Two Experiences, One Thumb

As you snicker at the title, keep in mind that it's very difficult in this day and age to name a body part without some sort of sexual connotation. Kidney, maybe... or spleen. I reserve "two spleens up" for horror movies, and there haven't been any ones of those since 1973. NO, SAW DOES NOT COUNT. GET THE HELL OFF MY LAWN.

Okay, maybe there HAVE been some since 1973. Just not very many. That's a whole other blog and one I'm not prepared to go into until something interesting actually comes out.... Speaking of which: Horror parody idea. Green-screen night vision view of a couple sleeping in the bed... as the door next to them opens by itself... to reveal.... a fat man in a red suit (rendered black by the green tint), delivering presents to all the good girls and boys. ... Title? ... "Paranormal Nativity." You can use that, I just want my name on it. Bonus points for Jesus cameo.

GEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK
Two movies this week, because it's been thin for a while... I won't even address the Oscar nominations, because any world where "The Help" is a Best Picture nominee is a world I want to set on fire.

"The Artist" (dir. Michael Hazanavicius)

He of the director of the "OSS 117" movies, which are like a way more hilarious Mad Men. Misogynistic but lovable. Like your granddad. See the original sometime.

Anyway.

The Artist is a silent movie about the end of silent movies. George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is the biggest silent movie star in the world, everyone loves his movies, and everyone (save for a co-star or two) loves him. He is married to an indifferent wife, has an adoring dog, and is the very epitome of happy... until he meets Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo) by chance, on the red carpet at one of his premieres. They make an impression on one another, and in fact meet again when she's an extra on his next film... and there's something there. Something neither of them quite understand, but he's married, and she's (as it turns out), destined for stardom... in talkies. Their paths go very different directions. It's a silent movie but the language of silent movies is explained readily within the first few minutes, using camera angles, visual tricks, and even sound (well, the score) to accentuate the important and leave the rest in the background. After five minutes, you won't even notice it's a silent movie... except when the film calls attention to it. Which it does, because it's brilliant like that. I laughed. I cried. I marvelled in awe at the sheer thinness of John Goodman. And the music is pretty happenin' too.

For all the mediocre movies nominated for Best Picture this year, "The Artist" has to be at the top. It's not condescending (like "The Help"), and it's not so artistic as to render it inaccessible to anybody wanting to just watch a good movie one evening ("Tree of Life"). Best movie I saw in 2011, even though I technically watched it in 2012. I'll grade on a curve.

NEXT:

Haywire. (dir Steven Soderbergh)

WHO THE FUCK IS GINA CARANO?

Did you watch the remake of "American Gladiators" on NBC a few years back? The one with Hulk Hogan as one of the hosts? If not, skip to the next paragraph. If so, Gina Carano was "Crush," one of the female gladiators, and attacked her opponents with what can only be described as... bemusement. I saw an episode where the ref called her on one of her rule violations, and though she wasn't a large woman-- in fact, quite petite and adorable-- she DID just get done mopping the floor with this chick, knocking her off the platform within the assigned 30 seconds or whatever. She responded to the judge in this high-pitched, girlie little voice.... 19 seconds after doing horrible ultra-violence. I had a Crush on Crush, but I want to make it clear that I do not anymore because I have a beautiful girlfriend who studied martial arts and is a former competitive power lifter. And quite frankly she'd probably call dibs.

So, when that show was cancelled, Carano went back to her, I shit you not, Mixed Martial Arts career. Wiki her. Pro-record, 7-1. Steven Soderbergh saw her and said, "This lady should be in movies."

Now: Let's make this abundantly clear. Based on the above, Carano is a mixed-martial arts competitor and has no acting experience. It shows. Her line delivery is flat (not completely, but about 80% of the time), and her facial expression seems to have a default setting of "amused smirk." But name one other action star who can act. Schwarzenegger? Statham? Okay, Bruce Willis I'll give you, but he was an actor before he was in action movies. The rest of their shtick, beat people down, the end. Steven Seagal was a world-famous action star for the duration of the 90's, and he couldn't act his way out of a perforated paper bag. Acting isn't important. Can your action star kick ass?

