a cat on camera. Later, he tries to lynch the cat with an electrical cord. Things go totally WICKER MAN for a bit, and there's also a Tom Atkins cameo. Great, forgotten film that more people should make an effort to track down.

(Bonus: my copy was an old VHS rental, with a trailer for SCANNERS II: THE NEW ORDER before it. Looks pretty horrible, but it does include the line from a narrator stating, "Nothing can stop a scanner. Except for perhaps another scanner." It probably doesn't read correctly, but when it's delivered in The Movie Guy Voice, it's pretty absurd. This makes me realize that I didn't include any Cronenberg in the project. Always next year, amiright?

KINDRED SPIRITS: Patton Oswalt's blog

2006-10-29T16:11:00.000-05:00

Hey, so apparently Patton Oswalt is going the exact same thing as I am, except with short stories. Check out his myspace blog for an entire month's worth of ruminations on macabre little ditties from Richard Matheson, Lovecraft, and the like. Actually, check out his blog in general, as Patton is amazingly funny. (NOTE: you may need to register for myspace to read it, I'm not sure. I don't recommend registering for myspace to anyone, but if you're dead-set on reading it, then you might not have a choice. Whatevs.)

DEMONS (Bava, 1985)

2006-10-29T16:04:00.000-05:00

I don't know, guys. It's hard for me to even write seriously about this one. Obviously, it's set in Berlin in the mid-80s for a reason, but I'm just still disgusted by it and while watching it, my skin was crawling and whatever subtext was there was just too obscure and deep for me to get to.

I think I'll get it a Joe Bob Briggs treatment, and be done with it.

One naked breast. 26 dead bodies. Two lynchings. 11 decapitations. Eyeball popping. One motorcycle attack scene. Two transformation scenes, one which sees a girl's teeth falling out and being replaced by fans, and another in which a demon claws its way out of a girl's back. Gratuitous Go West. Gratuitous Motley Crue. Gratuitous on-screen cocaine use (out of a Coke can, too!). Nipple tweaking via razor blade. Helicoptor fu. Kitana blade fu. Nostradamus fu. Drive-in Hall of Fame award for Bettina Ciampolini for saying "Hey hot dog, next time let's rip off a Ferrari, this heap's got no class", and Bobby Rhodes for saying "We got to stop it I tell you, we got to stop the movie!". Travis says check it out.

IT'S ALIVE (Cohen, 1974)

2006-10-28T19:20:00.000-04:00

Perhaps I should preface this review by proclaiming my eternal hatred for kids. I find them petulant and spoiled and hopelessly self-centered, and one of the primary causes for the complete boring direction the country has taken in recent years. We spent our time worrying about the children, taking toys off the markets and putting warning labels on cigarettes and CDs. Our culture is awash in the fear of sexual predators, school violence, and teenage pregnancy, and so the government is more than happy to seize control away from us (us, all of us rational, thinking human begins, fully capable of making our own choices), all in the name of making things safer for kids.

Fuck kids, and fuck the suffocating, anti-freedom landscape they've helped to develop.

Now then. Larry Cohen's IT'S ALIVE starts off as a delicious deconstruction of the American family and, while it veers off the tracks towards the end and we get a Changed Husband Who Realizes The Importance Of The Family Bond, we also get to see the post partum mother and a baby killing adults with razor sharp teeth and claws. Children are something to be feared. This is completely different from the usual portrait of the child in the American picture. Horror films have always been among the most daring in terms of presenting terrifying little kids to us (from THE OMEN to THE RING), but IT'S ALIVE for a short while seems as if it's going to be one of the few to take that extra little step and Kill The Kid. The Davis baby ultimately survived for a couple more sequels, but things get truly dark for a while and it seems as if we're going to have the father murder his own son. It doesn't quite turn out that way, but the fact that Cohen is willing to almost go there is respectable, if not ultimately disappointing and a cop-out.

There are references to toxins and pollutants mutating the Davis family baby, but it's not really an environmentalist film. What IT'S ALIVE is is a meditation on the nature of evil and what role the creators have in the development of our society's monsters. Is it the parent's fault that their kid came out of the womb a demonic killing machine? If not, then who else? After all, the baby is nothing more than sheer instinct, completely devoid of societal conditioning. If we're never told what's right and what's wrong, how can we be expected to know the difference? Society and commerce is more than ready to hold the baby accountable for his crimes, condemning it to death and ordering its destruction so that it won't affect the sales of the drugs that the mother took that perhaps lead to its monstrous state. The father of the freak takes it upon himself to slay the monster, referencing Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN and slapping around his disrespectful wife.

Again, IT'S ALIVE in the end has a daring father fighting to save his deformed, mutant child (called a "retard" at one point in a gloriously un-PC moment), but we realize that it is futile and pointless. Even if it lives for the sequel, does anyone remember IT LIVES AGAIN?

SAW (Wan, 2004)

2006-10-27T14:05:00.000-04:00

The SAW franchise is something that I initially resisted. From what I could tell, the choppy, MTV-inspired music video editing was overly-stylish and juvenile. The fact that its chief audience was mindless teenagers didn't help matters. But in 2005, there was not a lot of horror fare to choose from when October rolled around. Brandie and I actually went to see THE FOG in theatres, simply because it was the only genre picture in cinemas at the time. So SAW II seemed like a godsend, something that wasn't PG-13 and would be a good October Movie. I wasn't expecting much, but SAW II was far from a watered-down sequel set to cash in on the success of the original. The violence was gritty and realistic, just like my favorite horror films. I enjoyed it, despite the fact that the flashy cuts and generally bad acting took me out of it at some points. SAW II is a rare case of a whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The film fearlessly threw a helpless ex-heroin addict into a bit of syringes; amazing, I thought, and not at all what I was expecting. Graphic and grim in tone, SAW II was a pleasure.

It took me a whole year to get around to the original. I watched the uncut special edition. Since I never saw SAW in cinemas, I can't say what was cut for the theatrical release, but there is some truly explicit imagery which, according to director James Wan, was not supposed to be there at first. It seems as if the initial aim of the film was to be a "psychological thriller" along the lines of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS or SEVEN. It's always nice to see young directors ditch that slightly-pretentious, high-faluting room and just make a straight up nihilistic horror film. This of course also refers to people like Michael Heneke, who make horror films that ultimately seek to mock the genre and the audience. The label "thriller" is just a respectable way of saying "horror movie", and in the mid-90s, essentially killed the horror picture. SCREAM changed all that, of course, but that's neither here nor there. The point is, James Wan, Leigh Wannell, and Darren Lynn Bousman are not afraid of getting blood on their hands and they're not afraid of making dark, horrific films where everyone dies. This is a good thing for the genre.

Yes, I tried my hardest to fight against the SAW series for a while, and now I have no memory of why I even bothered. They're all realistic and gory, and the original helped kick off the American return to the grindhouse aesthetic. (Although I'd like to think that HIGH TENSION, released in France in 2003, truly signalled the return, HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES unfortunately probably had just as much a direct influence, as well as THE TEXAS CHAINSAW remake (again, unfortunately).) Most of the reviews of the original that I read referenced SEVEN, making it seem like just another simple rip-off of that much-imitated Fincher film, but SAW is a lot more visceral than SEVEN. Also, despite some half-baked philosophical concepts running throughout about how people don't appreciate being alive, SAW never seems to take itself as seriously as SEVEN did. The trite FIGHT CLUBisms get old after a while, but I suppose a serial killer with an idealogy behind what he's doing is scarier than someone like Jason Vorhees or Fred Krueger, who are just unexamined, undead, killing-machine monsters.

Graphic violence and gore abound, and SAW definitely fullfills the first rule of the drive-in, which is, again, Anyone Can Die At Any Time. The SAW pictures are exercises in hysteria and bloody murder, and while the first one never achieves the pure nihilistic vision of the sequel, the sheer audacity and mayhem is ultimately satisfying. It's probably pointless to even place something this repulsive in a larger context, but fuck it, that's what I'm here for. It's impossible to watch something like SAW (or HOSTEL or THE DEVIL'S REJECTS or any of the other Splat Pack pics) and not see it as a reaction against the new puritianism. Our scripture-quoting, gun-slinging President isn't that far from one of Garth Ennis' homocidial creations, but what's always been scariest about him, to me anyway, is his undying, unblinking, unwavering devotion to the Guy On The Cross. While I don't doubt that many within his inner circle snicker at the cow-eyed masses, looking into Bush's stupid, stupid eyes, you cannot help but realize that he believes all this. I wouldn't be so offended by the notion of Christianity (indeed, I'd think them all mindless and boringly irrelevant) except that their primary religious text is being used to guide public policy. It's not just tits on television and the censorship of movies, it's also homosexual marriage and the right to abortion and contraceptives.

The SAW films stand in direct opposition to all of the ideas that Christianity (and, in turn, our Christian leadership) holds dear. And the fact that people are going in droves to see them is heartening and (I hope I hopeihope) a sign of a general turning away from the new puritanism. Long live the SAW. Can't wait for the third one.

CARRIE (De Palma, 1976)

2006-10-26T20:42:00.000-04:00

Nothing sums up my memories of high school better than Brian De Palma's landmark from 1976. OK, so I wasn't tormented endlessly like Carrie. And I never had pig's blood dumped on me. I did, however, have a horrible religious upbringing that still sticks with me to this day, and I was taunted by my peers, and I felt awkward in my own skin and I did theatre and felt uncomfortable around people in general but girls especially. I am not here to ask your pity. Oh, quite the opposite, I am here to stand triumphant and proud of the fact that I survived without going Columbine.

