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One thing I really liked about As Above So Below was how much of it went basically without exposition even after we learn that Hell is basically the dark memories of your past haunting you. For instance, Benji the cameraman has an entire arc in this movie that I only put together, like, a day after I saw it, and it was all conveyed visually. Needless to say, as weird as it gets in the second and third act of the film, there's a lot of tangential pieces laced throughout the beginning of the film that only fall into place after it's had some time to settle in, and it basically implies what the teaser of her seeing her dad hanging by the noose in the Iranian tunnel at the opening does, which is that it's not really the catacombs that are catalyzing supernatural events, but that right at the beginning of the film we're already in the thick of this dark, Hellish scenario.
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Sep 4, 2014 08:09
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Benji is especially important when you consider the major surreality kicks in after he gets stuck, and it's his camera that gets pointedly left behind at the end - while, inexplicably, being the source of the final shot. I thought of about three films that I think As Above, So Below was quite similar to: Fede Alvarez's Evil Dead - I know a lot of people didn't like it, but I actually think it's a really good story about what happens when old friends who begin to realize that all of their friends are assholes who they have nothing in common with decide to keep up pretenses rather than moving on. As Above, So Below is similar for exactly the unexplained, evocative imagery you cite. For instance, La Taupe (La Taupe's spirit? Has La Taupe actually succeeded in doing what Flamel has achieved?! In accepting the horrifying nature of the world's perfect unity and becoming a bridge between the realm of the symbolic and the realm of the material?!) kills Souxie. Specifically. Why? The movie doesn't tell us. Similarly, Zed is the only one of his friends who 'survive' (if this is the case, which we don't know). Why? The movie doesn't tell us. The second is Lars von Trier's Antichrist, which is a film I've seen three times and didn't like nearly as much as As Above, So Below, but I think is worth mentioning because it makes a similar juxtaposition between historical denial (the 'justification' for gynocide in Antichrist, the 'truth' behind the symbolism of alchemy in As Above, So Below) and psychological repression (both films dealing with characters who avoid confronting their shame and trauma until it lashes out). Finally, though, there's Lucio Fulci's The Beyond, which goes further than As Above, So Below in that Fulci was literally attempting to make the mainstream Italian zombie movie equivalent of Un Chien Andalou, and, thus, everything that happens in the film cannot be taken literally, and is there specifically only to shock the viewer out of complacency. I didn't like The Beyond - frankly, I think it's just a lazier version of what Argento did better with Inferno - but seeing As Above, So Below actually makes me want to watch it again, perhaps seeing if it bares out as a satire of the cruelty of cinema.
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Sep 4, 2014 17:54
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Tell me, is this one of your favorite movies of the year, so far? Because it's quickly shot to my tentative top five.
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Sep 4, 2014 20:05
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Hollismason posted:I dunno how you compare The Beyond and Inferno, other than having loosely based plots around a woman finding a book, their not really similar in tone at all. As for it being similar to Dali's film, I don't think they're very similar. Dali's film is known for the eye cutting but other than that it's not particularlly horrific has like no plot and is just a series of images used to induce feeling and emotion. The Beyond actually does have a plot. InfiniteZero posted:I think that while The Beyond and Inferno have structural and thematic similarities, the way each ends sends a different message. I also have problems with classifying The Beyond as a "zombie movie" because it's much more complicated than that. I'm not sure if Fulci was literally trying to make a version of Chien Andalou either. I'm not even convinced that Fulci was just collecting random shocking imagery because there is a narrative, threadbare and dream-logic laden as it may be. There is also a theme of transformation in The Beyond that I don't see in Chien Anadalou. Un Chien Andalou is also steeped in not only imagery that mocks Catholicism, but also transformation imagery. At least to me, it seems that Fulci was particularly drawn to the imagery of the slicing of the woman's eye. Although there's already the famous eye-gouging scene in Zombi, the mutilation of the eye and blindness are consistent motifs throughout The Beyond, which has immediate implications in a primarily visual medium. And while there's definitely a plot to The Beyond, the events that take place aren't structured around a consistent perspective - the biggest example being Jill, the daughter of the plumber who, despite never setting foot in the haunted house which supposedly acts as the gates of Hell, undergoes an arc that is only tangentially related to Liza, John, and Emily. Furthermore, John and Emily only encounter Jill after the gates of Hell have actually opened which, because it completely throws logic into disrepair (the hospital becoming another facade of the house, leading to the same conclusion), it is thus indeterminable whether this Jill is either the one who was blinded and traumatized, or merely a facade to John and Emily. The same can be said for the zombies which attack Liza. My takeaway was that Fulci's representation of a horrifying afterlife, an undead existence which is neither alive nor dead, the space created by the cinema between the absence of the recorded subject and the presence of the symbolic one, is, not unlike Dali's, cruel precisely because it is constantly changing (this crucial transformation imagery that InfiniteZero discusses) and offers no certainty. Cruelty is a big part of this, because unlike American horror movies of the same time, and consistent with Fulci's anti-Catholic imagery, there is zero correlation between carnal sin and diabolical punishment. No matter what the characters do, the gates of Hell are opening, and this throws the binary moral order of the divine and the diabolical into disrepair. Calling back to the mob's symbolic crucifixion of the warlock, the hypocrisy of religion, its inability to represent true compassion in the face of state violence and its nature to instead compromise in order to survive, betrays the cruelty of Heaven and (because this is a horror movie, and we are getting pleasure from the cathartic cruelty) the paradise of Hell.
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Sep 4, 2014 22:11
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I haven't seen I Stand Alone in a long time, but both Irreversible and Enter the Void are great movies. Furthermore, all of Noe's films have very optimistic endings. They are definitely not miserablism for miserablism's sake. Like, Irreversible and Enter the Void aren't that different from Richard Linklater's Boyhood. A better example of miserablism for miserablism's sake would be, like, A Place Beyond the Pines. I Stand Alone is also one of the most vividly novel-esque films ever made, which probably comes at its detriment. One of my friends complained about adaptations of novels and criticized how films have a hard time emulating something unique to the novel form, which is the author's ability to create a sustained stream of consciousness that isn't restricted by what's literally happening in the narrative. I Stand Alone very much gives us this - a character walking around and narrating his own existence. It would be an extreme mistake to interpret these monologues as speaking to Noe's personal views.
