a sense of joy and then a panic

You'll notice "suicidal mountain-climbing" is on my list of LJ interests, but I'm not sure how much I've talked about it.  I have read the wikipedia List of deaths on eight-thousanders many times.  I am especially partial to stories about K2 - its peril is not exactly a secret in the mountaineering world (and really I should start looking up Annapurna, the mountain with the highest fatality rate: over 40%), but I was surprised to read about K2 in college.  The overriding theme of most of these stories is the question of personal vs. social/communal responsibility: that is, if you pass a mountaineer in trouble on your way to the peak, do you stop your ascent and try to help them down, or do you say "well, he made the mistake of climbing without oxygen/training/equipment, we all have to look out for ourselves"?  See David Sharp.  Sir Edmund Hillary is by far my favorite participant in that debate (Hillary described Mark Inglis' attitude as "pathetic").  Also see the controversial Into Thin Air, which is probably the most famous contemporary mountaineering story.

I think the real reason these stories appeal to me, though, is the surrealism of the whole experience, the time spent "in the company of death," where frozen dead bodies who have been there for years are actually markers like "Base Camp" and "Camp IV."  The surrealism and the incredible desire of these chronic climbers to do something so difficult, so likely to lead to death.  You watch those Everest documentaries and these people just do not stop thinking about 8,000-ers, especially if they've already tried to climb them and failed.  It appears to be their driving purpose in life, one that subsumes family, work, health, finances.  These mountains fucking haunt them.  Then of course there's all the Type-A, competitive aspects of the whole endeavor (that tie directly into the responsibility question) - the "rarr I defy death and gravity and nature" triumph-of-the-human survivalism, the "oh yeah?  well, I'm going to climb WITHOUT OXYGEN" oneupmanship that more often than not leads to death, the extremely bitter disputes over whether the dead people reached the summit or not (I'm guessing it's a question of whether their death was "for nothing").  Note that this attitude does not extend to everyone - Anatoli Boukreev being just one exception: "Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion...I go to them as humans go to worship."

So here I have watched three mountaineering movies.  Touching The Void is a documentary about Siula Grande, in the Andes.  K2 is "based on a true story" about K2 (obviously).  The North Face is "based on a true story" about Eiger, in the Alps.  Touching the Void and K2 are contemporary stories, while The North Face is set in the 1930s.

Touching the Void is a superb movie.  Simpson and Yates are descending from the summit of the Siula Grande.  Simpson breaks his leg and Yates is trying to rappel the both of them down (an extremely tough pill).  Eventually, Simpson is dangling off a cliff.  Yates can't see him and he can't support the weight of them both, so he hopes that Simpson is only a few feet from the ground and cuts the rope (and becomes known forever more as "The Man That Cut The Rope").  Oh dear, turns out Simpson is 100 foot from the ground.  Yates sees this and assumes Simpson's dead, then goes back to base camp.  But Simpson isn't dead, and has to crawl/hop out of a crevasse and onto a glacier and down to base camp by himself.  Touching the Void may have a leg-up on the other two just because it's a documentary.  But it's a well-done documentary that totally captures the hallucinatory weirdness (for lack of a better term) that Simpson experienced on his horrifically painful descent.  It is also very darkly funny - probably the most memorable part of the movie is when Simpson (on the mountain) has the auditory hallucination of hearing "Brown-Eyed Girl" by Boney M, a band that he hates.  And he's like, "Bloody hell, I'm going to die to Boney M."  My second-favorite part was the guys at base camp hearing this noise that sounds like Simpson crying in the wind but because they're sure he's dead, are too scared to go out because they think it's some undead spirit back to haunt them.  Trufax.  Note also that Simpson has always defended Yates' decision to cut the rope (he reasons that they both would have died otherwise).  Simpson also still climbs mountains.  Really highly recommended.

