Just a little heads up for my readers (assuming both of you are still reading): Scotty's Movies N' Tunes is going on a little hiatus, possibly for a year. I'll be working on my new blog, tentatively titled Eastern Trails, documenting the adventures of me and my wife as we embark on a journey volunteering on a series of farms and such throughout the eastern United States. I'll try to update that one a little more frequently than I did Movies N' Tunes, hopefully once a week. If I find time to post anything to this blog, I will, but I can't make any promises. One thing I can promise is that I'll resume it once we return to our home base of Tucson, AZ sometime next year.
Thanks and appreciation to anyone who took the time to read this blog. No blogger can expect to draw much of an audience, and those who gave it just a little of their attention have earned my gratitude.
See you on the road!
Saturday, May 5, 2012
THE GREY
I should probably
warn anyone reading this who hasn't seen the movie that there might
be a spoiler, of sorts, even though I have no intention of giving too
much away. It's just that I can't talk about what I thought was the
coolest aspect of this film without going into the ending a little,
so forgive me if I accidentally—or just carelessly—ruin your
viewing of The Grey with anything you come across here.
Besides, knowing the ending won't ruin what is ultimately a
satisfying experience, assuming you like your entertainment kind of
gritty.
Any movie that starts
with Liam Neeson sticking the barrel of a rifle in his mouth promises
to be pretty dark, so you can't go into this hoping for a happy
ending. The title's kind of a giveaway—what would you expect from
a movie called The Grey? What other kind of movie would that
title be appropriate for? Something about the Civil War?
Depressing. About food? Disgusting. About elderly people? Boring.
No, grey is the color they invented Prozac for, it's the color of
suicide and horrible weather. It has little to no positive emotional
connotations. The filmmakers chose well.
Which is not to say
that The Grey is a downbeat experience. Far from it. Nearly
everything about it is gripping and intense, there's a good deal of
suspense throughout, and I believe anyone watching it would have a
hard time not picturing themselves in the same situation and
wondering if they could push themselves to the same extremes.
Neeson plays a man who
shoots wolves for a living in order to protect the lives of oil rig
workers in Alaska. One of the opening scenes of the film depicts him
taking out a wolf as it charges a couple of men, oblivious to what's
coming their way. It becomes clear early on that he's dealing with
some serious personal issues...As I said, he almost shoots himself in
the first few minutes. A little later, he boards a flight with a
number of workers, and on the way the plane goes down in a remote
part of the Alaskan wilderness in the middle of winter. Neeson and
several other men survive the crash, but have little food and not
much idea how to keep themselves alive in a hostile environment.
Along with the cold, a
hungry and very territorial pack of wolves makes life miserable for
these men. They have no choice but to try to find help, and that
involves a difficult, grueling trek across an unforgiving tundra.
This leads to a lot of tension between the characters, not to mention
some unproductive chest-thumping. I liked this element of the story,
mainly because I think it's pretty likely that a group of macho guys
like this would have a hard time working together under such trying
circumstances without somebody vying for the position of alpha male.
That person, of course, winds up being Liam Neeson, in case you had
any doubts. None of this comes across as clichéd or obvious, and
instead feels like a natural part of the narrative. It's fitting for
a story depicting these kinds of characters, and the actors bring it
all off convincingly.
It's a pretty grim
story of survival. I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say
most of the men don't make it. Between the wolves, the cold, and the
usual injuries that occur while tromping around blind in an
unfamiliar world—or trying to shimmy down a rope over a yawning
chasm—these guys don't have much working in their favor. It gets
to a point where you wonder if any of them are going to live.
That's what's so
surprising about The Grey, and what finally makes it a
rewarding viewing experience. Hollywood almost never makes movies
this genuinely intense or bleak. Oh sure, lots of Hollywood movies
look bleak or have dark themes, but few of them really go the
distance the way this one does. The only other one I can think of is
Se7en—no happy ending there. Even Fight Club and
Schindler's List sort of ended on high notes. The
Grey is a slightly different breed of storytelling.
