'Return to Bloodfart Lake': I'm drunk so don't judge me, godammit

   Don't even talk to me about this. It's New Year's Eve, my wife is at work, and since it's 2012 in two and a half hours, the world just might end, if the ancient Mayans have anything to say about it, not to mention the makers of a shitty apocalyptic John Cusack movie (which had its effects done by a firm based in Victoria, BC!)


   Did I mention the kids are in bed, I'm alone, and I'm full of beer and prosecco? I shouldn't mention that. One should not drink and drive, nor should one drink and blog. But here I am, and I want to shout to the world that there is a movie coming out called Return To Bloodfart Lake. Not only that, the lead actress in this wonderful movie has big hooters and looks good in a red bikini.


  Is this a scam? No idea. I've never seen the first movie, or this movie, which is its sequel. Horror movies and horror novels are full of boners, bloopers, and crapheaps that we're supposed to hail as brilliant even though most of them are an Elephant-in-the-Room awkward tour-de-force of bad writing and rape, but I've never heard of the Bloodfart Lake franchise. Is Bloodfart Lake near Camp Crystal Lake? I don't know. All I know is that it's the second installment, and the third instalment might be called Bloodfart Lake III: The Sharting. 


    But the Bloodfart Lake saga is just the tip of the iceberg. There's  'The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror', which I haven't seen but you are welcome to try out. Even worse than that is the cinematic opus known as 'Gayniggers from Outer Space'. These are real movies, sort of. I guess they're movies, in that they were shot with cameras and real actors were hired and maybe paid with food or perhaps oxycontin.


   It's happened. It used to be that taking pictures cost money - you had to really think about what you wanted to capture on film. That shit had to go to a developer, and he held your pics hostage until you paid him money. If you had a bad hair day, or if the boyfriend you included in your family photo turned out to be an philandering meth addict, you sucked it up and pasted those pictured in your album, because otherwise there was no picture. No memory. No nothing. Photos were made from the hooves of living creatures, and you had to think of that every time you pressed 'click' on your camera.


   Then digital cameras arrived, and photo labs dropped out of existence. That was pretty cool, actually. You could take a picture and have it printed at Futureshop or Costco, or just with your printer.


   But now you can make a movie on your phone. The next generation of smartphones will carry 8mp cameras (a lot of the droids already have 8mp but Apple had to wait for the 4s to get on the 8mp bandwagon), and these days everyone can make a movie. This is both good and bad. Good in that someone in Nigeria can make a cinematic masterpiece without whoring him/herself out; bad in that my kids might be making homemade porn while I'm reading the newspaper in the next room. Bad in that someone might make Return to Bloodfart Lake. 


Edit: It turns our that Terror at Bloodfart Lake is available on youtube. You can see it here. I skimmed through it - it looks like a few goth boys and girls made it while they were drunk and high. I doubt anyone got paid. They just ran Dad's camcorder and called it a movie. Not only that: I looked at the poster that I posted at the beginning of this article. It's clearly a picture of some girl's head shopped onto the body of an innocent bikini model.

'The Adventures of Tintin'

Well, it had to happen. We had to go see The Adventured of Tintin.

It’s in 3-D. I don’t know about you, but 3-D in the theatres is terrible. The new 3-D flatscreens are miles better. To top it off, the theatre was full of people trying to fill the emotional void left by boxing day, so the theatre was crowded and we were late to begin with. We had trouble finding seats. When we finally did get settled in, we were three rows from the front, so I’m now worried that I’ve given myself and my kids brain cancer. Then, to top everything off, about a quarter of the way through the movie, a teenage girl barfed all over her seat. She and her father left, but a moment later we were engulfed by the odour of vomit. So we had to move and find new seats. Somewhere amidst all this, I saw the movie and I will do my damn best to tell you what it’s like.

It’s live action/animated, using a technique called motion capture, but you already knew that. It’s directed by Stephen Spielberg; Jamie Bell, the kid from Billy Elliot, plays Tintin, and Andy Serkis (Gollum, Caesar from Rise of the Planet of the Apes) plays Captain Haddock; Daniel Craig plays the bad guy who was unfairly engendered from a completely harmless character from the comics. But you already knew everything I’ve just told you. Is it a good movie? Does Spielberg et al do a reasonably good job tackling the mighty mythology that is Tintin?

