Not really that scary at all

So i was thinking about writing a little bit about this, but didn't think I could really post it on here because it doesn't have to do with fear or knitting.
But it does. It is a thing that many people in our society fear these days.

I'm talking about homophobia.
More specifically, the portrayal of gays in the media.

I was thinking about this watching modern family, and i thought about it watching project runway this season too, and a little bit with the one episode of Glee that i put myself through. Not scary movies, but they've been dealing with scary issues--anti-gay sentiment, HIV, etc.

Let's start with Modern Family, because i was just watching it. If you haven't seen this show, it's about three family units who are all related, one of which is a gay couple.  If you haven't seen this show, watch it now.

First off, i love the gay couple in this show. They are hilarious and lovable. But while i was watching it today, i realized: they are very very stereotypical.
And is that what the LGBT community wants? Sure, it's easy for the average american person to enjoy watching these guys, but for some people--who live in tiny towns in southern new england, like myself, where there's only one openly gay person who hasn't moved to New York or London--this might be the only exposure to gay people that viewers get, or, potentially, allow themselves to get.

And hey, I'm certainly not one to say that all gay people aren't like that, since i only know, like i said, like four people who have come out of the closet. (note, i'm almost positive all gay people aren't stereotypical. I mean no offense by this.) And even if they were, that's fine with me--like i said, these stereotypical characters are so lovable.
But some people love them not for their character and their senses of humor, but simply because they fulfill the stereotype. Take for instance, the made up character I'm about to discuss (cough, my father, cough) Mr...Jones.

So Mr. Jones doesn't know a lot of gay people (or doesn't think he does,) and also listens to a lot of conservative talk radio. As a result, he thinks that he doesn't like gay people, because, "he doesn't like watching men kiss." (no word yet on how he feels about women kissing, but when his teenage daughter brings home her black/hispanic/muslim girlfriend from college, we'll find out.)
Whenever Mr. Jones imitates gay men, he adopts a terrible rendition of a stereotypical flamboyant voice, leading people to believe that he thinks all gay men talk that way. In Mr. Jones' mind, he doesn't like people who talk that way (they are foreign, he doesn't understand them: they scare him,) so he doesn't like men who are attracted to other men.

One day, Mr. Jones says something in that voice in the context of telling a joke about two men who live together. The following conversation goes like this:

Mr. Jones's one liberal relative: not all men that live together talk like that!
Mr. Jones's mother in law, who hasn't left the house in six weeks: Yes they do! That's how they talk on TV!
Mr. Jones's daughter: *apalled*

That conversation happened. There is at least one person in the world who thinks that all gay people are exactly as they are portrayed in the media. And when there is one adorable and sweet, but sheltered and close minded old woman, there are a thousand. Maybe.

Project Runway, unfortunately, portrays gays--and fashion designers-- often in much the same way, but this is a reality show. My father, i mean, Mr. Jones, refers to all the male contestants and Tim Gunn and Micheal Kors as "that wicked gay guy."
As it is a reality show, it deals with some more realistic and scary issues than Modern Family does. (Not to criticize Modern Family, i know that it's purpose isn't to address realistic issues in hard-hitting ways, it's a satire.) I thought it was incredible that this season they got into the personal aspects of Mondo dealing with his  very religious family, his sexuality, and his HIV. That was intense. Tim Gunn discusses his sexuality more this season than any I can think of, and i think the show really represented the climate of the LGBT civil rights movement that (thank GOD) is so prevalent right now.
Yet still, people can be insensitive. I very nearly was sobbing when Micheal Costello got kicked off, yet during one of the floating head interview things, maybe in the preceding episode, my parents laughed at how affeminite he had to be to be getting so emotional over the show. Terrible. Terrible stuff.

And of course, i probably shouldn't get into the ending (i haven't even watched the finale.) Here's one way to not get ratings: Having the bitchy single woman beat the gay guy with the catholic family and HIV during the height of a LGBT civil rights movement. Way to go Lifetime.
So still, the theme is conflicting messages. We want to accept gays, they have a hard time, they are people too--but look at those weird clothes they wear! I'm a conservative New Englander, I can't interact with people who are that creative and brilliant!

Last, and actually probably most importantly, Glee. I'm not much of a Gleek, but I watched this episode, one, because i've seen "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!" so many times, and two, because i adore Rocky Horror.
Now, i love some of what Glee is doing. Having an openly gay character (no matter how stereotypical,) is a good thing, and addressing this issues is important. Most importantly, they've been massively helpful in the advent of the It Gets Better project in light of the recent suicides, and i love the It Gets Better Project. More on that later.
Since Glee is coming off as such a trailblazer in the world of portrayal of diversity in the media, I'd expect a pretty uncensored Rocky Horror portrayal. There is some pretty racy stuff in that movie. Like "Creature of the Night." Which they recreated. Shot by shot.
However, they edited out some key "inappropriate" words. Heavy petting became heavy sweating. (What?) Bed wetting became bed fretting (wait, do these sound worse to you?) Most importantly, though, was the way the edited "Sweet Transvestite." Give it a listen:


If you didn't see the episode and don't feel like clickin' about, the gist is that Mercedes is a sweet transvestite (wearing girls clothing, replacing every time she says "man" with "girl," so...cute? but..no?), from sensational Transylvania. Not transsexual Transylvania, which is how the song really goes, but sensational.
This edit doesn't make sense on so many levels. Not the least of which, transsexual isn't a bad word. It's just...a thing. That some people are. It's not a derogatory term or even something that the legality of is up for debate. It's just...a word. Not to mention, Transylvania is not a person. So we're not even talking about a person who's transgender, we're talking about a country or, more accurately, a made up planet that's being described as transsexual for no apparent reason other than to be whimsical. It's basically the equivalent of saying....The amputee planet Geneva. It has no relevance to anything. Are amputees offended by it? no. Are people who hate amputees offended by it? Not with any good reason they are.
The only effect of this edit is to offend people, as far as i can see. I haven't talked to any trans-gender people about it, because i don't know any, but it at least upset me quite a bit. As far as I'm concerned, fox can do whatever it wants, but if you're going to be a show that makes it self out to be in full support of teens trying to discover their sexuality, for god's sake, don't do something like this.
"We support you, who ever you are. If you're confused about your sexuality, come out of the closet. If you're confused about your gender, you can maybe become one of those..things. That we aren't allowed to say because it's too racy. But we support you!"

I feel like after all that jibber jabber my thoughts aren't portrayed entirely accurately. I am in full support of any and all homosexuals. I have crazy amounts of respect for them, and I'm honored to be part of the generation that seems to finally be making some headway on this anti gay nonsense. And I'm certainly not opposed to gay people who are open about their sexuality, and i wish we lived in a world where everyone could express themselves without automatically being stereotyped as sacreligious or whatever.
Thus, i'm in full support of portrayal of "stereotypical" gays in the media, especially if that is realistic (i certainly am not one to say whether or not it is.) I hope that this portrayal leads to an acceptance of these personalities, but i have my doubts and i think it deserves some thought.

In writing this, i was trying to think of a place where a gay man wasn't portrayed as affeminite or flamboyant: i could only think of one, but it's a darn good one.

If you're immensely bored and really love Sweeny Todd....

Yay formal film analysis!

*******            

           Sweeny Todd has been horrifying people for ages. The story was first told in the mid nineteenth century, about a barber who killed and ate his customers to satisfy his appetite for flesh.

            It became a folk tale of the London streets, and it is difficult now to say if there ever was, in fact, a demon barber on Fleet Street. Regardless, it has endeavored—the tale went on to take the form of plays at the Grand Guignol in Paris, early British comic books, an eighties TV movie, a Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim, and, most recently, a 2007 film directed by Tim Burton.

            The film is based most closely on Sondheim’s play, using its plot, music, and characters. Sweeny Todd returns home after spending years in the prison camps of Australia, only to find his daughter adopted by the judge that unfairly convicted him, and his wife presumed dead. Mrs. Lovett, the woman that now owns the building where his home and barbershop once were, takes him in and allows him to keep shop above her meat pie emporium. Before too long, Todd’s anger gets the best of him, and he goes into the business of killing his customers—both to get revenge against society and the judge, and to provide the meat for Mrs. Lovett’s pies. It is fair to say that this adaptation, with a screenplay based on Sondheim’s play by John Logan, brings the most complexity to the story. Each of the fully developed characters has his own clear motive that drives him through the plot of the story. While the themes of the movie are largely focused on horror, it is the subtle parallels and contrasts in characters that make the movie so impressive. Tim Burton uses brilliant cinematography to get this across, particularly in the use of foreground and background. Color is also manipulated brilliantly, through costumes, scenery, and color correction, to create contrast in the mise en scene during the scenes that characters with differing motives dominate.

            Of course, an extremely important aspect of the film and the play from which it was adapted is the music, which, while adding greatly to the mood of any given moment in the film, also emphasizes the differing motives of the characters. The lyrics to these songs also reveal the nature of these ends to the viewer. In fact, it is rare that any goal is directly stated in dialogue—they are nearly always said in song. Furthermore, many of these songs are duets, and in many cases characters sing the same words but with entirely opposite meanings.

            Burton’s innovative cinematography is large in part responsible for our understanding of the characters even though they do not always voice their thoughts. The relationships in this film as well as the motives are very important, and through the various shots and angles, we are able to identify the mood of a relationship between characters without either of them saying a word about it. Burton extensively uses a sort of over the shoulder shot—a close up of one character in the foreground, off to the side of the screen, with a blurred long or medium shot of another character in the background, occupying the other half of the shot. These shots usually function as shot/reverse shots, and many conversations occur without the actors ever looking at each other. Particularly enhanced by this technique is the relationship between the films’ leading lady and man, Mrs. Lovett and Sweeny Todd. Lovett is in love with Todd, and when he returns to London from his time as a prisoner in Australia, she takes him in, sets up his business, and eventually goes into a corrupt partnership with him, running their joint barber shop and restaurant. Because of this partnership, Todd is dependent on Lovett, despite his lack of emotion towards her.

            Lovett’s goals are mainly monetary—when she realizes that she can use the meat from the bodies of Todd’s victims to make her pies, it is a purely financial plan. However, she also wants a family. Todd is the only one who can provide her with either of these things. He depends on her meat pie business to dispose of his bodies, and on the facilities of his old barber shop—now owned by Lovett—to kill his victims. His main goal is revenge on the man that adopted his daughter after driving his wife to poison herself—but because that revenge depends on having the judge as a victim in a long line of murders, he depends on Mrs. Lovett to eventually obtain that goal. Their motives are interdependent, but conflicting.

            Therefore, in the sense that they are dependent on each other, they are partners, and, especially in Lovett’s mind, they are a couple. In one song, it is even implied briefly that they are lovers.[1] However, they are almost never showed in a direct two-shot. All of their conversations and interactions take place either in the aforementioned foreground-background format, in shot/reverse shots, or in a window or reflection. We never see them make eye contact, we rarely see their faces both in focus in one shot. We are shown through cinematography that, though in plot they are together, they are essentially alone.