K2 is not so good.  I don't know what the true story is like, but this felt quite overwrought.  I didn't really understand the motivations of the climbers, and I was totally on the side of the porters that ran away from the Savage Mountain in fear (sherpas, I should note, are incredibly bad ass).  The set-up here is that because the first two guys who tried to go up to the summit fell and died, the two best friends that were "cheated out of their chance" got to go up to the summit despite the great risk of bad weather.  The rest of the group has gone back to base camp and is going to fly away with a helicopter because the one guy has altitude sickness and will die if he doesn't get off the mountain.  But no, the helicopter can't leave!  They must go pick up the two climbers!  Even if the one dude dies of altitude sickness because of it!  Granted this may all be a realistic situation - in which case, quite frankly, it would be a shitty, dire situation exemplifying the tradeoffs and deals-with-the-Devil that people make on 8000-ers - but the presentation was so one-sided, and so straight-faced ("hooray they're dead!  now we can go!"  Huh?), that I found it more than a little eye-rolly.  Besides, the mountain didn't look very threatening - it looked like a tame mountain on a controlled set.  There was no darkness in this movie.  Just triumphant electric guitar.  Give it a pass.

The North Face falls between these two (but closer to Touching the Void).  The main characters are German, and the mountain is in Austria.  The Third Reich is just coming into power, and the German expats are sort of basking in their country's perceived inflation in global value.  Two German mountaineers have decided to climb the never-before-conquered North Face of Eiger, and Germany lets them leave the military to pursue their suicide-dream because it's a good PR opportunity.  Thus the media and onlookers watch them from a little chateau, taking pictures, eating feasts.  An Austrian team is climbing at the same time, and they join forces after one of the Austrians gets a head injury and the Germans discover the dead bodies of a pair that had gone before them.  The mountaineers know both they and their national honor are fucked.  Given these high stakes, they make the profoundly suicidal decision to keep going, lugging up the half-dead Austrian with them, in piss-poor weather.  This movie does not have a happy ending.  It is actually quite brutal, despite the mountain itself being a lowly 4000-er (probably partly because they have shitty equipment).  The movie's also trying to transcend the mountaineering genre and get to something broader - about patriotism, and voyeurism, and living vicariously through a couple sturdy young men who are then thrown around like rag dolls (militarism woo-hoo) - and, of course, about conquest and the predatory state of Nazi Germany.  Also highly recommended.

This song just came on shuffle, and I think it oddly fits [the pretend world being the veneer of achievement and conquest that accompanies these mountaineering missions, and the real world being what actually happens]:

In the pretend world, we all are very awake
In the pretend world, we all look sterile and fake
In this atmosphere we all could chatter for days
In the pretend world, we never admit our mistakes

But in the real world, we're hiding alone and ashamed
And we can't live well because we're addicted to pain
You see I cannot feel this no matter how you try
In the real world, we can't deny

In the pretend world, we gaze into empty eyes
We amuse ourselves with tawdry tales and white lies

But in the real world, where fools tormented for sport
We just stitch up our mouths so we can't admit or retort
You see I cannot say this, please don't ask me why
In the real world, we can't deny

I just watched this on Netflix Watch Instantly, and holy shit: how have I not seen this movie before?

Basic plot: People are getting evicted from their apartments in the ghetto so that the buildings can be torn down and turned into offices.  Fool, age 13, is coaxed to help his older sister's boyfriend and another burglar break into the house owned by the apartments' shitty landlords, since apparently they have a stash of gold in there.  Well, plan doesn't go so well because it turns out the people inside the house - Mr. and Mrs. Robeson - are batshit psycho murderers.  The two adult burglars end up dead quickly and Fool is trapped in the best-secured house in the neighborhood with the Robesons, their daughter Alice (who has survived because she sees no evil, hears no evil, speaks no evil), a whole bunch of mutilated, enslaved, and cannibalized People Under The Stairs, and a vicious but beloved Rottweiler. 