OK, so maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. I could've had it worse. But there still was a select group of people who seemed to take great pleasure in making me miserable. And I still spent most of my time with people that I haven't seen since graduation and have no desire whatsoever to see at this point. High school was a terrible time, and it was probably a terrible time for everyone. I've seen some people since graduation, and they seem OK, but I can count on one hand the number of people that I hang out with that I knew in high school (can count them on two fingers, actually). And truth be told, watching Carrie burn down her senior prom gives me chills and only makes me wish I could go back in order to do the same thing.

Listen. I had a rough day today. I spend my day talking to mentally ill people who have been conditioned by psychiatrists to believe that they are helpless and genetically flawed, with the only solution medication. I have to try to convince these people that they are not flawed, that they're functioning human beings and they can do things for themselves. Some people are not so easily convinced. Today I seemed to have a high number who were not easily convinced at all. So it was a long day, and all I wanted to do all day long was come home, draw the shades, drink rum straight out the bottle, and watch high school kids get burnt alive. And so that's what I did.

What's my favorite moment of it all? I think it's Carrie and Tommy dancing at the prom. I went to three proms, truth be told. My first was in tenth grade, and I'd been in a car accident the weekend before and fucked up my leg. I sat at the table all night and stared at other people having fun. My second year I spent with the girl I was head over heels in love with. I felt socially awkward and fought the urge to simply run out of the place all night. My senior prom, I went with a girl I sort of had a crush on but who had already given her heart to god. I was also dating the girl I took to prom the year before, but we'd only gotten together like a week before prom and I'd asked the girl I went with like months before, so I spent the night trying to balance out the girl I was dating and the girl I initially asked to prom. Who hated each other, by the way. They were three uniquely horrible nights.

Again, I'm exaggerating.

CARRIE, at its core, is a story about what happens when you deny your basic human nature. Carrie has spent her entire life trying to fight her sexuality, trying to keep the blood from flowing, trying to keep things with her mother nice and quiet. But then the blood does flow, and it doesn't stop until the end, baby. Because that's what repression brings about. Explosions and fire and the death of all of your classmates. I am drunk. What a great fucking movie.

KINDRED SPIRITS: The Onion AV Club

2006-10-26T16:42:00.000-04:00

Two similiar type things on the Onion AV Club site this week (and one final thought):

01. HORROR FILMS FOR LEFT WINGERS / HORROR FILMS FOR RIGHT WINGERS is a pretty good read. Some if it seems pretty easy (HOMECOMING, LAND OF THE DEAD, AMERICAN PSYCHO, THEY LIVE) but their inclusion of EYES WITHOUT A FACE is killer, and I've got to hand it to them for nailing that piece of shit, Pat Robertson-ghostwritten EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE. But, a bone (no pun intended) to pick: LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. Uh, guys? Craven's classic was penned as a reaction to the Viet Nam War and, at its base, is really an indictment of the death penalty, where the punishers become the punished, and when the police burst in at the end of the film and the vengeful dad is swinging around a chainsaw, they can't tell who are the killers and who are the parents of the murdered girl. The point is, violence begat violence, and violence leads to more violence, and what difference does it make when you've got blood on your hands (and on the walls and your mouth and etc.).

02. CROSSTALK: THE STATE OF HORROR CINEMA is pretty good when Scott Tobias is writing, not so much when Noel Murray comes in. This is mostly due to the fact that Murray seems to put himself (or herself, I'm not sure) above the genre at all times and seems actually quite repelled by it. Which is fine. But why not track down another horror-loving writer to provide commentary? Or maybe the reason is to provide balance to the argument? Whatever; I still think that Murray comes across as condescending and not at all a fan of the genre.

03. BOOK REVIEW: WORLD WAR Z: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ZOMBIE WAR. I'm only like halfway through the book, but so far, it rules, and Brooks is our literary zombie savior. But does reviewer Keith Phibbs have any sense of zombie history whatsoever? "It's far more affecting than anything involving zombies really has any right to be"? "It feels like the right book for the times, and that's the eeriest detail of all"? Of all monsters to peg as socially irrelevant, zombies are probably the last ones you'd want to choose...

DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE (Gordon, 2005)

2006-10-25T16:04:00.000-04:00

Stuart Gordon, for a long while, has been one of my favorite directors in the whole splatter subgenre. I've never seen CASTLE FREAK or DOLLS and I've not yet gotten around to seeing EDMOND (though, let's face it, Mamet + William H. Macy + the guy behind RE-ANIMATOR = $$), but based upon DAGON, RE-ANIMATOR, and FROM BEYOND alone, Gordon is still a true legend and hero of the genre. He's a low budget maestro, a veteran of the theatre, and perhaps the greatest the genre has ever seen at making the macabre and horrific into something far more significant than one would ever think possible. His general theme of sex and death being linked may seem like old hat given the slasher sub-genre's existence, but anyone who's seen the "head" scene from RE-ANIMATOR has surely seen this old cliche given new life.

DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE, though, is clearly a mis-step and mediocre, at best. The effort is there, but, again, due to time and monetary constraints, nothing is as fully fleshed out as it could possibly be. Ideas are hinted at but never expanded or built upon. The performances are good and all, but there's no Jeffrey Combs (or acceptable fascimiles) to truly stand out. Perhaps most disappointingly, there is no delicious subtext to dig into, none of Gordon's usual close study of human nature and tragedy, and how we ridiculously react to these horrible things that happen in our lives.

I still hold out hope for HOUSE OF RE-ANIMATOR, which, mark my words, is going to be his return to form. Dennis Paoli script, William H. Macy playing the President, Herbert West as evil political advisor, GEORGE FN WENDT; this is going to rule.

AMERICAN PSYCHO (Harron, 2000)

2006-10-24T22:18:00.000-04:00

I didn't like AMERICAN PSYCHO when I first saw it, upon its video release. I think maybe I was still a bit too young and didn't really understand what it was going for. Which is strange, as at the time that I saw it, I was going through a total Marxist phase, power to the people and such, and was in an AP American History class where I openly mocked neocon classmates and called them Nazis. Why didn't AMERICAN PSYCHO resonate on a deeper level with me?

It's not like it's subtle or anything (though I did just catch the "Just say no" part for the first time upon this viewing). The social commentary is basically the equivilant of a sledgehammer (or an axe) (or a chainsaw). Bateman dances, fucks, snorts, murders, and lies his way through the full 90 minutes, ensuring that each and every second is filled with action of some type. It's all so over the top that you would think it's impossible to hold a grudge.

But a lot of people don't care for AMERICAN PSYCHO, which I guess I can understand. It paints in broad, damning colors, it's got bright pop music used ironically (and effectively), and it's got Jared Leto in it. There's a lot not to like here. But like it I do, just the same, and truly, I like it more because of all of these things. Leto gets axed in the head, the soundtrack is garish and horrible (excepting New Order, natch), and every male character is portrayed as sexist, racist, homophobic, Republican, and white. There is no room for the other here, but that's the point, obviously.

And that's the thing. Everything about AMERICAN PSYCHO is so obvious and superficial, it's hard to believe that there's anything working underneath. Even the subtext is plain spoken. Just the same, I think that there is a real undercurrent of pain and isolation. One review of the novel noted that all of Bateman's murders are attempts to connect to something real and geniune, outside of his plastic, material existence. That never really comes through in the film, but I think that there is a real attempt on Bateman's part to attain something abstract or intangible. The fact that he takes mercy on his secretary on their "date" is proof that there is something else to him, that Bateman is more than just pure instinct and animalistic rage. It's a single, fleeting moment, but it's there just the same.

Other than that, Bateman is a monster, a funny and realistic monster (which is, of course, the best kind). AMERICAN PSYCHO is a horror film, a fact which I've neglected up until this point, and it's a very good one at that. There are moments of intense violence and bright red gore (though nowhere near the level of the book's descriptions), and in one scene, Bateman even watches THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (for inspiration?). He's clearly a fan of the genre, and every fan of the genre should be a fan of AMERICAN PSYCHO. Great flick.

FUNNY GAMES (Heneke, 1997)

2006-10-23T20:51:00.000-04:00

I guess I'm taking a bit of liberty by placing this in the horror genre, and Michael Heneke would probably grimace at being included, but what the hell, UHM and DC are both covering news of the remake, so I'm throwing it in here and writing about it. It raises questions that no other movie I've watched this month has, and really, it's a meta-horror film, examining the genre and toying with our expectations and notions about horror. The things that occur are horrible and I wouldn't with them on my worst enemy, and it meets Joe Bob Briggs' first rule of the drive-in (anyone can die at any time), so that's good enough for me.

Sort of MAN BITES DOG by way of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, FUNNY GAMES is a story about a middle class family who gets tortured by two psychotic equally-as-middle-class prep school kids. There isn't much of a plot but a lot of people talking politely about horrific things. There is a ten minute unbroken shot in which nothing happens except we see a couple go through the stages of grieving and then break into hysterics. There is sudden, shocking violence that knocks you backwards by the sheer audacity of it all. This is all just another way of saying it's a Michael Heneke film.

As always, Heneke is dealing with the affluent in his film, but unlike most of his other work, there is no representation of the lower class for the upper one to exploit. Rather, all of the characters are portrayed as polite and courteous to each other, except for when they're shooting and stabbing and putting pillow cases over the heads of the children.

