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flashy_mcflash posted:Megan is Missing and The Den are pretty mean. Inside, Lovely Molly, and Martyrs are right up there for me as well. Inside is mean as hell. pretty good, though.
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Sep 1, 2015 22:29
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My thing with Hobo With a Shotgun is that it might have gone down better for me if it felt satirical or otherwise had some extra layer of artifice between the viewer and all the violence, and while I'm pretty sure it was meant to be a satire (or homage, or something) of trashy exploitation cinema, it really doesn't look like or remind me of any particular kind of movie and winds up feeling a lot more sincere and disturbing. 'Mean-spirited' might not be the most accurate term for it necessarily, but I definitely found its nastiness off-putting and I didn't have any fun with it. Skyscraper posted:I think you mean Funny Games? Now there's a mean-spirited movie. Random question: considernig the US version is nearly identical to the original save for language and some cultural specifics, wouldn't it have made more sense to call it Fun and Games?
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Sep 1, 2015 23:25
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It's a bunch of fanboy fantasy, I know, but I'd absolutely watch this thing. I kind of like the implication that they're just one step away from being Mad Max in Canada. EDIT: Also I meant to say earlier, Rutger Hauer does a really good job as the Hobo. During his monologue about bears, I totally bought him as being way way too close to an actual homeless man.
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Sep 1, 2015 23:48
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Area 51 was cool, and I might re-watch it....but it does the one thing I hate in these kinds of movies. It doesn't show the aliens. I love waiting for the monsters, but I always feel gipped if you never once show them at all. Still cool though.
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Sep 2, 2015 00:00
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Skyscraper posted:It's a bunch of fanboy fantasy, I know, but I'd absolutely watch this thing. I kind of like the implication that they're just one step away from being Mad Max in Canada. A lot of the Hobo's dialogue in the movie is taken or inspired from real things David Brunt, the hobo from the original mock trailer, has said in casual conversation. Hauer really sells it, though. E: I'm sorry if I'm turning this thread into the Lurdiak Loves Hobo With A Shotgun thread.
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Sep 2, 2015 00:18
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It took me several watches to really warm up to Hobo with a Shotgun, even though I saw it for the first time under ideal conditions at midnight with a packed, rowdy crowd. I've really come around on its energy and Rutger Hauer's performance is really pretty great. I recommend watching the interviews in the BluRay special features. It's a lot of fun to hear Eisener gush about the film, and I'd love to see another feature from him.
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Sep 2, 2015 00:19
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"'The truth has the structure of a fiction' – is there a better exemplification of this thesis than cartoons in which the truth about the existing social order is rendered in such a direct way which would never be allowed in the narrative cinema with 'real' actors? Recall the image of society we get from aggressive cartoons in which animals fight: ruthless struggle for survival, brutal traps and attacks, exploiting others as suckers… if the same story were to be told in a feature film with 'real' actors, it would undoubtedly be either censored or dismissed as ridiculously over-pessimistic." -Zizek The point of Hobo With A Shotgun's aesthetic is not that it's too real, but that it is genuinely 'only a movie'. There are no limits. You can set fire to a schoolbus or whatever, and it doesn't matter. But the fact that anything is possible is not liberating, because the underlying logic is exploitation, through and through. And the trick - what I think really gets people - is that even the 'good' scenes are subordinated to this logic. By this I mean that even the heartfelt scenes, or scenes of triumph, are 'a part of the formula'. They're designed to sell extradiegetically and, in the world of the film, 'just hallucinations' - indications of the hero's insanity. But that's what fuels the ultimate Christian metaphor of the thing: authentic faith in a corrupted world.
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Sep 2, 2015 01:28
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lizardman posted:My thing with Hobo With a Shotgun is that it might have gone down better for me if it felt satirical or otherwise had some extra layer of artifice between the viewer and all the violence, and while I'm pretty sure it was meant to be a satire (or homage, or something) of trashy exploitation cinema, it really doesn't look like or remind me of any particular kind of movie and winds up feeling a lot more sincere and disturbing. I still haven't seen Hobo With a Shotgun but I usually feel like putting a level of ironic detachment from something weakens it, for me anyways.
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Sep 2, 2015 01:36
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I don't know what I would call Henry and Funny Games, but I don't think they are mean spirited.
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Sep 2, 2015 02:47
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I would say that Henry is nihilistic, but I don't think that's the same thing as mean spirited.
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Sep 2, 2015 02:49
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trip9 posted:The Poughkeepsie Tapes is a pretty mean film, and of course Hunger Games. Hunger Games taps into the teenage rage-against-the-machine fantasy of martyrdom in an unjust world of adults. The ethics of the movie side with the kids, which is why I wouldn't call it mean. I feel like for a movie to be mean, the movie itself has to hate the victims. I would rank Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a top-ten mean movie. Hunger games love teenagers, and wants you to root for them.