Gina Carano takes out Channing Tatum (who can't act either, so maybe he's in there to make her look good), Magneto (Michael Fassbender), and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor). Utterly obliterates them. In action movies, inexperienced directors will just shake the camera a lot so you can't really see what's going on-- Soderbergh sits back, keeps everything in-frame, only cuts away if the actors move out of it. It's shot beautifully, the fight scenes do not have music. That really is her, in a real fight. Not every punch lands, not every move is clean. But when she pulls a reverse on Tatum, puts him in a submission hold, and breaks his arm... you believe it. That guy's going to the hospital. And that's the first five minutes of the movie.

As a geek, I don't think Soderbergh knocks it out of the park every time. He's very, very good at working with actors, but he's only as good as his scripts... you can't polish a turd, and Ocean's 13 was what it was (I didn't hate it, but it couldn't hold a candle to his Ocean's 11). One review I read said it wasn't experimental like some of his more out-there work... I disagree. Lem Dobbs wrote it, a longtime Soderbergh collaborator... and while he has some mainstream movie credits, he also wrote or co-wrote "Dark City," "Kafka," and "The Limey" ... the latter two of which were directed by Soderbergh and were firmly in the "artistic" portion of his resume. Alternatively, the opening and closing credits are in the same style as "Ocean's 11," so you make the call. The film jumps around in time, plays with flashbacks, has a bare minimum of explanation for certain plot points. In "Ocean's 11" or "Out of Sight," you know what's going on at all times. In "Haywire," you only know Carano's Mallory and Ewan McGregor's Kenneth used to be a couple because one of them lets it slip several minutes into their first scene together. Or because you read it first in some asshole's blog. Paying attention is rewarded. Not paying attention just means you'll jump in your seat when suddenly a boring talking scene explodes into smashed furniture with no warning whatsoever. Then someone probably get handcuffed or shot.

Four out of Four stars on "The Artist."

Three out of Four on "Haywire," if only because Carano could've sold it a little better. But Schwarzenegger, Statham, Seagal and even Chuck Norris didn't exactly hit it out of the park on their first movie, either. So.... suck it.

NOT FUCKING GEEK

"The Artist."

Hadn't seen a silent movie in forever. This is a good one. Girlfriend t'weren't sure going in, but loved it as the credits rolled. Plus the leads were cute as shit.

"Haywire."

What other fucking action movie are you going to see this month? Red Tails? One for the Money? Fuck George Lucas and fuck Katherine Heigl. It has Ewan McGregor being evil Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, doing some fassbending, and Michael Douglas being smug. In six months you can buy this movie on DVD and throw it on at any party, in between Statham movies, and say, "Haywire? Oh yeah, it's fun. Pretty obscure though. Most people haven't heard of it."

..... hmm. Geek/Not Geek? Crap. Is "Geek/Fucking Hipster" taken? I apologize to my legions of fan.

"The Artist" could go next to "Slumdog Millionaire" or "The Hurt Locker," for tiny little obscure movies that won Best Picture, just by being that outstanding.

"Haywire" goes next to "Way of the Gun," for really entertaining action movies with famous names attached, but got shit for publicity anyway.

Latest possible next installment: The Cabin in the Woods. No, nothing on TV has excited me lately. Watch "Community" wherever you can stream or order it.

May God bless Allah, may Allah bless God, and may both bless the United States of America.

Play ball.

Blah Blah Oscars Blah

As a cultural milestone, the Oscars aren't really all that important; sure, we can forever look up who won what in a given year; but the ceremonies themselves are generally forgotten unless something really amazing happens, like a streaker, or a really great one-liner ("You like me, you really like me."). So even though last weekends Oscars are fresh in our minds, the ceremony itself wasn't all that important. Presenters, hosts, all were picked for business reasons, to raise their visibility in a ceremony that, in theory anyway, should be free of outside influence (at least as far as who wins).

NOT GEEK

I was bored, by and large. Anne Hathaway is multi-talented... attractive, yes, which doesn't hurt your chances of being a movie star, but at any given moment she looked poised, comfortable, and energetic. James Franco looked like he'd just been hanging out with Charlie Sheen.

Unlike Neil Patrick Harris, who had a much-deserved career renaissance in the last few years, James Franco's career arrived and died between 1999 and 2002. By the time "Spider-Man 2" came out, his career was over. But kudos to him, Harvard student that he is... he worked hard, applied himself, picked some wise projects, got his name back into the public spotlight, and used his most endearing quality-- weirdness-- to climb back into the public perception. For Round One, it was "let's make him a heart-throb." That didn't work, so now he's something else. And, it should be noted, he IS a talented actor... just not a charismatic one. Which is why he shouldn't host awards shows.

