24 frames per second: new movie thread

[jebreject]

Yup.

[MollySophia]

I kind of wish there weren't any aliens. I was thinking Crystal Skull like.. A human skull. It had potential to be a lot better, I feel. That was the biggest issue for me, however. The rest? Tolerable.

[DCDave]

Yeah, I was surprised at how tolerable he was

OH HO HO HO.

[auto-da-fey]

Earlier this week Gaby and I went to a free preview screening of Troma's Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, with Lloyd Kaufman in the house for a Q&A. We showed up quite early, on the grounds that it was likely to be packed and we wanted to get in. Turns out my insular little world of trash-cinema obsessiveness lost sight of the real world in which no one over 14 cares about Troma anymore, because there could not have been more than 25 people altogether in attendance. The film itself was fun--bogged down by some lame musical numbers, but full of the feces and carnage one would expect. I actually learned something in the Q&A, too: the morbidly obese guy who always shows up in Troma movies is not actually co-founder Michael herz, as he's billed; that's a 20-year long running joke, apparently, the subtle nature of which put it over my head.

Hey Whit, I wanna take a class this summer and I think it's gonna be a film course on slasher films. Hope I can tap you for insights!

hey, my few insights are at your disposal! I would anticipate reading Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern horror Film in that course. It's a book I admire, though it does sometimes, as I recall, fall prey to that fallacy--maybe GI can name this?--of 1980s poststructuralism in which the auto-deconstruction that all texts have theoretically always-already undergone is somehow mistaken for latent radicalism on the part of the text. I never was keen on that approach--I remember nearly throwing Jane Gaines' awful Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism across a room when she suggested watching TV was thus the most radical thing one could do in the 80s--but actually, I think I'm grinding a tangential axe here. I like the Clover book.

[auto-da-fey]

I haven't seen too many new films last year unfortunately, not enough to make a proper top 10, but the ones I did see were really good actually. My list is based on Dutch release dates as it sometimes takes one or two years for films to arrive here.

1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu/Romania/2007)

I'm debating seeing 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days again. I can't shake it. Maybe once I do, it's time for a second go.

It looks like these are the only mentions this film has received here, but holy shit, it's been sitting in the pit of my stomach for a few days now. Beyond the sheer emotional level, I admired it tremendously--why are male European indie filmmakers like Mungiu and Lukas Moodysson so feminist when we in the U.S. get . . . Wes Anderson (who, to preclude an oft-repeated debate, I DO like, but who is not exactly smashing the patriarchy)

[jebreject]

I kind of wish there weren't any aliens. I was thinking Crystal Skull like.. A human skull. It had potential to be a lot better, I feel. That was the biggest issue for me, however. The rest? Tolerable.

I didn't mind the aliens! And anyone who spends even twenty seconds listening to Art Bell knows what the crystal skulls are all about!

[elpollodiablo]

You're talking about the retroactive imposition of modern progressive political or theoretical discourses onto a text, making it momentarily radical? Like claiming Austen's work as an example of nascent feminism? Doesn't that kind of veer toward questions of intent? Or is that part of the fallacy?

Also how does Adrienne Rich's "re-vision" fit into that?

Sorry for all the questions; I'm interested.


xpost

[auto-da-fey]

Doesn't that kind of veer toward questions of intent? Or is that part of the fallacy?

Yeah, I mean, my reading--and this isn't my field, so I don't claim expertise here by any means--is that lit scholars were savvy enough to operate in a post-death-of-the-author framework and thus technically avoid the intentional fallacy--no one (I think, or at least hope) was making claims about Austen herself--but that they basically smuggled intent in anyway by just displacing it to "the text." Above and beyond that, though, there also seemed to be a pervasive tendency to align the radical deconstruction that every text has already undergone with radical politics in just such a way that what were once "guilty pleasures"--L.A. Law, Madonna, romance novels, etc.--are now arbitrarily "subversive." I think that was my main gripe--not an original one, to be sure, but one that's too often unfairly dismissed as a knee-jerk, reactionary stance toward poststructuralism, which it need not be.

[auto-da-fey]

(also probably more relevant to cultural studies than comp lit or english proper)

[elpollodiablo]

Same difference, man.

[auto-da-fey]

I suppose. And because suffering through the grading of a huge pile of exams apparently makes me post-happy, I'd throw film studies into the pile. I'm consistently amazed at how frequently people who write about porn are so eager to distance themselves from the wreckage of the feminist anti-porn movement that they seem to take a facile, uncritical, implicitly pro-porn stance that really does no one any good.

[auto-da-fey]

Jesus, I'm not sure what my point was there. In other news, I saw hostel II a while back. It was bad, and cutting off a dick in the climax did not make it a feminist film, though I'm sure Eli Roth would address that issue with a smug, smarmy smirk on his face.

[elpollodiablo]

I thought the best critique of the whole Eli Roth school of filmmaking was Christopher Moltisanti's "Cleaver"

[Good Intentions]

that fallacy--maybe GI can name this?--of 1980s poststructuralism in which the auto-deconstruction that all texts have theoretically always-already undergone is somehow mistaken for latent radicalism on the part of the text.

It's just wishful thinking. This lottery ticket could be a winner, it would be good for this ticket to be a winner, so we'll say that this lottery ticket is a winner.

