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I just watched The Deaths of Ian Stone.  But I’m going to have to back up a bit, at least once.

I have an annual project of sorts: to take a field of which I know nothing and find initially off-putting and try to immerse myself therein to try to “see it from the inside” and discern the figures of merit that aficionados appreciate.  Some Christians use a metaphor of stained glass windows to explain Christianity itself: you can see a stained glass window from the outside, they say, but you only really see it from the inside, and it is a powerful image (for the record, I spent 18 years seeing it from the inside, thank you very much, and I’ll still pass on it.  But that’s been covered in more and bitterer depth on this site before.)  But it’s a useful image, and I’ll appropriate: I want to see the sun shining through from within.

So, a couple of years ago my project was “horror movies”.  Some of my annual projects I am happy to fold up and tuck away after the year is over (they usually run summer-to-summer.)  I don’t feel the need to listen to “gangsta” rap any longer, for instance.  Some stick with me: I’m now a huge football (read: soccer) nut after a year of immersion, and I really now enjoy horror movies.

Like many (initially) difficult genres, horror movies rely very heavily on conventions and tropes.  They are, even if they are not self-consciously acting it out (as in the Scream franchise, for instance) addressing everything that’s come before.  And the moments one remembers — at least that I remember — from horror movies are the scenes in which the tropes are upended.  A (sonic) sting is just not scary — it works on me less than 4% of the time, I would estimate — but when something takes me really by surprise, as does one moment in the first Final Destination and three in the (fantastic and underrated) quasi-UK-government-funded Creep, the impact (ha) is breathtaking (ha).  But they are less meaningful and impacting if one isn’t completely familiar with what exactly is being upended.

I’m going to dwell on the last two movies I mentioned.  Final Destination is “For the love of God Montresor” fun-scary.  Creep is “Man’s Inhumanity to Man makes countless thousands mourn” egads-scary — even more so than Creep, The Wicker Man (fuck Nick Cage, I’m talking about the real The Wicker Man) epitomizes this.  But — and this is utterly baffling — no one seems to recognize that these are different genres.  I remember when I was a Netflix early-adopter.  These days their recommendations are almost comically precise; I was, for instance, offered “More dark Showtime TV series” after I had queued Dexter.  But in Netflix 1.0 days, I’d get things like “Other things you might like in foreign.”  WTF?  I like a movie in a different language, and therefore would like every movie in a different language?  And the horror cross-indexing — to this day, as far as I can tell — jumps this dichotomized genre.  Or should I say multi-somethinged genre now?  Two other genres are lumped in: the “torture porn” of Hostel and its ilk (I avoid those on principle) — and “Extreme Horror”.

What is “Extreme Horror”?  I wondered that, too.  One likely place to find out seemed Greencine, a Netflix clone that knows it cannot compete on level ground, so fills two niche markets that Netflix ignores: XXX films and “Extreme Horror”.  I didn’t really have any desire to see any (the full cut of Ôdishon was quite enough for me, thanks) but I was really curious what sort of things were in this realm.  I read some of the plot descriptions, and one — I really wish I were making this up for emphasis — was a Freedom of Information Act-retrieved amateur videotape of an actual motherfucking murder spree.  What the fucking hell?!  This is not horror.  Or, if it is, this is horror, and the cinematic efforts need to give up the pretense of claiming that title.  I didn’t see it — never would — but my pulserate has doubled just writing this paragraph.  What is wrong with some people?  This is like, to modify someone else’s joke, finding Jeffrey Dahmer’s diaries in the cookbook section at Borders.

Calm.  Deep breath.  Let it out slowly.

So, The Deaths of Ian Stone.  It’s the “Montresor” fun-scary.  It was produced by the late (and terribly mourned) Stan Winston, and therefore (I think the causality is justified) featured impeccable special effects.  This is relevant because: it was an After Dark Horrorfest selection from the festival’s second year.

