Still, though, these five struck me as seminal when I first saw them.  All (huh) were directed by feature film directors, significant animators, or those who went on to direct feature films.  I believe this suggests something about the legitimacy of the art form.

In chronological order:

1984, Thriller by Michael Jackson
Director John Landis directed the films The Blues Brothers, Twilight Zone: The Movie, and the (excellent) Masters of Horror episode “Family”

1990, Vogue by Madonna
Director David Fincher directed the films Se7en, Fight Club, The Game, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

1994, Sabotage by Beastie Boys
Director Spike Jonze directed the films Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Where the Wild Things Are

1998, Do the Evolution by Pearl Jam
Directors were Todd McFarlane (the artist behind Spawn) and Kevin Altieri of Batman: The Animated Series

2009, Bad Romance by Lady Gaga
Director Francis Lawrence directed the film I Am Legend and has another in development

Here is the playlist link!

I would start at the one on the top, the Caliendo.

Let me know what you think.  I think they’re all worth watching and were the best among those I watched.  And let me know if I can do the YouTube linkage better.

For instance, I was being helped by someone at the concessions counter.  As he was filling my drink, I saw that he had a large, elaborate tattoo reading “Cynthia” on his right forearm.

“Is that ink still relevant?” I asked.

“”Technically’”, he responded, using finger quotes.  Then he looked down at his arm.  “Oh, you mean that one?  No.  She doesn’t exist.”

And I succeeded in not saying something like “You might want to think about settling down soon.  You’re going to run out of skin.”

Also, for the second time now, I was asked for spare change by a panhandler who was, at that moment, talking on a mobile phone.  “You might want to think about eliminating your data plan” is what sprung into my mind.  But instead I gave him two quarters.

Further, outside the theater, there were two young women.  One was screaming into a mobile phone: “I have so much in my future!  I have great things in my future!  I can do so much better than you!”  I was tempted to pretend to read a sign until she got off the phone and say “So … you’re single, then?”  But, no.  Didn’t. 

Finally, two (other) women were standing outside the theater trying to decide what to see.  One was perusing the titles and showtimes, and the other was … doing something else.  Not sure.  Looking at posters, I think.

The former said: “Do you want to see Hot Tub Machine or The Jonasses?”  The latter answered.  The former replied, “OK.  But I want to see that other movie at some point: L.A. Mission.”  For real.  I was dumbstruck.

Nothing sprung into my mind immediately, but it would probably have been something like “I see why you go to the movies instead of staying home to read a book.”  But that would be dickish even by my standards, and there is a fish/barrel threshold beyond which it’s not even fun.

In the post category, I, of course, am the asshole.

A … bit of a reasoning gap there.

Now, messing up their genome so that their offspring were not viable might work, if these modified insects were reintroduced each generation.  Breeding or engineering the flies to be stronger and sterile might work, if they could compete with normal males and make the latter starve — again given that this were repeated.  Or introducing a terminator gene so that offspring were sterile could be a good strategy.  All sorts of hand-waves work.  Just not this one.

[reference in title]

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I think it will be the case that people with email notifications will see the synopses in the clear, so I hope that doesn’t cause problems for those who want to see the films.  If it does on this first one, don’t read the snippets in the subsequent emails, instead visiting the site directly.

Horror movies are one of the most trope-drenched genres of art that exist.  There is nothing inherently wrong about this — impressionist symphonic music is too, for instance — but one will sometimes watch an entire film for one key moment in which conventions are upended.  And, of course, recognition requires that one is familiar with the conventions in the first place.

Horror films were an Immersion Project for me, and one that I stuck with after the year.  I’m a huge fanboy now.  But I think it would be funny to tabulate the occurrence of tropes in these films.  There are probably both false positives and false negatives in the list, but I expect their occurrence is less than 10% — which we’ll find out if another fanboy critiques my list.

The films are:

D: Dread
H: Hidden
LM: Lake Mungo
KT: Kill Theory
TF: The Final
TG: The Graves
TR: The Reeds
Z: Zombies of Mass Destruction

So, eight films, all these tropes, and $100 later, will I go to next year’s festival?  Hellz yeah.

I want to write longer reviews of these, but I’d like input on the reviews’ format.  More inside.

“Is there backstory I should know?”

“Do crazy Christians freak out about this?”

[On seeing Emma Watson appear onscreen:] “Oh, she’s going to be pretty when she grows up!  Wait, when did this come out?  Maybe she has grown up.”

“So, if I’ve counted right, that’s, like, the fourth racial stereotype they’ve presented.”

“This is dense storytelling.  They must be trying to be authentic to the long novels I’ve seen.”

The premise for the character of R2-D2 is of a robot that can understand spoken English perfectly but cannot generate it.  And the language in which he speaks to C3-PO seems woefully insufficient to communicate the complexity of the thoughts that are supposedly being transmitted, unless there is some weird tonal stuff going on that, like Mandarin, is completely inaudible to me.  (That was a joke.)  Even in the 1970s, I expect that tech-minded people would have been sophisticated enough to understand that they had this backwards.  But even that is comparing just a speech recognition program to a TTS.  The idea that a little robot can understand spoken language in an NLP way, with perfect comprehension, but no one could be bothered to give him a better synthesizer?  It’s like Noonian Soong getting everything perfect in an android except for skin tone.

Now, I can’t always tell certain Australian accents from South African accents, which I assume should be easy.  But that doesn’t annoy me.  The American bit does, because it sounds insulting: it is almost always a little too broad, a little too flat, a little too lifeless, and I’ll think, “Hey, we do not sound that bad.  Knock it off!”  Fortunately, incredibly patronizing accents (Kenneth Branaugh, Catherine Zeta-Jones, etc.) are not the norm.  But it will often severely detract from my enjoyment of a film.  It can be forgiven by making up a theoretical American accent, one so stylized (Hugo Weaving, Eddie Izzard) that it’s kind of just there — after all, Stallone is American — but when it’s supposed to be perfect, and it’s not.  Gah.

Within my lifetime, Mel Gibson and Nicole Kidman perfected theirs.  It’s clearly possible.  Yes, it does make me wince at how badly American actors could be butchering non-American accents.  But, come on.  Voice.  Training.  Please.

Just remember, when he’s parrying people, he’s actually saying “fuck you”, and remember that when he says “fuck you” to them, he’s actually saying “fuck you” to you, and remember that even though he just told you to go fuck yourself, the man’s got a rapier.  Or, in better words than mine, from his abduction fantasy:

I drifted higher and higher. I was convinced I was a part of the light. But I wasn’t. It was a portal of some sort and I was being sucked in.  It felt strange.  Unlike any sucking experience I’ve ever had.

Wikipedia has a “Snuff disambiguation” page.  This is frustrating for people who want nicotine and not to kill porn stars.

But aargh: I’m in a one-push excursion in Wikipedia now, both forking from that page, beginning on (respectively) “Snuff film” and “Snuff (tobacco)”.  Following link after link, pushing further into the bowels of Wikipedia with the plan to eventually pop (see stack) but never actually popping, because of the finite number of hours in one person’s life.

This has landed me outside of Wikipedia, into exploring “Antiques > Decorative Arts > Other” (where snuff boxes live on eBay), adding Tesis (7.6starswoot!) to my Netflix queue, and entirely forgetting how to monetize either.  Also, being reminded that Saddam Hussein was dead.

Sometimes I need to stop, realize that few people care, and admit that no one is paying me for blogging, despite my best efforts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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?

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

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.