It's a sort of uniquely childish nightmare, the "puzzle house" that you can't get out of, and the action/chase sequences are very much that kind of hysterical, booby-trap-laden adventure that amusement parks try and fail to replicate.  And yet adventure is the wrong word, because even though it's a lot of fun to watch, the danger posed to the kids always seems real and shocking.  They actually do kill one child (not one of the main two).  Fool tells Alice, "Your father is one sick mutha.  And your mother is one sick mutha too."  And vice versa: these are not the kids from Jumanji.  By the end both Fool and Alice are ready to bash some brains in.  Are there plot holes and inconsistencies?  Quite frankly, this is a movie in which I neither noticed nor gave a fuck.

So just in that basic respect, the movie is already a success.  But what really makes this movie awesome is everything going on conceptually.  The big one, the most powerful and obvious one, is race and class.  First off, the movie sets you very firmly in the POV of the black, urban, and poor.  Period.  And that in and of itself is worth noting.  Visually, most of the movie is essentially two upper-middle class white adults screaming at and trying to kill a black child.  But of course, not any adults and not any child - the adults are already effectively destroying the child's neighborhood, with the excuse that it isn't a real (white, well-behaved) neighborhood anyway.  When the (entirely white) police are called to the Robesons' mansion to investigate child abuse claims, they're going in assuming that it's a bogus charge and barely investigate anything, while Mrs. Robeson plies them with pithy politeness and coffee.  At one point Mrs. Robeson says something about, "It's almost as if the criminals have the run of the neighborhood, and we're trapped inside."  Of course not only hugely ironic but a typical ridiculous white-flight sentiment.  And all this just escalates and escalates and escalates.  

But then on top of that you have the religious zealotry of the Robesons - "may he burn in hell" is their favorite phrase, it seems - and their abuse of Alice, who's expected to be a pure and perfect girl-child.  You first see her in a turn-of-the-century girly, ribboned dress, terrified because she's lost her dinner fork.  Mrs. Robeson shoves her in boiling water to keep her clean and Mr. Robeson - who has this psycho leather dominatrix war armor thing - is in charge of corporal punishment, and it's strongly implied that he will eventually (if he doesn't already) start sexually abusing Alice.  When the Robesons figure out that Alice has been helping Fool they call her a whore, while Mr. Robeson says "they did it, I know it!"  Because of course he owns Alice's sexuality.  This too, escalates and escalates and escalates.

I would never expect to see all of this in ANY horror movie, let alone a 1991 Wes Craven movie that seems targeted to kids.  Not only is this one hell of an action-horror, but it's one hell of a piece of social-horror too.  Thought went into this.  And I'll just come right out and say it: more horror movies need to be made like The People Under the Stairs.

So yesterday at work (yes, I know, but I can ~multitask~) I used Netflix Watch Instantly to watch Grace, which I'd heard about previously when it was selected for Sundance.  It's about a young woman, Madeline, who gets into a car crash with her husband while she's very pregnant.  The husband and the baby die, but Madeline - who has already had 2 miscarriages, and clearly really wants/needs a baby - won't go to the hospital to get induced.  She has the baby and holds it, saying, "please stay," until she wills it back to life.  Madeline clearly didn't read Pet Sematary, because what happens is classic "sometimes death is better" - the baby smells, and attracts flies, and only wants human blood.  Madeline shuts herself in the house to try to supply the baby's "special food," eventually getting anemia and cabin fever and a new set of social norms.  Meanwhile, her mother-in-law, who's always disliked Madeline, has become convinced that in order to get through the pain of her son's death, she needs to get custody of the granddaughter.  I know this might sound like a really terrible, exploitative B-movie, which is why I'm including the teaser trailer for Sundance, which more accurately portrays what the movie's like: meditative, subtle, creepy.  The progression to violence is slow and it is not portrayed lightly. 

Obviously, though, I don't recommend anyone this to anyone who's pregnant or even has young children, tbh. 


