JUNKFILM

Ah, the life of a recluse.  Saturday in the Chicago-land area was down fall central.  We had more rain here than most places have good food.  With the constant flooding of streets, we had decided to stay in on this day after we had drove out to Chicago for a freelance photoshop gig.  Over the past 2 weeks my Netflix copies have been building up so we decided to have a go at the stack of DVDs before us.

We first tried the new-to-us show, The Riches, and immediatly fell in love with it.  The script is well designed and the acting far above expectations.  Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver are remarkable actors.  And this show has something different when it comes to child actors….kids who can act.  Very good watch…but I will not review the entire show until I have watched one complete season.  So far, it’s only been 3 episodes, so we’re a ways off.

Feel in love with another cable show called Flight of the Conchords. If you have yet to see this you are doing yourself a disservice.  It’s brilliant funny.  It’s not the kind of funny you just walk away from and come back and do laundry to like Seinfeld.  I ahte Seinfeld.  With a fucking passion.  Flight is corny at parts but it’s the kind of corny that only drags your laugh deeper.  It’s brilliant, and I want to use that word lightly since this is deserving of it.  Highly recommend this one to any one who enjoys a good laugh and asmart musical accompanying behind it.  The songs the show bursts into are funny and clever, but damn catchy at the same time.  I want to find a CD of the songs.

And on to the rest of the night…documentaries…..

The first doc of the evening was “Otaku Unite!”    A much anticipated doc for me since I have been waiting quite a while to see a doc about anime culture and the fanatics behind it called otaku.  The doc seems like something that would be a great watch and even a challenging event, but it often fails where it should jump up and question things.  I don’t want to delve too far into this but I have to say I was much less interested in the actual people than  was with picking part problems with the film itself.  And when you are documenting people and their views, and they concerns, and their world, those people are supposed to draw us in, visually, viserally, and vividly.  Unfortunately, the films lacks any real substance besides a tutorial on the history of anime and the consumer base it’s produced.

I really wanted to like this, as I used to be one of these fans.  I used to go to the anime cons and dress up, buy stupid amounts of crap to feel like I was a real fan.  I wanted to like this because I wanted to see a view of the world I had once been a part of and overtly interested in.  The film makes an argument that these are normal people but instantly shows a negative side, unintentionally, by showing people who are not good communicators and possible bad hygene.  I know, this comes with the world you enter.  You can’t do a comic book convention doc and not show the horror side of it all.  But this isn’t my argument.  The people they interview have to be engaging.  We have to either LOVE them or simply HATE them.  If we are interested in what they are saying, we find affection toward them.  Not physical of course, but the kind you feel when you can’t look away because it’s so engaging to listen to.

This brings us to the next doc of the evening.

“Snuff: A Documentary about Killing on Film” was much less and much more than I was expecting.  I was a bit let down with the low numbers of faux snuff films they decided to talk about and show in the course of the film.  I was hoping for more exposure and detail on the faux snuff world (films like: “August Underground” and it’s 2 sequels, “Guinnie Pig Experiments”, “Cannibal Ferox”, and more).  They did touch on films like “Snuff”, “Cannibal Holocaust”, they showed a scene from GPE but never talked about it and how thousands of people really thought it was a snuff film.  Even Charlie Sheen called the FBI thinking it was real.

The film goes into discussions about what is a snuff film from a pretty low amount of interviewees.  The interviewees consisted of a film maker, a film producer, an ex cop, an ex FBI agent, a video store clerk, a Communication teacher, and a film enthusist.  Ironically, the film enthusist was the most engaging of the bunch.  The best stories came from the film producer, who was behind the creation of the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

The major argument of the film was “is snuff a real thing?” While they argue about the “Faces of Death” series and other similar things including news footage, they talk about war videos and murders caught on tape, the answer was never talked about if snuff was real until the very end, told through a pretty sickening story.  Some of the interviewees were quite dull to listen to, and the only real nausiating part of the doc was either the story at the end or the sample from “Cannibal Holocaust” where an animal is brutally murdered on film.

There was a section that caught my interest but the delving into the subject was nil and void.  They discussed the backlash of the 1974 film, “Snuff.”  They talked about how people were up in arms about the controversy and horror and sickness of the film while many of these people thought it was completely real.  The movie portrays a scene in a film being shot by a film crew where a girls gets stabbed.  The film crew cuts and the actress and a crewman  start getting hot for each other.  She notices the camera is still running and then the crewman grabs a knife and stabs her in the shoulder, very slowly.  I HIGHLY suggest anyone try and watch this scene.  Unfortunately, I can’t find a YouTube video of this scene, I keep finding Slipknot, Gene McDaniels, and Buddy Knox (metal and jazz…that’s hardcore snuff to be sure).  But the scene is so painfully fake that any nonfilm person can see that her body is inside the bed she is being cut on, and the entrails being pulled out are sadly fake as well.  It looks fake as shit.  I would have liked to have seen interviewees of both sides, horror fans who watched this in the theaters and the picket people who thought it was real.  But no, we got a video store clerk.

Hm….

Honestly, it was an interesting watch and an informative view, but it felt much more like a “part 1 of a 7 part series.”  It just touched on too little for me.

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And your moment of Zen comes today from my friend Tor….

Benny Lava and the Bollywood translation.

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