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Sep 2, 2015 03:00
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Funny Games is disdainful for its audience and its villains The film itself shows empathy towards its protagonists. The only time the film verges on being mean spirited is the remote scene. Funny Games is pretty obvious from the get go in drawing its audience in as complicit to its violence. The remote scene really rubs the audience's nose in it though. It allows the audience to feel momentary triumph, only to pull it away and point out the hypocrisy of that sense of triumph.
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Sep 2, 2015 03:16
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hobo with a shotgun is like a troma movie if troma movies weren't terrible (i love troma) you aren't supposed to take the hilarious over the top violence and 1 dimensional characters seriously. Tolkien minority fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Sep 2, 2015 |
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Sep 2, 2015 04:36
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:Inside is mean as hell. pretty good, though. Oh for sure - I like most of the films I listed, but there's a kind of hopelessness in them that leaves you feeling really bad. (Asia) Argento's The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things is fairly relentless too, but it's not exactly horror.
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Sep 2, 2015 16:41
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Basebf555 posted:I would say that Henry is nihilistic, but I don't think that's the same thing as mean spirited. Definitely nihlistic and relentlessly bleak, but not mean-spirited.
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Sep 2, 2015 18:33
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So, I rewatched Kill List and yeah it's my favorite horror movie of 2010s. Flawless. I rewatched Lost Highway, too, since that one scared the poo poo out of me back in the day, and found it absolutely hilarious, both in being 90s as gently caress and complete lack of subtlety in its imagery. "What the gently caress is your name?" scene still gave me chills, though. rvm fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Sep 2, 2015 |
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Sep 2, 2015 23:14
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rvm posted:So, I rewatched Kill List and yeah it's my favorite horror movie of 2010s. Flawless. I feel like Lost Highway gets overlooked when compared to the rest of Lynch's stuff. It terrified me as a kid and still got under my skin a few years ago when I watched it again. I think it's time for a rewatch. I think the idea of a psychotic manifesting itself as a physical reality is awesome. Like all his movies, I get a new understanding each time I watch them over.
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Sep 3, 2015 03:47
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rvm posted:So, I rewatched Kill List and yeah it's my favorite horror movie of 2010s. Flawless. The movie was well made but the ending was really, really predictable.
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Sep 3, 2015 06:18
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so, was bored this evening and decided to catch The Tortured on Netflix..... aptly named. I am not sure who was tortured more, the "bad guy" in the movie or me watching it all. Not that I was really expecting a whole lot, but drat, a little effort could have gone into the acting and editing....I think.... Just sort of falls into a jumbled mess of "i don't know what the gently caress" by the last 30 minutes
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Sep 3, 2015 06:59
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flashy_mcflash posted:Megan is Missing and The Den are pretty mean. Inside, Lovely Molly, and Martyrs are right up there for me as well. I kind of felt Martyrs was too much about empathy for the suffering to be mean-spirited. It was more of a "gently caress you" to the impulse to use the elevation of victimhood for our own personal and ideological validation.
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Sep 3, 2015 07:59
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cthulusnewzulubbq posted:The movie was well made but the ending was really, really predictable. Sure, but Kill List is more of a train wreck than an exciting ride with twists and turns and stuff.
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Sep 3, 2015 08:16
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eckoelab posted:so, was bored this evening and decided to catch The Tortured on Netflix..... It's a loose remake of a French movie called Seven Days. For some reason the American version added a really stupid and implausible twist and cut out some great gore.
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Sep 3, 2015 08:50
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So I'm sure this is common knowledge to everyone in this thread except for me, but I'm watching Phantasm II and just noticed this: Anyone know the story behind this? Just a homage or are they friends?
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Sep 3, 2015 10:02
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Coscarelli and Raimi are good buddies, and Raimi visited the set a bunch to help out during production. He also recommended several makeup and sfx artists that worked with him on Evil Dead II.
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Sep 3, 2015 14:38
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Hodgepodge posted:I kind of felt Martyrs was too much about empathy for the suffering to be mean-spirited. It was more of a "gently caress you" to the impulse to use the elevation of victimhood for our own personal and ideological validation. I guess that's what I meant by meanness in that instance. Martyrs is pretty disdainful of the audience for consuming what's being put onscreen for entertainment. It's not mean to the characters (except in a literal way) but it is a little mean to put these graphic images up in a movie you're watching and tell you not to look at them.
