Rock for Relevance

Soundscan reports that in its first week the Smashing Pumpkins reunion (that's Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin) album Zeitgeist sold 149,000 copies. It's number 2 on the US chart after TI. The Pumpkins are number 1 in Canada, because many Canadians are strangely confused by urban pop music, and the logging industry inspires people to want to rock.

This is a band that's a decade past its heyday, and goes in and out of fashion with record critics with regularity. Album sales are half of what they were 10 years ago, except for country music (presumably because its listeners are less prone to use computers, but I'm not going there.) Number 2 seems pretty good. But MTV news is calling the sales a disappointment. And the reviews have been harsh. I think Zeitgeist is fairly solid, and unselfconscious about how a new Smashing Pumpkins is supposed to sound.

I have a theory about SP albums that I haven't heard from anyone else. It's that they're each about a different age.

Gish doesn't count, since it's just the band releasing its first material. Siamese Dream is an album about
childhood. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is about adolescence. More specifically, it's about high school. And frankly, I can barely say how important that CD was to me in grades 11 and 12. Everybody had it too. Adore is set during a person's mid to late 20s, after the hardest most soul-defining break up of their life. Machina I and II are next about man's relationship to God.

Zeitgeist is about the person trying to remain true to himself when ideals like country, government and God have all come to mean something that he opposes. If anything, it's about reclaiming those terms. The adult is brought back to a state of adolescent idealism and rebellion. That's why the line in "Doomsday Clock" that goes "These lonely days, will they ever stop?" has pertinence. It's an adult character frustrated that he's still plagued by teenage feelings.

The same goes for "7 Shades of Black." There's a 90s feel to these first 2 songs, and I think that's in the way their sentiment reaches out to listeners. It's angsty, but more poetically phrased than Linkin Park. This track would be killer if the guitars were louder. It's not quite "Bodies."

The really good songs on Zeitgeist are "Doomsday Clock," "That's the Way (My Love Is)," "Tarantula," "Starz," "Neverlost" and "For God and Country." I first thought the album hit a slump after midpoint "United States." But then I was listening to "Neverlost" in my car the other night and really liked it. Maybe because it was the first time I understood it. It's the kind of song you need to hear when you're driving alone at night. The only really weak track is "Bring the Light."

Does Zeitgeist come close to being the new Mellon Collie? Of course not. It's not that good. What albums are?

So yeah, I think it's a solid CD. It had the potential to be great, but for some reason 3 key tracks were left as B-sides, each separately available on special editions of the album. The solution is to purchase the album, download the songs "Death From Above," "Stellar" and "Zeitgeist" and then make an expanded version (based on where each appear on their special editions the songs should be placed respectively as tracks 9, 12 and 15.) Without them, Zeitgeist has thematic coherence, but plays like so many albums this year as a collection of potential singles. In the iPod generation, record labels assume nobody listens to CDs from start to end anymore. These songs give Zeitgeist its shape and texture. It becomes epic and pretentious, like great Pumpkins albums should be. "Stellar" even contains some of the most heartfelt lyrics of the album. Corgan asks, "Is it wrong to say / There's God and then there's faith? / Is it wrong to say so?" -- a plea for freedom of expression in a world with strict tabs on what constitutes acceptable thoughts.

The summer of 07 has found a surplus of 90s rock stars vying for a share of the new marketplace. Many of them seem out of place in the American Idol, High School Musical and faceless indie rock climate. Sales and reviews have reflected this.

It probably shouldn't be too surprising that Chris Cornell's second solo CD Carry On hasn't fared too well commercially. But that doesn't excuse the way music critics misread Cornell's efforts and intentions against past totems. Let's be honest with ourselves, and all agree that Soundgarden's Superunknown is the best rock album of the 90s. Great. Now let's also admit that we'd be laughing at Cornell if he was trying to make his present work sound like Soundgarden.

Carry On's song structures are often too simple, and its tone sometimes misjudged. It should also be noted that the final song, Casino Royale theme "You Know My Name," does not fit here. But what's right about it outweighs what's wrong. I sometimes think Cornell is the most misunderstood major rock vocalist. I'd probably place him as one of the top 5 writers who have influenced my own writing. He's made a record about the strains of aging with regret. Its the pop sensibilities critics harp on. But it's Cornell's faith in pop that makes it matter.

The single "No Such Thing" recalls the danger of youthful nihilism, with experience. The lesson "there's no such thing as nothing" communicates that the wish for invisibility is impossible. "Laughed at love / It was a big mistake / In the absence of / I filled it with hate."

If Carry On disappoints, it's in the same way the summer's other rock star returns do. Those of us who were in their adolescence when they were at their height want them to return to that place where they can take over the world. Part of it is the musicians, and the listeners, getting older. While the music can still have pertinence, it will be a different pertinence. We can never look at rock stars the same way we did at 17. If we do, we're in trouble. Cornell's on the right track by not trying to recapture past glory.