This movie actually affected me, and I think it was partly because certain aspects of it hard core reminded me of the situation women are in in The Novel.  It's a post-apocalyptic, claustrophobic setting, and the pressure to have children is very high (this is not a 28 Days Later/ Atwood-esque situation, though, I hasten to add - this is not quite dystopia).  Unfortunately, there are a lot of miscarriages, and infant-maternal mortality is uncomfortably high (certainly higher than one would expect in the American heartland).  Thus there is a lot of anxiety surrounding childbirth and more broadly, child-rearing, particularly for the female characters.  It's essentially their version of the war that the men carry out defending the perimeters. 

Scarface and Capturing the Friedmans have more in common than you might think.  Besides both being incredibly awesome watches, that is - five out of five stars to both.  Yes, I had not seen Scarface until a couple weeks ago. 

They both revolve around "reviled villains" who have been black-marked by the society they live in - 1980s Miami, 1980s upstate New York.  After brief experiences living "the good life," something has slipped, some care has not been taken, and Tony Montana and Arthur Friedman find themselves in jail, with both their social standing and family life in ruins.  Seemingly overnight, they have become hazards to society.  Communal napalm.  And they are treated appropriately.  Their friends and neighbors have either abandoned them or left death threats through the telephone.  They've become scapegoats for a complicated illness that the whole community feels, but can't pinpoint - because nobody's going to point at themselves.  Except, of course, Tony Montana and Arthur Friedman.  True pillars of the community that they are, they will gamely carry on the mantle of their social role to their deaths.  Guilty plea, blame it on me.

Notice, however - neither Tony Montana nor Arnold Friedman are saints.  They are far from it, in fact.  CtF concludes - based off Friedman's own letters - that Friedman was a pedophile and he had acted on it (but he was probably innocent in the incredibly lurid case he was prosecuted for).  Montana smuggles cocaine and kills anyone who gets in his way, and on the side he kills anyone who gets involved with his younger sister.  This isn't Salem, Mass.  It's also not Forks, Wash., with all its "what if I'm the bad guy?" bullshit.  No, these are the Bad Guys, in-the-deed-the-glory, right down to their Inevitable Downfall. 

I wish I could find Tony Montana's speech on  YouTube, but it's all shit quality.  But here's the gist - and this takes place at a very ritzy restaurant filled with rich white people, after having chased off his wife with the admonition that she's a junkie who can't have kids - "You need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers and say 'that's the bad guy.'  So, what does that make you?  Good?  You're not good.  You just know how to hide, how to lie.  Me, I don't have that problem.  Me, I always tell the truth even when I lie.  So say goodnight to the bad guy.  Go on.  Last time you're gonna see a bad guy like this again.  Go on.  Make way for the bad guy, there's a bad guy comin' through!" 

Victimized communities is from Debbie Nathan, an investigative journalist who first suspects all the parents are participating in mass hysteria.  Not even going to try to find that clip.  Here's the policeman's quote that sets it up: "Sometimes there'd be some idle conversation about you know, another boy was sodomized five times, but my son was sodomized six times.  As if that meant something in the overall scheme of things."  And here's Nathan: "There's a whole community atmosphere that gets created in a mass abuse case like this.  There is definitely an element when a community defines itself as a victimized community, that - if you're not victimized, you don't fit into that community."

Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste

After I saw Picnic on Hanging Rock, I looked up all of director Peter Weir's movies.  I saved Fearless (1993) to Netflix, and I just watched it yesterday.  It's one of the best movies I've ever seen, and I really recommend it to everyone and anyone.