The Heneke backlash is in full effect, but the only directors worth watching are those that can polarize audiences. People call FUNNY GAMES genius or they call it complete and utter bullshit. That simply means it's interesting and worthy of discussing. I'm somewhere in between these two extremes. The commentary-within-the-film felt gimmicky and cringe-worthy, with characters talking directly to the camera (ie, the audience, ie, YOU), but I can respect its intent. By having the killer speak with the audience, he's implementing the viewer in the atrocities that are occuring on the screen. On an interview on the DVD, Heneke claims that the viewer does this every time he watches "this type of film" except for (wait for it) something like FUNNY GAMES, which he identifies as "self-reflexive".

So. FUNNY GAMES is a reaction to, say, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, where you're meant to cheer violence against the killers. But because FUNNY GAMES is sooo post-modern, it's exempted and somehow above the genre.

I like Heneke, I really do. I saw CACHE in the theatre this past winter and thought it was truly the best fucking movie I saw all year long. But he needs to fess up to what he's making: high brow exploitation flicks. When he cuts off a chicken's head in CACHE, how different is that from CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST? Heneke makes the argument that these animals die each and every single day, and people only bother to be offended by it when they're forced to see it. I can dig that. But he would also classify CACHE as something totally different than the average exploitation picture.

Fuck it, Heneke goes further than the average genre flick and he knows it. To a grindhouse fan, FUNNY GAMES becomes a satire on that sub-genre, but most people haven't seen MISS .45 and thus, can't really put FUNNY GAMES into that context. In my opinion, Heneke isn't even commenting on the horror genre, but rather the typical Hollywood action film. In that vein, I applaud Heneke for having the courage to KILL THE KID, which is somewhere that Hollywood usually won't go, unless there is a slow-killing disease involved or the child has somehow touched the life of others and they'll never forget him. Of course, I'm above all that and can appreciate it as a social comment, but then, I'm just a lot more educated than you, aren't I?

Fuck all that nonsense. FUNNY GAMES is a horror film, through and thought, plain and simple. It's as intense and terrifying as LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, which is all that I ask from my shock flicks. Heneke is perhaps elevating himself a bit above the genre and taking an ironic look at it, but what the fuck, horror could probably use that, especially when we all spend so much time tracking down obscure torture-and-rape-fests filmed in Uganda in 1979 by the little-known Bronx director Joey Ferrera that features an on-screen ejaculation in the eye of the female victim who ends up castrating one hundred men with a straight razor that they initially used to rape her. FUNNY GAMES makes the violence count, and it makes the violence hurt. It also reflects back at the viewer exactly what you're watching, and forces you to confront how you feel about it. I'm perfectly OK with cheering the death of a guy who has just murdered a little kid, but Heneke wants us to realize that we did actually just cheer for the death of a character. Where you stand politically on the death penalty probably colors this, but still, the intent is honorable.

More than that, though, FUNNY GAMES forces one to think about what we're looking for in the horror genre. What does one gain from watching two girls get raped and murdered in the woods? I've spent a long time asking myself that. Is it mere entertainment? Can we distances ourselves intellectually from it and place it into some sort of larger cultural context or make them socially relevant (which, of course, is the entire purpose of this blog)? For now, I need a palate cleanser, so I'm going to go put on STELLA. I've had enough horror for one day.

(ADDENDUM: how about Hollywood casting? I know they've got Naomi Watts locked in, but I think Paul Rudd would make a great Paul, and Philip Seymour Hoffman would be great as Peter. Throw another bankable face in the husband role (Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck, Leo, what difference does it make?) and get a kid whose parents are willing to let him get slapped around on-screen, and I'd shell out $20 for it in the theatre. I really can't believe that both FUNNY GAMES and LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT are both being remade in the same year. This is going to be the watershed moment for the horror redux craze, I think. Will the world shell out $100 mill to see Jessica Beil made to piss her low-rise jeans? Stay tuned.)

HALLOWEEN (Carpenter, 1978)

2006-10-22T22:32:00.000-04:00

Perhaps the ultimate October Movie, John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN is stylish and cool and scary all at the same time. There has been a body of literature written about the film over the years, ranging from its influence on the slasher sub-genre to its treatment of female sexuality to its impact on the independent film in Hollywood. I'm not going to pretend that I can bring something new to the table. I'd much rather shed new light on something like MANIAC than try to present an original thought on something like HALLOWEEN.

Two things, though:

01. I'm really excited about Rob Zombie's remake, though I'm sure I didn't come across as too glowing in my review of THE DEVIL'S REJECTS. I think that REJECTS proved Zombie can make a good film, and I went as Captain Spaulding to a couple of Halloween parties this past weekend (visual proof!), and I think he can bring something really fresh to the basic concept of the story.

02. One thing I only caught onto recently, despite having seen this film probably twenty times, at least, is the way that Carpenter portrays suburban life. I think my absolute favorite moment is Laurie running to her neighbor's front door and banging on it, pleading for help. The porch light switches on, someone is home and hears her, but then it flips off, and the door never opens. Carpenter is saying something with images here, much like the way the tree-lined streets cast ominous shadows, or how a jack o' lantern sitting on a porch seems creepy. HALLOWEEN is Americana turned blackly sinister, layers of the suburbs peeled back to reveal something creepy and crawly sliding around underneath. Teenagers fuck while their parents are out of the house and murders happen in living rooms and garages. These symbols of prosperity and safety turn out to be the things that trap us, in the end. We'll discuss this more in our next entry...

THE DEVIL'S REJECTS (Zombie, 2005)

2006-10-21T13:01:00.000-04:00

Much has been written about what a visceral film THE DEVIL'S REJECTS is, but upon my initial viewing of it in a movie theatre in July 2006, the only emotional reaction I had was that of disappointment. I had seen HIGH TENSION in a theatre with my girlfriend only a month or so before, and that French film had left me shocked and numb, thrilled and disgusted. LAND OF THE DEAD had followed shorly thereafter, and while it was no DAWN OF THE DEAD, it was Romero's most political and (possibly) gory film to date and had been satisfying to be sure. It seemed like the Summer of Grind for a short little while, and REJECTS, from all I'd read, was only going to expand upon that. Reviews claimed it was hard to watch at times, that the violence was gritty and realistic, and that there were no heroes, only those with the least blood on their hands.

REJECTS was all of these things, but just not to the degree that I would have liked. Hardened viewers have seen all of the film's tricks in the past, and done better, too. I came out feeling gilted and let down. Where were the limit-pushing scenes? Yes, REJECTS has the hotel room sequence, which is scary and effective, but if you've seen LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, then you've seen it before, where it was scarier and more effective. I saw it with a large group of friends, and my girlfriend and I seemed to be the only ones who enjoyed it. I felt the desire to defend it later on that night to my friends, placing it into a larger cultural context and explaining the pedigree of films like this. It's a very different type of horror film, especially to those used to long lines of FRIDAY THE 13TH sequels and WHITE NOISE. I tried my hardest to argue in favor of THE DEVIL'S REJECTS because, deep down, I still wanted to love it. But I didn't, and wouldn't, for a couple more months.

I got it on DVD and re-watched it, and immediately I picked up on things that I missed the first time. I spent the entire first viewing waiting for the film to go further, to make me uncomfortable and queasy, but that never happened. But in November, in my bedroom, watching the film alone, it was a different experience. I was able to enjoy it. Listening to the commentary track, one can plainly see Zombie is a smart guy who knows cinema and what he's doing. I enjoyed THE DEVIL'S REJECTS the second time around, when there were no expectations to be met and I could view it on its own terms, rather than mine.

I've had a weird relationship with this film, but now I think it's one of the finest horror films of the 00s (incidently, how do you say that? The Aughts? The Oh-Ohs? The Double Zeroes? They all sound like 1977 UK punk band names.). I can appreciate it with a degree of distance, rather than as THE MOST EXXXXTREME FILM YOU'LL EVER SEE! Zombie has created characters that are funny and likeable and ruthless serial killers, and you're left to process how you feel about that. The violence is intense and realistic, and the soundtrack is great. The opening sequence, set to "Midnight Rider" is terrific and a wonderful mood-setter. Ken Foree, Michael Berryman, Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, PJ Soles, Priscilla Barnes, Danny Trejo, DDP, Brian Posehn, and Ginger Lynn Allen all have roles, giving fans of trash culture the chance to play Spot the Cult Figure.

But ultimately, that's what bothers me about THE DEVIL'S REJECTS. Not so much the star-borrowing, but the references to the past films of the genre. It's obvious that Zombie has a deep affection for the grindhouse drive-in classics of the past, but right now, everyone else does, too. Grind is the flavor of the month (SAW I, II, and III, THE HILLS HAVE EYES remake, HIGH TENSION, WOLF CREEK, HOSTEL, the new TEXAS CHAINSAW pictures, the upcoming TURISTAS and LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT remake) and REJECTS, in the end, just feels like another 70s influenced horror flick. This is not a slight against the film, but rather the oversaturation of the grindhouse aesthetic at this point in time. If this were released in 2001, then it would feel revolutionary and classic. I still recommend it and love it, but I think that it's just a victim of circumstance.

THE HITCHER (Harmon, 1986)

2006-10-20T08:22:00.000-04:00

This is another one of my favorites. THE HITCHER is an exercise in restraint and nuance, rarities indeed in the context of the horror genre, which usually strives to show more More MORE of the gore and sex and everything else, too, really. Relationships and motives are not fully explained, nor do they need to be. Truth be told, it's much scarier to consider that the horrible things that happen in the film were done for no reason at all, that there was no prime motivator or psychiatric illness at work.

