First Full Trailer for Carrie Remake is Released

The first teaser for Kimberly Peirce‘s remake of Carrie, based off the Stephen King book hit with an appropriate creep factor and sense of dread…

And now, the full force of the re-imagining of the 1976  film directed by the talented Brian De Palma is unleashed, including shots of the famous ending which is getting a grand-scale makeover more in line with Stephen King’s original vision. For this take, Chloe Grace Moretz will be taking on the eponymous role of Carrie which was originally played by Sissy Spacek and Julianne Moore will play Margaret White, Carrie’s religious fanatic mother, whose role was originally played by Piper Laurie (who played Catherine Martel in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks).

I am personally quite pleased with the choice of director. Kimberly Pierce directed the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry which starred Hillary Swank as a transgendered woman who was struggling against ostracism and the risks she faces for just being who she is. She was also involved in the 2005 film, This Film is Not Yet Rated, which looked at the power the MPAA wields over directors. For these reasons, I think she is an ideal choice for this project. She has been involved with multiple projects dealing with repression and oppression and so should be able to get the audience to really feel for what Carrie is going through. At least I hope this will be the case. You’ll have to watch the trailer and see for yourself what you think but I am cautiously optimistic she can pull this off. 

Roger Ebert has Died.

Roger Ebert has died at the age of 70. For the past decade he’s had battles with thyroid cancer, cancer of the jaw, and cancer of the salivary glands. Today, he lost his battle with another aggressive cancer. Like the movies he reviewed, his life has finally come to the credits. But what a list of credits he has to show! He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reviews, reviewed hundreds of movies, and made movie critique a form of both insightful reflection and entertainment. Whether or not you agreed with all his reviews you can’t help but feel a sort of kinship with someone who so passionately loved film. So, here’s to a life well lived. Thanks for sharing your love of film with us.

 

Martyrs (2008) by Pascal Laugier: Per Aspera ad Astra

Martyrs (2008) by Pascal Laugier is a disturbing, terrifying, but intelligent and fascinating film that isn’t afraid to twist conventions of the genre and emerge as something that is startlingly unique. A lot of people have said this is one of the most brutal movies of the last decade and I would say I have to agree on some level. I must be a masochist because following my viewing of A Serbian Film, I felt I had to see another offering from the dark corner of cinema if only to see if there is truly any merit to be found here or if it’s all like that execrable bit of nastiness I reviewed last time. That and I still love horror. This film is still in the extreme and is actually a poster child for the New French Extremity movement but it is an example of horror done well. Let me say that I liked this film a lot. That’s not to say I enjoyed it. It is very unpleasant and in some parts soul wrenching. Would I suggest it to the average viewer or even the average viewer of horror? No. Not in the least. If you think Hostel or Saw is intense, don’t bother with this one. I’ll reiterate: this is an unpleasant and jarring film. The last hour or so is going to crawl right on top of you if you aren’t ready for it and chances are you aren’t. Then again, I get the feeling that you’re not supposed to be. This isn’t a movie that is just stuffed full of blood and gore and sex (there’s actually no sex in the movie which makes for a refreshing change of pace) or about blood and gore. Rest assured, it’s there and when it hits, it is intense and nasty but the worst of this movie comes from the up close and personal depictions of pain and suffering, both mental and physical. But it’s also, in a strange way, about transcendence. In contrast to A Serbian Film‘s mindless nastiness, this film is about something and leads the audience to ask questions about metaphysical issues that are actually interesting.

Before beginning, I want to make a note of saying that there are some spoilers, especially the middle twist and towards the end, including the ending itself, that deserve talking about and that need to be talked about in order to review the plot, but they will be marked out ahead of time so you can avoid them if you wish. So here we go: Martyrs.

Martyrs (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Martyrs primarily follows Lucie and her best friend Anna. We first meet Lucie as a child as she runs screaming from what looks like an abandoned factory or industrial site. She’s obviously been abused and traumatized and we have no idea what is going on. From there, she is placed in an orphanage where she meets Anna who befriends her and begins to connect with the withdrawn Lucie. But something from Lucie’s experience in the industrial ruins has followed her to the orphanage, an emaciated, scarred creature that haunts her. Cut to fifteen years later, and we find that Lucie, played by Mylène Jampanoï, has been looking for the people who tortured her as a child. Anna, played by Morjana Alaoui, is still with her and is called to clean up Lucie’s mess after she believes she’s found those responsible and punishes them in what might be one of the goriest and most disturbing shoot-outs I’ve ever seen. What follows is a decent into multiple strata of madness, pain, regret, and incredible cruelty and suffering. And, believe it or not, something that may verge on the sublime.

Something lurks at the end of the bed.