In truth, this isn't
really a movie about survival at all. The fact that most of the cast
doesn't survive effectively underscores that point. What The
Grey is trying to tell us goes a bit deeper than that. This is a
story about the inevitability of death, and humankind's relationship
with its own mortality. All of us will die, and the only difference
between us in that regard is how we deal with it. Some of us are
stricken down without warning, some die violently, others quietly
accept their fate and wait for death to come, and still others choose
to fight it until their last. This film pretty much covers the full
range.
It's Neeson's character
who chooses to fight, and I have to say, the last final scene in this
movie is one of the most badass things I've seen in a while. I'd say
it's totally the equal of Chow Yun Fat sliding down a banister while
shooting two pistols at the same time in Hard-Boiled, or Clint
Eastwood blowing away a gang of rangy outlaws in A Fistful of
Dollars. Neeson faces down the alpha wolf of the very pack that
has been picking off his companions with nothing but a knife in one
hand a few broken airplane liquor bottles wedged between his fingers
in the other. The confrontation is executed perfectly, with zero
pandering to the audience. It is simply the toughest, baddest,
grittiest thing I've witnessed in a movie for years.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
THE THING
I've done a few entries
here discussing movies, and in some cases bad-mouthing them in terms
that most people would find less than flattering. It's a common
practice on the internet to heap disproportionately gargantuan vats
of bile and venom on anything that even displeases you mildly, often
without taking a few moments to consider the exaggerated nature of
the claims. Sometimes the exaggeration is for humorous effect (such
as when I say Michael Bay should be force-fed his entire filmography
in laserdisc format), and isn't meant to be taken seriously. But,
somehow, I get the nagging feeling that a number of people actually
seem to mean what they say, regardless of how ridiculous and
over-the-top their rhetoric.
Film is definitely one
area of discussion where people show a tendency to let fly with
incredibly negative, dismissive criticism, disregarding in one or two
sentences works that very likely took at least a year, if not several
years, to complete. I still do it myself on occasion, though in
recent times I've tried to tone down the intensity of my words when
talking about movies I didn't like or, what's more likely, failed to
impress me strongly one way or the other.
Movies take a lot of
work to produce. It's hard to see that when you're watching one,
mainly because we're accustomed to passively consuming moving
images—a practice many of us have engaged in from the time we were
old enough to turn on a TV—without giving a thought to the process
required to create those images in the first place. Even
self-identified cinephiles often seem to possess only a vague, cloudy
notion of what it means for a movie to have been produced, written,
directed, or in any way brought into being by filmmakers. Most film
fans do not make movies themselves, so it's easy to forget the
immense amount of labor that goes into a production, from low-budget
indies to mega-budget Hollywood blockbusters.
Watch the
behind-the-scenes featurettes on many DVDs and you see what I mean:
massive sets that require teams of professional tradespeople to
build, working from careful designs commissioned by the producers.
Lighting and camera placements involving tons of expensive equipment.
Costumes, makeup, special effects, stunts, dialogue coaches, script
supervisors, and dozens—if not hundreds—of other tasks and
specialists all have to be closely managed and supervised in order
for any movie to exist. Chances are, the better the movie looks, the
greater the amount of work that went into making it.
The point I'm trying to
make is that, any time you watch a movie, even one that falls far
short of your expectations, you should probably take a moment to
consider all of that time and work, and all of the hopes and
ambitions of the people who went through the trouble to create what
you've been zoning out to while sitting on the couch eating frozen
pizza.
But as with all
endeavors, the results aren't always good. Anyone who has sat
through an awful movie can attest to that. I'm sure Night
Patrol took a lot of effort on the part of everyone
involved to see it through to the final stages, but it's still a
worthless piece of shit. Seriously, watch that movie and tell me you
don't want to beat the Unknown Comic with a crowbar at least a little
bit. (Anyone reading this too young to remember who the Unknown
Comic was, he was a barely-talented stand-up with an act based on
awful puns and wearing a paper bad over his head. He got popular
some time around the late 70's/early 80's, and eventually made one of
the single worst comedies of all time, the aforementioned Night
Patrol.)