            Unsurprisingly, Todd’s motives also differ greatly from the other characters’, but again, they are closely intertwined. The goal of Todd is to regain possession of his daughter Joanna; Antony, a young boy that he met while sailing home from Australia, also wants to pull her from her current home, but wishes to marry her and run away. The judge, who has adopted Joanna, and whom Todd wants to kill, wishes to marry her himself. Joanna wishes to marry Antony, but really, not knowing her father exists, just wants to escape her unhappy and sexually abusive home with the judge.  Lucy, Todd’s presumably late wife who now walks the streets, a crazed victim of self-induced arsenic poisoning, wishes to destroy the business that Todd and Lovett have created.           

            While all of these conflicts are revealed through the normal plot devices of dialogue, lyrics, and flashbacks, the paradoxical contrasting and parallel nature of them are further emphasized through two things: color and music.

            Tim Burton has been using up-to-date CGI technology brilliantly and innovatively since the beginning of his career, and this film is no exception. Green screen and color correction, as well as costumes, make up, and mise-en-scene, make the bulk of the movie seem almost black and white. Though the film is not actually in grayscale, only a few colors exist in Sweeny’s world. There are shades of dark gray and black—in his hair, his clothes, the walls and floors in Lovett’s home, and most importantly, the sky of the “great black pit” that is London. Lighter shades of gray and pure white show themselves occasionally, in the high contrast light that shines in through the large window of the barbershop, in the barber cloak, the shaving cream, and Lovett and Todd’s very makeuped skin. Yellow exists in small places—mainly in the streetlights, a rare flit of the color of Lucy’s hair that Todd remembers so well and recalls so frequently. Most importantly, Todd’s world is accented in red: in the outdoor lights at Mrs. Lovett’s meat pie emporium, in some subtle details in Lovett’s clothing, in the meat that fills her pies, and, of course, in the highly stylized blood that soaks Sweeny’s barbershop each time he kills a customer.  Through some magic of editing, almost no other colors stand out or are even visible in Todd’s world.

            In contrast, the world of Todd’s past in the exposition flashbacks in the beginning of the film is filled with overly saturated bright colors. Almost every thing is on the lighter shade of the spectrum, a theme radiating from Lucy’s white-blonde hair. The color theme is only disturbed when the officer that comes to drag a falsely accused Sweeny away enters the scene, dressed entirely in over-dramatized dark black.

            Back in current London, Joanna, in seeming unconscious homage to her mother, is the only character who dresses in light colors, the sole hue that she will wear. She also spends all her time sitting in a window with white curtains, watching a bright yellow canary sing in a literal cage that parallels her own metaphorical one. Though her situation is every bit as dark as the other characters, by nature of her identity she brings light to the screen.

            The world of the judge is as dark as Sweeny’s at most times—after all, he spends his life in the same gloomy weather that dominates Todd’s London. Somehow, though, his world is often a big brighter, a bit more well-lit. His hair is white and his skin is less ghastly than Todd’s, his visage is in shadow less of the time, his face becomes the location of the pure white shaving cream, the lightest colored material in Todd’s world. This lightness vaguely represents the judge’s position in society. As a judge, he is known to be lawful and pious—but the audience, and Sweeny Todd, know that this is not the case. Even though Sweeny Todd is the one killing people, he is the protagonist, making his enemy, the judge, the antagonist by default. It is different and plays with our views of the characters to have the hero all in black and the villain all in white.

            Of course, these colors mean nothing out of relation to each other. Left over chronology from the play puts different characters in nearly every scene—almost no consecutive scenes follow the same plot or sub-plot. This drastically emphasizes the color contrast in the mise en scene that follows different characters. Burton translated these transitions, which would take some time on the stage, into quick, sharp cuts between scenes; by doing this, he keeps the movie fast-paced and interesting, but also directly juxtaposes the contrasting scenes. Our mind has no time to stop thinking in black before it is plunged suddenly into whiteness. This contrast, of course, follows the contrasting personalities and motives.

            The music is also brilliantly crafted by Sondheim to match exactly the nature of the characters that sing it. All the music relating to Sweeny’s goals is either very dark, lyrical, orchestral music in minor keys, or quick, suspenseful, angry music to accompany his revenge. The songs that Lovett sings about her imagined future life are light and happy, her soprano and the poppy tempo of her tunes, of course, match the vision of happiness she has. Antony’s serenades to Joanna are hopeful and poetic, as are Joanna’s musical musings of freedom.