The story is pretty simple. A young guy, Jim, driving a car cross country to California for a car transporting service picks up a hitchhiker who turns out to be a serial killer. The Hitcher, who says his name is John Ryder, then proceeds to keep popping up, even though Jim kicks him out of the car and thinks he ditches him. The Hitcher proceeds to make life for Jim miserable in some pretty inventive ways. Along the way, basically an entire police force gets murdered, a helicoptor wrecks in the desert, Jim nearly eats a human finger, a woman is quartered via 18 wheeler, a gas station explodes, Jim gets framed for Ryder's crimes, a day-trippin family gets butchered, and Ryder says stuff like "I cut off his legs. And his arms. And his head."

It's a true drive-in classic, and Rutger Hauer is simply amazing as the cooly psychotic Ryder. The story is sort of a mash-up between that other masterpiece of drive-in sleaze, DUEL, and Americonic urban legends about hitchhikers and the long, wide open road. It's a good mash-up, though, more Girl Talk than Jay-Zeezer, and most of it's thanks to Hauer, who is icy and extremely crazy at the same time and makes it all work due to some type of unspoken bond between Jim and Ryder. "Why are you doing this?" asks Jim, and Ryder replies, "Because I want you to stop me." What's that mean?

Further, what's it mean when Hauer places coins in Jim's eyes when they're seated together at a diner? What's it mean when Jim takes Ryder's hand and holds him for a few seconds? What's Ryder mean when he says, "You're smart kid. Figure it out." Jim never does, and neither does the audience, but that's what makes it all so damned good. You don't know what to make of the seeming father-son relationship that seems to exist between Driver and Hitcher. Is it a psychic bond? Does Ryder want Jim to take over for him (doubtful, in light of the fact that THE HITCHER 2 starred Jake Busey; ugh)? Is it a homoerotic relationship? THE HITCHER doesn't want us to know, not for sure, and this nagging insistence on providing no closure is ultimately so very satisfying.

THE HITCHER is a restrained exploration into growth from innocence to maturity, with Ryder guiding Jim through a nasty little baptism by fire, until he reaches the point when he can "stop" Ryder. The climax is blood-on-the-windsheild good, with Ryder carrying out righteous vengence against Ryder. All very Biblical cool. When it's all said and done, we know just as little as we did when Jim said, "My mother told me never to do this" and picked up a hitchhiker against his better judgement. But isn't that how it always ends.

AUDITION (Miike, 1999)

2006-10-19T23:37:00.000-04:00

Takashi Miike is a genius. I find this point not even open to debate. Anyone who attempts to tell me otherwise will be met only with ridicule and disdain. AUDITION, to me, is his crowning moment (though I've seen only a smattering of the, what, 150 movies he made in the past 10 or so years). It's a complete and utter masterpiece, a twisted little social satire that never gets explicit in its message, instead piling on creepy visuals and layering subtext on top of deep undertones. His disciples, like Eli Roth, could learn a lot from the subtely of this picture. I realize that "subtle" isn't one word you'd usually think of to describe Miike's work, which is typically filled with gore and rape and the most disturbing imagery you'll ever see, but AUDITION is truly a work of gentle beauty and tense wonder.

Things begin innocently enough, with a story that seems jacked from a Tom Hanks vehicle. Shigeharu is a widower who gets tired of being alone. His movie producer friend encourages him to hold a fake audition and pick from all of the girls who try out for the lead. It's here that Shigeharu meets Asami, an injured ballet dancer who mystifies him. Things get strange after that, but I won't spoil what happens for anyone who's never seen it. I typically don't give a fuck for spoilers, but this is one time I'll make an exception.

OK, so I'll give a little, teensy bit away. AUDITION is a play on the horror film, wherein the Last Girl is actually a Last Guy, and the slasher is a girl. But it needs to be considered outside of the horror context, as well. It is set in Japan, land of arranged marriages and entrenched female deferrence. Shigeharu is quietly approached by several women, including his maid and his secretary (both in positions of servitude to him) and one of whom we later he actually did sleep with. He seems to ignore these women serving traditional roles, lamenting the loss of all the "nice" girls. He is drawn in by Asami, the ballet dancer (again, tradition), who is quiet and somewhat distant from him.

AUDITION also deals with loneliness. "All of Japan is lonely," one character says near the beginning, and Miike certainly makes it seem that way. Humans try to connect, but as one of the film's central themes indicates, you can never really know anyone. If you think you do, then you don't, plain and simple. Asami and Shigeharu are both profoundly lonely, but Asami feels she truly has no one, whereas Shigeharu has his son, the memory of his wife, his friends, his business associates. Relationships are ultimately about power; who holds it and who wants it. AUDITION plays out that power struggle in rich, lurid detail, culminating in one of the great ending sequences of our time. A classic of the 90s and the horror genre in general. Recommend it to anyone who says they hate horror. They'll either love it and buy you a drink in Miike's honor, or they'll never speak to you again. Either way, you win.

THE RETURN OF THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (Henkel, 1994)

2006-10-18T16:51:00.000-04:00

This writer viewed the film with my buddy, Phil, who had heard about it on the TCM e! TRUE HOLLYWOOD STORY. I'd had my copy for around a year now and wanted to finally get around to watching it. I'd read a lot about the sequel (which is, really, more of a remake), some good, some bad. But absolutely nothing could've prepared me for what followed. TCM4 is an absolute clusterfuck of a film, filled with some of the most inane dialogue delivered by some of the worst actors ever in a horror film. That's saying something, too. Several of the performances are so wooden and stilted that I had to believe they were purposefully terrible.

Henkel is a good writer, I think, but this thing was just a mess. He tries to link together conspiracy theories into the CHAIN SAW legacy, and it just ends up falling flat on its own face. McConaughey was just so over the top as to be unbelievable, and I hate Zelweger, so there wasn't much here to enjoy. A lot of reviews I've read on IMDb focus on Leatherface's cross-dressing, but they seem to forget that he's dressed like a woman in the original, too.

Is this a spoof? It's not smart enough to be considered satire. Henkel tries to link together literary references and governmental conspiracies, but ultimately, it's incoherent and absurd. Not that these are necessarily bad things, but you get the sense they weren't intended to turn out that way. I've read the film is a victim of editing, so I'll reserve total judgement. I will say that there are laughs to be had from the film; they're just not intentional. Unless they were.

THE VANISHING (Sluzier, 1988)

2006-10-17T13:37:00.000-04:00

A man and his wife go on a driving holiday and stop at a rest stop. The woman goes into the store and gets some beer. The man stays at the car. The woman never comes out. The man spends three years searching for her and one day, the kidnapper contacts him and tells him he can show him what he did to her. What would you do? Is the searching more important than the actual truth, the knowledge of what happened? Or would you lose something when the search ended? THE VANISHING takes these fairly essential questions and plays them out in the form of an epic French horror film. It is French, which means that people say things like "The loneliness was unbearable" but, no shit, this is a seriously wonderful film that everyone should see.

THE VANISHING has, simply put, the greatest twist ending and one of the greatest sequences in all of horror history. I won't give it away for anyone who's never seen it, because the effect works best when you have no clue what's coming. Suffice it to say, the man's going to end up wishing he didn't know what happened. The ending is nasty and sad and beautiful, all at once.

But, again, the real beauty lies in the getting there. THE VANISHING gives away the identity of the kidnapper within the first ten minutes of the film. The question, then, isn't whodunit, but whydhedoit? Isn't that so much more interesting, anyway? The plot folds out and unpeels itself slowly, revealing rich layers typically not explored within the horror genre. There is no gore, no rape, no monsters and no explosions. There is simply the dark heart of man, the knowledge that we are all capable of good and evil, amazing highs and debilitating lows.

Sluzier's characters spend their lives attempting to find truth or perfection, and by the end, they both realize that neither is worthwhile, that truth is void and trying to find it is pointless. In the end, all there is is vast emptiness and darkness, and all the knowledge in the world can't change that.

2001 MANIACS (Sullivan, 2005)

2006-10-16T19:53:00.000-04:00

On one of the DVD's special features, director slash co-writer Tim Sullivan claims, "2001 MANIACS is not a subtle film." That is an understatement, and calling it an understatement is probably another understatement. In one scene, a black character is killed by a cotton press. A gay character is rammed through the rectum with a spear that ends up coming out his mouth. Sheep are fucked. Cousins kiss. There are tits and S&M and disembodied limbs and oh so many decapitated heads. And it's all so gloriously over-the-top and campy that it never offends but, instead, entertains. It also all tends to blur together into one big sight gag after a while. But if the thing is going to blur together, better it blurs into a big red blob as opposed to a big gray one, correct? After all, anything worth doing is worth over-doing.

Eli Roth produced, so you know you're going to get the goods in terms of kill scenes. But Roth being attached means that he also brings his brand of superficial social conscience. It's a throwback to 80s pictures, with too much sex and gore and decadence and stupid fucking college kids being stupid fucking college kids, but like HOSTEL, it also tries its hand at social commentary. It almost seems as if guys like Roth and Sullivan feel the need to prove they spent as much time growing up with Romero and Carpenter as they did with Jason and Freddy. Also like HOSTEL, the subtext is so under-developed that it ends up just falling flat and feeling meaningless, tacked on.

