http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Mon, 15 Dec 2003 05:21:29 EST http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. 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Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/12/15/052129.php James RussellI've had bugger all that I've wanted to say here for months anyway, and, frankly, as long as certain individuals are associated with this site (I'll leave them to guess who they are), I don't really want to be associated with it myself.Bye, everyone. It's been nice knowing some of you. Culture10974@blogcritics.org Mon, 15 Dec 2003 05:21:29 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/12/15/001430.php James RussellI was going to say what I'm about to say as a comment to someone else's post, but since I've seen a few commenters on other posts around this place get their knuckles rapped for being insufficiently overjoyed about the capture of Saddam Hussein (or, in this case, for being insufficiently serious about it), I decided to post my opinion separately.1) The capture of Saddam Hussein is an undeniably good thing and should be celebrated. Saddam was a bad bad man, and the fact that he is no longer at large is something to be glad about.2) The capture of Saddam Hussein is NOT, however, a guarantee that all will necessarily be well for Iraq in the future. It only means Saddam himself won't rise again; we still have no guarantee that whoever we appoint to replace him won't eventually turn out to be as bad or even worse than he was. As W. said himself: "The capture of Saddam Hussein does not mean the end of violence in Iraq." It won't mean the end of terrorism anywhere else, either.Celebrate the capture of Saddam all you like now. If you don't mind, though, I'll wait until I'm more confident Iraq is going to turn out OK before I join in. Politics10972@blogcritics.org Mon, 15 Dec 2003 00:14:30 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/31/041154.php James RussellRetrocrush have an interesting top 100 list of the scariest moments in films. It's interesting because the list actually isn't restricted to horror films as such (the pink elephants from Dumbo being a notable example), although there are a lot of those. That said, I find myself wondering what's particularly scary about some of the moments they've chosen. (I should add the page is profusely illustrated, sometimes unattractively as well. You may wish to consider yourself warned.)For example, among the top 100 is the infamous gut-puking scene from Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead; Fulci makes another appearance with his equally notorious eyeball-skewering from Zombie Flesh Eaters. Plus there's the exploding head from David Cronenberg's Scanners (illustrated with a GIF animation of the scene). And there's Linda Blair's green puke from The Exorcist and Luis Bunuel with his razor in Un chien andalou. I've not seen any of these films apart from the last two, but even so I have to ask: what is actually scary about these scenes as such.Back around the time I was at uni I discovered my local library held a book by a fellow called Peter Nicholls called Fantastic Cinema (published circa 1983, now presumably long out of print; a pretty good book for its time, though, if you want to go looking for it). It was a history of the whole SF/horror/fantasy genre, and it had a rather interesting way of appraising films in the guide at the back of the book, giving them not one but two ratings: one for overall quality and one (where merited) for gore content. And he made what I thought was an interesting point as his justification for this, namely that fear is one emotion, disgust is another, and although you can mix the two, just because a scene is icky (someone's head exploding or guts bursting forth) doesn't necessarily make it scary. Which leads me to wonder whether these scenes I've highlighted are necessarily scary as such or just squicky. For example, I found The Exorcist scary when I first saw it on TV, but the split pea soup was not frightening, just kind of ugh. Similarly, the eyeball stuff in the Bunuel film is more biologically yuck than scary. Maybe it's a bit scary for people who don't know that it's coming... the first time I saw it was in a university lecture theatre with a bunch of people who mostly didn't seem to know what lay ahead; that occasion provided proof that a film made in 1928 still has the power to make people scream with horror. Hmm, horror, there's that word again. Apparently Boris Karloff didn't like Frankenstein being called a horror film as he thought "horror" had connotations of physical nastiness rather than the emotion of fear. He suggested "terror film" as an alternative name for the new genre but it never caught on. Maybe he was onto something, though.Anyway, the eyeball stuff in Chien strikes me as more of a shock thing than anything else, which, I suppose, then begs the question, just how much of a difference is there between shocking a viewer and scaring them. Some examples again. The shower scene from Psycho tops the list. There's also the scene from The Birds with the dead man with no eyes, that rather bravura opening murder from Suspiria, and Lon Chaney's unmasking in The Phantom of the Opera. These are, to be sure, shock moments... but are they scary? Or am I just splitting hairs here? I don't know because I don't actually have an answer to that question, so "splitting hairs" may actually be the valid response here. Still, thought I'd throw the question out anyway.Incidentally, Chaney's unmasking scores quite highly on the list, which is nice to see. For my money, though, it's probably not until you compare a photo of him from that film with a photo of him without makeup and contemplate the makeup job he had to do on himself to get that look (yes, he did his own makeup) that you realise how scary his Phantom actually is. See what I mean? (Photos via Jon Mirsalis' Lon Chaney Home Page.)Notably, The Shining makes a number of appearances on the list, but Retrocrush