Watching Movies Alone with crumbsroom

Wow. I had this book. Totally forgot it existed.

The most critical step of creating the scar face is, of course, skewing your bowl cut to the side.

By virtue of no one else knowing of its existence, you are now suspect #1 in its disappearance.


Where were you in the summer of 1980? Were you wandering past the pool party on Swirlingleaves Avenue?



Confess!

X


Eat shit.

No way.
I can't believe even you, almost especially you, didn't like it. Even though it's, ya know, you.

It's annoyingly referential to better movies without adding anything. It preys on its audiences gross out factor in ways that I found lazy and maybe even distasteful. It wants me to believe in characters that never rise above bland archetypes, and yet there is this patina of depth that expects me to give weight to their lives.


It's a color by numbers of what I dislike in modern horror. Piggy backing on a film culture that it hardly seem to understand beyond its dumb surface thrills. Let's call this trend the Eli Rothing of the genre.



Unlike West's House of the Devil, which seemed to at least understand the spirit of direct to video 80's horror, this movie just apes a grindhouse vibe (relatively well in its look, horribly in its feel and rhythm) and never goes any further than to mine the worst tropes out of it.



Having a bleached out film stock look to the movie is not enough to win me over.


I think there are seeds of a good movie in there. But West was just deeply uninspired in what he brought to it.

So, still overall positive on House of the Devil?
I know one person, IRL, who thought it was shit, and I wasn't sure if there was some mass re-evaluation of that one I missed. I know most people are down on West's subsequent films, but I've only seen that one and X, and House of the Devil, in isolation, still seemed good to me.

I still think I would like House of the Devil. It felt more inspired by the narrative looseness inherent in a lot of 80s trash horror. And it filled that space with both a reverence for that form and a legitimate sense of menace. Yes, it's just as derivative as X in a lot of ways, but what it steals is a lot more nuanced. He fetishes weird elements of those kind of films.


Unlike this one that lifts ideas from TCM and other Grindhouse films that even the most casual fan would pick up on. Basically all of the stuff we already know those originals do way way better. As a result, there was no fun in how this plays with its influences. And I felt zero threat or menace as everything just felt too busy making recreations of those better movies, so I can't possibly forget how anxious something like TCM makes me. You could smell the sweat and slaughterhouses in that. In this, there is just the smell of Axe body spray and Kraft service hamburgers. It isn't lived in. And it's not nearly good enough to even pass as a decent homage.

I strongly disagree. I felt that West actually cut through all the things you abhor above and did every single one of them but in a way that felt both genuine and organic, like this film wasn't homaging or copycatting the movies that inspired it but grew out of the same Earth. I'm bummed that you felt the other way.

We finally got MKS to like a Ti West film and now this.
SIGH!

(I haven't seen the film in question)

__________________
Captain's Log
My Collection

X is like one of those designer flannel shirts suburban malls were selling for a 100 bucks during the Seattle scene. It's faux slumming and it just reeks of inauthenticity if someone ever dared to wear one of them to a show.Aping a low budget for some kind of cultural cache just makes the whole thing feel like a lie. And I'm not big into movies that lie to me.


That's my basic issue of the movie on a tactile and philosophical level. Its not what it says it is. Now, I have lots of other issues with it, but that is the one that puts it behind the 8 ball right from the get go.


It's like a movie that is made to be deliberately bad (Sharknado) or made to be deliberately weird (Malignant). These things don't work when they are manufactured. They have a very particular stink to them.

So, this is a weird thing for me to focus on, but in some ways seems like a metaphor for crumbs' complaint, but it's also something Rock also noted as well. The porno they're making, they're talking about how great and artistic it is, but nothing about what they shot looked very noteworthy. Like, it was the general, modern conception of what porn is. Rock is definitely more a connoisseur, but the little bit I've seen of movies from the 70s just seemed more inspired. (Positioning the camera so the gas pump looks like a huge dong of your character isn't exactly cutting edge).


The one odd thing that sticks out in my mind is how after looking at, what I guess are the dailies, the producer gets really excited about how creative it is, and mentions the cross-cutting that's happening in a scene.
Which then made me wonder, "okay, maybe the editing is where the movie gets creative. I can't help but wonder how much of interesting 70s films like that were made interesting in the editing. But... how are they editing the film in the barn?" I'm not familiar with the equipment, but I'd have thought they'd need to do the editing after they get back. They aren't composing movies on a laptop there. Maybe my brain is off on that point, but it raised my eyebrow.

I disagree so much that I can't even express it. Particularly with your opening statement. I think literally the opposite. Instead of faux-slumming, like Death Proof (which I do actually like) I think it takes an elevated approach to slum material and knocks it absolutely out of the park. Like if someone took the slum material and actually took it seriously and tried to make as good a movie as could be made from that material, ignoring all the short-comings of the sub-genre that inspired it and delivering the best movie that sub-genre could actually ever be.
I think of X, at worst, almost like The Strokes are to the bands they invoked. But actually much better than that.

As I've said elsewhere, that's because they're actually not very good at what they're doing. I mean, I thought that was kinda the point of their part of the movie, their characters, that they were total amateurs with delusions of their own possibilities.

So, this is an odd detail that I'm curious about though. Could the cinematographer have actually been editing the film on site with the equipment they had?

So the audience is supposed to think this is a shit movie they are making?


Then what is the audience supposed to be thinking when the girl holding the boom is so inspired by what she is seeing that she wants to be in the movie. Are we supposed to feel sorry for her that she's deluded too? Are we supposed to laugh at such a decision to want to be part of such a farce? Are we meant to be on her side when she seems completely oblivious that this might be upsetting to her boyfriend who will have to film her?


What are we supposed to do with this scene, which was already stupid and weird if we accept some great filmmaking is happening here. It just becomes extra confusing, on lots of levels, if we are supposed to think their movie is complete trash.


While I dont think any movie about porn should have to live up to Rocks exacting standards in the genre (an unfairly tall order), I think his complaint has merit. Because it just seems we are supposed to accept certain things as fact just because we are told to see them that way. They say they are making something great and I think we are supposed to just assume that they are making something great. Just like we are supposed to see these characters as having depth even though, once we scratch the surface, they are never more than 2d archetypes, who are just clearly constructs of the movies needs.


Just think of the naturalism of the performances in something like your beloved f13 part 2. Those are characters that exists beyond their purpose in the film. Their banter and their body language in how they relate to eachother is unstudied and as a result authentic. Even though they were a bunch of unknowns playing the parts. Contrariwise the characters in X are given little personality fragments to spout out, but are mostly just shoehorned and manipulated into having specific functions for the film. There is nothing natural about their acting or the terribly affected dialogue they are given. Exactly the same issues I have with Wan or (most comically egregiously) Shyamalan.

Between being cited multiple times in this discussion, and Tak telling people to watch porn in the Hall of Infamy, I’ve never felt so proud of my online influence.

Don’t worry. I kinda loved Pearl so the tables have tipped once more.

Oh my god, Pearl is gonna be the worst movie ever made.