Yes. Mostly. There are hiccups and misteps throughout, and there are a few too many horrendously intricate and incomprehensible action scenes, but on the whole the vehicle drives. 

The racism, animal cruelty, and colonial patronizing of the original comics are largely gone, but that had to be done. The Thompsons are still there, and still inexplicable as ever (twins? Lovers? Colleagues? Members of a local make-work collective for the mentally handicapped? It’s never been explained). Captain Haddock is as gloriously dangerous and drunk as he has ever been.

The movie is a amalgam of The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham’s Treasure, and The Crab with the Golden Claws, with an entirely new villain thrown in. The action has been upped, so that Tintin and the Captain have to discuss the complex plot (for the audience’s sake) while fighting bad guys and running for their lives. 

But here it is in a nutshell: Tintin discovers a model ship called The Unicorn, which hides a secret, or part of a secret, that leads to buried treasure. He teams up with Captain Haddock, whose ancestor hid the treasure under the sea, and together they traverse the globe in a race with the bad guys to find the last  piece of the puzzle. 

As I mentioned before, the actions scenes are overdone, but there is one massive and exciting exception.

In The Secret of the Unicorn, Captain Haddock recounts to Tintin his ancestor’s unsuccessful fight to repel pirates from the Unicorn, and his eventual revenge on those pirates, and their leader, Red Rackham. It’s the single most exciting story in the entire Tintin oeuvre. How exciting is it? Well, Captain Haddock has to get horrendously drunk and destroy his apartment to do the story justice. 

The best scene in the movie is when Red Rackham’s crew descends upon the Unicorn and a massive pitched battle breaks out. It’s three-dimensional in both imagery and concept as the brigands come at Sir Francis Haddock from all corners, as the pirate ship itself gets tangled in the Unicorn’s mast and swings back and forth like Calculus’s pendulum and everything, including Red Rackham’s cape, dances with flame. This battle sequence alone is worth the price of admission. 

The movie ends with the possibility of a sequel, with Peter Jackson at the helm. 

Steven Spielberg was a great admirer of Hergé, and Hergé was a great admirer of his. Both men are/were exponents of adventure storytelling and fantasy, and both men will be remembered and admired for generations. Hergé’s simple, shadowless drawings seem to become richer and more complex as time marches on, and Spielberg’s older works (ET, Duel, Jaws) shine more readily than anything done by James Cameron, because they were done with the same ephemeral and linear magic he shares with Hergé. 

Now I’m going to wait, very patiently, for Spielberg and Jackson to tackle Asterix. 

'Shame' - Can we talk about our global porn addiction?

I can’t wait to see Shame. I’ve heard opposing reviews - it’s slow, arty, it’s about subject that we’ve become far too prudish about; it’s brilliant, brave, about a subject we’ve become too unhealthily obsessed about. 

It’s about sex addiction, and thank God someone has made a movie about it. I’ve seen movies about alcoholism, drug addiction, and even gambling addiction, but never legitimate sex addiction. It’s high time someone’s tackled it, brought it out into the open. I’d love for people to see this movie and maybe ask if they see parts of themselves staring back. 

I’ve heard a lot of talk about addiction - how to solve it, what causes it. What I keep hearing is this - you become more addicted when the supply is readily accessible and cheap.

Let’s talk about porn. When I was a teenager, my friends and I had to walk across town and find the one East Indian corner store that rented VHS porn. You had to pay real money to see porn. You brought it home; it was a big, square piece of hollow black plastic, and we had to keep it safe. You had to hide it someplace away from your parents. When you and your friends nervously watched the stuff, you had to keep your hand on the remote in case your mother wandered downstairs in her nightgown to see just what the hell you all were doing. And then, when you were done and it was the next day, you had to bring that tape back to the store. You had to rent, carry, hide, and then return pornography by a certain date. Porn was like a library book. Think on that for a moment. 

