The City Dark (2010): This American Life Goes Cinematic

The City Dark (2010)
dir: Ian Cheney

NPR's This American Life has been on the air for YEARS. It's been going on since 1995, and caught fire by the late 90s when my mother used to rave about it. For those of you who don't know the program, it is an hour long radio show hosted by Ira Glass, which generally assembles 2-6 stories centered around a theme of the week. These stories are generally sociological in nature, sometimes they're fictions and sometimes they're scientific stories. But, they're told with a rather calming pace frequently interspersed with calming music and sometimes containing interviews. There is a very specific pattern to This American Life, which becomes immediately apparent after just one of the episodes.

The City Dark is not unlike the radio show of This American Life. The theme is the lights in the city, and how they create light pollution. The City Dark is narrated by Ian Cheney, with a calming peaceful tonality.  It is divided into 6 different sections, each with a different angle on the night sky and the city lights. It frequently intersperses generic calming music in the pauses. It has interviews with people to relay information regarding each section. But, the main difference is that The City Dark is a film with some periodically gorgeous imagery.

Ian Cheney grew up in Maine, and moved to New York City. In his small town in Maine, the night sky was lit up like a Christmas tree, with thousands upon thousands of stars. But, in New York City, he noticed that there were maybe tens upon tens of stars if you strained your eyes enough. This difference was caused by the light pollution in New York City. This disturbed him because, as a kid, he had fancied himself to be an amateur astronomer who drew up star maps and recreated his own constellations.

The City Dark is Cheney's meditation on the importance of the night sky, where he interviews different scientific figures and visits various locations which have to do with the topic. He visits a light store in New Jersey where the owner comments on the increasing brightness of the bulbs. He also visits Sky Village, an astronomer's paradise in between Arizona and New Mexico. He starts to dive into topics like cancer, sleep deprivation, crime prevention, and animal migration patterns.

Cheney doesn't form a conclusive statement saying that city lights are bad. He merely presents some of the cases that city light might be affecting us negatively, but concludes that he kind of likes the big city and all that the light can offer. Much like most episodes of This American Life, Cheney's intent isn't to make a de facto statement and conclusion on a topic, but merely to relate how one topic can relate to various people's lives.

While worries about Light Pollution have been around for years, Cheney still finds new angles to explore. Such as when he goes on a hatching quest for the sea turtles, who have developed in such a way that the light was what guided them to the water. But, now that the brightest light source is the city the turtles generally head in the wrong direction (though he says that they saved all of the turtles they recorded). Or, the studies that have proven that non daytime workers have a much higher rate of breast cancer than daytime workers.

Cheney's use of stunning nighttime imagery elevates The City Dark above its This American Life style narrative. It's a meditative poetic film that can be looked at or can be listened to, but it is gorgeous in either way you watch it. The open ended nature of the documentary may be frustrating to some who want their documentaries to have a bit more of a conclusive and decisive tone. If you can handle information dealt to you in non-confrontational methods that ponder the positive and negative effects that city light and the disappearance of the stars means to city dwellers, you may enjoy this. I did.

LA Zombie (2010): Fucking the Status Quo

LA Zombie (2010)
dir: Bruce LaBruce

Bruce LaBruce is a provocateur, first and foremost. His films have, traditionally, ridden a punk line between political statement and pornography, with both vying for screen time. Most of the political statements are of the anarcho-punk nature, but they always seemed to be more pointed to a solution than to the ills of society, and the sex was there to make you take note.

With L.A. Zombie, Bruce LaBruce isn't providing any answers. But, he's seeing a hell of a lot of problems.

First off, any reader should know there are two versions of L.A. Zombie in existence. A 67-minute cinema and film festival edition, and a 103 Hardcore edition. You'll know which one you're watching because, LaBruce retitled the full movie to LA Zombie Hardcore in the credits. And, there is a lot of gay hardcore sex (a lot).

The movie centers around a being who emerges from the Pacific Ocean as a zombie with vampiric fangs and a gaping red mouth. Throughout the movie this being changes into a regular homeless man, and also a beast with huge teeth or horns, and an modified fantasy cock. The essence of this character, played by Francois Sagat, could be that he's a schizophrenic homeless man. And, he could also be a zombie and a monster, which is how society regularly sees our mentally ill homeless population.

Homeless Zombie Monster, once out of the ocean, hitches a ride with a guy, who promptly crashes his truck and dies with gigantic gaping holes and a heart on the outside of his body. HZM then proceeds to fuck the gigantic gaping holes with his deformed fantasy cock, and ejaculates black semen in order to bring the driver back to life and in order to have a full-on hardcore sex scene with the living, but still completely injured, driver.

Much like David DeCoteau with his 1313 series, this pattern repeats itself rather ad nauseum. Guy dies. HZM sees the dead guy. HZM fucks dead guy back to life. And, then they have hardcore sex. Repeat.

With almost no dialogue whatsoever, Bruce LaBruce is forcing us to watch the images and see if we actually care about this. The sex, for the most part, isn't shown as erotic, being largely overlaid with somber boner-killing music that makes the sex almost dirge-like. The one exception to that is a 4-person leather orgy which is punctuated by men making manly gay sounds of passionate orgiastic gay sex.

The characters that HZM runs into, though, are actually symbols of the ills of society that we're constantly ignoring, or not caring about. The truck driver represents the ills of driving. There is a business deal that goes bad, with the business man surrounded by his white collar crime money. A black gang member who is dumped, dead, in an alley. A homeless guy who died alone in his refrigerator box home. And, four leather guys who are killed in a drug deal.

The film ends with HZM crying tears of blood as he looks over societies ills, before he digs the soft dirt over a grave marked "Law" as a storm brews overhead. Whether LaBruce is saying that the law of the land has created these horrible conditions, or whether he's saying that HZM wants to fuck Law back to life to fix these things is unclear. HZM never finds the body of Law to fuck it back to life. And, law never returns to the land.

Bruce LaBruce is creating a weird pornographic blend of political commentary that is pointed straight at the materialistic heart of society, namely American society. He isn't fetishizing these ills. He shows that he has the ability to create hardcore porno that's kind of hot when he actually shows us the pre-death 4-man leather orgy, which is the only scene I found stimulating. LaBruce is exposing these ills in society to the gay art house audience.

But, his main problem is that he puts in a lot of hardcore sex into this film. I mean, A LOT. We're talking about 10+ minute scenes of semi-unerotic blowjobs and fucking. Given that LaBruce cut out these scenes for the festival circuit, it leads to the question of why film them like this at all?  What's the statement he's trying to make, if any? Is he trying to say, "if you're bored of this, imagine if you were living like this?" Or, is he just trying to provoke some sort of shock value out of gay sex, but ending up with boredom?

