tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-349939912024-03-07T16:15:45.329-05:00And Now the Screaming StartsCRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.comBlogger929125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-73489352514631973962015-12-31T13:40:00.001-05:002015-12-31T13:41:46.715-05:00Stuff: Nothing Is Certain But Death and Taxonomy.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-25063785939091308702015-10-15T14:02:00.002-04:002015-10-15T14:02:34.297-04:00Stuff: "Spicy, Tantalizing Fashion"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Unless you consider the use of guacamole as a canape spread an unholy abomination, I'll admit there not much in the way of scares here. But a movie-time treat with a nice pedigree is always welcome. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If you ever wondered how Boris Karloff liked his guacamole, now you know. And now the double dipping starts . . . </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCd7g7k299EhCaHiDFK4tmrlUNjkA3PTJi9E8OwJhFjyyJ6-wxZYdR11fW8I9TCZ41zW4mOLaucFcJxNNIiCOsm4Lia-iYJjp65G56PcqYS1uELIDIvWeUIiokKJypixOyH3Xe/s1600/tumblr_nw6ig0HndI1udhg39o1_540.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCd7g7k299EhCaHiDFK4tmrlUNjkA3PTJi9E8OwJhFjyyJ6-wxZYdR11fW8I9TCZ41zW4mOLaucFcJxNNIiCOsm4Lia-iYJjp65G56PcqYS1uELIDIvWeUIiokKJypixOyH3Xe/s400/tumblr_nw6ig0HndI1udhg39o1_540.jpg" width="376" /></a></div>
<br />CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-24719795455509122022015-04-30T11:00:00.002-04:002015-04-30T11:00:18.925-04:00Games: The Call's Coming from Inside the Smartphone.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Augmented reality, a sort of mid-stage between virtual reality and a clear user-interface mediated experience in which a portable device - like your phone - reacts to the dynamic environment around it to create novel experiences, is mostly just a gimmick now. There have been a lot of fun games built around the concept, but few have really taken advantage of the fact that players could be fully mobile and that the virtual NPC's within the game could adapt to the world around them. Mostly, the games have exploited a stable map with experiences tied to specific landmarks. The developers of <i>Night Terrors</i> want to change that. They have a promo concepty video above that discusses how their game will turn any home (presumably you'd need one big enough, loft apartments would kind of suck for this game) into a haunted house. It's worth checking out.CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-7237378576465529572015-04-22T22:15:00.001-04:002015-04-22T22:20:13.678-04:00Movies: What, was home depot out of olive drab?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Let's just get this out there. It is baffling to the point of distraction that Amelia, the mother going through what can only considered a serious downgrade in the QC of her parenting skills throughout Jennifer Kent's justly lauded debut <i>The Badadook</i>, and her dead-before-the-story-starts hubby decided that the best color to paint every freakin' surface in the interior of their home was gray. And, like, super gray, total gray, industrial background color of a WWII era battleship gray.<br />
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I don't expect the victims in horror flicks to get all feng shuish (feng shuiy? feng shuesque?), but seriously, what the fuck is up with that? Are we to assume that in the happy, pre-banana-town-crazy-pants days of the husband's still-aliveness the happily married couple decided that every room in their house should have walls the color of a dead pre-flatscreen television's screen? Are we supposed to believe that Amelia did the repaint after her hubby died and nobody thought that the chromatic equivalent of choked sob was a sign of incipient weapons-grade depression? Were they just looking to save a buck on paint and somehow got a hold a bunch of cans of Navy surplus gray-wash?<br />
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I'm reminded of the bizarrely aggressive design of the titular spaceship at the center of the ghosts-in-space flick <i>Event Horizon</i>. Watching that film for the first time I couldn't help but be distracted by the idea that some complete and utter jackass back at whatever will pass for NASA after we've privatized nearly every aspect of space travel thought, "I was thinking, this is a longterm space mission and these folks are going to be stuck in this tin can for a long, long time. Better make their environment as conducive to mental health as possible by designing it to look, as much as it can, like a cross between a haunted house and the inside of a meat grinder."<br />
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That form follows function door swings both ways. You don't want a haunted house, don't make a haunted, and there won't be no haunted house. Just sayin'.<br />
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That said, I feel like there is truly nothing constructive I can add to pretty much universal chorus of praise <i>Babadook</i> earned. Consider, interior decoration issues aside, my voice added to the chorus. And, yes, I get the metaphorical significance of Amelia's inexplicably dumb color scheme choice. In fact, it is rare misstep into "aboutness" that this obviously allegorical flick makes, which means this film pulls off the truly rare stunt of wallowing in implicit real world themes without dragging the viewer into a tedious lecture.<br />
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So here's my cheat for <i>Babadook</i>: just imagine that Amelia and the dead hubby were about to paint the house in some seriously bold colors, but the hubby died and derailed things after the gray softening base coat went down. Then push that completely absurd objection out of your mind and enjoy a remarkable film.<br />
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<br />CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-1800991660304570692015-04-19T15:12:00.001-04:002015-04-19T15:22:15.810-04:00Music: I bet you didn't know someone could love this much.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Big Data's video "Dangerous" combines so many things I love: overtly sexualized female jogger berserkers who headbut random people to death, nice bass work, and a smart critique of the cliches of modern love songs and an amoral culture of marketing that would sell death in jar to to their own mothers if it made them a buck. It also includes the single best close captioned sound-effect in the history of video: [HOT DOG SLAP]. What more can you ask for?</div>
CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-32280889744967635852015-04-18T14:15:00.003-04:002015-04-18T14:15:55.847-04:00Movies: Off the preservation.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHvNyACXn1iVVBDHkeHmwPcuA69YYVV2E5N0-vNZc-_aPcWmdqNuMzEOCqN6dAW2M9j_hp_ukaOJ2Z8VaT5ShRUWvXDAJZ03Smrn6w4MSnWUQRcv4vwydzbXGcfqOvHp3Aaxqg/s1600/Preservation_review.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHvNyACXn1iVVBDHkeHmwPcuA69YYVV2E5N0-vNZc-_aPcWmdqNuMzEOCqN6dAW2M9j_hp_ukaOJ2Z8VaT5ShRUWvXDAJZ03Smrn6w4MSnWUQRcv4vwydzbXGcfqOvHp3Aaxqg/s1600/Preservation_review.jpg" height="135" width="320" /></a></div>
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The film opens with credit our first protags – big brother
Sean, little brother Mike, and Mrs. Little Brother, (punningly and
aspirationally named) Wit Neary – driving down winding country roads. We know
from a montage of the their supplies that they plan mostly to hunt with
Chekhov’s guns: there’s a quick progression of shots, covering everything from
rifles to road flares to hunting dog, that was probably described in the script
as “montage shows all the stuff we use to fight the baddie later.” This also
reveals, and I’m not sure if this is due to the filmmakers’ unfamiliarity with
firearms or if we’re meant to actually understand this about the characters,
that they are woefully incompetent. Their rifles, though nice, are not kept in
cases. Their road flares are just stacked in the back. They also drink while
they drive. Ultimately, it’s a damn good thing that plot demanded that they get
somewhere were a masked psychos were waiting to kill them or, honestly, these
two gentlemen might have just bought it due to misadventure.<o:p></o:p></div>
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They make a short stop at a gas station. I mention this here
simply because it is notable among gas stations in horror flicks for being at
once remote and staffed by local yokels and, yet, does not resemble either a
country general store from some sort of splatter-cinema version of 1845 or
seemingly a fanatically deliberate effort cultivate every sort of filth, spore,
mold, and fungus. Along with just a few other gas stations – the gas-and-shop
at the front of <i>Dusk ‘Till Dawn</i>; the clean, but questionably
lit with green and yellow colored lights petrol station from <i>High
Tension</i> - I’m going to go ahead and give this one, despite some weird
shot featuring a trapped animal hanging from a plastic bag on the roof, the
ANTSS Award for Horror Flick Gas Station I at Which Would Actually Ask for the
Bathroom Key. Ghouls and Gals: look for the ANTSS Travel Advisory Seal of
Approval – if it isn’t ANTSS okay, stay away!<o:p></o:p></div>
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The final destination of our trio is a shut down national
park. There they trek into the forest with a weird combination of bro-ish
hunter zen – “The real hunter doesn’t give chase; the real hunter is already
there” – and casual disregard for the environment. They tromp deeper into the
woods, taking turns pontificating about the sort of bushido-focus one needs to
conquer the wilderness and committing casual acts of pollution.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The next sequence drags a bit. Sean becomes increasingly
rugged in direct proportion to how often he appears in a tank top. Mike takes
every opportunity to wallow in his city-weak
ready-to-be-Darwinistically-selected-against-ness. Wit struggles between a
clear attraction to the manly man biceps of Sean and the fact that she’s
actually walking stereotype of urbanized elitist softness (she proclaims she’s
a vegan, making her willingness to be an active participant in a deer hunt
somewhat curious). There’s a whole why-no-babies subplot between Wit and Mike.