Mike Patton has never stopped keeping at it. His new project with outfit Tomahawk, titled Anonymous, is an album of electric renditions of Native American tribal chants from the late 1800s. The music succeeds as atmospheric pop, although Patton's ritual chanting can be silly. I like most albums the guy puts out, but I'm still waiting for one to occupy my mind and time since the last Mr. Bungle release. Mike Patton has become the master of new ideas that end up sort of like all his other ideas. How often do you listen to, for instance, the third Fantomas album? He's a genius whose music, now more than ever, needs to find its soul. For a challenging artist, that will be the real challenge for his fanbase.

I don't know what I wanted from the new Marilyn Manson. His first CD in 4 years Eat Me, Drink Me uses imagery of Lewis Carroll and Armin Melwes (the German cannibal who met his willing victim through a website), but evolved from Manson's breakup with burlesque dancer Dita von Treese. This has been the hardest Manson album for me to form an opinion on. It's his catchiest and most personal. But it's also the first that isn't larger than life. It's been interesting that 2007 saw Trent Reznor making Year Zero, a world weary Marilyn Manson album, while Manson makes Eat Me, Drink Me, an inward-reflective Nine Inch Nails album. This one also shares a lot with the new Pumpkins. It feels like a collection of potential theme-based singles which should be about 3 songs longer (though I told you how to make Zeitgeist more complete). I like every song on it but one (in this case that's "The Red Carpet Grave"). There are only 2 musicians who play on it. And Manson once said that Billy Corgan should wear a yellow shirt with a black zigzag and he'd look just like Charlie Brown.

Music critics have not been kind to Manson, or Cornell, or the Pumpkins this year. They'll take Patton, I suspect because they're afraid of his listeners. Music criticism is even more fashion-centric than movie criticism. Basically, it works like this: If your band is in vogue, you're cool. If you're last week's news, sorry. If, however, you're last week's news but can now be seen as ironic or heavily nostalgic (worthy of some renaissance), you're in luck. The monopoly of opinion from music reviews infiltrates to serious music buyers. Pitchfork (www.pitchforkmedia.com) is the worst for this. Beyond the site's predictability, elitism, and extreme whiteness, it became a giant force in indie music as soon as it got rid of its Reader Mail page--a very calculated move. Now there's no way for readers to respond, except in blogs and unrelated sites. Pitchfork is accepted as the unchallenged voice of authority.

Fashionability informs critics too much (it happens with movie critics as well, but in a different way), because the new CDs by Queens of the Stone Age, The White Stripes and Bad Brains aren't really that interesting.

I don't have much to say about Queens' Era Vulgaris. I've heard it. I'm fine with it. So I'll start with the Stripes album Icky Thump. It's good. But it's exactly as good as you expect it to be before you hear it. It's 13 new songs by The White Stripes. Because this is an extremely likeable rock band, the title track, "Rag and Bone," "Catch Hell Blues" and "I'm Slowly Turning Into You" know how to kick it without watering down their gut crunching heavy joy. But it's less interesting a collection than 2005's minimalist Get Behind Me Satan, and the CD mastering is awful.

The White Stripes are becoming a reliable confort band like The Ramones. The world turns thousands of times, and they're still the same White Stripes. I hope they don't die like The Ramones, though--they broke their fan contract when that happened. Jack and Meg White have real stage presence too. I like how when Meg plays drums she wears an expression like she's drifting to a far off place while thinking about Tori Amos lyrics.

It's saying something though that The White Stripes best song, "We're Going to Be Friends" off White Blood Cells is one of their least typical. The simplicity of that song belies its genius. It's a song about school and friendship without a trace of cynicism, told from the perspective of a kid. Not a teenager, 12, or 10 year-old, but a 5 year-old! Think about how fucking ambitious that is in a song intended for adult listeners. It's at once the band's happiest and saddest song, because it puts our own jaded views in perspective. Without being sappy, it's purely emotional--a connective feeling to a part of life we've all lived, that's inherently a part of us, but few of us ever think about in any detail. That's the eye-opening feeling I'd like to get from The White Stripes again before rushing to call each of their records their best in years.

People are obviously so excited there's a new Bad Brains out that they're happy to call it the best since 1986's I Against I. Hardly. I wouldn't even necessarily proclaim the new Build a Nation better than God of Love.

Too many of the lyrics consist of a song title repeated ad-infinitum, though the album is quite addictive once you've pressed play. Between listens, I tend to forget how great these guys sound musically here. There's a weak shift in the band's focus on more recent releases that can't be ignored. What makes Bad Brains songs of yore important is that, like Fishbone, they acknowledge the world at its most unjust and then refuse to let it stand in their way. It's an attitude of optimism as a state of defiance. Bad Brains penetrated that with innovative hardcore. The songs on Build a Nation will never affect anyone like "Banned in DC," "Sailin' On," "Pay to Cum," or the rebellious cry of "Never give in" in "At the Movies." Now that vocalist H.R. is only about Jah, so are the songs. Bad Brains must realize, though, that it's a tiny fraction of their audience that seriously gives a shit about Rastafarianism in any major capacity. They speak what they believe, but they don't translate it like they used to.

