Under The Brown Hat

NuvaRing ad against safe sex?

2009-11-11T00:04:00.003-05:00

You know, I was kinda looking forward to a break from writing anything about sex. I mean, various issues of feminism fascinate me a lot and in general I find them fun to analyze, but I'm not really aiming to turn my blog into the next Dr. Ruth explains it all.

But alas, feeling a bit restless tonight, I decided to kill an hour or so on Hulu, and I ran into this ad which I can't help but comment on.

That the ad has a group of women telling stories about how inconvenient taking birth control pills are isn't that troubling to me. It's not that they are shooting down one kind of hormone treatment to promote another, but rather something that is said around the middle of the ad. A woman tells about losing a pill and her doctor suggesting she just use condoms until everything is back on cycle. This, was apparently a huge no-no for the woman. "That's the whole point of it," she exclaims, that the pill allows you to not need condoms.

So here's my gripe: birth control hormones, be they by pill or ring, do not protect against STDs! Yes, we can speculate that the woman is in a monogamous relationship, married possibly even, and simply taking the pill to avoid having children, in which case the "whole point" bit might seem benign. However, we're given no personal information about the woman to confirm that. All that is clear is that there is something unfavorable about condoms, which happen to be the best way to prevent the spread of STDs short of abstinence. The pill and the ring both carry out virtually all the same functions and thus their quality can be compared. Condoms, however, do not function in all the same ways as these hormone-based contraceptives. Comparing the quality of their shared function without acknowledging the simultaneous alternative use of the condom, at best, ignores this alternate use--and its importance--and, at worse, implies their superiority over the condom at its alternate function, which of course is completely false (the latter is admittedly a stretch, considering they do note in the end of the ad that NuvaRing does not protect against STDs).

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with NuvaRing as a product, but good grief does this strike me as irresponsible advertising. It's not like the women are a bunch of teenagers talking about how they can sleep around with lots of guys and not worry about getting pregnant, but nonetheless the ad's disregard for the seriousness of sexually transmitted diseases warrants someone getting slapped upside their head.

Feminism and Gender Debate (continued from FIFE).

2009-11-10T13:04:00.003-05:00

So yeah, I've been debating a lot on topics of feminism with Dan of Life Scans Darkly (good music taste by the way). Both on this blog and over at Feminism is for Everyone. In the case of the latter, things have gotten a little off topic from what the original post was about. Our discussion began when he responded to an aspect of a question I asked another commenter, Lindsey, about part of what she had said about the topic of the post. From there, our discussion took over the thread and Dan has asked me if we could take it to email. Since the debate began public, however, I kinda feel it should remain so if there is anything more to be said (at this point I do feel rather done with it on my end). My blog gets pretty low traffic from what I can tell, so I don't think there is any kind of home advantage to speak of. Still, I hope fellow readers will stay cordial or at least civil.

To avoid unfairly slanting the discussion in my summery, anyone that is curious about this post please follow the link to the FIFE discussion board to see what this is all about. The topic does pertain to sexual ethics, so none of this is probably appropriate for minors (when has my blog ever been?).

As for the debate...

Dan, you asked last time if I could repeat my last comment for you to respond to here it is (if not clear to others, quotation marks indicate things Dan said that I'm responding to; these quotes are all from one comment posted by him and should not be read as a back and forth chat--see original post):

"Just as feminism was a result of femininity, femininity was a result of women. Logically - if there were no women, there would be no such thing as femininity."

That's... just...

Ok look, you just arbitrarily picked a sex to blame gender roles on. You could just as easily say 'feminism is a result of masculinity (and yes, PATRIARCHY), and that logically, were there no men there would be no masculinity (or femininity or gender). You offer no grounding for why the woman must be the 'other' of the equation.

"As such, gender no more "traps" women in femininity than a photograph "traps" a landscape in perpetual summer. The photograph is a depiction (result) of the landscape, just as femininity is a depiction (result) of female traits. It's not a trap - it's a portrait."

While I really don't want to drag out Susan Sontag, your photograph analogy is neither that accurate or to your benefit. There is the assumption that in a photograph you do capture something of the truth, but how does one capture?: through the framing and focus. A photo only conveys a moment, of what is in its frame, from the position of the lens--attempting to translate a three-dimensional temporal reality into a stagnant two-dimensional moment. What is outside of the frame, what happened before or after the shot... all excluded. The phenomenon of the event becomes a story, a document through the photo which can never be fully trusted on its own to convey real truth.

Femininity (and masculinity) as photograph is in this sense, at best like a stereotype: a projected assumption of the whole based upon an observation of a portion. So yes, where gender roles are upheld, gender does trap.

"It's one thing to be a non-feminine woman, but to rail against femininity itself is pointless."

I have nothing against femininity. My fiancee is in many respects quite feminine... when she's not kicking ass with a broadsword or pinning a sheep down for her folks to sheer. I have nothing against feminine qualities - both in the sense of western forms and my above description of gender being 'what each sex does'. Behavior is not the problem, its the constraints of gender upon behavior. It's the part where behavior becomes designated and dichotomized by sex.

"As long as women and men exist, so will gender."

As long as women and men exist there will be women and men, gender designations have increasingly become blurry within our society. We are no where near as strict as we were. Women can play sports, men can more and more acceptably be stay at home dads. Men can more acceptably cry. There is a major problem with women being raped in the military, but at the same time there is a lot more acceptance within this generation for them going to war. Forms of behavior have become much more open to both sexes, there is no reason to assume they will not continue to progress.

No Longer A Man's World? Part 2: Marge Simpson and Speculations about the 'New' Sexual Object as Sacrifical Victim

2009-10-24T14:33:00.008-04:00

Note: Sorry for the House of Leaves effect, but out of respect for commentators, additions and significant edits after the fact are in red so that their arguments cannot be swept under the rug as I refine this when shown the need to. Thanks!

Previously on Under The Brown Hat (yeah, I've always wanted to do that), I purposed the question, if the economic dimension of Feminism, the primary goals of the First-Wave, are coming to an end as TIME Magazine suggests, can we say the same awaits on the near horizon
for problems such as the sexual objectification of women?

One somewhat backwards solution to the age old problem has become fairly established already and is partially to be blamed for why we are able to so easily overlook the problem now. Returning to this idea of "true equality" Stengel purposes, we can see one method for dissolving women's objectification has been through a 'thigh for a thigh, boob for a man-boob' reciprocated sexual objectification of the male body. From the stripped to his waist, bloodied and provocatively Christlike first cinematic male-sex symbol, Rudolf Valentino, to the "neurotic erotica" of Gillette's body shaving campaign for men which encourages pubic shaving, men have been and are ever increasingly objectified (Twilight anyone?). There are at least three problems that need to be addressed about this approach:

First, the most frivolous, is that though women have, can, and do objectify men, it can hardly be said that the degree of sexual objectification is equal. On the most basic level this can be shown to be evident by taking the safe mode off Google Images (I should have to point out that this will result in NSFW material) and comparing the results for typing in "Man" and "Woman."

I did this a second ago and found for men a magazine cover with Robert Downy Jr. in a suit declared "sexiest man alive," some images of mutilated soldiers, some female nude photos taken by Man Ray ironically, and... well... some ordinary photographs of men. Mostly working class people, but little more than that for six pages of searching.

"Woman" bombarded me with at least half a screen full of hardcore pornography. Women on women, women being gang banged... nasty stuff. There was also a picture of a Muslim Woman and at least one picture of Wonder Woman that wasn't excessively erotic. I only made it two screen searches before I got sick of the obvious pattern. "Woman" produces predominantly exploitative images of graphic pornographic scenes that have apparently no artistic erotic dimension beyond being masturbatory fodder. I rest my case.

The second problem is even though there is some male sexual objectification isn't the majority of it skewed in some way to reiterate the original patriarchal gender dynamics? From Valentino to Robert Pattinson, is there not in many of these sex-icons an effeminate dimension to their appeal? In truth, it is only one vein among many different demeanors and body types of objectified male icons, but if we fallow sexual objectification to physical victimization do we not see the subjects emerge in a feminine role? When the bare fact is pointed out that men are also rape victims, is not the overlooked detail that men are usually raped by other men? Though cases of women raping men are recorded, they are seen as freakish and abnormal and are certainly rarer than men raping men. In the ultimate act of male sexual objectification, the victim's fate is to in being raped be made his assailant's 'bitch', thus reaffirming the gendered chauvinistic dynamic of feminine as subordinate even when the victim is male.

Beyond this subversion that leads sexual objectification to be an inherently feminine role regardless of the subject's sex, there is a more obvious reason why sexually objectifying human beings is not resolved by making men equally objectified. The third problem is the ultimate reality that sexually objectifying men on any level just means more people are being sexually objectified. What is ultimately wrong with objectification is the inherent disregard for the individuality of those who are objectified.

From these three problems we can see that sexual objectification is not a feminist issue--in that limited sense of feminism being the realm of 'women's interests'--because more women get sexually objectified than men and the playing field must be quantitatively evened-out, the way that according to TIME Magazine the workforce is becoming, but rather because this fundamental wrong, this cold, violent even, form of solipsism, is gendered at its core. It is this gendering that, as an offshoot, results in the imbalance of female to male sexual objectification, but it must be understood as an offshoot first and foremost, for the major problem is the solipsist disconnect of individuals from other individuals.

With this understanding of how sexual objectification functions and has thus far been erroneously dealt with through generalized sexual objectification, we can re-investigate the Oct. 26th issue of TIME to see if in its predominate optimism there is in fact any clue for how to deal with this unmentionable problem of how society addresses women as sexual objects. And lo and behold, a rather comical solution does in fact appear in one of the most counter-intuitive of places.

On page 17, at the bottom of the list of Verbatim quotes, there can be found one from James Jellinek, the editorial director of Playboy Magazine. The quote pertains to "his decision to feature Marge Simpson on the magazine's November cover" saying that, "She is a stunning example of the cartoon form." The solution here is admittedly perverse, but it is also misleading. For though it might not seem such a radically new concept--even for Playboy (which has featured virtual videogame women before (NSFW)), let alone that animated pornography and pornographic images both have considerably long histories of existence--it is not so much the content as Jellinek's approach to the content that flirts with something radical. To understand this, lets consider a similar contemporary analysis of sexism's sibling of sorts, racism.

In Slavoj Zizek's The Fragile Absolute, he analysis the criticisms of the first of the Star Wars Prequel as an example of a third kind of racism, neither direct or reverse, but reflective.

The usual leftist critical point that the multitude of exotic alien (extra-human) species in Star Wars represent, in code, inter-human ethnic differences, reducing them to the level of common racist stereotypes (the evil merchants of the greedy Trade Federation are a clear caricature of the ant-like Chinese merchants), somehow misses the point: these references to ethnic clichés are not a cipher to be penetrated through an arduous theoretical analysis; they are directly alluded to, their identification is, as it were, part of the game. […] What is crucial here is that [the aliens] are not played by real actors, but are pure digital creations – as such, they do not merely refer to the clichés; rather, they are directly presented, staged as nothing but animated clichés. For that reason they are, in some way, ‘flat’, lacking the ‘depth’ of a true personality: the grimaces of their almost infinitely plastic faces give immediate and direct expression to their innermost attitudes and feelings (anger, fear, lust, pride), making them totally transparent (Zizek, pages 4-5 in my copy, page 7 in the linked version).

Humoring the idea that all stereotypes emerge from a kernel of truth, that the actions or characteristics of one or a group of people are then attributed to the whole of their race, the mistake such critics make of Star Wars is in thinking that it is like the minstrel show, where black performers or white performs in blackface act out racist archetypes of black people, directly attributing stereotype to race. Star Wars is not such a minstrel. The staggering irony here is that in these embodiments of racist stereotypes, these pure living manifestations of stereotypes disconnected from human beings, "staged as nothing but animated clichés" become racist only through their re-attribution with human races. Like the famous lewd joke Jack Nicholson tells in Chinatown, it is the politically correct critic of the Star Wars aliens who, like the presumably innocent (of infidelity but also racism) wife of the racist man, ends up shouting, "You're skrewin' just like a Chinaman!" (emphasis mine).

In saying that, "She is a stunning example of the cartoon form," Jellinek escapes this error. Unlike, say, Barbie, which Mattel is often accused by feminist of prescribing as a representation of the female form, despite the grotesque anatomical impossibilities of the doll's proportions, Jellinek largely does not identify Marge, beyond the gendering "She" as a representation of female form. He acknowledges that by putting her on the cover of Playboy, as the placeholder of sexual objectification, "she" is "staged as nothing but animated clichés." He has in fact, for one issue, if only on the cover and perhaps a few pages within the magazine, and only in the proposal of this obscurely quoted sentence, offered an extraction of the feminine blackface from the minstrel show of female sexual objectification, severing the link between woman and object, by replacing woman-as-object with an object-as-object.

Is not in some respects the potential of this replacement the same as the sacrificial object which Rene Girard explores in Violence and the Sacred and subsequent works?

The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric. Everything else derives from that. If once we take this fundamental approach to sacrifice, choosing the road that violence opens before us, we can see that there is no aspect of human existence foreign to the subject, not even material prosperity. (Violence and the Sacred, page 8).