On the technical end of things, this is an incredibly shot, edited, and scored film. It is a very polished film for sure with some really great shots that serve the atmosphere of a scene or add to the horror and unease we feel. The good use of angled shots leads to feelings of vertigo and dread and tight shots create some very uncomfortable and claustrophobic moments. Some of the later cinematography in particular catches the eye and lends well to the sense of otherness and otherworldly. The sound design is absolute fantastic. I’d like to give a lot of credit here as the sound does a lot to create a tense atmosphere. Even when you think things are safe, the ambient sounds can convince you otherwise. Then there is the shoot-out and shotgun blast sound effect. Rarely have guns been done so well. This one shotgun manages to make me cringe in a way that no Hollywood shootout has since I’m not even sure when. Every time that gun goes off, you’re going to feel it and no, it doesn’t feel good. For a horror movie, it’s very well lit with scenes of horror playing out sometimes in broad daylight and sometimes in well lit surroundings. I really thought playing with this convention that the monsters only come out at night does a lot to strip away any illusion of safety and add even more fear to the viewer. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the special effects. All of it is practical and done on camera as far as I can tell. The effects here are very well done with blood and gore effects feeling particularly nasty but not over the top. The makeup work on the creature is very convincing and does a lot to make it something you will have trouble getting out of your head at night. The other makeup effects that come later in the film (more on that in the spoiler section) are truly unsettling but unsettling in a way that feels realistic. So often movies go for the familiar reds of blood and viscera and forget about the blacks and blues and swelling that actually occur when tissue undergoes trauma. This movie gets it and so actually makes scenes more disturbing by not resorting to the typical blood and gore (though something on this level does end up coming up later.). But the effects are subservient to and serve the story and highlight the actual human pain and suffering taking place. In other words, as unpleasant as it is, I didn’t get the sense it was exploitative. On that note, what could have turned into a familiar gory scene of torture actually becomes something more (and possibly more frightening) as we don’t see what is done. What follows though is truly grisly and a fantastic piece of prosthetic work. The other thing that really adds to the fear is how natural and believable the acting is and the fact we care about these characters.

Say hello to what’s going to be invading your dreams for the rest of the week. An example of horror in a well-lit room.

Mylène Jampanoï as Lucie contemplating what she’s done.

Both  Jampanoï and Alaoui are exceptional actresses who sell this movie. If they hadn’t been up to the task of digging deep for these roles or if their characters weren’t so easy to empathize with, this would have ended up just another shock-fest. But because of these two, the film definitely feels more organic and more complete. Jampanoï as Lucie makes the viewer both uncomfortable, sad, and bewildered. Until about half way through the film, we’re not quite sure if she’s crazy or not. But what she most certainly is is tragic and often times pathetic. Returning to the previous shoot-out, even after she goes through with the slaughter and the director risks making her a completely unlikable character, she manages to show us how broken up she is and how profound her mental trauma is. We may not condone what she’s done, but her acting brings us closer to at least caring about her. Her mental anguish only gets worse and we learn about the unstoppable guilt that plagues her and drives her to do what she does. All of this is powerfully represented by Jampanoï who holds absolutely nothing back and manages to play between a nuanced and quiet performance and all-out psychosis.

Morjana Alaoui as Anna

As for Alaoui, she is the emotional, empathetic heart of the film and the person who ultimately raises the film to a higher level. Her character pretty much serves as a beacon of humaneness in the midst of all this madness and Alaoui does a commendable job of portraying a human being who does her best to cope with and alleviate some of the suffering around her. She also does a great job portraying the internal struggle of a woman who fears she is watching her friend sink deeper and deeper into homicidal mania and the tension between helping those who have been hurt as a result of that and staying true to her friend. Then there is what comes later in the movie. All I can say is Alaoui’s performance is heartbreaking and that she deserves some kind of recognition for her ability to portray this kind of a shift in a character’s mental state with such genuineness and humanity. This is as far as I can go without hitting the spoiler button so for those of you who want the full review and discussion, go past the spoiler alert banner to get the rest of the review. The end of the spoiler section will be marked and the spoiler free concluding section will follow. Heavy spoilers that spoil the entire plot follow so read at your own risk.

The film is mostly character based and in that respect, it is well served by the decisions the characters make. Lucie and Anna never feel out of character or like they are doing things that go against what they would do. To that end, Lucie’s rage and violence are given a deeper meaning as we learn the nature of her phantasm. When she escaped her captors, she left behind another woman who was being put through a similar torment. The guilt follows her and torments her, forcing her to cut herself and hurt herself, almost as a form of self punishment. Towards the middle of the film, she realizes there is no escape and she finally kills herself. After this, through a series of circumstances, Anna finds a secret passageway that leads to what is essentially an underground torture facility. In there she finds out that Lucie had been right and finds the family’s latest “victim.” She tries to ease the woman’s pain and puts her in a bath then in a grisly scene leverages out the nails that have been set into the woman’s skull that keeps a sensory deprivation mask on. Just when you think things can’t get worse, the story twists and a group of black clad people come into the house, shoot the woman, and bring Anna into the underground torture facility where she meets their leader, a woman called Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle explains what they have been doing is an attempt to create martyrs, people who have been subjected to enough pain and suffering that they see the other side and live to tell about it. And now, they have Anna. Through beatings and systematic degradation and psychological torture which includes force feeding and allowing her to think she can escape so that she can be caught and beat, Anna is reduced to a shell of herself. In an incredibly heartfelt scene, Anna “talks” to Lucie who tells her to, “let go” in order to stop being afraid. In the end, Anna does reach a state of what could be called enlightenment where she accepts whatever happens and is done to her. But there is one more test which is foreshadowed earlier. Anna is flayed alive and then left to either die or bring back an account of what she sees. She does have a transcendent experience and Mademoiselle rushes to her side to hear about it though we the viewers don’t get to learn exactly what is said. Later the “cult” for lack of a better term convenes to hear about this remarkable occurrence. Etienne, Mademoiselle’s aide, finds her in the bathroom and knocks on the door to tell her their guests have arrived. Through the door he asks her if it’s real and if Anna really saw the other side to which Mademoiselle says there can be no interpretation as she removes her fake eyelashes and makeup. She asks him if he’s ever tried to imagine what the afterlife is like or if he can. He says no. To which she replies, “Keep doubting,” then she puts a pistol in her mouth and kills herself.