This particular species of fallacious thinking depends on ascribing motives, which is always troublesome because other people's thinking is more or less opaque to us. It picks one possible motivation out of all the others for some reason or the other, and says that that's the right one. Unlike a lottery ticket, you can't simply show the conclusion to be false, because you can't see into the minds of other people: it's like a lottery ticket for a draw that's eternally deferred. But the flawed reasoning is clear enough.

This has been your GI Critical Thinking Flash. For another such service, just look in a mirror and say my name three times.

[elpollodiablo]

Last time I did that I found a dead puppy in the toilet


In other news, Jumper wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Actually some of the teleportation fights were kinda cool! Greg, didn't you see this? 

[sassymcassface]

netflix has hellraiser streaming.
i'm so going to watch it tomorrow while peeing myself in fear :cool:

[kadiekatRN]

netflix has hellraiser streaming.
i'm so going to watch it tomorrow while peeing myself in fear :cool:

The first Hellraiser is pretty awesome. 

Fun fact: One X-mas Eve, my fiance, his mom, and I sat around and watched Hellraiser: Bloodline http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116514/  How festive!

[Greg Nog]

In other news, Jumper wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Actually some of the teleportation fights were kinda cool! Greg, didn't you see this? 

I did, but aside from a couple of the fight scenes, I kinda hated it.  I had thought the story was going to be a "With great power comes great responsibility" kind of plot, but instead it just seemed to be "Well uh yeah so I can teleport how about that."  Which might have been fun as a celebration of sociopathology, but there didn't seem to be any great pleasure taken in his superpower, either for good for for evil.  So I didn't feel super-invested in wanting either side to win, and it ended up being roughly as exciting as watching C-Span.

[sassymcassface]

netflix has hellraiser streaming.
i'm so going to watch it tomorrow while peeing myself in fear :cool:

The first Hellraiser is pretty awesome. 

Fun fact: One X-mas Eve, my fiance, his mom, and I sat around and watched Hellraiser: Bloodline http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116514/  How festive!

hellraiser is scary shit.
i'm such a girl about movies i could barely handle evil dead 2

[Bernard]

Huh? You suddenly grow ovaries when a movie comes on? That's really bizarre.

[slow west vultures]

just watched once for the first time. erin and finn and i came down to macon to spend a couple days with my folks, and they have the netflix thing, and i was very surprised to see that this was one of the movies they'd just been shipped. when it started, it was me, erin, dad, mom, and my grandmother watching. within an hour, it was just me. sweet movie, i thought. i'm glad they didn't flinch away from filming entire songs. that's where the magic was.

so you're family all walked away from it?  i thought it was a great movie.  i ended up watching the whole thing because my mom had rented it and i think she and my dad really liked it too.  i was hoping there was going to be a second half to the movie with the glenn hansard character trying to make it in london. 

[Babar]

want to see!

[girl]

I haven't seen too many new films last year unfortunately, not enough to make a proper top 10, but the ones I did see were really good actually. My list is based on Dutch release dates as it sometimes takes one or two years for films to arrive here.

1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu/Romania/2007)

I'm debating seeing 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days again. I can't shake it. Maybe once I do, it's time for a second go.

It looks like these are the only mentions this film has received here, but holy shit, it's been sitting in the pit of my stomach for a few days now. Beyond the sheer emotional level, I admired it tremendously--why are male European indie filmmakers like Mungiu and Lukas Moodysson so feminist when we in the U.S. get . . . Wes Anderson (who, to preclude an oft-repeated debate, I DO like, but who is not exactly smashing the patriarchy)

I've had it at home all week, but I just got around to watching it today. It was excellent.

[auto-da-fey]

Glad you agree. It would make a perfect double feature with Children Underground, the devastating documentary about street kids in Romania. I've been watching a lot of films lately, but this one won't get out of my head--for some reason, that penultimate scene where Otilia is out walking at night and the guy starts to follow her and you expect it to go in a certain direction but then it doesn't, just has a hold on me.

[auto-da-fey]

When I was in middle school I got this anthology called Cut! horror Writers on horror Film (I'm still cutting and pasting my h's, so no caps, alas), which had an essay on the 13 most disturbing films of all time (which included Cannibal holocaust, Last house on the Left, Men Behind the Sun, Bloodsucking Freaks, Ilsa, I Spit on Your Grave . . . I could probably recall the whole list with some effort, but it's the usual batch--oh yeah, Salo, of course!), and I naturally went on a mission to track them all down. In a Glass Cage took me the longest to find, but when I finally saw it, it did unnerve me a bit, what with the opening scene of a pedophile ex-Nazi photographing then beating to death a naked boy he has hanging in his basement.

Anyway, G wanted to see this film, for some reason, so we watched it last night. It was less disturbing this time around (maybe because I'm no longer in the age range of the boys who get erotically murdered in it?), but I still admired it as a bold feat of filmmaking. I actually have no idea why the grindhouse crowed has adopted what seems like a natural arthouse flick--had this come out in the mid-90s alongside the whole 'new queer cinema' thing it might have fit right in, but I guess in 1986 the sight of a Nazi-infused gay s/m relationship that culminates in the face-fucking of a dying old man who's been yanked out of his iron lung as he gasps for breath was apparently too much for some people.