Sean is revealed to be a drunken soldier who got discharged under vaguely
sinister circumstances. It’s like a poor man’s Pinter wrote cinematic cut-scenes
for Buck Hunter. Weirdly, in this section, Sean retells the story of Artemis
and Callisto, but completely just makes up some bullshit out of his ass. The
story he tells has no significant relation to actual myth, even to the point of
changing Callisto from woman into a man. It’s another moment when it is unclear
if the filmmakers just didn’t give a crap or we’re supposed to take this as a
sign of Sean’s mental imbalance and the fact that he’s untrustworthy.<o:p></o:p></div>
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There’s a too drunk, too late fireside conversation. Sean
drinks Wild Turkey. There’s some flirting. A chocolate fountain is discussed.
Awkward return of husband. Wit and Mike retire to their tent to sleep. Then . .
.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Let’s take an aside here. Wild Turkey is like coffee
temperatures: it’s an excluded middle sort of thing. The same way you want you
coffee hot as fuck or ice cold, but everything in the middle sucks; you want
Wild Turkey not at all, or enough of it to ensure you are physically incapable
of doing something stupid. A reasonable amount of Wild Turkey is a crap idea.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Okay, back to the movie. Then . . . Wit and Mike wake up
with their sleeping bags on the ground. Everything from the campsite is gone. I
mean everything. Their tent was cut out from around them. Their shoes are gone.
The guns. The dog. The big brother. Everything. They also have X’s drawn on
their heads. Mike immediately blames Sean for going PTSD on them. Sean claims
he detects three distinct footprints from the crew that stole their stuff, but
Mike thinks Sean’s just lost marbles. The scene is somewhat undercut by the
fact that you can see a fairly substantial road in the background of the shot.
They march back to the car. There’s the inevitable “do you want to fuck my
brother” scene, Sean breaks off from the group because he won’t leave his red
herring – I mean dog – behind, and it’s reveled that Wit is preggers. Then,
finally . . . FINALLY . . . the baddies makes their move.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The masked killers in this flick are a cross between the
nameless manhunter in <i>Trigger Man</i> and the masked
thrill-killers in <i>The Strangers</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Interestingly, one of the killers has the
logo of Men Going Their Own Way, a bizarre Men’s Rights (I guess that’s a thing
now) group that espouses rejecting society’s imposed norms on manhood, but has
a site filled with jet fighters, lonely travelers down dusty roads, and pretty
much every other well accepted cliché of manhood imaginable. The idea that
these are wacked out Gamergaters or something is novel.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The rest of the movie starts to quickly coalesce around the
elimination of the male protags and Wit finding her way out of her vegan,
lady-ish, weak uselessness and becoming a fighter. On one hand, Wit turns out
to be a pleasingly effective hero. She’s brave, handy with first aid, and, when
the time comes, effective enough when it comes to doling out the violence.
Still, there’s something unsettling about her transformation. The film makes it
baddies some weird MRA-types playing at some sort of LARPy “Most Dangerous
Game”, so that suggests disapproval of the “movement’s” paleo attitudes to
gender essentialism, but the film also has a running thread of contempt for
Mike and Wit’s supposedly laughable city folk liberal lifestyles. Ultimately,
it can only place Wit in the driver’s seat when it has stripped her of her
values and identity and turned her into another avatar of its basic “kill or be
killed” ethos; an ethos, one imagines, the masked killers use to justify their
own grotesque behavior. I don’t know what to make of this. Or even if anything
should be made of it. But it’s there and, I think, worth noting.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Despite my snark, there’s a lot this flick does right. The
masked killer chasing stupid teens in the woods thing is pretty freakin’ tired.
It’s nice to see our victim pool made up of adults who – some sibling and
bedswerving squabbles aside – immediately latch into survival mode. The results
don’t really differ, but the stakes feel higher. Also, the film is actually quite
lovely. There’s also some effective use of contemporary elements that, as a
general rule, your standard crazy-killer-in-the-woods flick avoids. To keep
things simple, most of these flicks plunge the protagonists into pretty Year
Zero situations: no phones, no cars, weapons that would be at home in the 15<sup>th</sup>
century. This uses firearms and cellphones and the like really well. This
includes a charming scene in which one of the killers must chat with his mom,
who has called his cell at an inopportune time. Perhaps it is simply the
cheaper cost of high quality cameras and such, but
<i>Preservation</i> makes the most out of the beauty of its
wilderness surroundings. And I’m inclined to not to simply chalk it up to the
low price point of premium filmmaking tech given that this technical prowess is
wed to an aesthetic that takes it time and allows characters to pause, react,
and be still. This approach is so rare in this particular subgenre that it,
unintentionally, causes the viewer anxiety: sometimes you’re simply watching a
character do some bit of emotional work, but you’re assuming, from the rules of
slashers (and, presence of guns aside, this is basically a slasher) that any
sort of slow down is necessarily a set-up for a jump scare.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Preservation</i> won’t blow you away, but it
isn’t some strictly by-the-numbers phoned in effort. That’s commendable. If
you’ve got room for such modest pleasures in your film-watching schedule, you
could do far worse.<o:p></o:p></div>
CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-24100011862249797192015-04-16T11:48:00.001-04:002015-04-16T12:01:57.714-04:00Science: Given how we've treated their funding of late, they might just do it on purpose.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/uzgaZbbDsAA/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/uzgaZbbDsAA?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
<br />
PBS's <i>Space Time</i> video blog series ponders whether a routine space mission could accidentally kick off a zombie apocalypse. The answer is no. Of course not. The kicker is the whole reanimation bit: we don't really have any scientific analog for a bacteria or virus that can pull of that stunt yet. At least not in humans. That said, there's a long and interesting bit about how time spent in space has the unfortunate tendency to make existing bacteria and viruses more contagious and deadly. Neat stuff.CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-35435832463501916362015-04-15T11:10:00.000-04:002015-04-15T11:10:04.790-04:00Movies: But back to Whitford/Hadley’s fish-man boner.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh6dkPANePL-mkSNOJExzwMKLGvvHbhokFFxE3ZlQ2P5jNkkfTomJY-5qFUOQKDuGkJy4IT17jxJobxM6y3XnzLFPxqPJ04aFdlXZyj5MDq3hKiHc0qDkqnEppUuIDp630VcD9/s1600/91BKhDN7ssL._SL1500_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh6dkPANePL-mkSNOJExzwMKLGvvHbhokFFxE3ZlQ2P5jNkkfTomJY-5qFUOQKDuGkJy4IT17jxJobxM6y3XnzLFPxqPJ04aFdlXZyj5MDq3hKiHc0qDkqnEppUuIDp630VcD9/s1600/91BKhDN7ssL._SL1500_.jpg" height="320" width="224" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Remember the running gag about mermen in <i>Cabin in
the Woods</i>? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Let’s assume that the whole “the film’s a metaphor for
films” thing is true (which, of course it is, they all are), than you can posit
a scenario in which Bradley Whitford’s character is a horror audience member
(which is kinda a sloppy metaphor, since he’s kinda also the co-director of the
“movie” of the ritual – which reveals something of the real driver here: it’s
less a metaphor about film as art than a metaphor about being a filmmaker and
yet another lecture on why we should be grateful to pay for marginal
improvements because, oh dear God, they could do so much awesome if we just
wouldn’t tie their hands with our ignorant audience entitlement . . . but I
digress) whose obsession with seeing mermen, which is constantly thwarted by
the repeated appearance of endless variations of the zombie subgenre, speaks to
our alleged desire to see something new.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Yes, I decided to appear again, after a, what?, more than
three year absence, with a paragraph long sentence. I’ve missed you guys so
much.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But back to Whitford/Hadley’s fish-man boner. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So Hadley is desperate for something other than zombies and
he’s pinned his hopes on mer-people. This might seem odd, given that,
cinematically, the dominate image the vast majority of us have of mer-people is
a just-no-longer-tween red head in a shell bra who needs to be reminded by a
pan-Caribbean crab that things are better down where it’s wetter. . . Get your
mind out of the gutter, you sad, sick reader. But, taking the longer view,
Haldey’s on point. Traditionally, mer-people are total vicious bastards. I’ll
cite a single example. In 2009, Bavarian cultural curator Erika Eichenseer
found a stash of previously undocumented fairy tales from Franz Xaver von
Schönwerth, a historian who transcribed them in the 19<sup>th</sup> century.