Music is in some ways more personal than movies. You walk around with a song in your head more intimately than how you walk around with a movie in your head. It's purely emotional, in a way where I sometimes find discussing music about as futile as trying to find an intellectual reason for falling in love. But when music I like becomes relevant to others, that's special. It's the connective potential of pop, which is the reason why it's worth caring when bands are "relevant." But they lose that relevance. Something they pick it up again. It's not only the rock stars actions that decide it. It's them, or it's us, or it's the music media telling us what to think.

The New Sadism postscript

Following my writeup on The New Sadism last month, I thought it would be worth posting my review of Captivity. This has been the most notorious of the recent torture-focused horror movies, even before anyone had seen it. Now that about 3 people went to it on its first weekend, it's still the most hated. But I see a clear difference in what's going on in this film than in Saw. Just don't ask me to watch it again.

The Review (as written for The Coast):

Let's assume Captivity is smarter than anybody but its makers recognize. This isn't too outlandish a supposition. Captivity has been the target of scorn for months. Its controversial LA billboards led to numerous op-ed pieces about the state of horror films. The trailer just leaves one puzzling over who'd want to see such a thing. Even with all this hatred lowering expectations, the reality of Captivity is that it's so unpleasant, the few people prone to look for virtues in it either won't go see it or will be too appalled to make the effort.

Captivity is a stupid movie made by smart people, meaning it's not as dumb as it looks. Roland Joffe and screenwriter Larry Cohen stage their critique of celebrity-obsession. "You know something is real when you can touch it," is the movie's repeated mantra. Because celebrities are untouchable, that makes them not real, and henceforth "victimless" targets of society's impotent rage. Celebrated New York fashion scenester Jennifer Tree (Elisha Cuthbert) wakes up to find herself trapped in a cellar where she's toyed with through video images, torture devices, and merchandise of herself.

It's almost a one-woman show, punctuated by a repeated pattern where Jennifer freaks out, and then Joffe breaks the scene with a fade-out. It's agonizing, but appropriately so. The film serves as the third in writer Cohen's Phone Trilogy, following Phone Booth and Cellular. Captivity has Jennifer text messaging her high society friends at the start, only to go crazy in a space without any communicative means.

The irony is that Captivity is ABOUT the things it's hated for - a culture that views women as objects, fascination with death and mutilation, turning to the misery of others for our entertainment. When it develops a sly sense of humour in the final half there are even a couple great B-movie shocks. The end plays more honestly as a feminist horror film than Hostel Part II.

If Captivity can't be endorsed, it's because it's cheapened by its most gratuitous gore. When producers caught wind of the controversy the movie was generating, they shot more violence to meet the hype. Scenes of force fed cannibalism and the consumption of battery acid are nasty in any context. Especially when they have none.

Your favourite movie hates you!

The amount that I find myself at a frat house party is less and less these days. But Scarface posters haven't left my vision completely. On one level, it's really cool that people who use their mantles to build shrines for emptied beer bottles have such passion for one of Brian De Palma's seminal works of 80s cinema. Yet the love isn't without irony.

How Scarface is so misunderstood by so many of its biggest fans is one of life's mysteries.

Maybe people just see what they want. They love that Tony Montana rises to the top by not taking no fucking shit. So what if he's a pathetic figure by the end, who's gunned down in his own house after dunking his face in a mountain of llello? Until then he made crime a profitable business.



"This movie's the most closely impactful for out generation. Our generation was really put here with nothing."
- Diddy, on the impact of Scarface in the Def Jam documentary Origins of a Hip-Hop Classic.

It's frankly so impossible to miss the message of Scarface, an over-the-top satire of Reagan era excess, that you just have to toss it up to people choosing to look around it. I love this movie. I have a Montana action figure standing on top of my TV. I admit that its drugs and violence fueled melodrama is completely badass. Those who dislike Scarface don't accept it as a modernized Shakespeare tragedy. It's as quotable as Hamlet. What's scary is how many corrupt entrepreneurs this movie has created. There's not a minute of the film where Montana isn't an asshole.

So why the adulation?

I blame Oliver Stone.

There's nothing inherently evil about Stone's script. But the guy has some weird voodoo curse on him that seems to affect his movies like nobody else's. Stone's films are doomed to be most loved by people who (sometimes deliberately) take the completely wrong message from them. I'm not trying to sound smarter than anyone; if there's one thing Stone is not, it's subtle. Critics weren't uncomfortable with Alexander on grounds that it wasn't gay enough.