A title card informs us that the word “martyr” comes from the Greek word “marturos” which means “to witness.”

All in all, this film’s plot keeps you guessing as it evolves from one thing to another. But the amazing thing is it works. Everything is set up so that when the twists come, you can say, “Oh yeah, I remember when such and such happens,” or you could just say as I did, “What the hell is going on?” then be amazed as the movie turns into a completely different animal than what you thought it would be. I applaud how Laugier never allows us to become too comfortable with what we’re watching and this for me adds a lot to the sense of unease. We are not sure where we’re going to end up. All we can say or be reasonably sure of is that we won’t like what we find when we get there. But these twists feel like they belong there and aren’t there for just shock’s sake which says a lot about the storytelling going on here. The director has made a world that isn’t easy to wrap your head around just as the central reason for all this madness is an attempt to comprehend something that defies human comprehension, namely, the afterlife. Which brings me to contemplating the grisliness of this film.

As the director pointed out in this very interesting interview that I highly suggest reading, this is not a torture porn movie or even a movie about torture. It’s a movie about pain and dealing with it. In that sense, the violence in this movie is highly allegorical though that doesn’t at all detract from how disturbing a lot of it is. But as I said before, what is more disturbing is watching what constant pain and cruelty does to a human being. The special effects coordinator Benoit Lestang convinces us with incredible makeup work that Anna has been brutalized past human endurance. Her eyes are swollen shut and black and blue. Her nose is broken and her lips are cracked and split. All realistically. I find this realistic approach so welcome in a cinematic landscape that trivializes the human body. Part of what makes this film so damn hard to stomach is that it feels convincing enough that we believe we are watching this woman being turned into a shattered wreck. The same is true of the woman found in the family’s torture lab. It hurts to look at her and engages our basic empathy pathways in a way that other films that instead use the violence as a point of attraction don’t. We as the audience don’t want to see such believable cruelty which is truly sold by the stellar performances. As I said, part of what makes this film so horrible isn’t just the gore. That’s easy and we’ve seen movies like Hostel do it to much more excessive extremes. In fact, we don’t even see all the gore and violence. Some of the most shocking stuff happens off camera or is shot in an oblique way. It’s the way the performers act and react to their suffering that is probably the toughest thing to watch and that makes this movie so unpleasant in many ways. But when pain really is the main focus of the movie, there’s no getting away from depictions of it.

Interestingly, a movie about pain actually supplies its own answer on how to overcome it. One of the things that snapped to my mind during the film was Victor Frankl’s idea that the last human freedom is choice, something that Buddhism also deals with. The solution to fear and to pain is letting go. The scene in which Anna has a conversation with the now dead Lucie scene struck me as incredibly powerful but it also struck me how much it makes sense in the context of the film and in general. Anna was always the selfless one, reaching out to others with kindness. In the end, Anna completely lets go of ego and becomes something pain can’t touch. She exercises the last of her freedoms and makes the choice to simply let go. In a sense, I can’t help but feel that this movie, despite all its bleakness, is about a type of empowerment. When we can’t escape from our hells, we can alter ourselves to find our own small island of peace. Not that this glorifies the means used here to achieve such peace. Quite the contrary. Instead, unlike so many other films that depict brutality and violence, this is a movie that sits squarely with the victim. Of course there is one more stage she must go through and in a really visually interesting scene, Anna does see something and tells Mademoiselle about it. This leads to the massive twist ending that I described before.

In the end, I’d have to say for its audacity, uncompromising vision, and exploration of themes relating to life after death and the nature of suffering, this has become one of my favorite films. Did it lead to fear and revulsion? Yes it did. Did it lead to feelings of discomfort and restlessness long after the film was over. Yeah. But this is one of the few films that you can’t get out of your head not just because of how scary it is but also because it turns a mirror back on our own lives and asks us what we believe about suffering and death and what follows that. I’d actually liken this to Mama by Andres Muschietti or the work of David Cronenberg in its deep exploration and commitment to its themes in the midst of visceral body horror. However, the humanity and heart of the film is more akin to Mama. Nevertheless, don’t underestimate the brutality of this movie. It is not for the squeamish or the easily offended. While it may not be as consistently gory as some other specimens of the extreme horror genre, it confronts us with something that affects us on an even deeper and more primordial level by unflinchingly showing the all too human effects of brutality as it ravages body and mind. This is not by any means a “bro film.” By that I mean, you will not be saying to your buddies, “Bro, did you see that? I can’t believe how nasty that was!” This is an extremely somber film and I’d even go so far as to say it’s a depressing film. The last hour in particular is going to cement your opinion of the film. However, I commend it for being, in Laugier’s words, “the anti-Hostel.” You will not enjoy this film. I did not enjoy this film in the traditional sense. Instead, it is an experience or a film to be experienced which is in keeping with the existential current running throughout the film. If you can stomach extreme horror and violence then I feel I have to recommend this film as one of the smartest and most affecting horror films you will get to see.

The question now is: Do you dare become a witness?