Girard makes a point in these introductory pages of explaining why ritual sacrifice is such a difficult concept for us to comprehend, as it is utterly absent from contemporary society, explaining that it is fundamentally an aspect of pre-judicial society. It stopped the endless flow of cyclical violence cause by blood feuds where every revenge would beget another until the violence became a thing separate from the initial wronging. However, considering this phenomenon of objects-as-objects, as placeholders for objectification, can we not see sacrifice not still alive, reemerging, the behavior mediated to a new space that is conceptual now not only in the representative function of the victim, but also in the act as a no longer physical event? Is this sexual objectification that severs individuality from representation and physical form, this 'thigh for a thigh, boob for a boob' mentality of sexual objectification not all fundamentally violent, conceptually and ultimately through its most extreme form (rape) literally? If so, the formula for treatment seems identical, as the victims of objectification (women and men in the made-effeminate position of women) are replaced by a sacrificial victim that bares a "physical resemblance" to the real victim.

In a general study of sacrifice there is little reason to differentiate between human and animal victims. When the principal of the substitution is physical resemblance between the vicarious victim and its prototypes, the mere fact that both victims are human beings seems to suffice. Thus it is hardly surprising that in some societies whole categories of human beings are systematically reserved for sacrificial purposes in order to protect other categories (page 10).

From this point of view, we can see the description of the sacrificial victim Girard offers in the first chapter of Violence and the Sacred more is not only a dead-ringer for these racially and sexually archetypal objectified cartoons "staged as nothing but animated clichés." They are potentially improvements upon the conventional sacrificial victims because of their intangibility.

If we analyze Jellinek's statement throughly enough, we sooner or later must ponder the question, 'why Marge?' Why is she "a stunning example" compared to others? For one, she is not the most exaggeratively endowed cartoon character; she is not, say, a Barbie or like many of the common conventions of Anime, nor is she the most realistic. She is plainly drawn without texture or depth, yet she is a stunning example for this very reason. She is, like her Star Wars compatriots, "flat," which is important as, unlike them, she does represent a human. Essentially, they are like the early sacrifices, animals, where she is a kind of human sacrifice, but she is not too human. Which is important as Girard points out.

We have remarked that all victims, even animal ones, bear a certain resemblance to the object they replace; otherwise the violent impulse would remain unsatisfied. But this resemblance must not be carried to the extreme of complete assimilation, or it would lead to disastrous confusion. In the case of animal victims the difference is always clear, and no such confusion is possible. Although they do their best to empathize with their cattle, the Nuers never quite manage to mistake a man for a cow--the proof being that they always sacrifice the latter and never the former (page 11).

Marge walks this precarious line, standing as it were, safely before the edge of the uncanny valley. She is not too close as to cause "disastrous confusion" and yet she is not too inhuman as to not bear resemblance and cause disconnect.

However, there is another way to interpret this humanoid-as-human versus animal-as-human aspect. Besides the dimension of furries within animation (which has obviously been tip-toed around up to this point), how else can we interpret the relationship between animation and these animal/human roots of sacrifice? When Girard points out that "Although they do their best to empathize with their cattle, the Nuers never quite manage to mistake a man for a cow--the proof being that they always sacrifice the latter and never the former" what contemporary phenominon can we compare this behavior too? One unsettling possibility returns us to the previous question of why Marge, a character that, why sexually active (with her husband) within the TV show, is not the most intuitive choice for a Playboy cover, like, say, an anime character.

Perhaps the real reason why Marge was chosen is modesty. Let us not forget that for all that Playboy is, it isn't Hustler or even harder pornographic fare. In The Huffington Post article linked to above, they note that, "Marge isn't going to bare all [...] as the magazine says there will only be "implied nudity" in the 3-page pictorial."

That they would lean more towards burlesque might seem obvious on one hand; she is as the article puts it "the matriarch of Springfield's first family," but by the same token isn't that also what makes putting her in this sacrificial position of sexual object so desirous? Isn't that the catharsis for the economically and educationally emasculated American male, that according to TIME has statistically lost his world, to indulge in? Acknowledging the practical reality that her creators would probably not allow Marge to "bare all" (although to some existent, I do wonder), perhaps a better understanding of Playboy's modesty is to proximate her character as the 'human', and an alternative like the various popular anime girls as the 'animal'. That is to say, 'although male emasculate voyeurs do their best to empathize with anime girls, they never quite manage to mistake Marge Simpson for an anime girl--the proof being that voyeurs always rape the latter and never the former.' My point here is not really a literal one, in the sense that, yes, I'm sure there is hardcore Simpsons porn in existence (there's always someone into something twisted), but it is almost certainly all fan-made, where violent sex-games like Rapelay, along with apparently a great deal of rape oriented Hentai, are official products. However, the significance between formal products and informal, unauthorized constructs does bare weight for Girard. As he points out,

In attempting to formulate the fundamental principals of sacrifice without a reference to the ritualistic framework in which the sacrifice takes place, we run the risk of appearing simplistic. Such an effort smacks strongly of "psychologizing." Clearly, it would be inexact to compare the sacrificial act to the spontaneous gesture of the man who kicks his dog because he dares not kick his wife or boss (pages 8-9).

If capitalism can be seen as 'the new' religion, then commercial forums such a Playboy and other publisher/producers (from television, to film, to games) to varying degrees are the subsequent spaces of ritual for sexual objectification. They are the authoritative references with their respective sects, Jellinek being a kind of sexual priest anointing Marge "a stunning example" as her head becomes framed in the figurative guillotine of sacrificial sexual objectification (yeah... I'm having fun writing this). But when figurative guillotine becomes literal one, there is simply a higher level of acceptance for seeing these exaggerated, big eyed, anime girls torn to pieces than if the same were done to a more 'human' character like Marge.

Again, am I underestimating the degree to which Marge is a familiar and beloved character, and, am I overlooking the potential for cultural contexts and differences (Rapelay, like most Hentai, being Japanese)? Of course! And to an extent, no. Her familiarity is a part of her human-ness--but either way, that is a diversion from the primary issue at hand, which is the cartoon form. As for cultural differences, consider the largely feminist anime, Perfect Blue, about a young pop singer who turns actress only to be further objectified by the film industry than the music industry (there's a murder mystery bit as well, but it's almost there just to give the film momentum). Satoshi Kon essentially bites the hand that feeds most anime directors by discussing fandom and objectification negatively, but as such, it is through his artistic style that he bares those teeth and definitively rejects hentai by making his protagonist proportionally realistic and her rapist freakishly distorted. As a result what is usually a fetishistic spectacle of glorified misogyny in hentai films becomes here a tragically visceral scene intended to make its audience feel like shit for ever thinking of drooling over a picture of Sailor Moon. Even within the confines of anime we can see this phenomenon of closeness is not as simple as the character's proximity to the uncanny valley.

Like an onion, it seems there are further depths to be peeled and worthwhile to do so. A reasonable argument to emerge in addition to those already brought up against comparing Marge to conventional anime characters is the fact that Marge is not exactly the most human of characters herself in many respects. She may not have unnaturally formed breasts, but her skin is stark yellow, her hair is gravity defying blue (also apparently natural) that puts even the most eccentric 80s pop artists to shame, and she has bug eyes of her own, eyes that protrude more than halfway out of her head! Indeed, Girard makes note that analysts should not allow themselves to be distracted by the differences between animal and human sacrifice, and though this analysis challenges his claim that sacrifice is not a contemporary phenomenon, perhaps disagreements should end there. But what then is the cost?

If we cannot differentiate the types of sacrificial victims, then we must face a new ethical dilemma. Where the major fundamental problem with the 'thigh for a thigh, boob for a boob' approach was that it overlooked the significant wrong of sexually objectifying any human as opposed to just women, we now must ask ourselves if the true 'wrong' is not the pure act of sexual objectification. In this light, Playboy's treatment of Marge is revealed not to be modesty so much as a hesitance, resistance even, to truly crossing that line between the tangible and intangible, between the flesh and blood sacrifice of the celebrity (or celebrity-made) human model and the immaterial one, for beyond even the kind of disregard the the Nuer are described by Girard as having for animals, the cartoon victims "staged as nothing but animated clichés" are utterly inconsequential. If the horror of something like the game Rapelay is that it is a kind of extreme misogynistic minstrel, the relief and consultation is that, "as nothing but animated clichés," to weep for its victims with their cartoonishly huge breasts and high-pitched cutesy voices is not unlike weeping for the masturbatory Kleenex. In this, the utter horror of the sacrifice is understood. There is a reason Girard's sacrifices are blood sacrifices, and not, say, pinata sacrifices. Without that collision of objectification with the human, humanity is not guaranteed to intersect.

From this point I can truly only speculate as to whether the violent extremity of things like Rapelay is a result of too little "physical resemblance," where as Girard explains, "the violent impulse would remain unsatisfied," or rather from the absence of physicality, causing an insatiability, not entirely unlike another Zizekian concept from The Fragile Absolute: "Coke as objet petit a." Focusing primarily on the Jacques-Alain Miller observation that Zizek sites, that, "Coke has the paradoxical property that the more you drink, the thirstier you get, the greater you need to drink more" (page 19 in my copy, 22 in the linked version), we can see how the escalation of animated pornographic violence might be explained, in a sense, by the lack of physical blood in the ever pallet stimulating animated gallons split, poured, or even sprayed in frenzy. Where the prior cause always threatens such an escalation, the latter almost guarantees it without uncertainty. From neither can we confirm an inevitable shift from such extremes being carried out on object-as-object victims to human-as-object victims--to living human beings, but even if the cartoon victims "as nothing but animated clichés" are utterly purged of their minstrel dimension, cut clean like the aliens of Star Wars to the point that even the remnants of gender like "she" and "her" are erased, is this something we can be comfortable with? Is this not, in a sense, the ultimate ethical challenge - not to commit the truly victimless crime on the basis that it is a crime not because of its victim? Are all these negotiations of sexual objectification avoidances of the seemingly too simple solution of not objectifying, or are they because sexual objectification is an inescapable part of who we are which we must simply find a way of not letting get out of hand?

If TIME Magazine is right about one thing, it is that the 'world' of the sexes has changed
drastically in America, in the statistical arena that it reports upon, and also in the unspoken arena I've discussed. I would like to say my speculation of this one quote from Jellinek was really just wild speculation, but as I look at the cultural phenomenons of my generation, I wonder if it really is out of touch with the 'reality' of today. Like many, I am eagerly bouncing in my seat at the mere thought of each little shred of information that comes out about James Cameron's new film Avatar and twice as gleeful upon receiving them, but when I hear talk about Cameron wanting the alien Na'vi to be sexy, I wonder, as a feminist, both within the simple dimension of victims "as nothing but animated clichés" and the expanded context of the film's avatars, that the human characters use to infiltrate the alien species, just what really is the future of sexual objectification?

No Longer A Man's World? Part 1: Thoughts as a Feminist on the Oct. 26th Issue of TIME Magazine

2009-10-24T11:46:00.006-04:00

I was looking at the cover of this last Oct. 26th issue of Time Magazine sitting on the coffee table and couldn’t help but be struck by the title of the cover story: “Special Report: The State of the American Woman” or more particularly it’s description, “A new poll shows why they are more powerful—but less happy.” Looking at the black and white cover image, the woman's eye looking off into a starkly contrasting dark abyss, those words evoke anti-suffrage arguments from the likes of Helen Kendrick Johnson and Lyman Abbot among others who valued the privilege of staying at home and being supported by their husbands, free from "the double curse or work and pain" that their "frailer organization" would halve to bear, and able to still affect social and even governmental change through, as Abbot puts it "womanly influence" over her husband, for, “She is glad to counsel; she is loath to command." It can't possibly be the argument that the magazine is aiming to make: that woman are miserable because they finally got what they wanted and found out that they were better off being taken care of. Nonetheless, it's an effective attention grabber, and even if it does not aim to revitalize a truly anachronistic argument of the woman's place, the issue does pose some curiosities.

Richard Stengel in his To Our Readers section (page 6) is smart to emphasize from the get go that while the issue focuses on how women are “poised to dominate the workforce” the special report “examines their status—and what they still need.” However, what follows in the body of his introduction to the issue is a cautious but nonetheless evident pondering of the possible end of feminism.

In one very real sense, our TIME/Rockefeller Foundation poll shows that women have become dominant in our society. Women will soon constitute a majority of the workforce; they earn 57% of college degrees; they make 75% of buying decisions in the home. At the same time, the poll found that women are not terribly concerned with equality issues, nor are they patting themselves on the back for their pre-eminence—they are simply dealing with the often bewildering changes and uncertainty in our economy as breadwinners, spouses, mothers, and daughters. It’s not the anachronistic battle of the sexes anymore but how we all—women and men—grapple with a new economy and new era. I suppose you could say that’s true equality.

Even as a male feminist myself, I find something inescapably suspicious in a man saying that woman have found "true equality." Furthermore, the message is illustrated with photographs by a male artist, Ralph Gibson (though I concede to the fact that the cover was commissioned by the magazine's female director of photography, Kira Pollack and selected his other photos used throughout the magazine). The image used as the centerpiece to Stengel's introduction is credited as "A portrait titled Francesca, 1972" but has a slightly different name on Gibson's website. When it is called "Woman and Rolls Royce," the subversive pairing of woman and automobile as objects of male desire truly shine through, making Stengel's statement all the more unsettling.