            Again, these themes mean very little until they are compared to each other. The most clever pieces of music occur during the duets. It is common in musical theater for two characters to sing the same song, lending the lyrics to entirely different interpretations, but Sondheim takes this to a new level. Again with Todd and Lovett: their first duet, “My friends,” is an ode from Todd to the razors he finds--the tools he once used to earn a living, and will now use to exact revenge. However, when Lovett joins in, the song takes on an entirely different meaning. She has found a past love, (she reveals in the song that she "always had a fondness" for "Mr. Todd,") and says that she wishes to have a life with him using the same lyrics that he uses to express his future plans of murder and vengeance to his weapons. Later, Todd sings a duet with the judge, his enemy, about "Pretty Women." From the judge’s perspective, the song is a lyrical waxing on the nature of beautiful women, particularly his ward (Todd's daughter,) whom he is about to marry. Todd, while singing the same song, is sardonically and bitterly veiling his resentment for the judge's situation; while they both sing the same words--"Pretty women, are a wonder, even when they leave you and vanish they still are there--" the judge is referencing the satisfaction he has gained from sexually abusing Sweeny's wife and daughter, while Sweeny is referencing the pain he has experienced from the judge's taking the women in his life, the only people he cared for. Later, Antony sings a song entitled Joanna, expressing his desire to marry the girl and his hope for their future; Todd sings along on alternate verses, expressing his regret at loosing the life his family potentially could have had and resigning himself to the fact that they will never be reunited. In Lovett and Todd's infamous duet, "A Little Priest," in which they formulate their plan to cook corpses into Mrs. Lovett's meat pies, though they do not sing the same words, but their respective lyrics, set to jovial music contrast their goals; Todd expresses his need for revenge in a dissonant shout, (“I’ll come again when you have judge on the menu!”)  while Lovett is inspired by the idea due to her lack of money to buy meat, (“With the price of meat what it is, when you get it, if you get it…”). The music in this movie is packed with double entendres and is, in fact, often a double entendre in and of its self.

            The entire movie is packed with double meanings, and each carefully crafted word can lead to parallels between the motives of the different characters. Luckily for us common viewers, we do not have to analyze each word for what it can mean for every character in the film—Burton shows us the subtleties through his brilliant cinematography and manipulation of color. Each mise en scene presents a different personality, a different sub-plot or goal, and the characters, whether originating in Sondheim or fables in the streets of London, are complex and developed enough to match them.

            

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

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[1] In fantasizing about their future wedding, Lovett sings, “me rumpled bedding legitimized.” It is unclear whether or not she is referring to a current sexual relationship or one she imagines in their future. 

Halloween!

Guys, (two or three people who might read this, until i become a famous blogger,) i haven't posted in a while. I apologize. I have a draft for a rant about movies/murder, but it needs work. I've been busy.

And tonight is no exception. I've got a psychology essay to write, colleges to apply to, a movie to edit, a room to clean, an english worksheet to do, a poem about this girl i recently walked into floating around in my head.

But tonight is also Halloween, tomorrow is senior skip day, and gosh darnit, even if i don't write a blog entry any other day this year i will write one tonight.
I must. 

Since I don't by any means have time to watch a movie, I'm going to do this equally obligatory post: my top five favorite scary movies this very moment in no particular order. Ok maybe in order of how much I like them.
Really, it should be ten, but I'm going for quality.

5) Burnt Offerings: My best friend and I watched this one night, after having a specific craving for a bad horror movie, from the seventies. Of course, we didn't think it would be hard to find something to satisfy our appetite--is there any such thing as a good horror movie from the seventies?
The answer is YES. And this is it. Predating Amityville Horror by three years, this is the best haunted house movie I've ever seen. And, even though haunted house/possession movies aren't my MO, I feel pretty confident in saying this is a fairly important and fairly scary movie.
And really, movie's don't scare me very often. Even though this film has its silly moments of terrible acting and weird effects, it's overall very chilling. The storyline is about the same as Amityville, a family moves into a house for the summer, and slowly the family members act stranger and stranger until deaths start occurring. The ideas that get presented through this plot--the father's traumatic and horrifying memories of his own father's funeral, and the way that makes him treat his son, the mother's need to be needed by something and her resentfulness towards her husband's aunt, the couple's strained relationship as a result of their respective problems--are much deeper than the film seems it should go.
In this film, the house is the real villain, and the motifs and cinematography do a good job of presenting this. Photographs of the house in various states of disrepair line the walls of the interior, and important scenes--such as the husband assaulting his wife after being rejected--are overshadowed by the house in the background. The quick zoom in close ups on the smiling hearse driver that the father remembers from his childhood are terrifying, and the ending, (spoilers!) where the house sheds its skin, does extremely well with the special effects of the decade.
I actually saw this film before I saw Psycho, so at the time I did not recognize homage in a shot in the ending of the movie, where the husband walks up to the attic where the "sick mother" of the house's wintertime owners is said to stay. He enters the room--usually locked--to see an old woman sitting in a rocking chair with her back to him. You know how it goes from here, he approaches her slowly, turns the chair around--and there is not an old woman or a corpse, but his wife, aged fourty years and with a familiar malicious grin on her face.

Well that was long! On to the next one!

4) Psycho: I'm not going to say too much about this one, because how much could i say? This is the best horror movie ever made. This was the grandfather of the slasher film.
Not to mention, this film has had the life analyzed out of it by every prominent horror analyst since 1960. Alfred Hitchcock actually asked Stanford to do a study on its popularity (unfortunately, it never happened under his watch--when he was told the estimated price, he said something along the lines of, "well, i'm not that curious.")
In truth, I haven't seen this movie enough times to really analyze it right here and now spontaneously, but i can tell you what i do love about it the most: Norman Bates. Definitely one of the scariest and most lovable characters in film ever. I might be risky in saying that he's the beginning of serial killers that warranted our sympathy, but come on. How could you not love this face.

3:) Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): Two words: Wes Craven. I love Wes Craven. More on that later.
This is the first movie i watched after i realized that i was meant to love slasher movies. (The realization occurred with a documentary, not included on this list on technicality, called Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film.) I watched it on demand for free before my second date with my second boyfriend. He thought I was crazy when i soon after related him how much i enjoyed it.
(Side note--that date was to see the second narnia movie, which, after watching Nightmare on Elm Street, was a pretty terrible film.)
Anyways, this movie came at a fun time in the slasher craze. It's the latest of the big three, (Micheal, Jason, Freddy,) and it had an air of self-satire more than any of the other films did. I like this movie because it is at once very clear and very confusing. We don't know who Freddy is or where he came from at first, but we get what the movie is saying to us--have sex, die.
Thank you Wes Craven. Imagine how many teen pregnancies there would be without Wes Craven.
I love the bad special effects in this film especially much. Freddy Krueger's face? Fantastic! Johnny Depp being sucked into a bed and producing as much blood as there is water in Lake Michigan? Beautiful!
Not to mention it's lovely connections to the fears of the time. The film was actually based around a story that Craven had read where a kid in the far east wouldn't go to sleep, and his family and doctors and such got all upset at him, and a few weeks after the ordeal started the found him dead in his closet with tons of caffeine pills. Apparently the whole movie has a lot of ties to eastern philosophy, but i can't recall them at this moment. So don't quote me on that. Also, the fact that the whole movie is sort of based around a fear and mistrust of authority (guess who was in office at the time?) is pretty fantastic.
That leads me to address something i must address with this movie: Nightmare on Elm Street, 2010. I actually loved it, even though survivorgirl's boyfriend did drugs and lived. They did the original proud, i think. The story was updated with the background that modern horror audiences apparently want, and i think the distrust of authority was a good thing to bring back into horror for this time. We're all pretty upset at authorities right now, right? (my dad is?) A scary thing about the new one is how much it goes into the backstory, because my elementary school janitor actually went to jail for being a pedophile...
but we never tried to kill him by lighting his home under the preschool on fire, so we're safe from an Elm Street situation in lil ol' southern new england town.

2.) Scream: Did i tell you how much I love wes craven? I love Wes Craven so much. I really hope i meet him someday.
I might do a blog on horror satire someday, so i won't rant about this too much, but this is the epitome of horror satire. (And i've never seen Scary Movie 1, but is it really making fun of Scream? That's the stupidest thing ever. You can't/shouldn't make satires of satire, guys. Not classy.) There are so many references in this movie that if you played a drinking game with that as the theme, you would die of alcohol poisoning really badly. (joke credit). And the impressive and really, really classy thing about this satire is that Wes Craven directed it. Wes Craven. One step down on the ladder from Hitchcock in horror. So he's really entirely making fun of himself. While being hilarious and not taking itself to seriously, Scream also has some really interesting things to say about the nature of the horror genre and it's formulaic nature, it's potential negative influence on people, the lessons it teaches, and character archetypes. Not to mention, it has some of the best quotes in horror history, a mon avi.
"Movies don't make psychos, movies make psychos more creative."

1) Behind the Mask: The rise of Leslie Vernon: To this day this movie wins the race for my favorite film ever every time. It's half mockumentary, half slasher deconstruction, and entirely amazing. The acting is fantastic--the dual performance of Nathan Baesel as a funny, friendly guy and a traditional slasher serial killer is incredible, Zelda Rubenstien is beautiful, Robert Englund's cameo is perfect, and Angela Goethals makes a fantastic heroine. This movie is like slasher 101--if you aren't ready for the Fruedian analysis implicit in most analytical literature on slashers, this is a great movie to watch. Really, this is always a great movie to watch. The jokes are hilarious, the cinematography is creative and effective, the scares are scary and the characters are relatable. Like Scream, it is a satire of itself, but it has some brilliant things to say. Leslie Vernon, the main character and a serial killer, tries so hard to explain to Taylor, the documentary maker, the entire time through the film why he does what he does, and she never gets it. Nonetheless, she has sympathy for him. But when they get to the actual night of the killing, she can't go through with her objective reporting--and we find ourselves asking why we were on Leslie's side the whole time. (I never stop being on his side when i watch this.) The twist in the end is placed perfectly--it is revealed at the exact moment you figure it out yourself. I could get into more in-depth analysis-- like how we're put into a personal relationship with Leslie in the beginning with a lot of close and medium shots, and how in the end during his killing spree we see him only in long shot, until the climax, where his humanity is revealed once again in extreme close up. But i don't have too much time to spend on that right now.
Really though. A genre piece, but a great one. Watch it now.


There are two other movies which i cannot in good conscience leave off of this list entirely--Sweeney Todd, and (egoegoego) Getting In Trouble, the child of my best friend and i. However, i have in mind very specific blog entries for them, and they will, must be saved for another time.

Happy Halloween, all. Screw homework and go watch a scary movie until it's November.

Jamie Lee Curtis as Jamie Lee Curtis in....

Today I decided it was high time i watch another good old fashioned slasher. A look through my netflix instant queue, (which, in my opinion, has every slasher movie that netflix offers and is worthy of viewing on it,) i decided on a movie that immediately followed Friday the Thirteenth part one, a movie that many consider to be one of the first of THE low budget slasher craze--Terror Train.

It's pretty easy to tell that this is right after Friday the Thirteenth, and I'd say it's probably still riding on Jamie Lee's success in Halloween. There isn't too much about it that makes it special, but it certainly has its moments.

So it's your pretty standard prank goes wrong at a frat graduation party and the victim exacts revenge on the tricky jokesters/murderers (Wait, what?) Anyways, it all started freshmen year when Doc whatever was hazing somebody or something, (its kinda foggy,) and he tries to get Jamie Lee to sleep with him or something(the kid he was hazing.) However, it turns out that the kid has some sort of strange disorder that makes him kill people, then look at his hands really freaky, then spin around a lot.

I don't know if you can tell, but this is a dude spinning around with no explanation

Cut to four years later, and we have Jamie Lee and best friend, and their boyfriends, on a train with the rest of...(the fraternity? the school?) having a...costume party? on New Years?