Thoughts Are Fingers: When You Stop Thinking and Start Writing

One of the things I have found out about writing is that the process works best when we don’t consciously write. That’s not to say consciousness plays no role in the process. Quite the contrary. Conscious decision making and analytic skills are of indispensable importance when editing and proof-reading a piece and without it a work can’t be improved on or made better. But when it comes to making something to actually proof-read, conscious effort may be the biggest stumbling block a writer faces. Why is that and how do you avoid just creating a mish-mosh of unrelated images and words with only a tenuous string of thought tying them together?

One thing I found is that conscious thought contravenes open creativity in two ways. The most hurtful and familiar way conscious thought gets in the way of being creative is doubt and self-consciousness. We are all familiar with that I believe. It’s not a little voice telling you this as much as it is a commanding voice intoning that you can’t write, you’re not good enough. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you how loud this voice can get and how difficult it is to ignore it. And after a while, you believe it. This leads to anxiety and anxiety leads to constantly questioning every choice you make. And if you are constantly second guessing yourself, writing becomes a miserable chore. In the end, the doubt takes over, crippling your ability to create. Creativity can’t flourish under such conditions which leads to a vicious cycle. The more you listen to that voice, the more you won’t create, the more you fail to create, the more power that voice gains and can influence you. Related to this, is being overly critical.

When you are writing, you aren’t writing anything more than a first draft so if you are critical of everything you put down, if you need to find the perfect word from the get the get-go, you may be cutting yourself off at the knees. Going for perfection is the fastest way to ensure you end up with nothing. Every time you stop to wonder about the right word, or just the right turn of phrase, you break your momentum and have to build it back up again. Writing is kind of like playing music: you have to feel it and if you think too much about it, you will remove the element of vitality from it. And without that, the writing falls flat and you’ll have to drag every word out of yourself instead of letting it progress naturally. If you wanted to put in a page with nothing but the word, “cupcake,” that’s fine because you have to do a second draft and a third draft and as many drafts as it takes to make it into the best possible  story it can be. But that is a gradual process. The first draft is just throwing everything you can at the page and not thinking about it. But how are you supposed to make sure your plot isn’t full of holes if you just write without thought?

This is where outlining comes in. Outlining gives you the opportunity to understand where your story is going and how things are going to fit together before you get to the actual writing part. You can over-do your self-criticism here as well as feel the push and pull of self doubt but at this most preliminary stage, you should feel relaxed enough to just play with the ideas you have. Things will fall into place if you don’t rush things and enjoy exploring what your story could ultimately look like. Of course, this outline isn’t something you have to stick to or even that you should stick to. Surprising things happen on the way to a completed story so you may end up in places you could never have anticipated. Don’t be afraid of that. Look for the common threads and how it can all fit together. Chances are there is one there that you can use as a through-line so don’t worry. Once you have a picture of what your story will be, you can move on to the writing portion with an idea of what leads to what and you can keep that in the back of your mind the same way you’d keep a map in your glove box. It’s there if you need it. But in the meantime, you have to enjoy the ride.

Now you are at the most fun and exciting part in my opinion. Here’s the moment when you can write. And write is exactly what you need to do. Not think. Not analyze and look for the right word. You need to write. You have to move aside and let the words come of their own accord. If you can’t think of what to write, just sit there with your fingers at the ready. In time, the ideas will happen and they will move straight to your fingers. In a way, writing is as much a physical thing as it is a cerebral undertaking. You feel your fingers hitting the keys, you hear the keys click. You can watch the words propagate the screen like ice crystals over a window. And your thoughts? They’re there but as long as you continue to write, they won’t be truly, “visible,” to you. What happens is that every keystroke is the manifestation, the direct manifestation, of a thought, of a word, or an image, or emotion. There is no break between the thought and the finger hitting the key because once you move your conscious, doubting, judging ego out of the way, the thoughts become your fingers. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Perhaps, your fingers become your thoughts and you begin to think with your fingers, judging by way of tempo, intensity, and tactile feedback. More likely, you simply close yourself out of your writing, cast yourself aside which is where you belong. You can’t create from inside a locked box of your own identity since the story is the thing that is coming into being. If you’re there, the story isn’t. But when you get out of the way, stop second-guessing everything you do, and let yourself be carried away by the rhythm and the internal logic that the story uses to weave itself together, you’ll end up writing truly and convincingly and you’ll find that you’ve said everything you needed to say.

Thanks for reading and leave a comment with your ideas about writing and how you get into the “writing zone.”