The story is pretty simple: some partying kids from the North take a detour on their way to Daytona Beach and end up in Pleasant Valley, Georgia, just in time for the annual Blood and Guts Jubilee. They hang out and fuck some locals for a while before meeting their grisly ends. There's a twist at the end but it doesn't feel jolting or shocking, but just sort of natural. Robert Englund stars, and holds together, the whole thing as the wonderfully-animated, yet never cartoonish, Mayor Buckman. It's pretty amazing to watch this back-to-back with EATEN ALIVE and see the same guy, thirty years apart, turning in two different performances. He is so much better in MANIACS than EATEN ALIVE, and it's easy to see why he's so beloved within the genre. He clearly holds a deep affection for horror and its pictures, and he's a boon to the entire community.

I could now take time to complain about the continued Puritanesque equation of teenage sex with death that lives on strong in the horroe genre. I could, if I wasn't all-too-glad to see the fratboys beheaded, castrated, and violently dissolved via acid bong. I just finished my undergrad, which means I spent the last four years with these fucking idiots. Stuff like HOSTEL and 2001 MANIACS ends up being cathartic. So what if I spent all four of my Spring Breaks toiling away at a gas station? I could've been in Georgia being brutally murdered and eaten by a town full of Confederate zombies. See? I was right all along.

EATEN ALIVE (Hooper, 1977)

2006-10-15T22:37:00.000-04:00

EATEN ALIVE doesn't seem to get a lot of love, or, for that matter, print. I found my copy (which seems to not be the uncut version, from what I've read) at BLOBFEST 2005 from a vendor on the street, and I'd never even heard of it before, which is odd, considering it was Hooper's follow up to CHAIN SAW and that Robert Englund plays a major role almost ten years before NIGHTMARE made him a genre legend.

But maybe the reason that no one ever talks about EATEN ALIVE is that it just sort of is silly and not really very good. This is in spite of the wonderful Neville Brand turn as a tortured WWII vet-cum-hotel-owner who freaks out and starts feeding people to his aligator that he swears is really a crocodile. It's set in Louisiana's swamps and features Hooper's stock characters: terrifying rednecks who do wretched things to The Other. The Other in EATEN ALIVE is a bunch of people from the Big City coming into the backwoods and meeting their fate. The city people are portrayed as neurotic pill poppers, and their doom is assured. They exist for no reason but to meet their end and, in several cases, survive, surely only to become even more neurotic in the aftermath. Sound familiar?

EATEN ALIVE is a whole lot like TEXAS CHAIN SAW, but where as SAW was essentially asexual (aside from Leatherface's gender-bending), EATEN ALIVE is crawling with horrific sexual violence right from the opening shots (don't miss Englund's opening line which Tarantino pilfered for KILL BILL VOL. 1, too). It's sort of the evolution of Hooper's realistic brand of ultraviolence, as he branches out and discovers that the implied threat of rape is probably the scariest thing you can commit to film. There are several really effective sequences in EATEN ALIVE; not quite at the level of the bad trip that CHAIN SAW is, but they are still grisly and unrelenting. Hooper really lets the weirdness run rampant, though, as Neville mumbles and stumbles his way through several creepy monologues where you can barely make out what he's saying. It's a good case of Hooper burying the vocals low in the mix and Neville just looking like a fucking psychopath.

But that's essentially what EATEN ALIVE is good for, a snapshot of Hooper's development as a filmmaker. It's not nearly as good as CHAIN SAW and is in no way essential. It's for completists, those who wish to see where Hooper started and where he went after his first feature became the drive-in legend that it was. If you're a fan of his work, then by all means, track it down, but if you're faced with the choice between EATEN ALIVE or THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, well, you know who you're picking.

PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (Wood, 1959)

2006-10-14T11:05:00.000-04:00

So somehow I went to see GWAR and only got one splotch of the good red stuff on me. What the fuck is up with that. But regardless, it was a great night, all set to a mixtape including "The Number of the Beast", "Friday the 13th Part 2" by Frightmare, and "Thriller". I got extremely drunk in the car ride there and when we stopped on the PA turnpike for an ATM tap, I drank a shot of Cabo Wabo in a turnpike stall. While in there, I discovered that some dastardly kids had taped a Chick Tract up in the stall, so I ripped it off and then proceeded to tear hate literature down from the rest of the stall doors. The enterprising little bastards thought they covered the entire truckstop, but I showed them, didn't I? There was a group standing outside around a couple of vans who had the awkward teenaged boringness that suggested they were a youth group going on a retreat for the weekend, so we theorized that it was them who put the tracts up. We drove by them blasting "Angel of Death" and Brossman screeched like a banshee into the night air. Anyway, the Red Chord fucking blazed. Third time seeing them live and fuckin' A they rule. GWAR of course brought down the house by beheading George Bush and doing all sorts of unspeakable acts upon that stage. Municipal Waste we missed.

Oh, but the movie. We hit the bar when we got home and did a bunch of shots, then hung out with some cats for a while before heading home. Brandie and I watched this drunk on Rob Zombie's TCM underground thing, which was actually really cool. Anytime you get Roger Corman and Sid Haig on TV talking about campy horror flicks is a good time. PLAN 9 I have on DVD but watching it on a late night shlock show seemed like the best way to experience it for the first time. But like I said...really, really fucking drunk. I seem to remember something about vampires from outer space? There were swaying tombstones, too, right? And Bela Lugosi is replaced mid-scene and you're not supposed to notice or something. Again, really drunk. But something tells me that a sober viewing of this wouldn't be much more coherent than the hazy one I had, huh?

You know, Ed Wood was deliciously inept as a filmmaker, but there is a campy energy and fucking fun in his pictures that's oh-so-absent in modern horror cinema. The differences between Uwe Boll and Ed Wood are: one, that Wood worked on shoestring budgets and had to use imagination to create his pictures, whereas Boll scams government funding and has modern effects to fall back on; and, more importantly, two, that Wood's films have a completely fun nature alive inside of them, whereas Boll indulges in non-sense like boxing net geek critics and saying things like his next movie (gasp, not a video game adaptation) will redefine the horror genre in terms of extreme gore. Yes, that sentence did just have both a colon and a semi-colon in it.

The point is, the world (not just the horror world, but the World world) needs more Ed Woods and less Uwe Bolls.

(Real analysis tomorrow, I promise. I need something meaty to sink my teeth into. It'll be fun.)

GGGWWWAAARRR

2006-10-13T17:10:00.000-04:00

No movie tonight, because we're all off to see the Red Chord, Municipal Waste, and mfin GWAR. I'll post pictures of what my white t-shirt looks like, though.

CHOCOLATE (Garris, 2005)

2006-10-12T23:13:00.000-04:00

Not sure how I feel about Garris overall, but I actually thought this was pretty good and creepy. Henry Thomas (who apparently was the main kid from ET? WTF.) plays Jamie, a thirtysomething whose wife ditches him, taking the kid and leaving him in a big, empty apartment. He's depressed and doesn't go out much. Things get weird when he starts having visions of a beautiful young girl, Catherine, who is in danger and does some pretty stupid stuff. In a BEING JOHN MALKOVICH moment, he actually enters her body and sees what she sees, feels what she feels.

The joke of sorts is on him. Jamie thinks his life is empty and the only way to provide any meaning is by finding this girl, helping her get out of trouble, saving her. In the process, maybe she'll save him. It is a naive and stupid thing, of course, but Jamie is also slowly losing his mind. It's an interesting story, and I appreciate the double entrende there (whereas Jamie is empty, Catherine is full, what with having two people inside of her, ha ha ha), but ultimately, there just isn't that much there.

As is the problem with all of the MASTERS OF HORROR episodes, it could've benefitted from another half hour of exploration. Characters ultimately feel truncated and not as fleshed out as they otherwise could. Garris gets points for effort and for bringing the MASTERS series to the air, though.

CANDYMAN (Rose, 1992)

2006-10-11T14:10:00.000-04:00

CANDYMAN draws a line from slavery to modern segregation-via-public housing, and it's fucking great. Jan Harold Brunvald, believed to be the father of the term "urban legend", claims that these largely-orally communicated stories that we whisper around campfires have no basis in fact, but rather speak to our deep-seeded, collective fears about the Other. Writer-director Bernard Rose re-works a Clive Barker short story into a sort of dark American history, dealing with a murdered young black man (a former slave) who lives on in infamy, stalking those who dare to gaze into a mirror and say his name five times. Candyman is a story told to keep children from wandering into public bathrooms alone, to keep the babysitter from having her boyfriend over when the kids go to bed. In content and imagery, it seems to be a synthesis of "the Hook" and the "Bloody Mary" urban legends, which I'm sure we're all familiar with by this point. But the Candyman legend is original and written just for the film. In this sense, the filmmakers have attempted to create an entirely new urban legend.

And, best of all, it worked. Clive Barker has a commentary on the DVD and he talks about how people have approached him about the roots of the Candyman legend and how they heard a similar story ages ago. Barker created the legend just for the story.

Back to Grunvald (who Barker claims was the inspiration for the initial short story, "The Hidden"). CANDYMAN follows his logic; urban legends are really a literary manifestation of our unconscious fears and prejudices, a public purging of our darkest thoughts and biases. Rose, with this film, takes this to its extreme end, re-writing the history of the United States (based around the slave trade) and painting the entire country as completely and utterly racist and hateful. It's powerful stuff.

But there's plenty beyond subtext. There is some truly great gore to behold, and the image of bees swarming out of Tony Todd's mouth is going to stick with me for a long time, not to mention the sound of them crushing when his lips meet Helen's. Philip fucking Glass did the soundtrack, and it's great. I realize that this was pretty much disjointed and rambling, but I'll make it up to you in the future. Promise. CANDYMAN is a keeper, though.