The actual title of the cover article, "What Women Want Now", is also rather loaded with male oriented gender strife. While online, the article features a color photo of a woman, which beyond the plasticity caused by the lighting and her makeup seems relatively symbolically benign, the printed version (page 24) has a full-page filled with Gibson's "MJ in Little Mirror" which shows a woman's hand holding a mirror with the beach and ocean out of focus in the background. Not a terribly inappropriate image, the land and sea have both the potential significance of representing new frontiers and the blurring of gender boundaries while the mirror in relation to them shows the existential quandary both of woman within this distortion of dualities and individual beyond this distortion, the potential of the image's existential weight is diffused in two ways. First, by a closer inspection of the content of the image itself, and secondly how that content collides with the article's title. The mirror does not reflect the woman's eyes, but her nose and mouth, indicating that she is looking more at her superficial appearance then into the depths of her soul, asking herself not who she is, but how does she look. The mirror is small and round, and while not necessarily an actual make-up mirror, is inescapably evocative of such a mirror through its shape. Positioning such an image beside the title "What Women Want Now" drives the interpretation home, securing the 'material girl' evocation with all the self-parody of a trashy supermarket 'women's magazine'.

The actual article by Nancy Gibbs reiterates much of Stengel's points, naturally in further depth. Both confirm that the nightmare ideology of the anti-suffragist suggested by the cover is far from their point. The economic reality is that women make up more of the breadwinners in this country and as a result, more are dealing with the same kinds of burdens men have had to and are being affected directly by the recession in the sense that it is their job which the household depends upon. Also like Stengel, however, there is that sense that this inescapably radical shift in gender dynamics, means equality is something perhaps more fulfilled then it is. Great, more women are working than men, more women are supporting their families, as the primary supporters even, but isn't something missing? Little to nothing has been mentioned thus far about feminism, but if this really is no longer "a man's world" and we are seeing "true equality" then feminism isn't needed anymore, right?

At last there is Maria Shriver's piece, which has no inappropriate images from Gibson, but instead an image of Eunice Kennedy with her brother Jack. The focus on Eunice is strong in the image; she is not over shadowed by her iconic brother, but framed in the center while his face is partially cut off, as if he were an unimportant side furnishing before the true subject of the shot. Complimenting the image is the title "The Unfinished Revolution" and in the body of the page Shriver offers a viewpoint on the special report that dosen't overlook the reality of women today in their "true equality."

While there's much to cheer about these days on the equality front, we still have a long way to go. Women still don't make as much as men do for the same jobs. The U.S. still is the only industrialized nation without a child-care policy. Women are still being punished by a tax code designed when men were the sole breadwinners and women the sole caregivers. Sexual violence against women still is a huge issue. Women still are disproportionately affected by a lack of health-care services. And lesbian couples and older women are among the poorest segments of our society.

What is in essence missing from Stengel and Gibbs' Virginia Slim praise was the second and third waves of feminism. Woman are working! Hurray! But as truly remarkable as the changes that have occurred have been, there is indeed much more to be said and done. Indeed, Shriver dosen't get off the hook all that easily either. The quoted paragraph is her seventh, almost a side acknowledgment on her way to her conclusion, and while it is admirable that she acknowledged the plight of lesbians, feminism has much more on its mind that she covers.

If my analysis has seemed harsh and excessively extensive, it is only that I am interested in through it pointing out the most evident absence to me in these three articles. Take a look at the preoccupations of feminist blogs like our local FIFE (Feminism Is For Everyone), and some of those it links to. What you find are existential/linguistic concerns, sociological concerns, cultural commentary and media analysis. When you look around at how things are commercialized, on how men and women are depicted, is it really equal? How have we dealt with the idea of sexual objectification? As a feminist, I look at this shift in financial power and female elevation and ponder what the male cultural backlash might be, what things will go unsaid and or conveyed subversively. I wonder what things we will say are ok now, because we are truly equal.

Does the issue of Time magazine have any answers to these kinds of questions? Can we foresee in it any future solution to the problems of, to address simply one of the unmentionables, sexual objectification of women?

FIND OUT IN PART 2!!!

(Sorry, I'm tired.)

Thoughts on Female Halloween Costumes

2009-10-23T17:47:00.005-04:00

If my last piece on Halloween costumes could be seen as male centric (particularly the last line, which was admittedly not the most feminist thing I've ever written), I thought this might be an interesting counterpoint to the issue of gore costumes... whore costumes!

I can't help but draw attention to the irony (hypocrisy even) of me opposing 'sexy' costumes. For years I've said that when it comes to censorship, what disturbs me more than any particular restriction is the dynamic between sex and violence, the utter backwardness of western priorities when it comes allowing gore galore to make it into R and even PG-13 movies while the MPAA threatens films like The Cooler and Boys Don't Cry respectively for showing too much pubic hair and a close up of a woman's face while enjoying an orgasm (see the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated for details). In general, I still think that if something needs to be cautioned or censored, violence is something parents should be more concerned about than sex. The nature of sexual content however does make that claim complicated. How is sex depicted in a given film, and what messages does it give? Is a film's depiction of sex, sexist, glorifying negative gender dynamics? Does it simply provide false or misleading information about sex? In these regards, sexual content dosen't necessarily get a free pass over violence, and for now I'm not even touching where the two blur together. However, even with this acknowledgment I must question if the concerns of sexual content fall truly explicitness or more precisely upon the context and specific substance--the happening--of the content. For example, a film showing explicit sex may allow sex to be depicted more realistically as opposed to unrealistically. Though it may be highly counter intuitive, is there not to some degree a higher level of responsibility in the graphic sex scenes of The Dreamers than the modestly show and romantically lit sex scene in The Terminator? The Dreamers has youths having sex with all the explicit biological complexities of virginity (the breaking of the hymen), but it also has skillful acting that conveys the psychological recklessness of the characters who ultimately through the film's climax are revealed to be utterly self-destructive in their decadence. In The Terminator, we may have adults having sex (excusing for the moment that they are still out of wedlock) but with them there are no complexities, nothing visceral and intimate and complex at all. It is simply this magical, idealized, wonderful thing, that looks utterly beautiful, sterile , and fun to do. Even the fact that she becomes a single mother is left as an overwhelmingly ok thing. It is attractive sex with no consequences, and when you think about it, PG-13 films are even worse about this kind of thing.

Returning to the costumes, I like Lindsey am not really opposed in the sense of wanting to deprive anyone of the right to dress like a scantily clad soft-porn star if they choose to, but the issue is rather one of availability. These are the images that costume stores and companies crank out as the female costume option. Your options every year are, cat skank, fairy princess skank, pirate skank (as opposed to say, Anne Bonny) and so on and so skankily forth (via FIFE comments section which I highly recommend!). Now, my reasons for generally defending gore costumes were pretty well explained previously, but taking the predominantly gender divided options into consideration, isn't this a pretty disturbing dynamic? Is this not the worst connotation of my closing line about "the sight of a kid wearing a Freddy glove, with a bucket of candy, saying, 'One, two, Freddy's coming for you...' to the annoyance of his sister" brought to the forefront? Costume companies encourage boys to dress up like phallic weapon wielding slasher characters while girls are to dress up like sexual objects. I.e., boys kill skanky girls is the visual narrative at play. But don't women and girls have gore costumes too? Well, yes, but there aren't many stores selling female killers as much as fetish witch costumes and the like. If anything, girls get to be victims any way you cut it (pardon the pun). At best, they get empowerment framed within male fantasy.

Back in 2002 a horror movie came out called May which I thought had a wonderfully iconic killer in it. A woman who wants to be loved but isn't, so she kills people to make a man who will love her out of their body parts. In appearance, she's like a not dead Sally from A Nightmare Before Christmas, only rather evil with a pair of scissors. Not exactly the most feminist contribution to horror, she was nonetheless effective as a moder Carrie in her own weird way, ad I fully expected to see tones of girls running around in May (the character's name) costumes the fallowing Halloween. Nada. Not a single one did I see. A google image search has thus far found me not only no stores selling May costumes, but not even any homemade May costumes, which is surprising since as a seamstress herself, she should have been a big hit with the Gothy DIY crowd. Most of the other female killers of horror like Jason's Mother tend to be absent from costume companies as well. This isn't entirely surprising considering that there was little iconic about many of them in appearance, having no masks or special weapons that made them stand out, and my previous point being that it is the iconic image and look of Jason, Michael and Freddy that have given them lasting power, but May, like Carrie, had that striking look. Only Sally seems available, and for all her lovableness, she's really not a monster so much as an awkward girl that wants to get away from her parents and live with an angst-ridden guy who ignores her (sorry Lindsey). Sally is not exactly one to make bumps in the night.

Ultimately all I can really say about the issue is MAKE YOUR OWN COSTUMES! That and perhaps flood the internet with images of the ones you make. That way the costume companies that make this crap might catch on to what people really want and make a wider range of options. There really is something creepy about the gender divide in costume types; I say we close it, fill it, blur it.

Thoughts on Halloween Costumes of Horror Icons for Kids

2009-10-22T11:26:00.005-04:00

There is an associate press piece in todays Daily Progress about Halloween costumes being too gory. It's not on their website as far as I can tell, but like most associated press pieces, it can be found elsewhere.

I can't help but feel on some level this is one of those stories that exists because it's almost Halloween and papers have to write something about Halloween. For one, the article feels like it was written 20 years ago. Its outrage that they're are Jason, Freddy, Michael and Leatherface costumes made me laugh a little as I couldn't help but want to add dates to each film it notes the killers are from.

Freddy - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Jason - Friday the 13th (1980)

Michael - Halloween (1978)

Leatherface - The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Monsters from 25 to 35 years ago are causing issues now? Admittedly all of these characters have or are in the process of being remade for this decade with more gore and less intelligence, but if you look at the Daily Progress version of the article, it comes with an example of an accursed Michael costume. Clean white mask... yep, that's not Rob Zombie's redneck Michael from the remake. These kinds of costumes have been around for decades. I went as Jason and Freddy several times as a kid, once even saving up to buy a prosthetic mask for Freddy's face which I had hand painted all the burns onto, making sure to get the right balance of yellow to show how the wounds were puss'ing with infection (yum!). So, if they want to talk about this like it was a new problem (if it's even a problem at all) they should probably talk about contemporary horror costumes. Have a parent upset about a Jigsaw doll costume, or a Hostel gimp Mask for kids. I couldn't even find a Ghostface costume from the Scream trilogy (which, yes, I went as, but I was probably about 15 or 16 by then). The fact that I couldn't find a kids Repo-man or Jigsaw doll costume negates the fact that horror movies have become much more realistically gory and arguably more sadistic (torture porn isn't as new as some would think, but the slasher icons of the 70s and 80s were never as messed up as the things recent killers have been up to). It's not like they can say the stakes have been drastically raised by having new even more perverse killers become childhood heroes. So again, nothing new under the sun.

Still, lets examine the "gore." If you zoom in on the above picture of Micheal Myers from the Zooster site, you will notice that at least there is a bit of gore on the fake knife. The linked version of the article above also has a picture of an Axe murder that has no gore whatsoever, making the article extra silly. Perhaps the most challenging of these is Leatherface, who, like Norman Bates of Psycho and Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs, was inspired by Ed Gein. As such the leather of his mask and apron is human skin. Zooster is pretty conservative in their handling of this fairly extreme horror icon, compared to Costume World which even I find a tad tasteless with its extra face and fingers on the apron and the bit in the description saying to "stalk your victims."

Admittedly, none of these characters are exactly role-models for kids. Freddy's back-story is that he was a child murder (and to varying degrees it has been implied and in some sequels expressed that he was pedophile) that was burned alive by vengeful parents, who now haunts their children's dreams, killing them in his sleep. Leatherface, as mentioned before liked to wear people, and is the mentally challenged youngest member of a family of backwoods cannibals. Jason has always been a bit more sympathetic as the deformed child left to drown by careless camp consolers who would rather have sex than carry out their responsibilities. It's hard not to feel for the guy when he sees his mother (who went on a killing spree, thinking he was dead) get decapitated. Then there is Michael, who kills his sister for no clear reason when he was a child, only to grow up into a a force of "pure evil." These characters are vicious perverse killers, and in that respect the degree of gore present with their costumes is almost irrelevant compared to the implied gore of simply who they are. If you dress up as Hitler, you don't need to walk around with a handful of gold teeth for people to get the idea.

However, implied gore does require you get the implication. This is the ultimate irony to be found in the article pointing out that "Costume sizes can run so small that many wearers might be too young to have seen the slasher movies under film industry guidelines." I'm pretty sure I'd never seen Dracula (any version) the first time I went as the Count. I honestly can't recall If I had seen Friday the 13th before the first time I donned a hockey mask. By the early 90s, these characters were so ingrained in pop culture, it didn't matter. They were on The Simpsons, they were told about by friends at campfires. Jason and Freddy had replaced 'The Hook Man' and 'The Boogey Man.' Heck, Michael Myers is The Boogey Man! The reason Freddy is such an immortal character has virtually nothing to do with the movies. People reading this probably have grandparents that know who Freddy and Jason are, and not the kind of cool kind of grandparents that know own box sets of both franchises. The Freddy movies are silly, but it is the idea of Freddy that sticks. He goes after kids in their nightmares, making them real. What can be more scary for a little kid than that? Nightmares are where all the monsters we fear reside, and our only comfort is that we know they aren't real, but then comes Freddy saying, 'Oh yes they are!'

