5 posts categorized "Exploitation"

June 04, 2007

A MIGHTY HEART — CANNES 2007

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Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

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ColeSmithey.comNo Neorealism Here
Third Hollywood Post-9/11 Same as The Other Two

By Cole Smithey

"A Mighty Heart," like the other post-9/11 Hollywood movies ("United 93" and "World Trade Center"), is a would-be documentary subject inflated with promotion in its incarnation as a narrative feature.

The turgid emphasis on sentiment and emotion is intended to overpower the viewer into believing and agreeing with everything on the screen, lest he or she be thought of as callous. All of the oh-so-sincere earnestness seems to say, you are either with us or you are a bad person.

ColeSmithey.com

"Hokey" is a word that springs to the lips when I think of these films, but not hokey in a cool Humphrey Bogart in "Casablanca" way. No, these movies are meant to be perceived as "important" and "serious" because they ostensibly reveal "heroes" that we the audience should aspire to, but could never be, since we are not in the enviable position of the suffering person onscreen.

ColeSmithey.com

The "mighty heart" of the film’s title refers more to the long suffering wife of the deceased Wall Street Journalist reporter Daniel Pearl than it does to the man himself. We know this because the climax of the piece arrives when the protagonist, a pregnant Mariane Pearl, goes into an extended primal scream session after hearing news of her husband’s long foreshadowed death.

ColeSmithey.com

Never more has the Shakespeare quote from Hamlet, "the lady doth protest too much" applied so acutely to a crisis decision in a movie. Daniel Pearl and his wife were aware of the dangers of his job. He was in Karachi trying to get interviews with known terrorists.

That Mariane Pearl chose to improperly apply for the 9/11 victim’s relief fund, even though her husband did not perish in that event, informs her unflinching sense of opportunism that carried over to writing a book and participating in making a film about her husband’s death.

ColeSmithey.com

Somehow, all of this obvious motivation escaped director Michael Winterbottom, the film’s producer Brad Pitt, and his wife Angelina Jolie. They bought into Mariane Pearl’s money grab pity party hook, line, and sinker. Never mind that the linear story isn’t capable of maintaining a three-act structure merely because actress, star, and supermom Angelina Jolie plays the rather homely-looking Mariane Pearl with every curly hair flawlessly in place. If only Warren Zevon’s "Werewolves of London" played on the soundtrack, then we’d know for certain that her "hair was perfect."

Rated R. 143 mins.

Zero StarsZERO STARS

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

July 19, 2005

THE DEVIL'S REJECTS

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ColeSmithey.com

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

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Thanks a lot acorns!

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ColeSmithey.com

 

Extreme Prejudice
Rob Zombie Takes Horror Exploitation To Its
Neoconservative Extreme
By Cole Smithey

ColeSmithey.comControversial for its gratuitous use of exploitative violence and gore "The Devil's Rejects" is irredeemable for its wrongheaded attempt at glamorizing a band of detestable serial killers.

Writer/director Rob Zombie's vaguely kindred sequel to his slapdash horror movie "House of 1000 Corpses," finds the satanic Firefly family of quasi cannibals forced on the lam after a bloody showdown with cops attempting to bust up their serial-killing enterprise.

William Forsythe takes on thankless acting duties as the film's temporary protagonist, Sheriff Wydell before a third act bait-and-switch substitutes the serial killers as the would-be likable characters the audience is expected to empathize with. "The Devil's Rejects" is a fascist piece of neoconservative filmmaking that should be ignored with a vengeance.

ColeSmithey.com

Rob Zombie opens the movie with a '70s era television credit sequence homage that mocks the same style David Gordon Green used in his Terrence Malick-inspired drama "Undertow" (2004). As Sheriff Wydell leads a team of speeding patrol cars to the Firefly's remote Alabama farmhouse, where all kinds of torture and carnage has taken place, the camera regularly freezes to apprehend the vulgar characters whose violent actions we will contemplate for the duration of the film.

ColeSmithey.com

The compositions are lovingly composed to emphasize the presence of Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) as an out-of-place normal looking girl who fills the sort of validating purpose for the offensive killers as Pat Priest served as Marilyn on the "Munsters " television show.

ColeSmithey.com

For all of the firepower at their disposal, the cops are nonetheless beaten at their own game so that Zombie's revolting renegades can hit the open road and call in the help of their greasy serial killer clown accomplice Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig). The group's bloodthirsty mother (Leslie Easterbrook) is captured and taken into custody by Sheriff Wydell, who wants desperately to avenge the murder of his brother by the Firefly gang.

ColeSmithey.com

The centerpiece of the movie is a desensitizing torture, humiliation, and murder sequence that alone should have mandated an NC-17 rating for the movie. The Firefly gore-hounds kidnap a close-knit traveling country music band at a motel and set about sexually humiliating the bandleader's wife and friend in an episode of torture that is utterly reprehensible.

The sequence is made all the more abject when the sole surviving victim is discovered by a motel chambermaid, wearing a mask made from a human face. The shocking scene that follows delivers one of the most grisly and unnecessarily disgusting visuals in cinema history.   

ColeSmithey.com

It seems that Rob Zombie is so bored with "heroes" that he, like the neoconservative movement in America, is content to stretch the examples set at Abu Ghraib out to their logical limit. He tries to posit insanely cruel and heartless killers as gentle people who enjoy the simple things in life, like partying together and taking comfortable walks in the sun when they aren't busy raping and eviscerating other people.

ColeSmithey.com

If there's one consistent thematic lesson to be culled from "The Devil's Rejects" it's that we should embrace ruthless murderers as outlaw saints. It doesn't matter how many innocent people are tortured in "The Devil's Rejects" because they all end up dying in a horrible blood-splaying ecstasy that the audience is expected to soak up like rubberneckers at a noxious car wreck as if to say, "Was it good for you too?"

Zombie puts his big-statement tagline on the movie with a "Thelma And Louise"-inspired ending that has the serial killers driving in a big convertible American car as Lynard Skynyrd's "Freebird" plays.

ColeSmithey.com

As the car speeds toward a roadblock of rifle firing cops, a series of flashbacks shows the gang enjoying each other's company on sunny days like a well-adjusted family. The "barf-me-out" episode is clearly meant to be ironic just as George Bush's permanent smirk prevents him from ever being sincere or serious. The implications are deadly.

Rated R. 101 mins.

Zero StarsZERO STARS

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

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