LaBruce isn't a master filmmaker. Never was. Never will be. He's a punk filmmaker. He knows how to shock, or get a reaction. When you watch Sagat's unadorned cock starting to probe the shotgun wound in a guy's head, you're still a bit shocked, even if he's penetrated many other wounds before that. LA Zombie is almost Cronenbergian in its obsession with blood, wounds, and sex and the intersection thereof. Blood and open holes exist so that HZM can fuck people in their wounds back to life. But, LaBruce is no Cronenberg. His set ups and shots are like mid-level porn quality in the mid-90s. And, his editing is mildly atrocious.

But, does it provoke? Does it communicate his intention? Not as well as he hoped. And, it is in this that LA Zombie is ultimately a failure. Sure, I just spent an inordinate number of words talking about LA Zombie's cataloging of society's ills, but a lot of movies do that. LaBruce brings nothing much to the table, except, possibly, that we're killing ourselves. It's a sour note, in part because its a sour message that you have to give some credit for trying.

But, I do miss overly punk LaBruce.

Kaboom (2010): The Flawed Uprising of the Millennials

Kaboom (2010)
dir: Gregg Araki

Did I say that Nowhere marked the end of the Teenage Apocalypse trilogy? AHAHAHAHAHAH!!!

For 13 years, Araki stayed away from portraying youth culture in his movies. Sure, Mysterious Skin was about young adults, but he wasn't a representation for the generation that was just now coming up. Then, in 2010, Araki releases Kaboom, a celebration of all things Millennial, and a guide to what is going on.

Kaboom is about a gay 18-year-old boy, Smith, about to turn 19 who is experiencing weird events in the days leading up to, and past, his 19th birthday. He has dreams about hallways, girls, and dumpsters behind doors. His lesbian friend starts dating a psychotic witch with psychic abilities. He starts dating a British girl, who uses him and other guys to have orgasms. One of his dream girls pukes on his shoes before being decapitated in front of him by three guys in masks. And, it's all because he's the Chosen One of a cult where his father is a very powerful leader. And, it all ends in the nuclear destruction of the world.

Kaboom feels like it picked up where Nowhere was leaving off. Look at the frame I used for the Nowhere clip. It's a dark soul being surrounded by happy go lucky colors. Kaboom is all about color. There is no oppressed dark brooding soul. Gays are merrily accepted by everybody. Smith's roommate, a dumb blond surfer, is comfortable trying to suck his own dick in front. Of course, the surfer is also working for the cult who eventually kidnaps Smith in order to bring him to his father, but that's revealed in the final act.

The Millennials are post-acceptance. This is the conundrum presented by G.B.F. What is the big deal about coming out when most kids accept you anyways? Araki handles it more skillfully, of course, as he is a far more observant eye and is skilled in cramming every fucking nook and cranny in his movies with something to talk about.

But, the Millennials in Kaboom are also acted on by their parental forces. The father in Kaboom looks old enough to be a Boomer. The RA (James Duval) who is the leader of the counter force, takes on the guise of a hippy. The Boomers have control over the lives of the Millennials, and it's almost as if Gen X doesn't exist, except in secret. Duval is not old enough to be a Boomer Hippy, and takes his disguise off by the end of the film in order to save Smith, but he has to make like he is one.

Araki is still saying that Boomers are out to destroy the world. As they once destroyed the Gen Xers by coopting them into their web of commercialism, so to will they co-opt the Millennials, or else they'll blow up the whole fucking planet. When the Millennials refuse to go to become like their father, Dad hits the big red button and destroys everything.

Which is very reminiscent of modern day politics. Especially in 2013, three years after, but the need to get out the youth has always been one of the goals of the politicians. In the Obama vs McCain grudge match of 2008, they were seriously trying to duke it out over the youth vote. The youth, more so than before, are voting against the established leaders, and starting to make changes in the world that they want to see. Here in Seattle, in 2013 we elected our first socialist city councilwoman, and in nearby Seatac, they voted in a $15/hr minimum wage.  All to the chagrin of the established, mostly Boomer-aged, politicians.

The cult also represents everything corporate. There is something worshiping about the cult of commercialism that isn't present anywhere else in the movie. They are busy kidnapping kids at young ages, and trying to brainwash them to be good little cult members, and the ones who don't function right are released upon the world, such as the psychotic lesbian witch girlfriend. There isn't a specific religious symbol invoked in the cult, but it feels very much like a corporate co-option of the New Age symbolism.

And, so, Araki's solution for the Millennials to succeed in killing themselves in order to save themselves. With Kaboom, he finally crafted a high-energy bullet train of sex, love, and meaning as a way to welcome in the next generation. It feels fresh, energetic, and joyous with all the energy that a new generation can give off. And, yet, it could be all too bleakly hilarious, if it weren't so fucking true.

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010): Stay Awake

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010)
dir: Panos Cosmatos

When you watch a horror movie, you almost always know that you're going to be watching something of a well worn tone: either a slow burn, something suspenseful or shocking, or maybe a horror comedy.  But, rarely do you get hypnotic and trippy.  There have only been a couple of movies that have fit this tone so specifically: Inland Empire, and Eraserhead.  Both are David Lynch films.  If you take the dream state of Lynch's films, add in more than a dash of the surreality of Altered States with the look of THX 1138, then you begin to get the originality of Beyond the Black Rainbow, a movie that is stunning and singular in its design even as it is inspired by a whole rash of cult movies.

Beyond the Black Rainbow has almost no dialogue, and it uses it only to express the abstract history of the characters. The whole first act is set up around 2 or 3 "interrogations" and "tests" that really consist of what seems like 4 or 5 lines of dialogue each. But, that's OK, because Beyond the Black Rainbow isn't really hear to give you shocks, but to fill you with an existential dread of everything you've ever known.

The main thrust of Beyond the Black Rainbow is almost a retelling of the second half of Stephen King's Firestarter, only replacing Charlie with Carrie White. A teenage girl, Elena, with telekinetic powers is trapped in a science lab controlled by a sociopathic doctor, who drills her to probe her desires and motivations, and also to fulfill his sick sadistic pleasures.  The doctor knows her powers, and also suppresses her abilities via a large white triangle somewhere in the facility. Of course, Elena wants to get out of the facility.  Struggles ensue.

The science lab is the former utopian haven, the Arboria Institute. In the 1960s, this was supposed to be a new age sanctuary for experimentation and happiness. Along the way, in 1966, there was a failed experiment which caused the Institute to change hands from its idealistic leader to its current sociopathic doctor.

Beyond the Black Rainbow tells the story abstractly, and primarily through visuals without dialogue. It disconnects from a direct and obvious story and leaves clues for the audience to pick up on the history, like puzzle pieces left lying around.  Once you assemble the puzzle, it becomes clear that Cosmatos is discussing familial ties, ancestry, identity, disease, new age shams, control issues, Reaganism, isolation, and religious ideals.  Especially in the realms of new age and religion, Cosmatos seems to try to say that our search for our deeper senses may have results that we cannot deal with on our current plane. And, he seems to hint that these other planes of existence may actually exist in our minds, but that, as a human, we should not be able to attain them. In these spiritual discussions, Beyond the Black Rainbow almost seems to be straining for a Black Lodge/White Lodge discussion of spirituality that David Lynch was opening in the last few episodes of Twin Peaks, only with a purely negative vision of our humanity.