That was the beauty of Halloween for me as a kid really. You got to dress up as boogey men. You got to make them silly and have fun with it. Like WWF Wrestling, we all knew it was fake. We would make our costumes together, save up or beg our parents to get stuff like fake blood and plastic knives, and then we would see each others costumes and marvel at the person who figured out that Elmer's glue makes great fake skin to peel off your arm. It was fun to get grossed out and then see how people pulled off the illusion. That really what it's all about, the old sawing the girl in half trick.

Still, times have changed. I grew up with shows like Movie Magic, with Stan Winston, Tom Savini and Greg Nicotero as heroes, and I wasn't even a subscriber to Fangoria! Perhaps now kids aren't as aware of effects as I was.

It's not so much that I disagree that some of this stuff is a little out of hand as I'm troubled by the kind of argument people like Joel Schwartzberg shape in going after companies like Zooster and Costume World: the simple trend of gory costumes becomes the problem. I agree that targeting kids below the age of 6 is pretty crazy for some of this stuff, but when in his piece for the Huffinington Post he exclaims "Whatever happened to pirates and hobos?" I have to raise an eyebrow.

If there is any real fear that these characters influence kids, that costumes are influential, then are pirates - people who murder, rape, drink a lot, disregard authority and happen to still exist - really be that much better? Should we encourage kids to be bums? A lot of the classic horror icons aren't that much better really, but figures like Dracula have been so ingrained into the iconography of Halloween that we forget that the original Count offers his three wives an infant to tear limb from limb (and they do!) in the novel. Bela Lugosi and Karloff may be the faces we remember, but lets not forget Lugosi was drug addict, and when the kids excitedly run to IMDB and Netflix in hopes of finding afilm with the two titans working together, the first two collaborations of Karloff and Lugosi were The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven (1935), the two films that established the torture horror film genre in America. You know... for kids!

There are plenty of costumes we take for granted, are Micheal and Freddy and Jason, really that dangerous? At this point aren't they really just skeletons, ghosts and vampires. Don't many kids just want to be Freddy because the costume looks cool, and have a little bit of that appeal as something more grown up?

Perhaps I have been unfair to Schwartzberg's argument. Isn't his real concern that kids are getting desensitized to "brutal violence?" In response to that I can say from personal experience that little of that was evident from my growing up. As many horror films as I saw, the sight of real blood never ceased to affect me. When someone was injured and bleeding it was always very upsetting to me because it was real and I understood that. Once when I was eight or so, I visited my grandmother in the hospital and her roommate had lost his legs. It was probably the first time I'd seen a real amputee and it was almost traumatic. The idea that that man would never walk again with his legs, never wiggle his toes or do all the things I take for granted was completely processed and when we were back in the car I cried. Blood and corn syrup are not the same thing. Kids get that.

Ultimately I think it's up to parents to decide what is best for their kids and I'm tempted to take something of a George Carlin mentality here. If your kid is stupid and really can't make those connections between reality and fantasy, don't let them watch horror movies or run around with fake knives or pirate swords... don't let them dress up like ninja assassins or bandits or in vigilante superhero costumes or anything else that you wouldn't want them to want to do for real or grow up to be just like. If Halloween is not your thing for religious reasons, or ethical ones, fine. In all seriousness, I have nothing against parents choosing not to expose their kids to horror. I actually have found myself on several occasions lately being utterly outraged at the theater to find other people in the audience have brought their kids to horror movies like Hostel II and stuff. I do have limits, and taking a five year old to see torture horror is sick and repulsive to me. Even the last Rambo was a bit much in my opinion for really young minors to see. If you can't articulate complex sentences you probably shouldn't be watching something so hard that it makes me wish the R rating was cut in half and made into two ratings (since no-one will just call some things NC-17 no matter how much they clearly are).

Honestly, my fiancee works in a children theater that is going to have a show on Halloween night, and if I go in costume it won't be anything really scary if even ghoulish at all. I'm not inconsiderate. Then again, I'm also a broad shouldered 24-year-old that stands over 6-feet-tall and knows how to do gore; I'm not a six year old going 'boo' in a hockey mask with some red paint on the end of a plastic knife. Let little kids have fun, especially if they have a chance to tricker treat outside. It's fun scaring one another. Kids scream, and then they laugh. I do understand about some of this super young targeting being outlandish. I'm not fond of exploiting kids, and as I've repeatedly noted, I think with the occasional store bought aid, costumes should generally be made not bought pre-assembled. I'm a big fan of making your own costumes, especially when gore is involved as it allows you to connect with that sawing in half aspect, that magician making something not real look real bit. Overall, lets not forget what Halloween is when we complain that it's getting a little macabre. It's a celebration of life through celebrating death. It's about that transitory stage where we learn to joyously put away are boogey men. Life can be brutal and vicious. Kids are growing up in a world where people around them are maimed and mutilated in wars. The very paper I first read this article in had for cover stories a missing student case and a woman confessing to killing and throwing her boyfriend's body down a well. The world is pretty scary, and there are many parental philosophies for how to help kids deal with the real and imaginary things that if we think about too much can leave us overwhelmed with dread. One philosophy we can see in variation from Halloween's roots to The Day of the Dead and elsewhere in the world is to celebrate death. On Halloween we can dress up like the things we fear and decide that we are going to still respect them, but stop dreading them. It's not for everyone, and it's not what motivates everyone that gores up (some just like getting sticky), but it's the reason I smile more often than feel outrage at the sight of a kid wearing a Freddy glove, with a bucket of candy, saying, "One, two, Freddy's coming for you..." to the annoyance of his sister.

Horror Movies That Don't Suck: The Fly (1958)

2009-10-14T13:22:00.003-04:00

Like most people of the last generation or two, when I think of The Fly, I think of the remake directed by David Cronenberg. The melodramatic acting style of the film hasn't aged well, and the fact that Cronenberg was working from someone else's script as opposed to his own is unfortunately evident, but the special effects are amazing and the film stands as one of the few remakes thought to be better than the original. Due to this assumption and having the original summarized for me on several occasions, I've only recently gotten around to seeing the Vincent Price classic. Then this morning I noticed that James over at Cinemassacre decided to take a look at the film, and for the most part agree with his review. The original Fly is a much, much underrated film that is nothing like its black and white sequel (the first one is in color) with its iconic giant fake bug head monster. Instead, it has much more of the romantic tragedy that the Cronenberg sequel is known for (which was one of the major contributions Cronenberg made to Charles Edward Pogue's script). The tired motif of 50s sci-fi, 'beware the dangers of science' is prevalent throughout and one of the major drags of the film, but the chemistry of the characters is wonderful. It's a pretty sincere melodrama, and the wonder of it is in how great a horror movie it is without a tacked on body count. Like the remake, the horror of the film is what someone working alone does to their body. In place of his teleportation machine, one could easily imagine experiments with radioactive material going wrong, slowly deteriorating away. In this case, slowly losing grasp of one's humanity. It's a surprisingly tragic film, with minimal interest in trying to scare and much more of a focus upon having a loved one slowly die a horrible death.

I can't say really if the classic or original is superior, but in many ways that's why a recommend fellow fans of the remake check it out. Again, I suspect many have confused the terrible sequel, which is shot in black and white and also features Vincent Price, for the original which was shot in color. The difference in monster design is rather significant, original isn't anywhere near as absurd and for the time was a pretty decent low budget monster. More importantly, since the monster is tragic as oppose to a dangerous beast, the film dosen't rely so heavily on it being scary, the limited number of sets give the film a nice theatric feel to them further making the effects forgivable. It's always a shame with films like this how difficult it is to go into them fresh, for the idea of experiencing this with out the knowledge that it is about a fly-man is quite fun. The film's a slow burn investigation that shifts into a confession for why the doctor's wife apparently murdered him. I really like the narrative pacing of this one much more than the original which always felt clunky when it came to editing.

If you like classic horror movies like The Wolfman, I highly recommend giving this an open minded shot. It has really been overshadowed for far too long by its fantastic remake.

October 2009 Horror Movie Reccomendations (Ask Away!)

2009-10-04T01:02:00.005-04:00

It's that time of year again. That time when very large smiles grow on the faces of horror movie geeks like myself. It's the month of Halloween and the #1 time of the year to throw a horror movie marathon.

For several years now I've been meaning to put together a massive guide to throwing a horror movie marathon, including foods to eat, fluids to drink and most importantly of all, movies to watch. Back in the early days of Ain't It Cool News I posted one such guide in the talkbacks, but these days sifting through their archives is a nightmare and I have no idea where I saved the document (probably an old computer long since scrapped). Writing a new one from scratch this year is particularly problematic as I've already been in the process of composing a top ten (or twenty... still deciding) horror movies of the decade list. Not wanting to repeat myself, as I've already written several pages of criticism for that, I've come up with another solution.

Just ask.

While I might write a few lengthy posts on selections for this year's Virginia Film Festival, I expect that like the prior month I'm not going to post much. So this page will not likely get buried. So, I'm going to use this post's comments section to converse throughout the month.

Here's how it will work.

Give as much information that might help me suggest a horror movie for you and I'll try to. For example, list three horror movies you LIKE. Or if you are pretty new to horror, list other films you like a lot. Try to keep the info movie centric so I'll be most likely to make connections. Be sure to point out any issues with content such as no sex or nudity, or only films that are PG-13. I'm just as interested in trying to find enjoyable movies for casual viewers as I am for Saw-heads who want to know what Herschell Gordon Lewis film to see first. I haven't seen everything, and there are plenty of gaps (good mummy movies besides the Karloff classic, for example, I'd be useless at trying to help you find) but overall I have a pretty extensive and somewhat academic background reaching back to the 1910s. If you're a big horror geek already I can't promise I won't recommend things you've already seen, but I'll do my best.

All I ask is that snobbery be left off the board. If someone likes Scream 2 and wants to know what else is out there like it, please, no heckling. Fellow geeks, feel free to chime in with recommendations as well, but just remember, this isn't an Ain't it Cool News forum. So be nice guys.

I don't think my blog gets a lot of traffic these days, so I'm not expecting this to be too difficult to manage. If I'm wrong, then... well... I'll figure something out then. But in the mean time I look forward hearing from anyone who needs help trying to find a good horror movie for Halloween.

Excuses, excuses...

2009-09-05T02:05:00.003-04:00

While it's true that I lost half a day to a saddleback caterpillar sting that made my right arm mostly useless, that this occurred shortly after recovering from a stomach virus that snagged me on the mend from the afore mentioned spider bite, and have had some run ins with my good old friend, the chronic pinched nerve in my neck... the last week's silence cannot be excused so much by this crazy barrage of mishaps (seriously, this has got to go down as the oddest summer of injuries, easily one upping that one where I discovered I'm dangerously allergic to bees and started tripping on the medication) nor by my continued hunt for a job or editing my play or anything else like that.

I mean, yes, I'm hunting for a job and I'm working on a forth draft of my play while researching for what might be my next one (set in late 17th century London) depending on which of three ideas take fullest shape first, and those things do take up a bit of my free time, but that's not the real thing that's kept me off the blogs and facebooks and even a little slow on email.

Nope.

I discovered Doctor Who.

And I LOVE IT with the kind of passion that people often form anonymous groups to help you get over.

So yeah.

Sorry.

I'm so sorry.

Edit: Oh yeah, I left out the bit about my allergy to metal deciding to all of a sudden react to the strip of metal on the earpiece of my cell phone. That was a real bitch. But yeah, still all Doctor Who's fault. The Ninth and Tenth Doctor's in particular but sadly not exclusively.

So what has been up?

2009-08-11T11:55:00.002-04:00

Caution: some of this is not for easily queasy. I'm doing perfectly fine now, so no worries.

Early on in the week before last I was bitten by something and it got fairly infected. My doctor diagnosed it as a Brown Recluse bite. I disputed this some but he assured me he had treated several in his career, pulled out books, shown me Recluse spider bites and that was that. The reason I disputed this was that I've always understood that Brown Recluses do not live in this region. What most people confuse Brown Recluses for are actually Hobo Spiders, which do live in this area and are disputed to have similar side effects when they bite you. For those in the dark about what these side effects are, basically horrible tissue damage of the variety where a fists worth of flesh can die off. So, Hobo, Recluse... the point is something bit me and tissue started dying until there was a very nasty hole in my leg about the circumference of a quarter and the depth of four quarters stacked. More precisely this depth was filled with black and green dead tissue which hardened over, preventing healing and getting worse as the larger dark ring around it and the mild inflammation both indicated. The hole came later when said dead tissue come off - or out (deep breaths and in the words of my bio professor, "wiggle your toes"). But that's ok, alternatives were I might have had a bad staph infection or full on MRSA. The idea of a bad spider bite that often does much worse than what it was doing to me sounded better than that. Blood work was done and I came out clean. Swabbing the wound also produced no cultures. So all roads point to bad spider bite. I was medicated. The doctor told me it would take about a month to get all the dead tissue out using wet to dry compresses. Anna spent the weekend with me letting me stay off my leg and feeding me awesome mushroom soup while we watched cooking shows. about 95% of the tissue (i.e., the aforementioned chunk of green-black dead flesh) came off in the shower on the Sunday morning. The rest of the dead has come off since then and it is healing up nicely. It now looks like I just slid hard for home base and found a sharp rock along the way.

