Wednesday, October 20, 2010

It puts the wireless router in, or else it gets the hose again.

Finally, finally, I have the internets in my apartment.

Technically, they're not in my apartment, but they're being beamed magically from below by a wireless router my landlords put in -- or had put in by the official people who do such things.

P.C. handed them a wireless router a few months ago in an effort to get free internet up to the apartment, and it worked perfectly...for about two hours. When their phone stopped working (which it had done several times before), they pulled the plug on the wireless internet, convinced the way people who observed a black cat crossing their paths right before their crops failed are convinced by the coincidence, that somehow the unrelated router had ruined their already bad phone service.

But this time, oh, this time, with an officially sanctioned router, after paying the officially sanctioned $75 installation fee, I'm hoping it lasts.

It will help me continue my capstone paper research into movies and TV shows featuring serial killers, for one thing -- and to make more witty title references in blog postings.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

PSA: Canadian politics GONE WILD!

"GONE WILD," that is, just like one would expect Canadian girls to "go wild" on their spring break, in 42 degree Manitoban weather: Canadian style (that is to say, not at all).

But they are hilarious, in their self-deprecating way (who remembers the Olympics closing ceremonies? Very funny stuff, Canada), despite the overall lack of Mardi Gras beads and politicking.

Here's a funny, satirical campaign video about Canadian mayor of Winnipeg, Sam Katz, to prove it. It's gone viral, so you may have seen it, but heck, watch it again. (It's not always working, so you may have to go to youtube and type in things like "Winnipeg" and "Sam Katz" -- you'll know when you find it.)

Oh, PATKITFOC. If only America could have a three-party system, you'd get my vote, straight down the party line. As far as I know, neither Democrats nor Republicans have a really strong view on kicking children in the face.

I guess in the meantime, if I want to strongly support not kicking kids in the face, I can always move to Winnipeg.

PSA: It's DEMocracy, not dumbocracy.

It seems that Iowans are going to vote with their votes on whether to allow a few appointed judges to remain in office, after said judges (actually Iowa Supreme Court justices) ruled that same-sex marriage should be legal.

That is, of course, they ruled that gay people can marry other gay people. That is all. They did not rule that gay people should be allowed to marry just whoever they want and force those other people to marry them back unfairly, even if you're not gay yourself. They did not rule that everyone has to be gay. And they did not rule that you had to stop raising your kids to cross to the other side of the street if you saw a "suspected gay person" walking down the sidewalk.

So presumably, like all other gay marriage laws, this law amounts to telling people to mind their own business and let other people mind theirs.

Apparently, Iowans don't vote for justices, but they can vote justices out. Now, I can actually understand the concept of disliking "legislating from the bench," since we're supposed to be a democracy and all that, but recently it's come to my attention that equally annoying and interruptive to public processes is what I'm going to call "benching from the ballot box."

Injecting politics into something that's supposed to be impartial and beyond us all -- "The Law" -- happens all the time in legislation, but judges' chambers are supposed to be free of that. I understand that the side that believes in "saving marriage" for only white heterosexual Protestants uses the same argument to say the judges leaned left in their ruling.

But I have to believe that judges, especially ones who refuse to pour money into a campaign to save their jobs, are at least impartial enough to be bound by the law, whether or not they personally fully agree with it...which means gay people may have the right to get married whether anybody likes it or not. That's just the way our laws are stacking up.

It's our own fault, ultimately, for giving blacks and women the right to vote, and setting all those silly human rights precedents.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

In Defense of Poppery, XIII: The Human Centipede

Okay, disclaimers: I'm not saying that anyone should watch this movie. In fact, only two-point-five of the people possibly reading this should consider picking it up at the local Blockbuster, or putting it into their Netflix queue -- you know who you are. If you think it might not be you, it's not.

I'm not even particularly interested in "redeeming" The Human Centipede, any more than I would try to redeem the equally-tellingly-titled Snakes on a Plane. I'm more interested in discussing where Centipede fits into the generally available oeuvre of horror films, why it has a spot there (why that spot exists), and in proclaiming my disappointment with less-well-done horror films, such as the movie so bad I can't remember its title (IMDB reveals that it's called The Fear Chamber, and shockingly came out just last year).

The plot of The Human Centipede is simple: there's a mad scientist doctor who's only recently gone mad, who wants to sew three people together, mouth to anus, into a "human centipede." He was previously a world-class surgeon who separated conjoined twins. Spoiler alert: He succeeds.

P.C. and I chose to rent this movie (from the local, now bankrupt Blockbuster) because I felt it had been following me around for a few months; perhaps it was first hearing about it on NPR-like Sirius radio on the way to friend Becca's wedding in part of a comedy routine. Perhaps it was having it somehow pop up in ads online or somewhere I can't quite identify. Maybe it stuck with me because it's such a simple and grotesque idea. But yesterday, after an afternoon of reading about the "philosophy of horror," I felt ready to descend into the macabre world of a torture-film, and The Human Centipede seemed as good as any other.

In fact, it's better than most others, which was a pleasant surprise.

The front of the DVD quotes Eli Roth saying the movie made him sick, which was a high compliment for horror, and it's reviewed as being "surprisingly straight-forward," which is exactly what it is. Unlike The Collector, which makes a small attempt to explain the sadistic torturer's motives for entering the homes of families and then butchering them slowly ("he collects people" -- but what this means is never exactly clear), The Human Centipede has a certain elegant lack of explanation that is only elegant because an explanation is unnecessary.

