The Exorcist and The Mystery of Faith

I know that I brought this movie up in another post that is very recent but as that post entailed, I bought The Exorcist and watched that thing that night, late in the dark of the basement room I sleep and practically live in, and really enjoyed it for perhaps the same reason I think I did as a kid since it really is not a horror film or at least it isn't intending to be, it is more like in the vein of a psychological thriller which is kind of the horror type movies I have grown to over the recent years. Movies that don't necessarily have a lot of blood and gore or throwing as many nameless characters to get slaughtered, but where it has a slow build where the main focus is the story and the characters that allow itself not to shock (or at least not always) but to have this feeling of angst and dread permeate throughout, sticking inside of someone's mind for years to come. I'll get into those movies more in detail in a future post since that isn't the real focus of this one so back to the movie. I had a lot of things that I remembered about it but some things I had forgotten was how slow and methodical the movie was, where it takes a little over a half an hour into the film before something that pertains to the possession sinking in occurs or even the fact that the exorcism doesn't happen until the 1;30 or so mark. I could go on and on while  kind of kick myself for not buying this movie sooner since it really has become one of my personal favorite movies (which is pretty much my entire Bluray collection up to this point, the DVDs are filled with good movies and some so called guilty pleasures).

After watching the movie, I kind of grew an obsession with it and watched through all of the special features that were available and part of it did kind of involve what William Friedkin's interpretation of what the message of the movie was, which he described as being about the mystery of faith. That got me thinking about the movie all the more and what was really the focus, that the thing that people most likely remember about the movie, the possessed Regan MacNeil and the exorcism, was looking at it the wrong way. Throughout the movie, it does show a lot of the going ons of the MacNeil's, with Chris being an actress who is working on a movie in Georgetown who has to deal with her daughter's changing personality out of the blue, initially through a lot of medical tests (another thing I had completely forgotten yet might be one of the more cringe worthy moments of the movie) but there is also the amount of time that is put on Damien Karras to the point where the story might be about him and what goes on with him throughout the film.

The amount of time spent with Karras is the reason why I completely agree with the whole mystery of faith angle, since in the beginning of the movie, he is losing his faith due to the deteriorating health of his mother and the fact that he moved away from her due to his work and rarely sees her. Eventually, his mother dies and it leaves him struggling with himself since he still goes through his duties in the church yet feels as if he is lying to himself while trying to deal with the regret of thinking that he had been the main reason why she died in the first place. It isn't until while later, after he had been interviewed by Detective Kinderman regarding the death of Burke Dennings, the director/boyfriend of Chris MacNeil, where he actually meets the girl, who at that point was taken over completely by the demon Pazuzu. Since he is a psychiatrist along with his faith being diminished, he is skeptical of what is going on, only going to see her again later to record some evidence due to how scared Chris was with what was going on, which was coming from a nonbeliever (which I'll get to later). Part of what gets to him though is that the demon knows what is going on in his head and plays around with it, either through the changing voices to people that he saw like the homeless man and even his mother, to the point where it could be said that the real purpose of possessing Regan was to break Karras by the worst means imaginable. So later on, Father Merrin comes into play to perform the exorcism and the whole time, the demon is more focused on Damien and even poses as his mother for a moment to get at him even more. And then the end happens, with Karras sacrificing himself and is left dying while confessing his sins to Father Dyer, which could signify that the whole experience had brought his faith back.

There are a few scenes that aren't focusing on Karras that do kind of go into the mystery of faith angle as well. The first one I'll mention is the one that turns out to be the breaking point of Chris to where she realizes that the only solution might be an exorcism, and that is the scene with the cross and the "Let Jesus fuck you" line. In some of the interviews, the writer of the book and screenplay William Peter Blatty wrote that scene that way for a purpose that is stated rather well and that is he needed to come up with something that would convince a nonbeliever (Blatty sees Chris as an atheist which might be more stated in the book but it could just be pure agnosticism in the movie or I'm reading that wrong) to actually realize what needed to be done. The scene needed to be powerful enough to make someone who puts all of their faith in science and technology that this was beyond the mortal coil and it works since what could be worse for a mother than to see their daughter mutilate themselves with a cross and them forcing themselves on her. I'll go into one more and it is something that I only got when listening to the commentary track and that is when Father Merrin is about to begin the second round of the exorcism after kicking Karras out due to his realization that he couldn't handle it. In the movie, Merrin takes nitroglycerin pills due to his heart condition that might have been caused by the previous encounter with Pazuzu years prior, and right before he enters the room again, he is in the bathroom taking another pill with the realization that he most likely will die in that bedroom no matter the outcome. Back to the preparation, in the commentary Friedkin told Max Von Sydow to perform the prep scene in a way where he was also giving himself his last rites in the process due to knowing that his life would be cut short very soon (and it does). It gives that scene a lot more to it than I initially gave it since it also does play into faith and that the demon was trying to break everyone in the house along with Karras. Merrin is more stoic at this point than Karras is since his faith was not wavering  like the latter's was and that scene could also mirror the sacrifice Karras gives in the end as well.