Going to Extremes: Sadism and the Pit of Nihilism

After watching a particularly nasty film, it feels appropriate that this post is going to be a meditation on the extremes of sadistic violence and sex in fiction and as such is actually a sequel to an early post I wrote dealing with the nature of violence in fiction. This post will also be a review as I go through what I liked and didn’t like about the film in question. The film I’m talking about and that I recently had the displeasure of experiencing is called A Serbian Film. Right off the bat, I can’t suggest this film to anyone. Maybe if you’re an experienced gore hound then fine but for the rest of you, you can spend the better part of two hours doing something better than watching this film. Even watching fruit rot would be a better investment to be honest if you are not prepared for this movie. Now, I’m willing to bet for those of you who haven’t heard of this movie or who have heard of its infamy, with your curiosity piqued it will sound like a good idea in the moment to go and watch it. But in the moment and in the spirit of seeing how far you can push yourself, you might also think that guzzling two liters of soda or eating too many hot peppers (trust me on that second one) is a good idea. From my experience in such things, you will feel like you can handle it as you are going through it but afterwards, your stomach begins to reject it. In the same way, our minds cope with what has been given in the moment then afterwards we are left feeling sick. I consider myself pretty battle hardened when it comes to the most shocking cinema has to offer. I’ve seen Pierre Paolo-Pasolini’s 120 Giornate di Sodoma as well as Antichrist by Lars von Trier just to name two of the most infamous movies produced that I’ve seen. This is just by way of demonstrating that I’m no stranger to the controversial and the grotesque. And yet I feel as though this film in particular has transgressed in a certain way and opened a door that is better off left alone. There will be more on what I mean by that later but first I want to dive into this snake pit.

The film revolves around Milos, a retired porn actor. He has a wife, Marija (played by Jelena Gavrilovic) and son, Petar (played by Luka Mijatović). Low on cash, his friend from the business, Lejla (played by Katarina Žutić) tells him about a job in an art film by a man named Vukmir (played by Sergej Trifunovic). As it turns out, Vukmir is one twisted fellow and his idea of an artistic pornography film is essentially sadistic torture/rape/everything else you could think of. From there, we as the audience get to witness a fever dream of debauchery and depravity. There are some subplots like Milos’ brother’s obsession with his wife and this does come into play later but it’s not the main focus. But before I even get to my gripes, I want to discuss the more neutral aspects of the film.

First off, let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. Here are some observations on the technical end of the film. I have to give credit where credit is due. The film looks good. The director, Srdjan Spasojevic, knows how to compose a shot and develop an atmosphere of bleakness. For all the lurid and graphic sex in the film, it has a surprisingly sterile atmosphere, as if we’re gazing into an ongoing apocalypse. Cinematography is pretty standard with not too much there to grab your attention which fits with the feeling of the rest of the film. Ugly, blocky utilitarian. The music, surprisingly, is solidd, with droning industrial sounds and off-kilter warbling synths that feel like they’ve been jacked full of speed and are full of nothing but bad intentions. Sound design is  good as well. Violence is given a very brutal, sickening sound signature. The voices are easy to hear and ambient sounds in some scenes lend a real sense of place. In terms of special effects, it’s actually pretty hit and miss. The gore effects are  mediocre to good. I’ve seen more convincing stuff but overall it does the job of eliciting squick. The prosthetic work and animatronics are laughable though I’m sure the animatronic in question is going to bring out disgust/rage/shock just for being put to film any ways. Overall, the production quality is quite good which leaves the big question of the acting.

The acting is tough to review because it feels like the actors are in two different movies. One of which could have been good and I would have liked to have seen. In the part of the movie that would have been good, there is Srdjan Todorovic playing Milos, a retired porn star who is trying to have a normal life with a family. Todorovic really sells the idea of a man who is caught between a rock and a hard place. He has no job but the only job he knew, the only world he knew, was the seedy world of pornography. How does he square that with being a family man? His character is aware of the hopelessness of the situation and wants to get out of Serbia but is trapped by financial circumstances. I can sympathize with the guy somewhat as a man with a past he is stuck with. Gavrilovic turns in some good acting as well, especially towards the end. Her muted expressions are affecting and effective in a movie that has done so much to dehumanize and numb the audience. I really give her credit. Which is part of what is so maddening. There is a pretty good movie in here somewhere. But the film needed and possibly deserved a better, more subtle, and more mature writer-director. As I said, there is a decent film hiding in here but you will be hard pressed to find it amidst the perversion. Don’t think that this absolves the film because it absolutely does not and you shouldn’t sit through the rest of this just for a few minutes of good acting. So that is the “good” insofar as the word can be applied to this film. Now it’s time to deal with the bad half of the acting. And everything else.

The character of Milos undergoes a drastic change that consumes the majority of the second half of the film. After being pumped full of livestock aphrodisiac, he is more animal than man. Sure he sells it, which is something of a feat, but as he sells it more and more, there is less and less to relate to. The other big character is Vukmir. Trifunovic’s chewing of the scenery is almost as brutal as the overt violence. Plus, he got saddled with all of the most pretentious lines and was left with being the mouthpiece of the director. Which raises some interesting questions about the nature of the film (Vukmir=Spasojevic?) and us for watching it. But overall, the character is reprehensible and unrelateable as the mad creator. He is just there to allow the director to inject the film with the themes he wants to be more apparent. The supporting cast is broadly a collection of victims we see on screen long enough for them to be used as fodder and then tossed, or conversely, for them to do some sadistic or violent act then get tossed. Anyone else here seeing a pattern? And speaking of patterns, it’s time to talk about theme and how not to do it.

