Ti West’s The House of the Devil finds its sweet spot in the paranoid shadow of misdirection, so it’s best not to reveal much of the plot beyond what you’ll know from watching the trailer: it’s the 80s, and a sleepy college town is obsessed with an impeding eclipse, and a young, pretty co-ed in desperate need of some quick cash takes a mysterious babysitting job in a big, secluded manse, for a creepy couple who don’t actually have a kid. What actually happens is less important than what West teases could happen. Duality is the order of the day: there are two houses that could potentially be devilish, two girls — serious brunette Sam (Jocelin Donahue) and the more playful blonde Megan (Greta Gerwig) –– at the mercy of two men (Tom Noonan and AJ Bowen), each with two evident personalities. The final punchline even sets up a new twosome whose story could easily fuel a second film.
It would be easy to peg Devil as a superficial exercise in vintage pastiche –– the film non-ironically borrows the look and feel of the horror produced in the era in which it’s set — but West’s more impressive nod at classic horror is his mastery of misdirection. I was recently asked to make a list of my favorite horror films of all time, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to readers of this blog that all five films I chose were made before 1980, and three of them before 1950. If horror films weren’t unequivocably better before gore and graphic violence and were standard practices available to makers of mainstream scary films, a lot of the Code-restricted frighteners that have survived to become classics (cult or otherwise) are richer in subtext, more evocative of base human fears, and more effectively politically and/or philosophically provocative. In other words, in the classic horror and sci-fi films that I love, there tends to be more than one thing going on: there’s what we see, there’s what we don’t see but imagine or infer is also happening, and there’s what, as a product of the clash between the actual visible evidence and what our psyches produce as an extension or embroidery on what we see, there’s what we leave believing it all really means.
Torture pornographer Eli Roth is in talks “a baseball bat-swinging Nazi hunter” in Quentin Tarantino’s The Inglorious Bastards. Tarantino is apparently still talking to Brad Pitt about playing the lead role in the film, but nothing has been finalized.
Pineapple Express and the sequel to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsare opening today because their distributors want to “get a jump on a weekend full of Olympics coverage, which shifts into high gear Friday with the Opening Ceremony.” The “high end of expectations” would have David Gordon Green’s stoner comedy beating Batman at the box office. Emphasis on the “high.”
A theoretical SAG work stoppage be damned, Ang Lee will begin shootingTaking Woodstock this month, his ensemble film about the “aspiring interior designer” who offered up his parents hotel as the concert’s base of operation. Meanwhile, a new 40th anniversary Woodstock DVD is in the works, with at least an hour of concert footage added.
Prada has commissioned nine short films inspired by Prada, which Prada will then have edited into a feature about Prada, for viewing on the Prada website.
It happens eventually to every filmmaker and actor associated with R-rated movies*, and now Eli Roth, the “torture porn auteur” who gave us Hostel and Hostel II, is making the transition to family-friendly fare — in order to make the kids happy, of course.
No, it has nothing to do with the money, which comes more easily with younger-targeted, lower-rated releases (especially when your last movie disappoints). It has to do with the realization that kids don’t have enough movies made for them, and they’d apparently like to see what Eli Roth’s talent is like. Only, up until now, they haven’t been allowed. As Roth defends the move:
“Everyone I know has been saying ‘When are you gonna do a movie my kids can see?’ And finally, I’m gonna make a movie that 13-year-old kids can see.”
I’m a bit late in posting this awesome video featuring Uwe Boll responding to the online petition against him, which I argued against last week. But since a new pro-Boll petition has shown up online, I’m glad to be posting it late rather than having to bring you daily coverage of the most hated filmmaker in the world. Even if each update is more hilarious than the last.
Boll himself called for the second petition, which he seems sure will have just as much chance of being signed by a million people. The self-proclaimed “only fucking genius in the business” may need to wait awhile, though, as the number of current anti-Boll signatures is nearly 200,000 while the number of pro-Bollers is only at 4. The issue may be that none of us have yet seen Boll’s new film, Postal, which he says is “way better than all that social-critic George Clooney bullshit that you get every fucking weekend.”
If you have a recent picture of yourself in a costume and can make the appropriate value judgements about John Carpenter flicks, you could attend Harry Knowles’ 24-hour film festival.
Film theorist Rudolf Arnheim died, but commenter Marco didn’t have anything to do with it.
You can download a free issue of Film Quarterly that includes out takes from the script of Mark Rappaport’s From The Journals of Jean Seberg. I read them on the subway and they were awesome.
Think Tyler Perry’s a hack and Judd Apatow’s a genius? Armond White says that’s because you’re white.
On FilmCouch: Paul and Kevin mull over Mike Mills’ depression in Japan doc Does Your Soul Have A Cold? and finally got around to seeing The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — no thanks to Warner Brothers. And Karina tries to explain why a four hour Tom Petty documentary directed by Peter Bogdanovich makes perfect sense.
On my very first day as a SpoutBlogger, I wrote about a whiny blog post on MySpace by Eli Roth, in which the Hostel auteur blamed both film critics and piracy for the relative failure of Hostel 2, and ultimately declared that he was taking a year off from filmmaking. But don’t worry, he was just joshing! His next project already has an August 2008 release date.
