Banning the Human Centipede

In a decision that is truly mind blowing in this day and age, Tom Six's sequel to HUMAN CENTIPEDE: FIRST SEQUENCE (Subtitled FULL SEQUENCE) has been banned by the BBFC, Britain's film censor board.  As reported in various sources, though I first read about it in The Guardian, the reasoning behind the decision is based entirely on the certification that the film breaches the BBFC's Classification Guidelines, and poses "a real, as opposed to a fanciful, risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers."


For those of you who have not yet been scarred by what in the film poses such a risk to viewers of the movie, a little taste of the plot:  A man becomes increasingly obsessed with the first film and starts to act out sexual perversions and recreate the centipede by abducting and surgically altering captors of his own.  Two scenes in particular, involving masturbation with sandpaper while watching the film and a rape scene involving barbed wire and the girl bringing up the rear of the man's creation, are singled out by the board in its justification for the classification, which makes any activity having to do with the film (including possession, distribution, and viewing - much like drugs) illegal.


But as pointed out by a favorite film blog of mine based in Britain, Little White Lies, this essentially tells us nothing about what these fears may be.  Clearly the fears of the board are realized within the film itself, but what of the real world prospects of copy cat amateur surgeons?  The first film has been out for nearly two years and I've yet to read a single report of anyone moved to such lengths by a perverse little diversion.  It also bears to recognize, as again pointed out by LWL, that the board has banned films for similar reasons before, including THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, which created an absurd situation that saw one of the defining horror movies of all time, as well as one of the less sanguinary of the last thirty years by comparison, banned in the UK until 1999.


That ban did nothing to stop people from seeing the movie, though, and this one will likely do nothing to stop THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE: FULL SEQUENCE either.  In an era when anything and everything can simply be downloaded via torrent or sold internationally, there's no stopping someone from seeing something if they want to.  It's just absurd to do it with something as fluid and accessible as cinema, no matter how lacking in artistic merit it may be.  And if we start banning things based on that criteria, I say we start with movies starring Rob Schneider.


And then there's the situation brought on by the announcement of the ban itself.  As evidenced by the growing interest in A SEBIAN FILM, a nasty little number from last year's festival circuit which still fails to have U.S. distribution, all the attention about how horrific and immoral it is has only given it free publicity and increased the likelihood that more people will actually see the movie at this point.  Not to mention the fact that adults are allowed to make decisions about what they would like to watch or read because they are adults, hence the very need for a classification system at all.  Tell us what's in the movie, and then let us watch it if we want to.  I know I, for one, can't wait to decide whether or not to watch Tom Six's follow-up to THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE.  That's because I'm an adult, and not a child to be coddled and told what is appropriate.  All that aside, though, there's more seriously fucked up material written in literature these days anyway, but I guess that's okay because the luddites out there who want us to be on the lookout for perversion don't read anything anyway.

Movies, Morality and ...Wait a Minute...Child Porn?

The recent kerfuffle over the movie KICK-ASS has me quite ruffled in a professional (as well as admittedly personal) way, mostly due to the completely unfounded attacks and assumptions the discussion surrounding Chloe Grace Moretz's portrayal of Hit-Girl.  I'm not going to get into the specific attacks that much, but you can see some of the lunacy, on both sides of the argument, by reading Roger Ebert's misreading of the film (in which he actually says, "Big Daddy and Mindy never have a chat about, you know, stuff like how when you kill people, they are really dead," which, while technically true - those characters never discuss it - it's pointed out several times by other characters to them), as well as checking out my pal Julia's article posted over at the California Literary Review and the comments it received for a small sampling.  What's amazing to me is that these arguments seem to have traction with people.  Movies are too violent, check.  Movies contain too many curse words, check.  Movies about teenagers (or children) doing anything violent or swearing are immoral and equate child porn, wait, what?

