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Week Of June 4, 2007 - Mon / Wed / Fri
June 4 , 2007
Shades Of Ugliness:
An Issue Of HumanityIn a festival of hundreds of movies, it was a powerful reminder of how any one film or even a moment in a film can change your worldview in a flash.
Before I get rolling, I first have to mea culpa. Because one of the two films in this column today I saw illegally, via a pirate DVD. I even went as far as to say, in the blog, that I wouldn't be watching the film. That was my intention at the time. I have, as I foretold in that same blog entry, already made arrangements to deliver this pirated DVD to the studio in question this week in Los Angeles. Still, the intent in buying the film on the streets of Seattle was specifically to see whether the stories of the pristine version of a picture weeks from release were true. Watching the film, much less commenting on it based on that marked up, working version of the film is against the standards I have held for a long while. But watch it I did ... and what I saw, I feel I have to comment on, even if the choice allows some to, deservedly, call me a hypocrite. I am a journalist. But still, the argument can be made that I have done wrong in some way. I can't argue.
And so ...
Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire is the most important political documentary to become part of the American discourse since The War Room, which made plain the realities of running a presidential campaign as opposed to the fantasy so many of us wish we could still harbor. It played at the 33rd Seattle International Film Festival on Saturday, to a third-full house.
I saw the film first in Toronto at TIFF last September. Distribution was slow in coming. And it came ... slowly. But still, I don't expect a lot of noise when the film hits theaters. And that is a pitiable shame.
Lake of Fire is about the abortion rights fight. During the course of the movie, we watch two abortion procedures, witness many homicides, watch the fetus post-abortion being cleaned of blood then reassembled piece by piece so that the doctor can be sure that the woman's body is clear of parts, and we deal with the pain and thoughts (serious and less so) of real people on both sides of this very personal issue.
There is a brand of documentaries that are even-handed, fair minded, and brutally difficult to watch. Invariably the filmmaker has taken a position for themselves. But the best of these films are rarely seen. I often point to the great Blood In The Face, a doc on neo-Nazis, that was booed after premiering at Sundance because the Nazi wannabes, as loony as could be, were allowed to speak their truths without editorial comment by the filmmakers. There is Raw Deal: A Question of Consent, the Sundance doc about a frat house rape of a stripper at the University of Florida (shades of Duke) that in spite of being purchased for distribution never got distributed, but forces audiences to confront enormous ugliness and our own sense of where the line is ... does "no" always mean "no?" The Maysles and Allan King often offer raw truth for the audience to decipher.
Every time I recommend Lake of Fire, I warn the person that the experience will make them very, very uncomfortable. It will. It has made me very uncomfortable. That is the point. None of these issues are simple. And whatever side you are on, the failure of your philosophy, if there is one, is likely to be built on an overly simple idea of what the 'other side' feels, of their humanity, of their sincerity.
I got to Lake of Fire after a bad night of sleep on Friday. Late in the evening, just before going to sleep, I went on MCN and saw, again, the story about Hostel II being pirated and being on the streets. This reminded me that I had bought a copy of the film - at least I assumed so - in Seattle when a guy with a photo bag was walking past me on a busy shopping street calling out gently, 'Movies ... I got movies.'
I found the disc in some shopping bag and threw it in my room's DVD player. Indeed, the $5 DVD - not in a case, as it has often been in NY, but with a handwritten Sharpie and a flimsy little sleeve - was the already infamous in-house copy of Hostel II. I wrote the confirmation up in the blog and was ready to get back to bed and sleep.
And then I thought, 'I hated the first movie, though I didn't find it all that horrible ... a long jerk off ... I can fast forward though this one and never have to think or write about it again.'
So I started watching, in spite of writing in the blog that I wasn't going to. I got through about 30 minutes ... three girls touring Europe ... a hot Eurobabe who invites them to the Hostel ... minor skirmishes with guys on the train ... yadda yadda yadda ...
Somewhere around an hour, the inevitable turn. The girls are sold over the internet for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Men will soon come and do whatever they want to do with them, invariably leading to death. This is the lovely premise of this idiotic horror porn franchise. (Last time the guys were sold.)
The girls get separated. The third act has begun.
And then, I watched a scene that was the most disgusting, degrading, misogynistic, soulless shit I have ever seen in a movie that is going to be released widely in this country.
If this is a spoiler for you, I am sorry for you.
Heather Matarazzo, who you might know from Welcome to the Dollhouse, The Princess Diaries or a number of other films, is hung upside down, naked, bound and gagged over a pool that slowly has candles lit around it as she screams through her gag throughout. Then a beautiful European woman comes in, disrobes, lays in the tub, and starts toying with the screaming Matarazzo with a long handled sickle. She starts to draw blood and also starts getting off on it. She eventually removes the gag so Matarazzo can beg more pathetically and then cuts her throat, bathing and luxuriating in the blood as it pores over here.
And at that moment, for me, this was no longer just about a stupid, masturbatory, poorly directed shit piece of horror porn. Eli Roth became a little less human to me.