Unlike the Brothers Grimm, who had their daughters filter the tales and clean
them up for public consumption, von Schönwerth’s tales were recorded as raw
research materials, and not intended for a larger, commercial audience. These
tales depict mermaids as creepy seductresses, who lure men away from their
homes with promises of the untold pleasures that wait in the mermaid’s watery
realm. The only condition, of course, is that the victim completely forget his
surface life (mermaids, in the old tales, never prey upon women). Mermen, on
the other hand, are far less cunning and graceful. They’re basically what you’d
get if you crossed Jaws and the Creature from the Black Lagoon with a serial
rapist. It isn’t pretty. There’s no hot crustacean band.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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But back to Hadley’s fatal jones for mer-based horror:
Hadley, of course, gets his wish. And it kills him. In terms of the film’s
central metaphor, it’s a basic be careful what you wish for theme.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Keeping that in mind, <i>Killer Mermaid</i>
(a.k.a. <i>Nymph</i>, a.k.a. <i>Mamula</i>) is the
mermaid horror film you’ve erroneously been wishing for, Hadley. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<i>Killer Mermaid</i> follows the adventures of
two young women on a get-your-groove-back Euro trip. The first, Kelly, is an
uptight American, whose work and romantic hang-ups provide a sort of running
tsk-tsk throughout the movie. Oddly enough, Kelly’s agreed to vacation on the
seashore despite the fact that her suitcase is full of backstory explaining why
she fears the water. She’s the wingwoman of Lucy, an absurdly hot ex pat local
who is arguably a supporting character, but is far better loved by the camera
and given far more plot points to claim as her own. And I mean absurdly hot,
emphasis on the absurd. There’s a certain beauty that is a product of an almost
monastic commitment to being pretty. It comes at the cost of individuality and
is the result of a deliberate program of becoming what a vast constellation of
industry and media have set as the collective definition of the beautiful. There’s
an almost suicidal heroism in achieving it. The result is high-gloss,
discomfortingly robotic, but undeniably beautiful. It has to be: even when you
know it is fake and impersonal and imposed upon you, you are also aware that
the shared paradigm of concepts we use to dissect the world around us doesn’t
give you any other choice but to give in. (This is weirdly relevant later, when
the titular homicidal fish-lady shows up.) It’s beauty that demands a kind of
bitter submission. When we first meet Kelly and Lucy, Kelly is busy trying to
text work and Lucy is busy letting the camera goes into full “<i>mostra</i>
the riches” mode on her bikini clad pert posterior. This effectively sets up
everything we need to know about these to protagonists: one is a work text, the
other is precision-tooled hot ass in a bikini.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Turns out that Kelly and Lucy are in Montenegro (which
reminds me, later, ask me to tell you a kind of funny thing about this
bartender I know who is from Montenegro – she’s a peach and it’s a cute little
storyette) to touch base with a college friend, a former party boy Alex. Lucy
still holds a bit of a torch for Alex, which is complicated because the once
famous rover is engaged. This doesn’t stop Lucy from totally wetting down his
wick . . . Ah, fuck it, you know what, none of this matters. This shit goes on
for like 50 minutes of a 90-minute movie. And seriously, who cares?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The thing is there’s
a bunch a fakey drama that eventually gets Lucy, Kelly, Alex, Alex’s
wife-to-be, and this painfully horndog Euro bro Bob (Americanized from
something vaguely Bobish in Montenegran) stuck on an island the aforementioned
mermaid of lethal variety and a weird murderous guardian fisherman guy who,
sadly, is actually played by Franco “the first Django” Nero.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What doesn’t work
with <i>Killer Mermaid</i>? Pacing mainly. For nearly an hour the
flick wanders about, exploring the “problem” of Lucy’s lingering desire for
Alex, as if we clicked play on a film called <i>Killer Mermaid</i>
to ponder in depth the relationship problems of seemingly wealthy without
working hot younger people. There’s a place for that and it’s called “not
anywhere in a movie called <i>Killer Mermaid</i>.” I hate to sound
philistine here, but when you put a killer mermaid in the title of your flick,
I’d like to see some killing, preferably done by mermaid. That title makes a
promise and, call me naïve, I think it is fair for me to expect you to keep it.
Instead, the film strolls towards the mermaid thing, sticking in weird kill
scenes involving Nero’s fisherman character, seemingly just to remind us that
this is ostensibly a horror flick. The film, on multiple occasions, introduces
some nameless character whose sole function is to get offed by the fisherman.
They rarely get more than a minute or two of screen time.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What does work? Well, Montenegro for one thing. If there
wasn’t a weirdo killer fisherman and an especially mean mergirl in this pic, it
could serve as an ad for the tourism board. The only thing the camera loves
more in this flick then Lucy’s generic hotness is the beauty of the
Mediterranean coast of Montenegro. And I can find no fault with that; it is
truly stunning. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I’ve already droned on too long about this particular flick.
<i>Killer Mermaid</i> is a pretty drag. It nice to look at, and
when it is getting down to crass tacks, it can deliver the goods; but it takes
too long to get there and you’re probably better off budgeting time for a less
leisurely flick.<o:p></o:p></div>
CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-83882555828259485892013-01-21T13:04:00.000-05:002013-01-21T19:36:29.519-05:00Movies: Half-way through the morning of the fourth day of the week after the 6-month anniversary of the second Tuesday after the Day of the Woman.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGFKGsfTjhBx_dDBmdB7wKGhz68FZwhWLvEYzmyTelGuAXq1lwUCZIym0KkN6nvkDsLTw30yxVyHopdkEiMOym21E39dAtADkQrGzHBawtYDE8QMlFLENB4avHghg3kLrbb-03/s1600/rock_star.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGFKGsfTjhBx_dDBmdB7wKGhz68FZwhWLvEYzmyTelGuAXq1lwUCZIym0KkN6nvkDsLTw30yxVyHopdkEiMOym21E39dAtADkQrGzHBawtYDE8QMlFLENB4avHghg3kLrbb-03/s320/rock_star.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i>I Spit On Your Grave</i>, the 1978 revanchist rape exploiter that also traffics under the somewhat deceptive label <i>Day of the Woman</i>, reads better than it plays. This is because, in conversation and in writing, you can filter all the problematic elements of the flick through a critical scrim that invests them with nuance, depth, and significance. In the moment, however, all vulgarity is experienced as the same thing. We can, for example, discuss how the film critiques its own violence, but before that we're all going to have to sit through a 20-minute long gang rape scene. Or, depending on your definition of "rape" and "scene," perhaps we're just watching four five-minute long rape scenes. Either way, it amounts to quite a bit of forced penetration, screaming, bruising, bleeding, and generally rapey unpleasantness. Later we can discuss themes and craft and whatnot, but the immediate experience is entirely present and needs no explanation. Later, we can cluck at the shoddiness of it all or put on our post-third wave feminism hats and deconstruct it, but the immediate experience is that we're watching a woman get raped for entertainment. The result is that <i>ISOYGorDotW</i> works like the opposite of a really good joke: it's better if you weren't there and somebody explains it to you.<br /><br />The weirdest thing about <i>ISOYGorDotW</i> is that it is, simultaneously, better and worse than you've heard. The usual line for the film's defenders is that it is some primitivist feminist piece in which a victimized woman masters the very violence that subjugates her and turns the tables her patriarchal oppressors with extreme prejudice. This isn't a critical view so much as plot description with a politically correct escape hatch for those who consider themselves enlightened, but need to explain why they spent nearly a half hour of their life volunteering to watch four dudes take turns brutally raping a woman. For our purposes, the important thing about this standard take isn't its self-serving moral cowardice, but the fact that it is wrong. And not just wrong: wrong in such a way that obscures the few things worth discussing in the film. <br /><br />Our main character, Jennifer Hills, a writer who has left the big city to finish her new book, is a plot device rather than a character. She exists in the story mainly to get raped by four locals - Johnny, Matthew Lucas, Stanley, and Andy - and be the conduit for their Old Testament style reckoning. Her history is a blank, her interactions with others (when not sexual or violent) are vapid, and her most characteristic expression, an affectless stare, suggests the defining shallowness of her as a concept. My initial reaction was to wonder if Jennifer's relentless nothingness was part of a larger strategy: perhaps director/writer Meir Zarchi meant her to be a sort of everywoman and thought he needed to scrub her of individual details so she could better serve as vessel of viewer identification. But that's not how the film feels to me. Compare Jennifer with the other protags: the four attackers. In contrast to Jennifer, the men have internal worlds. We see them negotiate their own emotions and the pecking-order style politics of their micro-community. They exhibit savagery and remorse, fear and desire, sexual confusion and even a weirdly primitive sense of justice. We're talking about a b-grade grindhouse flick, so I'm not saying these guys are a quartet of Henry James characters here. But compared to the not-a-person that is Jennifer, they are notably robust. To be fair, I'm willing to bet you've got furniture that exhibits more personality than Jennifer.