Beyond the Black Rainbow is completely pessimistic and misanthropic. And, it is for those reasons that I love it.  Behind it's amazing retro future visuals that are a perfect meld of THX 1138 and 2001, and the hypnotic, slow, and syrupy pacing, there is a dark bleak look at what spirituality is, even as it maintains that some spirits cannot be broken. Almost everybody in this movie is bleak or damaged, and they act against the good spirits of humanity. This is Stephen King meeting Sartre meeting Michel Houellebecq. If you think about what is happening long enough, it should make you feel a bit creeped out and gross.

But, that's if you can stay awake and wade your way through the sludge.  Beyond the Black Rainbow is the cinematic equivalent of combining Ketamine and Quaaludes. It will hypnotize you with its Tangerine Dream-esque prog rock soundtrack, vivid full saturation colors, cold aesthetic, and sleepy pacing until you feel like you've suddenly got narcosleepy and pass out.  You'll be compelled but lulled at once.

If you can stay awake, Beyond the Black Rainbow is a rewardingly dark experience and visual journey that hasn't been tried in ages.

The Final (2010) and Murder By Proxy: How America Went Postal (2010) : High school re-enactment as microcosm

The Final (2010)
dir: Joey Stewart

Murder By Proxy: How America Went Postal (2010)
dir: Emil Chiaberi

Initially, this entry was going to be solely about The Final and how it was a fantasy role play that was probably made by people who were either outcasts themselves or by people who were trying to enter the minds of the kids who do mass shootings.  Initially, it was going to be about life lessons and how the direction was actually pretty good, and how the movie is also a bit of a warning sign saying treat people better.  Because, really, we need more of that.

In a fit of happenstance, I stumbled upon Murder By Proxy immediately after watching The Final. The former is a documentary, and the latter a torture-porn horror film.  The former is about workplace environments, the latter is about high school. The former is, in part, about the failed 2008 thrust of Washington State House Bill 2142, the latter is about a Halloween party.  On the surface they seem like such disparate movies, but they are so intrinsically tied together.

Murder By Proxy documents the rise in workplace violence that started in the 80s, and increases to this day. It starts with the first case of workplace mass murder, in Edmond, Oklahoma, in 1986 by Patrick Sherrill at a post office.  It continued with the 1991 mass shooting in Royal Oak by Tom McIlvane, and focuses on his case for its intent.  Murder By Proxy does also look into many other cases beyond these two, but these are the most in depth cases given its use of Charlie Withers.

The "official" story (and, on the Wikipedia site it still is this story) was that McIlvane was a post office employee who had a history of altercations and had gone postal after being fired due to insubordination. Interviews in the film indicate that the management had become caustic and aggressive, and had started writing up McIlvane for stupid inane things, such as wearing shorts that were too tight.  Director Emil Chiaberi found help explaining the case in the form of Charlie Withers, an employee at the time of McIlvane's rampage who wouldn't stay quiet about the injustice he was seeing.

The thing is, Murder by Proxy is about the workplace bullying that occurs in everyday society.  There are no protections from it.  These range from usual harassment to downright belittling and condescension.  In the 1970s, the Postal Service had been pseudo privatized, where it was separated from the US government getting money, and was now responsible for making itself rather self-supportive.  This meant that the Postal Service was now available to using the same hostile management tactics that started pervading all management in the 1970s and moreso in the 1980s, and still pervades to this day.

In interviews found and conducted within Murder By Proxy, post office employees repeatedly said that they didn't agree with what McIlvane did, but they understood it.  Having your fellow workers say they understand why you went on a shooting spree, is damning evidence pointing towards a shitty management in the work place.  Your employees should not be "understanding" of another employee mass murdering the management.

Since the 1970s, the majority of the laws passed have been to protect the rights of the employer.  Murder By Proxy spends part of its time focusing on Washington State House Bill 2142, which was an anti-hostile work environment bill.  Charlie Withers even flew to Olympia to speak on behalf of the bill.  It was sponsored by 7 representatives.  It died in committee in February 2008.

In 2008, there was a case here in Washington, Spain vs Employment Security Department.  In the case, Spain had reported constant verbal abuse by her employer, who also made employees stand outside in the rain amongst other allegations.  She was denied unemployment insurance, and sued all the way to the State Supreme Court, which ruled that she had "good cause" and the ESD commissioner had discretion to say that she did.  The Supreme court ruling came down in June 2008, four months after the anti-hostile bill died.  Which would be OK news...except in 2009, Washington State house and senate passed a bill that stated that "good cause" was not a good enough reason anymore, and also reduced the taxes that employers had to pay.  This was passed in February 2009.

Let's go through that timeline again.  In early February 2008, Washington State rejected a bill that would made it punishable to have a hostile work environment. In late February 2008, Spain vs ESD was argued to get unemployment money for quitting due to a hostile work environment. In June 2008, she was allowed to collect unemployment.  But, in February 2009, Washington State passed, with the help of many democratic senators and representatives, a bill that not only rolled back that ruling (allowing for hostile work environments to have no legal ramifications) but it also cut the taxes of employers.

One of the reasons people shoot up their places of work is that they are intrinsically tied to their job, and they otherwise feel helpless.  At least, that is what Murder By Proxy says, and that's rather conventional wisdom.  If an employee is very tied to his job where it is his friends and life, then losing his position, especially by claims of insubordination or a newly hostile environment, is likely to set off a catastrophic mass murder.

Murder By Proxy also sees the ties to this type of hostile environment to the high school environments that are created.  Murder By Proxy directly links going postal to Columbine.  The filmmakers state that we frequently go for the too-easy answer: Drugs, video games, movies.  In trying to explain what turns a yellow card of warning into a red flag after the fact, Chiaberi explores his own too easy solutions.  He explores fame, and isolation.  But, he barely touches on a few reasons that seems rather easy and obvious to some: revenge, leaving the world a better place, and educating people.

The Final doesn't even hold back on those lessons.  In The Final, a group of outcasts, who have been mocked and harassed daily by the various cool kids, set up a Halloween party where they plan to torture and disfigure the kids in order to teach them lessons.  The outcasts don't want to actually kill their tormentors because that would be too easy, and the tormentors wouldn't suffer enough.

The Final addresses, briefly, the whole fame angle.  And, it also posits that the outcasts have all survived on a diet of horror movies, trying to claim it is more dangerous than it is.  By the end, fortunately, The Final decides that the fame angle exists only because it is intrinsically tied to the lessons the outcasts want to teach the world.  The outcasts ramble on and on about how harassed they were, and how cruel the tormentors were, and how this will be a lesson to everybody to stop being such high school shits.

