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There are a few philosophy of film books that try to get at what the nature of horror is, and what the requirements might be, the most prominent of which is probably Noel Carroll's Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart.
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Jul 18, 2020 23:45
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 13:23 |
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Would it make you feel any different if their sexes were reversed?
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Aug 12, 2020 17:17
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Glad everyone is about to get clued in to the greatness of Altered States.
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Aug 14, 2020 02:18
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Once the Deep Red score clicks with you, you can't not love it. It's just a jammin good time.
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Aug 14, 2020 18:20
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How are these video streams hosted/shared?
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Aug 20, 2020 18:52
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What I like most about the Dead trilogy as a whole is that I love each of them for completely different reasons. Night is impressive for its originality, the obvious effort that went into it from enthusiastic and talented filmmakers without a budget, the isolated creeping dread to it (its mood is one of my favorites from any movie), the b&w photography, and Jones is a great lead. Dawn is paradoxically more fun and also more melancholy. Its a full apocalyptic prep movie, and I enjoy watching characters going through plans and setting up a perimeter, corralling the dead, looting the stores for supplies, all that poo poo. The amped up gore. And unlike Night, none of the main characters are unlikable. They're just people trying to create a normal life in an increasingly abnormal world. Day is the death of that dream. It's post apocalyptic nihilism. The only survivors are armed madmen and those they deemed valuable enough to keep alive. Any trace of humanity or intellectualism is seen as a weakness or a threat. What's left of mankind is worse than the zombies. That's why Rhodes is so over the top, to clearly differentiate him and his followers as being far more dangerous than the living dead, a militarized political continuation of the roving bikers in Dawn. Half the cast are some brand of psycho, but it plays like an exaggeration because it needs to, and thats why I love Pilato in the role. The score is great, and the gore is the crown jewel of Savini's career. If Night was a latent commentary about racism, and Dawn is about consumerism, then Day is at least about militarized fascism and our tendency to backslide into it, and all are revealing that the end of the species is ultimately due to some great flaw that lies within the human heart.
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Aug 27, 2020 01:00
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Christine is quality Carpenter. It's one of his best looking films and the soundtrack is awesome. In most other matchups, it should win. But not this time.
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Aug 27, 2020 21:25
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Hell, Craven caught lightening in a bottle three times. You didn't see much rape/revenge exploitation fare before LHotL became a midnight and drive-in hit due to the controversy it created. For better or worse, his decision to do a grimy remake of Virgin Spring arguably birthed a subgenre. Also, I knew Craven fell in round 1, but it was LHotL that fell to Sleepy Hollow???? Jfc people.
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Sep 2, 2020 01:09
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Jedit posted:I think that for most people it isn't a question of "for better or worse". It's just "for worse". Rape/revenge is not a subgenre that ever needed to exist. And if it did, Craven and Cunningham didn't "birth" it anyway. You want to give that award to anyone then give it to Sam Peckinpah for Straw Dogs. Tbf, Dustin Hoffman's character never has any knowledge of the rape, so how can he be taking revenge for it? Unless you're thinking strictly symbolically, but there's a lot more going on in that movie. I'll still stick to Craven being the catalyst for the deluge of films that followed (and often directly aping his marketing), for worse if you like. And while I think that most rape/revenge films are garbage, some do have artistic merit like Ms.45, Lady Snowblood, Thriller, Female Prisoner Scorpion, Irreversible. Mandy follows the formula pretty closely. Hell, Death Wish, which is politically bankrupt but still a good watch. If we're getting second wave influence here, then Thelma & Louise or Monster would probably fit. This is just off the top of my head. There's significant work to come out of the genre, despite the majority of it being total dogshit like I Spit On Your Grave 3. Regarding the larger idea that the genre didn't need to exist, I don't think any genre needs to exist. Taking them at face value, slashers are at least as bad, if not worse than rape/revenge