I'll make a Cheeseburger tomorrow

Effects in Horror Movies

Horror movies are my favorite movies.  I'm not sure why, but it must have something to do with the fact that I'm scared to die (the two things can't be unconnected):  I enjoy, perversely, being scared, but I think I mostly really like seeing death (violent death especially) trivialized and mocked.  The best horror movies, to me, are those that paint it as a very vivid but also surreal and dreamlike experience.  I like it when the effects are not terribly realistic but not unrealistic enough to be totally absurd.  And I'm probably wrong, but I imagine that when horrific things actually happen to people it is a surreal experience, and surely does not resemble anything like the razor-sharp digitalized bullshit that most horror movies display these days.  

I like crusty special effects (within reason) better, and a lot of the time it's scarier that way.  There're many thousands of exceptions.  (Example of when crustier is not better.)  Then again, I guess I don't usually watch them to get scared anymore.  (It hasn't always been that way.  I remember a period in highschool when I couldn't help but take it all very seriously.  I imagined every hammer blow to the head was happening to me, and I didn't enjoy it but felt compelled to keep watching them anyway.  Luckily it doesn't really happen anymore.)

I really don't understand the attitude that not only is it some sort of virtue for all special effects to appear as "realistic" as possible, but also that CGI can actually help us achieve this stupid, stupid goal.  I get that the effects filmmakers used to have to employ were cheesy and unrealistic--paper mache stop action and really bad green screen technology for example.  I guess horror directors today are trying to push back against that and also to find new ways to make their movies as scary as they can.  After all, audiences These Days are pretty jaded.  

But I'm not necessarily looking to see the most realistic death when I go to see a scary movie.  Most of the ones that have come out in recent years are completely awful.  I especially hate the "gritty" torture porn style of Eli Roth (though I haven't seen Hostel yeah yeah) and Rob Zombie's shitty version of Halloween.  Not that the first Halloween was that great, but whatever.  I like the second one cause it's really crusty.  I stopped watching Jerk Zombie's version after what I guess is the first time baby Michael kills someone.  It wasn't fun.  I like a lot of gore, but it sort of defeats the purpose for me if you're just trying to replicate perfectly the exact sound a skull makes when a tree branch crushes it.  And I'm not just being a pussy when I say that.  I find it really boring.  What's the point?  And then it's exacerbated by the fact that these types of movies rarely have any style...the aesthetic is like an hours-long nu metal videos from the late nineties or else the same tired digitalized interpretation of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  (PS, I love that movie, it has the best atmosphere ever, but as I read in some online review of it once, it spawned the whole AWFUL genre of a pack of teenagers doing something whateeever and getting picked off one by one...)

Aaaaaanyway, maybe I'm not being fair.  My taste is really specific and I do like a lot of really bad movies.  The first part of this clip has one of my favorite examples of effects in a horror movie.  It's so cheap and cheesy but it's so much more awesome and affective than if it had been done with CGI.  (Demons is really one of the best and you can watch it all on Youtube right now.)  The noises she's making are great and even though it's so obbbbviously fake my gums Always hurt when her teeth start coming out.

McDonalds Happy Meal Magic Snack Maker

I never had this but I wanted it really badly.  It's a good thing I didn't because I would have been cruelly disillusioned.  I was led to believe from the commercials that the burgers were REAL, MINI, BURGERS, but apparently the buns were made out of vanilla wafers and the meat was like chocolate paste or something.  The fries were white bread with cinnamon on it.  I don't like being blindsided by Sweet stuff when I'm expecting something savory.  It isn't alright.  

McDonalds food looks and tastes like cartoon food and cartoon food always looks more delicious than I could ever possibly imagine.  The pizza on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the best pizza in the world.  The cheese is always moving around.  Seriously, though, that's half of the appeal of McDonalds for me.  I wish they still had this. And fucking THIS. What's wrong with everybody anyway.  Maybe they were unsafe or something, or maybe it's cause they're not supposed to market to kids anymore, but whatever it is I'm not gonna lay down and die.  Okay Wayne.  It's bed time.  I do mind.  I mind big time.  Im never having any childrens

OH MAN I remember these too!