I was recently informed of an attorney who just had a gold bracelet made with the name Gordon Gekko inscribed in it. Gekko is the bigwig stockmarket villain played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street. He's a man who has sold his soul before the movie has even started. His motto is "Greed is Good." He's the Dark Side ruler whose temptations must be resisted by the film's hero. So why does this person think Wall Street shares his philosophy? The movie is opposed to his way of life.

Isn't separating the attitudes of characters from the attitudes of the story something people learn about in tenth grade English?

Angus Wallen and Kara Winn were 27 when they killed Brandon Murphy in a murder similar to that of Mallory's mom in Natural Born Killers. Like the 8 other alleged NBK-inspired killers (including Columbine duo Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold), Wallen and Winn must have missed that the movie considers their actions part of the downfall of civilization. This isn't a hidden message either; it's about 115 of Natural Born Killers 120 minutes. And it's as subtle as a sledgehammer. They're paying respect to a movie that despises them.

When you look at it, the movies that become common youth obsessions (to the point where when you see its poster you know the beer bottle shrine isn't far away) deal in antisocial themes. If it's not Scarface on that wall, it's A Clockwork Orange or something by Tarantino. It would be funny if college age kids chose to idolize different Oliver Stone films. They could post pictures to Facebook of doing bong hits in front of their Nixon posters. "I'm going to university, so I can be a fucked up President too!"

The idea of art sometimes opposing its fans always reminds me a little of when Schwarzenegger ordered the execution of The Crips' co-founder Stanley Tookie Williams. Just think about how fucked up that is. As a notorious leader of the South Central LA street gang, it's highly likely that Tookie was a fan of Predator, The Terminator and Commando. And then one day, this guy whose movies Tookie felt a connection with decides he should be dead.

Imagine the world's biggest Woody Allen fan. He grew up watching Annie Hall, landed the woman of his dreams by studying Manhattan, and he tends to quote Love and Death in casual conversation. Then one day Allen decides he doesn't like something about this guy, and has the power to kill him. That must be the ultimate betrayal!

"Arnie partying with Tookie / Smokin and drinkin till they lose their cookies / Crips are cousins / Bloods are brothers / Family killing one another" - Fishbone, "Party With Saddam"

Sometimes a movie will deliberately turn its back on a significant part of its audience. I'm talking about critic hatred here.

It manifests in last year's Lady in the Water and in this year's Ratatouille. I don't for a second doubt that M. Night Shyamalan making a critic an antagonist in Lady in the Water is a big factor in that movie's critical thrashing. (Another factor is that critics universally decided it was time to be fed up with Shyamalan--something that's happened to Oliver Stone more than once.)

I didn't react negatively to Bob Balaban's portrait of a know-it-all movie critic in Lady in the Water for several reasons: 1) I'm able to see the humour in this job. 2) I don't identify much with most other critics, and have no aspiration to speak for the "critical communty." 3) There really are plenty of critics like the one Balaban plays, and they deserve to be called on it. Shyamalan has a thin skin, but there you go.

Ratatouille is a little stranger. Pixar movies pre-Cars have only ever gotten glowing reviews. In this case, it's a food critic named Anton Ego, but the general swipes would still apply. Writer Brad Bird includes a bit of voiceover dialogue where the critic admits that it's easier to destroy than to create, or such bullshit. And that his work will never be as important as the stuff he's tearing down. I wish filmmakers would acknowledge that they're critics too. Art is a commentary on life. And criticism is a commentary on art. Only the medium is different.

Still, I can't really take offense at Ratatouille. The movie's pretty great, and the other characters don't escape such exaggerations either. But you should see this food critic's mansion. Jesus! How much do these jobs pay in France, and why don't I live there?

The New Sadism

"Did you invent the term 'torture porn'?," my friend Phil asked me.

This question was posed around the time of last Fall's release of Saw III, and 'torture porn' was becoming a common internet term for horror movies (often in the mainstream) that are increasingly focused on their protagonists' mutilation.

"I don't think so," I answered. But thinking about it now, maybe in an offhand way I did. I addressed the issue in my early 2002 review of Final Destination 2--probably the most negative review that movie got. And several months later, in a mid-year report article, I refer to said film as "death porn." My Saw II review was among the very first to hit the net, and there my Rotten Tomatoes headline quote is, "Real porn is more dignified than this."

I can't take direct responsibility for everyone on the Ain't It Cool talkbacks adding 'torture porn' to their lexicon.

Besides, I prefer branding these movies with the term "The New Sadism."

The New Sadism implicates the audience's culpability in these films' attitude in ways that Torture Porn does not. The New Sadism is an overground movement. Torture Porn sounds like its locked in the basement dungeon of a backalley video store. The New Sadism lets you see graphic and prolonged disembowlings and castrations at a mall multiplex. You can watch them in an audience with 14 year olds still standing beneath Rihanna's Umberella-ella-ella-eh-eh.