<br /><br />This imbalance reveals the wrong-headedness of the whole wishful feminist take on <i>ISOYGorDotW</i>. It's a movie by a dude about dudes. The story really is about four men who commit a crime and then pay for it. It isn't about female empowerment, but rather about the lines you don't cross and the fatal logic of the consequences. Jennifer is little more than a marionette the director yanks on to stage, gets dirty, and then manipulates into offing his central protagonists. This is why I prefer <i>I Spit On Your Grave</i> as the title: it is easy to imagine Meir Zarchi playing God an saying that directly to his flawed and transgressing creations. For <i>Day of the Woman</i> to make sense, a real woman would have to appear somewhere in the film.<br /><br />This is why I say the flick is worse than you've heard: the feminist apology for it is pretty much BS and it is no friend to the ladies. If you were hoping for some sort of social value here, I think you're barking up the wrong tree. There's a reason exploitation cinema was called that. Let's just admit it.<br /><br />So how is this movie better than you've heard? Once we get over trying to excuse it, there's some pleasingly strange things about the film. Vengeful-Jennifer is as blank as Victim-Jennifer, but she's an interesting blank. First, there's the strangely dispassionate way in which she goes about her business. You get the feeling that Jennifer is sleep walking through the whole thing, a sense that is strengthened by the increasing sense of unreality throughout the whole last quarter of the movie. Jennifer doesn't just kill her attackers, but seems to need to do so in very specific ways: for example, Jen actually passes up popping a cap in Johnny and ending it quick so that she can entangle him an unlikely sexual situation and then dispatch him. The illogic of it - forgoing the opportunity to gun him down when you've got him at your mercy in order to get into a situation where you're far more vulnerable and the whole thing could turn into a battle of strength he could easily win - is striking and never resolves into something reasonable. There's also post-rape Jen's weird use of sex as a weapon of revenge. The most common take on Jen's post-rape predatory sexuality is that she's luring her attackers into a false sense of dominance. Unfortunately, this makes no sense. The first time she plays siren, her victim is a mentally retarded man who really poses no threat to her anymore. This guy shows up ready to be her victim, the whole seduction seems strangely unnecessary. Then, in the scene in which seduces and cuts the john off Johnny, her use of her sexuality as a weapon only makes sense if you ignore the fact that she already had a perfect opportunity to kill Johnny and opted instead to get into a situation where using her sexuality would be necessary. Why? I don't have an answer. It's weird, right? Then there's the methods of murder. Jen has access to firearms, but she chooses again and again to dispatch her attackers in overly elaborate ways, often involving some heavy-handed visual pun. This tendency towards the pun is odd in that, outside of the context of the viewer watching the movie, the puns make no sense; that is to say, since nobody within the film except Jen and her attackers knows what happened (the whole film seems to take place in world without law enforcement), the punchline of these pun-based deaths would mean nothing to any other character in the film. They appear to be something Jen is specifically doing for the viewer of the film, without ever showing any "meta" awareness of being a character in a film.<br /><br />Whether or not the curious way the movie spirals into a crooked semi-surreality will outweigh the unpleasantness of the first half of the film is a debate you'll have to have with yourself. I would like to propose the following though: when you watch, keep open the possibility in your mind that all of Jen's revenge is a fantasy on her part. She's supposed to be a writer, right? What if, just what if, she gets attacked, is helpless to avenge herself, and concocts a story of unnecessarily elaborate revenge killings? Her character never worries about leaving behind evidence for the police because she controls the story-world and she knows they're not ever coming. The puns behind the murders are for her, the viewer of her fantasy. Her willingness to toss aside good opportunities in favor of carrying out unnecessarily dangerous schemes makes sense if she is in charge of the story-world: she knows everything will work out for her. Finally, it explains the strange sense that the Jen we see is a sort of story-device/ghost, a tool for a story-teller to impose his/her logic on the story-world. I'm not saying this is "the answer" to the movie. Movies aren't riddles that can be solved. Not good ones anyway. I'm just suggesting it as an alternate way of looking at the flick. Let me know how that works out. I'm probably not seeing it again any time soon.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br /></span>CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-22072418460461405152012-12-24T12:30:00.000-05:002012-12-24T12:30:11.764-05:00Movies: Like a little lump of coal for your hoilday horror film stocking.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5UJyRmwgdGD8V8ypVo4lvVyATWsIk4Eox6aZI2DVawKzkvf-G4w-VSZK4leaTEyocXFMeT-2Fxh7x_kHRyj7RtmZ4lOBcN9fZh3dYyDaRqGXxv3w_6tN7NjjvnVL1b6bli4V_/s1600/jack_frost_killer_rapist_snowman_1996.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="184" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5UJyRmwgdGD8V8ypVo4lvVyATWsIk4Eox6aZI2DVawKzkvf-G4w-VSZK4leaTEyocXFMeT-2Fxh7x_kHRyj7RtmZ4lOBcN9fZh3dYyDaRqGXxv3w_6tN7NjjvnVL1b6bli4V_/s320/jack_frost_killer_rapist_snowman_1996.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">What actress reads a script that dispatches her by rape/murder-by-snowman's-nose-carrot and thinks, "All right! This is a film a have to be part of!"? That's not a rhetorical question. The answer is Shannon Elizabeth. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This is the only question to which the answer is Shannon Elizabeth.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i>Jack Frost, </i>the '97 straight-to-video flick starring a serial killer turned snowman,<i> </i>is one of those films that seems to believe that you can mitigate your suckiness by admitting to the audience that you're aware of your suckiness. It's called Carsoning. David Foster Wallace once wrote a 1,700 page essay on the phenomenon and in the footnote to the 3,245th endnote in the third appendix of the second volume of the CD supplement, he defined Carsoning as preempting criticism of a creative act by overtly taking a critical stance to it yourself within the creative act. Done well, you groan before you tell the joke, before the audience does, and you've shifted the emphasis of the humor to your empathic link with the audience and you're now banded together in mutual mockery of a crappy joke, even though you told the crappy joke.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Here's the problem, there needs to be some element of plausible denial for Carsoning to work. (This is why DFW was so baffled by the phenomenon and pondered why it was almost impossible for an artist to pull off.) Carson wasn't making fun of his own jokes: he was breaking the fourth wall, revealing explicitly the work of a writing staff, and acting as if he too was this staff's unwitting victim. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">To take an example closer to the world of horror flicks, think of MST3000. The concept worked for so long because they could act like they too were victims of the crappy flicks they shared with the audience. In fact, that was even part of the framing device of the show. Now imagine a show's whose premise is that the people making fun of the movies they showed you were also responsible for making the crappy movies. The result would be tedium.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i>Jack Frost</i> is just that: a <span class="st">Möbius strip of mediocrity commenting on its own mediocrity. You haven't been that naughty this year. There's no reason to do this to yourself.</span></span>CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-32180494961544977982012-07-14T18:14:00.002-04:002012-07-22T19:40:29.577-04:00Movies: The best worst plan in horror bad guy history.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIuWYqXb8vS73sY1IsEE2DcBB9Q8JA_Sc2kUH0HWHHH6h44BfEOphGOOOeGnD-2tY3d4DONEUA-zGdfA7BnroV7n4UOfDQ03YhgSnHMDiz_qbysWugVt1QlLLwizuqvjJCMr2y/s1600/Shark_Night_3D_05.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIuWYqXb8vS73sY1IsEE2DcBB9Q8JA_Sc2kUH0HWHHH6h44BfEOphGOOOeGnD-2tY3d4DONEUA-zGdfA7BnroV7n4UOfDQ03YhgSnHMDiz_qbysWugVt1QlLLwizuqvjJCMr2y/s320/Shark_Night_3D_05.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>Shark Night 3D </i>contains more than one shark and takes place over the course of more than one single night. That's really the only sense in which <i>Shark Night </i>can be said to exceed expectations.</div>