films, in terms of what they depict. People often make hay about audiences being fine with someone being torn up in a bloody hail of bullets or with graphic decapitations, but recoiling in horror at exposed genitals, usually saying something about our skewed views of sex vs. violence. That also seems to similarly pan out when it comes to depictions of sexual violence vs. depictions of murder as well. I'm sure a lot of folks who can casually watch slashers won't go near something like I Spit On Your Grave. I watched Jennifer's Body with a group a few weeks ago and most of the viewers were relieved that a character had "only" been ritually murdered, instead of being raped and let go. I had a similar but opposite reaction the first time I saw Last House on the Left as a teenager, where the frank depiction of a sadistic sexual assault shook me in a way that no depictions of murder ever had. But are these skewed reactions justified? Why be disproportionately upset about a movie where a woman is sexually assaulted for less than a third of the runtime, who survives and then murders her assailants for the majority of the runtime, and not be so upset about a movie where over a dozen people are stalked and graphically murdered for 80% of the runtime and then the last person standing stops the murderer in the last 10 mins? If we're going to be making moral judgments of films or genres, we better have drat good reasons for such a disparity in our moral evaluations, and I don't know that we do. Anyway, that might be a bit tangential, but it's something I was thinking a lot about roughly a decade ago, but never reached any conclusive thoughts about it.
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Sep 2, 2020 10:29
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After seeing the horrors of war, mass shooters, serial killers, ISIS torture and execution videos, etc, can any depictions of violence outside of the supernatural be considered unreal? People are brutally murdered every day. Sometimes many people are brutally murdered by a single individual, either at once in a mass event or over time in a series of killings, and sometimes in incredibly graphic ways. But if realism is the only thing causing us to balk at depictions of sexual violence but easily face depictions of excessive murder, then we should have a much harder time watching Zodiac than Bloodsucking Freaks, since the former is a realistic depiction of true events while the latter, as far as depictions of sexual assault goes, is very much on the excessive unrealistic end of the spectrum. But we don't. If we're using Commando as our example of excess of murder that eases our discomfort by its lack of plausibility or realism, imagine a movie with the same amount of excess, but instead of murders it's sexual assaults. Would our discomfort be eased? I doubt it.
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Sep 2, 2020 16:15
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I wish I had my copy of Cronenberg On Cronenberg handy. It's a great book of interviews where he talks about his moves and ideas at length. It's been many years since I've read it, but one thing that struck me is when he said that his depiction of the Mantle twins in the opening of Dead Ringers, when they are these detached-seeming children trying to investigate the world, was the most autobiographical thing he's done. He's always taken a clinical curiosity at people and bodies, and just as the surgeon passes no moral judgment when they turn our insides out for display and analysis, neither does he. It's unsurprising that Cronenberg's primary concerns are philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the relations of bodies to technology / each other, because his movies come off as the work of a fascinated academic.
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Sep 4, 2020 07:01
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I vaguely recall Visitor Q being wild as hell but it's been nearly 20 years since I've seen it god drat I'm getting old
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Sep 10, 2020 19:31
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Inland Empire really needs a two hour cut.
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Sep 17, 2020 23:54
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Wheelchair ain't even on fire tho
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Sep 18, 2020 17:33
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One of my biggest issues with Inland Empire is Lynch's reliance on the onboard autofocus of the outdated dvcams he shot it on, which causes the classic problem of closeups of people being blurry while the background is in focus. IE has a ton of closeups like this, usually through some kind of fisheye lens, and they just look like amateur hour. Debbie Does Dagon posted:My history with Inland Empire is that I walked in on my brother watching the film in his bedroom shortly after it came out. On the screen was the backyard barbeque scene, and my instant impression was that this film looked like poo poo, the acting was terrible, it just looked awful, I'm out. So while I am a massive fangirl for Lynch, I did not come into this matchup with high hopes. This is funny because that's easily the worst scene in the movie.