An easy mistake is to dismiss all these films outright. The New Sadism is the horror movie equivalent of Nu-Metal (which was big at the turn-of-the-millenium). It's seen by many as a perversion of a genre's purity, and by others as a genre at its most accessibly hardcore. The bottomline is that, even at a low playing field, some of these movies are better than others. The people who are most militant and unwavering in their dismissal of horror movies are always the ones who never watch them.

But I can say that, as a trend, I don't like The New Sadism.

It's the dominant movement in horror movies right now--just ahead of the Japanese People Are Scared of Mute Ghost Children genre.

Here's how it happened:

In Christmas 1996, Wes Craven's Scream opened. It grossed $100 million and reignited popular interest in horror films. Scream is a postmodern take on the teen slasher films of the 70s and 80s, given a very hip sensibility. It's hard for many to admit now, but 10 years ago Scream was seen as enormously cool. (Christmas 96 rocked for mainstream counterprogramming. We also got Mars Attacks! and Beavis and Butt-head Do America.)

Scream had so much crossover appeal because it's a feminized horror movie (more on that in a bit.) It was about 10 times as smart as it needed to be, thanks largely to a script by newcomer Kevin Williamson. It made stars Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox and Drew Barrymore seem cool. It spoke to teenagers, as well as people who just love slasher movies.

As a 17 year old who was into horror (and most other genres), I was obsessed with Scream for a while. In my years at high school it was (barring Kids and Romeo and Juliet) one of only two teen movies released in that whole period. The other was Clueless, which I never cared about.

Inevitably, other movies tried to cash-in. The forgettable Urban Legend and its even more forgettable sequel Urban Legends: Final Cut followed. The market looked right for another Chucky movie. We got Wes Craven Presents Wishmaster, Disturbing Behavior, Halloween H20, and The Faculty.

The most popular of these late-90s follow-ups, besides the good but overstuffed Scream 2, was I Know What You Did Last Summer. That movie's pedigree was due to several factors. For one, it brought Scream scribe Williamson back. I don't know what's since happened to that guy. He was in some ways the horror version of John Hughes. The first two seasons of Dawson's Creek are also better than you think. I Know What You Did Last Summer has one of the fucking best horror movie titles ever. Conversely, its sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer has one of the worst. But Williamson's typical dignity for his teenage characters was missing in I Know What You Did. These kids were sort of dispicable. And the intriguing premise, of four youths trying to bury the secret of a man they accidentally killed, is too slickly directed by Jim Gillespie. It looks beautiful, but it needs a stripped down grit.

The teen horror phase ended around the time of 2001's Valentine. Judging by the voices on the Internet back then, nobody wanted it back. These movies, which were most often not that good, were derided for casting TV stars, occasionally getting PG-13 ratings, and often wussing out from being truly violent.





Enter The New Sadism.





I pick Final Destination 2 as the transitional movie between the teen and sadist subgenres. The original Final Destination, of which I'm a big fan, places squarely in the teen horror genre.

The major difference goes back to the issue of Scream's feminization. In Scream, Sidney's (Neve Campbell) fight for survival is a mirror of her personal struggles. Following her mother's murder, she wants life to leave her alone. The ghostface killer isn't allowing that to happen. The series is about a character's blossoming, with the horror element mirroring that story. There's a touching innocence to Scream if you watch it today. It's really great.

But it's actually typical of most slasher films before it and of its time, in that it's primarily concerned with survival. These movies are about claiming one's dignity. We want Jamie Lee Curtis to beat the Boogeyman in Halloween. We want to see the special needs kids vanquish Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm St. 3: Dream Warriors.

The New Sadism doesn't care about survival, only execution. As horror movies become more popular (Craven speaks on the Nightmare DVD boxed set about how he'd mainly see kids who didn't fit any mold at his movies on opening night), the formative process of horror movies is reversed. It's a countdown to extinction. The bloodier, the better.

What this means is that horror movies have lost their appeal as an empathetic outsider pop art--something detractors never understood about them anyway. In the 2005 remake of House of Wax, glamourous young stars Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray and Paris Hilton are convinced that all backwoods people are crazy imbred hillbillies. At the end, it's revealed the deformed redneck trying to kill them was abused during childhood. Fear those who are different than you, especially if their lives have been harder. That means they will kill you.

The New Sadism is typically about regular people caught in an animalistic land of primative psychopaths. It's not about who's gonna live, it's about how they'll die. This was the basis of Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses, which was celebrated by some as the antidote to years of Scream-wrought horror. It was also the focus of Marcus Nispel's corrupt remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Wolf Creek, Hostel, The Hills Have Eyes remake, Turistas and Severance.

Saw II was the point where I really objected. The increasing nihilism of these movies was getting defended as keeping with the spirit of horror movies. That is total bullshit. Horror got overtaken by people who like the genre far more than they understand it. The attraction to wanting to make these films is simple. If you're studying film craft, it's easier to detect and practice the overt style of horror sequences than other genres, which are often less pronounced. Horror gives newcomer directors a chance to get noticed by showing how "uncompromising" they are. It's why there are now almost as many zombie movies coming from film students as the typical film school projects about suicide and drugs. It's why Saw II, Hostel and Turistas feel like a pissing contest between Darren Lynn Bousman, Eli Roth and John Stockwell, each out to prove which of them is the most hardcore.