I would not want to get into my own personal beliefs since I think that if I did, the people who read this would probably get the wrong idea of my interpretations of the film. But I can talk about Friedkin's since I'm not the guy but I've heard him talk about it a lot in interviews. He considers himself agnostic, filming The Exorcist as a believer (mainly in the news story that the book was based on) and his philosophy amounts to a line from Hamlet that I wish I could remember exactly what it was. It was something like "There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt up in your philosophy" but I might have written that wrong just now. I can get behind that and it does kind of figure into why he views the movie as a meditation on the mystery of faith. Faith really does have a bad reputation due to its connection with religious beliefs but limiting faith to that is a disservice. Faith can amount to having a belief in something that you think to be true without any knowledge whether or not that would be the case, which in itself can either be broken or enforced when one were to learn new things that might contradict one's previous beliefs. The main characters, mainly Chris and Damien, all have times in the movie where their faith in whatever they believe in is broken and there is always that struggle of what to do afterwards with all the pieces remaining. It really is a mystery and the questions that could be asked from viewings make this movie more able to stand the test of time along with elevating it beyond what could be nothing more than just pure shock and that has to be a credit to the dual vision of Blatty and Friedkin in order to put out the best film they could, hopefully having future generations watching the movie and getting their own interpretations of it while still being able to enjoy it.

Did I Really Watch That? Times Where I Really Could Have Spent It Better.

I thought it'd be fun to bring in some conversation regarding times where one is forced to watch something out of obligation or having no escape out of the situation or one is just curious about from the looks of how something appears to be and despite the warnings not to watch it, you watch it anyway out of morbid curiosity. I'll save the morbid curiosity stuff for last because it'll be really weird if I start it off like that and have nothing that can top it later.

To start off, since I do not have a car, I have to ride with my parents if the distance is too long to ride my piece of crap bike there (or the weather is not providing any help) and since the car rides take some time and since there are kids in the house that are still in elementary school (one of whom is just starting), there is a DVD player in the car that is hooked up to the middle and back seats for obvious reasons. And for the most case, all of these films are kids movies minus a few exceptions but 90% of them are the kind of movies that I really try hard to avoid watching at all costs since they are the worst things put on film and has me feel rather sad at the amount of crap that is sold to movie theaters as kids entertainment. Some of them aren't that bad though, but another thing that makes it all the more difficult is that when I get into the car, it'll not be all the time so sometimes I'll always end up watching the same parts of the same movie over and over again. And when the movie selection contains some really terrible movies, it can get stressful on my brain and as such, I'd rather not get into all that much of what I've seen.

There is also the times where I'm eating dinner and have no choice but to stay upstairs and watch whatever was put on the TV, which is either reality shows or crappy sitcoms, and my disdain for both holds no bounds especially on the reality show part. If I have to watch any more of watching people in antique shops or pawn shops asking about whether or not their wares are worth anything, or another competition show that really isn't that much of a competition, I'll probably set fire to one of the studio heads responsible for such trite. It just comes to show that my parents have terrible taste in movies and TV shows, which is a shame because most of my taste comes from my mom who used to have good taste in a lot of things, including music, but lately has succumbed to the trends of today.

I realize that I've been complaining more than talking about more specific times so let's get on that and just get onto two specific scenarios. One is involving the two times I got to go see movies in the summer, all those at a drive in that usually had a double bill back to back. The first time of the two was a double feature of Turbo and Pacific Rim. I had been looking forward to the latter for pretty much the entire year up to that point so I thought it would be worth sitting through the former and for the most part it was since I didn't find Turbo that awful, although it really was forgettable which does help things a lot since I can't remember a thing about that movie. The next time, it was Planes and The Lone Ranger, which I only went to since I was just curious as to whether or not they were as bad as everyone said they were. If a movie that stars Dane Cook makes him the most interesting part of the movie that was never meant to be in theaters to begin with, it's a terrible movie. And I only caught half of The Lone Ranger since we had to leave early and while I could understand all of the criticisms that were being thrown that movie's way, it wasn't that bad once it got past the overextended introduction and I kind of look forward to watching it in its entirety at some point.

Now lets go to one case of morbid curiosity that was the inspiration of this post, and I have to thank an episode of the Cinema Snob, and I could make an entire post talking about things I've watched because of him. But today, I'll be bringing up the ET XXX episode that came out earlier this year. It was one of my favorite episodes of this year so far and I don't know why but I ended up looking for it to see if it was as bad as it was. I didn't though and I forgot about that endeavor for a while until recently when I found it in some clips that cut it up to separate each scene. I honestly would not recommend ever looking for those clips even if you're curious about it. The fourth scene is where I kind of went into that mode of where in the episode he goes "This is my life" since it is the threesome with ET. I could not describe it since it is one of the most disgusting things I have watched in quite some time and I have to give credit to the actress in the scene for actually being able to look like she's having a good time in spite of the circumstances.

I wish I could go into more detail about this sort of things but I'm not sure I want to since I really just wanted this to be a springboard for the people who read this to talk about similar situations. Anyone got something like that?

The Adaptation Complaints #3 - Brought To You By Cadre Cola

Here is an example of taking the source material and putting it in the blender until most of the original story is no longer there, and yet it somehow still works in the sense that the movie is somewhat a guilty pleasure of mine even though I don't feel guilty liking the movie. Of course, I am talking about The Running Man, the 1982 novel written by Stephen King under his pseudonym Richard Bachman that became the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film. They do share some of the basic plot details about a character named Ben Richards who enters a game show in a dystopian future. The circumstances behind why they're in the game in the first place along with what exactly the rules and format of it are. It is difficult to really call them the same story yet they are both fun and entertaining in their own right so lets just go into why they are so different.

