NERRRRRRRRRD! vol. 41

Start talking, Fuck-Knuckle: way too many thoughts revolving around Kick-Ass 2.

 

Patrolling on the brick wall that separates Spider-Man’s NYC and Hobo with a Shotgun’s Scumtown is Kick-Ass 2, a super-hero film for the midnight movie faithful, a Tromaville splatter-comedy revenge epic with A-List backing, the Tick vs. Maniac Cop, the Super-Friends as re-imagined by the Murder Junkies, playing make believe with spastics and sociopaths…. Hell, just call it one cocksucker of a good time at the movies. Remember having those? Before every asbestos-wheezing gasbag would spoil your fun via lazily ranting through a keyboard, not so much angry because the entertainment was less-than-stellar as they are infuriated that they had to leave the house for a few hours and be around people (previous sentence only done with the faintest hint of self mockery… ok, a lot of it)?  or before this new wave of outrage began punctuating the expression of opinion? I’d say its level has reached parodic, but the self-righteous indignation is so un-entertainingly callow that it surpasses spoof and glides comfortably into cryptofacist hate-speech. It’s why you see insufferable blog posts bemoaning the existence of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”, a benign nudie-cutie charmer, densely accusing the song and its accompanying video of being recruitment tools for misogynistic objectification, causally promoting the thriving continuity of a pop culture rape machine through a wink-wink-nudge-nudge-say-no-more mock-dismissal of such a system’s existence. 

   

It really shouldn’t surprise me at this point, but I’m still perplexed that here we are, 13 years deep into a new millennium, and we still have people fainting from appall when faced with violence or sex being presented in a creative environment. I wonder if its just an opportunity for certain types to condescend to supposed moral sensitivities, deluding themselves into the idea that they’re less prone to reptilian impulses than those of us who dare to find value in what the popular conscious has deemed objectionable, judging a work that is deliberate in its unpleasantness for achieving its goal. They call its acts/message “pointless”, when really it’s their tangential disgust that’s pointless, because while not entirely without provocation, it’s barren of interpersonal substance beyond the emotional misnomer that being outraged is synonymous with being humane, that they’ve achieved some sort of ultra-enlightenment that grants them the wisdom and the strength to rise above their baser instincts. 

Make no mistake; KA2 is a violent film, more than equal to its predecessor, yet still more than a few pints shy of the blood-drenched anti-chicanery present in its four-color counterpart. Don’t let the critics fool you, if you’ve read the comic, you know how much more vicious it could have been. And for the rest, trust me, you have seen A LOT worse. Other than that and a few other details, a generous helping of the comic has made it to the film, with some further character-play and breezy comedy peppered in to keep the affair a charming thrift shop version of the Masters of Evil destroying the Avengers’ mansion rather than an Infinity Gauntlet Red Wedding. 

Playing off of the Dark Knight theory of escalation, KA2 ramps up the menace a few hundred notches, with armies of people in funny costumes with silly names making the world all their own. It’s the sort of group of heroes vs. conglomerate of villains war story that never not works in comics, yet somehow never seems to make it to the cinematic adaptations. How much cooler would Avengers had been if instead of fighting non-descript alien invaders, the team had fought an equal-to-greater alliance of their greatest adversaries? All that history, personality, and character definition as each of them faced off against their opposite number? Where the “big two” slack, KA2 runs full throttle into the battle of good vs. evil, making it matter. It also doesn’t forget about the fundamental absurdity of masked vigilantes/costumed villains or the ruthless surrealism of their hyper-dramatic clashes. It short, it’s not all grimly serious and gritty business here. While the chaos of the KA universe (comic and film) is brutal and not without consequence, it follows that with a message of “yeah, it’s not always gonna be a slap fight with a bad-guy wrestler, but if we’re gonna do this, then we’re gonna do it all, because that’s the only way our cause will truly mean anything… so stop your fucking whining and suit up”. And isn’t that really what being a super-hero is about? 