The thing defenders of The New Sadism don't grasp about some detractors is that the objection is not about the level of violence in a film. It's 2007. I can take it. I'm used to it. I've imagined far worse. What offends is a filmmaker's attitude about violence. The greatest human plague facing us today is the spread of evil. Everybody feels this. Witnessing audiences laugh as a boy gets crushed into a pancake by a plate of glass in Final Destination 2, or cheer as Nispel's camera pulls out of a gunshot head-wound in TCM03 is a way of coping with this vulnerability. Laughing at death is a way of proving you're above it. Not caring about things is always easier.

But a good horror film, like any worthwhile movie, has to connect us to the world (if not to ourselves) to have significant value. The other route is to tune out--to fetishize cruelty. The popularity of the first few episodes on a season of American Idol work this way. Contestants make fools of themselves publically and the shallow viewer finds self-worth in their humiliation. It's that simple. Jackass defenders frequently bring up that the stars are willingly hurting only themselves. This is true. But the audience's relation to that show is no different than if they were hurting others. Pleasure is derived from seeing people on the screen in pain. It's sadistic either way.

My favourite defense of movies in The New Sadism (favourite, as in the stupidest) is common among IMDb message board users. "If you don't like it, don't watch it."

Great. And if I don't like that there's a war in Iraq, the solution is that I don't watch the news.

Another common response on The New Sadism's behalf is that society has always objected to horror movies, and this is no different.

This is compelling, but not really true.

Controversy, and in some cases outrage, has accompanied horror movies before. The difference is that the ones these proponents are talking about never had much popular cultural impact. Maybe that shouldn't make a difference, but it does.


1972's The Last House on the Left and its more exploitative 1977 retread I Spit on Your Grave played in drive-ins and seedy urban areas. They were niche films. Their appeal is precisely that they weren't in synch with the standards of dominant culture. They were a reaction to it. That's why those movies were important. They didn't fit the sanctioned template. They felt defiant, and that made them political.

Sure, there's a satiric element to Hostel. It's a cheeky/gruesome take on American perception of foreign cultures. But Hostel's popularity amongst the under 35 demographic means that it is part of dominant American culture. It no longer has a defiant value. Saw II counters what Dawn of the Dead and The Last House on the Left meant by pitching its extreme nature as something institutional and corrupt. That shit is so basic to me. The desire to see unorthodox cult movies infiltrate the ultramainstream is just insane.

The New Sadism isn't necessarily a curse. Though perhaps the most brutal entry in the subgenre, I thought Alexander Aja's remake of The Hills Have Eyes was terrific. It was imagined in vivid visual terms, its violence was never pacifying, and it had moral and social context. Aja really knows what he's doing, and that's a crucial difference. Those who doubt he's the most talented new horror director need to look at this thing again.

Otherwise, hey, Hostel Part II opens tomorrow.

I've said all this as somebody who cares about the horror genre enough to believe it's worth more. When you're yelling "Awesome!" at a guy cutting off his own foot in Saw, what exactly are you rebelling against?

WRONG!, Parts I and II

Every time I'm at the multiplex these days, I get an uneasy feeling. I wasn't sure why at first, but I've since discovered that the culprit is the poster for the new Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up.

It looks pretty benign at first. But as the great philosopher Kevin Spacey once taught us, look closer. See it now. Read the tagline. This movie is assuming that I'm a woman.

Ideally, this shouldn't be a problem. The film theorist Laura Mulvey has reasoned that it is always unquestioningly assumed that a movie's audience is male. So maybe it's a breakthrough whenever a poster decides to target the overlooked remaining 51% of the population.

Except, it's not that simple either. Not only is Knocked Up assuming I'm female, it presumes I'm the kind of female who would never give Seth Rogan the time of day. Despite not really relating to Rogan in any overwhelming way, my oversensitive empathetic side took over. I had to voice my unreasonable complaint on the IMDb message boards... as a character who isn't myself, of course.

BOYCOTT!! - Offensive Poster!

The poster for the new movie KNOCKED UP asks the question, “What if this guy got you pregnant?” Below the question is a picture of the star Seth Rogan’s face.

I am offended by this for 2 reasons.

1) It is assuming that I am a woman.

And 2) I look exactly like the guy on this poster.

This is very frustrating since it gives the general public the impression that I have not laid pipe plenty of times.

