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THE BEST USER REVIEWS ON NETFLIX

2011-11-24T18:52:00.001-08:00

Yes, the title says it all. Here it is.

Speaking For Myself,I Like The Movie For Many Reasons.And I won't explain them all,To the Birdbrains that are burn out in watching movies,They better take a good break from being glued to the tube.You have to keep in mind,That this movie is foreign,And many of the producers either would not or could not, afford to spend the money, that spoiled Americans of Hollywood and their up to date equitment could create.I have more to say on that matter,but I won't. My feelings are strong because I've been to war, And the average Joe has not,And if he or her has,They would'nt be quit to squeeze the trigger! This movie may lack the movie critic respect! But in the same token I too have little respect,for those who have convince themselfs that they know how to judge a good motion picture.Sincerly Yours, "The G.O.A.T. S.A.T. #10"

Goatsat #10, you have my shield. And my axe. NO WAIT maybe this is the best one?

ok i will be the first.i surry i just did not get this movie.after the first 45 min. i gave up on it .maby if you are korean you will get it.iam going to take a nap now.thank you. LWK.

No, LWK, thank YOU

OR HOW ABOUT THIS:

YOUR company Netty should be ashamed....to have this even titled on their site...T.S Slaughter , go back to the hole you crawled out of....it should be x rated...it porn blah. id give it a minus 4 stars

OR THIS:

I HATE SUBTITALED MOVIES, IT ATLEAST COULD HAVE BEEN DUBBED OVER IN ENGLISH SO I DID NOT HAVE TO WASTE MY TIME READING WHAT WAS GOING DOWN AND MISS ALL THE COOL ACTOION AND BLOOD AND GUTS SEENS. I WAS SO PISSED OFF THAT THE MOVIE WAS DONE THIS WAY. I WAITED YEARS TO SEE THIS MOVIE AND IWAS LET DOWN HARD,

(yes, it really does end on that hanging comma).

Hanna [Joe Wright, 2011]

2011-10-29T20:47:00.000-07:00

You know what's fucking awesome? This movie. Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) is a teenage girl who has been trained from birth by her father (Eric Bana) to be a perfect killing machine. When events precipitate her departure from her forest home, she must learn to make do by herself in the wide world while fighting for her life against enemies that are out to kill her. Yes, that sounds like a standard plot, but it's what Wright does with this idea that makes the movie so effective: he makes it into a bizarre, brutal fairy tale. This is one of the most stunningly beautiful movies I've seen in a long time. Moving from an eerie snow-covered cabin in the middle of the woods to the deserts of Morocco and then to the urban center of Berlin, Hanna is like a Grimm brothers version of the Bourne movies. But unlike the Bourne movies, Wright is as interested in character and mood as he is in action: Ronan's performance as Hanna is a stunning piece of acting, and it is highly enjoyable to watch as this near-autistic character is introduced to a cast of strange characters, including Cate Blanchett, who gets to unleash her inner ice-queen as a fantastic villain.

Wright achieves a perfect balance of surreal character beats, weird mood, and kick-ass action. Pleasingly, he doesn't chop the action sequences to hash: you can actually see what's going on. One jaw-dropping set piece in the middle of the movie sees Bana exit a railway station, go down an escalator, and dispatch a bunch of thugs -- all in one long take. That must have been one hell of a difficult sequence to pull off, and as a bravura look-at-me piece of filmmaking, it's among the best scenes I've seen in a long while.

The movie is often implausible or perplexing -- for example, why would Hanna's father train her so much and then not actually tell her about things like, oh, electricity? How the hell does she get around? (She spends the last third of the movie traversing most of Berlin . . . on foot . . .?) One plot thread, involving a collection of secondary characters, is simply dropped without explanation. Strangely, though, all of this actually ends up helping the movie; this weirdness and intentional lack of explanation just add to the fairy tale atmosphere. I can't think of any other movie in which plot holes and deliberate lapses in logic are actually used to positive effect as in Hanna. Wright rejects standard plot structure in favor of an elliptical, drifting style that one almost never sees in this sort of movie.

