Movies, Reviews, Uncategorized

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

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You keep using that flag. I don't think it means what you think it means.
You keep using that flag. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

I’ve never been able to take pirates seriously. I blame Peter Pan. Neverland-centric adventures were the only context in which I encountered pirates during my land-locked childhood. Seeing them perpetually made fools of by a pack of flying children (who may or may not have been vampires, led by one of the darkest Dark Princes since Dracula…and his house-fairy) did not endear pirates to me, and tales of so-called “adventure” on the Early Modern Era’s high seas always struck me as horror stories by another name.

If you’ve read them, you know what I’m talking about: there are parts of Moby Dick fit to make even the hardest hardcore Saw fan curl up into a ball of tears and barf (which is why Moby Dick‘s screen adaptions usually omit those parts). Really-real life accounts of long sea voyages during that First Great Age of Colonialism are all about misery, deprivation and discomfort. I swear, before the invention of mass media, people could not shut the fuck up about their toothaches. Or “the scurvy.” And if it wasn’t “the scurvy” it was “the pox.” If it wasn’t “the pox” it was “consumption.” And if it wasn’t “consumption…”

You get the idea. Hopefully, by now, you’ll also have some idea as to why most Pirate Movies are fanciful romps, set in highly-romanticized alternate universes where grown ass men can spend their whole lives at sea but still come ashore with perfect teeth. Men like Douglas Fairbanks, or Erol Flynn. Or Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Or Burt Lancaster. By the time my mother was in grade school, pirate movies had at least grown the balls to cast unattractive dudes as sea dogs – like Robert Newton. Or Yul Brenner. But that didn’t last. The year I was born was also the year Pirates of Penzance came out, thrilling absolutely no one and proving not a goddamn thing had changed since the Silent Era. Continue reading Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) →

Movies, Reviews

Killer Joe (2011)

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All you Western fans will know what this means.
All you Western fans will know what this means.

I’ve shilled for genres big and small, appreciated or not, and Country Noir (as one of its main proponents, Daniel “author of Winter’s Bone” Woodrell labeled it back in 1996) is certainly one of the least-appreciated. Noir never left us, obviously, it just shed it’s outer skin of San Francisco, smokey rooms and Private Dicks with hot secretaries. All the cliches Raymond Chandler’s hardcore fans continue to embrace. Beyond the sheltering walls of cities, with their plumb angles and functional social structures (however corrupt they may or may not be) lies a world of violent crime, inveterate lying, and shameless acts of complete degradation. All in the name of catching what your average supercriminal (whether in Metropolis, Gotham or Wall Street) would consider financial table scraps – barely enough to blow your nose with, let alone improve your life. You think your life sucks because you lacked money…? NO! WRONG ANSWER!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Sorry. Didn’t mean to yell. But films that genuinely get to me are rare and special treats now, after years of facing down the New Release fire hose every week from late-May until late-December. I missed Killer Joe‘s first run because it didn’t have one, and it didn’t have one because the MPAA slapped it with a NC-17 – the Kiss of Death for any film hoping to screen in a US theaters. Most refuse to run NC-17-rated films flat-out, fearing the wrath of outraged, Puritanical assholes…like the ones who run the MPAA rating’s board. Director William Friedkin refused to cut this down for them, immediately earning my respect. “To get an R rating,” he said to Rope of Silicon,

“I would have had to destroy it in order to save it and I wasn’t interested in doing that…The ratings board says no child under the age of 17 can see an NC-17 picture even accompanied by their parent. So they are telling parents what they can and cannot expose their children to. And who the hell are they?” Continue reading Killer Joe (2011) →

Movies

Jor-El Was Right #1: On the False Dichotomy of “Arthouse” & “Mainstream” Cinema

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What is "arthouse"? What is "art"?
What is “arthouse”? What is “art”?

by General Zod

Arthouse (n) [art’howss]: (1) a film playing in cheap, rundown theaters inside the urban cores of major cities; often foreign or made independently of the Hollywood Studio financing System. May be retroactively applied to films made within the Hollywood Studio System, and film-making techniques used by those in the System’s employ, that the speaker particularly likes, but never as a pejorative. For the pejorative usage, see definition (2)

(2) A pejorative term for boring films made by even more boring film school graduates steeped in arcane theory and purposefully obtuse jargon-speak, because sounding smart is much easier than being smart. And if people were smart, we wouldn’t need terms like “arthouse.” See definition (3)

(3) A branding label for a lifestyle demographic that (like all demographics) is the largely-imaginary composite construct of marketing executives at distant advertising companies who don’t give a fuck about you, or any of the Actually Important Questions. Like, “What is art? What, therefore, is ‘arthouse’?” Who cares? There’s money to be made off the poor suckers and rich fools who think the source of their movies matters more than the movies themselves. (“People like that exist?” Yes, unfortunately, and here’s the real ass-kicker: there are more of them than there are of you.)

Continue reading Jor-El Was Right #1: On the False Dichotomy of “Arthouse” & “Mainstream” Cinema →

For a moment, there was hope