Other times—if not
most times—you wind up with mediocrity, which makes this as good a
place as any to take a look at the recent remake/prequel to John
Carpenter's groundbreaking remake of The Thing From
Another World. Considering
it's
a
prequel,
the
filmmakers
made
the
odd
decision
to
give
it
the exact same title
as
the
movie
it's
connected
to.
Wouldn't
The Thing Begins
or
The Birth Of The
Thing or
What The Fuck Is
That Thing have
been
better
options?
Something
to
set
it
apart
from
what
is,
in
just
about
every
way,
a
superior
original?
At
least
it
might
cut
down
on
any
confusion
between
a
classic
and
a
so-so
imitation.
I
remember
when
Carpenter's
Thing came
out
in
'82.
I
was
too
young
at
the
time
to
go
see
it
in
a
theater,
but
my
older
sister
wasn't.
What
she
told
me
of
it—grotesque,
mind-boggling
physical
transformations
of
a
kind
never
attempted
in
a
movie
before—captivated
me,
and
I
had
to
wait
a
few
impatient
years
before
I
was
able
to
see
it
on
VHS
at
the
local
library
(this
was
before
my
parents
bought
a
VCR).
She
didn't
lie—the
effects
were
gross,
outrageous,
surprising,
and
unlike
anything
I'd
ever
seen.
It
was
one
of
those
movies,
like
Jurassic Park about
a
decade
later,
that
opened
up
a
new
world
of
possibilities
for
film,
provided
the
filmmakers
had
the
imagination
(and
access
to
funding)
to
use
the
cutting-edge
techniques
to
their
fullest
potential.
 |
| Yes, this is gross. It's also groundbreaking. |
The
important
thing
to
remember
is
that
special
effects
of
the
sort
featured
in
Carpenter's
film
were
brand
new
at
the
time.
A
number
of
horror
movies
in
the
early
80's
made
use
of
a
combination
of
latex
appliances,
puppetry,
and
animatronics
to
push toward
the
next
step
in
movie
magic,
most
notably
with
Rick
Baker's
Academy
Award-winning
work
in
An American Werewolf In
London and
Rob
Bottin's
no
less-impressive
nightmare
werewolves
in
The Howling.
Like
the
T.
Rex
in
Jurassic,
these
never-before-seen creatures
caused
viewers
jaws
to
drop.
It
was
an
exciting
moment
in
cinema
history.
Also,
Carpenter
being
Carpenter,
he
populated
his
film
with
down-to-earth,
blue
collar
characters,
not
all
that
different
from
the
kind
of
people
encountered
in
the
first
Alien.
They're
easy
to
relate
to.
It
helps
immeasurably
that
he
put
together
a
cast
that
could
lend that quality
to
the
characters
through
screen
presence
alone—there's nothing more
folksy on this Earth than “Quaker Oats” Wilford Brimley, and no
one who looks more world-weary and fed up with peoples' bullshit than
Keith David.
 |
| He's had it up to here with this Thing bullshit |
These kinds of characters, along with the completely
unknown nature of the alien creature they're forced to battle, adds a
natural and uncontrived layer of suspense to the film. The Thing can
look like any person or animal, it could be one of the very people
upon which your life depends. The film does a lot with this idea,
and it works because it's easy for viewers to put themselves in the
situation and feel the same all-consuming paranoia.
When
we come to the remake, the circumstances have changed. Here we are
in the early 21st
century, and movies make such ubiquitous use of CG effects that it's
more noteworthy when you don't
see them. In the case of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, you
fully expect it. Why wouldn't you? It's how movies are made now.
There's nothing very special about it, and the more time goes by, the
less impressed moviegoers tend to be with the sight of digital white
noise flailing around onscreen. I found that to be the case
with the first two Transformers
movies: the action looked like a lot of cubist shapes mating with
Legos. Sure, a ton of work goes into creating digital effects, and
some of it does look
damn good, but market saturation has significantly devalued the
product.