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Sep 19, 2020 20:25
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Videodrome had a few issues during the making, where Cronenberg kept changing his mind, and the original script didn't have an ending. I think he wrote the ending towards the end of the shoot. That's probably why it feels like it's ideas aren't fully formed, or it's philosophy isn't clear. There's that scene where Max finds out Harlan is in on Videodrome and says "Wow, you've been here what, two years?" and Harlan says, sincerely, "Yes, two wonderful years". A minute later Harlan gets angry then calls Max and his TV station sick and degenerate and a sign of society's decay. It feels all over the place. While that would normally bother me, in Videodrome it works. The movie starts breaking down as Max's mind does, so in the end we can't make sense of things or recognize what's real any more than Max can.
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Sep 23, 2020 23:03
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Are the streaming versions of ROTLD 3 the unrated version? There's a fair bit of gore cut out in the R version.
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Sep 24, 2020 17:31
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Tarnop posted:On Prime it's just under 97 minutes which seems to be the length of the unrated on bluray.com Tbf, the unrated cut is 18 seconds longer, so they're both ~97 mins. A lot of the difference isn't longer scenes, but rather gorier alternate takes with the same runtime, and it's a lot of scenes. The version on Tubi says 96 mins, R rating too, so who knows.
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Sep 24, 2020 18:19
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After checking, the cut of ROTLD 3 on Prime is the cut version. Same deal for Tubi.
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Sep 24, 2020 19:22
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 13:23 |
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Franchescanado posted:Some thoughts, before voting is over, about Altered States A beautiful post. Altered States is one of my favorite movies, and I think you're pretty right in your interpretation. The thing about Jessup being in search for a kind of true spiritualism is explicit at the end of Chayefsky's original novel, where he says "What happened to me last night was more of a religious experience than a scientific one". I don't think Jessup is necessarily seeking out God or a specifically religious experience, but is looking for a kind of higher truth through a quasi-religious type experience that can only be obtained via destruction of the self. Bataille called these 'limit experiences', or a "tearing of the subject from himself", as Foucault put it. A lot of drug users who seek ego death seem to do so, by my lights, for its own sake. It's a kind of search for freedom via release from the self and all its trappings (and one could say Jessup definitely escapes his; it's hard to care/worry about a family when the only thing you know is the pleasure of hunting and killing a goat with your bare hands, though I think this is incidental for him). Jessup isn't just looking for the ecstasy of escape, he's actually looking for answers behind those trappings, and finds only nothingness. Maybe that's why I don't think he's irredeemable, because I sympathize with that desire (and like another poster who liked the film, I'm also another hopeless academic, so maybe there's something to that).  Jessup, as he once was As far as the ending goes, the movie has Jessup's declaration of love as the end, a victory for the real and tangible, but in the novel it's the first thing Jessup says when he wakes up. I'm guessing Russell did it for dramatic effect, to make the moment appear more final. That last, saving embrace in the novel is wordless. And just as you said, the ending isn't really an ending. Previous to that last moment, Emily goes into a full dialogue about how his nature will never let him leave those mysteries alone. "Truth is only transitory, it's human life that is real! You and me, sitting in this room! Truth is the illusion!", he says, wanting to burn his work in what he calls a symbolic act of religious sacrifice to try and exorcise the very real terror that exists within himself as a result of his discovery. "That despair is not just a matter of the spirit to me. It's a palpable demon inside me, and it has to be ripped out".  Jessup's crisis begins to manifestMoreso than an allegory for the dangers of seeking faith or transcendence in destructive ways, I take it as a character trying to come to terms with the depression caused by existential crisis. And that is something that really doesn't have a clean ending. We're all wanderers in the desert, lambs without a shepherd, perpetually on the brink of becoming the 'last man' and falling into a new nihilism. That's the demon that can hatch and grow inside us, consuming ourselves, by consequence consuming those we love (as it momentarily does Jessup's wife near the end), transforming us into hideous, new forms. Only something real and meaningful can save us. "... her face pressed against his real body, her arms desperately wrapped around his real waist, a pair of young living human beings standing embraced in the white sunlight of their living room."
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Oct 9, 2020 11:07
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