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Sep 5, 2014 15:43
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caiman posted:Irreversible is a great movie, but the last thing I would call it is optimistic. "Time ruins everything" is essentially the heart of the film. The ending, with its sunny happy vibe, is absolutely gut wrenching since we know the shitstorm that's about to happen. It's an optimistic ending in the same way that Enter the Void is, in that Noe criticizes our perception of reality and time more than the ineffable structures of our existence, which operate independent of us in ways that are often explicitly cruel. The phrase, "Time destroys everything" would be oppressive and cynical if the story were told in chronological order, but Noe specifically structures it so that we go from destruction to innocence. Time has destroyed everything, including destruction. The point is that if time is this cruel, impartial observer, then it necessarily also becomes the redemption of innocence. Unlike most rape-and-revenge movies which figure rape as this all-powerful destroyer of the victim, who must become like his/her oppressor in order to enact vengeance, Noe subverts our narrative expectations and concludes his film in such a way that Alex is explicitly not defined by her status as a victim. Despite the grueling cruelty that is inevitable, this cruelty can never itself destroy her innocence. The allusions to 2001 are very important here. She is the star-child, the vision of mankind's perfect unity with the cosmos, fundamentally unconquerable.
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Sep 5, 2014 16:46
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caiman posted:But it's impossible to ignore the bounds of narrative chronology. Noe does take us from destruction to innocence, but it's difficult to stay there very long, at least for me. After the pulsating white transitions into the end credits, the realization that the happiness we just witnessed is about to be untangled and destroyed is what ultimately stays with me and makes the ending seem so pessimistic. What we end up with is not only an understanding of how time is about to ruin everything, but also Noe rubbing it in our face. Rubbing our face in it would be much more effective with a chronological narrative. It's not 'cinematic trickery' at all, I don't feel. The illusion of the continuous camera literally suggests that time is occurring all but in reverse, that we in fact need to suspend our cynical suspicion that time fundamentally operates in one direction, and that this direction is always towards destruction. Take the opening scene, which actually features the protagonist from I Stand Alone revealing that he was arrested for molesting his daughter. The two men agree that "time destroys everything," but this leads directly to a setting called The Rectum. Their words floating out the window, they are figuratively talking out of their asses. The implication is that these cynical reprobates have already accepted the sinful imperfection of mankind and the cruelty of time, but this is because they are corrupt. The Rectum itself is a rather overt allusion to The Canterbury Tales, specifically "The Summoner's Tale." A big part of The Canterbury Tales written in the recent aftermath of the Black Death, is to revoke spiritual hypocrisy and cynicism, especially against those who exploit religious ignorance for personal gain in times of oppressive darkness (such as a plague). "The Summoner's Tale" is the most explicit, literally comparing religious hypocrisy to the Devil's flatulence. The punishment for Friars in Hell is revealed to be that they are doomed to love the smell of Satan's rectum, to buzz around it like flies lapping up the noxious blasphemy that they disseminated their whole lives. The point is that spiritual cynics speak from a perspective that damns all of humanity so that they can excuse their own debasement. They need to believe that the world is fundamentally cruel because this absolves them of their hypocrisy, which is that they secretly love cruelty. (The Rectum is an S&M club.) This is further emphasized as it is progressively revealed that Pierre, Alex's ex-boyfriend who professes to care so much about pleasuring the woman, is actually the one who ends up destroying her rapist, while Marcus, who talks big game, is easily put out of commission. The Rectum is a zone in which the hypocrites and cynics reveal their true selves. So while the ending is certainly 'rubbing our noses in it,' Noe is actually attacking cynics. He contrives a grueling tale of cruelty and debasement that concludes with innocence and perfection. It takes pleasure in showing the cynic their hyperbolic view of man's debasement and then categorically rejecting it. It's not at all dissimilar to Pier Paolo Pasolini's adaptation of The Canterbury Tales, which concludes not with "The Summoner's Tale," but with Pasolini as Chaucer sitting back in his chair with a bemused smile on his face, as if he's so pleased with himself that he's devised such a cruel and ironic punishment. Really, he's taking pleasure in that even more so than the cynic he is capable of rendering man's hypocrisy and cruelty, and still sitting back and appreciating the perfect beauty of God's creation. EDIT: Unrelenting cruelty is not the same as nihilism or cynicism. Both of those philosophies specifically speak to a basic suspicion of man's ethical nature, the belief that everything is a guise for power politics and hypocrisy. This is not the worldview that Irreversible expresses. It is framed on both sides by aberrant individuals whose debased nature can't possibly be disguised and a woman whose innocence is above suspicion. He is rejecting cynicism. The hypocrites and cynics and speaking out of their assholes. The Butcher's daughter did not want to be raped. K. Waste fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Sep 5, 2014 |
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Sep 5, 2014 18:20
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caiman posted:It's cinematic trickery simply because time doesn't actually move in reverse. And we have no reason to think that Noe's characters live in a universe that literally moves in reverse. Except that is how the story is told and what happens in the film. Irreversible is not a chronological story. It doesn't matter if the characters are 'aware' of this. quote:Just like Memento, we understand that it's a cinematic trick. That Alex is fine and happy at the end of the film's artificial perspective is no consolation to us, because we understand that in reality effects happen after causes, and no matter in what order Noe showed us the events, we know that the horrible poo poo hasn't happened yet and inevitably will happen. A real downer. But we also know that the way a story is told affects its meaning. This is not a 'cinematic trick' in Memento, either. The story is told the way it is for a reason. quote:This is all good subtextual stuff, but it's just that. None of this changes what actually happens in the movie. What happens in the movie is that we go from two naked criminals (one of whom is a convicted, incestuous rapist) to a pregnant innocent reading a book in a park. We have gone from debasement to innocence. This is not subtext, this is what happens in the movie. And Noe tells us this is "irreversible." If you played Irreversible in reverse, it wouldn't make sense. Now, if you re-edited the movie so that the scenes occurred 'chronologically,' it would be a sadistic, cynical, nihilistic film. The movie as it is merely depicts sadism. EDIT: There is no secret version of Irreversible where innocence is repudiated by sadism. There is, however, an extant film that goes from destruction to innocence, that the title tells us is irreversible. Noe is rubbing your nose in your own cynicism.