I can’t quite explain the pre-internet, corporeal nature of porn. You had to rent the stuff, or search around in your dad’s closet where he kept it in an old suitcase. Your dad’s porn was the strangest porn: glossy European magazines where skinny men with moustaches and black socks fucked dishwater blonde girls who never stopped smiling as though they were smelling strudel straight from the oven. My own dad had all those magazines locked away alongside something called The Anarchist’s Cookbook (19171), which taught you how to make bombs, grow marijauna, pick locks, and hack old payphones. Porn took trouble to acquire and keep, caused trouble when it was found, and was hard to find if you were underage. 

Then the internet arrived.  ASCII code could be converted into pictures. Porn was free, and for the first time, we found that freedom had nothing to do with cost. Porn was released, free to meet other porns and have pornlets. Porn had had it pretty rough before; it was once trapped in steaming, sticky theatres, forced into hardcore labor rooms where the doors were hung with seedy beads, kidnapped and held for ransom in the sun-baked California warehouses. 

Now it’s confusing. No one pays for porn, but yet the stuff is still being made. I can order it on my cable pay-per-view, but what would be the point of that? Porn is everywhere. It’s easy to find, to acquire, effortless to store in the limitless and Stygian depths of our computers. Yes, we all leave massive, day-glo, virtual computer porn trails like we were massive and horny slugs, and we would be fucked if a computer tech were to go over our hard drives. But what are the odds of a cyber CSI team confiscating our machines? There are billions of us!

Which leads me back to Shame, and what it might mean for us. One of our most potent drugs is free of both cost and risk; our kids are consuming it at twelve and younger. Porn is part and parcel of sex addiction.This movie could start a conversation.

I’m not anti-sex; I’m not going to be like Ted Bundy on the eve of his execution and conveniently blame everything on porn; I won’t suggest we start banning desires. But this movie could at least, much like the pro hockey discussion still in its infancy about concussion, start us talking about this massive and interconnected beehive of masturbation stations, and what it means for the brains of our future generations. 

Monsters (2010)

  This movie gave me hope. Monsters, a simple alien invasion story, gave me hope. 
  I've been worried about horror. It's not just the zombies, or the publishing houses that are built on zombie fiction, that worry me. It's the fiction, the stories. Horror, film or text, is now horror first and story second. Writers approach horror first with the scare, blood, rape, or monsters, before they even think of a story. But horror is nothing without real people, real surroundings, real language. Good horror is a good story first. Some of Stephen King's best-known works aren't horror; he's a great storyteller who happens to like scaring people. 
   Monsters is about two people, a man and woman, travelling through Mexico trying to get home to the US. You can almost taste and smell the tortillas a young Mexican mother makes for them; you notice the dirt and grit on the government signs warning of restricted areas. You can feel the tension between the two leads as they try and fail to always show themselves at their best.
  They just happen to be travelling through a land colonized by 300-foot tentacled aliens who are dead ringers for Lovecraft's Cthulhu. 
    But it works. The monsters are on CNN, and in the US and Mexico, life goes on. Judging by the signage on the roads leading to America, we can see there is another government agency created to deal with the threat, and that agency has its own logo, and each of its initiatives has its own logo as well. On the Mexican side of the border, there are religious shrines built in honour of the victims (think of pictures of children in their Confirmation clothes). There are protest signs against the collateral damage the anti-alien bombing causes. In the background of almost every shot there is a gutted building, destroyed either by bombs or aliens; the movie is never clear in that respect. 
    The movie makes wonderful educational point for writers and directors: any disaster that does not utterly destroy our civilization will instead give us signs, walls, protocols, curfews, a new vocabulary to explain what we see every day, and a new economy to deal with all those people who need things, or need to get somewhere fast.  But we will still drink, eat, care for our children and each other, and get on with life. Describe those details and you tell a story the audience wants to hear. Describe those people, and you won't need the monsters all that much. We'll see them through the eyes of those characters you worked so hard to flesh out. That's how horror works. 
   Oh, and if you want to add buckets of gore after you've successfully created your character and background, that's okay too. Just thought I'd add that. I'm not anti-gore, I'm anti-suckage. 