The most obvious comparison I could make is in the character of Ben Richards himself. In the novel, he is an unemployed married man with a child who is having a hard time finding work due to being blacklisted, leaving his wife to work as a prostitute to provide money to support the family as well as get medicine for their daughter, who has a really bad illness which means that the medicine they need is rather costly. This does lead him to have to resort to applying for The Running Man game show in order to support his family even if it ends up costing his life, which is almost a certainty due to the nature of the game in this version. As for the movie, it's a fucking Arnold Schwarzenegger film during the time where his was doing movies like Commando and Predator, so they turned him into a military man who in the beginning of the film, refuses to shoot at civilians so he ends up being arrested and sent to prison for the deed. He ends up escaping only to end up being captured by the cops who give him to the network who puts him in the Running Man game against his will. So completely different characters these two are yet they do fit the way the story is told in each of their versions.

Let's get into The Running Man itself, moreso how the game works in each version of the story. Starting with the novel, the contestant is declared an enemy of the state and has to survive alone in the world for 30 days while trying to hide himself from being spotted by the public, who get paid for telling the network where the contestant is, along with avoiding the hunters, the hitmen of the show. And the grand prize for making it all the way through the 30 days is 1 billion dollars. I almost forgot about how Richards has to send tapes to the network as messages in order to keep getting paid for his time surviving. As for the movie, it is more like a show where there are four different sections that the runner has to go through with each section having its own hunter that the runner has to get past. For the most part, the contestants in this version are usually criminals or at least criminals in the eyes of the government. In each scenario though, there is always some sort of conspiracy that goes into the game that prevents the contestants from actually winning or allowing any sort of message that either the government or the network approves. I think that the shit that Killian does to get Richards to do what he wants, especially the reveal at the end, is more messed up than in the movie which might have been due to the director, who was a replacement that Schwarzenegger thought ruined the movie and lost a lot of the commentary from the source material. And that director was Paul Michael Glaser, who played the original Starsky on TV, yet as a director made such classics such as The Cutting Edge and Kazaam so you know that this was probably his best work.

I could go on about all the differences between the two versions of The Running Man, which in itself could make up a decent 10 to 15 page essay, yet I don't want to get into spoilers for either version so this is where I'll leave it for today. Hopefully, I'll work on this series a lot more yet I hope I don't spread myself too thin with all the topics I plan on covering. If you think that I didn't cover enough with this one, mention it in the comments and I'll try and improve the content of this blog in general as well, since any criticism is more than appreciated.

Another Dumb Update - Scheduling Posts and Other Writing

This is for any people who are interested in the blog as a whole and are just curious what I'm planning on doing with it for the next couple of weeks. Right now, I'm going to watch The Great Dictator either today or Friday and let my thoughts of the movie just sit in my head for a day or two before I work on my post of it. Since it will be my first exposure to the works of Charlie Chaplin, I think it should be fun especially since it is going to become sort of a regular thing of me covering his films on The Depths of Pretension, but I might do a post of The Adaptation Complaints on The Running Man beforehand, something that I know I'll have fun doing since I've read the book and love the movie version despite that they are completely different stories. That might be a series I'll do on some occasions since it would be fun talking about book to film adaptations and one I want to do since I really want to read the book is Legion, which had it's film version be named The Exorcist III. The movie also sounds like it'd be a fun watch since it has Brad Dourif being Brad Dourif and what's wrong with that?

But let's get to what I'm sure most of you are excited to see me talk about (mainly my lone follower who I will attribute on the one he suggested I do) is the Nightmare Fuel week of DoP, where I try and cover some of the more out there films of the Criterion Collection, films that have a lot of rape, violence, genital mutilation, creepy visuals, and whatever else I can say to make it seem more controversial. The plan for that is I'm going to write all the posts in advance and post them one day for five days when I finish them all. I thought I might just give a short sentence regarding those picks and why they're on there since I'm sure anyone can look at my list and go "There are worse films than that," since I'm probably going to cover those movies anyway. The first one I plan on covering is the 1960 Ingmar Bergman film The Virgin Spring which came to my attention when I was looking up things regarding The Last House on the Left and how the former served as the basis of the latter so I thought that would be a given to start off. The second film will perhaps be the most notorious of the selections and might be the high point where what follows cannot live up to its reputation, which might end up being for the best so I don't feel like I have to one up the others and just write without having to feel any pressure, and that is the 1975 swan song of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which is only one of two films of the week that I have seen before the time I'm writing this post. Third on the list will be a movie I have kind of avoided watching due to its nature and the fact that I had been avoiding the director for no real reason as well and that is Lars Von Trier's 2009 film Antichrist. I think the real reason I avoided him was because I didn't think that it was a good place to start with his films and maybe I should try and do something that isn't so wrought with despair. After that one, it'll be the 1976 film In The Realm of the Senses, which I know almost nothing about aside from the fact that it has unsimulated sex scenes, which might make it weird to talk about. And the big finale of the whole thing is going to be the 1977 movie House, which is one of those movies I wanted to cover on the series but when I made my initial lists of what I was going to be cover, it always got left out for some reason but when I was rearranging the list again after finding that some films I thought would be fun to cover, like David Cronenberg's Scanners and Von Trier's Breaking The Waves, were on Hulu now so I thought maybe I should do some of those sooner which is when I switched out The Last Temptation of Christ from being the original finale of Nightmare Fuel week since it was going to be a similar theme idea to what I am going with the Chaplin films but it didn't fit all that much with what I was going with.