Perhaps this is no better illustrated than in the character of Hit-Girl, the closest thing the KA universe has to a conscious. The first act of the film, drawing from the Hit-Girl micro-series, makes the same point as its source material without beating it into your head that its making that point; that Mindy McCready (wondrously embodied by Chloe Grace Moretz) is everything not only a comic book hero (male or female, adult or child) should be, but at her essence, her center, she is perhaps the most positive role model (again, not constrained to gender) to come along in the medium in a long time. Yes, she kills people. Yes, she has a potty mouth. Yes, she wouldn’t have voted for President Obama (had she been voting age), but she is also determined, resilient, loyal, intelligent, fully capable of taking care of herself, and knows exactly who she is and what she’s about. Also, unlike some other lady heroes (some of whom appear in this film); her costume is functional rather than revealingly sexualized…. Not that there’s anything wrong with the latter AMIRITEDURHUR. Anyway, even when the customs of tween hierarchy dictate to girls that they’re supposed to value overpriced accessories, glib vapidness, and their appeal/dependence on boys as a form of self-validation, Mindy McCready understands that it’s more important to pay attention the your surroundings, to have a plan, and that, borrowing a line from Frank Millers the Dark Knight Returns, the world will only make sense when you force it to do so. Now, I’m suggesting that the total of one’s morals be taken entirely from comic books down to minutia (don’t kill people or get behind cowboy conservatives who haven’t really fought a day in their lives), but the basic essence of that ideological structure can act as a skeleton for your own moral architecture…. But then again, the series also shows you how fucked-up and dangerous it is to get your morals from comic books, creating a dystopic atmosphere of reckless endangerment with an ouroboros of payback; a devour/defecate clockwork orgy where the battle is owed more to callous routine than sympathetic instigation… but let’s chill for a minute here.   

That a film this colorfully offbeat and less-than-gun-shy found itself a wide release in 2013 is a success all its own. we’re in a time right now where it seems like a work that’s daringly eccentric or even marginally transgressive struggles to make a 2 day go of it at some run-down art theater on the outskirts of civilization before being dumped unceremoniously onto various home viewing outlets, because multiplexes are more preoccupied with showcasing struggling, bloated turkeys like the Lone Ranger than providing a decent venue for something like Only God Forgives, a film that might not fit the textbook definition of “crowd pleaser”, but no doubt packs a more memorable, long lasting punch than Johnny Depp playing Powderface Funnyhat for the 857^th go-round.

I can’t believe this needs to be said, but KA2 is not what’s wrong with films, let alone society. It’s a satire, one that works as a candy colored exaggeration of real world violence and as a sobering reality check for cartoon violence. If choreographed carnage, ambiguous shifts in morality, and playful profanity will only further bruise your tenderized soul, take in a screening of the Butler instead. There you can weep along with the weep-along, placate your white-guilt, assure yourself that everything is better now, and rock your gentle self to sleep as a compilation of whale songs hums at low volume, all the while whispering “this too will pass” into the tummy of your stuffed spirit animal. If your comic habits revolve around the latest Green Lantern x-over event, if your viewing habits are exclusively dependent upon the Walt Disney Fantasy Film Monopoly, than KA was never meant for you. If you love films, comics, and films based on comics, but have grown tired of all their overwrought symbolism, hackish video game conflicts, murky humanism, and assembly-line-formulaic structure, than consider KA2 your consolation prize for trudging through the Wolverines, the Men of Steel, and any other high-calorie-no-nutrition mid-octane sludge begging for your entertainment dollar this (or any) summer. It fucking delivers what it fucking promises.  

bring on Kick-Ass 3.

It's a Funny World We Live In vol. 19

Chinese Eat Baby Soup For Sex

It's a Funny World we Live In vol. 18

Christian cannibal: Puppeteer arrested with kiddie porn; planned to abduct and eat child 

 “I imagine him wiggling and then going still.”

We are the Sprocket Holes vol. 206

PACIFIC RIM and the golden age of Action Figure Cinema.

what is Action Figure cinema, you ask?