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Sep 3, 2015 14:45
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Hollismason posted:I don't know what I would call Henry and Funny Games, but I don't think they are mean spirited. Anyway, Henry is---like say In Cold Blood (1967) or Titicut Follies (1967)---dispassionate and relatively uninflected. And because of the material, this comes across as superficially cruel. But that's just narrative form following narrative function. When people describe films as `mean spirited' that, as often as not, just means there's no third act catharsis. No comeuppance for the bad guys. No Twilight Zone twist to reveal the underlying moral structure of the narrative universe. But if we accept that the things that happen in Henry also happen in the real world, and we accept that in the real world we don't always get catharsis in the third act, then we have to accept the fundamental reality that an act like breaking into someone's house to rape and murder them isn't something that can be filed and sanded down into a neat little puzzle piece that snaps cleanly into place to complete a larger picture. That pretending that it can be is an act of denial that we may find comforting but only at the expense of diminishing our experience of the act's real cost. You know how in episodic television or big multisequel franchise filmmaking there are moments where the narrative makes a big production about how maybe the main characters are about to get eaten or blown up or whatever the gently caress? Oh no the main dude, he's like totally dead guys. Listen to all this sad music and look at the rest of the cast moping around like sad puppies and poo poo. And then oh hurray it turns out they're fine after all. You know that poo poo? It's anti-drama. Because when anyone can come back from the dead then nothing counts, nothing matters. No matter what terrible poo poo happens we can always just shrug it off because loving main dude, he was like totally dead but then he wasn't. Films like Henry work precisely the opposite way. You keep waiting for the thing that's going to mitigate everything else. The reveal that will put it all into context. The sudden twist that will make it all make sense. And when it never comes, it's the fakeout hero death in reverse. It tells us that it's not just some stupid weightless made-up poo poo, it's consequential. It counts. And I think that approaching something like a bunch of loving stabbings or whatever that way, instead of the with-one-leap-Johnny-was-free way, reflects not a meanness of spirit, but a fundamental humanity. And I think it's the reason why a film like Henry is as memorable as it is, for all of its low-budget squalor.
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Sep 3, 2015 15:46
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SubG posted:Films like Henry work precisely the opposite way. You keep waiting for the thing that's going to mitigate everything else. The reveal that will put it all into context. The sudden twist that will make it all make sense. And when it never comes, it's the fakeout hero death in reverse. It tells us that it's not just some stupid weightless made-up poo poo, it's consequential. It counts. And I think that approaching something like a bunch of loving stabbings or whatever that way, instead of the with-one-leap-Johnny-was-free way, reflects not a meanness of spirit, but a fundamental humanity. And I think it's the reason why a film like Henry is as memorable as it is, for all of its low-budget squalor. Very well said.
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Sep 3, 2015 15:50
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The key is honesty. Its the difference between something like Henry and lets say Megan is Missing. Henry: PoaSK is very up front about what it is showing you, at no point do you get the sense that a hero cop is going to swoop in at the last second or that Henry will find love and change his ways or any of that nonsense. Henry murders everyone he comes into contact with; the conclusion is inevitable, so there isn't the same "haha gently caress you!" quality that something like Megan is Missing(or I'd argue, The Vanishing) has. That's not to say great films can't have mean-spirited moments. I'd consider Dick Hallorhan's death in The Shining mean-spirited because so much of the film sets the audience up to expect that he'll have a chance to effect the outcome that his death ends up feeling like a "gently caress you".
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Sep 3, 2015 19:11
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Cary Fukunaga talks IT:quote:“I was trying to make an unconventional horror film. It didn’t fit into the algorithm of what they knew they could spend and make money back on based on not offending their standard genre audience. Our budget was perfectly fine. We were always hovering at the $32 million mark, which was their budget. It was the creative that we were really battling. It was two movies. They didn’t care about that. In the first movie, what I was trying to do was an elevated horror film with actual characters. They didn’t want any characters. They wanted archetypes and scares. I wrote the script. They wanted me to make a much more inoffensive, conventional script. But I don’t think you can do proper Stephen King and make it inoffensive.”
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Sep 3, 2015 19:29
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EDIT: beaten by seconds! Well here's another paragraph: "The main difference was making Pennywise more than just the clown. After thirty years of villains that could read the emotional minds of characters and scare them, trying to find really sadistic and intelligent ways he scares children, and also the children had real lives prior to being scared. And all that character work takes time. It's a slow build, but it's worth it, especially by the second film. But definitely even in the first film, it pays off. It was being rejected. Every little thing was being rejected and asked for changes. Our conversations weren't dramatic. It was just quietly acrimonious. We didn't want to make the same movie. We'd already spent millions on pre-production. I certainly did not want to make a movie where I was being micro-managed all the way through production, so I couldn't be free to actually make something good for them. I never desire to screw something up. I desire to make something as good as possible. We invested years and so much anecdotal storytelling in it. Chase and I both put our childhood in that story. So our biggest fear was they were going to take our script and bastardize it. So I'm actually thankful that they are going to rewrite the script. I wouldn't want them to stealing our childhood memories and using that. I mean, I'm not sure if the fans would have liked what I would had done. I was honoring King's spirit of it, but I needed to update it. King saw an earlier draft and liked it."