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Sep 5, 2014 18:57
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penismightier posted:I'm thinking of Michael Caine getting his finger shot off in Children of Men, which was all done at a distance with almost no blood, but feels genuinely transgressive in a way that the French stuff is just playing at being. The scene is awe-inspiring and affective, but Noe's stuff is also very affective. I don't even think he's playing at being transgressive. And where precisely do we draw the line? How extreme is so extreme that we can deduce that someone is just trying to provoke the spectator? And what's wrong with provocation? I know this isn't stuff you're specifically saying but I think there's way more room for 'extreme' depictions of cruelty than you're giving due credit. It's not an either/or situation. The different approaches serve unique purposes. That being said, Children of Men, though perhaps less graphic, is thoroughly similar to Noe's films. The style of long (occasionally, significantly enhanced digitally) shots following and observing action both go along way to granting it and Irreversible their oppressive feel. But both films similarly try to depict oppression in a viscerally immediate way even if one is superficially more/less graphic about it, and ultimately for the purposes of subversion. It's not surrealism, but it's certainly derivative of theater of cruelty - attempting to shock and provoke the spectators sense of injustice. And in both cases, this provocation isn't just there for provocation's sake - the sadism and oppression in contrasted with an overtly optimistic (even unrealistic) conclusion that is basically a call to basic compassion. The point, I feel, is that we are being invited to recognize the oppressive nature of something close (but not quite the same) as what the film depicts so that we can more realistically reject it, rather than simply living in denial. caiman posted:I think the scene is both, and I disagree that the second one necessarily negates the first one. Its inclusion on "most hosed up poo poo EVER" lists and the like may garner it some superficial attention, but when someone actually sits and watches it they (hopefully) recognize the depth of realism on display and find it painful to watch. Exactly. Criticism of the way Irreversible was received is helpful primarily as social and cultural criticism, but it's not particularly helpful when trying to critically assess the film, because the response to the film isn't particularly critical in and of itself. It's reducing the film to a particular scene rather than the role that scene serves in the broader framework of the narrative. The people making 'most hosed up scenes' lists aren't concerned with theory, explicitly. They get voyeuristic legitimization out of saying they sat through it. They don't necessarily care about the film itself and are, thus, not particularly good critics. To me, Irreversible is told the way it is because it's about the reclamation of identity after horrifying trauma, just as Children of Men is about the reclamation of spirituality from contemporary cynicism.
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Sep 5, 2014 21:11
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Someone once pointed out that the transgendered woman is used in the same way in Irreversible. As what? A geek show? Her presence in the movie exclusively highlights the oppressive aggression of the male characters. Seeing her as a 'geek' I think speaks far more to the cynicism of the viewer than what is actually occurring on the screen. She's the person whose place Alex takes when the rapist corners them both, and when Marcus finds her, he begins acting like the rapist. Calling Irreversible a geek show is a strong charge because it implies that we are explicitly asked to patronize gawking at something for the pure joy of looking upon it as Other, confident in the social security we get from putting him/her away from us. How does Irreversible encourage this apart from portraying sadism and violence? Crank is a 'geek show.' You don't need to try to get joy out of Statham debasing himself because that is what the film encourages by contriving a situation where this is necessary in order for him to survive and seek revenge. Crank has a comedic rape scene.
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Sep 5, 2014 22:01
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Hollismason posted:Kind of curious if people talking about Irreversible have ever seen it cause , it's actually a feminist film, it's just horribly nihilistic. Basically women are hosed, forever. It's sex-negative, definitely. But it's not totally nihilistic. There is hope in the reclamation of innocence. This goes back to the film's construction of time. Yes, putting the scenes in reverse chronology can not reverse the 'cause-and-effect' of human action. But the rape very specifically is the interruption of the previous (actually later) cause-and-effect change. It is an unprovoked tragedy. It happens for no discernible reason other than that the rapist can. The movie is told 'in reverse' so that it in effect becomes about the reclamation of innocence - the reconstruction of a woman after a horrific trauma, the recognition of her total innocence and lack of any culpability or shame. Uncle Boogeyman posted:I don't remember this, can you refresh my memory? In the film, Marcus and Pierre are revealed to have discovered le Tenia's location after viciously threatening a transgender prostitute. Later, before Alex is raped, it is revealed that le Tenia is assaulting the transgender woman, and potentially intends to rape her.
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Sep 5, 2014 22:44
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penismightier posted:Yeah, I'm not sure, especially because I tend to like a certain degree of provocation - unlike a lot of y'all in this thread, I'm a big Funny Games fan. Ah, but which version do you prefer? InfiniteZero posted:Funny Games is a great film and it thrills me that people respond to it in such a hostile way. Same question. (For me, it's the American version. Yes, yes, it's a shot-for-shot, line-for-line remake - well, mostly - but the American version is much cleaner, and all the more viciously affective for it. It makes me wonder if Haneke has seen American Psycho.)
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Sep 5, 2014 23:14
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schwenz posted:i found myself changing my opinions when it was too late. The opening violence made me judge the boyfriend harshly, i didnt know who he was, but nothing could justify what he was doing. After the rape I wanted to change my mind, but i had already judged. Towards the end I kept wanting to judge the girl, how she flirts, what she wears, her impulsive behavior. I think in scenes just following the rape, i was so upset and shocked, I actually had the thought, "Well what does she expect?" And then yhe movie just keeps going on, and you see their relationship, which is ordinary and beautiful, and i want to take back my stupid thoughts because im seeing that I would never thought those things if tis was the opening of the movie. By the time the film ends I have forgotten the bar violence, and the rape I can remember, but its effect is faded a bit. What is important in the end is this relationship, and this beautiful woman, what she was, ad not what happened to her. No, you did a very good job of fleshing out the film's dramatic effect on you. I think it's especially pertinent that you bring up the judgment of Alex as a character. Noe does a very good job of subverting not only the cultural tendency to cynical suspect a woman of partial responsibility in her victimization, but also the corresponding judgment which is that this event now defines her. The way Alex is first presented is quite literally as a 'broken woman,' but the chronology of Noe's film means that Marcus and Pierre's actions actually precede this. The film restores the victim to some kind of identity other than her status as a victim, which is then used to justify Marcus and Pierre's wrath.
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Sep 5, 2014 23:37
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:...and failing to achieve it is the reason two thirds of the Three Mothers trilogy suck. I haven't seen Mother of Tears, but Inferno is great and might even be better than Suspiria. Timeless Appeal posted:I'm not really saying that it's a bad movie. Orlok is an amazing feat in cinema. Everything about him is perfect from the make-up to the performance to how he's shot. I'm just saying that the things outside of the Orlok scenes aren't particularly great including the film's most featured actor. The stripped down and loose adaptation of Dracula's plot is also a bit flat. Doesn't mean it's not great or important, because goddamn Orlok is great. It's just not the most well-rounded film. Interestingly enough, the dramatic tension of Shadow of the Vampire stems from Murnau's obsession with Nosferatu literally at the expense of his movie.