But onto other things, I've been trying to get some work on my novel again with a little progress each time but something that I might do is that there is a short story contest nearby that I might enter and see if I can win some cash. I do have some ideas that I wanted to do (one of which I kind of already did) is where a photographer is slowly dying due to his dreams being stolen from him, a lonely immortal an unknown amount of time in the future, two brothers trapped in a cave, or maybe I'll come up with something else since I want to do something more psychological and visceral in terms of it being horror themed. I think it has to be 1000 words or around that so I'll have to check on the rules again. I'll have to update this when I finish the story and submit it and again when they announce the winner. So I guess this is a good point as any to leave this post and also ask to my readers what they'd like me to cover on a future post or even what could I do to improve on this sort of thing. I also have another blog I'm working on where I talk strictly about video games called Atop Snowhead Mountain that I hope to work on with some regularity which, unlike this blog, will always be ad free if you guys don't like the ads.

The Depths of Pretension #4 - Cronos

There can be a lot of things that come to mind when you mention vampires in a conversation, whether it be the classic archetypes most people associate with them in the 19th century thanks to Bram Stoker's Dracula, which took a lot of archetypes from sources in European folklore and in turn made one of its own, or even the subversion of those things that many horror films have tried to do in order to establish their own rules and guidelines, or for lack of a better word, mythology. One of the elements that Stoker did establish in his book that many have worked on going into their own directions with it would be the romanticism of the whole ordeal, either through the way vampires are portrayed in media as usually being very attractive or appear to be so, or through the thought of being immortal along with no longer aging, to remain beautiful forever. The former will usually lend itself to a lot of material that pertains to the whole ordeal of turning a victim into a vampire, the ordeal of mixing up blood and other bodily fluids, as an allegory to the animalistic nature of humans and sex. The latter, though could probably have more of a focus on the whole aspect of immortality and the price of that process (again, being blood) while also losing a lot of what had made the characters human in the first place, now as creatures whose only motivation is the act of feeding on others. That part of vampirism is the part that the film I shall be talking about today, Cronos, mostly focuses on.

The movie, which was also the debut of director Guillermo Del Toro, has a story that revolves around an elderly antiques dealer who uncovers a 450-year old golden device in the shape of a scarab from the base of an archangel statue, which ends up latching itself onto him and injects him with a solution that ends up making him feel younger along with giving him a taste for blood. Along the way, there is another man named Dieter de la Guardia, a rich, dying businessman who has been searching for the statue himself for years so that he himself can combat his illness. For the most part, the character of the antiques dealer, Jesus Gris, does show some signs of vampirism after the incident with the device, mainly with how his appearance changes for the better, such as his wrinkles going away and his thirst for blood developing, yet it isn't until he is killed by Dieter's nephew Angel when some of the more tell tale signs come to fruition such as the disdain for sunlight and in a strange turn, the pale skin aspect of the vampire comes from peeling off the old skin, which decays from the body. And for the most part, no one actually uses the word vampire in the movie at all

The thing that makes it rather different than other stories about vampires is that the curse does not come from the bite of another of the cursed, but from the cronos device itself. The introduction of the film talks about the alchemist behind its creation who developed it in 1536 and did not pass away until around 400 years afterwards when the building he was in collapsed and he was pierced in the heart by some of the debris. Another thing I did not catch upon the first viewing directly was that there was blood hidden away that was never found by the investigators. There is not much detail given into the nature of the device or how it worked aside from some assumptions given by Dieter who mentions that it filtered the blood which may or may not be correct. There are moments where one can look inside of the device where there appears to be some sort of insect that was combined with machinery inside of it.

It never really explains how the device is able to make people immortal yet it could be assumed that the insect that resides in the device may be some sort of supernatural being, maybe serving as the analogue for the original vampire since it was able to survive nearly 50 years without any blood of its own to feed on, which could view the relationship between the device and the user as being in a symbiotic relationship that starts off initially as parasitic with the device harming the user while taking blood for itself. Throughout the movie, Jesus applies the device to himself multiple times, the most important being after he escapes nearly being cremated and he has become the undead. This does distance itself from the traditional way that a newborn vampire and its master maintain a relationship, as it would be that the master would turn the newborn and soon would have to teach it to survive its new form. Instead, the two of them have to coexist where Jesus finds blood to feed on so that the device can apparently create its immortality solution to give to Jesus so he may recover from being killed. The coexistence plays a lot more into the ending of the movie when Gris destroys the device after nearly attacking his granddaughter. 

Yet the whole context of immortality is played off both of Jesus and Dieter, one who is unwillingly given the gift and wants nothing more than to get rid of it and the other who wants to become immortal by any means necessary. It does a rather decent job in playing off both of those points in the movie itself, which I would give a recommendation to watch since for a debut film it is rather ambitious while also playing off the vampire myth enough to carve out its own identity. There are many other directions I could go with the cronos device and how that works that I would really like to hear others' opinions on the thing. 

The Guy Who Directed One Movie I Cannot Forget: William Friedkin. Why Haven't I Watched More Of His Movies?

