Arts This Weekend at the Movies
posted by on May 4 at 15:29 PM
The news:
Spider-Man 3 sux, but is still set to rake in cash.
The Guardian on misogyny in torture porn and Jodie Foster jonesing to play Leni Riefenstahl.
Tribeca handed out a bunch of awards; the only film I can presently confirm will play Seattle is NY Loves Film winner A Walk into the Sea, a doc about a Factory collaborator and lover of Andy Warhol’s. It’s in the Alternate Cinema lineup at SIFF, scheduled for Sat May 26 at 6:30 pm and Sun May 27 at 9:15 pm. And it’s a good one.
The SIFF schedule will be released next Thursday, May 10 (official site); tickets are available to the general public starting May 13. So far, they’ve announced a spotlight on Anthony Hopkins, who’ll touch down in Seattle for a spell—his recent experimental film Slipstream (called “a leap into stunning self-indulgence” by Variety) is the news hook.
Opening today:
Bradley Steinbacher reviews Spider-Man 3. Oh, Raimi. What were you thinking?
Crotchety old Francis Veber spreads on a thin layer of French farce in The Valet. Andrew Wright weighs in.
In On Screen this week: Stupid, stupid terrorism thriller Civic Duty (the crawl at the bottom of the cable news shows goes BACKWARD, for fuck’s sake), mopey cyclist biopic The Flying Scotsman (the velodrome sure is exciting, but can we have fewer shots of grown men weeping in corners, please?), and the whiskey-soaked pirate adventure Disappearances (“makes up for its small-budget, straight-to-video feel with an amateur charm,” says Brendan Kiley).
Recommended week-long runs: bizarre incest freakout Madeinusa at Grand Illusion, Vancouver-shot Doug Coupland comedy Everything’s Gone Green at the Varsity, and the spectacular Mexico City doc In the Pit at the Varsity, about the construction of a massive elevated freeway (especially recommended for all the transportation geeks who hang out on this here Slog) and the wry, romantic, funny, macho, and/or wife-beating workers who give away years of their lives to see it built. Plus: Silent Movie Monday (Harold Lloyd!) at the Paramount, 16mm Magnificent Ambersons for those of you cinema purists who wanna have your celluloid and eat pizza too at Central Cinema, and the microcinema showcase Independent Exposure, also at Central Cinema.
I could barely read that whole Guardian article. I kind of want to throw up.
And I enjoy Tarentino quite a lot. Pulp Fiction is one of my favorite movies.
But I just... vaginas and knives are the single most upsetting image you can put in someone's mind. I don't care if it's fucking ironic. Seriously.
Though I completely agree with the Guardian's repulsion of "torture porn" I think that there are much better examples of the genre than Grindhouse, which falls far short as torture porn.
I am far more disgusted by the The Hills Have Eyes films (and even more so the remakes) where everywoman in these films are raped, tortured, and if they are lucky, killed.
The article also fails to mention the benchmark for the torture porn genre, "Blood Sucking Freaks."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077247/quotes
Oh come on! The knife in the vagina image is so obviously played for laughs in the actual "preview"...Roth knows how over the top it is. That's what makes it funny. The women in the audience were laughing more than the men when I saw it.
Though I admit, there were comparatively few women in the audience.
I cannot see how a knife in your vagina can be funny, ever. Or being shot in the vagina. Or being anally raped with a knife. I'm sorry. I laugh at a lot of stuff, a lot of sick stuff, a lot of violent stuff, but I just cannot laugh at that. Actually, I'm not sorry at all. Not when just thinking about it makes my physically sick.
And it's not over the fucking top. It actually happens in the world. I have seen really photographs of REAL women who have been tortured and had shit like knives and broken bottles and bayonets shoved up their vaginas. After you see that, those images can never be "over the top" or "ironic". Jesus Christ. Men laughing at that is like white people using the N word. It's just not fucking allowed or you are a huge asshole.
I also think the author of the Guardian article made a mistake in centering her argument around Grindhouse. Roth's films (and also his trailer in Grindhouse, which I found disgusting) are pretty much indefensible, but both "Planet Terror" and "Death Proof" have enough wit and intelligence to avoid the simple misogyny that she attributes to them. Their gender polticis certainly aren't perfect, but both Rodriguez and Tarantino go out of their way to make sure that the women in these movies come off better than the men in the end. The attempted rape scene in "Planet Terror" is meant to be an "ironic" conflation of sex and violence, but anybody who's seen the movie knows that it's not a woman's victimization that we end up seeing and enjoying in the end. The article also selectively omits the second half of "Death Proof" which is undeniably female-positive. There should be some serious discussion of the rise in torture porn, but Grindhouse is not the movie to center it around.
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