Trailer Trash, according to an email sent by Roth to Bloody-Disgusting, will be a comedy consisting entirely of spoofy movie trailers. Roth says the project is “inspired” by the making ofThanksgiving, his MPAA-baiting contribution to Grindhouse, which Roth describes as “the most fun I’ve ever had filming anything.”
You can watch Thanksgiving above. Keep in mind, it’s not safe for work. Or, like, anywhere.
Last night I was flipping channels, and I came across a segment on my local Fox affiliate’s 10:00 news that had Michael Moore answering questions sent in by viewers. Most of these questions reflected the slant that you’d expect from the Fox News audience–my favorite: “Why do you hate America so much? Why don’t you go live in a country that you love, like Cuba, or Iran?–but Moore managed to deflect the criticism professionally (at least, he made it through the segment without cussing). The closest thing to a supportive question came from a viewer who wanted to know if the director thought that Sicko had been leaked onto the internet by insurance company operatives in order to sabotage the film’s commercial release. Moore basically responded, “Yes, that’s exactly what I think,” and then sort of backtracked and admitted that piracy is a major problem for the whole industry, blah blah blah.
As I said yesterday, I think Moore is a genius at turning a profit by painting himself as a victim, so watching the segment last night, I just figured he was taking an opening to do what he does best, and left it at that. But then this morning, I came across this post at Hollywood Elsewhere, wherein Jeffrey Wells presents a nugget of (debatably solid) evidence to support the sabotage theory:
A line from a recent news story about the YouTube offering of Sicko wasn’t used for obvious reasons, but the reporter passed it along. “While the motivation of the leaker(s) remains unclear,” it read, “one full copy of Sicko uploaded to a pirate website includes ’suckourdicks’ in the file name.” Does that suggest anything to anyone? “Suck our dicks” as in “fuck you, Moore!!…and we hope this hurts as a kind of payback for stretching the truth and flim-flamming in order to push your cause in Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11“…or words to that effect
This isn’t the most airtight argument I’ve ever seen, but it’s interesting that this story is floating around the very same week that Eli Roth encourages his fans to use filesharing to combat Hostel 2 piracy. In a way, the actual motives behind the Sicko leak don’t really matter–the idea that some entity is trying to enact revenge on Moore via piracy will now become part of the lore of the film. The only question is whether or not Moore can use it to his advantage.
Above: A bizarre clip in which perennial possible presidential candidate Fred Thompson implies that Michael Moore belongs in a mental institution.
I should say upfront that I’m strangely ambivalent when it comes to Hostel mastermind Eli Roth. There’s a kind of sick humor baked into his baroque, balls-out extended death sequences, that, as a Dario Argento fan, I appreciate, but like most modern horror movies, sitting through the bad dialogue and endless setup that threads together the torture scenes is, actually, torture. On the other hand, I kind of get a kick out of Roth’s pretentions about the socio-political allegorical value of his movies. There’s something about the petulance of a horror movie director favorably comparing himself to Dick Cheney that I can’t resist.
That said, is it just me, or does this whiny, panicky, super-dramatic blog post on Roth’s MySpace page kind of read like those coked-up interviews Dirk Diggler gave Amber Waves for her documentary in Boogie Nights? It’s like the beleaguered filmmaker’s equivalent of the ill-advised drunk dial.
“All over the map” would be an appropriate phrase to use here, if there were a map in the world big enough to encompass all of Eli Roth’s paranoia. The ostensible purpose of the post is for Roth to announce that he’s taking some time off from filmmaking, but in attempting to explain that decision, he manages to cast blame on every conceivable outside force for therelative failure of Hostel 2. Piracy, he says, “is really hurting us, especially internationally.” He then jumps to blame film critics (who aren’t usually allowed to see allegedly “critic proof” films like this before they’re released) for allegedly reviewing the pirated workprint of the film instead of the completed version. Which critics did that? Roth “wouldn’t dignify them by mentioning them by name,” but he’s going to make damn sure they’ll lose all legal access to his films (which doesn’t seem like much of a threat, since these critics would apparently rather watch a pirated workprint than go to a press screening anyway). My favorite part is when Roth tells his fans they can help fight piracy with … piracy? “Flood file sharing services with fake Hostel II downloads just so no one can ever actually get the movie,” he declares.
A rant like this is obviously candy for for haters. Nikki Finke, one of the most vocal opponents of the so-called “torture porn” genre, ate it up. “Notice how it doesn’t even enter his mind that moviegoers rejected his twisted content of torture porn,” Finke sniped. “Maybe this year off will help Eli get a clue.” Roth is obviously playing passive-aggressive, putting himself out there as a victim so that his fans will rally around and beg him to make another movie. It’s hard to imagine a successful film director actual being so immature that they would not see how such a tactic would be doomed to backfire.
What’s the real problem with Hostel 2? Did everyone who really wanted to see it really watch it online before it opened? Could it just be that the movie industry is cyclical, and the torture porn cycle is simply dying its natural, inevitable death? For what it’s worth, the Horror Movies 101 group here at Spout hasn’t really shown much interest in the Hostel films. Whether or not you’re a Roth fan, does such an, um, impassioned message from a filmmaker make you any more or less likely to support their work?
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Torture pornographer Eli Roth is in talks “a baseball bat-swinging Nazi hunter” in Quentin Tarantino’s The Inglorious Bastards. Tarantino is apparently still talking to Brad Pitt about playing the lead role in the film, but nothing has been finalized.