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Sep 8, 2014 03:09
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Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:The problem with this is that Pierre didn't kill her rapist, but one of his associates instead. I need to re-watch the film, but I'm glad you brought it up. Pierre being unable to kill Le Tenia obviously makes the point of the film even starker. Let's not beat around the bush - this is a film explicitly about rape and how characters vs. the film responds to it. The opening of the film is very much a subversion of the aggressive, lynch-mob mentality that overtakes Pierre and Marcus after Alex is attacked. It ends (begins) terribly for both of them, and though we can all in our own way identify with their rage, the reverse chronology of Noe's film already rather explicitly sends up this reactionism - remember, we literally see Marcus and Pierre when they are being shat out of The Rectum. This 'bloody rear end' imagery is itself foreshadowing of Alex's attack, which is an anal rape, what I believe to be Noe's attempt to thoroughly strip the attack of any possible sexual interpretation. Even American Psycho, another film very much about rape culture, Harron and Turner render a world in which - because the rape and killing are a fantasy - power and sexuality are indistinguishable; sex-negative. Noe seems much more sex-positive, contrasting the ironically impotent Marcus's relationship with Alex and their joking about anal sex with the thorough violation and denigration of the flesh that is rape, and revenge. Taking this 'bloody rear end' imagery one step further, Marcus and Pierre have actually 'disappeared' into rape culture. They are literally consumed by a bloody rear end. This is where Noe's detractors frequently misinterpret his films as queer-phobic. (See, also: the complaint about the transgender prostitute, who is marked as a woman victimized by both Le Tenia and our supposed heroes.) The point is that Noe is actually doing something quite radical, which is that he is using a gay S&M club to supplant the totality of phallocentric rape culture. This lays bare the homoerotic power games of patriarchal violence; Marcus and Pierre are very much obsessed with powerful men, hinted at later when Pierre grills Alex on why Marcus is better in bed though he made a more overt attempt to please her. Marcus and Pierre are consumed by wrath and fail. They seek the destruction of the rapist as the violator of their patriarchal rite to Alex's body. Noe contrasts the consuming wrath and violence of rape culture - the attempt to turn the phallic action upon the rapist, which fails, the 'bloody rear end' imagery reproduced in macrocosm - with the reclamation of the woman as the self-determinate identity independent of her male aggressors and avengers. Notice, critically, that this has nothing to do with virginal imagery. Noe and Belluci's characterization of Alex assumes the innocence of the woman without stripping her of her sexual agency.
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Sep 9, 2014 05:39
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harpomarxist posted:Except Noe isn't gay, except La Tenia is not brought to justice or even troubled, except the film is shot through with horror about this club in this prissy Cruising style of an outsider looking in. Lets look at the review by Robin Wood, someone who was gay, who has had experience with this kind of scene and was the best reviewer out there I'm not even really going to address the implication that one needs to 'squint' to find a queer-friendly agenda in Irreversible because it's really not what I'm talking about. That's a Red Herring - let's make the discussion about what makes something "queer-friendly" in such a way that we can automatically invalidate the content of a story because it lacks the 'superior ideology' to be worthy of deeper analysis. Instead, I'm going to continue talking about how this movie featuring a ten-minute rape sequence is about our cultural response to rape. If you could post a link to Wood's full criticism or PM it to me, that would be really helpful, because otherwise I'm going to have to address his criticism out of context. But out of context, his reading is uncritical and reductionist - not to mention randomly slagging off Hieronymous Bosch. Let's take, for instance, his direct equation of Noe's cinematic style specifically with sexual orientation: "The soundtrack noise (one cannot call it music), ominous, ugly, threatening; the whirling, swirling camera, seeming detached from human control, sometimes turning upside down, never still; the intermittent lighting (mostly the red of hellfire) that cuts through the murk, allowing us occasionally to make out naked male figures; the sounds of pain and/or desperation (no one appears to be enjoying himself)." Did he not watch the rest of the movie (or does he have access to a version of the film that a lot of people seem to have where it isn't in reverse chronology, confusing the beginning for the end)? Is he not aware that this whirling camera and ominous soundtrack and red mise-en-scene is consistent when exclusively associated with the straight Marcus and Pierre on their mission of impotent vengeance? Furthermore, as you point out, this whirling camera and distant 'crying' soundtrack is not actually abated by the end of the film, where the mise en scene has indeed been replaced by one that emphasizes procreation and sublimity. But this also misses the glaringly obvious - that Alex's ideal Eden lacks men. Marcus is absent from the equation. This is a veneration of the woman, who is necessarily a vessel of life, but not specifically any kind of heterosexual union. Men are taken out of the equation. What's problematic to me here is that Hood is putting his reader into a position where they are forced to see this veneration of procreation and womanhood as necessarily homophobic by perceiving a direct correlation between homosexuality and rape/violence, even though the straight characters are no less depicted as violent and morally compromised, and even though there are queer victims, specifically the man Pierre murders and the transvestite that both Le Tenia and Marcus assault. As a nontheist who doesn't believe in any substantial spirit or soul, I have a hard time conceiving of sexuality as anything other than the biological compulsion to procreate, and therefore implicitly reject the spurious equation between the veneration of procreation and patriarchal homophobia. And as someone who thinks that rape and violence are wrong, I have a hard time apologizing for a male-dominated, phallocentric culture that allows someone to get away with rape or violence. The crucial point is that Noe is explicitly not advocating or excusing his straight male characters, and thus expressing his apparently secret belief that 'those faggots got what they deserved.' The sinful sickness he is depicting is any one which conspicuously allows rape culture to foster and continue, whether it be Le Tenia's friends at the S&M club (who, for all we know, have no idea about what he's done), or the gangsters who help Marcus and Pierre hunt down Le Tenia for their revenge (which ends fantastically badly), or the man who witnesses Alex being raped by Le Tenia but does nothing to intervene. There is no exclusive signification of 'queer' with 'sin.' Rather, Noe is associating men with violence and rape culture, and even the sexually ambiguous figure, the transvestite prostitute, is explicitly a victim of classist and patriarchal oppression, torn between sexual binaries and victimized brutally as a result. You would need to squint, plug up your ears, and not read the subtitles to ignore this. A film that demonizes homosexuals as well as heterosexuals for partaking in patriarchy and rape culture is not homophobia - it is the tacit recognition of male privilege and the violence endemic in a patriarchal society. If you want something 'queer-friendly,' you need look no further than Bill Condon's Kinsey and its bastardization of his research in order to construct a patriarchal narrative of the possessive-investment of homosexuals in 'traditional moral values' pre-counterculture.
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Sep 9, 2014 17:04
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harpomarxist posted:Ok, so thank you for replying. I'll reply to this point which seems to be the crux here: "[a] film that demonizes homosexuals as well as heterosexuals for partaking in patriarchy and rape culture is not homophobia - it is the tacit recognition of male privilege and the violence endemic in a patriarchal society." except that this seems to suggest that Noe is somehow outside of this process, Wood believes he's supporting it. Outside of what and supporting what? I don't believe Noe is either outside of rape culture nor that he is supporting it. He is depicting it as a process of violent patriarchy. He does not need to be a pretentious, condescending loon who thinks himself above us 'norms' to do this. quote:After all this film isn't an an even-handed exposure of both hetero and homo rape culture, it's a film that is designed aesthetically to shock, not document, and in doing so reveal a bias. The Club scenes are carnivalesque in a horrifying way, the romantic scenes near the end between Alex and Marcus are shot naturally. This is a progression from Hell into Heaven as told to us through the eyes of a straight French film-maker. The bias is against rape. Noe is depicting rape and violence as inherently independent of sexual orientation. Both the straight and homosexual characters participate in a culture of rape and violent retribution. To present "hetero and homo rape culture" as if they are separate is antithetical to the point of the film, which is that rape is a unifying concept that doesn't care about orientation, that it is about wrath and power and not sexuality. That is the progression that is occurring - from a culture consumed by wrath and power to one of love. The association is not between homo-bad and hetero-good; it is between patriarchal-violence and feminine-innocence. Wood's criticism is that Noe's depiction of Hell is unique to queer subculture. This is not what happens in the movie. Hell is violence, power, wrath, and retribution.