What else can any non-geek say about the evening? It was long, the speeches ranged from boring to okay, with nothing to write home about (except for the one bleep), studio execs and agents got their "products" in front of a camera for a night. Was "The King's Speech" the best movie of the year? It was really, really good.... nothing except it, The Social Network, or Black Swan really had a chance. I didn't see "Winter's Bone." No one did. No one saw "The Shawshank Redemption" in 1994, either. History tends to repeat itself.

GEEK

The most common complain the next day was, "The Social Network got ROBBED!"

Look.

There are ten nominees for best picture, for the second year in a row. We're still feeling the after-effects of the writers strike, because it was two years ago and it takes two years to make a movie. 2009 and 2010 were thin years, cinematically speaking. So you get certain movies that, while good, certainly aren't deserving of a best picture nominee (I actually did watch "The Kids Are All Right," and I stand by my statement). Good movies, but not ones that have a chance of winning. "Winter's Bone" was this years "Precious" in the sense that it was an extremely good film, and well made, but it lacked that... something, that grandiosity, that .... commercial appeal... that will win you the award. Worth watching. But not the "It" movie.

So amongst those left-- The King's Speech, Black Swan, The Social Network, 127 Hours, and I guess even Inception... you have four movies made for the younger demographic, or rather, the same demographic that Hollywood has been making movies for, and only for, since the mid 1980s. And a fifth, The King's Speech, which your grandmother would go see, and enjoy. Also your parents. I enjoyed it, too. Nothing exploded and no one got shot, but it was still a quality film. Beautiful to look at, beautifully acted, and a lovely time at the movies.

So if you're young and hip, you voted for one of the other four, or maybe the fifth. Your vote is spread out five ways.

If you're old and traditional, you vote for The King's Speech.

Which is how we got a winner.

But to be fair, the other films were not perfect. "The Social Network" had an overabundance of CGI and too little attention paid to the performances, specifically Andrew Garfield, who is generic in every way, and Justin Timberlake, of whom the audience is always quite aware, throughout the movie, "Hey, that's Justin Timberlake."

"Black Swan" had a powerful, jaw-dropping performance at its center, but was a bit fuzzy around the edges. The conceit of re-telling the ballet "Swan Lake" was clever, but outside of that, it wasn't much different from "The Wrestler." It was an old story, re-told in a brilliant way, but you'll notice the last couple years the Academy is choosing uplifting movies for Best Picture, especially post-Obama. Black Swan is an actress' dream job, but the movie itself is a bigger picture, and a fuzzier one.

Same with "127 Hours."

The ACTUAL best movies of the year, and it's been true for as long as I can remember-- instead of looking at the Best Picture winner, look to the winners of Best Original Screenplay, and Best Adapted Screenplay. THOSE are the actual best movies of the year. Those are the best stories, the most wonderfully realized, the most fun movies to watch.

Best Picture is something entirely different. Everything must come together: EVERYTHING. Not just the plot, but the dialogue to tell it. The actors realization of the characters. The lighting, the costumes, the shot selection, the blocking of the actors. Music. Locations. Truly everything.

And I can't think of anyone who cares about all that stuff. *I* don't. I'm a film geek, and I'm watching the cinematography and the costumes and the lighting and the makeup, but... what makes one better than the other? No idea. I don't do their jobs.

But Hollywood people do.

"The Social Network" did not win, in part because of what I said before, but also because David Fincher cannot direct actors. He's part of the new and current school of filmmakers, who are brilliant with effects and shot composition, but have no idea what to do with actors, how to get a good performance out of them, or where to have them stand or move. Was the movie nominated for acting awards? Yes. It's Aaron Sorkin writing the dialogue, and if you can't act, you won't survive the first sixty seconds. So you hire an actor and let them say the lines. Which is what happens in the movie. And then Andrew Garfield looks confused, Jesse Eisenberg looks cranky, Armie Hammer looks angry, and Rooney Mara cries. Cut, print, how did the lighting look?

I don't say all that in ignorance: I'm perfectly aware that the opening scene, where Zuckerberg breaks up with his girlfriend, required 98 or 99 takes. At that point, I am convinced, it is NOT about the performance. It's about the placement of the actors, who moves his or her head when, what is happening in the background. By take 15, the performance is rote. There is nothing new to learn. You don't get to take 99 unless you're micro-managing, or are looking at other things.