Aside about this festival: the first year of this festival, showcasing indie and low-budget horror flicks, some by first-time filmmakers, was extremely hyped.  I didn’t go see them in the theaters, but I have seen all (of the canonical eight) from the first year on DVD, and they’re all fun-scary.  I had by the time the second year of the festival, in fact.  I bought in and was going to see all eight in the festival theater.  And the first film I saw was Borderland, a hideous, brutal, and fantastically made based-on-a-true-story tale about cults, kidnapping, and murder in Mexico.  It would not be sacrilege (ha) to name this as a worthy successor to The Wicker Man — in fact, it upped the stakes by putting three religious perspectives into the pileup, and it’s really based on a true story, not just sold as such for increased disturbance power.  It is a really, really great movie, and disturbing as fuck-all (my pulse is racing again.)  And it is profoundly ensconced in the egads-scary realm.  As I said, it was the first of the crop I saw, and I didn’t see any of the rest in the theater.  I said to myself that the festival had jumped genres — yes, not sub-genres — and if I were to see the rest of the films, I would be advised to do so in my own home with a remote control and a lightswitch.  (It turns out, however, that Borderland is the odd one of the lot, and the rest are of the safer genre, with everyone commenting on how disturbing this one film is.)

The Deaths of Ian Stone.  It’s not a great movie, and some things are really lousy, like the slate-flat dialogue audio (the special sound effects editing is much better.)  It relies far too heavily on exposition, even in this exposition-saturated genre, for instance.  But it has a subtle commentary that being a heroin user subjects the people one loves to a real-life horror movie.  This could have been explored more, and the trite ending doesn’t pay this theme off, but really, it’s quite acceptable for the genre, and most of what I would expect from the After Dark festival.  It also, in second billing, has Jaime Murray.

If you don’t want to delve into fetishes, here is a good place to stop reading this post.

Jaime Murray was in season 2 of Dexter, and as it happens, there is already a picture of her on the site, and may be deserving of another (hold on, I’m going to go check IMDB for her birth year.  1977 — just six or seven months out of placement in “Passing the Torch”.)

Jaime Murray is one of those people who doesn’t come off well in photo stills — she has a weird jaw thing going on, and her face is a bit weird — but she has a particular carriage, the sort of sexuality in which one kind of oozes from room to room rather than walks.  In the two roles I’ve seen her in, she is preternaturally femme toxiques (not a real term).  She is cadaver-pale, raven-haired, waify with improbable strategic fat deposits.  She’s willing to be naked on screen.  And she plays in those two roles such crazy characters that I will have great difficulty seeing her in anything else.

For several years — from when I left high school for college until, say, yesterday — having these features might have been a drawback in Hollywood.  But — speculating on the causality — Twilight, True Blood, and to a lesser extent the Underworld movies, have put vampiric women back in the limelight.  And she is fantastic in “For the love of God Montresor” horror (the fun kind).  In fact, she is an archetypical Poe character (that’s what the “Montresor” bit is referencing).  Poe had a “thing” about women like this — walking corpses — and he seemed to even prefer them as actual corpses, in a borderline-necrophiliac-but-mild-enough-that-you-still-get-a-postage-stamp kind of way.

The goth/corpse bit of 1995ish has come full circle, it appears: but I have wondered if any of it is to blame on CSI.  There is something disturbing about CSI.  It’s popular television, so they want hot women.  It’s a dark (if at times somewhat inept) series, though, so there are corpses.  Apparently someone at CBS said, “I know, we can have over-sexualized hot corpses!”  Poe would be pleased, and I’ve privately wondered how many necrophilic stirrings it has caused in viewers, in marketing and mainstreaming this sort of thing.

Second chance to back out.

OK, so: the walking-corpse waify-crazy bit really works for me.  It worked for me in Underworld, and it certainly works for me in the Murray roles.  She really is ideal for this sort of thing.  Someone (ahem) might suggest that she’s the sort of woman you wouldn’t especially mind cutting your throat in your sleep, as long as she did it slowly and nude.

Walking corpses, fictionally-actual corpses — mainstreamed now.  But to turn this post back in a circle: at least it hasn’t looped to real-actual corpses, in the mold of the discussed “extreme horror” film.  If it did, we’d have a merger of sex and murder — that’s “snuff”, right?  What is wrong with some people?

We can be sure of one thing, however: if that ever comes to pass — if it, against all reason and hope, becomes mainstream — it may be a lot of things.  But it won’t be horror.