The
creature effects for the new Thing
are, as far as I could tell, entirely digital—at any rate, if there
are any physical
effects, they get lost in the shuffle. This allows for scenes not
possible in the Carpenter version: grotesquely deformed and
misshapen human beings walk around on their freakish appendages in
full view, and chase after their prey. The Thing designs borrow
heavily from the older versions, and this winds up being a problem.
They hew so closely to Rob Bottin's ideas that they don't really
bring anything new to the concept. On top of that, the designers
don't seem all that inspired by what they've borrowed. In
Carpenter's Thing,
part of the horror one feels at the sight of these monsters is that
they seem capable of turning into any and all combinations of organic
life, as if somebody stuck parts of every animal on Earth in a food
processor and spiked them with mescaline. Here, we get spider legs,
crab claws, tentacles, and toothy vagina-mouths. That's pretty much
it, unless you want to count the fact that some of these squiggly
monsters have the faces of Thing-ified characters poking out of them.
There
are some problems with the writing as well. None of the characters
really stand out (although this may be as much a problem with the
casting), and so there's no reason to be very invested in what's
happening onscreen. There's a young scientist invited by her boss to
come out to Arctic and see this weird block of ice found by a group
of Norwegian researchers (all of the action takes place at the
abandoned base explored by Kurt Russell in the original), a subject
about which he insists on being unnecessarily cryptic. I mean, why
not just come right out and say, “They found some crazy shit in the
Arctic and it might be an alien!”
I know I'd be
excited. Even if he feels he shouldn't divulge too much for fear she
might blab to her boyfriend or mom or somebody, does he have to keep
her completely in the dark like this is some kind of Special Forces
Black Ops mission? It's a tactic the writer employs to make him
appear shady, untrustworthy, and arrogant, and that's about as
interesting as he gets. This is a stock character in any number of
horror/sci-fi movies, going at least as far back as Paul Reiser's
weaselly corporate lackey from Aliens, though
I detect some elements of the mad scientists from 50's sci-fi movies
in there too.
Our
young scientist, in the course of events, figures out the nature of
the alien creature that is overtaking them. In fact, she figures it
out in no time flat, almost as if she's seen the first movie. I had
a really hard time suspending disbelief on this point. Wilford
Brimley's character took a while to come around to his final
conclusion that the alien took over the cells of its host and copied
them flawlessly. We even see him watching a computer simulation and
trying to work it out, giving us the sense that all of this is just
too strange and otherworldly to understand without some serious
thinking. Yet this character just snaps her fingers and says “I've
got it! The alien takes over its host and copies its cells!” after what appears to be a few minutes of lab work. She
doesn't fiddle with any test tubes or bunsun burners, doesn't agonize
over her hypothesis, she just figures it out and the film goes on about its business. I understand that the filmmakers don't
want to waste much time explaining something to the audience that
they might already know, but still, couldn't they have made these
scenes a little more convincing? Is she that much smarter than
Wilford Brimley? Is anybody?
 |
| Wilford says no |
A
lack of engaging characters means most of the movie hinges on the
Thing effects, and as I've said, there's not much new going on there.
Images such as these have been a staple of horror and science
fiction, as well as many video games, for decades, and I can't help
but think that relying on computerized monster squids with crab legs
and vaginas was something of a miscalculation. In a way, the new
Thing suffers from the
same disadvantages as the Star Wars
prequels. Instead of pushing the boundaries of fantasy filmmaking,
they offer up the same thing you can catch any day of the week at the
multiplex, on Netflix, or in the Redbox. Shit, The Phantom
Menace came out in the wake of
The Matrix,
probably the first movie since the original Star Wars
to have such a profound and lasting effect on popular culture. When
big-budget, video game special effects are so commonplace, a good
story and strong characters become more important than ever, and a
failure to recognize that means running the risk of having a very
expensive, very labor-intensive project disappear from the popular
consciousness like a puff of smoke in a high wind.
