Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

Well, today is my first day in Los Angeles, and I have to admit that I am jittery as all get-out. I made the mistake of taking a MetroRail ride, which since most of it was above-ground just drove home how freakin’ huge this city is. It made me feel small and insignificant, and briefly made me wanna crawl on home to my hidey-hole.

But I’m still here! So to speak. At least, I think I am…

Dear CNN,

The YouTube debates have an interesting format. But when the videos ask you to read the text on the screen, could you not cut to an angle that makes the text hard to read?

Thanks,

-Glen

I was trying to catch up on some of my long-neglected pod/vodcasts when I came across the Rabbit Bites episode, Horror-ble. It’s a screed about horror movies being too violent and bloody, and it picks as its examples two of my least favorite directors – Rob Zombie and Eli Roth. I love good horror movies. Rob & Eli are not exactly chockablock with those.

Overall, I think they typify a more disturbing trend in horror than just an increase in violence. They illustrate the rise of the cool. When I recently watched Hostel Part 2, it was neither the nudity nor the blood that disturbed me about the much-hyped Bathory scene so much as the way Roth’s direction made it seem that the scene was much more designed to titillate than it was to disturb. As for the ending of the movie – Roth is just a little too proud of how clever he is to effectively end a horror flick.

Rob Zombie isn’t that much better when it comes to sequels. I recently watched The Devil’s Rejects at the insistence of friends who told me it was much better than House of 1000 Corpses. A full review will appear at Anvil and Sprocket later, but for the moment suffice to say that the ending left me feeling like I had just wasted far too much of my time.

But Goddess forbid that we should ever criticize Zombie and Roth for their real shortcomings as filmmakers. No, it’s much easier to criticize them for using gore, because thinking long enough to describe Zombie’s overwhelmingly schmaltzy glorification of psychotics hurts our brains. We need to decry violence as a storytelling element because it takes far too long to build a coherent argument that Roth as a filmmaker has no sense of timing, is overly-fascinated with pushing the ratings board at the expense of story and character, and is so self-satisfied and smug that he doesn’t film scary scenes so much as self-congratulation.

All I’m saying is that when you’re going to take potshots at horror for sacrificing story in favor of violence, using Roth and Zombie as your examples is a little bit like dynamite fishing in a barrel.

Here’s Buns and Chou-Chou:

If I were Steve Jobs, this would be the desktop picture on my iPhone at the next MacWorld Expo.