And, the causality and morality of the outcasts is where The Final is most interesting.  Outside of the speechifying, The Final is a typical torture porn where the kids disfigure, dismember, coerce, split spines, and all sorts of other violent and brutal acts intended to inflict the pain they're feeling.  And, to be fair, the outcasts really to want to inflict pain and vengeance.  But, an outcast really wants to teach lessons.  This is why the outcasts in The Final made sure they have a captive audience.  This is why the outcasts feel so compelled to speechify.  This is a fantasy concocted by somebody who has been an outcast, or at least knows the minds of those who are  This is a fantasy of vengeance that is inflicted at the highest order.

Whether The Final is scary or not depends on your stomach for the torture porn genre.  It really is pretty well made for a low budget affair.  The acting ranges from decent to occasionally awful.  The cinematography is actually really good, and the pacing is decent.  It is actually a solid movie inside of its own little techniques.  But, The Final is trying to say something about the mindsets that really hadn't been explicitly put down before.

Gus Van Sant's masterful Elephant or Lynne Ramsay's We Need To Talk About Kevin both have different takes on the outcast, neither of which get close to what it really is.  Elephant gives the atmosphere for the killing, but ignores the reasoning of the killers.  We Need To Talk About Kevin posits a sociopath is needed to kill people.  But, as Murder By Proxy points out, anybody could be a killer in their workplace.  And, similarly, anybody could be a killer at school.  Give the right atmosphere, and anybody could be a powder keg.

What The Final is trying to be is that fantasy lesson given by the outcast to everybody else to not be such pieces of shit to everybody. Murder By Proxy is the real life results if these lessons aren't learned by the time people get into business.  The Final is a solid low-budget torture porn movie that, while bloodless and not all that scary, rarely delves into stupidity.  Murder By Proxy is a masterful documentary that ties in everything you have been worried about the business sector, and how that's turning all of America into a powder keg.  Separately, they're amazing films.  Together, they provide an interesting and horrific conversation.

The Skin I Live In (2011) and Victim (2010): Adaptations and tonalities

The Skin I Live In (2011)
dir: Pedro Almodovar

Victim (2010)
dir: Matt Eskandari; Michael A. Pierce

One of the challenges of being both a cinephile and a reader is watching an adaptation of a book that you have read.  Some adaptations take the base material as a starting point, and change the plot points at random for what the director would consider a better or more honest experience..  Some adaptations are completely faithful and get the book just right.  Some miss whole points of the book because the book was overstuffed, or the points didn't fit.  Just as there are many way to read a book, there are infinitely more ways to adapt a book.

On Wednesday, I looked at how Mary Harron's adaptation (and promotion) of American Psycho could have missed the underlying points of Bret Easton Ellis' novel, but then wrote about how maybe it didn't due to thematic clues.  There were choices that she made that were antithetical to what a reader may have wanted, especially with the elimination of the extremely violent scenes in order to focus more on the dark humor and social satire of the novel.  In doing so, she may have also been attempting to make it easier to read the layers, if she knew it was there.

Today, I want to look at one book, and how it was adapted by two different filmmakers.  The first film is a Spanish film from acclaimed director Pedro Almodovar, who uses the source material as a starting point to make a very Almodovar film, while also staying true to the messages of the book.  The second film is a low-budget American film which strips the source material to the bone, changes it just enough to not have to pay for rights to the author, and creates a stripped down, streamlined horror film.

The book in question? Thierry Jonquet's Mygale, a very short French novel whose title translates to Tarantula.  The book is a sado-masochistic horror noir thriller black comedy.  It tells a dual story that comes together in the end.  The first story is the sado-masochistic story of Richard, a successful plastic surgeon who has a beautiful mistress, Eve, with whom he resides in a country mansion.  They seem to have a relationship fully based in animosity, and most evenings he takes her out for escorting on severe sado-masochistic adventure, in which she seems totally complicit. Richard also visits his daughter in an asylum who self-mutilates and is on a suicide watch.  The second story is about Alex, a petty thief who wants to get plastic surgery because his face has been recognized.  Alex sets upon kidnapping Eve in order to force Richard into giving him plastic surgery.  Alex is also looking for an old thief pal of his, Vincent, who has been missing for years.  These threads are tied together by a late book reveal of Vincent having raped Richard's daughter, he is kidnapped by Richard and turned into Eve, with full on descriptions of the prolonged torture and transformation process.

Essentially, the novel is a rape-revenge novel (the revenge committed by the family of the victim, in the tradition of The Virgin Spring and Last House on the Left).  Almost all of the horror is committed on a woman who used to be a man who violated a woman.  And, the rest of the horror is on the man who is becoming a woman.  It is a novel completely steeped in gender issues which also makes it clear that everybody is damaged in some form.

The tonality of the book waffles between horror and comedy and drama and Marquis de Sade sex farce. Given the complexity of this novel, and the variety of tonalities that it waffles between, it is easy to see how this book could be adapted wildly, without even completely changing around the elements to make a story of your own.

The Skin I Live In (2011)

While The Skin I Live In was released in 2011, the movie had been announced in 2002 by Almodovar.  This was a passion project of his, who had read the book in the 90s.  It didn't get released stateside until 2004, and then only by a pulp distributor (mind you it is a fantastic novel that I highly highly recommend), so it isn't exactly a widely known novel stateside.  By announcing his film first, and by actually buying the rights to the novel, Almodovar had full license to the book, and was able to keep the elements he wanted, change the elements he needed, and make everything his own.

One of the things one notices when comparing The Skin I Live In to Mygale is that Almodovar completely changes the tonality of the story, while still keeping some of the themes and adding in that flavor of Spanish-fried soap opera melodrama that he has done so well since All About My Mother.  It is just as interesting to note what he throws out and tones down as what he keeps in.

The first thing one notices that Almodovar completely throws out is the sado-masochistic relationship between Vera (Almodovar's Eve) and Robert (the surgeon).  Unlike Mygale, we're introduced to Vera as a forlorn woman in a body suit, who is not specifically trying to piss off everybody.  And, she is kept in her mansion instead of being taken out for abusive sex setups.

Almodovar makes Vera much more of a deeply fragile but tough person. Not somebody who is pointedly resentful of her situation, but is passively playing the long game.  He makes Vera far more feminine than Eve, and even has Vera played by an actress instead of an actor in drag.  Almodovar also has Vincente played by an actor, instead of the same actress as Vera, and also has Vincente possess a bit more femininity in his scenes as Vincente than the other male characters in The Skin I Live In. Almodovar's Vincente is also no longer a thief.  He is a regular missing teenager who had once worked in his mother's dress shop.

Almodovar also severely remade Alex.  Alex becomes Zeca, who is still a thief who needs to have plastic surgery.  Zeca, however is no longer looking for his partner Vincente.  Instead, he is actually the son of Marilla, Richard's maid.  And, Zeca is also Robert's half-brother, though neither of them know that.  Zeca also had an affari with Robert's wife who had been off to be with Zeca when she got into a car wreck killing her.  Didn't I say that Almodovar had wanted his melodramatic elements?