 |
| Or a vagina-mouth in a hurricane of tentacles |
Sunday, April 15, 2012
THOUGHTS ON SLASHER MOVIES, INSPIRED BY TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL
-->
If I may appoint myself an expert on recent cinema history, I'd say that the slasher movie has, by and large, become the most popular sub-category of the horror genre, outdistancing even relentless hordes of zombies in any honest, movie-by-movie tally (I assume. It's not like I've done any research). It also has the least-impressive pedigree, with few seminal works that rise above the level of laughable shit. Acknowledged classics such as the original Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or proto-slasher templates like Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace and Twitch of the Death Nerve, tend to work not because they represent any great leap forward in storytelling, but because talent behind the cameras kept them from being little more than the cynical exploitation the producers intended.
I suppose you could say that about almost any kind of movie, really, considering they're nearly all meant to be money machines. But I have a hard time thinking of any other kind of film, apart from porn, more concerned with the bottom line. If you were to sift through a random sampling of slasher flicks from the 80's, you'd find the vast majority are pure junk, either good only for poking fun at, or dull enough to cure insomnia (My personal favorite is Don't Go In The Woods...Alone, a piece of crap with acting so bad, and scoring so ridiculous, Ed Wood is foaming with rage in the afterlife because he didn't make it himself). Yet the form seems to have captured the imagination of a generation of filmmakers, and doesn't show any signs of letting up. It comes and goes, like a herpes inflammation, and has been around long enough to have what could rightly be called a classical period and a revival period. On the one side you have all those goddamn Friday the 13th movies (which actually get better as they go along, just because each one is sillier than the last), and on the other you have Rob Zombie's ambitious-but-flawed remake of Halloween, which comes at the original story in an unconventional way—telling it from Michael Myers' point of view—but stumbles by failing to make very many of the other characters sympathetic, and as a result leaves a total vacuum of suspense.
(Better yet, you also have Freddy Vs. Jason, an entertaining and funny pairing of two classic horror icons that even scooped Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1 by being the first movie in American theaters to feature Lone Wolf and Cub-style arterial blood spray.)
In the interest of getting to the main point of this post, I'm going to mention the country cousin of the slasher genre, the City Folk vs. Psycho Hillbillies movie, best represented by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes (or for those of you who prefer hicksploitation of a higher caliber, Deliverance). The main theme of these films is pretty straightforward: urbanites are scared shitless of rural America. Generally speaking, those who live in cities don't think all that highly of people from the country (I have to admit I'm sometimes guilty of this myself, and I grew up in a pretty rural part of Washington state). City folk are smart, cultured, civilized, enlightened, and bathe regularly. People from Backwoods U.S.A. Carry firearms at all times and eat things they find in the road. According to these movies they also eat a substantial amount of human flesh, which should tell you something about the availability of good grocery stores in the American heartland. I'd eat the occasional human being too if the only food outlet within 75 miles was a Wal-Mart.
 |
| Wal-Mart |
I'd also gladly eat man-flesh if there was a chance it would stop any more of these from getting made. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of the original Chainsaw Massacre, and I also enjoyed the first Wrong Turn movie (I haven't seen any of the others because, I mean, c'mon). But this is a well movie makers have gone to way too often. Massacre, as well The Hills Have Eyes, have both been remade and spawned sequels to those remakes. Along with Wrong Turn and its follow-ups, Mr. Zombie has thrown his hat into the ring with his first feature film, House of 1000 Corpses, and its sequel, the slightly better The Devils's Rejects (wouldn't the fact that the devil rejected them mean that they're not evil enough to get into Hell? Maybe that's the point of the movie—they're in the qualification phase). I'm sure I'm missing a bunch (does Cabin Fever count? It feels like it should). Apart from more graphic gore and contemporary filmmaking techniques, few of those movies differ much from their progenitors.
 |
| No camping trip is complete without at least one dead Harry Potter |
Then along comes Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, and turns the whole idea upside down. It bucks the trend in two distinct ways: firstly, it's a comedy instead of a horror film, with a reasonably touching bromance at its core. Second, the rednecks are the victims, not the victimizers. Tucker and Dale are two good-natured country boys looking to fix up an old cabin in the woods in the hopes of making it a vacation getaway. Not far off in the same woods, a group of college students, cleverly patterned after similar characters in vintage slasher movies, have set up camp for their own vacation.