The major theme of this movie is how the Serbian people are doomed. Pretty much all the time. Doom. From the moment they are born, the film asserts, they are manipulated and taken advantage of. This is represented by a scene- To be honest, if you want to know, go to the wikipedia page. (Read that then decide if you want to watch this.) You’ll know the “metaphor” used to express this view when you see it. This is how to do theme badly and this is one of my major gripes with the film. Supposedly, the director wants to shock us into feeling how the Serbian people feel. But honestly, this sounds like a flimsy excuse to justify the ugliness of the movie. Schindler’s List broke everyone’s heart and made us feel the helplessness and horror that these people experienced and it did it without resorting to what this film shows. Essentially, this movie lacks any kind of self awareness. It promotes itself as high-art and daring and fearless but at its core, it’s a film made to shock and disgust and really nothing more. In fact, I’m going to give the movie the benefit of the doubt and say there is a message here and it is a good one about exploitation of the weak by the powerful, and the voyeuristic nature of the audience watching horror films, and so on and so forth. That’s all well and good but the cruelty of the images utterly masks and distracts from what is going on. You don’t need a five minute rape/murder scene or some other repulsive imagery to get these points across. And if you are making a horror movie that is graphic there are better ways to tie your theme to your content. Just look at Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, or Cronenberg’s Videodrome, or on the more extreme side, Craven’s Last House on the Left. These films are horrifying and they horrify certainly but they don’t push so hard as to absolutely turn off the audience. They at least give us a point of connection whereas this movie leaves us with none. And no amount of theme is going to save your movie when the audience is left sitting in a vacuum.

And this ends the review portion. Still with me? If you are, then this is what I take away from this movie and movies like it.

In the end, I can’t say it was even so much the overt brutality of the movie that got to me. This stuff happens in the real world and happens to real human beings. Look at the Nanking Massacre or what Unit 731 did or the Rwandan genocide or the Nazi death camps or the atomic bombs being dropped or 9/11 or the wars that keep claiming more and more lives over-seas. If you want to be offended and disgusted, then be offended at the real atrocities committed against real human beings. Mourn for them and our capacity to do such things. This is just a trashy movie with pretensions of being art. So it wasn’t the gore or what was depicted though I’d be lying to say that there were parts that that didn’t genuinely churn my stomach. Instead what struck me was more subtle. It was the feeling as I said of being in a vacuum. What offended me was the nihilism of the film and the assertion of the film that it’s simply trying to represent life. Two things come to mind now: the news and Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls (which I have not seen and feel no need to see). Both claim to represent life but both only represent the ugliest aspects of it. All this movie did was take things to their logical extremes. In a way, I feel I must commend the movie for exposing and embodying the kind of delusion we live under that the world is this crapsack  existence. Furthermore, according to this film, there is no way out. Not even death saves you from desecration. I have a real problem with the fact a movie would, not suggest this (other films have), but would be a monument to nihilism. I get a real sense of emptiness from this movie. Though the director claims that there is a point to the movie, that there is a message, I don’t believe that for a second. The film genuinely seems to exist for no other reason than to be hideous and showcase this hideousness. The film obsesses over and fetishizes its nastiness to the point where I don’t know if the film is supposed to be denouncing or championing the things its showing. So why watch it?

I love horror movies and always like to see how much scary I can take before I have to shut my eyes. I watched this movie because I heard it was scary and disturbing and was morbidly curious. It’s like with my love of spicy food. I wanted to eat the hottest. However, to be honest, I’m more content with the mildly spicy and hot at this point rather than the dangerously spicy and I feel like this movie may be the thing that breaks my fondness or curiosity for the extremest horror or at least the new extreme horror of this generation. I can’t help but think of what Andre from My Dinner with Andre said about what it takes to break people out of their numbness and get to them. Now, My Dinner with Andre was a movie made back in 1981 but it’s still incredibly relevant and this remark is right on the nose. Andre says, “I mean it may very well be that 10 years from now people will pay $10,000 in cash to be castrated just in order to be affected by something.” I feel like we have reached that point somewhat where things have had to become meaner and sharper because we’re completely numb to life and the world around us. How else can one explain the interest in torture porn films and other forms of the extreme found in the media? These films offer the next best thing to castrating yourself which is vicarious castration/mutilation. But this is like opium in my opinion. It doesn’t last because the psychic wounds these films leave heal and scar so that the next time, we need something even sharper and meaner to get through to us. Just turning on the news requires we develop a thicker skin as I was saying. According to the news, the world we live in is terrible, absolutely terrible. Children never laugh, people never fall in love, no one ever does something out of altruism or because it was the right thing to do. Instead, all we hear is how awful everything is all the time. So if you listen to the news, you’re already going to need a strong tincture of brutality to get through to you. So does this mean I’m going to boycott horror movies and action movies or that I suggest others do so?

In short: hell no! Like with the hot food, I didn’t stop using red pepper or habanero peppers when I can get them. I simply toned it down from the extremes. I know I am looking forward to the Evil Dead remake and if you can’t tell from the continuing coverage, I am totally hyped for Pacific Rim. But these are movies that know what they are and aren’t trying to shock us into catatonia. They are fun house movies where something pops out and goes “BOO!” and you scream and laugh at how you could fall for such things. Or more specific to the Evil Dead movie, the gore is there to squick you out by being over the top but in a more cartoony way. We know demons are never going to come popping out of the Necronomicon so there is a remove from reality. In short, neither of these movies are trying to convince us of the nature of reality or life. They are there just to get your heart rate up and give you a sense of catharsis. Plus, I don’t get the feeling that the director or writers are trying to hurt the audience. Something I can’t say for the movie that got this ball rolling. There is no catharsis with A Serbian Film. There is no letting up and it begins as it ends, in darkness.