Like many people, I was wowed by the realspace titles in Fincher’s Panic Room.  I began actively watchig for them in this AskMeFi post of a few months ago, which traces them back to North by Northwest.  I’ve become relatively accustomed to them, so that I was startled when this establishing shot (or whatever they’re called) turned out to be not in realspace:

I was also startled that the software to do this automatically came out after bullet time became pervasive.  Commentary on the technique: “Something’s coming,” it seems to say. “And it ain’t gonna be fun.”  Except it was.

By the way, yes, it is extremely marvelous to be able to hit the ’s’ key and have a full-resolution movie-file/DVD screeshot written to disk.  Except, um, I’m not sure those DVDs are out yet — so I should note I got the screenshot from my good friend SWIM.

Since this incarnation of bachelorhood, I have felt not so much bachelor as vaguely pathetic.  But tonight, I am relaxing with horror DVDs and TV dinners, watching with headphones on a computer monitor I needn’t share, with a drink, on the sofa.  All I need now is to loosen my belt and belch — that, and pretend I’m drinking Pabst and not a mimosa.

From a survey site:

In order to ensure quality survey results, our system has built-in checks that evaluate the quality of responses and the length of time our panelists take to respond to a survey.  The lack of quality and/or short response times suggest that you have not read the questions thoroughly enough to provide thoughtful responses.  Thus, we regret to inform you that your participation in this study is no longer necessary.

I guess I’ll pretend to be less skilled at thought and keyboarding if I want my cookie next time.

Passing the Torch — contributions still courted.  Advertisers, heads-up: the page gets shloads of traffic.

So, yeah, I’m watching the Transformers movie.  I pirated it.  I’ve been watching it in slices.

And holy cow is it bad.  Like deeply, horribly, eternally bad.  Really really bad.  After the second scene I said, “Damn, this is Michael Bay, isn’t it?”  He’s one of those directors who leaves his stamp on a film, and not in a good way.

Damn.

Why am I watching?  I dunno.  Has something to do with what Ptolemy called “Explosions & hot chicks & shit.”  I figure if it’s good enough for Ptolemy, it’s good enough for me.  I’m not eager to argue with classical mathematicians.

Man.  I’m watching about ten minutes at a go.  And I start to think to myself, “Oh, to be a fly on the wall of Hasbro!”  Presumably it went something like this:

“Hey, how ’bout cars and trucks and helicopters that turn into robots?  Down in Tech, they’ve just figured out how to do the Rubik’s Cube trick on non-cubic objects.”

“Yes, but we need a way to market it.”

“A cartoon is always good.”

“What, a cartoon about cheap plastic toys that turn into other cheap plastic toys?”

“Yeah.  My idea is something something space cubes something something aliens something something racing stripes something something the end of the world.”

“Oh, that’s quite good, isn’t it?”

“You realize I just said something something repeatedly and didn’t offer any actual ideas, right?”

“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure no one will notice.  Start the assembly lines!”

And thus it was.  Before any of the stars were born, thus it was.  But hey, they reference eBay in the film.  Must be cool, hot and trendy then.

I wish USA Network would hurry up and air The 40-Year-Old Virgin already.

Surprised?  Let me clarify.  I don’t plan to watch it when it airs.  But I watch a lot of USA Network, and they have had the same thirty second promo for this film debut for a couple weeks, and they always start it right after the fade to black of my shows’ commercial breaks.  I don’t even get a fair chance to skip them.  Awfully sneaky.

Anyway, God, get it over with, USA, so I can start watch your next crappy in-house promo.

(Wow, USA Network’s ad campaign worked, didn’t it?  They successfully, and against my will, infected me with this “New movie on USA coming” meme.  It annoyed me so much, I turned around and passed it on to thousands.  Hmmm.)

I have six credits at Swap-A-DVD.  What’s worth owning rather than just queuing?  What am I going to get from Netflix and say, “Man, I should have just bought this to start with”?

Intentionally funny:  Elephant soup recipe, which calls for 1 medium elephant, 500 gallons of boiling water, and onions and potatoes by the bushel.  It lists as serving 3800 people, but if more guests show up than expected, you can add 2 chopped rabbits.

Why it’s funny:  If you’re cooking a whole elephant, two rabbits aren’t going to make a bit of difference, are they?  They’ll serve an additional 4 people, maybe.  That’s lost in the noise and overkill of the elephant recipe.