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Almost nothing works in this flick. The plot revolves around a completely stupid idea and the only way to redeem it would have been to simply go gonzo with it. But, in fact, <i>Shark Night</i> disappoints in its lame timidity. Okay, I'm not one of those bloggers who thinks every horror flick need be some battle of endurance wherein the viewer is pitted against the red syrup budget of the SFX department. I'll take smart plotting, rich characters, engaging themes, and genuine emotional impact over schlock any day of the week. But - and let's be honest with ourselves - what did anybody firing up the streaming (ha, I originally wrote steaming!) version of <i>SN</i> want or expect from this flick. Ain't nobody turning to their partner and saying, "Dear, I know we intended to watch Tarr's <i>Autumn Almanac</i> tonight, but I've heard that <i>Shark Night</i> captures the spiritual malaise while pushing the project of inventing the self-conscious experimentalism of remodernism even further than Tarr by placing it within a post-Guattarian framework. Plus, it's got the dude from <i>Grounded for Life</i> in it. We like him."<br />
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No, of course they didn't. If they did, they got exactly what they deserved. In fact, whatever happens to somebody like that is completely deserved. Even if it is worse than <i>Shark Night.</i><br />
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What anybody who watched this flick expected to see was nubile flesh, sharks, and death. See pic above.</div>
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Problem is, <i>Shark Night</i> is kinda afraid of girls when it comes to the skin show and it's remarkably bloodless when it comes to the killin'. It's got sharks, granted; but one out of three does not a champion make.</div>
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I will say that <i>Shark Night</i> does feature what is probably the most hilariously stupid villainous plan ever committed to film - or digital memory, as the case may be. I don't think you can spoil a rotten film, but if you're one of those obsessives, skip the rest of this paragraph and jump straight to the next one. Okay. They're gone. Here's the dilly. We're going to bide time here so it looks convincing that I'm dropping a spoiler on you. Then, in the next paragraph, I'm going to drop a spoiler on them right in the first sentence. Because we can. Are they looking over here? Look cool, look cool! Just act natural. Now, like, nod like I just told you all about the film. And . . . </div>
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The sharks are in the lake because some baddies thought a good way to make money would be to catch and maintain a large stable of the world's most deadly creatures - including what appears to be two animals (great whites) that have never been able to survive captivity before - so they can make Internet shark snuff films. Oh, um. End spoiler.</div>
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The sheer awesomeness of this idea is almost enough to redeem the film. Imagine the chain of logic that led three backwater hicks to this plan. "You know what people love watching: shark attacks."<br />
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"True that. I bet you could get rich if you just, like, had a ton of recorded shark attacks to sell."<br />
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"Yeah. Shame you'd have to figure out a way to make 'em happen regular like."</div>
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"Yeah. Shame there . . . Hey, wait. Here me out. What if we, you know, bought a boat. Then tricked it out with sufficient material and tech to capture sharks live. And I'm talking big sharks. Plus, you know, we should probably all get degrees in marine biology, 'cause I understand that keeping them things alive in captivity, especially the big ticket fellas, is a serious challenge for even the most well staffed and equipped aquarium."<br /></div>
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"Yeah. Like, even the Monterey Bay folks couldn't keep that baby great white contained and alive from more than few months."</div>
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"Exactly. That's what I'm sayin'. We'll need some real specialized skills and knowledge."</div>
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"The old boat shed probably won't cut it neither."</div>
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"Naw. And there's going to be a major outlay in underwater recording equipment."</div>
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"And we best hope the sharks just don't eat each other."</div>
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"Right. Sometimes, you just got to trust to God right? But anyway, I figure, for a several million outlay for training, equipment, labor, facility upgrades, and such, a fella stands to make a few bucks."</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />That, my friends, is entrepreneurial thinking. </span></div>CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-59638029055471883112012-04-25T11:51:00.001-04:002012-04-25T11:51:15.477-04:00"The lesson for everyone else: Never attempt to engage in any kind of outdoor physical activity, because traps are everywhere."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtVQUEiIhaEGzYcwxDK7UAaoDa5nA2qkX5DSZweYFoIT-qjDsLtP8Afh4CdK0VWYKl12ygK2eGfbCtWOUcg-7-zFCLY9YUblobQRocbNSU8v2l6rbqzA928SMnWLJ5kphleQRd/s1600/original.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtVQUEiIhaEGzYcwxDK7UAaoDa5nA2qkX5DSZweYFoIT-qjDsLtP8Afh4CdK0VWYKl12ygK2eGfbCtWOUcg-7-zFCLY9YUblobQRocbNSU8v2l6rbqzA928SMnWLJ5kphleQRd/s320/original.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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As a horror blogger, I don't get a lot of opportunity to link to <i>Gawker</i>, but said site has taken a break from its normal flow of "President Garfield still dead" recycled news and breathless speculation about the mental life of James Franco to finally post something worth linking to.</div>
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Police in Utah County, Utah, have busted two dudes who apparently <a href="http://gawker.com/5904902/two-men-jailed-for-setting-crude-nightmarish-booby-traps-along-a-hiking-trail">booby-trapped the crap out of a popular hiking trail</a> with stuff straight out of some "killer hillbilly" flick. The nasty bit of work shown above "was to be triggered via a fishing line trip wire; when crossed, it would send <strong>a 20-pound boulder</strong>,
to which several sharpened spikes had been affixed with what looks to
be just tons and tons and tons of rope, speeding at a victim's head."</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Mercifully, they were complete idiots and bragged about their death traps on facebook. </span>CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-16715511747844150452012-04-23T15:10:00.001-04:002012-04-23T15:10:51.747-04:00Music: The Wolfgangs, "Cannibal Family"So for the past month or so, I've been working on a entry pondering just how many people a cannibal clan would need to kill just to get the necessary calories in their diet. You'd be surprised at the amount of research that's been done on this question. While I continue to plug away, here's a song about cannibals. Enjoy.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="231" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/PHtJPrzUFEU" width="395"></iframe>CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-52972346677541809482012-02-09T16:12:00.001-05:002012-02-09T16:12:30.636-05:00Movies: The second worst thing Bin Laden has ever done to us?<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
What hath Kickstarter wrought?</div>
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It's possible that you were tiring of the zombie craze. Perhaps you've got no more energy for a fast vs. slow zombie debates. Maybe you think that context shifts - zombie strippers in space! - will no longer grab your attention by the shorties. "My God, just let this plague of zombie crap end!" you might cry in the long, dark lonely nights.</div>
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Well, this won't change any of that.</div>
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Somebody's made a zombie flick featuring Bin Laden as one of the walking dead.</div>
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<object height="360" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zb9V2lxa52M&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3">
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<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/zb9V2lxa52M&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="360"></embed></object>CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-88021080489109424942011-12-22T20:37:00.000-05:002011-12-22T20:37:07.841-05:00Don't apologize and never explain.I'm not going to follow the very good advice in the title. I'm about to become a first time father and thing are crazy absurd at work. I'll leave you to determine whether these are valid reasons for radio silence. I'll be back as soon as I can be. Thanks to all y'all that wait for me. For those that don't, godspeed, thanks for hanging.CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-87896489391041082242011-11-09T12:47:00.001-05:002011-11-09T12:47:25.280-05:00Art: Is this a bust or something?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhunIJZqaPOyXhFUclI7-gCNNZfsAICUlaDfZ215zBp4MuB1zXxY6BVzPvrseDv4pQihfqkn1OskJtuw7Fk6CmlvrsExUcGET3JJoGkeCwG9KghVDn4cl4uZqdqciPVx8fqRk61/s1600/frank.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhunIJZqaPOyXhFUclI7-gCNNZfsAICUlaDfZ215zBp4MuB1zXxY6BVzPvrseDv4pQihfqkn1OskJtuw7Fk6CmlvrsExUcGET3JJoGkeCwG9KghVDn4cl4uZqdqciPVx8fqRk61/s320/frank.JPG" width="235" /></a></div>