Yes, you heard me, one of the commenters on the CalLitReview site actually equated the film's portrayal of Hit-Girl (and thereby the young actress who portrays her) as being "child porn."  All of this, mind you, without seeing one full scene of the film, and only using other comments about the film from other people as his basis.  I could very easily get in on the whole rant about not commenting on a movie's supposed (im)morality if you haven't seen it, but that argument goes absolutely nowhere (see: THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, IRREVERSIBLE, PULP FICTION, etc.)  What is interesting here, though, is how devoid of context all of this argument is, and how someone like Roger Ebert, whose review says, quite clearly, that the film never mentions how ludicrous all of this is, and that if you enjoy seeing a little girl getting punched and kicked in the face, then you're an immoral person and are undeserving of having your opinion even considered by him.

Film history is full of instances of outrage.  Remember when Mae West was scandalous?  How about almost all of Tennessee Williams's screen adaptations?  How about when people were fearful that the kids would all go out and act just like Brando in THE WILD ONE, or James Dean in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, or how about all those horror movies you were told not to watch when you were a kid?  Hey, what do you think people were saying about Russ Meyer back in the 60s, when Roger Ebert was palling around with the guy and writing scripts for him?  What is really the fear here?  And why is it the filmmaker's responsibility to address it?  It's not.  The filmmaker is an artist in most cases, and even those who aren't are not responsible for someone's misreading of their work, no matter if it's a kid who takes a gun to a school, or a person who dons a mask and treks through the night killing scantily clad virginal teenagers.

Well, in the case of some of the arguments, I think it's because KICK-ASS is a fairly easy movie to have a misreading of.  I guess if you go about looking for things you think are fetishized, then yes, Hit-Girl is a character that gets a lot of attention for being "cool."  There is a portion of the audience, possibly even some kids, who will think it's cool what she does, and think about being able to do all the things she does.  And audiences do like the character.  But I also like Lee Marvin in POINT BLANK and Kurt Russell in DEATH PROOF, and when I was a child I liked watching horror films pretty regularly, and I have a certain adoration for the rape-revenge genre (I first saw I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE -another film Ebert detests - when I was 13), and I'm not going around committing high-level theft and running people down in my car, or raping girls, or killing the rapists of women in particularly violent and brutal ways.  Nor was I when I was a teenager, child, or whatever else I may have been or may be at some point.


These are films, guys.  These are characters in films.  One of the comments on CalLitReview is about Robert B. Parker's character Spenser, and I'm going to borrow it here.  "I am reminded of something the late Robert B. Parker said during a reading at Cody’s Books in Berkeley, CA in 1987… in the question and answer portion of the evening someone rather pointedly asked Parker if he knew that his character Spenser was an alcoholic. Parker replied that Spenser was not an alcoholic; Spenser was a fictional character."  Amen.

The problem is that now you're older, and you're nostalgic for a time that never existed.  I'm sorry that you feel the film is immoral without having any knowledge about its context (because you haven't seen it), or you feel that using a child in anything else other than a sweet movie about horses or killer whales is the equivalent of child porn.  There is nothing in KICK-ASS that could remotely be described as pornographic.  But I will give you a caveat:  If someone is turned on by guns being shot by children, or by violence perpetuated by children, or by children in leather suits, then yeah, I guess you could interpret this as child porn if you're a moron.  If it's the intent of a viewer to find Chloe Moretz as Hit-Girl to be a turn-on, guess what?  That's still not child porn.  That's a fetish, and it's the viewer's take on it, not the film's intent.  Your argument is the equivalent of saying that because some creep gets off on Jodie Foster as a hooker in TAXI DRIVER or Brooke Shields in BLUE LAGOON, then it's child porn.  If you feel so strongly about it, you might as well just take children offscreen altogether, because I'm sure someone out there loves watching girls ride horses, or boys dressed in striped pajamas, or any other thing that could be onscreen.  So, please, keep policing the movies for things that they have no control over.

DEAD SNOW and the Incessant Rehashing of Horror Concepts

For once the term "Army of the Undead" is actually accurate.  And brilliantly gory and fun.

The title of this piece may sound like I'm ragging on DEAD SNOW, the Norwegian Nazi-Zombie flick I just watched last night, but I'm totally not. In fact, the film's pretty amazing. What I am ragging on, however, is how it seems like the really original stuff, even if rehashing previous content, is being produced in other countries while Hollywood continues on its mission to remake literally every movie ever made - bigger and "better", as the saying goes.