With that title, it probably isn't that hard to figure out which movie I am talking about but to those who may not be familiar with who he is, it's The Exorcist. His film from 1973 based on the book by William Peter Blatty (who also wrote the screenplay and produced the movie) about a girl who is possessed by a demon named Pazuzu (which now I associate with not only this movie but also Futurama) and how two priests try to get it out of her. I watched this movie as a young boy because my mom was one of those who knew that watching those kinds of movies at a young age wouldn't turn me into an evil kid nor make me scared of everything for the rest of my life. I have grown up to be a normal person, at least in my sense of the word normal which might be a little crazy by anyone else's eyes, and there aren't really any horror movies that can actually scare me anymore. Some might startle me and give me nightmares for a few days, but not really stick with me the way that this one did. I haven't seen it in nearly ten years and it still gets under my skin and looking at some of what went into production, it really shows how much went into getting that sort of tone for the movie out. Some things of what could have been make me really interested about those situations, such as Tangerine Dream scoring the film and how the girl who played Violet in the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was considered for the role of Regan MacNeil (which would have turned out worse but it would have been hilarious to have seen her try and say some of those lines or the whole mutilating herself with the cross thing). I also like how Friedkin picked out Jason Miller out to play Father Karras after watching him perform on stage (his own award-winning play as well) and that it was his first film role, which is really surprising since from the clips of the movie I have watched, he really held his own against Max Von Sydow and that really fucking terrifying voice of Mercedes McCambridge. That relationship with stage production and Friedkin also brings me to the only two other films of his that I remember seeing (only one of which I remember any of) part of his collaboration with Tracy Letts, Bug and Killer Joe.

This brings me to shame though, since I do regard Friedkin as one of my favorite directors ever and probably one of the biggest influences if I ever actually get my foot off the ground and make my own damn movies, that I really only have seen three of his movies at this point and only one of them recently (which is also the only one I own so far, Killer Joe). He has directed a great amount of movies that are considered classics that I know I would love immediately such as The French Connection, Sorcerer, Cruising, To Live and Die In LA, Rampage, Blue Chips (which might be the only movie that has Shaquille O'Neal in it and could actually be considered a good movie without any irony), Jade, his version of 12 Angry Men, and there's also the episode of the 1985 Twilight Zone, Nightcrawlers. I am also looking forward to his future collaboration with Blatty, adapting the latters book Dimiter, which also brings me to the what could have been that was Legion (which became Exorcist III) which is one of those movies that really could have been one of the best horror films of it's time and one that could rival the original if it weren't for the studio involvement fucking that movie over, especially with the tacked on ending but even then it still is an admirable effort and makes me wish that Blatty did more movies in the director's chair.

Which brings me back to Killer Joe, which I might cover in more detail another time, which at this point in time is his most recent directing credit. It was one of those movies I got curious about mainly because of the rising star that was Matthew McConaughey and his surge as a well-respected actor and picked up from a used media store on a whim although I did do some research beforehand and also really liked the cast, especially with the underrated talent Emile Hirsch who I've always liked but haven't really seen him in all that much, which could also apply to Juno Temple, who left an impression on me from her performance in Mr Nobody. There is also that Tracy Letts, who I didn't realize that they had worked together on Bug (which is a movie I saw but cannot remember any of it and which apparently had Michael Shannon in it, before I knew who he was). This movie does make me feel bad though since I didn't realize that it was kind of a black comedy until the chicken leg scene even though I did find the movie pretty funny at times but I mean watching Joe Cooper as a character was really tense at times and almost serves as a precursor to McConaughey's performance as Rust Cohle in True Detective

But back to Friedkin, it's hard to really say what I really like about his directing style since I have very few references to go on. I mean I've seen more Nicolas Winding Refn films than Friedkin films and I have almost the exact same kind of skill at deciphering what it is they do although they do seem kind of insane in their own ways when it comes to production. If anything, I wish I could have my family watch the kind of movies these guys make instead of them watching the worst crimes committed to cinema in the past couple of years because they think it's more kid friendly. If it comes to having my kids watching either Killer Joe or Grown Ups, it's pretty obvious which direction I'd be going to, even if the former is NC-17 (and deserving of that rating). I'm pretty sure that if I had kids and let them watch movies like that, people would think I'm a terrible parent and I could agree with them to an extent since I think that I would know if they could handle the content, like my mom did with me. I just would rather have them watch good movies regardless of the content. Maybe I should pick up that copy of The Exorcist that I've been eyeing behind that glass case (since it's the 40th anniversary edition) and give it a watch again. And then show it to my five year old sister. I'm just kidding on that end. I'll just have her watch Taxi Driver.

My Thought Process During Watching Movies

Since I am writing a series of posts that focus on discussing films, I thought I might talk about some of the things that often make it difficult to do so upon watching the movie for the first time. When I watch it initially, I just try and watch it for the experience. I let my suspension of disbelief take me over and just try to get as involved with the process of watching it as I possibly can. If the movie is good, this can come rather easily and the opposite occurs if the movie turns out to be terrible, and as is the case with that, I'll just turn it off and never look it's way again unless I am forced to.

Why this often makes the process of analyzing the movie difficult and writing about it is that I often try and get the process done in many ways. I try to do some background research in order to get some more insight on any glaring holes I missed the first time and more recently, I've taken to writing notes during the initial viewing, which might also be hurting the way I analyze the movie itself since I am trying to get into the movie and just let the experience take me for a ride all the while trying to pick it apart and this process I might abandon due to how sometimes, it might be a good thing to just watch the movie and not try to tear it apart right away, so be forewarned for my discussion on Cronos because that one might be a little hard to get through. During the second viewing though, is where I usually watch the movie and write the post during it, often trying my hardest to try and incorporate some of what I see or get, which usually also comes from thoughts I build up from a few days of thinking about the movie itself long and hard. I'll often look up some of my research during this time and try and figure out what other people have found in the movie to talk about, mainly so that I can figure out if others have had similar ideas that I had as well and if they had worded them better than myself.