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The <i>It's Alive Project</i>, currently on
display at the City Arts Factory in Orlando, FL, is a show of 80 Boris Karloff
busts, redesigned by contemporary artists. Some of the busts allude to
Karloff's iconic roles, while others take Karloff's famous mug in some truly
odd directions. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/nerdcoreblog/sets/72157627926226395/with/6312263880/">Make
with the link clickin'</a> to check out a flikr set of the designs.</div>CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-31126152350406880362011-11-03T15:57:00.002-04:002011-11-03T15:57:35.750-04:00Mad science: The snuggle of doom!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5AgWBxH8uzOgqaOqzC1rVoJ9YCpeMQ7OEvpfoLXUzWhvsmfV71zwXwB6fTRPGwKwijhWnXJLeheY_E_OQJ5zri5X0d_x-F6RIA90RGIvC57ejUy9ipo5ZUlWt0f0bMK9FHIKd/s1600/l_38af082789d3435fb49eb52e86097b7b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="316" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5AgWBxH8uzOgqaOqzC1rVoJ9YCpeMQ7OEvpfoLXUzWhvsmfV71zwXwB6fTRPGwKwijhWnXJLeheY_E_OQJ5zri5X0d_x-F6RIA90RGIvC57ejUy9ipo5ZUlWt0f0bMK9FHIKd/s400/l_38af082789d3435fb49eb52e86097b7b.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?volumeID=24&editionID=207&ArticleID=1942"><i>The Psychologuist</i></a> has a great info dump article on the psychology of horror that gives readers a nice survey of work in the field: from evolutionary developmental theories on uses of fear to theories on the popularity of specific monster tropes. One nice takeaway is the experimental evidence for what's commonly known as the "snuggle theory." Now you'll rarely see the snuggle theory brought into horror conversations when the horror blog pro-am get around to discussing the importance and meaning of horror. Why? Well, because it's main premise is that horror's just an elaborate pick-up gimmick. Also, what horror blog wants to drop the word "snuggle?" The snuggle theory holds that "viewing
horror films may be a rite of passage for young people, providing them with an
opportunity to fulfill their traditional gender roles." Basically, it's a danger free way for dudes to act brave in the face of fear and be a comfort to their scared potential mates. Not only is there some awkwardly heavy-handed bio-determinism all up in there, but who wants to take their cherished genre and say that its, at it roots, a kinda of half-assed way to impress the babes with faux courage? But before we utterly dismiss it, here comes the science:<br /><br /><i>A paper from the late 1980s
by Dolf Zillmann, Norbert Mundorf and others found that male undergrads paired
with a female partner (unbeknown to them, a research assistant), enjoyed a
14-minute clip from Friday the 13th Part III almost twice as much if she showed
distress during the film. Female undergrads, by contrast, said they enjoyed the
film more if their male companion appeared calm and unmoved. Moreover, men who
were initially considered unattractive were later judged more appealing if they
displayed courage during the film viewing. ‘Scary movies and monsters are just
the ticket for girls to scream and hold on to a date for dear life and for the
date (male or female) to be there to reassure, protect, defend and, if need be,
destroy the monster,’ says Fischoff. ‘Both are playing gender roles prescribed
by a culture.’</i></div>
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So, next time somebody holds a roundtable on what's so great about horror, have the courage to say "I like horror because it's a great way to fool horror chicks into thinking I'm awesome so I can bang them." I know at least one horror blogger who should be answering this way already, but let's all do our horror-blog host pal a solid and take the pressure off by "I am Spartacus"-ing the idea.</div>CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-28906317350933301762011-10-29T09:23:00.001-04:002011-10-29T09:23:08.935-04:00Random Picture #5: Zip lock.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3ZXRxI8YNR81mVojds_c7BkaROPUtD7dmzpNXpr5FXrgeVeT99xRwwXpHJrUA4MpfhhjQFAxJR2FBHZ0R0luY_rrB7PwADVX5Ai2HrDytgqr6QCWuNgzZy9pyt35ZAC7EPwis/s1600/tumblr_lqs34cvZJ71qbhx4wo1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3ZXRxI8YNR81mVojds_c7BkaROPUtD7dmzpNXpr5FXrgeVeT99xRwwXpHJrUA4MpfhhjQFAxJR2FBHZ0R0luY_rrB7PwADVX5Ai2HrDytgqr6QCWuNgzZy9pyt35ZAC7EPwis/s400/tumblr_lqs34cvZJ71qbhx4wo1_500.jpg" width="303" /></a></div>
<br />CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-90055769454534633352011-10-25T11:05:00.000-04:002011-10-25T11:05:35.323-04:00Radio: "Listen to them. Children of the night."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEXkuNcI_6IzhfxJlnwby4XFQLkN6atBTDG5eppk2Q9lacUbaExcKizb0y2CnOZAd5WWrCPpT0Qeucpsw1vw0rrYZrYR82SK2Xp9bKcUtiPJRJr_vuNRae4ad5JBEx-T7TpOfx/s1600/Orson-Welles-at-CBS-with-Beard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEXkuNcI_6IzhfxJlnwby4XFQLkN6atBTDG5eppk2Q9lacUbaExcKizb0y2CnOZAd5WWrCPpT0Qeucpsw1vw0rrYZrYR82SK2Xp9bKcUtiPJRJr_vuNRae4ad5JBEx-T7TpOfx/s320/Orson-Welles-at-CBS-with-Beard.jpg" width="229" /></a></div>
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Certainly, the most famous Halloween-centric broadcast of the legendary Orson Welles (shown here in dapper and shockingly young form) is the much mythologized <i>War of the Worlds</i> show that, if one believes, was responsible for widespread panic throughout the Tri-state area.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But Welles's alien invasion radio play isn't the only show in </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The Mercury Theater</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> archives of interest to the spookshow junkie with a taste for the retro. Over at the fine music and horror blog Psychobabble you can listen to </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The Mercury Theater</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">'s production of <a href="http://psychobabble100.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/listen-to-orson-welless-dracula-on-psychobabble/">Bram Stoker's classic vampire novel: <i>Dracula</i></a></span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">When </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The Mercury Theater</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> (full title: <i>The Mercury Theater on the Air</i>) debuted in 1939, </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Dracula</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> was their first broadcast. Welles himself provided the voices of the eponymous vampire and Doctor Seward. </span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Theater</i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> regular Agnes Moorehead plays Mina and the great Bernard Herrmann provides the score. But why stay here reading my blah blah blah? Click on over and enjoy!</span>CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-81325653615231163492011-10-21T09:49:00.002-04:002011-10-21T09:49:56.342-04:00Stuff: "There won’t be enough bullets left to kill them all."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxNtTdd-7BVtZdSG1kl-tj_ac5-LO3oSwFVQwT3LSH4ajE7rGnvncCy0v7Ag9PA3euZCrOcn_DdLMd0HgGHRw_y0CJQEWywjGhgjprrMTe78CCdYtGN_EqZT7IXM6ZsvX5h66Y/s1600/GI_Zack.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxNtTdd-7BVtZdSG1kl-tj_ac5-LO3oSwFVQwT3LSH4ajE7rGnvncCy0v7Ag9PA3euZCrOcn_DdLMd0HgGHRw_y0CJQEWywjGhgjprrMTe78CCdYtGN_EqZT7IXM6ZsvX5h66Y/s320/GI_Zack.jpg" width="242" /></a></div>
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Just in time for Halloween, the defense-sector rag <i>Military Times</i> takes a look at <a href="http://militarytimes.com/offduty/health/offduty-zombie-war-deployment-guide-072611/">effective responses to the inevitable zombie holocaust</a>. Some of the article is delightfully wonky, in a sort of crazed militia-man way:</div>
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<br /><i>Perhaps the single hottest topic of debate among necro-warfare experts is what makes the ideal weapon against the undead.</i></div>
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<i>Fortunately,
as anyone who has seen the “Living Dead” movies knows, the
possibilities are infinite — anything that will take out a zombie’s
brain will do the trick.</i></div>
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<i>Former Marine and “Top Shot Season 2” champ Chris Reed says he would keep it simple. “A
good Ruger .22 is hard to beat for your typical zombie killing,” Reed
says. (His perfect deadpan delivery inspired our take on this story.)</i></div>
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<i>Others
worry that a .22 round just won’t have the stopping power needed for
zombie headshots. “The .22 won’t get skull penetration beyond 100
yards,” Bourne says. Instead, he’d grab an M4<strong> </strong>carbine or — better yet — an AK47 for drag-through-the-mud-and-still-shoot reliability.</i></div>
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<i>Outdoor
Life shooting editor John Snow’s top pick: Lauer Custom Weaponry’s
LCW15 Zombie Eliminator with the arrow gun attachment and Beta-C
100-round ammunition drum. For backups, he says he’d add the Remington