Almodovar spends the opening and closing 40 minutes in the post-surgery present, using the reveal of the history of Vincente's rape and his transformation into Vera for the centerpiece section of the film.  He also plays down the initial torture and brainwashing period required to feminize Vincente in order to focus more on the relationship dramatics of the central "family" of Robert, Vera, and Marilla.  Even Zeca's rape of Vera, and subsequent murder, is mainly an impetus to draw Robert, Vera and Marilla into more honest and intimate relations.

Almodovar's main themes transformed from basic rape/revenge and Stockholm syndrome black pulp into being about change and family ties that bind and strangle.  Marilla is tied to Zeca, even though she doesn't want to be.  She lets him in, but can't kill him.  In turn, he ties her up and gives himself permission to run rampant through the house.  Marilla's ex lover, Zeca's father, was a crazy servant she hasn't seen since the affair.  Robert is completely devoted to both his daughter and wife though they're long gone.  He's also devoted to Marilla who is essentially the only family he has left.

Almodovar is also about change.  Robert changes skin to make it more flame retardant after his experiences with his wife's firey car accident.  Robert has already changed from family man to violent vengeance seeker. Vincente changes into Vera. Robert's daughter changes from socially inept into traumatized victim. Everybody and everything in Almodovar's film is based on what you see and what isn't there and what is changing.  People are watching people change.  Everybody has windows into everybody else's room. The basement operating rooms are defined with glass and clear plastic hangings.  Yet, for all this supposed transparency, secrets are abound, and as people are changing if you can watch close enough.

However, Almodovar also kept the horror of the story.  It utilizes three of the most violating experiences one could survive.  One is the rape of a woman.  Another is the realization that what you did was rape when it seemed to start out as mutual longing.  And the third is the removal of the most basic identity one has: their gender.  But, he buries all this horror in the Almodovar family drama, without losing the themes of gender identity, violation of women, and deep protection and revenge by a father for his daughter.  Using the horrific, but not contentious, elements of Mygale, Almodovar crafted something completely different, and yet based in the same story.  While it is completely unfaithful, in tone, to the novel, it is completely faithful to Almodovar and should be viewed as a separate entity.

Victim (2010)

Except that somebody trainspotted Mygale the year before and made a completely low budget rip-off called Victim, which stripped out 2/3 of the book to focus on the torture and transformation process for 70 minutes.  Victim is a horror movie straight up. It starts with a video rape of a cute girl, then switches to the kidnapping and torture of a dude in LA.  The dude is kept in a basement dungeon, where he is beat, brainwashed, and feminized (to the point of getting a genital transplant, but not breast implants) by a plastic surgeon and his dumb man servant.

Victim completely focuses on the torture while also saving the rape/revenge reveal for the finale.  It eliminates the mistress portion of the novel.  It eliminates the Vincente searching story, and replaces it with a half-assed cop search story.  The novel is completely stripped away to explore the torture of brainwashing and forced gender changes.  It also adds in the weirdness of the brainwashing the rapist to pretending he is the daughter of the surgeon.

What Victim adds in is a replication of the original rape/murder.  The climax of Victim has the surgeon watching the violation of his daughter, while the rapist is actively raped by the man-servant in a replication of the hotel room of the original violation. The surgeon wanted to make the rapist experience exactly what he had experienced when he was the rapist in the beginning.

While it is a different movie in terms of tone, Victim feels like the movie that Almodovar stripped out of The Skin I Live In.  Watching the two as a back-to-back double-feature feels like you're watching the missing segments that were simply too icky for the first.  Victim is rougher, more brutal, and generally raw.  It has a stream-lined simplicity that makes Victim a sleek bullet of ugliness, especially if you ignore any of the cop scenes which seem to be completely superfluous to the movie as well.

Weirdly, both movies are at their strongest in a double feature with each other.  Victim is a fascinatingly bitter movie, which focuses on the torture of a man, and never loses sight of that.  It's a more straight-forward feministic rape-revenge.  While, The Skin I Live In is far more oblique and dramatic.  Together, they form a complex morality that is a potent duality.

Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010): Inversion of Other Demonization

Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010)
dir: Eli Craig

"It doesn't matter what happened. It only matters what looks like what happened." - Tucker

There is a whole sub-genre called Hicksploitation (or Hixploitation), in which there is demonization of the hick or the hillbilly by city folk.  It's all about being on the wrong side of the tracks, and how the horror movie wants you to be on the right side of the track.  Significant examples include The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Last House on the Left, Deliverance, The Hills Have Eyes, Wolf Creek, House of 1,000 Corpses, Redneck Zombies, 2000 Maniacs, Wrong Turn.  That list is not complete.  Every single one of those movies cashes in on the target audience of middle-class big city white people, mostly teenagers or college kids, who end up in a hellscape created by the poorer backwoods folks. In those movies, the hick is generally posed as purely evil demons who only want to kill.

Tucker and Dale vs Evil uses those classist expectations and tropes, and uses them to turn it all on its head through the use of perspective.  Tucker and Dale are the hillbilly title characters on vacation who come into contact with a bevvy of college kids who are going camping in the woods.  Tucker has just bought a rundown cabin in the woods, and is planning on cleaning the place up by sawing down trees, cleaning, and making everything pretty, but at first it is one of those cabins that horror movies present as creepy murder cabins.  Meanwhile, the college kids are freaked out by Dale due to his ineptly trying to hit on the college kids at the beginning of the movie while holding a scythe.

The first half of the movie is presented with the two different perspectives as two different movies flowing between each other. When Tucker and Dale are night fishing, one of the college girls slips on a rock out of view from the other students and falls unconscious into the water.  However, what the college kids see is Tucker and Dale hoisting an unconscious friend into their rowboat and shouting "We got your friend!"

The movie continues as the college kids try to "rescue" Allison and end up killing themselves in increasingly horrific ways.  Meanwhile, Tucker and Dale are trying to do work on their house, and protect Allison, and also inform the kids that they need to come get their friend.  And then the kids start dying all around Tucker and Dale.

When Tucker and Dale's split fades away as both movies start to confront each other, and comes out as an all out war, the movie loses half of the tension it had in the first half of the movie.  Even though it becomes a horror movie with the college kids as the antagonists, and it retains its comedic sensibilities, the tension between the warring perspectives evaporates and we're left with a little more straightforward of a movie.

As Tucker observes in the middle of the movie.  "It doesn't matter what happened.  It only matters what looks like what happened."  Where this movie differs from most horror comedies, is it doesn't just lampoon or abuse tropes, it turns them inside out.  It shows how certain events could be mis-perceived as something completely different based on expectations and tropes.  Effectively, you're watching the movie as a buddy comedy, who keep getting invaded by a hixploitative horror movie with college kids.

