The Official Movie Thread

Watched the Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh along with a bunch of other crapfests this weekend. I really liked it. It's a totally atmospheric alone in the haunted house type movie. A guy inherits his dead, angel cult member mothers house. The scares do come from jump scares but fucking goddamnit they are effective ones. The entire movie builds to the scares which is really cool to me. There's only one actor in the entire movie and a sense of unhappiness and later dread throughout. You know shit is going to go down but you don't know when or how and I don't know, I'm gushing I suppose. It's the first horror movie I've liked enough to watch again the next day in quite a while.
 
Other movies
Battledogs - cool idea, awful cgi fest. Basically werewolf virus outbreaks in an airport. Shirt on of werewolves now inhabit the area, military quarantine, etc. could have been awesome with a massive budget but a hundred cgi werewolves just looks ugly.

Alyce Kills - this movie went from boring to genuinely weird to just trying too fucking hard at the end. Highlight - Alyce rubbing her dead friends tits in the casket at her funeral.

Shadow people - kind of cool I guess. Played on the power of the mind and if you believed something could and would kill you, would it?
 
sevag00 said:
^Yes. Because you have a severe obsession with superhero movies.
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can we all at least agree that the Avengers didn't suck nearly as bad as it could have?? seriously, with a different production team, that movie could have easily been the worst movie of the decade
 
Just finished watching A Boy And His Dog (1975) it's a post apocalyptic movie, about a guy who can telepathically communicate with his dog. Very weird movie, and a really fucked up ending. Worth a watch.
 
Watched this the other night. There can be only one...

Highlander_Alternate_Movie_Poster.jpg
 
Just watched Antichrist. And maybe I didn't "get" it and I'm sure its some higher form of art or some shit but I fucking hated every minute of it. I especially didn't need to seem Willem Defoe penetrate someone, an erect penis bashed with a 4x4 chunk then masturbated until it ejaculated blood, or a woman cut off her clitoris with a pair of scissors, In between a shit ton of boringness and strange scenes with animals. Chaos reigns? Chaos reigns in my ass after I eat Taco Bell.
 
Krow said:
Just watched Antichrist. And maybe I didn't "get" it and I'm sure its some higher form of art or some shit but I fucking hated every minute of it. I especially didn't need to seem Willem Defoe penetrate someone, an erect penis bashed with a 4x4 chunk then masturbated until it ejaculated blood, or a woman cut off her clitoris with a pair of scissors, In between a shit ton of boringness and strange scenes with animals. Chaos reigns? Chaos reigns in my ass after I eat Taco Bell.
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Analysis by Nina Power:

The blanked-out faces of not only the other funeral-goers, but also of the massed women at the end, indicate that this is a story whose explicit focus is indeed the unhappy bourgeois couple and its miseries. After the abrupt death of Nic, the only other substantial characters are the animals, with perhaps the tree and cabin playing minor supporting roles. The Polaroid of an unhappy-looking she with Nic relegated to the background, and her neglect of Nic in the woodshed even as she follows what she thinks are his plaintive cries, demonstrate that this is a couple so profoundly turned inward that not even their child (or his death) can alter the course of their headlong mutual destruction.

“What are you afraid of?” His question to her, near the beginning of his “treatment” of her, jars. Surely the thing we would expect a young mother to be “most afraid of” has already just happened—the death of her child. Is his therapy so cutting-edge that he simply skips over the small matter of his child’s death (a fact which he seems surprisingly casual about), or is this further evidence of his poor therapeutic technique? His calming exercises seem to worsen his patient’s fears, and he seems unable to accept that what she is truly afraid of lacks an object. This is the Heideggerian definition of Angst—fear is always fear of something, an object or an outcome; Angst is the generalized feeling of not being at home in the world. Antichrist is a film about this deeper kind of anxiety, the kind that makes everything feel wrong: even when the stars align, their pattern resolves nothing. The film’s “Three Beggars,” Pain, Grief, and Despair in their various iterations, are a mythos suited to the malformed gnostic vision of von Trier’s Eden: a world where everything is a kind of abomination. If she is ultimately somehow attuned to the evil of this abortion of a universe, then perhaps it might do better to call her a kind of witch, skip over the flat and uninteresting charges of misogyny, and investigate the nature of her unholy powers.

The role of witchcraft in Antichrist should, in part, be understood in a context more complicated than that of Christianity. In some respects, Antichrist is a misleading title, implying a simple reversal of the Christian opposition between good and evil. It is unfortunate for us that our capacity for imagining nature is overdetermined by its depiction in the Bible: Adam gets to name the animals, Noah gets to pick them up in pairs, making sure to have more of the “good” ones than the creeping (and creepy) ones. But the disturbing hybrids of Antichrist resist easy description, reminding us more of Shakespeare’s dark litany of disturbed animals (Macbeth’s horses, “turn’d wild in nature,” start to eat each other). The use of contemporary techniques for getting the fox to speak, and the computer-game-like dream sequences which she conjures up and he stumbles through are the formal equivalent of the animal wrongnesses that Antichrist depicts. This is not a straightforwardly evil universe, but it is a world out of joint, a world which one god or other started but gave up on, perhaps having given language and insight to all the wrong animals. Chaos reigns.