I'm all for remakes, particularly in the horror genre, which has cannibalized itself all to hell ever since its formal inception with the classic Universal monster flicks of the 1930s and 40s. The current trend of remaking slashers doesn't even bother me, really, because I feel like they're at least as valid entries into series that have often made it into the double digits as the last six or seven films were. I may be the only person to stand up for HALLOWEEN II and proclaim it as the fresh air it was in a stagnant genre, but dammit, someone has to. Rob Zombie's underrated film was poorly received by a bunch of people who didn't want anything different than what they expected of the genre, or what they had seen before. Don't believe me? Read the user reviews on sites like Rotten Tomatoes and see what the number one gripe is from the "fans" of the genre. It's rife with accusations of desecrating the sacred original film, etc, etc, or being a poor handling of the character, or whatever else they want to dream up about what the movie wasn't, instead of looking at what the movie was. So, there you have it, case made in my mind for the validity of remakes and recycling concepts.

The most recycled monster as of late has definitely been the zombie - the ubiquitous slow-moving (but for some reason amped up and faster in their modern incarnations) look in the mirror for middle America. They're a favorite of the B-level flicks and the direct-to-DVD market, but for some reason they also handle a great big chunk of mainstream success. So much so that the upcoming remake of George Romero's brilliant film THE CRAZIES has been retrofitted to be more like a modern zombie movie. Don't take my word for it. Check out the trailers for original and the remake. Frankly, as a fan of the genre, and the zombie sub-genre, this is getting a bit tiring, regardless of how badly I would like a remake of THE CRAZIES starring Timothy Olyphant to be fantastic.

Last night I watched a zombie movie from Norway called DEAD SNOW, and it was amazingly inventive. It took the one part of the Romero flicks that no one has really touched - intelligence in the living dead - and worked it into a really entertaining gorefest that has a lot of fun with itself and the various ways the knowledge of movies plays into its identity, not only on the part of character self-awareness, but also its unabashed use of serious iconography from previous entries in the sublime horror-comedy category. On top of that, though, it manages to successfully combine two of our favorite monsters into one amazing combo: Nazis and zombies. That's right, Nazi zombies. And it works, though I wanted a bit more background or exposition on the big bads themselves. This is bliss, and it shows that even recycled and rehashed concepts can reinvigorate horror films and make them into something new and exciting for even the most jaded fan.

So, I hope Hollywood takes its cue from the foreign producers of genre fare. The most thrilling films of the past few years have been mostly foreign, and mostly French (FRONTIER(S), the supremely disturbing INSIDE, or THEM). I'm looking forward to the remakes in our future, particularly THE CRAZIES and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, but I fear that at best they'll be decent enough, and at worst they'll continue the tradition of crap that was already happening in their respective series/sub-genres. Here's hoping for the best.

America, the Idiotic, and THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR, a semi-review, but not really.

All right, that's it. I've had it with you, America, and your lame sense of being "entertained." Sure, I fall for Hollywood's tricks more often than not, becoming enamored with something because of this or that that reminds me of something I genuinely loved at one point, but no more! Thanks to Rob Cohen's THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR, I have decided that you, m'lady, are full of rancid shit.

The movie itself wasn't horrible; mildly enjoyable adventure film, I'd say. Not the disaster that THE SCORPION KING was, but close enough to THE MUMMY RETURNS territory as to wonder what the hell the filmmakers could possibly be thinking. After a solid first half, the film derails from its fragile and hastily laid tracks by implementing an attempt at humor so egregious to anyone who halfway has a brain that they should wind up hating this movie.

In the midst of a fight with some bad guys, a few Yeti are called into action - okay, it's a fantasy action film and we're in Nepal, so why not? But can someone please tell me why the hell there's a sequence where one Yeti punts an enemy off the mountain, looks over to his friend behind him, and expresses pure joy when the observer pronounces his field goal is "good" by making the standard American football signal for it? HOW THE FUCK DOES A YETI, admittedly a fictional creature, KNOW WHAT THE FUCK AMERICAN FOOTBALL IS?!?!?!?