Horror Movie Review: Home Alone (1990)

 Home Alone is as edgy as extreme horror. 

    Friday night; there was still time before bed; so what to do? The kids are starting to punch each other and soon they’ll be grabbing blunt objects. I desperately check the movies we have in on the PVR. Lo and behold, there’s a Home Alone that my wife taped last year off of CBC. I get the kids into their pyjamas, make them brush their teeth, and down into the activity room we go. A classic of the early nineties. I’ve never seen it before, but I heard of it when it came out. I missed it; That classic face-palming shot by Macaulay Culkin was everywhere and I hate anything ubiquitous. But it’s a kids’ movie and I was sure they’d like it.

    

   Horror is, simply, the destruction of order. Cancer, war, murder, deformity, disability, helplessness, the loss of civilization, helplessness. If you can see horror as the destruction of order, of peace, then a lot of films  one might never consider to be horror become horror films, and a lot of horror films (Saw, anyone?) are just gimmicks. 

   The premise (for the three of you who haven’t seen the movie): The McCallisters, a large, extremely wealthy extended family, are on their way to Paris for Christmas. The evening before the plane leaves, the youngest brother (Culkin) annoys everyone so much that he is banished to the attic. In the morning, amidst all the confusion, the family leaves the boy in the house, and only realize their mistake once they’re over the ocean. 

   Back home, Kevin McCallister wakes up, alone, and convinces himself that he has magically wished his family into oblivion.

   I said horror is the destruction of order. It must be done on a great magnitude. Kevin, a downtrodden little underdog, immediately moves into his parents’ room, jumps on beds, eats junk-food all day, raids his older brother’s room for cash and skin-mags, watches violent movies before noon while eating cake and ice-cream, and makes a terrible mess of his upper-1% family home. A storm has taken out the phone lines. The concept of a wealthy family’s comfortable Christmas, the great privilege of the western world, is dashed as effectively as if zombies staggered out of the woods, or a meteorite thundered down and wiped out Washington DC.

  Then the burglars arrive. 

    Two thieves (Joe Pesci an Daniel Stern), collectively called The Wet Bandits (known for leaving the taps on and flooding the houses of the people they burgle. As a homeowner, that infuriated me), have arrived to rob the the houses of everyone who has left for the Holidays. Kevin’s home is the largest and most ostentatious on the street. Kevin has to defend himself and his home. 

 Beforehand, there is a brief and touching scene when Kevin sadly sits in a church pew and watches the choir rehearse for Midnight Mass. He meets his neighbour, an old man who is rumoured to have killed his family, and discovers that the rumours are false and that he is kind and wise. He leaves the church, that symbol of timeless order, and runs home to deal with The Wet Bandits. What follows is pure horror for the adults watching, and pure, anarchical delight for younger viewers.

    Kevin comes just short of killing the two burglars. He sends them crashing down iced stairs, makes them step on rusting nails, attacks them with blowtorches, shoots one burglar in the crotch with a pellet gun, bludgeons another with an iron. The invasion of a secure environment, the transfer of power into the hands of a violent little second-grader, the silent woods outside, the family marooned in Paris and trying unsuccessfully to contact their youngest - this is a horror film.  This is a breakdown of the ruling order. 

    When it is over, only Kevin and the burglars know what has happened. When he is reunited with his family, the grown-up little Kevin, that whirling dervish of destruction, forgives his mother for leaving him home alone. But it’s his choice to do so.

   For all of you who can find it, I would highly recommend Home Alone. It is a violent and unexpectedly  sophisticated film of rebellion. It has also become standard Christmas TV for stations who don’t bother to screen their programming choices. If your local station is blindly broadcasting it for the Christmas lull, record it and prepare for a wonderful ride.  