Tucker and Dale is heavily political as well.  While it is upending cliches through the dual perspective, it is also confronting the classism that hixploitation movies perpetuate through using the hillbilly as the "other" in the horror movie.  In today's America, there is a split of the cultures that has been accomplished through the Republican's Southern Strategy in the 1960s. In the 1960s, the Republicans were losing ground as the Democrats were embracing the racial progresses that were happening through the Civil War.  In order to regain power, the Republicans sold out their party to better represent the values of the Southern conservative values.  In the 50 or so years since the southern strategy, the Republicans have not abandoned their southern strategy, and most voting maps are split between rural and big city, and north/west and south.

Frequently, the northern media has depicted the southern conservatives as hicks and others, and have labeled some of the states as "flyover" states.  These states, for the most part, were part of the confederacy of the Civil War.  And, as such, the south is demonized as being stupid hicks unworthy of having political opinions because they're racist and full of ultra-religious beliefs which should not be allowed due to separation of church and state.  Its like they're yokels.

Kevin Smith further added to this discussion in 2011's horror movie Red State, where he depicted two teenage boys picked up by a church about to use these sinners as part of some sort of sacrificial ritual. It demonizes the religious as an "other" worthy of being villainized. The religious were a more specific reference to Westboro Baptist Church, the group who goes and protests various funerals and protests in order to spread its message of whatever.

Tucker and Dale is basically saying that everybody has the potential to be demonized.  The college kids are the "other" to Tucker and Dale.  This is shown by them frequently calling out "college kids" in order to get their attention.  The antagonists in this movie are educated, young, mostly white, and middle class.  As such, the message of Tucker and Dale is that everybody deserves to be heard, and that your side may not be right just because it "sounds" right.

In any case, Tucker and Dale is actually a hilarious movie that deserves to be found by more.  It's violent and gruesome enough to satisfy the gorehounds, and hilarious enough to entertain everybody else. While the movie loses steam in the second half, it's first half more than makes up for that loss of momentum.

Bibliothèque Pascal (2010): Storytelling as Survival

Bibliothèque Pascal (2010)
dir: Szabolcs Hajdu

Bibliothèque Pascal would not be possible without Terry Gilliam.  Terry Gilliam is a consummate storyteller fascinated by the concept of storytelling. While he even had a Trilogy of Imagination - Time Bandits, Brazil, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen  - many of his films deal with charletans, storytellers, liars, flights of fantasy, dreams, and downright delusions. From The Fisher King's medieval fancy to Tideland's fantasies of escape to The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus' incredible machine of generating storytelling, Gilliam has always been fascinated with stories where we're dealing primarily with the imagination of one main character.

Certainly, other movies made by people other than Gilliam have dealt with the imaginations of a single character.  Recent notable examples of these other movies include Pan's Labyrinth, The Fall, and The Cell.  All of these movies include flights of fancy, and the former two are fantasies to escape the reality of the world in which they live. The Fall even concerns a storyteller weaving a fantasy in order to entertain a little girl to entice her to get him drugs.  But, they all owe a great deal of debt to Gilliam, who, in turn, also owed a debt to Fellini though definitely not nearly as overtly.

Like all of these movies, Bibliothèque Pascal is all about storytelling. (Warning: full plot breakdown ahead, including spoilers) The movie opens with a young woman, Mona, in Romanian child protective services office trying to win custody of her child who has been taken away from her. Mona had left her daughter with her aunt to take care of while Mona was away. Subsequently, her child was seen performing for money, and subsequently was taken away from Mona's aunt.  Mona, back in Romania, is now trying to win her child back with this interview.  The CPS agent asks Mona what happened, and we're launched into a technicolor fantasy of her creation for the majority of the movie.

Years ago, Mona, who seems to be a Romanian gypsy or wanderer of sorts, leaves her cheating and jealous boyfriend to a different city, with a beach.  While on the beach, she is taken hostage by a wanted criminal who has recently murdered a man solely for being gay and kissing another man in public. This criminal is also a dream projector, in which he projects his most vivid dreams onto other people. During the kidnapping, he projects a love dream onto Mona, who is so enthralled she has sex with him before he gets assassinated the next morning.

Fast forward and Mona has a daughter.  She is making a living telling stories with puppets at fairs.  The story shown is an allegorical retelling of her history so far, with the above criminal being represented by a scorpion. With it, we learn that her mother died when she was young.

At the fair, she meets up with her father, who is shown hanging around the fair. Her father is a prostitute dealer, and needs to replace a girl he was going to sellt. He is first shown being rejected by a one of the hookeriest hookers you could imagine because London trade is rough.  When he meets with Mona, he tricks Mona into being the replacement by feigning an illness and the need to see a doctor in Germany. And, so she is sold to human traffickers who, in turn, sells her to Pascal, an affable chap who runs a swanky nightclub and brothel, Bibliothèque Pascal.

Inside the brothel, the sex workers (3 women, a man, and a boy) act out different literary scenes for their clients.  There is a Lolita, a Pinocchio, a Dorian Gray, a Desdemona, and Mona's first story: Joan of Arc.  As Joan of Arc, she has to act out the scene of penance with a subsequently forced sex scene acted out.  She is drugged between acts, and bites the tongue of Pascal when he tries to kiss her, causing her to be placed as Desdemona, in a rubber suit, to get suffocated and raped.

But, she is rescued by the dream projection of her daughter, which is the street performance her daughter was doing.  Her daughter was sleeping, and dreamed of creating a marching band, led by Mona's father, to rescue Mona from the library.  And, scene.

When the CPS guy doesn't believe her (for obvious reasons), she recants and tearfully tells her real story in short sentences.  She met the father on the street, but doesn't know who he is.  He gave a false name and job.  She had the kid anyways.  She had to work odd, menial, jobs to survive.  She thought she could make more money and a better living as a prostitute in Britain, and left her child with her aunt promising to pay her from her wages.  But, she couldn't make a living in London, and couldn't send her aunt any money.  Thus, to cover costs, her aunt made the child perform.  And, that gets her her child back.

The film closes with her and her daughter having a fantasy dinner, and her daughter happily eating and drinking air in a gorgeous technicolor kitchen. And, Mona subsequently puts her daughter to bed, where she tells a story about how all the princes and princesses in fairy tales had disappeared, and now they had to deal with reality instead of being allowed to live in their fantasies which added color and zest to their life.  And, we pull back to discover that this touching scene is actually in a model setup in a department store.

And, so, Hajdu has created a movie about a woman weaving and embellishing, or entirely fabricating, her life story in order to escape the mundanities of reality.  It is a movie that isn't even ambiguous between whether or not it is lying, but instead asks you if you'd rather hear another sad tale about single mothers and sex trafficking and sex work, or if you'd like this fantasy story where the good people are good, and the bad people are bad.  The sex work is horrible, but the brothel is fantastic (in terms of fantasy, not in terms of good).