Besides being directed by Peter Weir, it has this going for it: it's about a plane crash.  Or rather, the aftermath of a plane crash.  The main character, Max Klein (Jeff Bridges), walks away from this crash that killed his best friend and business partner physically unscathed - he even saved the lives of several people on the plane by calling out to "follow him" out of the wreck.  But psychologically, Max has been changed.  He thinks the crash is the best thing that ever happened to him, that he now can eat the strawberries he was previously seriously allergic to, that he can truly savor life, that he's already dead, that he's invulnerable - he walks through traffic, shouting to the sky, "You want to kill me, but you can't!", and throws away his son's videogame because in real life people don't come back to life.  He forms a bond with Carla Rodrigo (Rosie Perez), who lost her baby in the crash and is totally despondent and just wants to die, and drifts away from his family.  On the one hand Max seems to have changed for the better - he seems to have a more authentic, organic, Zorba-the-Greek-ish approach to life.  On the other hand his life is now punctuated by mental freak-outs spurred by media attention on him as a "savior" or demands by his lawyer and business partner's widow that he lie about the seconds of suffering endured by the partner in order to collect as much damages as possible, and these freak-outs require him to, say, stand on the edge of skyscraper rooftops and dance around, to "refuse to live as a coward." 

Max is a character that Werner Herzog would probably love to make a documentary about.  He's one of those people who's now living in exile within a society that is recognizably absurd and flawed, one of those penguins in Encounters at the End of the World that leaves the herd and starts heading for an ice mountain, inevitably toward death.  Except Fearless is an attempt to reconcile this Herzog-ian character with the material world, and with other people. 

The most mindblowing, beautiful scene in the movie is the plane crash itself, which you don't see until the end - and unfortunately that scene is only on YouTube with Coldplay glued to it.  The trailer doesn't do it justice, so instead I'm including another great scene (the first time I cried was during this scene - the plane crash scene was like, waterworks).  Carla has just confessed that she "let go" of her baby at the moment of impact, and thus she is to blame for her baby's death - Max decides to prove to her that "there's no way you could have held onto your baby when you're going hundreds of miles an hour." 

Seriously, see this movie.

I watched all these via Netflix's Watch Instantly.  I think they're all worth watching, but they're also four totally different types of horror. 

Quarantine

The American remake of the French [rec], which I have yet to see.  I'm sure the original is better, but the remake is not bad.  Plot is very simple - firefighters and the TV crew shadowing them answer a distress call at an apartment building, and it turns out to be a zombie remake.  It's all shot from the perspective of the TV crewman's camera, and much of it is very dark.  It reminded me more of the X-Files episode X-Cops and possibly Cloverfield than Blair Witch.  Anyway, the government locks down the entire building, so the uninfected are trapped in there with the infected.  It's kind of like Under the Dome in that aspect, except without Good vs. Evil (just Healthy vs. Zombie), and far less sucky.  For once I did not begrudge the hysterical heroine's screaming.  I would be fucking screaming if I had to go through a dark apartment building and there might be zombies everywhere. 
Creepiness: 7 out of 10.
Originality: 5 out of 10.
Skill: 7 out of 10.
Gore Factor: Blood-vomit, ripped-out jugulars.

Candyman

I know, I never saw the original!  I've only seen the sequels.  I've always thought the Candyman franchise was one of the more elegant in horror, and my impressions were confirmed here.  This sums it up: it is scored by Philip Glass.  From the opening sequence - with Candyman narrating through a mass of bees, "They will say that I have shed innocent blood. What's blood for, if not for shedding?" - it's clear that thought went into this movie.  Doesn't hurt that it was based on a Clive Barker short story.  The main character is a pretty blonde graduate student (it actually does matter that she's blonde) who's writing her thesis on urban legends.  She concentrates on a particular housing complex in the "projects," where everybody believes in the vengeful Candyman.  Naturally, shit happens.  A lot of blood is spilled but it honestly feels more artistic than gratuitous.  Bleak, and tender, and very intelligent.
Creepiness: 5 out of 10.
Originality: 8 out of 10.
Skill: 8 out of 10.
Gore Factor: Blood, rib cages, decapitation.

