Martyrs: Film parody

I had no other purpose in mind than telling a story I felt connected to, doing a film I had faith in, and doing it with all my heart. When I was writing MARTYRS, I couldn't see another way to talk about all the things that were surrounding me. On a metaphorical way, horror was the perfect tool to react to the feeling I had, like a sad intuition, that the world we're living in right now is a brutal and unfair one. I mean, very brutal. It seems that the cynism and the power of the winners has killed everything. It seems that our urban societies are more than ever driven by the forces of jungle laws, by rules created by the strongest and the dominant people. I'm not saying anything original about injustice of our times, but it was strong enough in me to create the necessity of doing that film. The system creates a lot of losers, a lot of suffering weak people I feel very close to and MARTYRS in its way tells about them. So I would say that the horror genre is a way to talk about things that preoccupy me a lot. As a fan, I always took the films from the masters Argento, Carpenter, Polanski and dozens of other great artists as their own personal visions of life. That's why I liked them humanly too. And that's why I love horror so much. 

Pascal Laugier

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/interview/474

So visionary

I really wish I had known a bit more about the film Martyrs so I could have skipped wasting the 1 and 1/2 hours I put in trying to watch this. Just word-of-mouth that it was supposedly "one of the best horror films ever made" made me decide to watch it. I'm not a fan of horror particularly but I enjoyed being scared by films like The Exorcist and Poltergeist, and I'm interested in good films regardless of genre. I did not catch on to the fact that the same people who were praising Martyrs probably thought that August Underground's Mordum was a masterpiece, and this naivete is what led to the experience I ultimately ended up with.

My experience watching this film was similar to the expereinces I had trying to watch El Topo and 120 days of Sodom and is probably the last attempt I am ever going to make to objectively view or understand anything in this niche of European films. I sat through a huge amount of gratuitous violence, torture, and depravity in the hope that at some point I would begin to find the beginning of the thread the director was trying to spin to at least justify all the crap that had gone before. Once I got to the point where I realized that such a moment was not coming and that despite the director's claim , there was actually no story being told, I stopped watching. In Martyr's case this occurred around 1:20:00. I really wish it had been less.

Martyrs is basically a snuff film that uses a 5 min monologue by a nameless character on a ridiculous paper-thin premise to justify the extended scenes of graphic torture and abuse of young girls.  Here's a synopsis of the film : a shadowy organization systematically drives young girls insane with hideous torture and abuse till they begin to 'see things that others can't'. That's it. fin. If a 16-year old high school student had written the screenplay of Martyrs for a term paper she would have gotten a D-. In this regard it's very similar in execution to 120 Days of Sodom. where depiction of the kidnapping, sexual abuse and murder of a group of teenage girls and boys is justified by the kind of  idiotic liberal moralizing that makes your ears bleed listening to it.

It's society that's killing you, stupid.

It's not the fact that Martyrs is exploitation torture porn that bothers me - there's hundreds of films made and being made like it, and films like Saw and Hostel are constantly trying to push this so-called genre into the mainstream. But the fact that people actually consider this film to have any kind of creative merit says a lot more about human nature than what was depicted in the film.  And it's the cynicism of the director/writer of this film that is a lot more disturbing than watching teenage girls in their underwear getting tortured. So apparently the trend in horror no is to see how many extended scenes of graphic torture can fit into 2hrs and just under an 'R' rating. And then some idiot on the Internet gets to write about how the destruction of innocent girls represents the death of God and of innocence and so on and so forth...

Maybe torture porn should become a recognized and clearly-labelled genre like XXX (TTT?) so stuff like this would not have to share the same space with The Exorcist and Poltergeist and The Ring. Directors could celebrate nihilism and depravity all they want without having to carry the bourgeois burden of plot, character development, etc. All that would be required would be a simple 5-minute setup scene - an analogue to the beginning of movies where a 19-year old girl dressed in short shorts and stripper heels walks in on 5 guys playing pool and tells them her car broke down and she doesn't have any money for a mechanic or taxi.