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Sep 9, 2014 18:25
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harpomarxist posted:"I often get the question "Are you gay or a homophobe?" [laughs] For the record, I'm straight. Because a man can be anally raped, a woman can be anally raped, and you are more in the head of Monica [the victim] that the head of the rapist, most of the people who walk out of the theater then are men. The gay audience liked the movie much more than the straight male audience. Maybe because they have already experienced passive anal sex and so they have felt feminized." I think all he's saying - rather haphazardly - is that gay audiences know the difference between anal sex and anal rape, which is different from a straight male who is uncomfortable with the idea of anal penetration period. quote:Also, If you actually read the full piece by Wood he *does* point out the intricacies of the film and that he admires it, even whilst he felt that people can read the film rather easily as being anti-homosexual. So why did you quote him out of context to dispute my reading of the film as anti-patriarchal as opposed to homophobic? If his concern is about other people reading the film as anti-homosexual, that's still bad criticism. The job of a critic and scholar is to represent the text for what they view it to be, not to pontificate about what they hypothesize to be the secret feelings of others who aren't critics. It's unnecessarily muddying and cynically undercutting the whole purpose of the critical reading, which should reject reactionary and uncritical assumptions. In effect, Wood would be legitimizing the very thing he's concerned about, rather than taking a categorical ethical stance on the work, because he's basically saying that an uncritical and unsubstantiated reading is just as legitimate as his own. harpomarxist posted:Why do you think he deliberately chose to set the scenes of "wrath" in a gay s&m club, with the killer operating in that mileau? On the first point, because the thing that Marcus and Pierre are least likely to understand is the easiest target for their wrath. (See, also: the transgender prostitute who Marcus assaults much as Le Tenia does later.) The Rectum arouses their misguided, intolerant, reactionary hatred, but it consumes and, thus, comes to represent it. They are living out their 'Death Wish/Dirty Harry' retribution fantasy, but Noe subverts this by making it completely unsuccessful. Marcus assaults an innocent man who breaks his arm in self-defense, and then Pierre summarily executes this man by smashing his face in with a fire extinguisher. There is no ambiguity here: Marcus and Pierre are worse than what they hate, and they are 'damned' as a result, consumed by the Rectum. There's a very dark implication to this scene in the context of the rest of the film, which is that Marcus and Pierre would have been better off letting Le Tenia go free and not pursuing their vigilante fantasy. Because of them, an innocent man is dead, and Le Tenia (who is a mirror of Marcus) is still free. The association between Marcus and Le Tenia should make the rest of the film thoroughly suspect. Basically, the contrast that Noe offers is that Marcus technically isn't a sociopath, but that's basically the difference - Le Tenia implicitly admits to taking pleasure in sadistic violence, Marcus needs the excuse of vigilante justice. But they are both complicit in a patriarchal rape culture; it only takes the violation of Alex for Pierre and Marcus to 'reveal' themselves. The veneration of Alex's innocence should not be confused with an absolution of who Marcus and Pierre are.
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Sep 9, 2014 19:37
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Hollismason posted:Irreversible is kind of homophobic, I completely agree with that absolutely, the club itself is almost a parody of what a straight man would think a club like that would be. Having actually been to gay clubs and the like, it is absolutely presented as a den of sin and animalistic lust. The main characters have nothing but derision and disgust through out the entire scene, they're not there to sight see they are there to judge. I haven't seen Cruising, so I can't comment, but this basically repeats the conflation of how Marcus and Pierre think and act with a viewpoint that Noe is advocating. The club is very much a "parody" of the straight male gaze, phallocentric obsession and patriarchal violence brought to its most extreme conclusion. Marcus and Pierre are absolutely there not only to judge, but to take revenge, and in the process they not only fail, but they murder an innocent man, and the rapist gets away. This is an explicit statement on rape culture and patriarchal violence. The proximity of The Rectum to real-world gay clubs is immaterial, because it is very much the extremity of what Noe is depicting that is supposed to arouse our consciousness. It's not that depicting the homosexuals of Irreversible as passive victims of Marcus and Pierre's aggression couldn't have worked, but Noe isn't just making a point about heterosexual patriarchal violence, but all patriarchal violence and rape culture. The Rectum is a nightmarish mirror of Marcus and Pierre's own unstated, phallocentric sadism. He depicts the homosexuals as actual social deviants so as to make Marcus's castration and Pierre's sadism all the more pronounced. Despite considering the Rectum this inside-outsider world, they are nonetheless consumed by its paradigm of dominance and submission. They fit right at home, because they have brought this paradigm with them. What would have been truly homophobic is if the film, told chronologically, ended with Marcus and Pierre succeeding in dispatching Le Tenia, because effectively their fascist fantasy and literally violently assaulting The Rectum would have achieved justice (using rape to fight the rapist). Heterosexual normality would have won out over queer deviance associated with rape. But the heterophallic fascist fantasy doesn't work. Le Tenia survives because he thrives not on sex but violence. He is a sociopath and literal parasite (tapeworm) within The Rectum, but, again, the Rectum is a metaphor for all patriarchy and rape culture. Le Tenia's actions mirror Marcus's; Le Tenia is not bound to the Rectum, but moves freely through the intestines of Paris. He isn't bound by our binary assumptions of heteronormativity and queer deviance. He thrives off of cultural violence and its spurious rationalizations. The reverse chronology of the narrative makes this even more explicit. Just as Marcus and Pierre's actions effectively drive Le Tenia out of the Rectum and into hiding, Le Tenia symbolically cycles back to the midpoint of the film and rapes Alex.
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Sep 10, 2014 00:02
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Hollismason posted:Here's my list of feminist horror You forgot American Psycho. And The Brain That Wouldn't Die.