   

Tintin(2011)

    I grew up reading Tintin and Asterix. It was quite a few years before I realized that both were originally French (and I had no excuse for thinking Asterix was created in North America; they were Gauls, for Cripe's sake).
    There are a number of animated Tintin's, and there is an brisk industry in making live-action big-budget Asterix films (with Gerard Depardieu as Obelix). So why not make Tintin into a grand film live-action film for the theatres?
  Instead, we have this strange mix of live people made into animated creatures, which is how The Polar Express was done. Tintin looks like a animated statue from Mme Tussaud's. I'm not sure why they're doing this, but I'll hazard a guess.
  Tintin is an immortal, timeless brand. He is a simply and brilliantly drawn character, and that doesn't work  with real people. Sure, you could get Shia Labaoef or Justin Bieber to portray Tintin in an instance of celebrity casting to get bums in seats. But could you imagine either of these guys with a cropped head and a little tuft of blonde hair sitting perfectly atop his head? Could you take seriously a real person with that hair, plus-fours (the Tintin pants), a blue sweater, deck shoes, and what is probably a dickey? Does anyone even know what plus-fours and a dickey are? Tintin dresses like this all the time.
    Captain Haddock wears an officer's cap and a blue sweater with an anchor stencilled on the front. Always. The Thompsons are two men (not identical twins) who look and dress alike, finish each other's sentences, and sleep in the same room. In some Tintin books, Snowy the Dog can talk. I don't think there is any way this can be done with real people. It wouldn't be taken seriously.
   I'm not sure why the Tintin books can portray amazing stories, real emotions, suspense, murder, Moon landings, treasure hunts, Lovecraftian Mayan conspiracies, and brilliant commentary on politics and power,  through these buffonish characters. But it works.
    Looking back at what I've written, I accept the decision to go the hi-tech animated way. This will go a long way towards suspending the viewers' belief. And if it doesn't, we'll always have the books. They'll never get old.
    The movies makes it to North America on December 21st. I'll probably be there with my kids. Here's the trailer.


Edit: From the trailer, this movie appears to mix together several Tintin plots into one convoluted mass. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'll probably see it anyway. 

Trailer: We Need to Talk About Kevin

  Let's be honest. One of the best horror novels of the past several years was not some piece-of-crap zombie novel, nor was it anything to do with sparkly vampires. It was Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin.

    Like Pet Sematary, this book is horror defined. There is no gore involved, just the hell of seeing your child's soul die in front of you as he grows up. 

  The debate over what is horror can take up a lot of time and space. Horror is something visceral, so there's no point in trying to define it to someone who might view it differently. So I'll come up with two related examples.

   The other night, I was bopping around the vast world that is Reddit. Reddit is nothing more than a gigantic high school with a student body of more than a million people. I ended up in a sub-reddit called /r/gore. 

   The title says is all: Gory photos and videos. Once this corner of the net and many like it were inundated by videos releases by Al Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam: beheading videos in the desert. But those videos, which are awful, pale in comparison to what is now coming out of Mexico. 

  Mexican drug-cartels (And I'm afraid to even type their names; I suspect they just might show up at my door) like to capture members of rival gangs, and then slowly cut off their heads on camera. Sometimes they like to be efficient and use chainsaws. Sometimes they like to leave piles of dismembered bodies on the side of the road. 

  I was an idiot and watched a few of those videos, and clicked on a few photos. It's that awful Mount-Everest urge to vault the greatest heights, or see the most extreme things. Afterwards, I felt numb and ill, but I recovered. 

  I read up a little more about life in the cities south of the US border, such as Ciudad Juarez, which is the most afflicted by drug violence. This is what one resident said: "After work everyone rushes home. Because after dark, the vampires come out." 


    I was disturbed and grossed out by the videos, but that one statement by an innocent Mexican citizen horrified me and gave me nightmares. That is horror. 

   In We Need to Talk about Kevin, the vampires come out. A woman is condemned to hell on earth - because she didn't want a child in the first place? Because her son was born bad? Because she may have abused him? We never know, and the reader may as well vote as to whether the mother or Kevin himself is to blame for Kevin's behaviour. According to the author, it's about 50-50. 

    The movie is coming out soon. It's earned the author's seal of approval. It features John c. Reilly, who is wonderful, and most importantly, a delicious, six-foot package of acerbic and gingery goodness by the name of Tilda Swinton (who regretfully has gone brunette for this role). 

   For those of you who want true horror, and to be taken to a place where everything you ever wanted and valued turns sour and rotten as you live it, read this book. See this movie.