A misunderstanding leads the students to believe Tucker and Dale are bloodthirsty hillbilly psychos out to kill them all, when in fact the greatest danger they face is their own stupidity. Over the course of the film most of them manage to kill themselves or each other, often in very bloody ways (there's even an homage to Fargo when one kid jumps headfirst into a chipper/shredder). Tucker and Dale find themselves threatened by the creepy leader of this pack (the Evil of the title), who harbors a psychotic mistrust and hatred of “hillbillies”. Further carnage ensues.
 |
| This is still legal in some states |
I don't want to get into too much of a review here. I liked Tucker and Dale; it's amusing and kind of sweet, while also containing a generous amount of blood and gore (though it's actually pretty lightweight compared to some genuine horror fare of recent years). My main point is that this movie, for me anyway, heralds the official end of the slasher/crazy redneck arc. This is it. It's finally come to the parody stage, where making fun of the genre is more relevant than recycling all of its tropes. And that, in my very humble opinion, is exactly where it should stay. Personally, I'm done with it. Maybe I'll never watch another slasher movie again that wasn't made in the 80's and isn't hilarious. Unless some genius comes along and totally revitalizes the idea of a maniac stalking braindead kids, turning it into an art form on a par with violin concertos and breakfast burritos, I'll pass on any new installments. It's the same approach I've taken with zombie movies for the last few years (maybe in another post I'll get a chance to rant about how sick I am of that more-than-way-past-played-out craze).
Of course there'll be many more. How could there not be? Each new generation of filmgoers, lacking any experience with old movie trends, stumbles across tired and overused ideas all the time, and treats them as if they're brand new. There's money to be made off these naïve waifs, and therefore more mileage to be gotten out of clanking, wheezing, redundant horror conventions. As the Child's Play, Elm Street and Scream movies have made apparent, even the notion of making horror films funny and self-referential has become a shopworn cliché. Apart from an occasional rarity like Tucker and Dale, it looks like it's all downhill from here.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
ERASING DAVID: HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU
For a while, in a brief fit of paranoia, I decided to use only cash whenever I bought something. That way, any person or persons who might want to track my movements throughout the day (I don't know who—the FBI? The NSA? Walt Disney's frozen head? Like I said, I was paranoid) would know only what ATM I'd used to get cash and at what time. No one could take the information produced by regular use of a debit card and compile a map of my movements. Even if the bank assures you that all personal information is secure, it's become clear that anyone with the means and the skill can get at it if they please, and do with it as they see fit. I wanted to take measures to prevent that from happening in my case.
The problem, obviously, is that one has to remain eternally diligent in the computer age in order to accomplish such a goal, and I'm a little bit lazy. It took me less than two weeks to drop the idea. I went right back to using my card, scattering all kinds of data into the unforgiving world, the same as any other debit or credit card holder. Those of us with bank accounts sow the seeds of our own potential downfall.
Or consider that Google keeps a detailed database of its users containing a record of every site they've visited using the search engine and--who knows?--maybe every action they performed while on those sites. Google claims it only does so to tailor searches to individuals, but they can do what they like with the information they amass, and the legislation that might stop them from doing so has a nagging tendency to lag far behind advancements in technology.
The documentary Erasing David centers on the issue of privacy in the information age, and does so by making use of a poorly planned stunt. Journalist David Bond (he could not have a more perfect last name) decides to try to go underground, making himself as invisible as possible to the scrutiny of two private investigators charged with finding him, all to see if it is even possible for a person to go completely off the grid when so much about us has been recorded electronically.
 |
| The target |
As far as the stunt goes, he makes a huge mistake by attempting all this while his wife is nearing the end of her pregnancy. They have a low-key argument about it early on when he tells her that he intends to be gone for a month, meaning he'll be off playing espionage games while she's making repeat trips to the doctor to deal with the complications of an impending birth. Why is it that so many men in relationships are prone to pulling this kind of shit?