Films that successfully recreate the blissfully apocalyptic landscape of a young boy’s imagination as he strings together a weekend afternoon narrative drawing in any and all playthings at his disposal, displaying an infectious carelessness with regards to their intended relation to one another. Robocop and Swamp Thing will ride dragons to take on the Shredder’s army of Inhumanoids for the fate of Thundara… that sort of toy chest Mad Lib opens up an expansively rich universe, so creatively pregnant and removed from predictability, which acts as the germ for the increasing handfuls of entertainment on the high and low ends of the creative spectrum. MANBORG, FRANKENSTEIN’S ARMY, the comic/upcoming animated series AXE COP; Most of these have snugly been embraced by cult fans across the globe, but Guilermo Del Toro’s PACIFIC RIM is the first to truly capture this aesthetic vastness on a near-incalculably large scale. 

The story is simple: a transdimensional rift in the pacific ocean enables Kaiju (a Japanese term meaning “strange beast”) to enter our world, where they level pretty much anything in their path. In order to combat the monsters, the nations of the world unite to construct Jaegers; Skyscraper-size Mechs piloted by two via a neurological link. For awhile, the Jaegers are successful, until bigger and deadlier Kaiju make their way to the surface. That’s where the story picks up.

Some have written the film off as a Monsters vs. Robots punchfest with little in the way of story or character. These people either haven’t seen the film, or they haven’t seen the film. All we need to know about each character is established pretty much as soon as we meet them; a Kaiju attack survivor who is seeking vengeance, a Scientist who is also a Kaiju enthusiast, a shady black market dealer of decontaminated Kaiju parts, a retired Jaeger pilot who lost his brother during a fight with a Kaiju… their motivations are clear and consistent, and much of the soul these characters posses is revealed in wordless gestures rather than didactic declarations or convoluted symbolism. The fights are cool as cool can cool, but there is no “Awwwww YEAH!” posturing, nor any lunkhead one-liners; it’s a big fucking thing doing everything in its power to stop another big fucking thing. There is much shown of both the construction of the Jaegers and the biology of the Kaiju, and how they’re both evolving to combat their respective menace, and you can feel the weight of every touchdown. There in lies the multiplying genius of Del Toro’s work; whether it’s probing art-horror like THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE or freeplay escapisim like PACIFIC RIM; a rich surface doesn’t conceal depth, it informs it, spawning an intricate universe where nothing is superfluous. 

Where the GI JOE and TRANSFORMERS adaptations were aggressively tepid and contemptuously joyless, PACIFIC RIM is bewitchingly graceful and undeniably welcoming; a labor of love so unconditional it crosses over into pop-artful psychedelia, a relieving antidote to the bleakly explosive bombardment of self-glowering post 9-11 fear-bait that has regretfully become the primary driving force behind many contemporary blockbusters, where thrill seeking escapists are made to feel guilty by the peddlers of their fix. No such hypocrisy can be found in PACIFIC RIM. No jingoistic pandering, no bad jokes about Kaiju genitals (though their excrement is mentioned in passing, it is done in such a brief way that it doesn’t feel like forced gross-out humor), the Kaiju and the Jaegers simultaneously invoke fear and awe, commanding our respect and attention. 

As for the unfortunately inevitable “haters”, well if you find anything offensive about this film, you must have been molested with a Godzilla doll while Ultraman watched or something. To find fault in PACIFIC RIM is like lamenting a 15 minute eye contact heavy ass-in-the-air hummer from Amber Heard because the long licking/whispery dirty talk combo between imbibes made you cum too hard. I understand it’s the internet era and we’re supposed to display nothing but contrarian vitriol with regards to anything that might bring forth a modicum of excitement to our otherwise unremarkable routines, but the whole “NERD RAGE” hand is beyond played at this point. i get it; you know everything about everything, posses a labyrinthine wealth of genre knowledge, and should act as a consultant for every single “geek” project under the sun, cause everyone knows you can do it better than the people who spend YEARS of their time, dedication, finances, and passion actualizing the material that has brought them so much emotional satisfaction and spiritual pleasantry. Please, do pick apart the minute flaws in this colossally gorgeous work, because in the end it’s YOUR sneeringly vicious needlessly opinionated blog post people will come to remember and revere, and not the monument to engrossing spectacle that carries with it the strength to unlock our own creative possibilities. 

you're a dick, is what i'm getting at here.

go see this big fucking thing so the other big fucking thing (GROWN UPS 2) doesn't survive.