Yeah, they didn't give too much explanation as to why everyone was celebrating like Halloween when it was not, but i guess it was a pretty practical move. One of the coolest things about this movie is that the killer, (guys, the killer is the kid from the beginning who kills people, sorry for the spoilers,) takes the costume of whomever he kills. So you never really know if the guy you're randomly trying to have sex with to get revenge on your boyfriend is your old buddy Jack, or a psycho in a lizard suit

Either way, he's wearing a lizard suit, and you shouldn't try to seduce him

I guess the reason it was New Years instead of Halloween was so, A) they wouldn't be so obvious about coasting off of the movie Halloween, which Jamie Lee was in just two short years ago, and B) so it could be less than zero degrees outside. The other fear factor in this movie is that, even once they find out there's a killer on the train, (after an impressively quick fourty five minutes,) they can't get off the train, because for some reason they're in the arctic in December.

My other favorite part about this film is the Ahab. (Quick literary lesson my friends! I learned the other day that the technical term for an Ahab is a deus ex machina, or machine of the gods. Yay!) The adults in this film are pretty stereotypical--it consists of two sort of hillbilly characters who swear that railroad travel is coming back, and one conductor, our honorable Ahab, who is sort of going for a...Hitchcockian kind of character? 

In any case, he's pretty badass, if you will, and he's the one to find out that somebody's doin' some killin' on this here train. Everytime he sees a dead body, he goes "Mhyyy gohhd" all oldpersonish and it's just fantastic. When he tells Jamie Lee that her best friend is dead, the following conversation between them ensues:

JL-Who would do that to her?

Conductor-Probably some kid. Messed up on dope. Alchohol....

JL-I know these people. They wouldn't do this.

Conductor-Yeah, of course not. Probably some nut just snuck on the train.

Jamie's reassured face

Aside from those two features, it was pretty formulaic and uninteresting. David Copperfield was in it for some reason, probably because some director decided to make a movie with David Copperfield in it and formulated the entire story around him. Unfortunately, because of the lighting on trains at night, the whole movie was ill-lit, and it was constantly hard to tell what was going on. Special effects were too simple to be really ridiculous, but not very well done...

Oh Mitchy! How'd you get that lipstick all over your teeth?

The ending was bizzare, even though the climax all happened and i'm pretty sure Jamie Lee killed like three people in presumed self defense, there were at least five minutes until she actually confronted the killer, during which everyone kinda chilled out and assumed the killer was dead, and Jamie Lee kept jumping around like a schizophrenic homeless man. The confrontation though, was really very good, and there was a more emotional attachment between killer and survivor girl that a plot usually sets up for. It had a nice repeat of the beginning where the killer spins around a lot for no apparent reason. 

Oh my god, my hands! These were here last time I killed somebody!

But the meat of the matter is, i had two general slasher movie realizations.

One little one is about comic relief. The comic relief in this one was a dude named Charlie, and i loved him a lot. He was Jamie Lee's best friend, and comforted her when her boyfriend was sleeping with some other girl, and did impressions of some senator that i don't know about because i wasn't born, let alone aware of politics, in 1980. And even though i knew he was the comic relief, because he had a funny hat and smiled a lot, he wasn't actually funny. Not even a little bit. He was happy, he made me happy, but he didn't make me laugh out loud. And this is the case in a lot of movies--you know who the comic relief is, you know they're gonna get killed, but they're not actually funny at all.

Realization two, that a major theme is graduation parties. This is the case in Graduation day, (duh,) House on Sorority Row, this one, Rosemary's Killer, Final Destination, and I'm sure plenty of others. This is a real sting for teenagers like myself that movies like these are aimed at. I'm graduating at the end of this school year, and everyone's psyched. It's a pretty big deal, needless to say. Imagine you're in a slasher movie, and you've just gotten through four years of high school or college without getting killed. You had sex and did drugs all the time--but you made it anyways! You even have that one friend who stayed a virgin and got good grades! So you're partyin' it up like never before--but suddenly something snaps. Is it that you're partyin' has just breached the edge of what the local serial killers will tolerate? Is it because that kid you accidentally lit on fire your sophomore year just now is getting out of the hospital? Or is it because the forces of death are just so cruel that they waited until you thought you were out of the woods, out of the dark, into the light, and then BANG! You get a pickaxe in the throat? 

Well, my friends, the answer is that the director knows what you're afraid of. They want to get you where you're safe, where you feel the most invincible, and teenagers must feel no more invincible than when they graduate. The biggest threat of their tiny lives is gone--they can't not graduate now, they can't not get into college now, the threat of all their most severe punishments is essentially gone. Goals have been reached. You got what you wanted out of high school. You even got away with that crazy prank that left that one kid permanently disfigured. 

Also, is this guys jedi cloak knitted? 

When the divorce rate for our generation goes up, we know who to blame...