Apart from Bond's apparent cluelessness, he does a great job analyzing the nature of privacy in a time when, in the name of convenience and security, privacy is constantly eroded. The setting of the experiment is the U.K., so Bond takes a look at the ridiculously huge security culture of England, which has one of the most heavily spied-upon populations in the world. Evidently, it's close to impossible to go anywhere in London without being caught on camera. Londoners are always being watched, ostensibly as a crime-prevention measure. According to Bond, the ubiquitous cameras actually do little to cut down on crime. The implications of how else the cameras might be used is left meaningfully hanging.
He also touches on a trend in some British schools to use electronic fingerprinting as a way of keeping track of student activities. Students come in for class? They lay a finger on a classroom scanner. Check out a book from the library? Scanner. Ideally, children would be scanned everywhere they go at school, and fingerprint scans connect to a database of information about the students. While some may feel that such a technology will help with problems such as class attendance and keeping track of school materials, the same technology could be applied to life in the general community, meaning that that average citizen might one day find themselves required to be scanned in order to take part in government or private services.
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| The scanner in action |
As far as Bond's time on the run is concerned, he plays it smart at the beginning, and then just falls apart from there. He starts by heading over to France, and in so doing confounds his two pursuers by going well outside the net they cast for him. But not long after, he decides he needs to visit his parents' home in the country, working from the assumption that because it's in the middle of nowhere, he'll be able to see if anyone is trying to sneak up on him. It doesn't seem to occur to him that a relative's home is one of the first places investigators would look. From there, he heads off into a rural area in Wales, holing up for a night in an abandoned hut. It's here that we see the first signs of the intense paranoia that will plague him throughout the remainder of the experiment: Bond agonizes over every unidentified sound over the course of a drizzly night, seemingly in the grip of an almost painful anxiety. Later, in a hotel room, he becomes convinced that his portable camera equipment has been bugged or tagged with a tracking device. His behavior starts to mirror that of a paranoid schizophrenic, with Bond continually looking over his shoulder, certain that imaginary agents hired by the investigators are around every corner.
The funny thing is, apart from going online to gather some basic information, the two private eyes don't use any technologically special techniques to track their target. Most of the skills they apply appear to be old-fashioned investigative tools. They even go through Bond's garbage to gather intelligence on where he might turn up. Not surprisingly, they also go out to the countryside where Bond's parents live and spy on the house. They call the hospital where his wife is being treated, pretending to be him in order to find out when her appointments are scheduled. I don't want to give too much away, but when they do finally catch up to Bond, it's while he's doing something that could have, under different circumstances, been easily avoided. I can only assume that by this time in the experiment, stress and sleep deprivation had taken their toll on his cognitive functions.
I came away from this film with a disturbing impression. In most fiction dealing with distopian, totalitarian societies, the assumption is that government agencies vested with the power to spy on citizens will be the ones to finally exterminate civil liberties. So many conspiracy theories ground themselves in an overwhelming mistrust of government. And while we should always be aware of the degree to which government affects our quality of life, I find that relatively little attention is turned toward the motives of the private sector. It's as if people forget that the larger a corporation becomes, the more it is like a federal agency. And rather than privacy being taken away by a nosy government, people appear content to sign away a lot of their privacy, entirely of their own accord, to privately owned social networks such as Facebook. Why have security cameras mounted on every streetlight and telephone pole when so many willingly post photos and footage of themselves doing things they'll wish they hadn't in a few years? When we use the internet, we put a lot of ourselves out there for someone else to snatch up, and we do it freely.
Who would have thought we'd be inclined to give away so much of what we claim to be inviolable?