Now, I don’t look exactly like Seth Rogan does normally. I saw him in the movie DONNIE DARKO, and he did not look totally like me there. But on this poster, where he strikes the Morgan Spurlock-minus-fries-in-his-mouth pose, well, that DOES look like me. I have the same golden curly hair, halfway-bug-eyed look, confused eyebrow pose, mouth, and other less descript general facial characteristics, although I just shaved. My friends make fun of me every time we walk past this stupid poster to get a latenight milkshake. Every time we walk by a fine looking lady, someone in my crew will say, “Hey, what if Gord got you pregnant?” Last night, I even punched my buddy Dave for carrying on with this $&!#.

I want to be very clear on this: Just because I look like that guy on the poster doesn’t mean that girls don’t want to have sex with me. I have given the beef injection to women who are prettier than Katherine Heigl.

There was a promo for this movie before THE INVISIBLE, talking to its stars. When Ms. Heigl came on she said that the premise is every girl’s nightmare. That’s fatuous! I know girls like Ms. Heigl and they only want guys who look like Mark Paul Gosseler, so what could she even know about what it means to be another satisfied customer!?



Frankly, I have had something against this chick ever since I saw her on Leno promoting the Gerard Depardieu epic MY FATHER THE HERO, where she said that she likes to toilet paper peoples’ houses on Halloween. Somebody should let her know that someone has to clean that $&!# up!

In conclusion, please boycott this movie! It is propaganda telling people not to have sex with me.

Gord


Now, in reality I don't look anything like Seth Rogan. I'm really a very masculine amalgam of the more flattering physical qualities held by Keanu Reeves, Chris Cornell, Anna Kournikova and The Rock. For all I know, Knocked Up could be great (I haven't seen it yet.) It's just that the motivation behind this ad is very clear, and fairly unimaginative. Knocked Up is attempting to market itself to a female audience who wouldn't typically go for a fraternal ribald sex comedy--the kind of cross-over effort the Farrelly Brothers achieved in There's Something About Mary.

















But mostly, I just have the need to point out that THIS POSTER IS WRONG. By addressing its reader, even if its question is rhetorical, it is mildly discomforting. I've seen Minority Report; I know it's a bad future when ads start talking to me. And by misguessing my sex, I have an urge to pretend I'm insulted.

************

There's a new reality show on Fox this summer called On the Lot. It's basically American Idol with aspiring directors competing for a film deal. This marks a crucial difference with the other show for one reason. Beyond the monetary potential, the appeal of being the next American Idol is the possibility of a multitude of complete strangers masturbating to the idea of you. Filmmakers are less sexually lusted over than singers, but movies themselves are pure sex. That means that the people on On the Lot are in love with the idea of people getting off on their product rather than on them themselves.

That's really everything you'll ever need to know about movies. But I'll keep going anyway.

We feel (provided we possess a moral base) more comfortable judging the worth of movies than the worth of entertainers. This is because movies are products and not people, so any insult that comes back to a person is indirect. Or the blame is at least partitioned among a group of people. This is why when the judges on On the Lot don't like a movie, they always point out that the director is still talented without sounding like they're lying. A bad movie is just one instance of bad sex. Everyone feels entitled to say so, yet many haven't really investigated that opinion. More often critics just rely on cliches. On the Lot is proof of this.

On the second episode to air, judge Brett Ratner (director of the Rush Hour movies and X Men: The Final Stand) dismissed a filmmaker's one minute short because its use of text on the screen was too arty. Ratner said it was "style over substance." My friend pointed out that this text complaint means Ratner would likely hate my own movie Later That Stevening.

Curious as to how the consensus-defining Internet was reacting to Ratner's criticism, I did a combined google search on the terms "brett ratner" and "style over substance". Instead of getting anything related to the show, I ended up with dozens of links to reviews accusing Ratner's own movies of their style over substance.

This would be a poetic justice, except how is it even possible? How much discernable style do Ratner's movies possess? And how is it overwhelming the substance? Isn't the whole point of getting Brett Ratner to direct a movie that it isn't going to be personalized?

Saying that a movie is style over substance is a bizarre complaint anyway. I can't think of many movie-smart people I've ever heard say this. Interpreting style reveals substance. The two are connected most of the time. In cases where they aren't entirely, the issue of the "style over substance" charge is really just that the movie doesn't contain adequate substance. So the style is a virtue. If you take the style away too, you're not left with much. Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, for example, is a letdown thematically and conceptually. But it's a gorgeous movie. Every frame looks like a painting. The filmmaking style isn't a detriment, it's the major thing the movie has going for it.

THE "STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE" STYLE MOVIE REVIEWERS ARE WRONG! In my opinion.

Wearing Movies Like Prada

So last night I'm sitting in a gourmet hamburger restaurant on Hollywood Blvd. thinking hard about the usual LA concerns--money, networking, my abs--when a small posse walks in. Beyond the nobodies that make up 5/7 of that group is Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman.

"Excuse me," Kimmel says approaching my table. "Have I seen you in anything?"

"Yes, I get that a lot," I reply, trying to sound as polite as I can.

"Grindhouse, right?. You're Freddy Rodriguez."