Model 870 Shotgun and Para Super Hawg<strong> </strong>.45-caliber
pistol. All that might seem like overkill for something that’s not even
alive — or real — but among the ranks of zombie hunters, you can never
be too careful.</i></div>
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<i>Of course, firearms need plenty of ammo and
maintenance. That’s why Matt Mogk, president of the Zombie Research
Society, prefers simple, lightweight and silent — a baseball bat, metal
pipe or other blunt, maintenance-free implement that will deliver a
head-crushing blow.</i></div>
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<i>While the simple crowbar and more elegant
katana, favored by ancient samurai warriors, typically top zombie
fighters’ list of cold steel, Mogk says he isn’t a fan of bladed
weapons.</i></div>
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<i>“You have to keep swords sharp, especially if you’re to
trying take off heads. Plus, it’s too easy for them to get stuck inside a
zombie. Then you’re really hosed.”</i></div>
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
As fun as that is, I found it liked the more atypical bits of advice. For example, how should the smart soldier dress for the reign of the dead (Romero, feel free to snag that title - it's yours, <i>gratis</i>). Again, from the article:<br /> </div>
<div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">
<i>When things come to blows, you’ll be glad you dumped your heavy battle
rattle for simple protective gear that will keep you light on your feet
and infection-free. A supply of medical face masks and surgical gloves
are a no-brainer, but to keep all that blood at bay, try a heavy rubber
butcher’s apron.</i></div>CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-51986531847602813622011-10-11T19:18:00.001-04:002011-10-11T19:21:05.792-04:00Movies: How much does knowing you suck excuse you from sucking?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUYHBdWQy8sbSjjgNkyvrRXyFuTTMSkIxuYdCvgcCV8SoJtFY8C1NEP5e4GlRM8A_zT-UJc1ktwHHDtTeVUIM-Q5BmI3632lqzNED8kpQobexP5qeoAy5kPwN2kyiWjgAaHQxJ/s1600/51Rybh0AGaL._SX500_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUYHBdWQy8sbSjjgNkyvrRXyFuTTMSkIxuYdCvgcCV8SoJtFY8C1NEP5e4GlRM8A_zT-UJc1ktwHHDtTeVUIM-Q5BmI3632lqzNED8kpQobexP5qeoAy5kPwN2kyiWjgAaHQxJ/s320/51Rybh0AGaL._SX500_.jpg" width="225" /></a></div>
What does one write about <i>Monster Island</i>, the Jack Perez (of <i>Mega-Shark Versus Giant Octopus</i>
"fame") helmed MTV-produced made-for-TV oddity that pits a gaggle of
youths against an island populated by stop-motion animation giant
insects and Adam West?<br />
<br />
Honestly, this thing is barely a movie, so I feel it's only fair that I barely write about it. The most interesting thing about <i>Monster Island</i>
is the unintentionally philosophical question it's existence raises:
How much does knowing you suck excuse you sucking? This isn't a purely
hypothetical question. Regular readers, God forgive them, will know that
we here at <i>ANTSS</i> refer to this as the Byrne Problem, after author Anthony Burgess (yes, of <i>Clockwork Orange</i> fame, but he wrote a lot of other, better stuff too). To sum up: Burgess's last book, <i>Byrne</i>,
consisted of the fake autobiographical epic poem of the supposed worst
poet in the world. That sounds funny, until you realize that it means
reading through 150 pages of the intentionally worst poetry ever written.
At no time during this trudge through these 150 pages of utter crap verse
do you think Burgess isn't on the joke. He knows he's creating bad
verse; that's the point. The idea is that knowing he knows will somehow
make what's universally admitted as excruciating somehow less so. Still,
you've got to read 150 pages of shit. So, how much does knowing you
suck excuse you from sucking? Entire careers have been based on the idea that
the answer is "100%." Zack Snyder, I'm looking at you. (Not to be
confused with people who don't know that they utterly suck; <i>Day of the Woman</i>, I'm looking at you.) Smack dab in the <i>Byrne</i> sweet spot, you'll find <i>Monster Island</i>.<br />
<br />
I'm
hesitant to review <i>MI</i>, as I feel that gives it too
much credit. So, instead, I'm going to extract some observations from my
notes. That's right. I take notes. He says as he indignantly pushes his
glasses further up the bridge of his nose.<br />
<br />
Two random points.<br />
<br />
1. MTV gets props for presenting themselves as heartless
exploiters of young people. It would have been enough if MTV had simply
allowed their staff to be depicted as shallow, heartless dicks willing
to put young lives on the line for a quick buck - which this movie
totally depicts them as being - but they actually take it further.
Central to the plot of the film is the idea that teenagers would be
totally stoked to see a concert by Carmen Electra. Even in 2004, this
alone was enough to push the film clearly into sci-fi/fantasy territory,
no giant bugs necessary. The oddly brilliant twist is that, later,
giant ants (no relation) kidnap Carmen to sedate their human slave
population (long story). In drawing the parallel, the film basically
suggests that the entertainment MTV peddles isn't just exploitative, but
actually part of a control system meant to keep you a slave of the
colony. Kudos to everybody involved for the lucid moment. That you
buried it in a made-for-TV movie that all of maybe twenty people saw,
eh, not so great. Still, lollipops for everybody involved just for doing
it.<br />
<br />
2. Whenever a film targeted at the mainstream, no matter how hopelessly
as may be the case, has to include the taste of an indie music slob,
there's always an interesting conflict between the visual and the audio.
The perfect exemplar of this is the film <i>High
Fidelity</i>. The cats in that flick are supposedly the ultimate
in music snobs, but the first time we meet Jack Black's character - a
character so music obsessed that he regularly chases away customers by
insulting their taste - he's grooving on Katrina and the Wave's "Walking
on Sunshine." A spiffy little song to be sure, but hardly the signifier
of obscure, elitism. Throughout the whole film, we get, again and
again, bizarro cop-out music choices. When Jack Black tries to take over
the store's stereo from the sad sack mumbly dude, we learn that the
sad music he was trying to play was Belle and Sebastian. That's as indie
as it goes. The rest of flick rest clearly in common knowledge. When
the shop staff debate esoterica like what's the best first track of the
B-side of an album, they land safely in Clash and Stevie Wonder
territory (not to diss either of those, 'cause they're great). Who is the favorite musician of the indier-than-thou record store owner? The Boss, Bruce Springsteen. Don't get me wrong: the only boss I ever listen to is Bruce - as me spotty employment career more than attests to. Still, it's kind of weird.<br />
<br />
(Okay, as a I'm-no-hipster device, sure. When I was a college DJ, the head of the station was a brutally hip woman - so indie her shirts don't fit - who swore that she was the biggest Madonna fan; but it was bullshit, she deployed this po-mo hyper-intellectualized version of Madge as a defense against the charge that her profound love of intentionally inaccessible math rock was some classist affectation. It's the same reason modern hipster doofuses professes to love Beyonc<span class="st"><i></i></span>e<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/artist/beyonc-p349078"><i></i></a>. But we all know it's bullshit. Own your hipster elite douchebaggery and be done with it.)<br />
<br />
Anyway, I bring this up because there's an important scene in <i>MI</i> when our hero, a perfectly insufferable self-righteous dick of a indie boy, thumbs through the CD collection of Carmen Electra - and that's not a euphemism, though the phrase "thumbs through Carmen Electra's CD collection" sounds dirty because of Carmen Electra - and decides, despite the fact that she's whoring out (metaphorically this time) for MTV, she must be okay. The pivot point: Radiohead and the Ramones. Seriously? Why does this kid have the taste of 37-year-old man? What's the point of being a snotty music snob kid if you have to worship at the altar of your parents' balding over-the-hill hipster's music tastes?<br />
<br />
That said, the whole scene has an unintentional patina of nostalgia: how long before digital music effectively kills the tradition of secretly checking out a potential sexual partner's music collection for hints as to their suitability?CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-32152630642781249512011-09-13T20:07:00.004-04:002011-09-13T20:07:44.295-04:00Neo-folkie Madeline - who was not, I think, named after one of the cats I grew up with, but I like to pretend that she was - has a video that exploits <i>ANTSS</i> favorite horror flick. Enjoy.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="345" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Fe2pGpStFx8" width="560"></iframe>CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-70792353028152961932011-08-23T19:44:00.002-04:002011-08-23T19:45:19.749-04:00Random Picture #5: Variations on a Theme.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoLTI4lyAO2_pKgHOrCTld7G8RvZDSMmWsAf0J2Zt7N_oZvRe8mn3Ke6CoXtz_Ue59N-yGQPrFYNQ0gkrFywE0ekQUus-SRZAAGhp_jeEvhh9rSS3NUONZRcuCtPR09QS56P0q/s1600/tumblr_lppdto4VUI1qdmvrxo1_500.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 259px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoLTI4lyAO2_pKgHOrCTld7G8RvZDSMmWsAf0J2Zt7N_oZvRe8mn3Ke6CoXtz_Ue59N-yGQPrFYNQ0gkrFywE0ekQUus-SRZAAGhp_jeEvhh9rSS3NUONZRcuCtPR09QS56P0q/s400/tumblr_lppdto4VUI1qdmvrxo1_500.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5644201597155734930" border="0" /></a>