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Sep 3, 2015 19:34
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If you know absolutely nothing about Stephen King, or specifically IT, I can understand why the little character details wouldn't seem important. Its probably easy to argue that Bev's husband doesn't need to be abusing her, or that there's no need for a character who stutters, but if you actually read the book the entire thing is built on the relationships between those characters and all the details matter. If you throw that stuff out its just a generic slasher with a creepy clown. I wonder if they wanted him to cut out any references to IT's origins, which are some of the most interesting chapters in the book.
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Sep 3, 2015 19:37
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Fukunaga is an intelligent and thoughtful filmmaker.
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Sep 3, 2015 19:39
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Basebf555 posted:If you know absolutely nothing about Stephen King, or specifically IT, I can understand why the little character details wouldn't seem important. Its probably easy to argue that Bev's husband doesn't need to be abusing her, or that there's no need for a character who stutters, but if you actually read the book the entire thing is built on the relationships between those characters and all the details matter. If you throw that stuff out its just a generic slasher with a creepy clown. I wouldn't say generic, it's still pretty weird.
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Sep 3, 2015 19:49
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Basebf555 posted:a generic slasher with a creepy clown. I never had any doubt that this is what IT would end up being. It's a real shame but the way studios operate, it was a sure bet.
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Sep 3, 2015 20:58
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flashy_mcflash posted:I never had any doubt that this is what IT would end up being. It's a real shame but the way studios operate, it was a sure bet. I had hope when I heard it was being planned as two films but here we are. After growing up with the miniseries, when I finally read the novel it was the cosmic horror aspect that really intrigued me the most. It was more of a background element but I love the chapters from IT's perspective and the description of it's history, as well as the history of Derry and all the ways that they were connected.
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Sep 3, 2015 21:09
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Skyscraper posted:I think you mean Funny Games? Definitely meant Funny Games. My bad. Also I forget about The Vanishing a lot but whenever I'm reminded of it I want to re-watch it. I definitely think that counts as a mean spirited movie. As for It, I'm more salty than ever that we won't get to see Fukunaga's version. Maybe he'll make a different horror movie at some point and I can be somewhat placated.
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Sep 3, 2015 21:12
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Hat Thoughts posted:I still haven't seen Hobo With a Shotgun but I usually feel like putting a level of ironic detachment from something weakens it, for me anyways. I agree; I was trying to say that this was an instance where I actually wanted a movie's impact (or at least its hard edges) weakened. I was expecting a fun cheesy romp but found it genuinely unsettling. Maybe that was the point, I don't know, but it wasn't an experience I cared for.
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Sep 3, 2015 21:54
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Today (or maybe yesterday or tomorrow -- but it's close) is the 37th anniversary of the release of DAWN OF THE DEAD. We've got to survive! I understand that Romero is working on another sequel in Toronto as I type this. I can't say that I'm very excited though. I am excited to re-watch DAWN however.
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Sep 3, 2015 22:46
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Thread seems to haved moved on from Craven chat but for those interested, Hollywood Reporter has collected some nice lengthy anecdotes/ essays from some notable folks that worked with him over the years, including Kevin Williamson, Neve Campbell, Bob Shaye from New Line Studios, and Bob Weinstein, all definitely more meaty than the typical celebrity "RIP" tweet or statement."Kevin Williamson posted:I remember the first day of shooting. It was raining and freezing. We were huddled in a video village outside a remote house in Northern California while Drew Barrymore was answering a phone inside. It was first-day chaos. I was soaking up every moment. I overheard a conversation Wes was having with the DP about a Dutch angle. He saw me listening, my face a question mark. He pulled me aside and explained. "First ring. Everything is in its proper place. But with the second ring it's time to give the audience their first moment of dread — with a slight shift in perspective. They shouldn't notice it. It needs to be subconscious at this point." So, here is the director of the movie, in the middle of his stressful, busy first day giving this novice kid from Goose Creek a master class in building tension. Beyond his filmmaking brilliance, it is his kind nature and quiet grace I will remember most. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/scream-writer-kevin-williamson-pens-819296 Also, Slate has posted online a New York magazine article "With Horror Master Wes Craven (1939–2015), It Was Never 'Only a Movie'" which I thought was surprisingly touching precisely because it isn't ultra-reverent of all his work ("his name was on a lot of crap." it says at one point), painting him as a guy with undeniable talent and even brilliance that, for one reason or another, we only occasionally got to see realized. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/08/31/wes_craven_dead_at_76_with_the_nightmare_on_elm_street_and_scream_director.html
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Sep 3, 2015 23:14
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I posted about it in the docu thread, but if you can set aside the time for it I highly, highly recommend Never Sleep Again, the four hour long documentary chronicling every Nightmare movie up to Freddy vs. Jason plus the TV show.
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Sep 4, 2015 01:02
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