As Rodriguez has stolen my beard style and haircut, yet looks a whole foot shorter than me, I find this vaguely insulting.

"No. I'm not Freddy Rodriguez."

"Are you sure? From Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez's half of Grindhouse. Oh man, it's great. You need to see it."

On a sociological level, what's most interesting about this exchange (which may or may not have transpired exactly as documented) is the way Kimmel made no effort to conceal his love of Planet Terror. He wanted me to know he loved it. People try to shape their image through telling people what movies they love.

It's that whole thing about checking out your girlfriend's CD collection before judging whether she's worth your time. Except that music purchases are less reliable. Just because I took a chance on buying something doesn't mean I like it. It doesn't compare to the utility of including 35 titles on my MySpace top movies listing.

It's not worth anything to like a movie if others don't know how cool that makes you. That's why people wouldn't stop telling me how great they thought Little Miss Sunshine was. It's a sensibility that says, "Not only is this movie off the beaten path of my viewing habits, it defines me."

This is one of the reasons I don't like arguing movies with people I don't know. Beloved films become so tied in to one's identity that it's like arguing religion. People like what they like. I found The Royal Tenenbaums shrill and precious, but when I debated its merits with a friend it was like convincing him he was worshipping a false god.

Here's a true story: A couple weeks ago I was on a roadtrip with a bigtime filmmaker, his girlfriend, and a British guy who unforgiveably tried to cockblock me later that afternoon, but failed, so I can't be too upset.

Anyway, we have the radio on, and some sleazy film journalist is interviewing the director of a popular new English take on American buddy-action films. The interviewer comments that he thinks it was funny that the police force in said movie is called NWA--based of course on the trend setting gangsta rap unit.

"Yeah," the director responds. "I wanted to have a scene where somebody says "F-the Police", but they already used that joke in [$30 million-grossing biker movie that the director sitting in the car directed]."

"Holy shit!," the car passengers exclaim in near unison. This guy knows his modern B-movie history.

"Now we're getting into the classics," the snide interviewer says.

"[$30 million-grossing biker movie] is one of the greatest bad movies ever," clarifies the English director.

Now, I get a clear impression that this unnamed director is a fan of this unnamed movie. (Both are unnamed because as a reader of this blog, I like to keep you working hard for my insightful rewards.) Yet he's still hiding under the veil that this movie is ultimately a guilty pleasure.

Funny thing about people who qualify some movies as guilty pleasures: You can't trust them.

"Guilty pleasure" is one of the most overused terms in the popular film lexicon. Like "The worst movie ever made," which I suppose is the opposite of "The worst movie ever not made." It's a free ticket to snobbery. What kind of hypersensitive fool would feel guilt for liking a movie? It goes back to the film as fashion issue: Movies as identity projection.

"Well, I have a guilty pleasure," British cockblocker adds to our debate. "Troy. As a kid I always liked those kind of sweeping epics, which is what this movie reminded me of."

"That isn't a guilty pleasure," filmmaker counters.

"It's MY guilty pleasure."

"Why are you guilty about liking Troy?," I ask.

"Because it isn't very good."

"So what?"

The thing is, if a Hollywood movie gives you "pleasure" it probably isn't worth feeling guilty about. And in most cases, people who call these films guilty pleasures are just trying to disassociate themselves from the way they look by liking them. It's a way of kowtowing to society's standards of what's good and what's bad.

If you're willing to tell people you barely know that it's a guilty pleasure, it isn't a real guilty pleasure. It's not like saying you fuck sheep or fantasize about eating shit off Scarlett Johansson's chest.

"Well, I have a real guilty pleasure this time," British, basically good-natured, guy qualifies. "The movie Dune."






I'm not sure when we became so self-conscious about how movies look on us. I have absolute faith in my tastes in movies. Afterall, they're mine. But I also won't deny that I've seen Idle Hands and Not Another Teen Movie probably a combined dozen times.




The worst instances of guilty pleasure discussions come when people try to show how absolutely superior their taste is by condescending to a universally lauded film as something beneath them. Example: "I only watch Fellini and Antonioni films, but when I just want to relax, Casablanca will do... you know, as a guilty pleasure."

What's interesting is that the fashion statement aspect of movies has reached a stage where movies are now consciously defining their viewers.

By the mid 90s there was a surge of action films with interchangeable, but no-nonsense titles like Maximum Risk, Sudden Impact, Executive Decision. Those films sound like brute cologne. And there was a market for that stuff that lasted about 5 years.

But the funniest instances are with recent Women's Films. There has not been a more expertly titled movie in the past year than Because I Said So--the mother/daughter Diane Keaton/Mandy Moore Thing. I don't even know what that title has to do with the movie (and I've seen the thing), but it speaks very specifically to a female audience. Something's Gotta Give has a title that falls into the same camp of comfort films for women who can't get the respect they want from men. Soon we'll be seeing You Promised to Call, I Told You Already, and the urban equivalent Oh No You Didn't.