Entertainment : Battle for the Last Post!

Yeah, it was poetry, my bad.

I think Warhols problem was he did too much acid

I'm pretty sure that at "The Factory" the real problem was all of the speed. But I've already been wrong.... about a dozen times today.

Not saying he didn't do acid, just saying he did way more speed.

But a master of terror.  Hitler had nothing on Stalin when it came to frightening his own people.

I wonder what that says about artists? Hitler was a painter, Stalin a poet, If memory serves me I think Pol Pot was a musician.....

Yeah, I think you're right about that, Hitler used it as a hammer, Stalin used it like a scalpel. 

What does it say about artists?

That we are crazy. What is the nature of art? To inspire emotions in other people. That's what we all want to do. Well, let's say that your art isn't doing that. Terror is a cheap emotion, it isn't that hard to evoke it in other people.

And so these men terrorized their way to the top (and I mean, look at their ascents, one of them was killing and intimidating rivals until he reached the top of the Soviet food chain, the other was trying to overthrow the Weimar Republic with a machine gun and when that failed he burned down the Reichstag) and once they made it to the top they kept "inspiring emotions" in the way that they had become accustomed to doing so.

Yeah, Hannibal Rising totally took away the mystique of that character.  Prior to it, I found him quite likeable.  I didn't enjoy seeing him play the victim because that character was just never a victim.

I never read Hannibal.  I watched the movie.  He convinced Gary Oldman to cut off his own face and then later he wasn't afraid of pigs and that about all I remember.  Oh, and he and Ray Liotta ate Ray Liotta's brains.  And there was a disembowelling.  Okay, four things.

Do you remember when Silence of the Lambs was scary?  I remember that.  Buffalo Bill was scary, Hannibal was scary.  Bugs were scary.

Nothing was scary in the other movies.

I liked Red Dragon the best, but I'm not going to pretend that it was scary. It's about a cop catching a criminal. It's a great story, and probably the best prequel ever made, but, I mean, the plot is built in a distinctly different way than the plot of Silence of the Lambs, it is much more conventional.

Silence was creepy as hell, very scary the first time I saw it, but just the way it is built, Red Dragon of course has it's suspenseful moments where you would expect them, in the solving of the crime and proximity to the antagonist. Silence of the Lambs has that, but without any sort of secure sets. She is either chasing Bill, or Bill is chasing/abusing a victim, or she is interacting with Hannibal and his intelligence is just terrifying because he's obviously just trying to manipulate her and the only real method she has of creating a profile for Bill isn't doing reading and research, it is doing mental battle with an evil genius. And even beyond Hannibal there are people like the Warden, and everyone in the movie is either trying to kill you or manipulate you.

I hate horror films. But I love silence of the lambs, it is crafted so masterfully. Sure, I liked Red Dragon, but again, it's a conventional crime drama, not a horror film and I probably never would have watched it without having seen Silence of the Lambs.

I would have watched Red Dragon with or without Silence, because it has Edward Norton in it, and I am in love with him.

I like scary movies, sort of.  I get scared.  One of my friends makes fun of me because I think scary movies are - um - scary.  But isn't that the point?  If you are too cool to get scared, then why bother? 

"doing mental battle with an evil genius."

I do this all the time, exhausting.

Japanese horror is fucking weird. No, seriously,

not like the Grudge or Ringu, etc. Real Japanese horror is horrifying.

Oh, it is, there was this one movie about a crazy roommate that I remember seeing and thinking "whoa."

Anyway, so I take classes on globalization all the time. It's part of my major, and it's even the part I find interesting, nations and their citizens collaborating across national boundaries in political and non-political ways. And in these classes they are always talking about "Holywood" as if it is the purest embodiment of Western Cultural Dominance.

Which always makes me think "What, you have Tarantino and his ilk trying to make Kurosawa knockoffs on the one hand, and on the other hand you have Michael Bay and his ilk trying to develop the special effects that Toho Co invented," and I am stunned that Japan doesn't get credit as the birthplace of modern "western" films.

And now we try to knock off their horror films.

Exactly.

@Diaz:  I had that same moment when I read that essay.  It's fucking brilliant.  It's something I'd been told and told again, conceptually, for years, but that essay just made it make total sense.  Of the things on this site I am most excited about, one of those things is the thought verb essay.

Diaz - YAAAAY!  That is an exciting moment.  I remember when I read it for the first time.  It really does make a light bulb come on over your head.  Now you can start practicing executing some of those ideas!

LOL.  You remind a lot of a buddy right now.

@Diaz - your writing will be a lot stronger if you can do it.  I can't do it with any true reliability yet.  But I'm working on it. 

The Japanese have such an ingrained hierarchy that children falling out of line is a very real concern there. Hence the movies of children always being the evil. Adults are respected and horror movies about them being the evil would undermine the society.

How do you guys find this stuff? Really?

Regular porn is boring. Japanese porn crossed with horror = have to do it once, right?

Grudge or Ringu

Alright, so maybe we don't knock off their "high grade" horror films, but we still knock off their horror films.

You don't see us remaking Bollywood movies.

You know in Japan they have vending machines with used women's underwear....and of course cartoons with tentical rape....truely a fucked up culture. 

Oh yeah, American culture is sooo much better.

Tentacle Rape, yeah, that's weird, there's like, some heavy sexual anxiety getting vented there.

But, I mean, we live in the birthplace of Reality TV, I wouldn't get too excited about getting into a debate about who has a better culture.

It's been a long time since I saw my source on that one, so it could be a questionable source, but my hazy memory suggests it is legit.