Similar to Drive, another brilliant, dreamlike piece of revisionist action filmmaking also made by a European director not known for making action movies, Hanna is a rebuke to the usual Hollywood action shitfests. These two movies give me new hope for what I thought was a moribund genre. Can we have some sequels please? I would like that.

Atrocious [Fernando Barreda Luna, 2010]

2011-10-29T20:23:00.000-07:00

I am in favor of the found-footage/faux documentary horror movie. At its best (Lake Mungo, [Rec], Paranormal Activity 2) it brings the genre back to its hair-raisingly creepy roots. Atrocious is another Spanish entry into the genre, and although it clocks in at a pleasingly brief 75 minutes, it unfortunately struggles to pad out its running time. This is a shame, because the setting -- an old house beside a creepy, dilapidated tree maze -- is fantastic. Unfortunately, Luna forgot to actually write a plot, because most of the movie consists of the characters wandering about the maze shouting. There are some effective moments, a few of which occur in full daylight (a nice twist), and the ending is clever and brutal. Ultimately, though, Atrocious is too wafer-thin to land the punches it wants to.

Transformers 3 [Michael Bay, 2011]

2011-10-29T20:15:00.000-07:00

So how does this sound: would you like Michael Bay to beat you mercilessly with his dick for a punishing 2 1/2 hours? Would you like that? Well then here you go. Rent this movie. Rent it HARD. Let Michael teach you a lesson for wanting to watch a movie. Listen, let's just be upfront about this shit: this movie isn't just bad, it's a fucking war crime. It's so incoherent and shoddily made that everyone should really just get off Uwe Boll's case because he's goddamn Hitchcock compared to this turd ganache. Transformers 3 is like being screamed at for 9 hours by a syphilitic homeless man. At no moment in this horrific abortion is there anything remotely approaching a real human emotion. There are a lot of giant robots and explosions that Bay inexplicably treats like high, vital drama, busting out the slow-motion and epic orchestral soundtrack like Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List but with, you know, sentient kids' toys. HAHAHAHA WHAT. The scene where the music swells and Shia LaBeouf cries because ZOMG THEY ARE HURTING A ROBOT FRIEND would be hilarious if the cumulative effect of this mass of stupidity wasn't so enraging and depressing.

This -- this -- is a real horror movie, forcing you to stare into the twin gaping black maws of anti-charisma that are Josh Duhamel and Shia LaBeouf (two of the douchiest motherfuckers ever burned into celluloid) while they run and run and run and jump and fall and run some more and oh yes there's some more running while they do a lot of DUDE STUFF because DUDES ARE AWESOME and walk in slow motion with OTHER RAD DUDES and then sometimes stare at a lady's ass and boobs because THAT IS ALL WOMEN ARE GOOD FOR of course thank you Michael Bay you raging fucking frat boy. If someone says they like this movie then there's a 90% chance they're a date rapist.

Wake Wood [David Keating; 2011]

2011-10-14T20:23:00.000-07:00

The unsubtly-titled Wake Wood is the story of two grieving parents whose daughter dies at the opening of the movie in a twin assault from a rabid dog and a wildly shaking camera. (Oddly, the mother is played by Eva Birthistle who, between this and the vastly superior The Children, seems to be the go-to person for playing mothers beset by demonic children). After moving to a rural Irish town full of the sorts of creepy-weird townies found only in horror movies, they discover that there may be a way to bring their daughter back for a short time . . . but haven't they seen Pet Sematary?! To its credit, the film has a nice setting and mines Irish lore for some creepy rustic-magic touches. But the viewer is always four steps ahead, which is a serious problem in a movie with a plot as straightforward as this.

Wake Wood is an oddly inept movie. Scenes are often shot in irritatingly tight close-ups that drift away from the things we actually want to see. During nighttime sequences the lighting changes jarringly between day-for-night shots and badly-lit takes that were actually shot at night. In one strange scene that is meant to be serious, an actor breaks character and begins laughing at the end of the shot. Further, the movie has a terminal case of shaky-cam syndrome. The cumulative effect, oddly, is to make the movie more compelling, although not in the way the filmmakers intended -- the viewer is waiting for the next strange edit (one pivotal scene cuts, for no apparent reason, to a crane shot for a fraction of a second and never shows that angle again) or blown take. This kind of local Irish black-magic mythology could make for a good horror movie; too bad this isn't one.