I also think that maybe I should abandon the watching the movie a second time and writing the post during the viewing since I think one of my better posts had been done that way, and that one was the one on Eyes Without a Face. That mostly came from research and memory of what had gone on during the movie, which I remember very well for the most part at least in terms of the visuals and the basics of the story, while looking stuff up filled in some of the blanks. It also helps that the movie is one of my favorite movies of all time and that I did have to lot of time to think about things for quite a while. My Fear and Loathing post was similar but part of that not working was that I think I tried too hard to be insightful of what was going on and failing miserably, instead of just saying my own thoughts regardless of if they were original or not. Which may make the process of doing the week I have planned where I post a Depths of Pretension once a day for five days sound kind of daunting. So that might have to be done in a way that I can kind of go through all of those movies and watch them, take notes on what I think I would like to talk about, and them post later. Or I could work on them in advance but wheres the fun in that?

I also think I might just talk about movies I like without any real mission other than just mention what I really like about it. Maybe doing that more as a podcast sort of deal instead of writing about it, maybe have someone there with me who wants to talk about those movies as well. I don't know if I'll ever get to that anytime soon but it is something I'd really like to do. Have it where we watch the movie and then record the podcast an hour or so later when we put some more thought into it somewhat.

The Depths of Pretension #3: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Let's start right off the bat and say that when I saw this movie (and after.... and even now as I write this) I did not have much of an idea about the directorial works of Terry Gilliam, other than just having heard of his movies, such as his imagination trilogy of Time Bandits, Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. I was aware though that he was a member of Monty Python, which is another one of those things that I really want to get into yet have not gotten to it yet so I really did not have much idea of what I was getting into aside from side knowledge I caught while looking into it. I also really had no clue about Hunter S. Thompson, only really having been familiar with the name and that was it. So when I first saw Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it was really more of an experience rather than a film. Not really much of a plot to speak of, or story even, as it was separated more into vignettes of all different kinds mostly revolving around the excessive drug habits of Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo as they spend a couple of days in Vegas trying hard and failing to get any writing done. Odd fact out of the way quickly was that this was going to be the first movie I was going to watch with my girlfriend at the time but by the time we could do so, Netflix no longer had it.

The sheer oddity of what this movie is trying to do is one of the things that made it a rather polarizing film at the time (at least in the eyes of the critics) since as I said before that is it more of a series of sketches of the two main characters being on all kinds of drugs while exploring through Vegas, which while it does get a little overdone at times, it does kind of assert that the place they are in is pretty much the pure definition of American excess where it can either be the greatest place in the world or your own personal hell depending on how things go your way. As for the case of Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, it would probably fit onto the latter side of the spectrum with their drug use often bringing a large sense of paranoia that is prevalent throughout the film. One example I like is during the Mint 400 where Duke hallucinates that the other group of reporters are soldiers out to kill him. The way its shot often reflects what type of drug they're on at the time, yet it is hard to really keep track of the differences unless you like paying attention to that sort of thing, such as wobbly movements, disorientation, different levels of colors, and that sort of thing. It is easy to tell that the entire film was meant to feel like a drug trip from beginning to end which does make sense and feels that way despite that I myself have very little experience with drugs, having only drank and smoked a few times during my only year so far at college. I probably will never know how it feels to do stuff like LSD, ether, and mescaline so I might never be able to relate to the effects shown on screen. Yet that trip down at the end does really get hard to watch is things just seem to get a lot worse and no real way to recollect any of the information.

I could go on with the look of the movie as it often looks rather bright, neon-like in a way which again fits the setting rather nicely but let's try moving onto something different and just going more into specific scenes of the movie, or more like sections really. The opening is what I could consider to be an interesting way to set up the time period with some stock footage of protests of what is probably the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement with random splatters of blood along a black screen and The Lennon Sisters' version of the song My Favorite Things playing in the background. What it could all mean is up for debate but maybe it could be just signifying with culture of the 70's or moreso the death of the hippie era of the late 60s and the aftermath of that sort of thing, with those who were directly involved with that sort of culture being lost and without a real cause. For something a little more visual, lets go into when Duke is dealing with the Sunshine Acid at the hotel lobby, which might be one of the more iconic scenes of the film, as it has the reptile zoo orgy, the floor full of water. One of my favorite moments in the movie is when Duke is saying his thoughts out loud much to the dismay of the hitchhiker the two of them had recently picked up. The last scene I'll talk about is when they are at the Narcotics Convention which of course shows a lot of information that could be considered nothing more that propaganda and things such as how a joint is called a roach because of how it looks like a cockroach, which Gonzo immediately calls bullshit on and says that only people on acid would think it'd resemble a roach. I could go on a ton more but then I'd just be putting the movie on the blog which would make no sense.

Since this movie is mainly carried by the performances of Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro, who both pull out wonderful performances especially Depp who really had put his friendship with Thompson himself to good effect, a lot of the other big name actors that appear in the movie only show up for like a scene or two so I thought I'd mention which of them were my favorite. The obvious one I could bring up would be Christopher Meloni as the Flamingo Hotel clerk, Sven whose first appearance involves him shouting at an unruly guest in the most stereotypical gay tone that makes it rather hilarious due to how blatant it is. Another I really like is Harry Dean Stanton who has only two seconds of screen time maybe as a judge in one of Duke's hallucinations revolving around being caught for Gonzo drugging a teenage girl and the last I'll mention is one that many people might not really recognize yet I enjoy it because I recognize who it is and that is Gregory Itzin who you might remember if you watched 24 as being Charles Logan, who is one of the most memorable villains of that show, which makes it more funny that his character appears to give Raoul a good scare after ditching a hotel without paying all the outstanding room service bills.