HOSTEL (Roth, 2005)

2006-10-10T16:26:00.000-04:00

I like Eli Roth. As part of the whole Internet horror-geek group, this tends to alienate a lot of people. There is a whole, big sub-set of people who tend to hate Roth for any number of reasons. I suspect that a relatively high number stems from the fact that 'net geeks tend to be incredibly bitter, spiteful people, and to some degree, they envy Roth's success and fee,l that given his same circumstances, they could create better films than he does. There are also plenty of valid complaints, dealing with his tendency to completely lift (read: rip off) from some of his idols (Raimi, Miike, Hooper, et al). Most of the people who hate Roth for this reason also hate Quentin Tarantino, so the fact that they're friends (and that Tarantino co-executive produced HOSTEL, Roth's second film) doesn't do much to detract from their outright hatred of Roth.

But I like Eli Roth. I think his films are funny and cool and if he's a rip off hack, so what? Rob Zombie rips off the same people, to the same degree as Roth, and he encounters only a fraction of the criticism that Roth does. (I am speaking, again, of criticism from the Internet horror geek population, not from, you know, actual movie critics, who tend to sort of brush off both Roth and Zombie.) In the end, Roth is not as untalented as many think. What he's doing is derivative and unoriginal, but so many people who keep on crying out for "originality" in the horror genre forget that the genre, from 80s slashers to the current crop of re-makes to endless lines of sequels to shameless direct-to-video ripoffs, is ultmiately one of imitation. Roth is recontextualizing archetypes of horror cinema's past and making something new.

But this is all meaningless. Most people had decided they hated HOSTEL before they even saw it (if they bothered to see it at all), based solely on their dislike for Roth's first film, and, to an even greater degree, their dislike of Roth himself, as a person. And here I've spent two paragraphs talking about the guy and not talking about HOSTEL. What a hyopcrite I am, huh?

If CABIN FEVER was Roth doing Raimi and Peter Jackson, then HOSTEL is a mash-up of 70s grindhouse pictures and the artsploitation of Takashi Miike, in particular AUDITION. Like that (vastly superior) other film, HOSTEL is comprised largely of two parts: an opening half of seeming normalcy, and then a closing second half of mayhem and debauchery. As far as stories go, HOSTEL is really quite fun. Some retarded fratboys party their way across through Ansterdam and end up in Slovakia on a tip from an acquaitance who informs them that the girls there are desperate and horny. They crash at a hostel and meet some girls, who end up drugging them and selling them off to a company that allows traveling businessmen the chance to torture a real human being, for a price. One, an utterly unlikeable lout named Paxton, survives and extracts some revenge on the Dutch businessman who killed his (possibly gay?) friend, Josh. The possibly gay Josh sub-plot is interesting but ultimately meaningless, never paid off in any identifiable way. Not that it has to be, but it seemed like Roth hinting at a subtext and, in the end, doing nothing with it.

The entire film is like that. Homophobia and a sense of American entitlement run rampant and Roth makes a pretense of examining the issues, but seems content to leave them just hinted at. Maybe we should be content as an audience. Most critics, after all, focused on the violence and depravity on screen and ignored the social aspects, despite that fact that in interviews, Roth attempted to put HOSTEL into a political context, implying that people need a violent release in order to shelter themselves from the reality of having a fucking religious nut in the White House, but George Kaltsounakis deftly illulstrated the ways that Roth really just reinforces the current cultural climate with his picture. He raises some valid points, especially in his implication that by killing off Josh and allowing Paxton to live, he is making a comment on sexuality and a certain kind of attitude. While Josh wants to be a writer, Paxton wants to go to law school. Roth claims that he wanted the audience to identify with Josh, the sensitive guy, and then be shooken up and alone when he ends up being killed and we're left just with the brute, Paxton. But by allowing Paxton to survive the ordeal, Roth is commenting on the differences between these two guys and passing judgement on the two characters. I've never seen nor heard him comment on that point.

Something else that is interesting are the parallels that exist between the college kids and the rich businessmen who wind up paying to end their lives. Both come to Europe seeking depravity and thrills that they can't find (legally) in America. Rick Hoffman portrays an American businessman who claims that he has had his kill of women and drugs, and now the only thing that excites him is murder, the killing of another person. Roth seems to imply that Paxton, who came to Ansterdam for stories of fucking and pot, will one day end up coming back looking for debauchery and only finding pleasure in torture. It's an audacious comment, perhaps the film's most compelling. This too, of course, has largely been ignored by the critics.

Horror fans and Ebert alike focused on the gore and violence, and that's understandable. Perhaps it's even fitting, when you consider the half-baked arguments and observations that Roth makes. The torture sequences are immediate and end up being the only thing that anyone is going to be talking about. To anyone who's seen ICHI THE KILLER or LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, the violence will be pretty rote, aside from a particularly nasty scene involving a pair of scissors and a Japanese girl's eyeball. A sampling of the Rotten Tomatoes page for HOSTEL reveals critic's preoccupation: "Silly, blood nonsense..." "...unnecessary, unjustified exploitation of gore..." "...a reined in gorefest for afficionados of torture..." The most unintentionally hilarious is Tim Cogshell from Box Office magazine, who states "Is there a point? No. Will you like it? Perhaps, but if you do...you should see someone about that." By "see someone" I would assume he refers to seeking psychiatric help, which is just a silly suggestion, even if he meant it in jest. But his statement that there is no point, that HOSTEL is meaningless and devoid of value, is lazy and speaks to a general negligence of the horror genre by the critical elite. Fuck 'em, and fuck the Roth haters, too. Bring on HOSTEL: PART II.

SHAUN OF THE DEAD (Wright, 2004)

2006-10-09T17:01:00.000-04:00

SHAUN OF THE DEAD is an interesting take on one of the classic monster themes: change. And more exactly, the fear that always comes with it. Vampires, zombies, werewolves; these archetypes all address our natural aversion to evolution, to shaking up our daily routines. Oftentimes, these fears are examined through the alteration of a loved one. When you're bitten by a werewolf, you've got to deal with it. But how does one cope with the change of a loved one? NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is great with this type of stuff; all of Romero's stuff is, really. It's one of the themes he dealt with best. For as much as people talk about Romero's social commentary, he was also really good at interpersonal relationships, and the ways that changing into one of the undead lead to a shift in one's lifestyle.

SHAUN takes this theme to its logical end, and speaks to what it is we're all really afraid of: losing those we love and never having told them how we feel. Shaun is a slacker (good-natured and harmless, to be sure, but a slacker just the same) whose general contentment to coast through life starts to cause problems in his relationship with Liz. They've been dating for three years, but she's never met his mom, they don't spend enough time together, and she's upset that he's still stuck in the same dead end job he was for however many years he's been stuck at the same dead end job. Shaun, of course, has become accustomed to these day-to-day happenings. Comfort is the word, and the trouble. Our boy Shaun wants to change, he really does, and he wants to take Liz out to a nice restaurant, but in the end, the pub at the corner is what he knows, what he's used to, and where he would rather spend his time. SHAUN OF THE DEAD is very much a picture about longing to live and not being sure how to do it. This is portrayed quite literally by the zombies who have been rising up from the grave, but also by Shaun, staring dumbfounded into the camera at the film's opening. There's life in there, somewhere. He just isn't quite sure what to do with it.

The answer is provided when his life, and the lives of everyone he holds dear, are put into danger. It is a comment on humanity that it takes disaster to shake us up and make us realize that most days, we stumble through life half-awake and don't truly appreciate everything that is afforded us. He blows things with Liz because he forgets to make a dinner reservation at that upscale Italian joint, Fulci's (get it?), but only realizes his mistake when it's too late. This is indicative of his attitude towards the larger world around him. Shaun sees the chance to change his life by becoming a hero, not at all unlike Ash in THE EVIL DEAD, an average appliance salesman turned zombie-slaying machine. The zombie apocalypse provdes advantageous to Shaun, who can finally attach some type of meaning to his life. And with this mindset, he does do some rather mature things. He stands up to, and subsequently grows closer to, his stepfather. He shoots his re-animated mother. His best friend sacrifices his life for him. And then he and Liz prepare to take their own lives when things get too bleak. SHAUN's British humor always retains a blackened tint that is missing from most American comedies, but the film's final moments do seem as if they're going to be excessively dark.

And then the military rushes in and saves the day. Bit of a copout, but what can you do...

In the aftermath of their rescue, Shaun and Liz return to how their lives largely were before the zombie outbreak, but they do seem happier now. Therein lies the joke, which is also played out by the constant bickering among our band of zombie hunters. Life's small things don't stop in the face of tragedy. Relationship problems still exist when the zombies attack, and pretending they don't doesn't make them go away. The final gag is that in spite of how much both Liz and Shaun have changed, at the end, they're right back where they started. Disasters alter nothing, and when they're over with, we don't learn some greater truth about ourselves and humanity. We go right back to playing video games. I don't think it's being unrealistic to say that Liz is compromising, but perhaps the point is that sometimes, compromise is OK, too. After all, change is scary, right?

PHANTASM (Coscarelli, 1979)

2006-10-08T18:56:00.000-04:00

I think what I liked most about this one was the sense of wonder and almost childlike nature of what happened. Despite some horrific things occuring, there is the sense of it being a fairy tale, something like a modern fable. After all, the Grimm tales were rather grisly, no? And of course I realize that post-LADY IN THE WATER it's pretty damaging to refer to a horror flick as a "modern fairy tale" but PHANTASM never devolves into cheesy platitudes or easily-digested "life lessons". Rather, PHANTASM seems to indicate that the world is a scary, fascinating place where things are never what they seem, and are usually worse off than you think.