SIDE NOTE: From Eva Birthistle's IMDB page, I discovered that there are some gross dudes there who would be gracious enough to have sex with her as well as other actresses they deem attractive. How kind of them. How noble! Yes, mikey_apache, I'm sure that Birthistle and all of the other actresses on your list will be very flattered to hear that a random internet dude would hook up with them! Indeed, JackalJoker, I wouldn't have been able to sleep tonight without your full list of attractive actresses! Oh, and apologies to any actress who isn't on that list, because as you see by the title, it's a full list. Perhaps you hadn't heard but JackalJoker was appointed Broseph In Charge Of Picking Women Based on Hotness. Good job, Mikey and Jackal, you fucking creepy internet ass-stains. Now you can go back to your beds in the frat house and sleep the sleep of the righteous next to your giant bottles of roofies. You fuckers.

Cold Fish [Sion Sono, 2010]

2011-10-13T09:24:00.000-07:00

Nobuyuki is a quiet, unassuming family man who hasn't amounted to much in life and whose wife and daughter treat him with barely restrained contempt. When his daughter is caught shoplifting, it inspires a series of events that bring him into the orbit of a deranged serial killer. And that is all I'm going to say about the plot, because this amazing, disturbing movie needs to be seen without any knowledge of what's going to happen.

Given that plot description, you might think you have some idea of what this movie is like. You're almost certainly wrong, because this is a Sion Sono film, and Sono's movies are not like anyone else's. Since his breakthrough movie Suicide Club (2001), Sono has carved out a niche as one of the most unique filmmakers working today. Despite his fascination with the macabre, his focus is always on characters, and he has a warped, inimitable sense of humor. He's often compared with Takashi Miike, and certainly their movies share a superficial resemblance. Sono, though, is a much more consistent talent than Miike, perhaps because Sono writes his own movies.

Cold Fish, like most of Sono's films, is a whiplash-inducing mixture of comedy, weirdness, psychological realism, and extreme violence. Although the broad strokes of the plot are relatively simple, it's the way that Sono colors in the details that makes the movie so impressive and bizarre. At 2 1/2 hours, Cold Fish is a long movie, but that length gives all of the characters ample attention. The performances in this movie are uniformly excellent, and Sono likes long, dialogue-heavy takes. There are always strange, unusual things happening in the corners of the movie.

In one of the special features included on the DVD, Sono mentions that he thinks Cold Fish is a comedy. That says a lot, because although there are many of his trademark weird, deadpan comedic touches throughout, the movie is also deeply disturbing and fucked up. Perhaps it's precisely because of the comedy that the violence -- both psychological and actual -- has such a powerful effect. But, unlike so many other movies that are filled with extreme gore and perversion, Sono's focus always remains on the characters, and that is what elevates Cold Fish above other films of its type. After a shocking, unsettling climax, the movie ends with a transcendent scene in which one of the characters, unexpectedly freed from the shackles constraining their life, dances with joy. It's funny, unexpected, perverse, and weirdly touching: a great way to describe this uncompromising film itself.

On the morality of horror

2011-10-09T18:44:00.000-07:00

While looking at this review of the movie Megan is Missing (cf my review here), I noticed the same sorts of comments that always come up regarding a confrontational horror movie. Here are just a few of these gems:

This movie has no redeeming qualities. This is not a "powerful" film and there is no message to be delivered- no lesson to be learned. What we have here is a thinly-veiled attempt to deliver a child porn snuff film disguised as a third-rate found footage movie. The acting was terrible. None of it was believable. I would not subject any child to this obscenity. Parents, if you want to teach your kids the dangers of the internet, go ahead- you don't need a worthless film to do that.