The Last Winter

I'm a Larry Fessenden fan, which is why I looked forward to this.  And it's straight-up Fessenden - slow-building, bizarre, and not entirely comprehensible.  A small crew of oil workers - led by the always-awesome Ron Perlman - are out in a desolate outpost in the far, far north (as in, they ride around in snow mobiles and there's northern lights and everything).  They notice that it's getting warmer.  There's rain.  The ice is melting.  It's unheard of.  One by one the crew starts to go nutso - wandering around in the snow naked, getting nose bleeds that won't heal, talking about invisible creatures that are lurking in the snow.  It takes too long to figure out what's going on, and it goes in too many winding directions - and even when the creatures are revealed, the rational scientific viewer would be left going "what the ffffff."  I'm not that kind of viewer, so I was like, cooool.  The end sequence, which takes place in a hospital (of course), is an ingenious picture of apocalyptica.
Creepiness: 7 out of 10.  
Originality: 9 out of 10.
Skill: 7 out of 10.
Gore Factor: Blood, ice corpses.

The Orphanage

Another one you're probably surprised I haven't seen.  This one is clearly the best-made of the four - it's polished and cohesive and Belen Rueda is very good as the lead.  She plays a woman who's moved back to her childhood home, an orphanage for "special" children (she's not "special" herself), with her husband and adopted son, Simon.  Simon's all about the imaginary friends, and the new ones he meets in the old orphanage are quite the mean-spirited little fuckers.  Simon disappears during a party, and his mother becomes totally obsessed with finding him - even if it means asking the ghosts for help.  This is a directorial debut, which speaks well of Juan Antonio Bayona.  Despite its polish, it's not a particularly original plot, and plays horror movie tropes like a violin.  But the acting and directing is so good that I actually shed a little tear at the end (it's one of those "emotional" horror movies).  Does NOT need an American remake.
Creepiness: 7 out of 10.  
Originality: 5 out of 10.
Skill: 9 out of 10.
Gore Factor: Deformities, corpses (in various states of decomposition).

Trick 'r Treat (2008)



Straight to video movie with a couple name actors, featuring four intertwined horror stories taking place on Halloween in a little town that clearly everyone should move the hell out of.  There's another story that bookends the movie, and is about fifteen minutes of a yuppie couple deciding to take down their Halloween decorations before the night is over (Bad Idea!).  Then there's the four actual stories, which all work to a respectable degree.  First there's a child-killing school principal, played by eternal creepo actor Dylan Baker.  This one doesn't feel very complete, but the vibe is darkly funny.  There's some gratuitous vomiting in this one.  Then we have the young-adult take on Halloween - a group of twenty-something girls prancing around in slutty costumes, trying to get dates.  The "runt of the litter," Anna Paquin, is dressed as Little Red Riding Hood and is the introvert of the group, so she stays behind and attracts the attention of a masked executioner with vampire fangs.  This one has a delicious twist ending that I - for obvious reasons - got a total kick out of.  This is the kind of thing I would write, so I enjoyed it.  Then we're back with a group of realistically nasty middle-school kids collecting a bunch of jack-o-lanterns to offer as sacrifices to the victims of The Great School Bus Massacre, an urban legend that claims a bus driver drove a bunch of special ed/disturbed kids into a lake on behest of their parents.  This is way more brutal than anything you'd read in Goosebumps, and very creepy.  But giving it a run for creepiness is the last story, about a recluse old man who hates Halloween and is attacked by a little demon-boy with a burlap head (think: The Orphanage). 

They're not told sequentially, and transitions are in pseudo-comic-book format - so there's back-and-forth time things, like Earlier and Later.  They're also all ~connected~, sometimes quite cleverly.  Kind of like the camp-horror version of Magnolia/Traffic/Babel, if you will.  Just because of the non-traditional format and rather old-fashioned (non-teeny-bopper, and the "slasher" trope is subverted violently) version of horror, I don't know if it would have succeeded in theaters.  But it's definitely worth a rental, even a new releases rental, because it's nifty and creepy, and certainly better than anything you'll see on SyFy.  Horror fans and non-horror fans alike should give this one a shot. 