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Sep 10, 2014 01:04
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harpomarxist posted:So, again, a straight director wants to make a comment about patriarchal violence without consulting or even trying to understand how a queer reading might approach this, instead just deciding on a certain characterisation of a gay club as a nightmarish place to support his 'universal' condemnation of rape culture. That seems incredibly limiting. I don't find Noe's juxtaposition of homosexuality and patriarchal violence any more limiting than Kenneth Anger's Fireworks or Jean Genet's A Song of Love. I don't see its hyperreal characterization of queer culture as deliberate social deviancy in response to oppressive patriarchy and conservatism any more limiting than Anger's Scorpio Rising or John Waters' early films. I don't see his demonization of cultural and economic violence as any more limiting than Pier Paolo Pasolini literally making the Devil an avenger for persecuted homosexuals in The Canterbury Tales; to say nothing of the cross-dressing, poo poo-eating Libertine fascists of Salo. People are talking about Cruising when we should be talking about Clive Barker's Hellraiser. The Rectum... You opened it... We came.
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Sep 10, 2014 01:35
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harpomarxist posted:Every. single. director. you just listed there designated themselves as gay, and therefore there was a conscious attempt to create or challenge a queer identity. I am, in fact, aware of this. Your implication is that self-identified heterosexuals can't make the same conscious attempts to create or challenge sexual identity. My feeling is that there are, indeed, many self-identified heterosexuals who are nonetheless fascinated by the homoerotic and its subtle permeation throughout a supposedly straight society. For Noe, I believe this to be a crucial satiric point; he's connecting violent patriarchy and rape culture with the repression of latent homosexuality. quote:So this probably gets to mine and your point of seperation, right? you claim he's offering a general attack on patriarchal violence, i'm saying that he fails in this by having a 2d characterisation of the queer experience, to the point where it's actually homophobic in certain scenes. I'm saying heterosexual people can have a legitimate queer experience. I'm saying Noe is fascinated by the works of queer artists and fundamentally identifies with them. Scorpio Rising is about a homoerotic biker gang that Anger simultaneously juxtaposes with both Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. Noe is big into Anger, if Enter the Void is any indication, and a big part of Anger's films is the use of shock and obscenity to expose the contradictions of conservative, heteronormative culture, revealing the 'queer' aspects of society that are repressed. Noe totally buys into and identifies with Anger's aesthetic and thematic positions in response to heteronormative society. That he obviously depicts this satiric revelation of the closeted 'queerness' of patriarchal violence and rape culture as horrific (less funny, but no less tragic than Anger) speaks to his position as a self-identified straight male coming to terms with his latent fascination with and capacity for homosexuality. Irreversible is an honest representation of the point of view of someone who shifts uncomfortably at the idea of homosexual contact but nonetheless recognizes the homoeroticism implicit in the phallocentrism of a patriarchal society. This is different from a hardline right winger who shouts over the material decadence and sin of homosexuals in order to repress his/her own latent capacity for what they hate, in that Irreversible explicitly frames its homophobic straight characters as utterly failing the test of 'true' masculinity against these reifications of phallocentric culture and further allowing the parasite to escape. Noe localizes the social 'problem' not in homosexuality but in the patriarchal culture which represses and is intolerant of it. Noe isn't trying to demonize and thus repress queer identities, but, like Anger or Pasolini or Waters, believes in bringing them to the surface and tolerating them even if they disgust us personally. EDIT: See, also, The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
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Sep 10, 2014 02:44
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Jadunk posted:Really, so the multi-page discussion about a movie that IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes and wikipedia all agree is not a horror movie is a discussion about a horror movie? Not all movies with an extended rape scene or with brutal violence are horror. I don't mind small derails but how many pages in a row have been spent discussing it? Enough that people have magically lost the ability to discuss other horror movies (except that they haven't and those other discussions are ongoing as well). I don't know, Irreversible is a horror movie to me. I also totally think of Psycho and Silence of the Lambs as being horror movies. Wiki might call it a mystery thriller, but there's no mystery and it's not thrilling. The emotion is provokes is very much horror.
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Sep 10, 2014 03:11
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Hollismason posted:That's the whole point he does something and he falls loving flat on his face. It's so on the nose to be a loving parody. He named a bar the Rectum, then had people fist loving each other there. It's not a introspection it's just a parody of gay culture. I don't know, man, a movie in which two straight guys on a revenge path disappear inside a giant rear end in a top hat? There's definitely some 'innerspace' stuff going on there. Obviously Noe falls flat on his face if you see his goal as to parody (emulate, trivialize, and otherwise mock) gay culture. But my entire point is that he's not trivializing homosexuality, but satirizing phallocentric patriarchy. I didn't say homosexuality was phallocentric, I said patriarchy was, and that this symbolic and social obsession with the phallus betrays a latent physical obsession with the male form. This is obviously superficially homoerotic, but patriarchy is a superficial display of dominance and power through aggression against the Other. For a complementary example from a straight-identified filmmaker, look no further than Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike, a film whose subjects very much engage in and exploit phallocentrism and homoerotism even if they are quite definitively heterosexual. quote:Also, if you don't find Irreversible horrifying I dunno what to say? Sure , I don't consider it a straight up horror film, it's just loving horrific. is Guinea Pig films horror? Cause the first one is just a woman getting tortured with no plot what so ever pretty much. Who are you even talking to? I literally said the opposite of what you're accusing me of saying.
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Sep 10, 2014 03:37
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harpomarxist posted:Gaspar Noe in his own press kit for Irreversible : "I didn't do it rationally; I didn't think about it. The whole movie's about being in the brain of So a movie about being in the brain of a someone who wants revenge depicts the demonization of the rapist (the target of the revenge) and his associates as animalistic, condemned perverts, and nonetheless depicts the outcome of this as an abject failure to resolve injustice, and instead proves to duplicate it, in the form of a rapist whose actions mirror the actions of the one seeking revenge. Sounds about right. harpomarxist posted:...Noe deliberately chooses to include a gay S&M club as the focal point of his character's hell, this was HIS CHOICE. Obviously this is Noe's choice. For his character. But the character is also subverted. The rapist gets away. The rapist is just as much like him as he is the subcultural, deviant 'pervert,' if not more so because Le Tenia and Marcus are the only characters who actions are directly mirrored (particularly against the transvestite prostitute).
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Sep 11, 2014 01:46
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Enter The Void has surely got some ideas, I just didn't find any of them interesting. It should have been more confident with what it was showing you rather than what it was telling you. A lot of people feel that way about A Scanner Darkly. It's funny, 'cause I don't feel that way at all about either of those films, but exactly that way about Lucy. To each their own cinema.
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Sep 11, 2014 02:04
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harpomarxist posted:Anyway K Waste, you've offered a smart reasoned argument for this film, and I do agree that Noe has a critique of rape culture to offer, I just think that he's naive in his use of gay subculture. I can dig it. Good show, old sport. I appreciate your continuing this most engaging debate.
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Sep 11, 2014 14:03
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I was pretty sure that the body they discover is supposed to be Flamel's, and that they even identify him as such. I need to see it again, and there's probably more room for ambiguity, but it is Flamel's tomb that they're looking for, because that's where they believe the Philosopher's Stone is.