In films like Evil Dead or Alien the violence and fear and gore provided a visceral experience, but one whichwas always embedded in something larger - a fantasy about some unknown thing in the dark that we all have this primeval dread of, like the supernatural or alien species. The ordeal the characters went through always had a rationalization you could accept as necessary to the fantasy. Films like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th and Halloween have always been about nothing more but entertainment - the kind of stuff you go see when you're 19 and with 10 people and you immediately forget as soon as you leave the car park. Nobody tries to sell House of Wax or Final Destination or I Know What You Did Last Summer as anything but 2 hours of teenagers getting killed in ways which were similarly gruesome and comical. But to me Martyrs is less horror film than parody. It's just a vehicle for sadism and depravity; that's all I can say about it. There's no difference between and it and any movie starring Lisa-Ann as Sarah Palin or Sasha Grey as a doctor.

Better than Martyrs

At least movies like the above don't insult your intelligence and pretend they're anything more than pandering to people's desire for visceral excitement. People who enjoy watching  torture and abuse will like Martyrs and praise it just as they did Cannibal Holocaust and every Italian and French exploitation film they come across. But here's a question to anybody who sees any artistic merit in Martyrs: why did the writer choose young women to be 'the most sensitive' to the supposed 'transformation'? Why couldn't it have been old men who were chosen to be 'martyrs'? The answer is that nobody wants to see old men in their underwear tortured, abused, and degraded. I guess that's not artistic enough.

Sure Martyrs is disturbing. But if I wanted to be disturbed all I have to do is get on the net and pull up pictures and news about the Somali famine or the DRC or Sierra Leone or Liberian civil wars. There's enough real-life suffering and depravity in this world to last 1000 life times. I really don't need films like this to supposedly tell me how screwed up life is

Atlas Shrugged Trailer

Oh boy. Well, I'm looking forward to it. It'll be interesting to see what they did with it because Atlas Shrugged is like one of those books that defy film adaptation. But I'm psyched for it.

Honestly the best thing about this movie is naked Kate Winslet followed in 2nd-place by old Kate Winset. I understand where it was trying to go - a polemic on German guilt juxtaposed with an unconventional love story but it just didn't pull me in, except right down to the end. Everything in this film has been done to death before. Just like Revolutionary Road - fantastic individual performance by Kate Winslet over a pretty plain film.

Revolutionary Road

Well I imagine the book is probably a lot better. The most interesting thing about this film was supposed to be "Kate and Leo" 10 years after Titanic, in their thirties living in suburbia. But the dialogue between them for most of the film was just bland and stilted and unnatural and sounded  forced a lot of the time. I guess they tried to stick to the book's dialogue - which probably wasn't a good idea. This needed a better screenplay The worst thing about this movie for people who haven't read the book was its predictability. From the opening scene you could easily guess what was going to happen in the next scene, and the next and the next...and less than 1/3 of the way in you could probaly guess how the whole thing will turn out.

All of the dialogue and scenes were just bread-and-butter American post-war fiction. If you read John Updike then you have a good idea. There's nothing new here really. Winslet gave a fantastic individual performance but that was it.

Hannibal Rising

This film could have been much better with a better lead actor. Gaspard Ulliel's Hannibal is completely unconvincing and with that horrible accent is utterly amateur. But the story overall was good. For the first half of the film it's really an intense story that really gets you thinking on the nature of revenge. You can actually see the point where Hannibal tranforms from seeking vengeance to actually enjoying his killing. Gantz's revelation that Hannibal too took part in the act that drove him mad was a really good twist. It would have been nice if the story didn't just peter out though. A lot of the killing shown is just gratuitous - you could have made a whole film about Hannibal Lecter without showing any blood.

Red Dragon

It was decent - Hopkins was great, Fiennes was pretty good, Norton was kinda mediocre though. His character just didn't have any personality at all in this. The focus was on Hopkins and Fiennes. It was a decent Hannibal movie but they could have explored the Red Dragon mythology and the origins of the Tooth Fairy more..

Cross of Iron

Caught this on TCM last night and I thought it was pretty damn good. I think this is the first WWII film I've seen from the POV of German infantry. It really takes you through the pathos and trauma of soldiers, especially in a desperate, hopeless situation like the crumbling German Eastern Front. It doesn't try to be ultra-realistic and historically accurate like Band of Brothers and modern war epics, but the story really isn't about the combat. It's mostly about ordinary men in an unnatural situation and the extremes they are driven to - both good and evil. It is ultra-realistic about the insanity of war. A lot of the stuff that's depicted, Saving Private Ryan and most American films wouldn't touch.