OK, that was pretty basic.  Let’s move on to The Matrix.

Unintentionally Funny:  Morpheus: The human generates more bio-electricity than 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat.  Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need.

Why it’s funny:  If you have fusion power, you don’t really need human body heat, do you?  Just add an extra teaspoonful of water and replace all of humanity.

OK, moving right along.

Pathetically unfunny:  The MPAA rating of the David Fincher film Zodiac, which reads “Rated R for some strong killings, language, drug material and brief sexual images.”

Why it’s pathetically unfunny, and talks about how screwed up our country’s priorities are:  Shouldn’t it just need to stop at strong killings?  Is there really a parent out there who would say, “Oh, graphic images of murder?  That’s fine, as long as there’s no profanity or brief images of clothed people having sex!”  Are these four criteria really of comparable weight?  Depicting bound people being stabbed multiple times is similar enough to the “f” word to list them in the same sentence?  Isn’t all the non-killing stuff lost in the overkill of the murders?

Check out the cast list for this upcoming film.

SwapaDVD is now online, to complement PaperBackSwap, SwapaCD, and SwapaGoat (Maaaa!).

Please use those links to sign up, they’ll help me.

At my last job, several years ago, we were sitting around at lunch discussing the topic of sampling in music.  I cited a few instances I could think of, including the famous monologue from the film Cool Hand Luke being sampled in rock band Guns ‘n’ Roses’ Civil War.

One of my colleagues scoffed and said, “I don’t expect many Guns ‘n’ Roses fans have seen Cool Hand Luke!”

I was about to indignantly reply, “Hey, I like Guns ‘n’ Roses!”  But I stopped myself.  There’s an obvious comeback: “And have you seen Cool Hand Luke?”  I hadn’t, so I kept my mouth shut.

I still don’t grok why being a GnR fan would negatively correlate with having seen the film.  But my not having seen it is probably inexcusable.  So I’ll repair that deficiency soon, and do a moviemath entry on it.

OK, Joel Schumacher and I are done.  I thought we were done after 8MM, then I bought Veronica Guerin (which I didn’t know he directed, and I liked it, Blanchett redeeming it as always), but now I saw The Number 23, which has turned me into a box-reader.  Seriously.  He can fuck off.  His upcoming films are entitled Town Creek, 1:30 Train, and The Crowded Room.

You can now see my Recently Viewed Films in addition to my Recently Read Books.  I attempt to assign an astral scalar value to each.

Ed Vedder’s soundtrack for the film Into the Wild is very, very good, and entirely worth buying even if only for the song Long Nights.

Chad Donella is really a fine actor of my generation.  He, unfortunately, has not gotten a chance to really shine in a perfect role yet, but the performances I have witnessed have all been fantastic.

He was in the X-Files episode “Hungry”, playing a brain-eating mutant.  Just try to pull off that role in a heartwarming way, but he did it.  And then there’s Taco Bell.  Several years ago Taco Bell filmed a commercial with him overjoyed to be stuffing his face with a taco.  We’ll likely be deluged with the commercial again when the X Games start showing in a few weeks.

Thing is, he filmed the taco commercial after the X-Files episode, as far as I know.  And the X-Files episode has a scene where he compulsively and with great gusto sucks human brain matter off his fingers.  Fictionally, of course.  I hope.  Same expression of glee as in the Taco spot.

So what, did some ad executive see his brain-sucking and think, “That’s the guy for us!  Let’s have him dig into our tacos!”  Did they have an open call for the commercial, or did someone call his agent and say, “Hey, send the brain-sucker over to chomp our tacos!”  Would be interesting to find out.  Probably.

There was an interesting-looking martial arts movie that was advertised in the American theaters last summer, I believe, with wire-fu and special effects galore.  Anybody have a memory of the name?

The Nostalgia Factory.  Buy original movie posters and press kits for surprisingly little money and with low shipping charges.  Also, the official provider of poster images to IMDB.

Irène Jacob turned 40 on Saturday.  Famke Janssen is 40, too.  Lena Olin is 51.  All the hottest actresses in Hollywood are over 40 now.

No big deal?  You must not mind getting old as much as I do.  Our fantasy women get older as we get older.  Bummer.