I'm not sure I actually did any good writing this but I think it comes with the territory of this movie. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of those things that as a film, it is more for the experience more than anything and the experience is an odd one that I'll probably go through many more times. It would be interesting to read the book since they did cut a lot of it out and that there was a lot more going on with it being a lot worse than what was on screen. Another curio I wish I could experience with this movie is the version that Alex Cox (who you guys might recognize if you read the Repo Man post) would have directed since he was attached before Gilliam. And who knows how that would have turned out? So hopefully this was worth someone's time and hopefully this writing thing goes a lot better on the next post of Depths of Pretension, which will be the Guillermo Del Toro movie Cronos. Until then, I'll just return to my lonely obscurity as a freak in the freak kingdom.

The Future of Depths of Pretension (A Post About A List)

Since there are so many movies that are in the Criterion Collection and I have my Depths of Pretension series to discuss said films, I also had the slight realization that I really did not have much of a plan on which movies I was going to cover past number 5 (which hopefully is going to be The Great Dictator) so I thought that I might as well come up with a list so that I have some sort of reference point to go to, along with which ones I have to purchase if I can't find a way to stream them. So here is the list as of right now,

1. Repo Man
2. Eyes Without a Face
3. Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas
4. Cronos
5. The Great Dictator
6. The Virgin Spring
7. Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom
8. Antichrist
9. In The Realm of the Senses
10. The Last Temptation of Christ
11. Paris, Texas
12. The Vanishing
13. Brand Upon The Brain!
14. Persona
15. The Gold Rush
16. The Seventh Seal
17. Breathless
18. Breaking the Waves
19. Naked Lunch
20. The Passion of Joan of Arc
21. The Ice Storm
22. Kagemusha
23. Slacker
24. Badlands
25. Modern Times
26. Blow Out
27. Eraserhead
28. Carnival of Souls
29. Following
30. Man Bites Dog

I rearranged this list from the last time as I wanted to get my "Sex and Violence.... That's What The Kids Are Into, Right?" list, aka oh, that fucking movie?!?!? which amounts to numbers 6 through 10 so that will be tons of fun to talk about. There is also a sort of running theme where every one that ends with 5 is a Charlie Chaplin film and the ones that end in zero were meant to have some sort of religious overtones in it, where they do play a large theme in the story. Which is broken almost immediately with the inclusion of Man Bites Dog at number 30. Now to tally up the numbers to see which directors I will be discussing more than once over the course of these 28 films (as I already went through the first two). Chaplin and Ingmar Bergman are both on there three times, Lars Von Trier is on there twice, and that's it for multiples. Well, hopefully I'll be working on Fear and Loathing either on Tuesday night or Wednesday so if there isn't a post on that, everyone who reads this can call me on it and bitch me out

Oh, How I Wish More Theaters Played Classic Movies

Tomorrow, hopefully I will be able to spend a solid portion of my afternoon at the movie theater which I haven't been to since I saw The Lego Movie, which has lead me to some dismay over my infrequent travel to the movies. Many I have been unable to see due to weather conditions and a lack of consistent transportation to do so and since that time of the year is fast approaching, I thought I should go since they are showing Ghostbusters to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the movie and if I can it'll be on a personal double bill with Guardians of the Galaxy. One other thing that has suffered in my movie viewing due to said transportation problems is the distance between me and the nearest Cinemark theater. I first learned of Cinemark while watching the Midnight Screenings on thecinemasnob.com, which have been some of my favorite sources of background commentary when they talk about really terrible movies that they saw and for a while, they did classic movies that were showing at a smaller theater to the point where that sort of movie would be just Brad and his mom talking about it, and those have been some of my favorites. It also got me interested in if any theaters near me were doing something similar, which unfortunately did not turn out to be the case. So I missed movies that I really wanted to see in theaters, such as The Godfather Part I and II as a double bill, which would have killed my day for the most part but it would have been fun nonetheless.

The fact that I have missed all these opportunities to catch these movies in the theater had left me kind of sad since I am unsure when I will get an actual chance to do so. And it got me thinking about why don't more theaters do things like this? Maybe not on an almost weekly basis for movies that show about two days of the week. It could be like once in a while for a day or two, they'd show one of those movies in a couple of screenings, and it could work really well when the new crop of films turn out to be duds or there are not enough movies coming out to validate the amount of screens in the theater. Especially if they do the matinee pricing, I know that I would try and get to at least one of these screenings if that were possible. It is kind of hard to figure out why not many theaters do something like this, maybe it has to do with licensing the movies that would make it not that much of a profit to do on a regular basis or that they don't see much of an audience for this kind of thing (which since I'm writing this post and that Cinemark is still doing it's thing, is kind of bullshit) or even that maybe there is some other reason I can't think of at the moment but it is rather unfortunate that stuff like this doesn't happen.

I also thought that maybe since theaters wouldn't do that more often, maybe I should start my own film committee (or club, or group whichever sounds better) where we watch movies like that regularly, either weekly or bi-weekly for people like me in the community who just like watching movies. I have looked up some of what I would need to get something like this started and it has kind of disheartened me though since I do not really have the necessary funds to get it off the ground and my lack of friends and film buffs to talk to has left the budget for that sort of thing onto just myself and that is too much of an undertaking at the moment. This is coming from someone who wants to film his own horror anthology movie with four different parts (one of which I had to rework due to realizing almost immediately that it was kind of more stupid than I wanted it to be and also just how most of the budget would just go to that one section of the film, [in case any of you are wondering, it was about this bus driver who set up his bus with all of these hidden traps and torture setups for people who think the bus is too dirty and messy, since it was going to be sort of a torture porn satire or parody due to it's outlandishness]) and that seems like such a large undertaking since I was going to have to do most of the work myself, and by most, I mean all of the work that doesn't have to do with acting, making a movie with no experience, no resources, no people to help, it really makes me wish I had friends that could help me out. That's kind of a bit off topic though.