NERRRRRRRRRRD! vol. 40

 

The Mandarin: 'Iron Man 3' does WHAT to Tony Stark's nemesis? -- SPOILER ANALYSIS

 

really good read on this whole fiasco that has us all in a tizzle.

i'm also sad that we didn't get a racist Asian stereotype with Captain Planet rings, but at least they gave us something, and that it kinda made sense... well comic book sense, but that's better than no sense at all.

i was pissed off at the reveal as i was watching it unfold, but the more i thought about it, the more i became accepting of the change, maybe because they actually put some effort into making it work. much like the fusion of Crimson Dynamo and Whiplash formed Mickey Rourke's Ivan Vanko in the 2nd IM film, 2 sort-of silly characters were fused into a super-villain that was visually impressive and an actual character. i didn't care for Rourke in 2, but still there was something there, and there's something here, too.

the article says it better.

We are the Sprocket Holes vol. 205

R.I.P. Jess Franco

i don't remember exactly when i first saw a Jess Franco film, or even which film of his i did see first. maybe that's because of the way Franco's films play... their movement and language being that of a dream; following it by the narrative (if indeed there is any)is almost beyond fruitless, and after it's over, your reccolection of the events is hazy and jumbled... but certain moments, characters, images are seized by your memory, to be played in a warping loop, whether they are deliberately paced terror, unraveling kink, maniacal surrealism, or all of the above. you don't watch a Franco film for an easy scare or juvenile gorehound kicks. fans of mediocre jock horror, with its charmless direction, boilerplate writing, artless production design, cynical attempts at bland humanism, overbearing exposition that insultingly obvious, and glitchy music video editing that's less a technique than it is a failed style, can just keep their Netflix stream of the Collection and remain ignorant in their dismissals. Franco's films are less exploitative escapism and more unrestrained examinations of the ID's wilding pathologies. a place where Gothic Horror iconography and European Literary Decadence take part in a conjoint filtration of their essence, their shared perversity distilled into a fevered crawl of nightmarish eroticism.

 trailer for FACELESS (embedding disabled cause fuck me, right?)

Blue Underground, Shriek Show, Anchor Bay, and others have many of Franco's films released in gorgeous editions. look for them. fuck streaming.

RIP. 

We are the Sprocket Holes vol. 204

a free-floating look at Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers

though the year is still young, this could be the ballsiest film of 2013. it would've been transgressive enough having the gigging lunatic behind this directing a beach party movie starring Disney Ch. actresses and scored by Skrillex, but i don't think Korine has it in him to do something that isn't strange, and Spring Breakers fits perfectly among his filmography, the glitz being turned into a darkly comic reflection of its self; a long form music video that subtly exposes every sordid amoral detail of the spring break "culture" in a post Girls Gone Wild world, where a new generation informed by Dub-Step, Grand Theft Auto, and Bang Bros take what in the past were fun-loving MTV shenanigans and mutate it into a neon basked blood-orgy that's too nihilistic to be considered lashing out.

none of this is surprising if you've followed the career path of Harmony Korine, who first courted controversy in 1995 with his script for the Larry Clarke directed Kids, showcasing teenage promiscuity in a post-AIDS NYC, then continued in 1997 with a putrid slice of decaying americana known as Gummo, his directorial debut about the day in the life of the bizarre residents of an economically shattered Ohio suburb (also the first film to use violent black metal on the soundtrack), and went even further down into the sinking cellar with Julian Donkey Boy and the afforlinked Trash Humpers. whether you love or loath him, Korine's vision is all his own, and he hasn't really changed his narrative methods or even the traits of his characters for Spring Breakers. they're bored, aloof, sexually uninhibited... they're just way prettier, prefer Britney Spears to Bethlehem, and are in a sunnier locale.

i don't really feel like examining the film at the moment (i'll check it again on DVD and expand on these thoughts), but i am very happy to see a film that's actually challenging getting a fairly wide release. more later maybe.