Along with that, I was recovering from insomnia--which means I was also trying to quit caffeine, and I had the worst pinched nerve (I have a reoccurring neck problem) that I've had in years, which felt like the equivalent of having four root canals without Novocaine. I was later on busy helping Anna hunt for apartments (mostly this weekend), and while all this was swirling around I also had a temp job at Ivy Publications this last week. I hope they don't think I was a drug addict or anything terrible.

So it was in fact an exceptionally hectic couple of weeks and I'm looking at the unfinished projects for this blog and trying to figure out where I was going with them, which has been the furthest thing from my mind. I'd like to get back to all those things I mentioned I had in progress but they'll probably be later on when they are back on my mind. For now expect more film reviews/commentary when I get around to it.

Also, I got nowhere since I last mentioned it with that play I'm working on. That's still a priority to me, so entries may continue to be slow. However, I'm hoping that since whenever I say I'm going to write something I don't, that by saying I won't write much on this blog I will actually manage to get something done for it. That's the plan anyway.

Yep, still busy.

2009-08-06T21:12:00.001-04:00

The time between my last post and this one has been extra special crazy. I'll get into it more as soon as I can.

Busy

2009-07-27T13:11:00.002-04:00

I honestly have no sense of who does or doesn't read this blog, but if there are people outside of a tight circle of friends (and in many cases even among that circle) who are suspecting that the blog is going back into hibernation as it did for well over a year, I just wanted to reassure you it isn't. Well, at least that's not the plan. I have outlines for four lengthy posts to appear sometime in the future, two of which are in unfinished draft form. Of these, one came very close to being a finished piece... before I lost all the links I was using due to a brief power outage. Fun, fun. Anyway, my point is simply that I do intend to continue the blog.

So what have I been doing instead?

Several things. Some family/life/work stuff, job hunting, and -- perhaps most distracting -- I've been writing a play. I've finished a first draft and am doing rewrites right now, but more on that in the future. I've just been busy, but the blog has not been forgotten. So thanks for reading, and if I find I'm not back here cranking something out soon(ish), I'll at least try to give another update before nearly three weeks pass.

Robo Cheetah.

2009-07-08T16:41:00.000-04:00

I want one.

Horror Movies That Don't Suck: Near Dark

2009-07-08T13:46:00.002-04:00

After an annoying bout with insomnia last night I came across Harry Knowles weekly DVD Picks and Peeks article. Among the selections this week is a new edition of Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 vampire classic, Near Dark, which has some very... um... special box art.

Like Harry, I find this rather hilarious, but I also find it a tad annoying. Near Dark is not Twilight, and while I'm with him on enjoying the prospect of a bunch of cushy Twilighters stumbling across this movie and getting a taste of what a vampire action romance can really be (that is, good), I can't stand how cheapening this box art is, and how discouraging it is to anyone who hates Twilight. This movie is the anti-Twilight. From a glance though, I actually thought it was a straight-to-video remake.

Near Dark is the other 80s vampire movie. People will often cite The Lost Boys as the best vampire movie of the 80s. The Lost Boys of course being the story of a single mom and her kids who move in to their uncle's house (ignoring potential Toys in the Attic joke), the oldest falls for a girl who is caught up in a biker gang who turn out to be vampires, becomes a vampire, doesn't want to kill people, and then has a crazy showdown at the end. Near Dark is about a rancher boy who falls for a girl who is caught up in a biker gang of vampires, becomes a vampire himself, REALLY doesn't want to kill people, and has a big showdown at the end. It is, the other vampire movie of the 80s. (If you haven't gathered by now, I'm not a fan of The Hunger.) However, where The Lost Boys is rather campy, Near Dark is a hard R, seriously badass film with a quarter of the cast of Aliens (Lance Henricksen, Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein) making up the vampire gang. It's an outlaw film, with an epic shoot out and one of the most violent bar-fights in film history. Its a hybrid of action and horror that puts the Underworld and Blade films to shame, with the closest film I can think of to compare it to being the original The Hitcher (which I plan to write about more in the future). But to sum it up, it's a Kathryn (Blue Steel, Point Break, Strange Days and recently The Hurt Locker) Bigelow film. What more really needs to be said?

This movie isn't about glistening skin as the golden-eyed hunk (...of hairspray) gazes at the virginal young teen girl, its about a woman letting a guy feed off her blood so he'll survive because, unlike her, he lacks the killer instinct. That's basically the romance here. They do not exactly sparkle when the sun comes up. Oh, and the golden eyes and white skin on that cover... total BS. Not in the movie. It's that blatant an attempt to make this look like Twilight, and frankly, I don't think Twilight has a scene where someone's throat gets ripped open by way of Bill Paxton's boot spurs. Gore isn't everything, and far from all Near Dark has to offer; it's one of if not the best vampire movie of the 80s. The cover art designer(s) should show a little more respect. Sheesh.

Horror Movies That Don't Suck: Rogue

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

During the torture horror wave Dimension EXTREME and Lion's Gate had a tendency to buy out a lot of horror movies and utterly shaft them on the distribution. Greg McLean's 2007 follow up to Wolf Creek, the giant killer croc film Rogue, was one such film. As I recall, it went straight to video in the US, and as the used copy sitting on my desk can account, it was given the most misleadingly terrible cover art they could possibly have given it, but more on that in a moment.

The giant killer corc/gator sub-genre is roughly a step above the giant killer snake sub-genre and a step or two below the werewolf picture. Few people wouldn't be hard pressed to come up with more than two titles worth your time of day. There is Cujo director Lewis Teague's 1980 classic, Alligator, and then their is Steve Miner's 1999 return to comedy horror, Lake Placid. For all the Robert Forster glory of Teague's gator-in-the-sewer flick, it hasn't aged well at all. Miner's can almost be considered the American Werewolf in London of giant croc films, and should probably be considered the best, except that unlike Werewolf in London, it never tries to mix real scares along with its humor; it's just a fun crazy film. Beyond these two though, it's mostly just terrible Sci-fi Channel schlock. The same year as Rogue brought us another larger budgeted attempt to make a scary croc film with Primeval, which I think did get a go in the theaters. It's a film that, while not totally terrible, doesn't really satisfy. Partially because the characters have a human element to face along with their croc, something that worked in Anaconda, and even makes sense considering the premise of Primeval (thousands of bodies dumped in the Burundi marshes by a warlord lead to a croc overfeeding and developing a taste for human flesh, which then attacks reporters investigating the mass graves... or something like that) the action element is ultimately a little distracting. Not a terrible film, but one that doesn't induce any kind of real desire to return to it again.

And then there is Rogue.

I. Really. Like. Rogue.

It doesn't water itself down with a subplot about military warlords, it doesn't avoid taking itself seriously with absurd comical moments (though there are laughs to be found now and then). It's just a straight up film about a tour boat taking a wrong turn in the Northern Territory of Australia to investigate a distress flare, getting attack by a 7 meter rogue saltwater crocodile and the survivors fending for themselves on a small patch of land as the tide comes in. It's a simple good old fashion monster movie, but a surprisingly well made one. Surprising not in the sense of McLean's competence (say what you will about Wolf Creek, but it was shot well, the teens were some of the most believable characters of any torture horror film of the period, and it was pretty damn scary) but rather in how he approaches the film. Contrary to what one might expect from the premise, there are no long agonizing scenes of half devoured people bleeding all over the sand, screaming to their loved ones as their guts spill out. In fact, their is really little gore in this film at all. Some deaths actually happen off camera and the gore of what is shown feels more practical than gratuitous. People forget that despite Ebert's rant about its utter cruelty, Wolf Creek was actually quite tame in literal gore compared to the Hostel or Saw films. For all its very gruesome scenes, what made the film the hardest to watch of nearly all the films from the wave was that it made characters you cared for, and pulled no punches with them. It succeeded in giving the (original) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre experience to a modern horror going audience. This time out, McLean isn't even going for that. He is simply making a good monster film--a love letter to Jaws even, and while it is unquestionably inferior to that classic, it has something that that film never even showed an interest in having: a stiff shot of reality. Rogue crocodiles are a phenomenon that is real, and as crazy as it is to imagine, McLean's restraint on the gore is also carried over into his monster's size. There was supposedly a crocodile reported in the Northern Territory as big as 7.5 meters. As huge as his beasties is, they do get bigger than it.

(NOTE: spoiler heavy paragraph)

When the film does drift into the realm of disbelief suspending fantasy, it is largely on a symbolic level. The formulaic male weakling from the city (Michael Vartan) does ultimately go toe to toe with the croc, in a cave, to save the female lead (Radha Mitchell), the dragon slayer feel of it is strangely aesthetically pleasing. There isn't really a sense of feminist guilt to be had. The scene is practically saturated in psychoanalytical imagery (something I always welcome in horror films when smartly executed) but Mitchell plays the tour boat captain as a strong woman whose moment of distress doesn't seem to bare any judgment on her femininity. That the two leads do not for all their chemistry become a couple at the end further aids the film in escaping the knight saves the princess formula, leaving instead a pure exploration of male impudence. The protagonist enters an unmodernized world where and combats primal nature, but the heroics that he rises to are not the heroics of a man saving a woman, but of a human being saving another human being. The phallic and yonic symbolism persists not as a literal stand in for sexual organs and their respected sexes, but as the narrativized geography of the psyche.

(End spoilers.)

Like Wolf Creek, McLean, with late cinematographer Will Gibson, use the scenery to great effect within the film. Horror cinema has been in an unfortunate rut when it comes to mise-en-scene with many films simply revising the same basic approach of eclectic decay. It worked in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs, and was perhaps utilized best in Se7en, where the obsessiveness of John Doe's (Kevin Spacey) apartment was used to contrast the pristine library that serves as pursuing Detective Summerset's (Morgan Freeman) own lair. Horror movies like the new TCM, and Saw and more recently (and most mind bogglingly) the remake of Friday the 13th (oh god, don't get me started on that one) today adopt the aesthetic without offering any intellectual content. McLean doesn't do this so much. With Rogue he continues to use Australia in much the same way that Peter Jackson uses New Zealand, to take us to another world. Much of the Northern Territory, including where a great deal of the film is shot, is tribally owned and normally off limits. It is a real corner of the world where dinosaurs are alive, and the photography revels in all the Heart of Darkness, modernist colonial anxiety of the jungle, the dark water that you can't see the bottom of. This is Jaws territory.

The casting is also quite nice for your basic monster movie. It's a delight see Radha Mitchell, not needing to try and hide her Aussie accent. Most of the rest of the cast is a little stock, from snarky guy turned hero, to nervous breakdown girl, to the all time favorite: arrogant asshole that doesn't stick to the plan and almost (or does) get everyone killed in a moment of utter stupidity guy. (Oh, why does he always have to come along for the ride?) Still, they are largely good stock, interesting enough to watch stock. They each get a moment or two to make them likable on some level. The real surprise though is John Jaratt, the guy who played the serial killer Mick Taylor (or as I like to call him Crocodile Dundee-McF*@k-You-Up-My-God-He's-Evil). His unrecognizable performance as the pudgy widow who is sometimes a jerk and at other times quite likable officially makes me interested in the actor. He really steals the show, offering almost uncharacteristically tender moments to the a genre known for cartoonish dog chompings off camera (not that this film would stoop to such lowbrow humor... really...).

Rogue isn't perfect of course. The line between good old fashion horror and formulaic horror is a tough one to walk. The CGI is... CGI, but the painstaking work taken to capture how crocodiles really behave pays off, creating a monster with a lot of personality that moves realistically enough to overlook its other budgetary limitations. The obligatory moment where someone does something stupid, for all its suspense, is frustrating to watch unfold. And while it can be cop-out to say this, it simply isn't JAWS. Still, people that see that horrible box cover, with its bloody mouth implying hundreds of gallons of blood and guts (there are body parts and parts of bodies... but it's seriously not that bad), and the BS "UNRATED" edition label, are more likely than not going to give it a complete pass in the rental, and that is a shame. This isn't torture horror. This isn't Sci-fi Channel schlock. It's a genuinely decent monster movie that tries to be great, with beautiful cinematography--the last work of an artist who died tragically too soon--and many entertaining moments of acting, horror, and action (I unapologetically love the final showdown). McLean can do more than Wolf Creek, and this film shows that. From the range of his first two major film, horror fans should be greatly anticipating whatever he does next. I know I am.

I.e., it doesn't suck.

After Thought About Micheal Jackson's Death

2009-07-03T19:06:00.003-04:00

You know who I feel really bad for? Macaulay Culkin. I'm dead serious. Child actors have a way of getting skewed up pretty badly, but if there is one kid I think deserved a few heavy narcotics in his system, it was the kid from the Black or White music video.

I was largely persuaded by the "Take Two" or "Rebuttal" video to Martin Bashir's special, Living with Michael Jackson, that it is very possible that Jackson is not a pedophile. Crazy? Oh god yes. Still, that special was fairly convincing that a sound byte free Jackson was much more rational than I'd have ever wagered. Nonetheless, let's say he did molest those children. Let's go so far as to take even the joke seriously and say he molested Culkin as well. If that were true, how utterly horrible for him, not only to be a victim, but to be surrounded in media making fun of the fact that he was raped.

Think about it, what are the two things Culkin is most known for? Home Alone first and foremost, obviously, but how many people can honestly say #2 for them is The Pagemaster, Richie Rich, or even The Good Son? The reality is that for most people he is the butt (pardon the tasteless pun) of a rape joke, that few of us can saw we aren't guilty of laughing at or even making a variation of at one point or another. He's that kid Jackson slept with. No, not the one with cancer! The one from Home Alone!