Twilight. Overall, a pretty unimpressive film, but as we all know, it has started the biggest teen-pop culture sensation since Harry Potter, and, according to my bff IMDB, was the second most popular film in 2008, next to The Dark Knight. Seriously, guys? Seriously, females of my generation? Dark Knight is probably going to be considered in ten years to be one of the best movies ever made, and you already can't mention Twilight without every male or cultured female in the room either groaning or laughing at you.
But no need to get into that. Along with a lot of angry ranting that went through my head (and came out of my mouth, I'm sure, much to the chagrin of my best friend,) during this movie, and the added hilarity of the rifftrax we played along with it, (http://www.rifftrax.com/), I came up with three questions that I needed to find some answers to-1,Why did we like this? 2, Why do people still like this so much? And 3, I wonder how many relationships this movie has corrupted?
So when Twilight came out, my very best friend read it, and fell in love with it. It wasn't popular yet, and she, being very dark, fell in love with the atmosphere, and could relate to Bella living in an excruciatingly small town. I read it to, of course, and didn't mind it so much myself.
Now you must understand, my friend and I are not your typical everyday vampire fangirls, nor were we then. We were the outcasts at our school, we intentionally avoided every trend we could. And that is the girl that Bella is really meant to relate to. She cares more about school than she does her appearance or the opposite gender (well..), she isn't athletic, her family is a little off. Her character, and the whole book, really play to a trend that was very popular at the time that I like to call pop-emo. I think (or like to think) that this has been sort of displaced by the indie thing that's happening right now, but when Twilight started, when I was in about seventh grade, this "emo" thing was very popular. And if any of you four or five people reading this are very sensitive about this sort of thing, I don't mean really emo. There's emo, then there's "emo." There's The Cure, and then there's All American Rejects. There're nose piercings, then there are little rubber bracelets with skulls on them. There's Sylvia Plath, and then there's twilight. It was definitely the book of this softcore cultural movement, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't at least a little bit invested in that movement myself, at the time. It's angsty, it covers most of the life questions that thirteen year old girls have thought about, the atmosphere is dark.
And quite frankly, it's just a fun book to read. I wouldn't be the first one to say that the reason Bella is so painfully boring is because the less personality she has, the easier it is for middle school girls to cut and paste themselves into her character and be swept up in the unlikely romance. And the romance really is what makes the book, or more specifically, the fact that the romance is happening in Forks. I live in a place not unlike Forks, in a state not unlike Washington, and though I don't really want a vampire to be stalking me, shoot, at least it'd be something interesting to spend my time paying attention to.
I think it's fair to say nowadays that the oh-so-cute pop-emo movement has pretty much left the mainstream and a good chunk of the girls who are so obsessed with Edward Cullen are not the social outcasts of their school and cannot relate to Bella's trouble fitting in quite so much. Quite frankly, to be a proper Twilight fangirl, you have to have a lot of pep, and you would not be able to fit all the gloom that is necessary to really relate to Bella, the gloomiest gloomster in the gloomiest town in the continental US. So what's the appeal now?
Sexual harrasment, guys. That is the appeal. I'm only sort of kidding. Edward and Jacob are the reasons girls watch these movies now--they are so, very very invested in themselves--i mean Bella making her choice.
First of all, Team Jacob, you need to stop. Bella ends up with Edward. Jacob ends up with Bella's newborn daughter. You're fighting a loosing battle. That being said, I'm not going to really get into the Jacob thing, because he has less than ten minutes of screen time in Twilight, and i've opted not to watch the rest of the saga.
So after some serious discussion last night, my friend and i determined why Eddie is so attractive. And they aren't bad reasons to be attracted to someone--he's smart, he's unique compared to the other guys in Forks, he's musical, he has an old fashioned sense of chivalry and romance, his family loves and welcomes Bella and treats her like she belongs. And I'm not gonna lie, those are some of the things that make my very stereotypical high school relationship nice. My boyfriend threatens to beat up someone who threatened me somehow? Swoon! His family is incredibly sweet? How perfect! He doesn't act like the other guys at school? How refreshing! He's a homicidal maniac who likes to spend time with me because I smell like his favorite meal? Ama-wait. Here's where the problem is, people. Edward uses his good qualities to hide the fact that he's a horrible womanizing freak. Never have i felt less good about being female than after watching this film. Bella is supposedly a tough chick--and she totally is, until she moves to forks. It's like small towns secrete some sort of sexist ooze. Bella grew up with no men in the house, taking care of her mother, being an individual at school, and studying literature. As soon as she gets to forks, she's cooking and cleaning for her father, and as soon as she meets Edward, she's constantly being taken care of like some helpless cripple. Edward is so superior to her in his male-ness that he actually carries her around most of the time instead of letting her walk. He watches her sleep--and that's ok, because he's just being protective. The movie doesn't even try to hide this, like, at all--at one point, they are trying to run away from something, and instead of being rational and letting her get in the car to save time, he opens her door for her, pretty much picks her up and places her in the car, and then actually starts to buckle her seat belt for her. Seriously?
And unfortunately, i cannot answer question number three, but i can only guess it's a lot. Twilight teaches us that our high school sweethearts will be our significant others for the rest of our lives, and we should act as if our happiness forever depends on the success of that relationship. It teaches us that we only can ever have one real relationship--bella and edward get married at eighteen and they are immortal, werewolves imprint on someone and are with them forever, Bella's dad can't have another relationship because he loved her mom, etc. It teaches us girls that overprotective, chauvinistic men who are also aggressive, controlling, and violent make the best boyfriends--can you say abusive relationship? And it shows us that when we are really in love with someone, when they leave, for whatever reason, the most logical reaction is to give up on life and go into a deep, nearly irreversible depression and do life-threatening things all the time. I've seen it happen, guys. Don't let your relationship be...bellafied. Nothing good will come of it.

Legally Blonde+I Know What You Did Last Summer=...