PHANTASM doesn't shirk away from death or sex (or, its horror film representatives, Gore and Tits), rather presenting them as natural parts of life. And especially adolescence. That horrible, horrible time when zits erupt, embarassing erections present themselves in geometry, and you're forced to cope with it in whatever way you can, is presented in vivid, detailed color in PHANTASM. It's really a coming-of-age tale, about a boy dealing with the death of friends and family, which, when coupled with the usual, general malaise of one's teens, would most likely be unbearable.

When the gore comes, it is unexpected and bright, goopy stuff that doesn't look real, but works in spite of it, due to the dreamlike nature of the entire film. The ending is logical and the twist never seems to detract from what came before; rather, it is natural and right. M. Night Shamawhatever could learn a lot from Coscerelli.

Brief again, and I apologize. It's been a long day. Never did see the new TEXAS CHAINSAW prequel, but next, it's SHAUN OF THE DEAD. Best horror film of the 00s? Maybe...

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 (Miner, 1981)

2006-10-07T14:02:00.000-04:00

Perhaps the most bizarre thing about stereotypes is that they're often based in truth. The thing about all Jewish people being made of money and nose? Totally true. On a different note, FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 single-handedly proves every single cliche about the horror genre (or, more correctly, the slasher sub-genre) correct. There is really a token black guy. There is really one KOOKY guy who plays pranks and does funny voices throughout. There is really a guy in a wheelchair for no reason whatsoever. The people who get naked, or at least sneak into a cabin to fuck, do get punished for their sins. And it's all really, really bad.

F13P2 opens with the Last Girl from the first FRIDAY picture getting an ice pick to the temple. Amazingly, there is actually a sort of interesting, long, unbroken, steadicam shot in the opening sequence. That's about the highlight of the film's stylish flourishes, however. The rest is all just utterly rote 80s slasher trash. The Oedipal undertones of other slasher pictures, such as SLEEPAWAY CAMP and MANIAC, are present here, but unlike in those two others, are not explored in any interesting or meaningful way. I still have a soft spot for the first FRIDAY film, and I love FREDDY VS. JASON with a passion, but aside from those, there are simply no good FRIDAY movies. Amazing, considering how long the franchise thrived for.

At the same time, I can't discount the movies entirely. Sure, its sexual politics are more Falwell than I'd like, and there really is just simple, mindless violence at the core of all of the films. But c'mon. Everyone enjoys sitting in a dark room, with a bowel of popcorn, watching stupid teenagers have horrible things done to them. Anyone who says otherwise is probably a terrorist, or a liar. Or a lying terrorist. The first FRIDAY film I ever saw was JASON TAKES MANHATTEN, and I was probably around ten or so, and it was on TV, but I was still enthralled at the mayhem and the sex and the wonder of it all. Of course, revisiting the series years later reveals the niave nature of my initial thoughts, but just the same, there is still fun to be found in these movies.

I'm not even going to attempt to give this one a serious treatment. FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 is something that you've either seen time and time again, or you're just not going to like it at all. I doubt there are very many people seeing the movies for the first time at this point. I realize this makes for two rather droll reviews in a row (one of which was written while I was drunk, in my own defense), but I'll make up for it next time. TCM: THE BEGINNING tonight!

976-EVIL (Englund, 1989)

2006-10-06T20:26:00.000-04:00

Maybe it's just the liquor talking, but the film overall was a letdown. Around the time that put-upon teenagetrs started summoning the devil and making pentagrams with salt, I was all "YES AWESOME!" but the ending was a total bummer. I wanted Satan to wipe out the entire town, not get stopped by the rebellious teemager's cousin. First drunk thinig I've written on the internet ever but I'm still going to remember to justify the text.

MANIAC (Lustig, 1980)

2006-10-05T13:38:00.000-04:00

The mother/son relationship has been plundered many times within the horror genre (see: PSYCHO, PIECES, FRIDAY THE 13TH). MANIAC is not the best of these, but it's also certainly not the worst. Frank Spinell portrays the perpetually-sweaty, probably-schizophrenic Frank Zito, a NY mama's boy whose childhood traumas at the hands of his neglectful mother lead him to see her everywhere, long after she's dead. Every woman on the street is his mother. Supermarkets, parks, hospitals; she's everywhere.

Freud's comments about there being six people in the bedroom comes to mind. Frank's fractured relationships with women stems from being locked in the closet while his mother goes out night after night, selling her body, selling the love that Frank should receive, free of charge.

Now, there's not really much interesting in this so far. Family relationships have been explored in many more subtle, innovative ways in the medium of film. Also as a slasher picture, it's pretty much just standard fare. Where MANIAC begins to differentiate itself is in its portrayal of women. Frank cuts them up, then removes their scalps, taking the hair back to his apartment and putting them on mannequins. These lifesize dolls sit around his apartment and he converses with them, screams at them, weeps with them. The mannequins become a sort of surrogate mothers, ones that will never leave him, never question him, never beat or insult or leave him. He is in a state of arrested development, and so, of course, are the women in his life. Outside of his fantasy world, he is emotionally stunted and barely able to keep it together. His relationship with a woman named Anna, an artist, is entirely on Frank's terms. In one scene, he phones her and asks if she would like to go to a movie. She says of course she would. "Can you be ready in fifteen minutes?" he asks. "I can be ready in ten" is her answer, implying that she has nothing better to do except wait for Frank's calls and be seen on his arm, in spite of the fact that she is a young, beautiful artist whose stock is rapidly rising. Like in TAXI DRIVER (which, along with THE DRILLER KILLER and PSYCHO are obvious reference points for MANIAC), it is only a question of how long until Frank screws up his relationship with Anna, and the answer is, not very long at all.

The women who he victimizes are the stereotypical slasher victims: female, young, pretty, and truly, wholly, stupid. Their vapidity in this picture is stunning, and it leads me to believe that it was also intentional. Is MANIAC a comment on the place of women in the horror picture? Quiet, stupid, existing only as a receptacle for either rage, lust, or some horrible combination of the two?

The ending seems to indicate so. Frank lies in bed, weeping, alone, having alienated the only woman that he seemed to make some kind of emotional connection with (aside from, naturally, mommy dearest). The mannequins begin to move from their places, taking up weapons and moving in on Frank, who stares, mouth agape, in horror. They then proceed to pop his head from his shoulders (in a great fucking effects sequence from Tom Savini, who earlier creates perhaps the greatest exploding head shot in horror history). It is here that MANIAC's comment becomes clear. Frank, dripping wet and looking like the retarded post-op siamese twin of Jon Lovitz, seems to believe that women exist only to serve and protect him, and he spends his adult life trying to replace the mother he never had, or who, at least, never loved him. Women, of course, are not so easily boxed, and react in kind, ripping off the greasy cranium of the male oppressor, who would have them remain in the apartment forever, never speaking or moving except to satisify his needs, and leaving him for dead.

Pretty heady stuff.

*Rimshot!*

BAD TASTE (Jackson, 1987)

2006-10-04T13:51:00.000-04:00

Peter Jackson is the king of splatterhouse horror comedies. Not Sam Raimi, not RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, not Stuart Gordon, not even Tobe Hooper. Jackson is responsible for three of the most hysterical, horrifying freakouts ever committed to film, in BAD TASTE, MEET THE FEEBLES, and, of course, DEAD ALIVE, the last of which may just be the greatest horror film of the 80s.

BAD TASTE is pretty damn great in its own right, too, though. It's a masterpiece of shlock cinema, the type of thing that Joe Bob Briggs would show if MONSTERVISION was still on the air. (Although Rob Zombie's TCM thing sounds like fun.) Like DEAD ALIVE, there are parts that make me physically ill to view, and there are parts where I laugh so hard that my eyes burn and I can't speak. Jackson is a master at balancing the laughs with some flat out disgusting imagery, which, of course, also draw laughs.

The story is, simply put, ridiculous. A team of government officials stumble across an alien plot to wipe out the human race and use the flesh and blood for their intergalactic fast food chain. The joke, of course, is that humans are the outer space version of McDonald's, an inexpensive, half-cooked substitute for something fulfilling and traditional.

But the commentary never gets any deeper than that. No, if you want social relevance, rent DAY OF THE DEAD. If you want gruesome, chainsaw-wielding, bowel-clenching, acid-soaked fun, then BAD TASTE is where you want to be.

INCIDENT ON AND OFF A MOUNTAIN ROAD (Coscarelli, 2005)

2006-10-03T12:20:00.000-04:00

Sat and watched TV tonight; nothing else for it when they're practically showing your backyard on CNN. Glenn Beck went on TV tonight and talked about the "culture of death", how we're raising our children on violent video games and movies and not spending enough time eating dinner together, as families. Glenn is a fucking douchebag and if you've never seen his show, count yourself lucky. He randomly removes and replaces his eyeglasses on a whim, and it's every bit as annoying as it sounds. He's also careful to distinguish between "us" and "them"; he believes that he is a private citizen, rather than a nationally-known radio and television pundit, and he makes sure to rage against "the media" like he's not just another part of it. Nancy Grace does the same thing, masquerading as a defender of our nation's children, and at the same time, flashing their lifeless images on your screen with "serious" music playing over top so that you're sure what you're watching is Important, and in no way exploitation.