Keep in mind that when the first allegations of Jackson molesting a child were made, Culkin was 13. Yeah, of I'd get into narcotics too.

Even though he's not really a rape victim in the least likelihood, I can't help but imagine how much it would get to me after awhile. Culkin: the raped kid. And just as he's starting to inch his way back into acting... Jackson dies, and despite how much that rebuttal video showed how distorted the media image of Jackson really was (guilty or not), the media can resist dredging up the molestation charges again.

If Jackson was innocent, then as sad as it is, at least he doesn't have to deal with the blitz anymore. Culkin on the other hand, is a big target for some pot shots, and god that's got to suck.

So, I saw Flowers in the Attic... THE MOVIE

2009-06-30T12:35:00.001-04:00

"EAT THE COOKIE!!!"

That is all.

So... Rees is sponsored by Sprint?

2009-06-28T13:17:00.004-04:00

I've sat on this one for about a day now since I followed the NBC29 link in Waldo's recent post to the campaign website of Brad Rees. At heart, when I discovered Rees' website and this sort of manifesto, I wasn't interested in coming down on it for party reasons. To put it bluntly, I don't think he has a chance; the need to defend Perriello against him is the last thing on my mind. He's just a long shot trying to get his ideas out there, so whatever.

Still, even the above attempt to depoliticize fails, as it implies allegiance to Perriello (Disclosure: his father was my doctor from infancy till only a few years ago, and technically right up till his retirement). More importantly, in stating my doubt for his chance so bluntly, I can be accused of swaying voters. For one reason or another, people tend to not vote for or give their time/money to support lost causes.

Perhaps there is an utter futility to trying to claim politics do not matter here, in the sense that I, as a Democrat (or a crazy independent wolf in Democratic Party clothing), am criticizing the website of a Republican candidate. Nonetheless I insist that my interest is more broad than that. It is the content of his piece that interests me, and while I'd like to think that I'd be just as hard on a Democratic candidate, I'm not really interested in who did what first or how many worse things Republicans think Democrats have done. I'm interested in criticizing the content of Rees' multi-media post "Welcome To A New Kind of Campaign From A New Kind Of Candidate" because I think it is... well... special.

The tiresome 'I hate lawyers' rhetoric and the not very new approach of 'I'm a working Joe like you' (even if he is one) are of little interest to me other than the basic problems of representation that crop up because of them. The aspect that makes this a multi-media post--a video entitled "What if Firefighters Ran the World?"--however, I find fascinating.

Where do I begin?

The video is a neat little piece of blue collar catharsis. A sort of Regan era down with the eggheads mentality permeates it as the firefighters breeze through problem after political problem, unanimously agreeing to fix each--speaking in unison even. Sure, it's funny, but while it seems to praise firefighters, doesn't it also mock them right alongside the bureaucrats they replace? Did the tensions of the last three presidential campaigns not leave us with some degree of heightened awareness of just how complex politics can be? Don't we find the utter naivete of the video repulsive? The representation assumes that the firefighters must purely tackle problems as opposed to issues (problem + solution = done, as opposed to situations where either/or the problem or the solution cannot be unanimously accepted, where there are causes and consequences). Of course, I'm saying the obvious, but nonetheless is this a wise representation of the blue collar worker for a self-proclaimed working Joe politician to evoke right off the bat? Yes, yes, lawyers are teh bad... but they have a fluent knowledge of laws and argumentative/problematic variables, things one should want in a politician. A representation like this makes me question that a candidate opposing them would as well.

Another creepy issue I have with the video is the arguable discrepancy between the title and the content. It says it is about firefighters running the world but it very clearly shows them running America. While we can suppose that a similar scene is occurring in other locations around the world, the logistics of it are difficult to actually imagine. Instead what we have is America (the flag is just barely visible in the top of the frame, and of course there's not exactly much evidence that this is occurring in, say, Russia) as the world. Maybe also not a wise image to associate with running for office.

Then there is the simple intertextuality of firefighters in politics. Over eight years after September 11, I'd like to think that we can dissociate firefighters in general with the heroics of those at the World Trade Center, but when they are placed in such a blatant political context, it's still nigh impossible. Both parties have evoked 9/11 numerous times throughout the decade for political reasons, but Republicans in particular have come under fire for it as a rally cry for Iraq. Bush fell back on it in tight spots so often it was almost like a special kind of TS. So as indirect as it is, again it strikes me as a bad move for a politician to take who is claiming a "New Kind of Campaign." But it gets worse. I've been dancing around one of the most striking things about this video being used in a political campaign:

It's an ad for a cellphone from Sprint.

That's right. It shows firefighters, talking on cellphones, running congress (and the world from congress?), and it's a phone advertisement. So if the issue of exploiting the heroics of firefighters bothers you, here we have them being doubly exploited first by an cellphone company of all things and then by a political candidate. Then there is just the pure issue of having an ad woven into your major introduction to your website and campaign. Is Rees sponsored by Sprint? Did he get permission to use their ad? Are cellphones a big part of his platform? Are firefighters?

There is something appealing about the underdog DIY mentality of utilizing external media to get around the annoying reality that it does take a lot of money to run a campaign, but ultimately is it really a good idea? Most politicians try to avoid addressing their relationships to large corporations helping fund their campaigns. Rees proclaims to be "The guy with no money to speak of" but uses a Sprint Cellphone commercial as a welcome mat.

Regardless of political views, to anyone interested in pursuing politics, I think Rees offers an example for the textbooks of how NOT to run an underdog campaign website.

Sacha, Can't You See Michael Jackson is Burning?: Too-Soon-Ness and Icon Exploitation

2009-06-27T11:40:00.015-04:00

I'm not particularly interested in writing about Michael Jackson's death. My parents called me in a short game of phone hopscotch to let me know about it after my dad heard the news on the radio. My reaction was indifferent, I liked a lot of his material and am old enough to remember when he was still huge, but besides a recent look back at his material after seeing The Nostalgia Critic's episode on Moonwalker, I just don't think of him often enough anymore to really feel anything. I was honestly more upset about Farrah Fawcett dying.

That said, I find myself somewhat fascinated by the media reaction. I suspect that this is less a particular fascination as it is the first incident of this kind I've been aware of post-college (particularly post-media studies courses) and in a moment of semi-leisure where I could actually critically take it in.

There are two incidents that fascinate me. The first is rather typical of a pop-icon's death or really any iconic figure's death. I am of course talking about the immediate need to exploit that death. It becomes the fixation of the media, prioritizing it over almost any piece of news that might actually be relevant to the lives of readers and viewers. As in life, the person continues in death to be a free-for-all commodity to be traded and sold. This relationship between person and image is embedded in their very title as icon, a term which loses the person in the "pictorial representation" of the person when their "form suggests its meaning" and becomes something in itself. Calling someone an icon thus creates a separation of the figure--of their form--from the literal intimate person, who becomes a source of tension and instability (e.g. Jackon's image of being a great humanitarian who loves children being all but utterly obliterated by accusations of child molestation later in life) essentially till their death. At which point, the process of shaping their total life into the particularly lucrative product of narrative becomes virtually stable (the imposed form of narrative onto the total life is completed by a formal and definitive end of the story).

In the case of Michael Jackson we can see the perversion in icon commodity value not through the under reported events of relevant news (well... we could... but who reads anything beyond the front page anyway? ;) ), but through the comparative valuing of another iconic figure's death on the same day: Farrah Fawcett. I think Larry King made this about as apparent as it could be made with his tasteless comment on CNN Live while plugging his show for that evening. Originally planned to focus on Fawcett, he said, "this puts that story into the past" (skip to the 1:50 mark if you can't stand Larry King and just want to get to the point). What is so striking about it is the admission that Michael's death does not mean that Fawcett's focus will have to be dimmed down to accommodate two icons dying, but that it means Fawcett is officially a less valuable commodity. She is yesterday's news. The stock has officially plummeted for Fawcett icon sales in light of the sudden rise of Michael's.

At the same time that the media floods the market with products of the disembodied body, the icon husk of Michael Jackson, there is another phenomenon of restraint which can be witnessed. In the case of Jackson, we can see an example of too-soon-ness in the choice to omit a scene in Sacha Baron Cohen's new Movie Bruno where he gets a-hold of La Toya Jackson's Blackberry and tries to get Michael's number. Ain't it Cool News reporter "Beaks" provides an account of the scene:

Earlier this week, I saw BRUNO (Cohen's follow-up to BORAT directed by Larry Charles), and thought nothing of a scene in which the flamboyant Austrian talk show host interviewed La Toya Jackson while sitting on, um, Mexican furniture. As with most of the bits in BRUNO, it was in spectacularly bad taste. But while Cohen was definitely taking advantage of Ms. Jackson's shocking naiveté, it actually turned out to be one of the least cruel vignettes in the entire movie. And what is cruel about it really has nothing to do with La Toya. In fact, the highlight of the scene - where Bruno commandeers Jackson's Blackberry and attempts to relay her ultra-famous brother's phone number to his assistant (in German) - actually elicits a kinda cute response from the giggly La Toya.

Unless he is grossly downplaying the scene, it appears that it has little to do with Micheal at all beyond the phone number, in which case the too-soon-ness of the scene would appear to lie not in its making fun of a figure whose recent death places them in high sympathy which as a result would hurt the Bruno's sales, but the more subtle case of simply addressing Micheal after the fact.

How do we reconcile these two acts? How is it acceptable to flood media with icon commodity and yet in poor taste to address the deceased?

A consistency does occur upon closer examination. The commoditizing media produce essentially two kinds of products: "Jackson is dead" and "Remember Jackson" (this second one of course branches into multiple subcategories from nostalgia to narration to reexamination of past narrative, among others quite possibly). What is apparently so inappropriate despite the chronology of the film to Jackson's death, is the illusion that Jackson is not dead in the present. Bruno is something new, and will be seen as something new, but it is a world of the past which exists unaware that it is a product comprised of the past. This tends to happen with any contemporary fiction (acknowledging of course the problems with calling Bruno fiction in the conventional sense) that is not date specific, a sort of space-time split where the fictionalized present is either an alternate universe or simply in the close future. As such, Bruno becomes out of joint with the current, like the long unseen friend who upon bumping into you in town asks about some mutual acquaintance unaware that they're deceased.

What is likely to become (if it hasn't yet) the classic example of this phenomenon is the digital removal of the twin towers from Sam Raimi's Spider-man. While the media was generally called on for its exploitation of the incident, it was essentially accepted that images of the towers being hit and collapsing could be shown over and over (and over) again, but the idea of showing the towers in some of the last films that captured them before the attacks as if they still existed was somehow too upsetting. It recalls to me the Freudian story of the father who dreams of his son burning so that he will not wake to the horror of him actually being dead and burning as it was reinterpreted by Lacan and introduced to me through Zizek:

Why do we dream? Freud’s answer is deceptively simple: the ultimate function of the dream is to enable the dreamer to stay asleep. This is usually interpreted as bearing on the kinds of dream we have when some external disturbance – noise, for example – threatens to wake us. In such a situation, the sleeper immediately begins to imagine a situation which incorporates this external stimulus and thereby is able to continue sleeping for a while longer; when the external stimulus becomes too strong, he finally wakes up. Are things really so straightforward? In another famous example from The Interpretation of Dreams, an exhausted father, whose young son has just died, falls asleep and dreams that the child is standing by his bed in flames, whispering the horrifying reproach: ‘Father, can’t you see I’m burning?’ Soon afterwards, the father wakes to discover that a fallen candle has set fire to his dead son’s shroud. He had smelled the smoke while asleep, and incorporated the image of his burning son into his dream to prolong his sleep. Had the father woken up because the external stimulus became too strong to be contained within the dream-scenario? Or was it the obverse, that the father constructed the dream in order to prolong his sleep, but what he encountered in the dream was much more unbearable even than external reality, so that he woke up to escape into that reality.

To understand this theory that the dream of the boy is more terrifying than the actual death of the boy, we must note from the set up that the boy is already dead. The horror of the dream is the confrontation with the desire for the son, The World Trade Center, and now Michael Jackson (the element of the absurd in this statement does not escape me) to live. It is traumatic in that our desire cannot be fulfilled. Our dreams show us what we want but can never ever truly have. With are own anxieties of death, is the unbearable reality not the fear of non-existence but rather the horror that we don't want to cease existing but will anyway? That our underlying nature is in an inherent conflict with the real, which as a result reveals a fundamental riff in our sense, or rather our illusion, of control?

The films show us things that are no more and act as if they still are, and like the long unseen friend, we tell the screen that they aren't, but we wish they were. Of course, I doubt Sacha or Raimi were really thinking about this when either made their call, but does it not explain this inconsistency? How exploitation is met with cynical but nonetheless complacent disgust while the phenomenon of films like Bruno and Spider-man evoke a need for self-censorship? The exploitative supplements our desire for what can't be through the persistence of the disembodied body, the commoditized icon. As Elton John put it, "your candle burned out long ago/ your legend never will."

God Bless France: A Secularist Feminist Critique of Sarkozy's Objection to Burqas

2009-06-22T18:32:00.009-04:00

NOTE: I should in fairness stress that my following of this incident has been limited. I looked at a few other stories online which seemed to be summeries of the Google article, so the analysis is based almost completely on this one account. If you feel the article does not represent the incident or Sarkozy well enough, please feel free to leave alternative accounts in the discussion below with links. I'm headed out of town and had to scramble to finish this before it became too dated. I expect that even with the proof reading I'll want to edit this thing to death when I see it again with fresh eyes two days from now.