But I digress. I fucking loved the movie and I fucking loved all the Best Picture nominees that I saw (7 out of 10, with Winter's Bone still to be crossed off the list... probably The Fighter, too).

Just I see all these rants the next day, every year, going "(blah) got robbed!!"

I've been watching the Oscars a long time, and even when something goes wrong (which happens less often then the pop culture would lead you to believe), there's a reason for it.

In 1995, Best Supporting Actor went to Kevin Spacey for "The Usual Suspects." I maintain then, as I do now, that he won the award because of some perceived masterwork he did in hiding his true identity from the audience. In all reality, he was just saying the lines, and the secret being hidden is due in no small part to the talent of the director and screenwriter, not Spacey. And his career since then will back me up on that. Meanwhile, Brad Pitt was nominated for "12 Monkeys," was brilliant in it, but lost because he was perceived as a generic pretty-boy, and also no one saw his movie. "The Usual Suspects" was more popular, and seen by more Academy members than "12 Monkeys," so that was that.

In 2001, "A Beautiful Mind" won Best Picture, despite being (1) not Ron Howards best movie, and (2) not a very good movie anyway. It did not follow its own internal logic, and the screenwriter stole everything that was 'clever' about it from other genres. The screenwriter who, by the way, also wrote "Batman and Robin." This is not a talented man. Just one with friends in the business.

The point? No, the Best So-and-So doesn't always win, but there's never NOT a reason for it. Ron Howard won because he'd been making brilliant movies for over a decade; Kevin Spacey won because his movie was damn good, and he was given more to do than Gabriel Byrne.

But no one remembers that. They remember who won, and if the movie was good or not.

So in a year, or more likely, in a week, we'll have forgotten everything about that rushed, over-produced, over-long show. But the facts are these: "The Social Network" was the best story adapted from another medium, "The King's Speech" was the best original story. I loved them both. You probably did, too.

Or, y'know, if you didn't, then there's always "Drive Angry 3-D." Shit blows up, and there's nekkid women in it.

We are officially OUT of awards season. And there's something for everybody here.

Why You Hate Comics

Right up until 4-5 years ago, you hated comic book movies.

And I know this is true because *I* hated comic book movies, and I didn't dislike comics. I remember seeing "Spawn" as an impressionable youth, and thinking, "Well. THIS sucks."

And years later, other people had to educate me. They showed me Batman comics and Captain America comics and ... well, things that don't qualify as "comics."

I am not, by any means, a nerd about that stuff. I own less than two-dozen graphic novels, and 12 of them are the same authors' multi-volume set of "The Punisher" in which the "hero" distributes vigilante justice (via the "bullet" method) to an average of 20-30 criminals per book. It is sold in the "absolutely no children beyond this point" portion of the comic shop. If it were a movie, it would be NC-17. Even the R-rated "Punisher" movie(s) had to tone themselves down to be R-rated, compared to these books.

WHICH IS THE PROBLEM.

Robert Downey Jr. said "Yes" to Iron Man, and suddenly it was cool for mainstream actors to be in comic book character adaptations again, for the first time since "Batman Returns" in 1992. (Val Kilmer and George Clooney as Batman is what made it UNcool again, a few years later). But even now, not a lot of mainstream American actors are following in his footsteps.

Scarlett Johanssen? Yes. Chris Evans? Hardly a household name. Chris Hemsworth? Who the fuck is that.

So we're back to square one.

And people on the street, commenters on message boards, and my mom, all say things like, "Isn't that based on a comic book? It'll probably be silly."

...

Then I had an epiphany as to why people automatically assume comics are silly:


WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT.

There are a billion "Cathy" comic strips, and all of them are less funny than this one. Even humor itself, peeking its head out from under a rock, would not recognize this comic as anything remotely familial. It is anti-humor, designed to earn the author a steady paycheck. It is roughly five square inches in your daily newspaper, and there's not a fucking thing you can do to stop it.