The Unborn (2009)

And now, a Hollywood movie with a very standard contemporary approach to paranormal-horror.  At least it's not a remake of a Japanese movie - but it may as well be.  A girl who looks like Megan Fox (but isn't) is seeing things, like a creepy little boy and a mysterious blue glove and another creepy little boy who is actually her neighbor.  She has bad dreams.  Her mother committed suicide in a mental hospital.  Oh, and it turns out she had a twin brother who died in utero.  It seems like she's being haunted by this dead twin (a truly wonderful and frightening X-Files episode, incidentally).  Er, except not.  The actual explanation involves, believe it or not, Auschwitz (where the Nazis laid their victims on gurneys and covered them with sheets, don't you know?!), and demons, and becomes really needlessly complicated.  Why not just make it the dead twin brother?  I don't know why.  Maybe because demons require exorcisms, and Hollywood's developed a real fetish for violent exorcisms. 

Anyway, this is a very structurally poor, borderline nonsensical movie - and also riddled with cliches.  Girl Who Looks Like Megan Fox is a horrible actress (no surprise, I suppose) who says horrible lines of dialogue.  But it uses visual horror tropes too, and wrings them hard - we've got both a mental asylum and a retirement home here, both a haunted videotape and a haunted photograph, both Exorcist-style possessions and The Grudge-style crawling bodies, both dead fetuses and malformed animals.  If you're in a public bathroom, it's not only the mirror that's haunted, it's the toilet stall too.  And the result of all this relentless horror is a movie that's unfairly scary, given how bad the story is.  It's not clever.  It's just JUMP.

Well, that was waaaaay more depressing than the book.  I think it's because you're not seeing the desolation of the dying Earth in the book.  It's also because it feels more like first-person than the book's third-person.  The Man is the narrator now, not just a character.  Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee did a really unbelievable job, in such difficult roles.  I thought the expansion of The Wife's role was a good thing.  There were tons of heart-wrenching scenes, of course (every scene is either horrific or heart-wrenching), but the conversations where The Man is trying to convince her not to commit suicide are some of the heaviest.  Because you can really see now how awful the world has become, how stripped down to the only things that last.  And I think that's sort of what McCarthy's all about, those lasting things - both good and bad.

I think what really came through for me was how The Boy, who has never seen the world before the trauma (he is both fortunate and unfortunate because of this), was a sort of God-figure, the conscience of humanity - or The Man's "Warrant."  The Boy embodies mercy.  The movie also articulated what "the fire" really is.  I also found myself thinking about all the people that, post-trauma, turn into the bad guys - how did that happen?  What do they think about?  What happened to their families?  And what the hell happens next?  And other things we can't know.

Great adaptation. 

This is "Alcoholic."  It's by a band called Cash Crop and it's on the Sorority Row soundtrack and yes, I find it amusing.  Doubly so because I fucking hate jagerbombs and my drinking pal always makes me take one.  I'm not an alcoholic, by the way.  But the Lincoln bar scene is actually kind of fun in a pathetic sort of way.  I mean, it's pretty much exactly like the song.  Or the bar scene in the beginning of Star Trek, except, you know, filthy and in brick buildings.  I cannot WAIT for Halloween.

The scene in Men in Black is the one in the morgue (i.e., "she's got that whole queen of the dead thing going on" [let's just say this movie was a formative experience for me] and the little dying alien man).  Oh yeah, also, I love Men in Black too much.  

Bonus: Halloween userpics!

I managed to see three - yes, THREE - horror movies last Sunday.  It was a crazy day.  And now I shall write belated, sloppy reviews of them. 