Just watched that movie on Netflix and got through to the part that you show on your site with the Picture of Amy. I must say i am at disgust that this would be allowed on Netflix where any one can watch it. it was disturbing and disgusting and should be given a NR17 rating not a NR.

I must say i am at disgust (?) with these comments. (For example, I don't know what a "Not Rated 17" rating would be. The whole point of NR is that extreme movies often are not rated.) But wait, there's more of this from the users at Netflix:

I would never intentionally watch a snuff film, so this is probably the closest I'll come. They say it serves a moral purpose, maybe it does, but I imagine it will serve as a blueprint for as many perverts as it serves as a socially conscious warning for teenagers. I'm sorry I watched it, it was a mistake.

Since it is entertainment and a how-to manual for psychopaths, I give it one star.

This is more like a SNUFF FILM. I am sorry i even watched it. I wouldn't think NetF&$x or any other distributer [sic] would be able to distribute this kind of film.

Hmm, very interesting! Let's continue on with this line of reasoning: obviously The Godfather is nothing more than a how-to manual for criminals, and clearly the only reason that someone would like Schindler's List is because they want Jews to die.

No, wait! That's ridiculous. These idiots have it completely backwards. In fact, the entire point of watching movies is that we get to experience, in a safe environment, things that we do not want to experience in real life. Nobody watched Saving Private Ryan and then left the theater wishing that they were storming the beaches at Normandy. Horror is an extreme example of this. Nobody watches slasher movies because they want to kill a bunch of teenagers. Nobody watches haunted house movies because they want to live in a haunted house and get terrorized by ghosts.

By analogy, consider a roller coaster. Roller coasters are fun because you get the thrill of falling 100 feet -- something that would normally maim or kill you -- but you get to do it safely. Certainly, extreme horror movies and books are not for everyone, just as hardcore roller coasters aren't for everyone. But for those of us that like it, horror is like an ethical roller coaster: we get to vicariously experience life-threatening or taboo-shattering situations in a morally safe environment. Nobody was actually killed in the making of Megan Is Missing.

In fact, the disturbing nature of extreme horror comes precisely from the fact that the viewer is not a serial killer or rapist. A filmmaker who sets out to disturb or confront an audience with a movie such as Irreversible, I Spit On Your Grave, Salò, A Serbian Film, Men Behind the Sun, Funny Games, etc., does so with the expectation that the viewer is operating within the conventional bounds of morality. The disjunction between the viewer's moral sense and what is shown onscreen is exactly what makes the film disturbing! If you think that torture is awesome and hilarious then the effect of Men Behind the Sun will be totally lost on you.

Let me give Thomas Ligotti (from whose work the name of this blog is derived) the last word. From his excellent essay "The Consolations of Horror" which opens my favorite book of all time:

Horror, at least in its artistic presentations, can be a comfort . . . . Hence that arena of artificial experience, supposedly of the worst kind -- the horror story -- where gruesome conspiracies may be trumped up to our soul's satisfaction, where the deck is stacked with shivers, shocks, and dismembered hands for every player; and, most importantly, where one, at a safe distance, can come to grips (after a fashion) with death, pain, and loss in the, quote, real world unquote.

. . . As in any satisfying relationship, the creator of horror and its consumer approach oneness with each other. This, then, is the ultimate, that is only, consolation: simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and -- like it or not -- peculiar set of experiences to appreciate. Amazing thing to say, the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the sounding-board of our horror-hollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery.

Amer [Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2009]

2011-10-09T17:38:00.000-07:00

Amer is an homage to the films of Dario Argento and Mario Bava, and for better or for worse, nobody could ever accuse the directors of not getting the tone right. If you get short of breath just imagining creepy sets drenched in inappropriately colored lighting, then this movie is right up your alley. As with most giallos, the plot of Amer is unimportant: We see 3 psychosexual (or just plain psychotic) scenes from the life of a woman named Ana, spanning the period from childhood to adulthood, but what plot there is only exists as a scaffolding on which to hang a lot of style. And indeed, Amer is not just an example of style over substance -- it is all style and no substance. It's a beautifully composed movie, and for the first third, which follows an especially unpleasant and surreal episode in Ana's childhood, I thought I might be watching a classic. Amer conjures an oneiric state unlike anything since . . . well, since when Argento was actually making good movies.