And there's MORE LIKE IT. Dozens. Dozens of other unfunny little childish comic strips in your newspaper, distributed en masse by the millions, every day. Crazy, redonkulous exercises in non-jokes like Beetle Bailey and B.C. and One Tree Hill... I don't even read this crap anymore, because it wasn't even funny when I was twelve. When I was twelve I had to ask my parents what the joke meant, and wait for a response before I then realized it wasn't funny. By 13, I had cut out the middle man. What the hell is going on?

This runs in newspapers all over the country, and is seen by MILLIONS. Someone was PAID for this. There was probably even a first draft before it, where the author said, "No, no, wait... ten dollars isn't funny enough. It needs to be FIVE dollars."

But even that is giving it too much credit. Strips like this one have been manufactured by a computer program since 1988. I am sure of it. There is no possible way that a person could create that, and THEN an editor would read it and say, "Ha, yes, good work," and THEN pay the man. Unless the comic strip racket is run like Saturday Night Live, where you tell one funny joke then get to collect a paycheck for seven years while doing nothing at all.

Which is entirely possible. It's not like anyone is paying attention to this shit. Except for this person, my new hero:

"The Ten Newspaper Comic Strips that Need to Fucking End."
by Alicia Ashby

.......... I had ignored this crap for years, this cheap, pandering free money for bad artists, but as an adult without a great income, it pisses me off that the person who draws "Mamaduke" got paid more last year than I did. The last time I got drunk and pissed on the bathroom wall it created more interesting art than this bullshit. It is market-tested, color-coordinated, guaranteed-not-to-offend-anyone.... "art." Which would be fine, if there were five of them, but there's like EIGHTY in your newspaper every day.

And so that is what we, as a society, think comics look like. Also, comics are drawn, and as we all know hand-drawn animation is Disney's gift to the world. If it's a cartoon, it's for kids, yup yup yup!


When you write a movie, you have to make it easy to understand for the widest possible audience. There are rules, rules which most people aren't even aware of or care about: You cannot show violence against children, and if you do, it's not the hero committing such acts. The hero cannot beat women, take a dump, do drugs, and if he's shown stealing car it is always, ALWAYS for a good cause. There are never any consequences. He always wins in the end, the bad guy always dies (unless they want a sequel), any character who broke the law along the way also typically dies, lest any tiny corner of the audience feel uncomfortable.

If you are an adult, and writing a graphic novel for yourself... you can kill anyone you damn well please. If it entertains YOU, who cares if it's going to sell well in a mall? Trade it with your friends. Put it online.


You can't put that shit in the cineplexes. 100% entertainment value only. The author has set it in the near future and the Rapture occurs, except the Pope doesn't go because he's been too busy doing drugs and fucking whores. The populace is, as you can imagine, quite confused as to why the POPE didn't get called up in the Rapture... but luckily Yonder Pope is a mighty warrior in his spare time, and helps defend his fellow man against the evil left on earth.

If you read that... and you created "Funky Winkerbean" ... you should rightly hang your head in disgusted shame. You are a boil on society and you need to be lanced.

There are a thousand brilliant, multi-layered stories to tell here. And while some newspaper comics do still generate honest political commentary, or a genuinely funny gag-- you can count those comics on one hand. Doonesbury. The Boondocks. The art and content of "Get Fuzzy" is usually entertaining, and "Pearls Before Swine" has some clever wordplay.

And then there's fifty comic strips from the people who brought you "The Wizard of Id" just waiting there to suck. "Family Circus" is still allowed to exist, like a remnant of the 1950's that everyone forgot about. Alone they are nothing. Together they are skewing the perceptions of an entire nation. If YOU had lived in a foreign country all your life, and someone showed you "Garfield," what would YOU think of America?

Everything you know about the animated medium is wrong. People who write humorless, poorly drawn comic strips do it because they are contractually obligated to do so, and are under no individual obligation to be funny or interesting. It's rather like receiving tenure.

People who write movies must specifically write to appeal to the most number of people possible, particularly for a summer blockbuster (because that's what most often the stories lend themselves to), though there are a fair amount of graphic novels, too, that do not feature explosions. ("A History of Violence," for example, did not have a single car chase or flying robot).

People who write Graphic Novels do so because they honestly love it. They don't have a house in Hollywood Hills, they're not appearing on Letterman (though neither do screenwriters, really).

Screenwriter Scott Frank, who received an Oscar-nomination for adapting "Out of Sight" for the big screen, but also adapted "Get Shorty" and made his directorial debut two years ago with "The Lookout," once said...