Pacific Rim CES Trailer Shows Off Brutal Mecha-Kaiju Battles

Well, I can’t understand why I haven’t seen this until now. But it turns out that back in January, a new trailer for Guillermo del Toro‘s Pacific Rim that included new snippets of footage of mechas hammer-fisting kaiju over the head, new touched-up CGI, and more looks at the pilots being total badasses was shown off at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show. Of course, this new trailer still keeps Idris Elba being a total badass and giving his, “cancelling the apocalypse,” speech. Actually, they should just rename the film “Badassness” since that’s what this is. Pure, unadulterated, straight to the main-line badassery. Below is the trailer and a newly released picture of a kaiju footprint. Needless, to say, time to rev the hype machine!

Reminder of a Kaiju Attack

Writer Update

I thought that since I have no advice to give, no trenchant observations to make, I’d write about what I’m doing now and such. Maybe this will be of some interest you, maybe not. As with all things, your mileage may vary.

At the moment, I am at the climax portion of a short story that came to me literally out of nowhere, practically fully formed. It needed a few tweaks but the skeleton of the story, right down to the coccyx and itty-bitty carpals was right there, waiting to be assembled. Now of course you know that the skeleton of a story is very different from a living story. Things needed to be added. Flesh for the main characters for example. They started out as archetypes. One represented one thing, the other represented its antithesis. But then, over a couple of days, they came into their own and started doing things and reacting to things in a way that only they could. The world also needed to be tied together with the sturdy ligaments of cause and effect. Some things were out of order and I needed to figure out what in the hell they were doing, why they were there, and if I could either make them hold together or nix the thing altogether and replace it with something better fitting. After some world-building, I happened upon a mythology that to me feels elusive yet cohesive. It’s a world in which history is something to escape from and forget. Luckily it all seems to have come together. Actually, it would have come together sooner if I had either pushed it a little harder or had not stopped myself in the middle of some crucial scenes.

It might seem a little ridiculous to stop writing, put away the word processor, and go do something else in the middle of a great writing session but it works and I’ll tell you why. This, by the way, isn’t my own idea but something I’d read about somewhere, probably in a writer’s journal or something. Back on topic though. When everything is just coming up aces and you follow through, things can only go a certain way. You have a vision and damn it all that vision will live! Which is fine. But rarely if ever is the first iteration the final one. Writing is, like any creative endeavor, a recursive process. So, by stopping yourself in the middle of writing, you give yourself time to play with your ideas. You may come up with something you hadn’t thought of while in the throes of creative ecstasy. Or you may come to realize you were playing with a theme you hadn’t been aware of and you want to further develop it. Then there’s also the fact that by holding off, well, to be honest, it’s a bit like abstinence. You let the pressure build and build so that the next time you sit down and are ready to write, boy oh boy, the words are going to come bursting out of you. In this way, you don’t fatigue yourself and throw it all in at one sitting. You save up, think it through, then when there’s enough pressure, you let it spill out of you. It works for me well enough so hopefully it may prove useful for you as well.

Finally, I will  add that I’m doing my best to cut out as much noise as I can from my life. I’ve already said how the unchecked influence of the internet can be a bullet to the heart of your creativity. So, taking my own advice, I began cutting back and cutting back. But it still wasn’t enough. I noticed that even if I hadn’t looked at a bunch of web pages that day, something was still off. Well, turns out that we are all very good at producing, packaging, and shipping up from our unconscious all kinds of distractions. The flagship product, not surprisingly, is self-doubt. It took a while but I’v managed to get that under control in a way I haven’t had in a long time. In fact, I think that perhaps this is a good place to end this and lead into next week’s post. So, my friends keep writing, try the start-stop method (I don’t know what it’s called exactly) of writing if you like and I’ll send word from my little corner of the world next week. As always, you’re invited to leave a comment and join be a part of this sharing of ideas.

A New Fiction

So it’s been a while. And there’s a good reason. I had nothing new to say. No ideas. I could have posted a bunch of links to stuff but I didn’t feel that was going to do much of anything substantial. Nevertheless, here I am again and time has led me to some new thoughts about fiction and what we can do with it or rather what we should be doing with it. Partially I was inspired by the movie My Dinner with Andre and partially the ideas came about as a result of looking at the world and looking at fiction, both what others are writing and what I’m writing. Then there were some words from the always great Terence McKenna. The net result was that I came away feeling that, regardless of whether or not fiction still has the power to reach people, we should be trying to create a fiction that frees people in a way. It doesn’t matter what genre you prefer since I think this is something that can be done in any genre. I think the important thing to realize is that fiction is stuck in a sort of rut and that now is as good a time as any to break out of it. What do I mean by a rut though?

I think that there are two sides to the rut we find ourselves in, two channels if you will. One side is pessimism. You see this very clearly in sci-fi though some are calling for a change. There are tons of post-apocalyptic stories in which there is nothing left; no hope, nothing to live for. Just nothing.  However on the other side is fiction that doesn’t say much or do much of anything at all. It’s just there to make you feel kind of good then disappear. Now maybe you’ll say “Why does fiction have to do something? Can’t it just be fun or sentimental or something?” I’d ask this in return: “If fiction has any capacity to lead to positive change, if it can do some good in the world, then shouldn’t it?” Yes I agree that sometimes a fun story is just a fun story and that sometimes we can’t avoid dealing with unpleasantness and ideas that make us uncomfortable. However, when I see so much of fiction dealing with these things then I can’t help but feel we are indeed in a rut. So how do we get out of it? Even if we could all agree that we are in a rut, where do we go? What should we make?