The House on Sorority Row! It's been too, too long since I've watched a good old fashioned slasher, and it makes me feel so good to do so again. So I decided to write a little rant about it.
First of all, lets define "good old fashioned slasher." I'm kind of a stickler for the rules on this one. And the rules are, as I've observed, are these:

1. Teenagers: The "victims" in a good, true, old fashioned slasher, are teenagers, and they deserve whatever they get because they drink, do drugs, have sex, or, in a few special cases, kill old people. We'll be discussing this tonight.
2. Survivorgirl: This is also referred to as "the last girl." There is always one girl, who either is reluctant to or completely avoids doing all the other bad teenager things her pals are doing. You may find yourself wondering, "why is this nice, smart girl who's probably valedictorian of the class hanging out with all these deadbeat potheads?" She, as the name implies, survives, and is the often the special interest of the killer (ie, Prom Night, Halloween.) Some newer movies like to play fast and loose with the rules here and have a boy and a girl survive (Nightmare on Elm Street 2010, House of Wax 2005, etc)
3. Killer: The killers in good old fashioned slasher movies do not use guns. Traditionally, we do not see him until the end of the film. They are driven by some sort of motive, normally of a vengeful variety. 
4. Ahab: This one doesn't always happen, but usually in slashers you see one important adult who explains the killer (often a doctor,) and who represents goodness and safety for the teens. Usually he comes too late to help much. 
5. Plot: The plot goes like this: Teenagers do stupid things. Mysterious stuff happens. Teenagers ignore it and continue to do stupid things. People start disappearing. Teenagers stop ignoring it. Everyone dies. Ahab arrives too late. Survivorgirl bests killer, with some help from Ahab. Movie sets up for sequel. 

Now that we've done that! We can get on with the review.

This movie came out in 1983, well into the slasher movie epidemic. So of course, it's pretty much whats to be expected. Which i loved. The cast of b-list actors (two of the seven sorority sisters are now prominent enough to have pictures on IMDB--nobody else in this film does) added a bit of extra cheese to the film, especially the lead actress, who looks like a mixture of Helen Hunt and Kirsten Stewart...

Needless to say, I was surprised when her blind date didn't try to suck her blood.

The movie begins with a nice flashback of a woman going through some seriously strenuous labor, and it is implied that she miscarries. (spoilers: she doesn't.) Then we quickly get to some good old sorority fun. Not any bouncy wet tee-shirt pillow fights like i was expecting, but instead a nice eighties version of the opening scene from Legally Blonde. Which was hilarious. Long story short, the girls are staying at their sorority house for a few extra days to have their crazy graduation party, much to the dismay of their elderly house mother, who is (gasp!) the woman from scene one. Extra-snob girl gets upset because elderly house mother tears a hole in her waterbed, so the sorority kills her. By accident. Then, one by one, the sisters get killed off mysteriously by a force with the SAME WEAPON that the elderly person they killed carried.

Wait, wrong movie. 

This makes it even easier for us to route for the killer. Yeah, i know they didn't want to kill the old woman, and they didn't mean to dump her in the pool when she was actually still alive, but honestly, they haven't even starting drinking yet. Make some judgement calls. I don't even have any sympathy for survivorgirl here, she so easily could have called the police and just opted out of it. Usually slasher movies are pretty subtle about the teenagers being punished--mainstream culture doesn't want to be too in their face about saying that drinking and having sex will get you killed. But its pretty much safe to assume that the viewers won't get contradictory with this message. Don't kill old people, kids. Its bad, you'll have a lot to clean up, and their ghosts will probably come back from the dead and stab you with weirdly weapon like old people stuff. 

     Luckily, the film does have a plot twist at the end, (though not one I had too much trouble predicting.) The doctor that delivered the house mothers baby comes back, in true Ahab style, and him and Bell-i mean survivorgirl figure out that all the other sisters have died, and are not being killed by old lady house mother, but the allegedly miscarried son, who was horribly disfigured and lived in his mothers attic for the past twenty two years. 

So over all pretty white bread and ketchup movie. My favorite part was definitely some of the especially gruesome death scenes.

This made me so happy

And some pretty beautiful clown imagery, which connected very nicely back to the house mother's obsession with her (unborn?) child and ended up doing some serious damage at the end of the film.

When you see the jack in the box, it means you're about to die.

But the thing i really want to rant about is this: the killer. Because Eric (house mother's son) was born as part of some sort of in-vitro fertilization experiment gone wrong, he was born with a horrible disfigurement that makes him look like every other disfigured serial killer before him. which made me realize: society sucks. Theoretically, we depict in films that are supposed to be scary things that supposedly scare us, and, theoretically, we fear what we don't know. So i guess it makes sense that a lot of movies depict children born with weird disfigurements (note: in slasher movies, "disfigurements" often stands for "downs syndrome," but people like to pretend it doesn't) because at the time, and still, we don't really understand things like that and every mother fears that her child will be born that way. And often they act the way they do because they were bullied or mistreated as children. But seriously? This depiction of them isn't really helping their rep, guys. "Hey, you better be nice to people with cognitive disorders and facial disfigurements, they're people just like us, and if you aren't nice to them, a screw will come loose and they'll grow up to kill your children in horribly heartless ways." Being disfigured puts our killer in league with some of the best, including Jason and Leatherface, and less famously, Victor from House of Wax (2005? Chad Micheal Murray and Paris Hilton? Anyone?) Often the killer is upset because his mother was murdered, which gets into the much less offensive themes of killer as victim and the devotion a mother has for her son being repaid posthumously, which is probably a more overlying theme. But we form opinions based on what we see being depicted in the media, no matter how subtle--so just make sure that when you watch this movie, you keep in mind that people with birth defects do not usually grow up to kill teenagers.

Even if those teenagers really deserve it.