So maybe it’s time for a new generation.  Christina Hendricks, A.J. Cook, Morena Baccarin, Michelle Williams (thinking of the Oscars here), and Keira Knightley are all ‘78ers or later.  Long may they live, and never get older than I.

Add contributions as you will to the comments page.

Err … nice.  I hope the system’s just temporarily offline.

I’m not sure if Steven Seagal ever bothered to jump the shark or whether he was just born with a school between him and the mainstream public, but he’s still jumping something.  As his physical fitness declines and he relies more and more on slow-motion to hide his slow reactions, he’s portraying ever more benign characters forced into violence by ever more tragic circumstances.  I mean, it used to be sufficient for him to be an EPA agent forced to punch and kick by ruthless big-business profiteers.  Then, it escalated.  He had to be a Buddhist recluse forced to punch and kick when his daughter is kidnapped.  I don’t know where he can really go from here.  I mean, what, maybe a guy who nurses sick birds back to health at a wildlife refuge forced to punch and kick by a gang of thugs selling little orphan girls as sex slaves?  I mean, maybe I could write that up this weekend and sell it.  “Birdman rescues vestal orphans.”  It could fly.

(Hold on, gotta take this.  Hi.  Yeah.  No, I hadn’t heard.  Really?  Really?  Oh.  OK then.)

Hi, I’m back.  Umm … seems he’s got that one covered.  Anyone else with a spec script?  I’m out of ideas.

My brother in law has written a review of the Silent Hill movie on his LiveJournal, but I don’t have a LJ account and I’m still working on getting OpenID running on this site, so I’ll post here. Maybe he’ll link back to me.  My review is as someone totally unfamiliar with the video game.

Great: Color timing, cinematography, Pyramid Head, Sean Bean, Jodelle Ferland, the cockroaches, certain in-camera shots (such as the camera descending to frame a character through a broken chair) and certain effects shots (such as the elevator descent).

Good: The score, Alice Krige, Deborah Unger, interior production design.

Bad: The legions of identical reveals of disfigured bodies, the fact that as a horror movie it failed to elevate my heartrate even once, exterior facades of main street, Laurie Holden.

Terrible: Radha Mitchell.

My rating: 7 out of 10.

Last year’s film Suspect Zero wasn’t that bad.  It gets a 5.7 at IMDB.  I gave it a 6.  Unlike my brother, I like to watch director’s commentaries. I almost always watch them, especially if I either loved or loathed the movie. If I’m just apathetic about it and can’t imagine sitting through it again, I might skip it. So I put in the commentary for the movie. I made it two and a half minutes in. I transcribed the beginning of it for you. Enjoy.

My name is Elias Merhige and I am the director of Suspect Zero.

I did not set out to make a serial killer genre film, I did not set out to make a film about serial killers, I set out to express something much more deep, about the nature of the unconscious and the nature of justice and the nature of how the human mind works. These opening titles demonstrate the synapses of Orion’s brain, as each neurological fiber of his brain screams out to find and hunt. Right out of the titles we pull out of a drainpipe off of some lonely, forgotten highway. We come out of the unconscious, out of the earth, out of the bowels of the earth, and what do we see? A lonely can, tossed aside. A baseball that’s been used; for how many games? A broken doll that was once loved. Where is its owner?

We come upon a grimy milk carton. The rain begins to wash away the grime. The dirt falls away and we see this adorable, innocent child. Her date of birth. She’s been missing. Where is she? Most people don’t know, but since 1972, that this close to ninety thousand people: adults, women, men, children, that are all missing [sic].  Their bodies unaccounted for, their whereabouts unaccounted for.  Where are they?  That’s a fact, that’s not a fiction.

I was watching The Two Towers with my brother. It came to the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and all the young children were being ushered into caves while the men and older boys were being armed.

“I care about the kids as much as the next guy,” I said, “but surely even a seven year old boy or girl could ferry arrows to the front lines?”

“We don’t talk about the arrows!” said my brother.

The End of Late Fees!  Big advertising blitz!  Rejoicing in the streets!  All hail!

So I asked the young woman at the counter what the details of this are.