left out what I think is the key scene of the film, the one where Jack is released from being locked up in the pantry by the ghosts of the Overlook. That, for me, is when the film really trips out into horror; hitherto we've assumed the ghosts are just hallucinations on Jack's part, but this scene forces us to question that assumption and wonder just what the hell they actually are. There's a comparable scene near the end of Fritz Lang's Testament of Dr Mabuse; we assume that the ghost of Mabuse who appears to the hospital director at various points is just a hallucination, except the ghost is seen at the film's end to open a cell door for him. Subtle, yet freakish.And I should end by noting my disappointment that The Haunting (1963 version) appears to have been overlooked completely by whoever compiled the list. That is my definition of a shit-scary movie, with its house that was "born bad", and I don't recall being as purely scared by a film in recent years as I was by that one. Its absence from the list really is a travesty... still, as I've said, the only real function these lists usually serve is to provoke disagreements and arguments, and the Retrocrush list has succeeded at that. Meantime, do check it out, as it does contain some thought-provoking choices. And have a look also at this nice article on the 70th anniversary of King Kong (containing a shot from the lost scene with the giant spider), which I may say is still a surprisingly violent film, given the period it was made in... Video9702@blogcritics.org Fri, 31 Oct 2003 04:11:54 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/22/083241.php James RussellApparently so. Elliott Smith has died at age 34, according to an obituary posted late Tuesday on Sweet Adeline, Smith's official website. Rumors had been circulating on the Internet all day about Smith's apparent suicide; by early evening, the overwhelming traffic from well-wishers and fans was crashing Sweet Adeline's discussion board. A handful of posts indicated that representatives from Smith's label, Dreamworks, were attempting to contact Charlie Ramirez, the webmaster for Sweet Adeline. Within hours, Ramirez posted the following: "As you probably realize, I'm pretty devastated about having to say goodbye to Elliott... it's never easy to put into words what someone means to you... Elliott was such a lovely man... I will always have his love, kindness, intelligence, humbleness, creativeness, greatness and so much more in me forever because that's what he was and i'll always love him for being who he was... I'll miss you so much. We will all miss you. See you in heaven, Elliott." I know next to nothing about Smith or his music, but if this is true (as it appears to be) then it's very sad stuff indeed. Music9395@blogcritics.org Wed, 22 Oct 2003 08:32:41 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/07/27/055039.php James RussellIt doesn't just happen with films about Jesus.One of Bollywood's leading Muslim stars has shelved plans to play a Hindu god after receiving a series of threats, reportedly from a religious group. Controversial superstar Salman Khan - currently facing trial over a hit-and-run death - had been due to play the Hindu god Ram in the film Ramayan. But since the project made the headlines, the actor - and producers GS Entertainment - say they have received threatening telephone calls.That's not what the Times of India is saying:Hindu organisations in the city have categorically denied threatening actor Salman Khan for playing the role of Lord Ram in a Hindi film. In a recent interview to a national daily, the actor said he had decided against playing the role in a film based on the Ramayana, following threats from Hindutva organisations. "Why should we raise a stink on such a minor issue?" asked Shankar Gaikar, state convenor of the Bajrang Dal. "Salman is an actor and can play any character he chooses to. His religion has nothing to do with the kind of roles he enacts in his films," he said. Ramesh Mehta, Vishwa Hindu Parishad city chief, added: "We are broad-minded Hindus. We had no objection when Sanjay Khan, a Muslim actor, produced television serials on Hanuman and Mahabharata. We have no problems with this project too, as long as it does not distort history and hurt the religious sentiments of Hindus." Video7257@blogcritics.org Sun, 27 Jul 2003 05:50:39 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/07/27/054515.php James RussellNo, I'm not kidding. I've not heard the whole thing yet (about half the songs are only up in sample form anyway), but I have played the second track, "If I Could Smell Her Cunt", and, well... I frankly don't know what to say. Listen for yourself. Music7256@blogcritics.org Sun, 27 Jul 2003 05:45:15 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/07/27/054050.php James RussellIt’s not every day that you encounter a new zombie film in Australia, and it’s even less often that you encounter one actually made in Australia. Nonetheless, the other night I did just that when I saw Undead, the first feature from Michael and Peter Spierig.Undead is set in the small Queensland town of Berkeley. There’s been a shower of meteorites, and an outbreak of some disease that causes people to turn into zombies has ensued. There’s only six people left to fight the hordes of the living dead: a down on her luck beauty queen, a nice young couple expecting their first child at any minute, a police constable enjoying her first day at work, her superior officer with his impossibly foul mouth and dictatorial attitude, and the village lunatic who’s been through all this before and who has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of guns. And as well as the zombies, there’s also aliens, acid rain and killer fish.You’re quite possibly thinking all of this sounds very silly indeed, and to a certain extent you’d be right, but it’s silly in a good way rather than in a “bad Italian horror exploitation film from the 1960s or 1970s” way. While the Spierig Brothers take a good deal of