Thursday, March 1, 2012
HEAVY METAL'S NOT ANGRY, IT'S JUST EXCITED
More than once over the years, after mentioning to someone that I enjoy heavy metal, I've gotten the reply, “Really? You don't seem like an angry person to me.”
Since when do you have to be seething with rage to like heavy metal? It's the kind of opinion I expect from people unfamiliar with the genre: all metal is grinding, bashing hatemusic, produced by serial killers, for serial killers. Everybody knows that.
I'm not going to say there isn't a lot of stuff in the genre marketed to frustrated teens and surly twenty-somethings. There sure as shit is, possibly the majority of it judging from the average album cover. But for every ten or so screamer metalcore bands, there's at least one doing interesting things with melody and time signatures, writing genuinely complex, engaging music that demonstrates not only instrumental virtuosity but a uniqueness of vision and imagination.
My taste in metal has, over the course of twenty years, drifted away from the howling angst typically associated with this kind of music, and gone more in the direction of work that attempts something new without necessarily relying on negativity or rage. The angrier-sounding something is, the less likely I am to want to hear it.
This is probably the key reason I don't listen to Slayer anymore. There was a time when I tapped into the full-on belligerence they're famous for, mainly in my teens and partway into my early twenties. They have a sound that appeals particularly to the frustrated and hormonal. What I find remarkable is that in close to thirty years, almost nothing has changed about their style--except maybe that it has grown more sonically brutal—and never seems to have moved beyond the war/religion/psycho killer subject matter that has suffused every album since the beginning.
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| This is what Slayer sounds like |
I sure have. And I feel the same way about many bands that subscribe to the hyper-aggro aesthetic Slayer, in large part, set in motion decades ago. I have no problem with an element of aggression in music—as with profanity, it can express a great deal when used carefully. But I find that, as I grow older, the internal discontent that frequently comes attached to an enjoyment of intense metal music has disappeared, and in its place there's a desire to hear something that's still loud, still heavy, still informed by a certain combative attitude, but nevertheless doesn't bury itself alive under six feet of wailing despondency.
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| The kind that makes you do stuff like this |
It's the bands that are wiling to change and experiment that I appreciate the most. My favorite Slayer album? South Of Heaven, the one where they slowed down a few of the songs and allowed for a more brooding and dynamic style. I remember when that album came out. Most of my peers hated it, exactly because it wasn't fast from beginning to end. My memory of how the album was received tends to reinforce my opinion that the most overtly belligerent music appeals mainly to the young and discontented, and in the course of growing up it's vital that we begin to develop a taste for work that is denser and more involved. Slayer, at least on that one record, showed that they have it in them to do unexpected things. A band that fails to do so becomes stagnant. Those who do reflect the same kind of deepening maturity we hope for in ourselves.
Just look at the Melvins. They've been around since the mid-80's, playing what I would describe as hardcore punk during their earliest period, gliding over into slower, more structurally complex music in the late 80's and early 90's, as well as producing the droning, tonally-oriented work they're best known for on Lysol, Bullhead and Eggnog. Then, during their time on Atlantic Records, they changed again, retaining elements of their earlier period while writing songs that were simultaneously more accessible and very weird, if that's possible. Tracks on Houdini and Stoner Witch display a latent pop sensibility that would come to greater fruition in their post-Atlantic years, particularly on more recent albums; there's stuff on Nude With Boots that I swear would sound perfectly normal if performed by Led Zeppelin in their heyday.
Mastodon are another great example, and one that is more temporally compressed. In just a little over ten years, they've gone from borderline hardcore to becoming a stellar representative of the progressive metal vanguard. Listen to “The Last Baron” from Crack The Skye—it's absolutely epic, making multiple twists and turns in its approximately thirteen-minute running time, at times laid back and at others roaring with a spirit that is not so much antagonistic as exultant. Like all great metal-as-metal, it exhilarates and thrills the listener, lifting you out of the everyday and into a place that can be as mystical and fathomless as all outer space.
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| This is what Mastodon sounds like |
Listen to Master Of Puppets and tell me I'm wrong.
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