There are a few things about French President Sarkozy's reasoning against the wearing of burqas in his country that I find curious. Living in Virginia, where it is illegal for an adult regardless of sex to wear a mask or other substantial face covering in public, I find it surprising that the most pragmatic argument against allowing the wearing of a burqa--that it conceals the wearers identity in public--is apparently not an issue with regard to safety for Sarkozy. Where I cannot walk down the street wearing a full Richard Nixon mask over my head without a police officer being concerned that I'm going to commit a crime (yes, like rob a bank), Sarkozy seems more concerned about someone completely covered from head to toe posing a threat to secularism and feminism.

As a secularist and a feminist (yes men can be feminist too) Sarkozy's angle bothers me.

First of all, there is the simple inconsistency of his secular argument as it's presented by Google News. He seems to want to have it both ways, saying that the Islamic burka (or burqa) is not welcome in secular France but at the same time saying, "The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience." How can it be both not a sign of religion and undermine secularism? While shifting the focus to feminism this quote in effect manages to secularize the burqa which poses even more trouble for his agenda when we look at how it supposedly undermines feminism.

Since Sarkozy has relieved us of our burdensome preconceptions about ignorant Islamic barbarism, let us indulge a bit more and lay down the baggage of western (arguably still white) middle-class/bourgeois feminism. That is to say, let us attempt to look at the Burqa as a completely secularized object devoid of as much preconceived bureaucracy of dynamics as possible. What we are left with is an object that virtually conceals all aspects of appearance, forcing wearers to define their selves in a non-superficial manner. When we are freed from the the notion of the non-consensual wearing of the burqa, the male order forcing women to cover up so that their sexuality does not undermine some patriarchal chauvinist order, we see the woman (or wearer of any sex) is just as freed from the objective gaze. Instead of the physical prejudices which influence our opinions of people (what is beautiful, ugly, sexy, etc.), relationships with and between burqa wearers would seem to develop on the basis of personality, one's intelligence, beliefs, tastes and so on. In this light, is the burqa not potentially the physical preexistence of the condition of early internet socializing?

With image and video an ever increasing aspect of internet society now, it is easy to forget that in the early days there were no or very limited avatars and profile pictures. In your home you were you with all your physical characteristics, but on the internet you were essentially a name, a being of text to be judged by the content of your text. This relationship hasn't utterly vanished. For example, I've never bothered to put a photo of myself up on this blog, so for the visiting reader I am essentially these words. You can't see if I am buttoned down and neatly dressed or unshaven and covered in grass clippings, fat or trim, if I look like an Old Navy model or your cousin who plays Halo 3 all the time, to give but a few of the many possibilities. Without an external relationship, I'm freed of virtually all visual coding by you the reader.

A personal example of this absence of visual codes as a positive is found in the many late nights in college talking with a Muslim friend of mine. Though she did not wear a burqa, she did adhere to many formalities in public which coded her very much as Muslim, which, all things September 11th aside, left a sense of treading eggshells for a ferocious secularist fighting the Marshall-Newman amendment like myself. Yet, this baggage was quickly obliterated within the disembodied space of the internet where she would initiate wonderful conversations with me about, among other things--and of all things--Nietzsche. (This occurred often at three in the morning while we both wrote papers due the next day). While I never disregarded her customs, this idea of Muslim other simply broke down, and I found myself able to talk to her more or less as I would anyone else.

The Burqa seems to function mostly in the same way. Inside one's home, it is not worn (among family); it is something put on to enter the public sphere which makes interaction something outside visual coding. This however is not as effective as the internet for it still retains the cultural dimension of the specific garment, which admittedly can become exceptionally coded, especially in contemporary times. While it prevents me from seeing not only if I am sexually attracted to wearer's physique, it also prevents me from making preconceptions about them based on fashion sense... except that they are Muslim. That detail of course is one betrayed by Sarcozy in claiming the garment to be "not a sign of religion." Secularized, it is a garment that, like the text-based internet, actually encourages intellectuality and personality as the definers of identity and relationship.

Isn't that what most feminist want? To be identified as people and not just sexual objects?

I am not unaware of the enormous problem with what I've argued so far. Sarcozy, or any sensible feminist who wants to strangle me write now, is arguing that women are forced to wear these so men don't have deal with their urges. Feminism is as much a psychological movement as a political one, and in most circles it is the gaze itself that is the issue, not what is being gazed at. My point is simply that the object, the burqa, separated from the context of who decides for who, is not a fundamentally bad thing. It is not genital mutilation or some other extreme form of misogyny at its core, but rather something which one could even conceivably choose to wear as a means of separating their identity from their body. This could even be an act of feminist resistance to the sexual objectification of one's self.

Let us consider how identity is addressed by Sarkozy. Instead of framing it as a necessity that others see one's identity for their benefit (ridding all criminals and law abiding citizens alike of the luxury of visual anonymity), Sarkozy focuses on the woman's need to show her self for the benefit of being seen. "We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity." Identity here becomes something bestowed by society, projected upon the woman's exposed skin. Identity is thus superficial. I think I just heard Camus roll over in his grave.

What this 'need to be seen' really means is that to have an identity others must see you, and (because of the extreme coverage of the burqa) you can't wear too much clothing while being seen. That strikes me as the opposite of feminism, and even smacks of the same subversive motivations as heterosexual men insisting that women should have the same equal rights to walk around topless. If Sarkozy is seriously concerned about feminism in his country he should (like Obama, who he makes a point of differing with) stress the woman's choice to wear or not wear a burqa and oppose anyone depriving them of the right to choose for their selves. He should even insist that men have the right to wear them as well, destroying the gender connotation.

I swear, as he argues it, even the use of "submissive" becomes suspect. Don't people have the right to wear submissively coded clothes? I get that he's probably as hard on nuns for the way they dress, but can we expect him to crack down on corset wearing emo-types as well? Should we be bracing for a full-scale shut down of fetish clubs and a mass deportation of gimps from France in the coming months?

Jokes aside, Sarkozy's argument has a perverse undercurrent to his reasons against the burqa that should not be overlooked by our cultural imperialistic progressive urge to cleans everyone of barbarity. I haven't even gotten to what, as a secularist, I find to be perhaps the biggest problem with his statement that, "The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience." More than the inconsistency of the statement we should be asking who is he to say that it isn't a sign of religion? What he is doing is as a president--one of the highest positions of political authority--is imposing a theocratic position on his people. How the hell can he call himself a secularist and do that? Imposing a theocratic view from a political position as an argument for potential legislation is about the greatest undermining of secularism anyone could conceivably commit.

The purpose of a secularist government should be the insistence of pragmatism and utilitarianism as the means for determining laws. Drawing from the premise of theologian Roger Williams that marrying church and state corrupts the church, secularism can be as much a pro-religion institution as opposed, understanding the necessity of the state not to favor one religion or particular interpretation of a religion over others in a multi-faith populace. As I pointed out at the beginning, there is a perfectly good pragmatic reason to object burqas for reasons of safety, but Sarcozy is not quoted addressing it, choosing instead to tell citizens what does and does not represent their faith and that they cannot represent their faith. While the movement to forbid politicians from wearing signs or otherwise outwardly designating themselves as members of a particular faith is not beyond the scope of how secularism can be practiced by a government, the implementing of such restrictions on civilians elevates atheism in the very same problematic way as elevating a given religion. Politicians bare a responsibility to everyone that they represent, which in a secularist state requires some personal sacrifice to ensure one serves equally, but to impose the same on civilians as citizens is pure religious oppression. Sarkozy seems more interested in an atheist state than a secular government for France, which anyone truly serious about secularism should oppose.

So yeah, damn you Sarkozy for making me defend burqas!

People Carrying Guns Discussion

2009-06-18T11:29:00.002-04:00

So this blog hasn't been very philosophical of late in the fashion that is used to be. I've threatened in the past to make it a movie blog and I've enjoyed thus far taking it in a more media studies oriented and personal direction. That said, I've been a bit of a windbag over at Jackson's blog, discussing people that carry guns, so if anyone (who doesn't already frequently read Rule .303) misses my old stuff or is just interested in the issue, check out his post and the subsequent discussion board.

Thoughts on Drag Me To Hell

2009-06-16T18:52:00.003-04:00

I'm not going to go into a great deal of depth because there is a possibility I will have to review this again later in the year (more on that... um... later in the year) and don't want to rehash it all again.

That said, it is problematic but very enjoyable, especially in a movie theater, which feels like the only way one should watch this film. I really did like it a lot and found it a very fun date movie (something I've very rarely been able to say about any horror movies this decade). The lead actress, Alison Lohman, hindered the film at several places where she very visibly didn't seem to know what to do. Raimi has a very distinct style of camp that requires a very specific style of over the top camp (as Edward pointed out in the previous comment board) It was never Téa Leoni bad, but their were flirtations towards that realm. Still the character did manage to walk the line between being someone you care about and someone you can enjoy watching put through the slapstick abuse (and oh yeah, Raimi doesn't go soft. She get's smacked around just about as much as Bruce used to, rest assured). The subplot about how she is trying to turn her back on her southern roots is particularly amusing when her accent creeps through in certain moments of duress. It's an almost Cohen Brothers touch (there was a lot of early collaboration between the three, as well as actor Bruce Cambell). While the problem is a lack of camp in some moments with Lohman, it is ironically quite refreshing to see Justin Long (great porn name, by the way, but it must have been hell working with Kevin Smith because of it) get a goofy but straight dramatic role. I hope more people give him a chance, because he was quite likable in this.

As for the film itself, it is refreshing in its effort not to rely on gore. Instead it goes for grossing out (think of a PG-13 Pink Flamingos) with bile and mucus and slime and other such fun things you wouldn't want in you mouth. In addition to grossness, it's a jump scare film to end all jump scare films, and this is where it gets problematic. Its almost a love letter to jump scares, they are everywhere and the amazing thing is they mostly work even though they are everywhere. It's a strong argument that jump scares seem cheap because people sell cheap jump scares and that they're is a still quality to be found if them if executed by directors with talent. Still they do almost become annoying in their endless onslaught. The secret to many jump scares being the sound scape, this film latterly beats you up in the theater. It's like having a trashcan thrown over your head and being bashed repeatedly with baseball bats. This film is not for people with heart conditions! The opening is in particular a bit forced in its pacing, showing just how aggressive the demon is by making it raise all hell (literally) the moment someone tries to test it. You just want more breathing time, more effort to make the story creepy in itself (like The Orphanage for example, or The Gift to draw on another Raimi film) but then again, this is Evil Dead II territory, it's about having fun with horror, and it does that. It's hard to describe the style of this fun, for it's not like Shaun of the Dead or Fido, but very much a strange mix of John Waters glee for the gross (though not sexual in this case) mixed with the Cohen's cruelty. Another film I've repeatedly thought of for some reason is Death Becomes Her, which it really isn't like at all beyond that sense of being very dark and yet very fun. It's a film to laugh with and jump through and just be silly while watching.

Drag Me To Hell proves that a pg-13 movie can be scary, even if it isn't exactly scary itself. A better actress and less CGI, and this would be unquestionably one of the best horror comedies and even flat out horror movies in many many years. Viewers going in should realize that its high praise and love is as much for what it represents as what it is, and in some ways more the latter. Torture horror and the kind of bleak hardcore horror that the French have been leading in have had their run, but its time for them to go like J-horror before them. I'm not saying gore must end, but I think a lot of people look forward to horror lightening up a little while still being good. Drag Me To Hell is a suggestion of where horror can go in the coming decade for its next phase, and personally, I'm stoked if it happens, but only if people improve on what Raimi has offered instead of offering more feebler fare. Hard R horror was needed in response to Hollywood fodder like The Haunting remake, and I don't want to see a simple relapse back into that crap.

A-

(Huh, I guess that wasn't super brief. Oh well.)

Fear and Loathing at Mount Vernon

2009-06-14T22:00:00.004-04:00

Me and guided tours do not often mix well, or at least have had a less than glowing history. They are the kind of activity I get dragged along to which makes me want to wear Hawaiian shirts and keep a sharp eye out for bats while walking around in a bowlegged fashion. I've been to Mr. Jefferson's house so many times one can't help but call on and compare the steely looks of the nice southern ladies -- their smiles designed to display pearly white teeth capable of taking my nose off with the veraciousness of Danny DeVito playing the Penguin -- when I ask about "the slaves." This was a sport for my teens, but even when I was littler I was quite capable of being a shit on such tours. I can recall one guided tour through the Luray Caverns, where the line was so long through the narrow tunnels that by being somewhere near the middle, I could make up names for rock formations and the people behind me would continue to point them out, not knowing any better since they couldn't hear the real tour guide talking up ahead.

But now it seems of I've become a reasonable mature member of the tourist herd. That or being engaged to a tour guide with a tendency to drive around with broad swords in her car has put me in my place. Whatever the case, I went to Mount Vernon today and behaved myself quite well.

1. At no point in the presence of a tour guide did I...
a) ask where they keep Washington's pimp wagon (because seriously, the guy's presidential carriage was tricked out).
b) I didn't follow said question with a comment about Washington's mad "grill."

(However, when my sister asked what his cause of death was, I did suggest gingivitis.)