In addition to the austerity of exposition (or lack of it), there's a modernist aesthetic to the German (of course German -- also, it's an apparently Dutch director's movie, though mostly in English, and subtitled, making the Japanese businessman's "Nazi!" epithet even more interesting) doctor's home, where most of the action takes place. The co-eds who find themselves victims to the doctor's plan aren't as stupid as they usually are in these movies, nor as deserving of torture, and that also streamlines the plot somehow. In general, this is a well-wrought, spare movie that revolves around a simple and simply revolting premise.

The Fear Chamber, a movie I picked up with seven others for less than a dollar each (a pack which includes the great classic Night of the Living Dead, making the other hideously bad movies worth the purchase), is the opposite in every way of The Human Centipede. The premise is so unclear that I can hardly state it here: there's a guy who likes to butcher women, for some reason, and later on he shows up in clown make-up. He stabs the detective-hero in the heart, but magically the detective doesn't die, even though he went to chase the killer alone on an abandoned roof in L.A. without calling for backup (but then, there are only 2 other cops on the LAPD force in this movie, anyway, and their investigative headquarters look suspiciously like a janitor's closet), and even though he got stabbed in the heart. But this all adds up at the end when it's revealed that the killer was selling organs on the black market, but that somehow the heart he'd removed from a psychic had been the transplanted heart that saved detective-hero's life.

In other words, it's a poorly written, poorly directed, slightly more macabre version of Return to Me.

But it's convoluted, non-sense-making movies like Fear Chamber (the title is never referenced in the movie, and its location is unclear; is the "fear chamber" the weird warehouse space the killer uses to kill victims, even though his locations appear to change? Or is it the janitor's closet where the 3 members of the LAPD meet?) that make The Human Centipede stand out. And for that, I suppose we must thank those movies that fail in their badness even to become fun camp films.

But in general, torture films do need an apologetic, even if I can argue successfully that The Human Centipede is a "good" version of such a genre. And the arguments in favor of the moral possibility of torture films (or the possibility of torture films being moral) are on about as wide a spread as the quality of the films themselves.

The best argument I've read so far, and the one that echoed in my brain as I looked over the Blockbuster's selection last night, finally to settle on the Centipede, is that great horror films -- particularly ones featuring sadistic torture scenes -- recognize, exploit, and make the viewer aware of the deep ambivalence in the human soul. While we feel the terror and pain of the victim, we are also often led (and Human Centipede is no exception in this; it dwells at length on the doctor's maniacal smiles and at times almost orgasmic pleasure with his creation, and also on the signs of his loneliness) to feel the sadistic pleasure of torture with the torturer.

This is disturbing. But it's supposed to be disturbing, and for me, that's the key. You're supposed to be disturbed by horror films.

People who don't like being disturbed, or perhaps more importantly people who aren't disturbed (but are instead turned on or made curious by these movies), probably shouldn't be watching horror films.

The most convoluted argument I've read in favor of allowing for torture films brought in the question of pornography (apparently relevant since these movies are often referred to as "torture porn"), comparing arguments about the suggestiveness of pornography (i.e., feminist argument that seeing women as objects in magazines will cause viewers to want to treat women the same way in real life) to supposed arguments about the suggestiveness of torture movies (i.e., you see someone pulling out another person's teeth in the movie and think "hey, that might be fun").

The author of that essay then spent a few sentences "debunking" the arguments against pornography, then attempted to apply the same logic to torture films, despite the fact that a few sentences don't suffice to redeem all porn from the arguments listed, and that if we agree that torture films aren't pornography, then the correlation in arguments is moot to begin with.

It was like Fear Chamber all over again; because I'm familiar with the genre, I can kind of see what he was trying to do, but it was clearly unsuccessful.

So if you like theorizing about, or pointing out the flaws in, badly made torture films and arguments about them, see The Fear Chamber and then read the third essay's final page in The Philosophy of Horror.

If, on the other hand, you like a good, well-founded disturbance now and then, but you want to feel okay about it, read the first essay in Philosophy of Horror and then catch a showing of The Human Centipede.

I can't say you won't regret it, but I can say that I didn't.

PSA: My computer is probably going slow because it's busy spamming you.

Fair warning -- don't open any emails from me that don't have a subject line. Anyone who's been reading my blog for any length of time at all should know intuitively that I can't resist putting in a subject line, and William J. Vader II has been hijacked by the viruses before, and made to do their bidding.

It's partly probably because I don't have the internets at home, and am forced to use public wireless at local libraries, that I've gotten this virus. (Or, alternately, it could be from opening non-subjected emails sent to me before this.)

I wish I could say it seemed like William was being made to spam against his will, but William II has always been a recalcitrant, reluctant-to-please machine, and it's more likely he's gleefully sending out email after email for "heath rx" or whatever Viagra is calling itself online these days, remorselessly.

Then again, maybe he's not that smart. I mean, this is a machine that has believed for several months that he has absolutely no audio output, when in reality he is even supposedly equipped with a DVD-R burner. Not that he's ever burned anything successfully for me onto a DVD, mind you. Just that he was supposed to be able to.

So be warned...and now be super-warned. Because William J. II is either stupid, or now he's really, really mad.