1.  The Burrowers:  I rented this from Netflix on pgtremblay's recommendation.  And it was sitting on the microwave unwatched when my mom said, "I'm going to start putting dates on how long you can not watch these..." (it wasn't disinterest!  but sports have been intense lately, and that tends to put a damper on watching DVDs) so I put it in.  The Burrowers sets itself apart from a lot of horror in a few ways: a) an Old West setting (specifically, the Dakotas in... um... the 1800s), and b) quite an artistic little camera.  Moody looks through the grass, sensitive and subtle flashbacks.  All very nice.  And when the monsters first show up - it's "burrowers" killing and kidnapping settlers, not Indians - they are very creepy.  They've got an unusual hunting style and an interesting ecological history, and they've got people pretty much outsmarted.  The melancholy, brooding-in-the-wilderness tone persists until the final act, when the filmmakers remembered they were making an action-horror movie and went all SciFi Saturdays on me.  Suddenly this clever little gem is making two big mistakes: a) showing the monster full-on when the movie did not have Jurassic Park's budget, and b) making the monsters VERY easy to kill.  That said, this is an atypical horror movie - it is very unkind to its characters (especially the sympathetic ones).   I actually felt it was so nasty to these people that the ending felt abrupt and unsatisfying.  I know, I know.  I usually reward bleakness in horror movies.  Maybe the risk/reward ratio in this one was too high; or maybe the characters were well-developed and real enough that I felt bad for them being sloughed off by the narrative for no apparent reason.

2.  Sorority Row:  I went to see this with friends later that afternoon.  I had very low expectations for this one.  But you know, it surprised me.  I mean, the acting was pretty bad.  There was, of course, gratuitous sorority-related near-porn.  I found the initial set-up - sorority sisters trick another sister's ex into thinking his roofies killed the sister, while the prank's still on he kills her for real, they dump body down a mine shaft - damn ridiculous.  The murderer, who runs around silently in a hood, is pretty generic and stale.  But the sisters are actually pretty entertaining - a nice blend of bitchy and justified - and aren't nearly as annoying as you would assume they'd be.  In order to explain what made this movie so different, however, I must supply spoilers - sorry.  The killer isn't a victim.  The killer isn't out to revenge some wrong.  All the bad guys here are male.  We've got: a) the original guy who killed his girlfriend - the fact that he thought she was already dead makes his stabbing her through the chest even more psychotic, b) the snotty and artificial senator's son, who berates and cheats on and hits his girlfriend (who finally realizes it's not worth marrying into this family), and c) the valedictorian and main character's boyfriend, who's the real killer.  He's just trying to keep his girlfriend away from her trashy sisters, and is furious when she chooses "her girlfriends" over him.  I won't say this is a feminist tract, because you know, it's not - but I do appreciate the Hos Before Bros gesture (so to speak), and the fact that all the "psycho killers on the loose" here are the people with all the privilege. 

3.  Clive Barker's Book of Blood:  Apparently this is a movie-that-never-found-a-home that eventually got aired by SyFy, based off "The Book of Blood" in Volume 1 of Books of Blood, and some other "postscript" story in Volume 6.  I haven't read the second story, so suffice it to say I was totally confused by the fact that this movie - which should have been a 30 minute Tales From The Crypt episode - was 2 HOURS LONG.  They dragged the first story out to about 90 minutes, embellishing wildly and adding unnecessary subplots and taking away scenes they didn't want to try and film, and then added another 30 minutes that looked like pure overkill.  Apparently the extra 30 minutes is truly based off of "On Jerusalem Street (a postscript)."  I kind of can't believe Clive Barker wrote this unnecessary addendum to the first story, but I guess I can't fault the movie producers for that one.  The thing is, I don't think even "The Book of Blood" is THAT great of a story.  It's about how this one house is a big intersection of the dead, so it's filled with ghosts, and the ghosts are all about telling their stories - on whatever surface they have.  It all just feels kind of pointless and even contrived.  Clive Barker's opening for the whole volume is way better: "we are all books of blood... whenever we're opened, we're red."  That's all you need.  You don't need two hours.  You especially don't need two hours of weak characterization and painfully slow and laughable ghosts (a park fountain of blood, with blood ghosts a la The Invisible Man dancing ring around the rosy?  really?).