Max Payne

It was a decent action flick - engaging. Kind of sputtered out at the end though. Would have liked to see more bullet-time sequences. Made me want to play the game.

Punisher Warzone

Started out good but sputtered. Spent too much on melodrama. It needed way more violence and gunfights. The villains were pretty obvious and one-dimensional. Max Payne was much better.

The Wicker Man

A beautiful film. The music alone is worth seeing it. I wouldn't say it's a horror though - more suspense. There's only one really scary moment - beautifully orchestrated I have to say.

Hot Fuzz

I enjoyed it - the latter scenes were great. Need more Pegg and Wright in my life.

Threads

Hey look who's back...
Everybody that holds positions of authority in society - government and industry leaders - those who would wage war and treat human life like pawns in chess, should watch this movie. It reminded me of Grave of the Fireflies. An exquisite, chilling, horrific tale of the human cost of nuclear war.

A nuclear exchange of 3000 megatons sent the world back to the Dark Ages. The scary thing is that some studies have shown that even a regional exchange between India and Pakistan would send enough dust and smoke into the atmosphere to realize the nuclear winter scenario

2 more very different movies

The Last King of Scotland didn't grab me at all. I was hoping to find some insight into Idi "The Butcher of Uganda" Amin's life and some psychological justification for what led this man to slaughter hunderds of thousands of human beings. Instead I got an adventure story starring Nicholas Garrigan as the protagonist and Amin his evil insane foil, with gratuitous sex and gore thrown in. The film doesn't even try explore the ordinary lives of Ugandans during the regime. Every panoramic scene is full of the same tired cliches of Africa - colourful clothing, women singing and men drumming in rural villages, tense unstable soldiers with weapons drawn...I just got tired of it really quickly. I really can't see what got Forest Whittaker Best Actor Oscar - he just put on an African accent and acted just as you would expect some insane African dictator buffon to act.

The Mist didn't win any awards but it was an outstanding film. The story, characters, acting, and special effects were top notch. Easily one of the best films I've seen for a while, probably one of my all-time favourites. The story is just perfectly paced - for most of the film you have no idea what the hell is really happening to the characters, and you share their confusion and fear. The scene where the fire-trucks and police car race by and then some Cold War siren starts blaring a futile warning is just brilliant - this is what would happen in real life you think.

I know I'm partial to sci-fi flicks but this is the second time a critically-acclaimed film
flopped and a lesser-known film ran away with me.

2 very different movies

I watched two very different movies this week. I honestly can't see what got NCFOM all that critical acclaim including 4 Oscars. The acting was really good but there are logical gaps in the plot and in the overall concept that just aren't filled. I guess you have to be a Cormac Mccarthy fan to enjoy it. It did make me go and borrow Child of God from my library though, just to start getting into McCarthy's work.

Sunshine on the other hand was a movie you could just sit back and enjoy. It constantly left you in awe of how amazing the Sun is; the all-enveloping white light just hypnotizes you, just like it did one of the characters. Sunshine didn't win any major awards and flopped at the box-office but for my plain tastes it was a lot better than NCFOM.

GIANT - ONE DAMN BIG GOOD MOVIE

Damn, I can't believe a month has passed since I last did a blog post. I've been pretty unproductive since exams shut down. This pretty much validates the idea of journals as therapy. When you're ok, you work, you write, code. When you're not ok you don't do much. The basic idea is to invert the relationship - when you work and write and code you will feel ok.

So I grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars and Rambo and Predator and those kind of movies and I never was enamoured of Golden Age movie stars like Liz Taylor and Katherine Hepburn. But I saw Giant on TCM and it was a hell of a move. Good acting is just timeless. And Liz Taylor looked fine. And at 200+mins, yeah they probably don't make them like that anymore. I now kinda understand the saying about Texas. Everything is just huge - the land, the money. The coolest thing was that my aunt recognised Rock Hudson straight away - I guess he was like Brad Pitt back in the day. It was also cool that a 1956 movie had racism as a subplot.