Glenn Beck was on TV tongiht talking about the Amish and how this school shooting incident is going to make them pull even further back from the sins of modern society. Anyone who lives close to Lancaster County, of course, realizes what utter bullshit this is. Glenn's never heard of the rampant accusations of incest, rape, and in-breeding among the Amish, apparently. To pretend that somewhere in central Pennsylvania there exists a haven of pure sinlessness, untouched by the evils of man, is ridiculous. Of course, he rolled out a child psychiatrist, the type of person he'd usually dismiss as a quack, except, naturally, in this instance, when the child psychiatrist agreed with Glenn. Yes, violence in the media creates violence in real life, and if we all only sat down to meals together and held hands and taught our kids the difference between reality and fantasy, we wouldn't have any more school shootings. It doesn't take any one party too long to latch onto other's tragedy and promote their own agenda, does it? The Christians only needed one day before they rolled Michael W. fucking Smith into Lancaster to play at their candlelight vigils and pretend that this is really about them.

After a night of watching this trash dressed up as serious journalism, I was in the mood for a nasty little movie, something that made no pretenses of being significant and instead was honest enough to wallow, nay, revel, in its own utter filth. MANIAC, I thought, would do the trick, but the VHS is lost somewhere to eternity. (Or the closet in Brandie's room.) INCIDENT ON AND OFF A MOUNTAIN ROAD, however, was right out in the open, sitting on top of my television set. This was the first MASTERS OF HORROR episode that aired, and from the four that I have on DVD, I'm really saddened that I don't have Showtime right now. The second season is kicking off soon and if it's anything like the ones I've watched, it should be a fun time.

INCIDENT was made by Don Coscarelli (BUBBA HO-TEP, PHANTASM, the upcoming BUBBA NOSFERATU) and goddamn, did it ever hit the spot. It's really your rather basic slasher/survival horror story, told with every intercut flashbacks. A lady driving on a (you guessed it) mountain road runs off the side and crashes. She is then chased by a strange, enormous forest creature with a pretty bitchin' knife. The flashbacks concern her relationship with her survivalist husband, who eventually becomes emotionally and physically abusive. The film, by the end, becomes a sort of feminist fable, and, indeed, a comment on the slasher sub-genre in general, especially TEXAS CHAIN SAW. Coscerelli works from a short story by Joe R. Lansdale, he of BUBBA HO-TEP and Jonah Hex fame, and Landsdale and Coscerelli end up on an extremely entertaining commentary track together. Lansdale says he wanted to create a slasher story that didn't include a helpless female victim, and so INCIDENT was born. By the end of the picture, everyone's got blood on their hands, including the stereotypical female survival (an archetype that Joe Bob Briggs refers to as the "Last Girl"). But the difference between INCIDENT and CHAIN SAW is that in INCIDENT, the Last Girl doesn't just survive, she wins. I don't want to give too much away, but the difference here is vital and clear and if you're at all interested in this, you should track down the DVD.

Like with CIGARETTE BURNS, Coscerelli would've benefitted from a bigger budget and a longer shooting schedule, but part of the appeal of these episodes is that they're all sort of low budget cool. They end up looking great but the special effects can get sort of cheesy at times (through no fault of the always amazing Greg Nicotero) and characterization can be sacrificed for time reasons. But when I watched INCIDENT a second time, with the commentary track on, the rather expedited character arch of the Last Girl makes sense. It's the kind of picture that grows with a second viewing, where every single image takes on a greater signicifance the second time through. Great stuff. Travis says check it out.

CIGARETTE BURNS (Carpenter, 2005)

2006-10-02T12:39:00.000-04:00

Maybe you've got to be a film snob to truly appreciate CIGARETTE BURNS. After all, the acting is pretty bad. The story itself gets kind of hokey at times. The gore towards the end is so over the top so as to be almost entirely ridiculous. But despite all these things (because of them?) I loved this hour long MASTERS OF HORROR episode.

The plot is actually pretty interesting. An arthouse owner, Kirby, who specializes in locating rare prints is called in by a rich film collector to track down a lost gem, LE FIN ABSOLUE DU MONDE, a French film screened only once. That one viewing threw the crowd into a murderous riot. The closer that Kirby gets to the film, the weirder things get. Toss in some rather pointless side plots involving lost girlfriends and gun-toting dads, and some near-slapstick gore, and you've got a Carpenter film that doesn't feel like a Carpenter film at all, really. It does contain his trademark spot-on pacing, managing a bit of a character arch in a half-hour episode, but you can definitely feel the confines of the made-for-TV context. LA doesn't look like LA. Europe doesn't look like Europe. Character development is truncated for the sake of time constraints. The film is shot through with a general sense of being rushed.

But the film does raise some interesting questions and will probably be endearing to anyone who's ever spent an evening watching something that sickens them. CIGARETTE BURNS becomes a comment on horror cinema, particularly the horror cinema of MS. 45, Takashi Miike, and CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. What draws people in to these pictures? What is their appeal? Prurient interest? Maybe. We all love a car wreck. Speaking personally, horror can become somewhat of an addiction. It can lead you to seeking out more and more extreme pictures, images that become increasingly more disturbing, disgusting, and, indelible. Speaking personally, I know my own thresholds and I know that LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT made me hate humanity, but I could not look away. Kirby's quest becomes the viewer's quest, or, at least, the near-snuff horror viewer's quest. CIGARETTE BURNS itself contains one truly cringe-worthy moment that had me wincing. But then again, my threshold isn't all that high.

What is the end result of watching something like I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (or, to bring it back around, LE FIN ABSOLUE DU MONDE)? Is some greater truth revealed? Is there any justification for stuff like this existing when in real life motherfuckers are shooting up Amish schoolhouses ten minutes from my home? Are you enriched in any way? Am I going to be a better person at the end of 31 days of horror movies? Answers to follow, possibly.

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (Hooper, 1974)

2006-10-01T21:26:00.000-04:00

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, for me, is the end-all, be-all of horror. Since my initial viewing of it, I've seen movies that have disturbed me on deeper levels and disgusted me and made my skin crawl, but nothing has stuck with me like this film. It reverberates on a level that I Spit On Your Grave and the Guinea Pig films never do. Despite its rather notorious reputation, it's actually an exercise in restraint. Most of the violence occurs off-screen or is implied. There is no nudity, little in the way of explicit gore, and what violence is seen is really sort of tame, especially in light of what's come since.

And in spite of all this, it is still the pinnacle of relentless terror in American cinema.

This is the sort of film that divides people. You can lose friends by admitting that you enjoyed it, found pleasure in it. "Why watch that when there's so much violence in real life?" Well, the short answer is, violence doesn't go away by ignoring its existence. Rather, by depicting violence on screen, perhaps we're exorcising some demons. Maybe this is release, catharsis, not at all unlike the Greek tragedies. Director Tobe Hooper has stated that the film is a reaction to the Viet Nam War, to the images that were appearing on the television each and every night. Maybe this picture was his way of externalizing all of that, turning his rage and despair into art.

There are many who would (and do) argue that Chain Saw is not art at all. Those people are idiots. On a purely visceral level, the film is a masterpiece. There is craft to appreciate, certainly, but the craft is of such an extreme nature that it nearly makes it pointless. To dissect and analyze is almost beside the point, when there is simply so much happening on the surface. A large part of this is the utterly terrifying soundtrack, which sounds sort of like a noise rock band playing inside of an exumed corpse. Horrible squeals and shrieks and the wail of the saw form a wall of pure white noise. And that's not even taking into account the pre-credits opening montage, with the Hitchhiker's camera snapping away shots of the carnage his family has caused. The sound of the camera is eerie and haunting and will burn itself onto your memory. Phil has often said that you can simply listen to the sound of the film without an image and still be creeped out. This attention to deal on the soundtrack speaks to a deeper level of committment and craft than the average genre film. Texas Chain Saw isn't just a good horror film, it's a good film period. Haunting and relentless, to be sure, but why are these emotions any less relevant than happiness and joy?

To watch this movie is to concede to the darker side of things, to accept that maybe things won't always turn out right. Texas Chain Saw is one of the only movies to present a character in a wheelchair (Franklin) and make that character completely unlikeable. In this way, Franklin becomes believable and realistic (human), not some symbol for equality. Films rarely take that type of risk; perhaps only the late-90s masterpiece, Happiness, has come close since then. Franklin is bitter and depressed and angry and miserable to everyone around him and I wouldn't have him any other way. Realism is never sacrificed for the sake of a message. And reality is not pretty and bright. In the end, Sally survives, laughing, and Leatherface dances alone with his saw, but the sheen of bleakness never really subsides. All that the viewer can imagine is that Sally is a neurotic mess, holed up in a state hospital and filled with regret and repressed memories. The ending isn't happy, it's just a place where the film ends. She lives but it's impossible to think that she escapes with anything other than her life.

I tend to watch horror films for their societal relevance. My favorite genre pictures are those of George A. Romero, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Takashi Miike, and, yes, Tobe Hooper, all of whom deal with deeper themes than what is simply happening on the screen. The point of this project, I think, is going to be to see simply what I can draw some these pictures. Thirty(-one) days of night, of mayhem, of blood and gore and trying to put it all together into some sort of larger context. Maybe it's about trying to find some kind of meaning, an attempt to glean meaning from the seemingly meaningless. (Or maybe it's just fun to watch a year's worth of mayhem and gore in a single month.)

The deal.

2006-09-29T11:58:00.000-04:00

OK. So I've been kicking this idea around for a couple of years now, but I think I'm at a place where I want to give it a shot. Throughout October, I'll watch a horror film every day of the month and then write an essay on it. OK, so they might not all be essays, but there'll be something resembling coherent thoughts. Unless there isn't.

Onward!