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Sep 13, 2014 20:06
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Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:The corpse doesn't really look anything like Flamel, at least from the pictures I've seen. I immediately assumed it was Flamel when I saw the film but it wouldn't make sense if he was immortal to just spend it laying comatose in a tomb. Whoever it is, I interpreted his presence to meaning that unlike the characters in the film - who have this horrifying realization of the totality of everything, where innocence and cruelty are juxtaposed vividly in what they believe to be 'Hell,' but which is really just a mirror of our own world, an external projection of the inner self - he accepts his role as a total oneness between the above and the below. Whoever he is, he saw his inner demons and remained unafraid. Thus, his body persists largely uncorrupted, his spirit becoming one with the totality of everything. He sees the spiritual knowledge that immortality has offered not as a curse, but a blessing, one that allows him a sublime sleep away from the nightmares and memories of living. (That 'angels to some, demons to others' thing.)
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Sep 13, 2014 21:24
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Nckdictator posted:Earlier today I watched Vincent Price's "Witchfinder General" and absolutely loved the whole rural English horror atmosphere, really reminded me of "The Wicker Man". Can anyone recomend any similar movies with that sort of setting? The Blood on Satan's Claw EDIT: Unfortunately it doesn't have a Region One release, which is absolutely criminal. You can get it as a Region Free DVD on Amazon, but also as part of Anchor Bay's Region Two Tigon Collection along with none other than Witchfinder General. You can also watch it in its entirety here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEDYSf65usk K. Waste fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 01:21
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Yeah, it's not simply that Lovecraft is overtly racist, it's that his writings are identifiably contemporaneous with reactionary nativist theories that Western civilization was literally on the brink of being destroyed by miscegenation with non-white Europeans / rape by brutal Black bucks. "The Rats in the Walls" is a particularly good example that demonstrates this, because it rings as especially relevant to any non-theist who has heard the fallacious argument that morality extends from the fear of divine reprisal. The racist protagonist discovers that he's descended from 'monkey people' and on-the-spot gives into cannibalistic urges that he didn't even know he had. The question becomes whether or not the abject horror that his racist protagonists experience necessarily satirizes their social views, or if it simply exploits the paranoid fear of the thin line between civilized man and his savage essence. I think the case can stand to be made either way, but the dude wasn't Mark Twain. (In fact, he probably wrote in precisely the style that Mark Twain would have hated and written essays criticizing.)
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Sep 14, 2014 05:04
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Sad Mammal posted:It's entirely possible to read Innsmouth with the lens of "fish mating = miscegenation" but animal mating has been recognized as gross going all the way back to the minotaur, so I still don't buy into inherent racism in Lovecraft's writings. I don't think people are judging Lovecraft's work by his personality, though. Like, when I say he's not Mark Twain, I literally mean in the sense that Mark Twain loved the poo poo out of minstrel shows and thought miscegenation was gross but his literature reflects a concerted effort to humanize and challenge rather than merely regurgitate racist paradigms. As others have pointed out, it's not so much that "fish mating = miscegenation," it's that the miscegenation stuff isn't even subtextual. The people who are engaging in the fish-mating/worshiping are almost always lower-class or non-white heathens, and the horrific tension and gnosis of his literature is almost always a protagonist who is literally driven mad by the idea that these 'savage forms' both culturally and historically 'outnumber,' 'surround,' and pervade Anglican white purity. The Senator Giroux's quote is the most-telling; there's racism in Lovecraft's literature even when it isn't textually relevant. Lovecraft's racism doesn't necessarily automatically transmit to his literature, but it does lend them an overtly cynical and anti-humanistic subtext that while perhaps appropriate for the pulp medium in which he wrote is basically regressive and un-salvageable. It's the mirror of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, where Tarzan literally accidentally lynches a Black tribesman and Burroughs starts commenting on how 'natural' this feels to him, followed up by Tarzan having to constantly rescue the impotent white intellectuals from the maw of death.
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Sep 14, 2014 05:42
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If Irreversible is a film that, for the most part, takes place within the head of someone who desires revenge, then I think it's best to see Pierre and Marcus as two unique aspects of the same psyche who, once enveloped in the Rectum, become one force that is both abject and brutal. The exchanging of roles is significant, because it actually turns out to be Marcus who becomes the 'damsel/pussy in distress,' and the intellectual Pierre takes on this savage, sadistic, and even kind of sociopathic identity that Noe deliberately establishes no future precedence for. Pierre is the arm-chair intellectual, and this carries over into the later half of the film when the phallic rage has subsided and we move into Alex being the protagonist and the subject becoming not the abjection of men but the veneration of the woman. Pierre passively pontificates about sensuality and intimacy, but what he actually represents is the opposite problem of Marcus, who sees sexuality as fundamentally power-driven. Pierre doesn't own up to the fact that power is a part of sexuality, and, thus, his actions at the film's beginning can be read as the explosion of repressed, misogynistic/homophobic aggression. His ineffectual subservience is just as limiting and unappealing to Alex as Marcus's unapologetic vulgarity becomes. It should be emphasized further that this concept of Pierre and Marcus representing the duality of patriarchy - that which tears the feminine identity between two contradictory but equally limiting viewpoints - is presaged by the opening of the film, which takes place in an apartment above the Rectum between the Butcher and an unnamed male partner. This apartment, above and looking back upon the Rectum is a vivid 'head space,' and the dark irony of this is that while these men are consumed with the memory of a incestuous rape that they have distorted as a consensual act persecuted by society's 'repression,' they are literally not cognizant that there is an 'anal rape' taking place behind and below them. This is sexuality totally divorced from any kind of intellectual or intimate consciousness, but at the same time it's overtly created by the Butcher's fantasy of an intimate relationship, his need to paint his rape victim as complicit in the act. The film is all about Pierre exchanging roles with Marcus, and it begins with the 'head space' above the Rectum.
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Sep 14, 2014 17:13
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Sad Mammal posted:How do you explain Carpenter being a big fan of Lovecraft's stuff? In the audio commentary for Cannibal Holocaust Ruggero Deodato describes Mondo Cane as "a beautiful film" and says the opening credits were directly inspired by those films. His movie is about a group of documentary filmmakers who burn indigenous villages, desecrate their rituals, and rape their women. You can be heavily inspired by and even explicitly admire an artist while notably improving upon/satirizing what they did. Carpenter, not unlike Tarantino after him, is heavily influenced by filmmakers whose works he nonetheless explicitly subverts. Like, Assault on Precinct 13 is a remake of Rio Bravo, but the opening of the film is meant to get you to sympathize with the 'Indian' marauders as victims of white supremacy and are taking sympathetic revenge. (The storyboards and original script are even more explicit about this.)