In the flights of fancy, the sex work is brutal and abusive.  In the flight of fancy, Desdemona is suffocated to the point of unconsciousness or death before she is fucked by two strange men in rubber suits.  In the flight of fancy, there is also the auction of women of sorts for the johns to buy and sell. And, in the reality, Mona says that the work was lousy, the wages were pathetic, the rent was high, and the pimp took way too much of a cut of the profit, rendering it unsustainable.

The one thing it might get wrong is that it suggests it was easy for Mona to leave the pimp and the sex work when she was frustrated by it.  She just ups and leaves to return to her daughter.  Considering that she went to sex work willingly, this might be one type of reality, but it also ignores the reality of sex workers who are trafficked from foreign countries and forced into sexual slavery.

It also is an interesting painting of a woman's story as told by a man. Hajdu's wife is the star of Bibliothèque Pascal, and much of the inspiration came from her sitting in a Hungarian jail cell, on a vehicle registration charge, with a prostitute who would spend her time spinning bizarre yarns about prostituting in London.  These are the worlds we create in order to survive.  These are the worlds we create to escape how humdrum the struggle for life for some actually is.

The main problem people will have is the sex work, and the sexual violence are all in the fantasy.  Unlike, say, Pan's Labyrinth, Mona isn't escaping a violent fantasy world which is marked by war and murder.  Mona is embellishing to make her life seem less pathetic.  And, as such, it is presented pretty unabashedly.

It also is a tad rapey, and I can't get around that.  Even though the whole story was a flight of fancy in order to get away from rehashing another boring, pathetic life, the story was also meant as an embellishment to create sympathy from the CPS agent.  No, my daughter wasn't performing just for money.  Her performance was also a dream projection meant to rescue me from this horrible brothel where I was raped in the worst way possible!  This wasn't just any brothel, this was the most fantastic brothel you could imagine, with the most horrible rapey sex ever, including rubber sex.  Can you imagine?  The movie never portrays the rape in a good light, and it almost always portrays it from a third party camera view in the first person storytelling.  But, it is rapey...and it is almost rapey as a throwaway device, which is, ultimately, kind of a fault of the movie.

This is a sultry movie which goes through its paces of fast and slow.  It's like the jazz music that populates the movie.  Sometimes its slow, and almost lulling you to sleep, then it can be eclectic, and sometimes it can be zippy or bombastic.  It is also visually stunning, owing much to Tarsem's The Cell and The Fall. Bibliothèque Pascal is a gorgeous work, immaculately framed and conceived.  It's borderline messy in its plotting, but aren't all flights of fancy?

Ticked Off Trannies With Knives (2010): Tranny as Victim and Victor

Ticked Off Trannies With Knives (2010)
dir: Israel Luna

This could also be better known as Day of the Tranny.  While Ticked Off Trannies With Knives is an amazing exploitation title, Day of the Tranny would be better because a) it acknowledges the deep deep debt it owes to I Spit On Your Grave, originally titled Day of the Woman and b) it doesn't reduce the victims to mere exploitation punch-lines. While the title is certainly sensational, it also belies the actual subject of the movie, which is a rape/murder-revenge fantasy that mirrors I Spit On Your Grave in terms of its harrowing nature and its possible empowerment messaging.

I could basically just write ditto on yesterday's I Spit On Your Grave review, and it would be completely accurate.  Well, not completely.  This has a bit more style, pizzazz, and personality than I Spit On Your Grave, which works to simultaneously humanize the victims, and actually be a better movie.  Oh, and I would have to replace Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel with GLAAD.

Ticked-Off Trannies is about a group of trannies - drag queens, transvestites, or transgendered people; in this movie, its more the first two - who go off on dates with a group of bio-gendered men, only to be drugged, beaten, raped and murdered, leaving one survivor.  This survivor and two more of her friends set traps for the rapist-murderers in order to exact bloody revenge.  Much like I Spit On Your Grave, that's the thick and thin of the plot.

Because of the title, Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives received a LOT of undeserved attention for being reductive of the perils that come with being a drag queen, transvestite or transgendered person.  In real life, they usually sit on the outsides of life, and are the target of bigoted attacks or murders.  One prominent example was in the movie Paris is Burning, a documentary about the Harlem ball culture of the underground LGBTQ scene, where one of the prime subjects of the movie, Venus Xtravaganza, was found strangled underneath a bed four days after she was murdered.  This is not a punchline.

And, Ticked-Off Trannies, despite its title, does not treat this situation like a punchline.  Much like I Spit On Your Grave, this is a harrowing, gut-wrenching experience which scars your soul.  It brings attention to the situation of violence against trans people, and also alludes to the idea that there is no justice for the outsiders of the world.  Much like I Spit On Your Grave, Ticked-Off Trannies alludes to the idea that the best justice is your own justice.

Luna acknowledges his owing to the movies of the '70s, as well as his inspiration from the Rodriguez/Tarantino movie Grindhouse. He rips through this classic exploitation flick and stylizes it like it came out of the grindhouse of the '70s.  Luna does have some gags to speed the movie up, like a missing reel gag, which brings a bit of humor to make the harrowing experience a less bitter pill to swallow and make it slightly more appealing to the masses.  Slightly.

Also, like I Spit On Your Grave, the rape/murder is excruciating, but it also comes back to identity.  As a member of the LGBTQ community, I found it harrowing and easier to identify with the victims.  And, it is the victims' story.  Luna doesn't allow the rape/murder to be intentionally vicariously enjoyed. He makes it as brutal as tense as one can in a horror movie.  But, that doesn't mean it can't be enjoyed by the sick portion of the population who are determined to enjoy the torture and rape of another human being.

Is this problematic?  Again, it's up to you to decide that.  This is decidedly not a movie to encourage or make light of the violence the Ts face in everyday life.  This is a movie that brings this to attention, and doesn't even give the pat justifications of a movie like Boys Don't Cry, where the FTM transgendered person lied to everybody around her.  Ticked-Off Trannies gives a full-on exploitation experience that brings attention to the issue, and also gives a revenge fantasy when it could be needed.

And, I repeat, due to its stylization, it is less soul searing than I Spit On Your Grave, but not much isn't really.

A Serbian Film (2010): Temper Tantrum as Critique

A Serbian Film (2010)
dir: Srdjan Spasojevic

When an artist throws a temper tantrum, sometimes the results can be amazing.  This is not that film.

A Serbian Film is a film created by a rich Serbian as a damning critique of the state of Serbian culture.  This isn't about the Balkan Wars, nor even allegorical for it, except to Western eyes trying to seek out some deeper meaning in a post-modern contextual manner.  If it is about the Balkan Wars, and the atrocities committed during the course of it, it is only in the most tangential of ways, in that they gave first-hand knowledge of the kind of horrors one human can commit against another.

Instead, A Serbian Film is a film directly commenting on the state of Serbian sociological culture in general, and film and arts culture in particular.  It is a film that is decrying the diminishing of Serbian cultures in order to fund and churn out art that is aimed directly at Western - read: American - audiences.  A Serbian Film is a torture porn film exaggerating what I call suffer porn.  