"Writing a screenplay is like raising a child for adoption."

Telling, that. You labor over it for hours, weeks, months... then you hand it over to the studio and the director will do whatever the fuck he wants with it. You hope for the best.

Comic strip writers don't have their work changed, but that's because their editor never actually reads it.

Authors of Graphic Novels? These people, and their editors, are passionate about telling stories, and have written some good ones.

Some of them don't even have Batman in them.

Check them out, but... don't leave them lying around where your mother can find them. Just because there's a panel where someone dies does not mean we should ban all comic stores to protect the children. Context is everything, and a dramatic story well-told can teach us a lot.

But your mom doesn't know that, because she grew up reading "Family Circus."

Educate ya-self.

The Horror... The Horror

NOT GEEK

I think the first movie I really remember scaring the ever-loving bejeezus out of me was either "Superman II" or "The Muppet Movie."

In the former, our hero Superman goes through some sort of highly-stylized, Satan's-James-Bond-opening montage transformation in which he really does nothing more than lose his powers, but at the time I was rather on the young side and just saw a bunch of red lights and skulls and scary noises, with the upshot being, "There's a big scary light and all you can do is stand there until you're weaker than you were before." Certainly something to look forward to, when you're six.

In the latter, the climax involves a mad scientist putting Kermit into something akin to an electric chair and nearly pulling the switch, but thanks to some wacky hi-jinks, the evil, malicious scientist gets the metallic-looking upside-down bowl on his head instead, and then goes bye-bye (again, six years old here). I've of course seen both movies since, and of course quite obviously realize that a) Superman II, though groundbreaking, was really mostly silly, and b) that "mad scientist" was actually Mel Brooks. Though I still hold a grudge for "Dracula: Dead and Loving It."

I never really had a taste for scary movies much as I got older; not that they scared me away, I just didn't see the point of them. "Hey, let's go watch people get killed." (this was the 1980's, after all) ... so? You've seen one death, you've seen 'em all. Plus there's Ghostbusters and that's awesome.

The first time I really appreciated a horror movie, I was well into my 20's... I'd seen plenty as I got into high school, of course, but it was in my early 20's where I finally realized I'd never seen the original "Halloween," and one October night, decided to rectify that situation.

It was awesome.

What made it awesome was precisely the fact that I HAD seen many other slasher movies by that point. The body count of the original "Halloween" was only, as I recall, five, far and away dwarfing that of its successors (even its own sequels). But it was the scariest, tensest thing I'd ever watched to that point. It was about the mood, not about the kills. Why splatter someone if you can get a reaction just by having the killer stand across the street... unseen by the main character, but in full view of the audience?

Scary.

It was Hitchcock who posited something along the lines of, if you have two people talking over a table at a cafe, that scene can be very boring. But if you let the audience know there is a ticking bomb under that same table, all of a sudden their conversation becomes extremely tense and dramatic, without changing the interaction of the actors at all.

Of course, there are plenty of movie-goers these days who might see such a scene and complain in their blogs or facebook pages, "OMG this movie is SO boring... is the bomb gonna go off or not? Get to it!!" ... this is, of course, to miss the entire point of the scene in the previous example, but it's a natural by-product of the way modern movies are made... and the way the slasher (or rather, "horror") movie has evolved. I admit that the slasher movie is only an offshoot of the genre that is/was "horror," but certainly "slasher" is the only offshoot of it that continues to survive. But I think we can still safely assume that most people can immerse themselves in the world of a movie based on subtlety and cinematic convention, given that ten years ago "The Blair Witch Project" rang up $100 million in ticket sales, and movies like Saw, and Hostel, while doing well, have certainly never become the event-movie that BWP became all those years ago. Niche vs. Culture-as-a-whole. BSG vs. Lost. For example.

What do we have nowadays? Saw Seven? Hostel 3? (the latter is straight-to-DVD, by the way. Hilarious). Is it just the slasher movie that's dead, or is it horror altogether? "Scream" was really more a parody of the genre, once upon a time, though it did bring back the horror movie in a big way... for a little while. Now it's all remakes, reboots, and all the truly bloody movies are more about people being tortured than the good ol' classic "Teenagers running through the woods and getting splatted" classics. Good lord, man, how on earth are you supposed to get a girl to jump into your lap at the movie theater anymore?