Unfortunately, the movie starts to irritate about halfway through, when it becomes clear that Cattet and Forzani don't intend to actually build a story around the interesting things they put on screen. Further, their array of styles -- red- and blue-saturated lighting, fast zooms, whip pans, macro shots, hyper-stylized editing, oppressive sound design -- feels fussed over rather than organic, and a movie like this needs to breathe. Argento knew this: in two of his best movies, Inferno and Suspira, he lets the camera glide languidly through his otherworldly set pieces. But Amer, like its unfortunate characters, is chopped to shreds and too self-conscious.

Today in Boomkat

2011-10-06T17:02:00.000-07:00

Here is a quote from a recent Boomkat review:

'Like We Used To' is a powerfully built 130bpm swinger, stroking fragrant female vocal into orgiastic glossolalia over clipped 2-step and seasick subs copulating like Zomby and SBTRKT. 'Helter Skelter' is more exothermic, radiating stereo spirals of cascading lazer synths on a halfstep bump and grind akin to the recent Objekt 12".

THINGS I HAVE LEARNED FROM THIS REVIEW: Songs can stroke female vocals; female vocals can be fragrant; when these stroked female vocals have a smell they can also be fluidly vocalizing in religious ecstasy; subs can be seasick and fucking at the same time (and apparently audible sounds below 90 Hz have genitalia and can have sex . . . ?); songs can radiate stereo spirals as opposed, I guess, to monophonic straight lines (??); and the editors at Boomkat, if there even are editors to look at this drug-fueled babbling, don't give a shit that their writers are hilariously, pretentiously incoherent. Not that I would ever want them to stop.

I'm gonna leave that whole "exothermic" bit alone, because I'm sure we've all had to listen to endothermic music at one time or another, and obviously we all prefer our music in the form of chemical reactions that release energy from the system.

Procession Of The Dead [Darren Shan, 1999; US Reprint, 2010]

2011-10-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

Capac Raimi moves to The City, an unnamed metropolis, to start a promising life of crime under the tutelage of his uncle, a small-time crook. Since this book is a variation on the theme of urban fantasy, The City is governed by odd magic. Clumsy references to various current aspects of popular culture (Reservoir Dogs, etc) place the novel in an alternate-reality version of present-day Earth (revelations in the course of the novel place the city somewhere in Mexico, maybe?). Things don't go as planned for Capac, but soon he catches the eye of The Cardinal, the incredibly powerful ruler of The City's underground. Perhaps his plans of becoming more than a tiny fish in a big pond will come to fruition . . . but why can't he remember his life before moving to The City?

That plot description may make this book sound like a yawn-inducing variation on the same theme that's been done a million times before: scrappy underdog brutally fights his way up through the ranks of a crime syndicate, with fantasy/horror touches. The best aspect of this book is unquestionably the way that it totally explodes this expectation. There is absolutely no way that anyone could predict the batshit-insane twists the plot takes, and while this may seem like unfair cheating (the final revelations at the book's climax require 30 pages of explanation, including an 11-page monologue by a main character and a telepathically-enhanced flashback to the distant past (!!!)), it also is pretty fun to see standard genre tropes fucked with so thoroughly. Seriously, I have to reiterate: It feels like Shan picked increasingly bizarre plot developments out of a hat as he was writing the book. This is actually kind of . . . refreshing? It should be irritating, but somehow it's not.

Unfortunately, the other aspects of the book are not nearly as good. Shan is a pedestrian prose stylist at best, and he does tons of telling when he should be showing. Characterization is essentially nonexistent; we should have a reason to care for the main character more than just the fact that he happens to be the main character, but we don't. Although some late-in-the-game revelations explain this somewhat, it still makes for a frustrating reading experience. Dialogue is usually clunky. Also, supporting characters are introduced as THE MOST DANGEROUS EVER or THE MOST UNPREDICTABLE EVER; subtlety doesn't play a role at all here.