Joshua: Could you tell me the details of the new program?
Employee: You still have a due date, but you have seven days from the due date to bring it back.
Joshua: And then what?
Employee: And then we sell it to you automatically, and it’s yours to keep.
Joshua: You what?
Employee: We charge you for the video, and you don’t have to bring it back.
Joshua: That’s pretty sneaky.
Employee: You have 30 days from when we charge you to return it for credit.

But hey, that’s not a late fee, I guess.

I almost want to let them do that to me once so that I can make a tidy profit when the inevitable class action lawsuit goes through.

Oh, and the “refund” you get?  “You will be charged a restocking fee plus applicable taxes.” Why? “BLOCKBUSTER incurs processing, administrative and other costs when we have to convert rental product to a sale, as well as when you return the product after that sale. The restocking fee helps to cover that cost.” Poor buggers. You almost feel sorry for them, don’t you? Pitiful bastards with their administrative costs when the big mean customer makes them take a video back.

I almost left my purchases sitting on the counter and walked out, but I didn’t want to be confrontational with the employee who, despite complicity by having no intentions of informing me of the new policy without my asking, couldn’t seem to care less. And I really wanted to see Life of Brian tonight.  But I had no idea how mad I’d end up.

The address, if you want to cut up your card and mail it with a nasty letter, is

Blockbuster Inc.

1201 Elm Street

Dallas, TX 75270

This company is so going to tank.  Divest now.

I saw Bowling for Columbine for the first time today. It’s in my top ten or twenty favorite films of all time. Michael Moore is a big guy, but his balls are outsized even for his frame. The portion where he stands up to Charlton Heston was really uncomfortable. I have no idea how he did it.

Tom Mauser is my new personal hero.

I watched Outfoxed today. Aargh. What a frustrating movie. It left me in a sour mood for the rest of the day. I have, however, come to the conclusion that Bill O’Reilly either needs to be somewhere where he can be taken care of and receive regular shots, or he needs to be somewhere where he can be taken care of and shot regularly.

Don Hewitt, of whom I’m no great fan, is retiring from 60 Minutes, of which I’m also no great fan.  I heard him on NPR yesterday talking in a highly opinionated fashion about the propensity of Americans to change the channel repeatedly and essentially “walk out” of the program; he compared the remote to “a gun”. He posed the following question: how many feature films have you walked out of in the theater? He claimed that no one would be able to name five. This is supposed to prove that we have “nothing invested” in television programs, compared to movies.

Well, I’ve walked out of four films, and I’ve fallen asleep in three others (post-childhood.) I’m also a third his age. Extrapolate at will. I have a feeling others have comparable statistics. So, if you’re inclined, post at the board.

OK, if you’re curious: I walked out of:

1. Trespass (1992, 5.9 stars at IMDB),
2. Hard Target (1993, 5.3 stars,  stars),
3. Natural Born Killers (1994, 6.6 stars), and
4. Starship Troopers (1997, 6.6 stars)

I fell asleep during:

1. The Ghost and the Darkness (1996, 6.4 stars),
2. The Core (2003, 5.5 stars), and
3. Cavale, aka On The Run, aka Trilogy:One (2002, 6.8 stars)

I tend to forget, with how much gore is permitted in R-rated films these days, how much more gory they can get when they are unrated.  Good grief.

The San Gabriel Valley in Perspective, or, Why You Shouldn’t Feel Sorry for How Much the Wedding in Father of the Bride Cost

Here is a comparison of median household incomes in the San Gabriel Valley, where I live:

Yes, that’s almost a factor of four range, and yes, San Marino (where Steve Martin and family live in Father of the Bride) is twice its nearest competitor.  All of these towns are are close enough to drive to

for a movie (not that San Marino has any theaters) or a meal (San Marino has exactly twelve restaurants, each located on one of only two streets.) To help visualize the towns, El Monte and Rosemead are pretty grimy, Alhambra is beginning to see a renaissance since the rebuilding of its downtown, Monrovia is fiercely small-town America and has some turn of the (last) century homes, South Pas and Arcadia have nice, big, new homes, Sierra Madre is a nice foothills community with a charming downtown, San Marino is clannish, conservative, and opulent, and the rest are fairly basic L.A. suburbs.

For comparison, Los Angeles proper (across its communities, including inner-city areas and the San Fernando Valley) has a median household income of $36,687, right near the bottom.