inspiration from George Romero’s zombie classics (which you can see reflected in scenes set in a supermarket and an isolated farmhouse), Peter Jackson’s early films seem to have been an influence on the Spierigs’ decision to go for comedy in Undead as much as anything else. The story is ludicrous, the performances are broad, and the gore effects are hilariously excessive.This is not a film for people who are offended by the sight of blood and guts, but then again they’re not the sort of people who’d be watching a zombie film anyway. Undead is, instead, targeted pretty squarely at the cult horror audience, who should be pretty impressed with it. Basically it’s a low-budget genre film with lots of splatter and computer graphics generated on an ordinary laptop, and with seemingly few pretensions to be anything more than that.The most remarkable thing about this film, perhaps, is that not only is it getting released in this country at all, it’s actually getting a cinema release in Australia (September 4th being the due date); it has, therefore, already been more successful in that regard than similarly-minded Australian low-budget trash films like Dawn of the DMFs (a film that hasn’t even had a video release yet). And while I think the small screen is actually probably the natural home for this sort of film, I like the idea of it getting shown on the big screen. At any rate, I’m fairly sure Undead is unlike any other Australian-made film you’ll see this year. It’s had rave reviews overseas already, it pretty much lives up to the hype, and if you like this sort of thing, it’s definitely one to check out. Video7255@blogcritics.org Sun, 27 Jul 2003 05:40:50 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/07/27/053541.php James RussellSen. Orrin Hatch is pushing a constitutional amendment that could allow his pal, fund-raising helper and potential California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger, to also run for U.S. president someday. Hatch, R-Utah, introduced without fanfare last week an amendment to allow foreign-born people who have been naturalized U.S. citizens for at least 20 years to run for president. Currently, only native-born citizens may run for president. Hatch spokeswoman Margarita Tapia said the legislation was not drafted with Schwarzenegger or anyone else specifically in mind when Hatch came up with the 20-year requirement. "It was a policy judgment not associated with any one individual," she said. [...] A constitutional amendment must pass both houses of Congress by two-thirds votes and then be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures to become law. The amendment was referred for consideration to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Hatch chairs.Now isn't that funny? Despite the insistence that this law wasn't meant with anyone in mind, Hatch is going to have trouble making this not look like a favour to Ahnuld. Of course, the law does also clear the way for Jerry Springer to run for President one day as well. I'm not sure which is the more frightening proposition, President Ahnuld or President Jerry... Politics7254@blogcritics.org Sun, 27 Jul 2003 05:35:41 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/07/27/052745.php James RussellSome interesting comments in this article, most of them from the readers at the end. It's particularly hard to disagree with this statement:The great thing about blogs is that anyone can set one up. The only problem is that anyone can set one up.Someone else made the interesting point that the hype around blogging is kind of like the hype around the World Wide Web nine or ten years ago, and that:Alternative perspectives are good as touchstones to keep the media in perspective, but a professional news media that trades on its accuracy and integrity rather than its writer's ego is the only way to ensure that anybody gets the full picture of anything.That's assuming there is such a professional news media out there. Most professional news media appear to be full of ego-driven performers with their own agendas, be they opinion columnists or actual media proprietors. And then there's this:The bloggers I am already aware of seem to have all the time in the world to sit and write their hubristic and self-opinionated garbage - goodness knows how they get the day job done and its a wonder their managers haven't spotted it. Life is too short to go around reading all this stuff.Not so short, apparently, that there isn't time to publicly complain to the BBC about how crap blogs are. Sci/Tech7253@blogcritics.org Sun, 27 Jul 2003 05:27:45 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/07/27/052200.php James RussellChannel 4 is planning an hour-long documentary on cocaine taking among BBC presenters. Frank Bough, Angus Deayton and Johnnie Walker are among the high-profile presenters whose downfalls will be charted in Snorting Coke with the BBC, reports Media Guardian. In it, Channel 4 will claim drug abuse is endemic at the BBC, and take a critical look at the way the broadcaster has dealt with presenters caught using the drug. "We thought it would be fun to look at the well-known characters who have suffered drug taking scandals," said a Channel 4 spokesman. "We wanted to look at what the way the BBC deals with these situations tells you about the broadcaster."No doubt no one at Channel 4 has ever indulged in any substance that could be described as illegal. The controller of the BBC is sublimely unconcerned:Ms Heggessey was asked if the drug stories had damaged the BBC, reports The Sun. She replied: "We live in the 21st century. The reality is that people will take drugs. They will do these sorts of things. I think the viewing public is aware of that." She added: "I think most of them are sophisticated enough to understand the decisions we have made - and I don't think we have been damaged by it."Evidently they're too concerned about the David Kelly business to worry about being called a bunch of cokeheads... Video7252@blogcritics.org Sun, 27 Jul 2003 05:22:00 EDT