<br />
<br />CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-4423891740342409982011-08-20T08:17:00.004-04:002011-08-20T08:27:28.922-04:00Stuff: Does anybody ask mystery writers what crimes they've solved?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWg7ve39BHgMzXfLUfS-wUE_c-oSoAO1MbfpJyiu4VClcuo9xjRsKmoPxqw_wzOyB3D5AhsQxrKbv1YvVTUCwW3kYrqPoLix2Q-Jw69rEP7dnSe_nw_46xPKmvmatHjCOhtBRN/s1600/movies_the_shining-10811.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWg7ve39BHgMzXfLUfS-wUE_c-oSoAO1MbfpJyiu4VClcuo9xjRsKmoPxqw_wzOyB3D5AhsQxrKbv1YvVTUCwW3kYrqPoLix2Q-Jw69rEP7dnSe_nw_46xPKmvmatHjCOhtBRN/s320/movies_the_shining-10811.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5642913284701479570" border="0" /></a>
<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">The Gray Dame has an nice with-your-coffee-on-Saturday fluff piece that revisits that perennial favorite topic of horror "journalism:" <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/movies/horror-movies-rattle-their-makers.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB">what scares the folk who make the things that scare us</a>? The nice thing about this particular piece is that the <i>NY Times</i> can pull together a list that would be the envy of even the most powerful blogging sites. Their mix of A-list names and notable horror indie types is one of the best horror conclaves I seen in ages.</span>
<br />CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34993991.post-24127290211682410822011-08-06T08:52:00.004-04:002015-04-18T14:18:27.485-04:00Books: Speaking of American Psycho . . .<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2m8JdtiIJbX_TSezHsm-i8WXYpn8JLajZSlSXvLLqwsZwbgQgU8lSgCNuU4C6sNXyxT4iaq1MrCIoKu4YUehMxWl_AGQRcY7KifJ6cKnSaReouBZIZDrj-khiiefvR-9NgjnS/s1600/americanpsycho.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2m8JdtiIJbX_TSezHsm-i8WXYpn8JLajZSlSXvLLqwsZwbgQgU8lSgCNuU4C6sNXyxT4iaq1MrCIoKu4YUehMxWl_AGQRcY7KifJ6cKnSaReouBZIZDrj-khiiefvR-9NgjnS/s320/americanpsycho.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5637725476848519474" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 240px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">In the <i>Times</i>, there's a neat <a href="http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/mapping-the-new-york-of-american-psycho/?scp=1&sq=psycho&st=cse">Google map of the locations</a> that appear in Mary Harmon's cult horror/satire <i>American Psycho</i>.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">Two things strike me as notable about the map. First, the section the <i>Times</i> ran it in: "Dealbook" in the business section. Second, the specific fact that it refers to the film alone.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">Just some thoughts.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">In his 1991 memoir of the Gulf War, ex-Marine Anthony Swofford admirably demolished the notion of filmmakers diminish our taste for conflict when they depict the violence of conflict in graphic terms. Previous, and perhaps more eloquent, writers had dismissed the utility of anti-war art before. Leslie Fiedler, for example, astutely pointed out the obvious in his introduction to </span><span class="st" style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">Jaroslav Hašek's classic unfinished novel <i></i></span><i><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">The Good Soldier Svejk</span></i> and stated that anti-war art hasn't done anything to prevent us from going to war, it's simply stripped it of its nobility. Swofford went one further than Fiedler and suggested that, by stripping it of the nobility that inscribed conflict within a matrix of civil action and responsibility, modern graphic depictions of war became a sort of naked celebration of the unleashed power of violence. Freed of the ideals of combat, what's left is a darkly glamorous wallowing in the use of force, liberated by the presumption of evil of any need to answer to moral calculus. Horace's suicidal war erotica might not have been "true," was it really worse than <i>Blackhawk Down</i>'s war porn? Swofford recalls how, prior to deployment, he and his fellow Marines would eat up ostensibly anti-war films like <i>Apocalypse Now</i> and <i>Platoon</i>, getting a proxy wargasm off the display of raw hell that they would soon (potentially) be in a position to wield themselves.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">Curiously, workers in the financial sector have the same weird fascination with their own potential corruption. In the 1980s, Gordon Gekko, allegedly created as a symbol of what was wrong with America, became something of a spiritual folk hero to the legions of overpaid insignificants toiling away at the bottom tranch of various wealth factories. (One of the few standout scenes in the otherwise mediocre <i>Boiler Room</i> involves the wannabe brokers watching <i>Wall Street</i> and ritualistically reciting lines along with the actors in the film the way geeks recite lines from <i>Star Wars</i>.) For the bloodthirsty guppy who longed to be a shark in the chum clogged pool of pre-Silicon Alley bubble Wall Street, you couldn't find a better icon than Patrick Bateman, the exquisitely acquisitive mental case at the center of Bret Easton Ellis's <i>American Psycho</i>.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">As a literary character, Bateman was kind of a bust - at least for the purposes of using him as anti-saint for the quants and bottom feeders of the Financial District. Though Ellis later claimed that <i>Psycho</i> was the second novel he completed, Patrick's first appearance was as the respectable, pompous, and dull older brother of Sean Bateman in <i>Rules of Attraction</i>. In his cameo, the notably not particularly psycho Patrick plays the hectoring voice of adulthood, reminding Sean yet again that the seemingly consequence free decadence of college life is temporary. Given what later know of Patrick, the scene seems unlikely at best.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">Even when Bateman got his own book, he wasn't really fit for duty. Though he's now overshadowed by his cinematic version, the literary version of Bateman is an odder and, despite the extreme gore and violence of the novel, more intellectually demanding beast. In the novel, Bateman literally slides in and out of fantasy: many of the characters and locations of the novel are lifted directly from other Brat pack novels and various '80s lit classics, a detail that's often overlooked, partially because the cult following of Ellis's novel is, I think, not the same audience for the novels Ellis alludes to. (Which is my nice way of saying that a lot of the people who love <i>American Psycho</i> don't read a lot.) For example, people often point out that the name of the firm Patrick works for, Pierce and Pierce, is a punning allusion to Bateman's extracurricular activities. It's less common for readers to point out that Bateman works for the same firm as Sherman McCoy, the main character in <i>Bonfire of the Vanities</i>. <i>American Psycho</i>'s something of a '80s Wall Street version of <i>League of Extraordinary Gentlemen</i>, yet only a single reference to Ellis's use of meta-fictional elements appears in the wikipedia entry for his novel (near-victim Allison Poole is correctly sourced to Jay McInerney's <i>Story of My Life</i>). This odd mingling of the "real" and "fake" within the story has important implications for whether or not Bateman is actually committing any of the increasingly surreal murders he so graphically describes. (Notably, wikipedia doesn't ever suggest the possibly that Ellis himself admits, that Bateman's no killer.)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">It would take the movies to streamline and simplify Bateman. Ellis wasn't very impressed with the film. Because "the medium of film demands answers," her said, the character of Bateman becomes "infinitely less interesting." (The adaptation also seems to mark the beginning of Ellis's unfortunate public displays of cinema-centric sexism: since the adaptation of <i>American Psycho</i>, Ellis has been known to raise a stink among the <i>Jezebel</i>-following crowd with seemingly throwaway comments about his belief that women can't direct films.) Regardless, director Mary Harmon's drastic constriction of Ellis's original work clarifies what Bateman is, makes explicit the connections between his violence and the economic rapaciousness around him, and sacrifices nuance for satiric punch. She created a monster where Ellis had built a mystery. And for the drones of Wall Street, that's just what they needed. Sexy, predatory, unstoppable - Patrick Bateman was the new Gordon Gekko. The alluring image of what, in their unrestricted hearts, they could be. Hot stuff. Plus, nice hair.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">Which also brings us to the locale map. I'm not certain that such a map would be possible for the novel. Ellis's book purposely has Bateman slide into some Wonderland Manhattan of near-real but not-quite places that seem to exist in a fantasy un-Manhattan matrix Bateman's spread over the real city. Only the movie, with its radically dumbed-down insistence on the literalness of Bateman's existence and activities would demand a geographic sense of '80s New York.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">But I ramble. Check out the map and enjoy.</span>CRwMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07896615209770501945noreply@blogger.com4