Suffer porn?  Huh?

Suffer porn is the genre of small foreign films which are all completely about somebody suffering at the hands of an evil culture or government, and either dying at the end or overcoming the atrocities.  It's all about emotional suffering under the guise that it teaches you something about the culture it is depicting.  The first time I noticed this was the American movie, Not Without My Daughter, which depicted the horrors of the Islamic culture against women, but was primarily about some woman who was suffering indignities in order to rescue her daughter.

The first link I selected from Wikipedia's Cinema of Serbia page under "Famous movies from Serbia", was When Father Was Away on Business, a story about a young boy trying to survive while his dad is sent to a labor camp, falls in love with a girl who is taken away by ambulance, and witnesses his father's mistress attempt suicide and his uncle is diagnosed with diabetes.  Life is a Miracle is about an engineer with a mentally unstable wife and a son who wants to play football, but is recruited for the Balkan wars...then the engineer falls in love with a Muslim hostage.  Every movie I've clicked on has been people suffering.

Which brings us back to A Serbian Film.  

A Serbian Film is about an aging porn star, Milos, with a huge "talent" that is married with a wife.  Milos, strapped for cash, gets one last well-paying gig, by a rich filmmaker, Vukmir, with Western interests, though Milos never hears what the film will entail.  

Milos' first shoot is at an abandoned orphanage, where he witnesses a mother physically and mentally abusing what looks like a fairly legal teenager.  Then, we get Milos' porn scene where he gets oral sex from the mother while watching the daughter lick a lollipop.  The scenes escalate from there, and include him physically abusing the mother, him killing the mother with a machete while having sex with her, him getting raped by a security guard, and more.  Yes, it's graphic, yes it tries for realism, and no it isn't sensational about any of it.  

At first, it is a straight-forward movie about one last gig, but by the end of the first hour, the movie firmly ensconces itself in Inland Empire territory, where things are half-remembered, half-dreamed, days are skipped, timelines go back and forth, and there is even video playback.  Basically, the film loses its mind with Milos, who goes crazier the longer he's involved with the movie.  

The movie is intended to shock.  The whole point of the movie is "I'm offended, why aren't you offended?"  It isn't a glib black comedy like Man Bites Dog or a facile torture porn movie like Hostel.  It isn't nearly as easily dismissable as either of those.  While the movie certainly does revel in the graphic depictions of gore, violence, sexual violence, sex, rape, and everything else, the movie is looking onto it with a bit of horror.  

And, I'd say its point was sledgehammer obvious, if I hadn't read so many opinions completely missing the point.  There are whole scenes where Milos is physically abusing women while the Westernized filmmaker is screaming "YES!  This is FILM!  This is ART!"  There are scenes where the filmmaker, even after being beaten, is saying how "this is TRUTH." There is a scene in the middle of the movie where a woman gives birth in a dark room, and a guy has sex with the newborn baby right out of the womb.  Milos storms out, disgusted, while the Vukmir is proudly proclaiming "NEWBORN PORN! NEWBORNS!"

On top of Spasojevic condemning the Westernization of Serbian film and culture, he is also condemning the government's participation of said film and culture.  *warning: spoilers and a description of the final scene* Milos' brother is a police officer who is ostensibly helping his brother out.  He promises to investigate Vukmir, and then tells his brother that Vukmir is a child psychologist with an interest in film.  You can trust him.  

The final scene has Milos being taken to a warehouse where he is told to have sex with a body that is laying under a sheet with a towel over its head.  And, then a masked man has sex with another covered body lying next to the first.  The masked man is uncovered, revealed to be his brother the cop, and then the bodies are revealed to be Milos' drugged son - with whom his is having sex - and his wife - with whom his brother is having sex.  This leads to a bloody blowout while the filmmaker is screaming this is TRUTH!  And encouraging the rampage, which includes a depiction of Milos penetrating the eye socket of the cinematographer.

Basically, Spasojevic is implying that the government (in the form of his brother) is very involved in the Western filmmakers' figurative raping and pillaging of Serbian culture, through financing, in order to find suffer porn for American audiences to feel bad about.  He wants the Serbs to have their own culture and their own film without having to kowtow to the needs of the wider global culture.  And, he laments that, because of the Serbian economy, that the Serbs cannot afford to have their own blossoming film industry independent of the West.

But, is the film good?

That question is not as easily answered.  Is a film good, if it shocks and it's intent is to shock?  Is a film that says "If you're not offended, you're not paying attention" successful if it offends the audience, possibly even beyond the point where they'll actually receive the message you're trying to send.  As I mentioned before, it is a temper tantrum of a film.  It's a primal scream parodying (not humorously) the suffer porn industry by turning it into torture porn.

One can pose the question as "is it art?"  But, that's almost like asking "Is Serrano's Immersion (Piss Christ) good?  Is it art?"  Is it valid if the point is missed?  What if the point is as explicit as one could possibly make it, and the point is still missed because you amped it way too loud, and people can't even understand it?  There is a whole scene where Milos is calling himself the victim, while everybody else suffers around him, kind of like the plot of When Father Was Away On Business, where the boy is there while everybody else suffers.  It can't possibly be any more direct without being a non-fiction essay.

So, that decision is up to you.

The one problem I have as a westerner, and as a human, is the sexual politics of the film.  The film is very brotastic in its mentality.  The biggest indignity that is suffered before the climax of the film is not Milos decapitating a woman while having sex with her.  It isn't the newborn porn, which actually almost has the humor of a dead baby joke.  It isn't teen rape, abuse, or any of the other indignities.  It is Milos getting raped, while drugged, by a security guard.  And, it is so offensive that we don't even get that in detail.  We only get a close-up of the security guards face close to Milos' face.

The women in A Serbian Film are violated the most often, the most graphically, and also are subjected to the majority of the graphic violence as well.  The one scene that is graphically depicted that isn't of a woman is the eye socket rape.  Everything else is violence against women.  One wonders if that is the point of the movie, and that was intended by the writer/director.  If the suffer porn frequently has women suffering around the male central character, and A Serbian Film just took that depiction to the extreme.  Or, if it really does have abominable sexual politics.  

In any case, A Serbian Film is not necessarily the evil that others make it out to be.  It is graphic, shocking, offensive, and it intends to be.  It isn't Chaos where it has nothing new to say about a topic.  It is moderately well filmed and made, even though I completely detested the Inland Empire style filmmaking of "is this reality, or is the main character going crazy?"  I feel that that was an attempt to lessen the blow of the violence, while still being able to keep it as depicted.  The pacing is decent.  But, the movie can even be quite dull.

So, is it good?  Is it bad?  Can it even be thought of that way?  

One thing it isn't, really, is dismissable.

American Availability: Uncensored on Youtube, Limited Edition Uncut DVD by Invincible Pictures, FlixFling, Censored DVD and Blu-Ray.