You have to remember, this is a movie. Not only did Eli Roth come up with this inhuman idea that has no meaning whatsoever other than his masturbatory fantasies about raising the bar. Shame on the L.A. Times for allowing him to ramble on about how there is a political subtext to his work. Utter bullshit. Of course, based on the story that ran in the Sunday Times, the paper did the piece without seeing this irredeemable embarrassment or, presumably, the new film would have been mentioned.
And not only did he think of this, but he hung an actress, however willing, upside down and naked, gagged and bound, screaming, as nothing but a piece of objectified meat as Roth's camera moves her breasts in and out of frame like some sort of sick porn tease. This is not the first time a director has done something horrible to an actress, but as the scene dragged on, I felt as though I was watching Ms. Matarazzo being raped on a spiritual level. This director did not identify with her as a human in the scene ... she is just the target for a bloody gag.
And then, like the truly sick punk he is, he made a woman do the dirty work in the scene. All said and done, the only person in the film who actually ends up sexually gratified by torture is a woman. There are others who seem to be going there. But this is the one fully executed torture/murder in the film. And just for fun, the woman gets to be naked too. (I would name the 'actress,' but I have no idea which character name is hers and I am not going to watch the scene again to find out.)
I never did respect Roth's work. Now, if he and I crossed paths, I would refuse to shake his hand. I would extinguish the fire if he was burning, using something quicker than urine, but I'm not sure that I wouldn't consider it karmic payback for him.
In fact, the work was not nearly as graphic as what I saw in Lake of Fire. But it was so without purpose that it sickened me to my core.
There is more stupidity in the film. Using a chainsaw with an aim to cut up Bijou Phillips, clever Roth uses the old "corded electric appliance that pulls out of the wall just in time" gag but the chainsaw doesn't lose power soon enough as half of her face has the skin ripped off. Ha ha! This disgusting moment sends the man who does it running out of the room in disgust. He's eaten by dogs because he refuses to finish the kill. Hardy har har.
And in a classic act of an idiot rationalizing their idiocy, the third girl is a multimillionaire (second act info that makes clear that a twist is coming) who flips the script on her would-be killer and then proceeds to cut his penis off with what seems to be a hedge clipper. More fun! Of course, there is little chance that this completely graphic act will make the R-rated release of the film because penises are more harshly rated by the MPAA than breasts and butts and skin removal.
I guess Roth thinks that penis removal somehow balances the score. It doesn't, in great part because he plays it for shock laughs, while he treats the women like meat.
In fact, I have no idea what will actually be in the release print of this film. But if there is anything close to what I saw in what was an internal version of the film, it should never have gotten an R. Moreover, I would expect this film, which is much more graphic and abusive than anything in any of the Saw movies or other horror porn released theatrically in America, to become the start of a very serious attack on Hollywood violence by the right wing. And sadly, it is impossible to defend except on a pure First Amendment basis.
And let me be clear ... I think Rob Zombie is far more clever in doing the very graphic work he does. Peter Jackson's films are graphic, but not nasty in the way this film is. The Descent is an exercise in style and has limited value for me, but I see why it is embraced by some. Even Wayne Kramer's Running Scared, which featured cute child molesting murderers for no reason, is not as disgusting and meaningless as this grotesquerie.
I had similar feelings about Wolf Creek, but I have to say ... it's not nearly as offensive as this thing. Why? Because it doesn't treat the subject as a joke. I have no need to see a relentless serial killer with no subtext of any interest in Wolf Creek. But the comedy version of Wolf Creek ... I really have a hard time finding the words.
Grindhouse? A cartoon in comparison. Tarantino can be self-indulgent, but he actually seems to like women, and his characters don't do the darkest things they do without any human reason. We can fight about whether the little girl walking in after Uma kills her mommy is manipulative or brilliant or both ... but it is human. Hostel 2, particularly that scene, is not.
I'm sure I will get a lot of e-mail and there will be a lot of talk on the blog defending this film. There always is. And I say, there is a line. This is a film that Lionsgate should be embarrassed about releasing. I have never said that before.
I am not a cranky old man. I am not someone who says that there is anything that shouldn't be in a film, if there is a purpose. A Clockwork Orange is one of my very favorite films and it is still one of the most spiritually violent films ever made. No one fought harder for Fight Club and its ultimate message of finding your best self, in spite of the very eye catching violence. But this ...
Lionsgate, as you might expect, isn't embarrassed ... at least, not publicly. When I arrived home from Seattle, there was a box (a few days old) with an expensive cut of meat sent from New York, a series of postcards - including one of Matarazzo hanging upside down, neither gagged nor bloody - and both notepads and a bandana with some form of bloody body parts that seem to include organs.
I am not amused.
I really like a lot of the people at Lionsgate. They are bright and talented and really well intended. This is the distributor of Grizzly Man and Deliver Us From Evil and Harvey Weinstein's too-hot-for-signatory films. But I am disgusted with the company for releasing the film and I will be disgusted if critics and writers and even crazy right wing talk show hosts don't stand up and do more than dismiss this as 'another one of those.' There must be a line in this world and Hostel II crosses it at the more basic level of humanity.
And Lake of Fire reminds us that humanity is all we have left. So we better protect it because there is always someone out there ready to snatch it away from us just because they want to.
E Me.
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