And why are YOU laughing at it, you standard American idiots I saw the film in an auditorium full of? Is that "clever" to you? I doubt it. I think you're just that stupid.

Go screw yourself, THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR!

"I've got two words to say to that: Bull SHIT!"

I was watching producer Roger Corman's brilliant B-classic, DEATH RACE 2000 the other night, and while I was watching it, I was constantly thinking about the sure-to-be-horrible remake coming up toward the end of the summer. How in the world does anyone think this movie can 1) be viably remade for today's market while keeping its subversive nature intact, and 2) needs to be remade at all? The idea of a remake is not a new one, nor will I argue an invalid one. Some of the best motion pictures of all time have been remakes, including THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (remake of THE SEVEN SAMURAI), SORCERER (remake of WAGES OF FEAR), and JOHN CARPENTER'S THE THING. So I'm not going to sit here and argue that remakes are evil and unnecessary.

I will, however, bring up that Hollywood in particular tends to remake far more films than need be, and usually in a far more inept way than the original, supposedly "inferior" films were. Setting aside the rash of PG-13 JHorror remakes aimed at teens, I instead want to focus on remakes that are a bit more puzzling, including the relatively recent releases HALLOWEEN, THE HILLS HAVE EYES, and DEATH SENTENCE, as well as discussing upcoming remakes/reboots (the Hollywood Executives' phrase- a'la mode.)

The DEATH RACE remake seems to me an unnecessary one simply because the original epitomizes everything one would ever hope to achieve in a movie called DEATH RACE 2000. There's nudity, gore, outrageous dialogue, a seriously black streak of comedy/commentary, and of course, the cars themselves, designed in low-budget futuristic glory by James Powers. Unless the screenplay for the remake culls everything exactly from the story on which the Corman film was loosely based, I just can't see the point of putting the exact same characters through the exact same motions other than upping the production values. That in and of itself is something that is almost laughable, with even the most bloated of budgets spent on CGI offering up a lot of crap (see the horrible effects work on display in I AM LEGEND, for intance), and that's really the only difference between a lot of the films made in the 1970s and today. CG is king, and that's why I think last year's brilliant DEATH PROOF, for example, is a hundred times more thrilling than stupid, stupid green screen and wire work that passes for "stunts" in today's films, and it's why the original DEATH RACE film will be more memorable than whatever gets churned out by the Hollywood remake factory.

Setting aside DEATH RACE for a moment, take a look at a couple of remakes that are as good as, or better than, or so different from their original source material that they validate their own existence. THE HILLS HAVE EYES, remade by Alexandre Aja into an ultraviolent retro-kitsch exploitation film, is better than the Wes Craven original only by a narrow margin, simply because it goes for the throat in every imaginable way, including creating characters that are fleshed out enough to care about, as well as monsters that are truly horrifying. The major differences between this and the original are negligible, but the style and subtext have been beefed up quite a bit, and the film becomes something all its own. HALLOWEEN, remade by Rob Zombie, is a film that differs substantially from the John Carpenter film, though in mostly good ways. While I won't say that Zombie's film is better (I don't think it is), I will say that it's much more interested in the monster than Carpenter's original, and therefore works by its own set of rules, creating a sort of hybrid/genre remix horror/domestic drama - a form that he began devoloping with THE DEVIL'S REJECTS in 2005. Both Aja and Zombie create films from the source that update the anxieties facing the modern viewers, and up the ante as far as the implications of their movies. The horror genre has always been a gauge of social anxiety, and Zombie and Aja prove that their updates of seminal films from the 1970s, arguably the last great decade for American horror, are valid extensions of the original films that incorporate just enough of today's world to terrify us all over again.

Last year's DEATH WISH remake, DEATH SENTENCE, starring Kevin Bacon, is a step in the opposite direction from the HALLOWEEN and THE HILLS HAVE EYES remakes. The first misstep is that the film's violence is meant to be "cool", something that, while present in the original film, is not the message, even though in later sequels it was the only thing holding proceedings together. The Charles Bronson classic is a film that stays with audiences because it doesn't feel ham-fisted. Bronson looks like the everyman, and the film's story never feels completely contrived. The one-man vigilante justice theme is a bit far-fetched, but only in that he continues to get away with it, not that he goes out and does it. In the remake, not only is the audience expected to buy that Kevin Bacon's character gets away with it, but that in no time flat he turns into a badass able to take on an entire gang in a very bloody shootout all by himself. It's just not good enough to warrant the effort. To add insult to injury, DEATH WISH is in the works to be remade yet again, this time by the original studio, MGM, and is to be written, directed by, and starring Sylvester Stallone. Sheesh already.