It’s time to create a fiction of potential, both personal and external. If a good chunk of fiction is saying nothing and the other half is telling us how bad everything is, what do you think the result is going to be? It’s going to just be an exacerbation of something that I think many are already half aware of and that is that things are not as they ought to be or could be. We are more wired but less connected to each other. We barely have any awareness of ourselves or who we are. The constant streaming of data into our heads is leading to a perpetual dream state. If anything our constant connection to the internet or some form of media is the outcome of our desire to live in a never ending dream. The internet is certainly just the externalization of mental space so that now we dream another person’s dreams. Then what of our own? Do we even dream anymore for ourselves? And if this is the case then how or do we even connect to each other? Is there anything left to connect to? This is why I think more than ever, we need a fiction that can re-introduce readers to the idea of being human, of being a self and knowing what that self is. So in effect, this new fiction would hopefully show the reader that there is something better, that even if it involves a tiny corner of his or her world, there is a way that leads to a reintroduction of the miraculous or at least the sublime into life. The point of this fiction would be to reactivate the parts of the person that modern life has anesthetized or at least remind the reader these parts exist.

That being said, do I think that this new fiction will change the world, make gardens bloom in deserts and end all wars? If only. No, I’d be happy to see even just one life made better. Because that’s the point. If one life can be changed, then that one life can maybe make one other person’s life better. I suppose this is a call to responsibility, to wakefulness, and to reach out. I’ll leave you with some Timothy Leary.

Reach out.

Armor: Defense Mechanisms as Barriers to Writing

In my last post, I took on the idea that one must necessarily suffer for one’s art and explained why I think this is not a helpful way to look at creativity. Continuing on with this theme of pain and creation, I would like to discuss a topic that may affect some writers, maybe even many writers. I’m sure we all experience some amount of trauma in our lives. It’s unavoidable. People we love die, or things happen or are done to us that infect us with pain that, even when dormant, is still there. Now, when it comes to writing, as I’ve said many times before, we must be authentic, we mustn’t squirm away. But how do we do that when the topic we are writing about brings something to the surface we don’t want to or are not ready to deal with? Sometimes, the decision is made for us with powerful psychological defense mechanisms that clamp down harder than any writer’s block you can imagine. How do we deal, not just with the defense mechanism, but its root cause? This is where one must begin a quest for truth and a truth of the most elusive and difficult to comprehend type.

It’s funny how the oldest advice is still the best and most powerful. As Plato wrote , “Know thyself.” In order to write, I believe one must first acknowledge and strive for this goal. It never ceases to amaze me how people think of truth as something external, something you have to seek. The way I see it, truth is internal and unless you grasp the truth inside yourself then the rest of the world, including your very ego, becomes distorted. Think of it like this: imagine you wear goggles from the time you’re born. They may tint the world green or red or blue. You never take these goggles off so to you, the world is always that color. But this isn’t reality. This is a filter. No matter what information or knowledge you seek “out there” it will always come to you through this filter. Until you question your own perceptions, everything you see will pass through this distorting influence. And boy do we humans love to distort. There are plenty of reasons we do it: fears, anger, unfulfilled desires we may never attain. Yet if we hope to write, we must rip these filters (or defense mechanisms) off and see the world, both internal and external, as it is. Even if to do this requires confronting what is  frightening and painful. How many things are there about yourself and your past that you wish were different or non-existent? How many things do you wish you had or had not done? How many things do you hate about yourself or others? It is these things that accumulate like grime and eventually can come to choke your ability to create.  In order to really write, to write without fetters, you must look at yourself with complete honesty, dig past whatever has been festering, and find that central pillar (whatever it may be) that I hypothesize all humans have. When you can begin doing that, I believe that you will begin to write with your own voice and to write about what truly matters to you. What’s more, you will write with authenticity and truly represent the human condition so we may know ourselves better. Not only that, once you begin to get past whatever you’re hung up on, you can get back to enjoying what you’re working on. But how does one make the kind of breakthrough to overcome overzealous defense mechanisms?

It would be beyond the scope of this blog and possibly irresponsible of me to go into psychological treatments or anything of the sort. Instead, I’d like to bring up Victor Frankl, Ph.D. the developer of logotherapy, a branch of existential therapy, and Holocaust survivor. Dr. Frankl said in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Essentially, one already has the power to free oneself, it just takes something of a leap of faith to make the choice to move on. It all comes down to a decision to set your own path and not allow anything to stand between you and what you want to accomplish. Is it easier said than done? Yes, absolutely. But if someone can discover such a powerful way to view life and find that human agency is unassailable in the living hell that was a Nazi death camp, then we can certainly make the choice in our own lives to not let circumstance dictate what we can achieve.

In short, choose to write. Choose to look at whatever it is that haunts you and decide for yourself how to respond to it and what impact it will have on your ability to create something that has meaning for you and that gives you a sense of accomplishment. In time, you will find you have regained control of your emotions and mind and are free to tackle any subject you like. It just begins with a choice.

 

The Deep End Will Infect Your Mind.

This amazing and weird  little short film is definitely not short of odd, surreal imagery. I bet it’s just the thing to jiggle loose a pesky bout of writer’s block with its constantly evolving images of the bizarre and out of place. And if not, then at least it can give you a good dose of the strange and disconcerting.