If nature is itself unnatural, incomplete, why bother trying to give it a meaning? The “dissertation” she works on, nothing more than a teenage scrapbook of hacked-out woodcuts and increasingly incomprehensible scrawls, leads her only back to herself, the “Me” at the top of the pyramid of fear, a narcissism so pronounced that even her own child can be accused of neglecting her (“Nic wasn’t there for me either”). Crippling his feet and attaching a lathe to her partner’s leg seem to be the only way she can keep the men around her from leaving. Not unlike Kathy Bates’s character in Misery, she literally arrests and creates the narrative which binds men to her. But she appears to misjudge the extent of her powers: it is she who is in control of the landscape, who can “just turn green,” who understands what the acorns are up to. Perhaps it is she who better performs his awful therapy-speak phrase “what the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve,” which is quite possibly why, in the end, he has to burn her.

But what kind of body are we talking about? In the post-psychoanalytic age, Freud might be dead, as she suggests at one point, and yet our language is nevertheless shot through with his words, and no body is fully “natural.” Nic, a mere toddler, performs a spectacular and speedy fusion of the primal scene and Oedipal misery in his early leap from the window, his ghostly figure in the snow making a mockery of any life force that protects the young. Grief may be a “natural, healthy emotion” as he suggests, but the really complicated affect here is anxiety: the symmetrical scenes of the back of her head, the way her pulse turns from a physiological reaction to grief to a vital force altogether more sinister in nature—if she is “false” in “teeth, hair, and eyes” (among other things) it is because beneath this conventionally attractive façade something much more primal lives, like the Dantesque hands and bodies lying in sexualized sympathy with the roots of trees.

There is darkness under cover of beauty, there is murk in the midst of hygiene: the roots of the plant dirtying the water in the tidy hospital, the bloody crow in the quiet of the foxhole. If she can change semen into blood (albeit with the help of a handy block of wood), does this mean that transubstantiation is, pace Catholicism, far more common than we think? After all, sexual organs with the power to bleed are hardly “unnatural” for half of humanity, or at least we’re not supposed to think it odd.

He may get the identifiable animals, but she gets everything that swarms, those things that make the ecology feel unsafe and excessive: the acorns, the burning ground, the ants crawling on the runt chick at the end of her “therapeutic” exercise. Bitten by a host of bugs when he dangles his hand out of the window, his final vision is of an endless stream of women marching ever upward.

The most interesting aspects of the film are not the predictably headline-provoking elements, neither the sex nor the violence. What is perhaps most interesting in some ways is the absence of knowingness, and of recognizable place (though the film is “set” in Seattle, Washington and in their cabin, Eden, they take a train to get there, as Europeans would do, and the bulk of the film was shot in Germany). This is not an urban film, a sex film, a commentary on American foreign policy, or an arch nod to other genres, but it certainly attempts a certain kind of arthouse horror—part of the dismissive huffing and puffing about Antichrist is about the clunkiness of its themes and affects: depression, sexual difference, theology, and human nature. These are not themes well-suited to irony, and there is no post-Buffy wit and patter to temper the abyssal artlessness of the stilted dialogue and the grimness of the self-devoured yet self-replicating nature (“OK, Mr. Nature, what do you want?” / “To hurt you as much as possible”).

But Antichrist is a serious attempt to undermine the unthinking acceptance of modern rationality and the flat utility of technology. The toilet she both bashes her head against and throws her pills down has the seat up, as if, for all his caring liberal humanism, he knows in the end that it’s a man’s world. When he enters the cabin, he casually touches both the lathe and the toolbox, reassured that these are his playthings, not hers. Antichrist is ultimately a film about the other side of these routine assumptions, about the relation between man and nature, women and men, and what happens when these things are horribly, cosmically misaligned.

Von Trier’s fascination with female violence goes back a long way, and his 1987 Medea asks the same question that Antichrist raises: is there anything more frightening than the idea that mothers may wish to commit infanticide? If you flip the film over and listen to what she says (“you shouldn’t have come here, you’re just so damn arrogant, but this may not last, ever thought of that?”), it becomes clear that for all her play-acting at his clumsy therapeutic games, the initial scene had been set in motion by her at least a year before: the teddy bear tied to the helium balloon tantalizing Nic to reach for it, the baby monitor on silent, the reversed shoes, the windows opening twice to let in the acorns and let out her son. Antichrist is a fascinated yet horrified disquisition on the ambiguity of witchcraft, a set of spells and strange incantations not unlike those practiced by the filmmaker himself.

In Malleus Maleficarum, the fifteenth-century treatise on witches, there is a description of the hailstorms alleged to have been caused by two women in Ratisbon, Germany. It is this supposed power to control the weather that she invokes at the base of the tree while finally getting her wish that he hit her: “the sisters from Ratisbon could start a hailstorm.” The couple-form has comes to dominate all relationships, particularly in arthouse films about bourgeois life, but there is also, or was, a sisterhood, and the fear of this female bond (with each other and with an unholy vision of nature) is invoked throughout Antichrist. If a certain kind of order is restored at the end, with the deer looking over Nic’s suicide and overseeing the provision of berries for his father, it is a washed-out image of the world, a version of the Christian mistake which imagines that animals belong to man and that nature will always provide. The swarming masked and gloved women at the end are not touched by this hierarchy of man and beast, however, and plough toward a darker, but perhaps less divided, new Garden of Eden.
 
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