And that brings me back to DEATH RACE 2000, a film that Stallone got one of his first leading roles in as "Machine Gun" Joe Viterbo. A remake seems unneccesary only insofar as I can see nothing new being added to it. But, maybe like THE HILLS HAVE EYES and HALLOWEEN, there will be some validity to it after all. Still, leaving remakes in the hands of less-than-capable directors (DEATH RACE is being made by Paul WS Anderson, who has only made one film of note in EVENT HORIZON) reeks of simple greed and the desire to cash in on name recognition with a popular audience that increasingly has no respect for film history or classic cinema. Frankly, the studios would probably make more money simply re-releasing these classics into theaters rather than spend the millions and millions to remake them outright, but then, who would come to see them? I, for one, would. And I bet a whole lot more people than even I give credit to would as well. As for remaking things nonstop (look at Hollywood's release schedule: well over half of 2008's scheduled releases are remakes/reboots/or sequels), I would just like to plead that the studios at least embark on these projects as something more than the supposed cash cows they see them as.

ART versus "This is what I think"

There's a big discussion going on over at Jim Emerson's ::Scanners:: Blog about some remarks (a bit of a point/counterpoint) made at the Telluride Film Festival between Tarkovsky and Richard Widmark. (read the post and discussion here *EDIT* the username of the person I reference is Gouthem*EDIT*) I'm, of course, taking part in it, as there's a bit of an arrogant tone to some of the proceedings that I just couldn't stand, particularly on the part of one guy who disses Hitchcock, Welles, Scorsese and John Ford all in the same paragraph as not being artists on the same level as Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky.

CITIZEN KANE, arguably the most influential movie ever made, and the one film that single-handedly
developed many heretofore unheard of filmmaking techniques is, apparantly, not art.

Apparantly, it's okay for someone who has no real knowledge of the workings of the Hollywood studio system, but has been living in his own arrogant, snotty filth for the better part of his 19 years to make a statement like this. He claims to have seen many classic Hollywood films, but there is no way in Hell that he actually watched them. If you can't recognize the artistry that goes into making a film as hilarious and subversive as SOME LIKE IT HOT or as shocking and influential as PSYCHO in a system that was churning out, literally, hundreds upon hundreds of pictures a year and that often stifled artistic input, there's clearly something that you just don't get.

RAGING BULL, by many accounts the greatest American film of the 1980s, is apparantly not art.

Regardless of how one feels about a particular film, the validity of art should not be the point up for discussion. I don't like the majority of Stanley Kubrick's work because I find it boring, just like Tarkovsky (whose SOLARIS, I should note, is about as perfect as can be, but still a pretty boring film). But just because something bores you, as I'll admit a fair amount of what people consider "art cinema" does to me, does not mean it's any less valid a form of artistic expression.

Neither CASABLANCA, lauded for its screenplay and politically subversive story,
nor VERTIGO, recognized by many critics as Hitchcock's best film, qualify, apparantly, as art.

Tarkovsky may be an artist, but that doesn't give you the right to say that someone like Hitchcock or Scorsese aren't artists. I love how, in one of his posts, he calls Godard an entertainer, then uses a quote by Godard to validate his statement about how one differentiates art and entertainment, all while simultaneously dissing Hitchcock's cred without ever noting that Godard wanted to un-entertain people very often and also how Godard was one of the very influential critics that lauded Hitch as the greatest filmmaker ever. This guy either doesn't understand cinema history, or he's completely off his rocker.

Weigh in and let me know if I'm just completely wrong, or what. Because honestly, I'll admit that maybe I'm just in crazy, obsessive mode right now and am taking things a bit too far... What do you think about it all?