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Sep 14, 2014 21:32
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Sad Mammal posted:Going in a different direction with given subject matter is only an improvement if you think art should promote "good" moral values. Not really. You don't need to actively promote a certain viewpoint in order to take an ethical stance, or for that ethical stance to be reflected in a work. Carpenter's sympathizing with the monstrous is definitely an improvement on Lovecraft's racist cynicism. Don't get me wrong, Lovecraft - as much as his works explicitly reflected a grotesque fear and hatred of the lower-class and 'unrefined' - was an important populist artist, and the explicit racism of his works ironically probably helped a lot of readers to work through their own similar ambivalence about changing social and cultural norms. Hell, his works still have that power. I wouldn't dismiss him any sooner than I would dismiss D. W. Griffith (who actually did make at least one surprisingly anti-racist film, Broken Blossoms), or even Mark Twain and Tex Avery. But if we're going to comment on the influences that del Toro and Carpenter and the like draw from Lovecraft, eventually we have to address the issue that Lovecraft's literature almost always operated from the standpoint that the dissolution of white Western supremacy was tantamount to the dissolution of all order, and that this is not only stripped away by Carpenter and del Toro, but not incidentally, both of these filmmakers seems to find hope in the dissolution of established order. None of these artists are actually promoting moral values, but one of them writes a frequently long, verbose (and not particularly cogently detailed), and turgid oeuvre that obsessively veers into the same cynical subject even when it's not narratively relevant; while the others challenge the spectator to view this same subject in ways that aren't immediately obvious and might even be counter to expectation. I don't see the goal of art to promote "good" moral values; I see it as to reveal unknown truths, and I just happen to think that Carpenter is better at this than a lot of the artists who inspired him.
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Sep 14, 2014 22:18
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I'm ashamed to say I've only seen Gozu and his remake of 13 Assassins, but they're both awesome. Especially Gozu, seriously, Gozu is such a loving good movie I can't even explain its perfection.
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Sep 15, 2014 20:34
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Kvlt! posted:
I probably won't have time to watch half of these while I'm working, but it's still fun to imagine one's own personal film festival: "Thirteen Nights of Halloween" 1) Silent, But Deadly a. Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) b. Harry Hoyt's The Lost World (1925) 2) The Power of Fear a. Tod Browning's Freaks (1932) b. James Whale's The Invisible Man (1933) 3) Death Is Good a. Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch's Curse of the Cat People (1944) b. Mark Robson's Isle of the Dead (1945) 4) The Invaders Within a. Don Siegal's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) b. William Castle's The Tingler (1959) 5) A New Kind of Horror, Pt. I a. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) b. Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960) 6) A New Kind of Horror, Pt. II a. Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba (1964) b. Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) 7) The Times They Are a-Changin' a. Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973) b. Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) 8) Theater of Cruelty a. Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) b. Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977) 9) Who Sold the Soul? a. Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980) b. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) 10) Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die a. Wes Craven's Scream (1996) b. Gus Van Sant's Psycho (1998) 11) Brightest Future in the Dark a. Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse (2001) b. Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002) 12) Salute to 2014 a. John Pogue's The Quiet Ones b. John Erick Dowdle's As Above, So Below 13) Halloween with the Misfits a. Edward Bernds' Return of the Fly (1959) b. Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast (1963) c. Silvio Narizzano's Fanatic (1965) d. Robert Day's She (1965) e. George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) f. Ted V. Mikels' The Astro-Zombies (1968) g. Brian G. Hutton's Where Eagles Dare (1968) h. Paul Wendkos's The Mephisto Waltz (1971) i. George Lucas's THX 1138 (1971) j. John Carpenter's Halloween (1978)
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Sep 16, 2014 18:12
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InfiniteZero posted:You asked for films from the 40s and 50s: why not go even earlier and watch Haxan and/or The Phantom Carriage? Crap-o-la, how did I forget about Haxan? That movie is just so superb in so many ways. Are there any other good examples of horror documentary (not faux-documentary or found footage)? kjetting posted:Pretty dope film festival all around, but this one really made me smile. Gracias. Someone pointed out to me that it's missing The Crimson Ghost, Monster from Green Hell, and The Misfits, but I tried keeping myself to 16-hours. Turns out Bloody Moon is on YouTube, which itself led me to remember Alice, Sweet Alice, a.k.a. Communion, a movie that scares the poo poo out of me to the extent that I've never watched it all the way through. Also, if anyone's looking for a really 'feel bad' horror movie, I highly recommend Agusti Villaronga's In a Glass Cage.
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Sep 16, 2014 19:24
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SALT CURES HAM posted:Also, Where Eagles Dare isn't a horror movie, so I would totally sub one of the others in for it on the Misfits list. Hell, It's two-and-a-half hours, so I could easily sub in both The Crimson Bat and Monsters from Green Hell. But, that being said, I ain't no God drat son of a bitch. (You better think about it, Salt Cures Ham.)
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Sep 16, 2014 20:11
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Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:so tonight I think I'm gonna do a double feature of Suspiria followed by Inferno. I remember a while back someone slagged off Inferno and I defended it but never followed up on why I thought it's so good. Basically, Inferno is The Beyond done right. It's an appropriate successor to Suspiria not only in its basic premise - of the Three Mothers covens and their haunted estates - but in the thoroughly lucid quality of the storytelling. Fulci and Argento attempted similar things with their respective films, where the emphasis was less on strict narrative logic and more on cruel imagery that would accurately replicate the inescapable and inexplicable terror of a nightmare. But while Fulci's version of this is basically just a generic exploitation movie written even more loosely (which has its own more direct, perhaps 'populist' qualities that some may prefer), Argento goes for the operatic. The production design of both films is heavily inspired not by contemporary horror movies (which Fulci was more want to do), but by Disney animated features and Hollywood musicals. You see this especially in Suspiria, which was originally written as a straight up horrific fairytale with little girls as the protagonists, except Argento discovered that this would be too difficult to achieve, so he decided to just direct his adult actresses like children through these larger-than-life set pieces. Inferno pushes these aesthetics even further while making the color palette and production design a tad more contemporary. Even more so than Suspiria, there's no fixed protagonist or goal or ethical dilemma. The horrors of the film are totally abstract, basically representing death itself. There are several points in the film - most notably early on in the lecture hall scene - where the cinematography is disconcertingly eccentric, suggesting further that, much like many dreams, there is no fixed point-of-view, and instead only the fractured worldview of a mind trapped in a menagerie of vaguely familiar places, all haunted by an inescapable shade. The Goblin score cuts out and cuts back in jarringly, achieving an often distinctly comedic effect. It's a much more Lynchian film than Suspiria, though it's not at all referring to Lynch.
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Sep 17, 2014 01:58
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