In sum, the mind-blowing novelty of the plot balances with the ho-hum quality of the writing to create an experience that I would just barely recommend, if only because you will never see the final plot twists coming. Not unless you've been smoking whatever Shan was when he wrote this.

Megan Is Missing [Michael Goi; 2011]

2011-10-05T19:19:00.000-07:00

So okay, here's what happens in this movie. Megan is a worldly girl who has sex, so clearly she's marked for terrible things. Already the movie is problematic by positing a link between sexual activity and bad things happening to you (degradation, rape, torture death, etc). Her friend Amy is an irritating drip with no personality and represents the opposite archetype, the goody-two-shoes. To the movie's credit -- or perhaps only to the actors' credit -- these roles are convincingly acted, and in fact the performances of the two main leads are the best aspect of the movie. Still, despite their best efforts, these characters clearly only exist to poke the viewer in the ribs and shout "HEY! ARE YOU GETTING THE MESSAGE YET?"

All right. So then Megan starts talking to some random dude online and even falls for him despite the fact that (1) he never activates the video on his end of the video chat, even though he can see her the whole time; (2) he acts like a dick; and (3) is totally creepy. Why would a teenage girl continue a one-way video chat with a creeper she never sees? And why the fuck would she agree, for their very first meeting, to meet up with him behind a diner in a place that screams RAPEATORIUM? These are mysteries that the movie never addresses, because OMG INTERNET TERROR. After the abduction of the none-too-bright Megan, it is OMG INTERNET TERROR SQUARED as really bad things happen to our two main characters, really bad things that won't come as much surprise to anyone who's watched survival horror movies.

Now, I want to be fair here. The movie is competently made and has some effectively creepy scenes. However! The director himself has shown up on some reviews of the movie to add his own comments, which . . . um, well, you can just read them:

We see so many reports of child abductions on TV that the subject loses its personal perspective. I was trying to correct that with MEGAN IS MISSING. We are talking about people, specifically children, who are unprepared to deal with the kind of deception that can take place on the internet.

...

I know that many people have said they will not be able to look at the world the same way after seeing Megan Is Missing. In a way, that may be a good thing. It takes a lot to get people riled up enough to actually take some action these days, and if my movie rattles people enough to protest the early prison release of a repeat sexual offender, or to go online to familywatchdog.us and check out how many convicted sexual offenders live in their neighborhood, then some good will have come from going through the trauma of watching the movie.

Michael Goi

WHAT? Jesus, what an asshole. Is this really what he believes? That rape and murder happen because people aren't scared enough? Yes, of course rape and murder of teenagers are bad things. Um, no duh, I think we all agree with that; but it is certainly not the case that video chatting will necessarily lead to rape, torture, and murder, and it's ridiculous to make a movie that claims this. Jettisoning rational thinking in favor of being freaked out about webcams or sex offenders in your neighborhood isn't going to make our society better: a culture of fear never makes anything better. And what "actions," exactly, does Goi intend for us to take? Is he implying that the early release of prisoners -- an integral aspect of our judicial system -- is a bad thing? If that really is his point, he needs to make much better argument than this. Also, I should point out that you're as likely to meet someone on the internet and get abducted, raped, and murdered in the fashion depicted in the movie as you are to be, say, struck by lightning. I expect that Michael Goi's next movie will alert us to the awful terrors of winning the lottery and then dying in a freak accident by being tramped to death by escaped rhinos. OH MY GOD YOU REALLY NEED TO GO ONLINE AND SEE HOW MANY ESCAPED RHINOS THERE ARE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD RIGHT NOW BE SCARED.

Further, the movie completely undercuts its own message when, after Megan is kidnapped by a MAN FROM THE INTERNET OH MY GOD, Amy is kidnapped by the same man -- but only because he stalked her in real life! Yes, Amy is kidnapped through no fault of the internet. Come on! Which is it? Does the internet inherently cause people to get raped to shreds or not? [HINT: no].