2. When discovering the stain glass mural in the main entrance to the grounds which displayed many great moment's from Washington's life (yes, including the damn cherry tree) I did not respond to its suggestion of Catholic Sainthood with any number of possible jokes from the subtle "blessed was Saint Washington" to the full on Reverend Cory Fallswell mode, preaching how all must "give your mon-NAAAY to the holy concession stands, so that YOU can savor the cherry FLAVOR of our presidential savior!"

3. When waiting in the hour plus long line to Washington's house with the couple behind me talking about Demon Seed, I did not offer that maybe the guy's wife didn't like the film because it is all about a robotic house trying to rape a housewife played by Julie Christie and that most wives don't like movies about being raped by houses.

4. I completely ignored the children's wooden guns that were being sold EVERYWHERE. Didn't even touch one.

5. I didn't ask the gift shop people for an Axe.

6. I didn't make any references to thee Jaws Universal Studios ride while on the boat tour.

7. I never brought up the Free Masons. This in itself isn't that shocking since, really, I don't care about Free Masons. I'm pretty indifferent about the whole lot more or less, and I only bring it up because I found the utter lack of masonry involved in the construction of his house hilarious. It looks like it is made from large bricks, but it's actually all wood painted over with a sand based substance to make it look like stone, complete with indentations in the boards to give a brickwork pattern. HGTV was also not addressed.

So yeah, I behaved. Go me.

It's not that I have any real grudge with Washington, or Jefferson for that matter. But I'm not a touristy person. I hate lines. I hate being out in the hot sun. I hate people talking to me in a very robotic fashion, while other people are gathering behind me to hear the same thing again after I proceed on to the next room. Things like this more me to maddness about 85% of the time if not more, so I become a bit evil to stay sane. Yet I've learned to keep it mostly to myself (or at least, hold off to share them on my blog it would seem).

Finally, having been to Washington's house, I can say that the Monticello people really have their act way more together, despite my teasing them for taking things so seriously. Go them for putting up with my asshattery and always having an answer to questions I'm sure they want to kill every annoying hippy/punk kid or Princess Diana grave robbing adult for bringing up for the eighteenth time that afternoon. If anyone is planning a trip to Mount Vernon and sees a long line to the house, SKIP IT. They rush you through, its not a terribly interesting house on the inside, and only one of the four respectable questions that I asked (pertaining mostly to furniture) were the guides able to fully answer. And, you really need to ask questions on the house tour to get a lot out of it, because in a couple of the larger rooms I was able to stick around to hear the compartmentalized guides repeat their rehearsed information and discovered that sometimes really, really cool details about the rooms were not covered when someone asked and only if someone asked (tip: look for and enquirer about the large key on the wall in the glass case). I'm not trying to rag on the place and the people. Everyone was nice, but you really will get more out of the grounds and going to the museum and the other activities offered than waiting all day to walk through the lower levels of his house. If your heart is set on it, then apparently it's a lot better to see the house in December (less people and you get to go to the third floor then). Also, if you've got all day, then yeah, why not? But if you're making a long drive to check it out, I think there is a lot more to be experienced doing everything except going inside.

Sick Day Movie Marrathon

2009-06-09T00:01:00.002-04:00

So I've been sick and useless all day. Actually, I was sick most of yesterday as well. Not feeling like writing or doing anything physical, I laid around with a quart of soup and watched a bunch of movies. Not particularly great films per se, but more sick day films, and not even necessarily perfect selections of sick day films, because I was just streaming things from netflix. Anyway, I figured I'd share my thoughts on what I watched.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

There is something about a good Ray Harryhausen that is simply perfect for starting a day. Maybe it's the Pirates of Dark Water fan in me, but films like Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts that just capture that magic of Saturday morning cartoons as a kid. Like Most of his Sinbad films, I had missed out on The Golden Voyage and boy was it a treat. Not a really a masterpiece on any level, it's just a fun sword and sandals on the high seas kind of adventure, but like most good Harryhausen films, it feels like something you would imagine as a kid in the best sense and not like most adventure films that only approximate that experience. It just a lot of fun, and made me want to go back and read all of Sinbad's adventures. Sinbad rules.

I should correct one thing though in saying that it isn't a masterpiece on any level. It is without question an essential for stop-motion animation and Harryhausen geeks alike for one simple thing: the Shiva duel. Anyone blown away by the Skeleton duel from Jason and the Argonauts
will be floored when Sinbad and his men take on a statue of the six-armed goddess. There's a cheat here and there where she is basically just using her front upper arms only, but there are at least two parts where she is dueling multiple men with all six that had my jaw on the floor. Keeping track of that many thing... if you are familiar with the process of stop-motion by itself, let alone having the puppets imposed such as to directly interact with real people, than it will simply blow you away.

The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick

Q: What's a good sign that your documentary is bad?

A: When it is on a subject that I'm intensely interested in and I still stop watching it fifteen minutes in.

I'm not even going to use the fact that I'm ill and wanted mindless entertainment as an excuse. This was not well crafted. Editing is the heart of documentary in all its forms. The documentarian has limited control over every element except how the element they have to work with are arranged, what is focused on and what is left on the cutting room floor. In one interview someone goes on and on trying to tell about how funny this one incident at a party with Dick was and keeps laughing the whole time as she tries to tell it, because she thinks its SO incredibly funny, and then when the joke is finally told, through all her laughing, it's rather mundane - all we learn from it is that Dick wouldn't say something funny he said earlier again - one wonders if anything was cut at all. It's just a really bloated moment that goes on past the good part. It begins as a conversation about smoking in Dick's novels, and should have cut to something else after the interviewee quotes what Dick had to say about the matter (that while his characters often smoke and she had never seen him smoke, his novels also often have a lot of sex--which she also probably hasn't SEEN him engage in). But no, it goes on and shows awkwardly past what feels very much like the moment.

Editing bits like the one above were annoying, but as I said before, I'm a Dick fan, so by themselves they wouldn't have made me quit. What really drove me bonkers was the damn animation segments. Either they didn't get the rights or there is apparently a limited amount of footage of Mr. Dick, because of what I watched I'm not sure I saw any. In place of images of the writer, what we get are poorly drawn animations of him that make Dr. Katz look like the work of Miyazaki. The opening credits are the most frustratingly slow process with each title page having to be a sheet of paper that he pulls from a stack, sets in his typewriter and then types. The process takes about ten seconds too long for each one. Opening credits should be a smooth transitional thing, not something laborious for the viewer to sit through. When they finally got to some recordings of Dick's voice and decided to have this terribly drawn cartoon Dick speak them. I said out loud to my computer "fuck it" and moved on. So congratulations Mark Steensland, you made a documentary on one of my all time favorite sci-fi writers, and I didn't last 15 minutes before turning it off (I just checked my netflix account and I only lasted for 14 minutes and 28 seconds).

1984

This is a movie I will blame being sick for my not finishing it. This was sometime later in the afternoon when I was getting tired and the pace of the movie was just too slow to keep me from falling asleep, so I cut it to avoid wasting free streaming time. It really does seem like the kind of movie I would love in the right mindset. It music is largely done by the Eurythmics and is strikingly good (I guess I haven't heard enough non-singles Eurythmics), ambient and surprisingly not dated sounding after all these years. Still, despite the great casting and wonderful dystopia, I found that slouching back in my chair, I couldn't help but expect the film to burst into a Pink Floyd number at anymoment, or for the the protagonist to dream that he is a birdman (yes, I know Brazil came afterwards, but I still was waiting for it). That's the problem with making a film out of Orwell's novel. It's been quoted and expanded upon in some many films since it was published that one can't help but feel something is absent when watching just the original story. So as good as it did seem, I suspect that when I do finish it I will leave the film with a sense that it doesn't quite retroactively hold up to the legacy it's created. Still, looked pretty top notch for what it is.

Men in Black

After that fun, fun downer that I wasn't in the mood for, I felt like watching something goofy, something I hadn't seen in a while and could probably finally laugh at again. Men in Black largely hit the spot. I forgot that Vincent D'Onofrio was Edgar, and enjoyed the character all over for how offbeat he was for him (kinda reminded me of Keaton as Beetlejuice in that you forget that its him). Not much to add other than how much I love bits like the Morgue scene. I always wish MIB had stayed small, eased off the saving the world scale missions. That was the biggest problem with the sequel and in many ways why I expect (and hope) we'll never see a third. I was the Bazooka goofy answer to X-files and before it was even finished with the first film it lost sight of that. Still, lots of fun.

Porky's

Bob Clark made three movies that make everything else he has turned out not matter. Black Christmas, A Christmas Story, and Porky's. Porky's is the birth of the raunchy teen movies, Meatballs was right there with it Porky's was operating on a whole other level. It's like someone took American Graffiti and gave those kids a stack of Playboy with maybe a Hustler or two to boot. It's foul-mouthed, sex-charged and full of sex and nudity. Seventeen years before American Pie, it still feels edgier. It has more nudity than most modern sex comedies, but there is something more to it than that which is why I can hate most of those films but actually love this one. Porky's has character's that feel real, exaggerated, but real. They are mostly interesting people. Even if they repulse you, there is something there that makes you care what happens to them. I never felt that with American Pie and what few of the other films of that generation I saw. The kids felt superficial and picked off of television shows and the plots felt completely contrived. Porky's has basically two major sex gags--a noisy orgasm, and the hole in the wall shower scene that is so symbolically potent (particularly but not exclusively considering Clark's background in slasher films) that it manages to elevate the film's academic value with its lewdest scene in ways molesting a pie will never touch. Sure, there is the giant condom bit, the killer husband gag and the hilarious "Tallywhacker" scene, but as far as visually lewd gags of the type that There's Something About Mary, American Pie and other films would later embrace, it isn't very jam packed.

A major subplot revolves around one of the member's of the gang being racist thanks to his abusive criminal father and the tensions between him and a new member of the gang that is Jewish. When the Jewish kid beats him in a fight, his father beats him up even worse. The character's arch to becoming friends with the Jewish kid isn't exactly ground breaking or unpredictable, but it's not something you are bound to get from modern sex comedies. At best you could probably hope for a character to quit smoking pot.

Porky's is a coming of age adult comedy for college students done right. I wasn't kidding when I said it is American Graffiti meets Playboy (old school Playboy, that is). It has that same kind of charm with its kids, just hornier.

Well, that's my movie-going experience for the day. Please pardon any typos (though feel free to point them out so I can correct them) as I'm still fairly sick and haven't thoroughly spell-checked this as much as I hope to in the future.

Ok... fine. I'll go see Drag Me To Hell in the theater.

2009-05-30T22:22:00.003-04:00

I have been very resistant to the hype around Sam Raimi's "return to horror" Drag Me To Hell. For several reasons this should appear odd. I'm a huge fan of Sam Raimi horror movies, and think that The Gift, his often overlooked previous return to horror is an underrated gem. I love the Evil Dead movies. LOVE THEM. So why not be excited?

I'm not even bitter about Spider Man 3. Ok, sure. I'm bitter about Spider Man 3. I mean, the film sucked. Toby disco... I'd have slapped Raimi on my way out of the theater for that crap. But I really don't hold that against him. That's not what this is about.

The trailer did just about nothing for me. There are glimpses of the kind of old Raimi charm in there, and even a little old school Poltergeist goodness. But on top of those sprinkles is a glaze of big budget gloss--the kind found in bad Wes Craven movies like Scream 2 and the terrible, terrible Cursed. And all that glossy goop, it's covering a plot that from the trailer bares a striking resemblance to a film that was not particularly good. Let's see if this sounds failure to any Stephen King masochists--I mean completests: some yuppie white person does a gypsy wrong. Gypsy goes all "I curse you: _____er" and then they have only a limited amount of time before the curse kills them. There doesn't seem to be anyway to stop the curse... but you can escape it by passing it on (and no, I'm not talking about The Ring).

Hmmm...

Yeah. I nearly forgot Thinner existed as well. And was happy to forget. But sure, Raimi isn't just making a ripoff of that fest pool. His film doesn't have the father from My Big Fat Greek Wedding trying to be evil. It is has original elements... like the ones it stole from The Ring (which is of course a remake of Ringu which was based off a novel that had a lot more to do with hermaphrodites than the dangers of student films apparently... but I haven't read it to be sure, so who knows). But that's not all we can derive that's creative and original from its trailer... there's also a seance/exorcism scene! Because... there aren't already something like six horror movies from this year and the last that didn't have this kind of scene in them. I know, I know: it's a horror stable, and that's fine, but I'm tell'n ya, I'm sick of them! We are officially maxed out on the holding hands at the table stuff. Let's set on this standard for a solid three years or so, ok?

So yeah. As much as I wanted to like this movie, that add's turned me WAY THE HELL OFF.

The hype has been too much. Every corner of online geekdom I've turned to is gushing for this movie. And yeah, I've wanted to gush too. But I just haven't been able to drop my guard on this one.

Well. That has officially changed. The Spoony One has convinced me. Not because he and I tend to agree on everything. In fact, on several occasions we really haven't, but because he's a picky bastard who for better or worse tends to be very believably earnest in speaking his mind. And if he's not going to tear this film a new one, chances are I'm not either.

Drag Me To Hell is officially the movie I'm looking forward to seeing in the theater as soon as possible. I was pretty confident that I could start my top ten horror movies of the 00s list and shelve it till new years. Now, I'm not.