So if this hasn't gotten my idea out there, I just really wish that more movie theaters, those closer to where I live especially would play classic films since who wouldn't want to see those movies that they loved as a kid but never got the chance to see them in the big screen?

A Short Retrospective on Nicolas Winding Refn AKA WTF Am I Watching?

This guy, huh? Like many people who have heard of Nicolas Refn, my first exposure to his films was his 2011 film Drive, which took me a while to see but I really liked it. Not necessarily for its story but for most part the visuals were really wonderful to look at at most parts and the soundtrack really fit the mood and tone said visuals were trying to set up. It was also easy to see when I played the game Hotline Miami when some people called it a video game version of Drive at least in some regards, and that wording might not have actually existed but it is a comparison that does work. Yet even though I really enjoyed the movie, I didn't have much of a desire to look up the rest of his work for a while.

At least until I heard about what a train wreck of a film his followup Only God Forgives was, which I caught a trailer of it once and like Drive, it had really cool visuals and had Ryan Gosling in it. Yet, from what I've heard the cinematography might have been the only good thing about the movie itself. After a while, I convinced myself to watch the movie just to see if the criticism that it was getting was justified. Here is where my experiences with watching a Nicolas Refn film start going into the territory of "what the fuck am I watching?" It is rather hard for me to summarize the plot of the movie without having to go to another source not necessarily because I didn't understand what was going on, but if I had to put it in words, it was more just not having a moment where everything clicks and things start making sense. The early stages of the film start off this way where this guy named Billy kills a under-aged prostitute and is caught by the cops. The Lieutenant (and maybe the main character of the movie itself) Chang lets the father of the girl beat up Billy, which gets too out of hand and Billy ends up being killed. Right after this, Chang cuts the father's arm off and I didn't understand why at first because when I first watched it I thought it was for killing Billy yet Chang was the one who let this happen. Looking up a synopsis made the scene make more sense yet not by much. I could go on for quite a while after this where the film just kind of go bonkers with the plotting where there is a plot where Gosling's character, Julian, is asked by his mother to track down his brothers killer yet there is a lot of times where things happen yet nothing happens at the same time. And for the most part, I get the criticisms of the movie, and I agree that the cinematography is wonderful along with just the visuals being the way they are (after learning that Refn suffers from mild color blindness, the way colors work in his films make a lot of sense).

A while later, I managed to watch Bronson (the oldest film of his that I have seen, in case you're wondering), though this was more of a curio on Tom Hardy since the only movies I had really watched that had him in it were Warrior and The Dark Knight Rises, which made me really interested in what other work he had done. It wasn't until I finished watching the movie that I put two and two together and realized that Refn was the one in the director's chair for this one as well, which took me longer than it should have as the first scene in the movie, where Bronson is on a stage talking to an audience to serve as some sort of stopgap in between moments of his life. This is another movie where not much of the plot made sense to me, which might have been partially due to my lack of knowledge in the subject matter and the amount of gaps in time that pass. I am unsure myself as to whether or not I really liked the movie or not, which is another sign that I have watched a Nicolas Refn film since out of the four I've seen, the only one that I have some sort of clear consensus on is Drive. As for this one, I found it rather intriguing at moments and thought that the character of Charlie Bronson was one that I was fascinated by which did add another interest point towards Tom Hardy as an actor.

Here is the most recent addition to his movies that I have watched and the one that made me want to do this post, Valhalla Rising. Another movie that I was interested in watching it mainly because of the actor in the lead, this time being Mads Mikkelsen. Now talk about someone who I really wish I had seen in other movies sooner, as my introduction to Mikkelsen was from the show Hannibal which made me see how fantastic he was and almost immediately had to see the other work he has done. This was one of them along with The Hunt (which I haven't seen yet) as well as realizing that he had actually worked with Refn before, such as in the first two films of his Pusher trilogy and Bleeder. What made me really want to watch Valhalla Rising was that the lead was an entirely silent character, which is something I haven't seen too often personally so I started watching it and the obvious came where the visuals of the film got me almost instantly and then the plot started coming into play and I'm trying to piece together what was going on. For those who aren't familiar, the film is about this mute prisoner named One Eye who escapes from his captors only to join a bunch of Christian crusaders who end up travelling to the Americas. The plot actually sounded cool, especially since I do have a soft spot for the Norse type of things, and for the most part I could get behind it. The weird thing though was that One Eye is apparently psychic since throughout the film, he has visions of the future which is partially how he was able to escape in the first place and he always follows his visions blindly. He also somehow communicates with this boy who was part of the community that held him prisoner despite the fact he doesn't speak, which is really given no explanation which I am unsure as to whether or not this hurts the film or not.

So, deciding if I like Nicolas Winding Refn as a director or not is one of those things that might end up perplexing me for years since the most obvious thing I like about him is his cinematography and visual style, while the rest kind of is a mixed bag. I also get his style due to his connection to Alejandro Jodorowsky, one of those guys whose movies I haven't seen aside from a few clips yet they do seem like glorious eye candy. For the most part, I'll try and catch some of his earlier work, mainly trying for Pusher so I can see his humble beginnings and looking forward to what he comes out with in the future. And hopefully, something in my brain clicks so I can enjoy the movie without being confused by it again.