And let's not even get started on how the climax of the movie lingers on the awful shit that happens to Amy but has Megan's death occur offscreen. Actually, yes, let's do get started. Since Goi is trying to rile up the viewer, by showing what happens to Amy and not Megan the movie sends the clear message that it's much worse when a pure, innocent girl is raped & tortured than when such things happen to someone who is sexually active. And I haven't even touched on the way that every character other than the two main characters is a one-dimensional monster created with the express purpose of FILLING US WITH RAGE SO THAT WE CAN GO PUNCH A SEX OFFENDER IN THE FACE AND THEN REGISTER AT OHGODDON'TLETANYONEUSETHEINTERNET.US or whatever.

There is the kernel of a highly effective horror movie here. The last 22 minutes (the whole rape/torture/murder bit where the horror viewer finally gets what they've been waiting for) are actually quite effective and intense, but then the movie fucks up one last time by falling into irritating sentimentality during the end credits, because MESSAGE. This is a movie for dipshits who think that horror movies need a moral lesson to balance the bloodshed.

[NB: I absolutely would not condemn the movie on the grounds of being "torture porn" or a "snuff film" -- see here for more]

p.s. You actually don't need to be that scared of escaped rhinos. Just make sure you have a bag of fruits and vegetables on hand at all times.

VITAL UPDATE: There is a very interesting summary of the movie here. I missed the part where Jason Voorhees "kills Hawes with a punch through the heart and throws his body into the exhumed coffin."

The mysteries of Shackleton, Mordant Music, and Appleblim

2011-10-05T13:14:00.000-07:00

Shackleton has, for a while, been one of the most beloved producers in the avant-dubstep scene. This is completely mysterious, because his music is garbage. Here is how you create a Shackelton song: Load up a few tablas and ethnic-sounding instruments into your favorite sampler and bang away on the pads for a moment or so to create a simple, boring beat. Loop this for 9 minutes. Add some sketchy-sounding sampled instruments, preferably Middle Eastern ones. Add an overbearing sine-wave bass (or a square wave, if you're feeling especially adventurous) and a load of reverb. There you go! If you spent more than 5 minutes doing this, trash what you did and start over. You're working too hard.

Let me hasten to add -- I'm not opposed to minimalism. Artists as varied as Alva Noto, Photek (at least in the 90s), and Loefah have made stunning music by stripping down their music to the bare bones. But good minimalism takes a lot of effort, and Shackleton's form of minimalism is lazy and boring, so much so that I sometimes wonder if his music is actually a skillful attempt at trolling a gullible dubstep blogosphere. See, eg, here, where the always dependable Boomkat drops some hilariously purple prose -- there's "agoraphobic subbass," and also "glutinous subbass suspends the mind's ass." Yes, indeed! I didn't know that subbass could be "agoraphobic." Now I know why subbass refuses to ever leave the house. My mind's ass is confused.

So now here is the mystery. As shitty as Shackleton's "my first Casio" attempts at music are, that is how mind-blowingly amazing the artists that appear with him on singles and compilations are. This offers further evidence that his music is an elaborate troll. He frequently splits singles with Mordant Music (an artist who, confusingly, records on a label of the same name) and Appleblim, two of the finest artists working in avant-dubstep/avant-weirdness. Strikingly, their productions are as opulent and lushly melodic as Shackleton's are minimal and poorly-constructed. Check out, for example, Mordant Music's stunning Olde Wobbly, which is on the same single as Shacketon's snooze-inducing El Din (Part One). Whereas Olde Wobbly clearly took a long time to construct, with its multiple sections and meticulously considered timbres, El Din is insultingly undercomposed.

But what do I know? Let me give the brilliant minds at Boomkat the last say. From their review of Shackleton's Fireworks single: "With 'Undeadman' his zombied cadaver arises again, divined like a worm from the ground by plunging subs to join the skull disco on consecrated ground."

HAHAHAHAHA WHAT THE FUCK? My laughs of derision have been divined like a worm from my mind's ass.

p.s. Dear Boomkat, you might want to read this before you write anything else.