It should be noted, though, that (a) I have not seen Paranormal Activity, and (b) That being true, the scariest movie I've seen in the last ten years was the American remake of "The Ring." And that was PG-13. (Not because it's not scary or because I'm a pussy, because it is and I'm not, but because there just wasn't any blood, and that's the kind of ignorant organization the MPAA is). Maybe I just need to watch more Japanese-horror. Or invent my own genre. Of horror. BOO!

GEEK

Pussssssssyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.

By your own admission, the scariest movie you ever saw was "The Blair Witch Project," because it creates that tension that people with imagination adore and people without imagination are confused by. Kind of like how only people without imagination could actually vote for Sarah Palin. Gravitas is its own reward, but if you don't see it, no one can explain it to you. Rather like the appeal of "Lost." Or Doctor Who.

For the record, I dislike Lost and could never get into it, but that's an entirely different entry. Back to the point:

The slasher genre is indeed a sub-set of the horror genre, and the horror genre is nothing new. From Dracula to Frankenstein to The Creature from the Black Lagoon, people like seeing scary movies because they are freaking scary. Sneaking up behind someone in the dark and going "boo!", going on a roller coaster, having sex in a public place... we all get our thrills somehow, and we've all tried at least one of those things. It's the shock, the moment of surprise... it's impossible to tell what the primal attraction is, maybe it's just the endorphins in the moment after your friend or sibling shouts "Boo!" and you realize you're perfectly safe... or if you're the Boo-er, maybe just that power to make someone jump. In any event, it's awesome.

And so in the early 1970's we get the book "Jaws," which Spielberg turned into a movie (see previous blog), which was essentially a symbol for its time, and a slasher movie all at once. Scary, unseen monster, preying on the unsuspecting, one at a time.....

Halloween did it again, 3 years later. In that movie, Michael Myers was punishing his "evil" sister over and over again, having killed his actual sister for being all slutty at the beginning of the film (when he was still five years old), then killing others whom he perceived to be either her, or the boy she was with, for the remainder of the movie. That, not Jaws, was the birth of the slasher movie.

We can see it right through the sequels to Halloween, the sequels to Friday the 13th, and most of the sequels to "A Nightmare on Elm Street" -- it's even explained, point-blank, in 1996's "Scream." If you are having sex, you are a target. If you are doing drugs, you are a target. If you're doing pretty much any of the behavior your adult-peers wouldn't approve of, LOOK OUT. OR THE BOOGEY-MAN WILL GET YOU.

And yet, the Boogey-Man never kills adults. Only teenagers who are up to the kind of shenanigans our ultra-conservative overseer, Ronald Reagan, would not approve of. Does this mean no adults were doing drugs, or having sex outside marriage? Well, apparently it did. Cuz there sure were a lot of teenagers dying in these movies, and the virginal "good girl" always seemed to survive until the end. Be good kids, and the killer will spare you.

But that was a 1980's thing. Times changed and politics mellowed, Bill Clinton coming into office and taboos relaxing (particularly ones involving cigars), the budget was balanced, and America was by and large a much happier, less-repressed place. The boogey-man was no longer coming to get anyone.

And yet teenagers were still dying... in movies. What was killing them?

As we learned from the original "Scream" .... themselves. The killers in the first movie just wanted to be famous, after all; the original reality TV wanna-bes. Scream 2 just turned out to be a petty revenge story (the boogey man again.... er, woman), but she was only doing it BECAUSE some teenagers had killed her teenager in the first place. Never mind that he'd been a psychotic killer. An eye for an eye, as they say.

The killer in the third film was a teenager again, or at least had been, when he got the idea... and by the time we get to Saw and Hostel, there's no in-the-shadows Boogey-man at all. The very subjects of the movie are forced to hurt themselves, and hurt others... in order to survive. Because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or because someone else is expressing their urges to make themselves happy... at the expense of others. In "Hostel," some rich foreigners cut up Americans cuz they're bored, or something... not really sure what's going on there, but the original made an awful lot of money for torture-porn... amusing, considering the premise used for ACTUAL porn would've been way more fun. "Hello, I'm Inga. I have paid the top dollar to have the secks with yuu pretty America boy...."

Saw has 6 movies in the franchise and counting, and in each some innocent bystander must commit some horrible atrocity against some fellow human being in order to go on with their lifestyle.

Thank goodness most of us just buy a Prius instead.