I don't know.  I like stuffed burgers, but won't the toppings lose some of their flavor if they're just cooking inside the meat the whole time?  Besides, I like that burgers are messy.

Co-Ed Call Girl (1996)

The bubblegum pink of that mirror is beautiful.  As far as I can tell, there is no way to buy this film online. It's not on DVD and was probably never even released on video, which means I'll have to hope to get lucky and catch it on Lifetime Network the next time they play it.  That'll probably never happen, which is a damned shame because judging from these two clips I found (maybe the only glimpses of C-ECG I'll ever have), it has to be delicious.

It never fails to amaze me the types of roles Lifetime thinks they can give Tori Spelling.  She's always Donna Martin anyway.  Even though I assume that when "Co-Ed Call Girl" begins Tori plays an innocent, virginal character who somehow gets roped into prostitution--wait a minute, let me just pull up the IMDb plot description:

"Thanks to a roommate's practical joke, bookish college student Joanna Halbert finds herself signed up with a Malibu-based escort service. Her initial annoyance turns to curiosity when she visits the boss's beach house - and she is soon captivated by the seemingly glamorous lifestyle of working as a high-class escort. Before long, however, she realises that glitz and money go hand in hand with exploitation and sleaze . . . and it may be too late to get out."

Ok, so...she accidentally became a prostitute because her roomate played a joke on her.  That's as believable as the idea of Tori being either a "bookish college student" OR a hustling femme fatale.  Because, you know, she's a terrible actress.  No, seriously, she's usually okay as a bookish college student.  It sort of fits in with the Donna Martin role (even though Donna HAS A LEARNING DISABILITY), which she usually replicates beautifully in all her other roles.  Okay, that's unfair:  she did a pretty decent job as the meanest girl in haahschool in "Death of a Cheerleader," I GUESS.  Maybe it was just easier to play someone so diametrically opposed to Donna Martin (i.e. a really mean popular girl) than something sort of in between the two.

For instance, just the other week I saw "Deadly Pursuits" (also from 1996, a busy year for Tori) for the first time.  In this one she's a kind of double agent, seducing and falling in love with a guy whom you later find out she's tailing on behalf of a mobster (Richard Belzer with a moustache).  It's clear from the beginning, though, that she is So Wild.  You can read it aaall over her face.  Tori first pops up in this movie when the main character is for some reason in the airport.  She catches him in her crosshairs and smiles knowingly.  (She’s sporting the short, bleached do Donna Martin made famous during the Ray Pruitt years, just FYI.)  Next thing you know, the guy lowers his newspaper to find Tori’s hips jutting seductively into his face.  She then successfully seduces him, I guess.  Her success is due in part to one of my favorite movie cliches:  she is such a damned Free Spirit.  They have lunch or something, I really don’t remember, OH NO, they’re getting out of a taxi, and she runs over to a smooth jazz band saxophoning on the street and starts to dance.  (I actually found a clip of it!!  It's from a later scene but it's the same dance.  For some reason someone tacked it onto a very uncomfortable stripping scene from another movie, so ignore that and just skip to about 4:38.  CLICK HERE)

Anyhow, it's definitely a lot of fun, if a little painful and embarrassing, to see Tori play this kind of character.  Probably because it's embarrassing to see ANYone doing that, especially in a Lifetime Original, but Tori really brings the laughs.  I don't feel like an asshole saying that either, because as far as I understand she's always had a pretty good sense of humor about herself.  Or, rather, she learned to do it after a while.  Not gonna go through the trouble of finding quotes.

An Invitation to Love

I started watching the second season of Twin Peaks again a couple days ago.  As far as I understand, David Lynch stopped being directly involved after a few episodes into the season (I tried to check out exactly how involved he was but it was difficult to tell just from IMDb listings), and needless to say it's inferior in a lot of ways to the first one--the writing and directing just aren't as good, and it lacks the same tightness and overall aura of hidden Real significance in every look and word.  Still, I love the second season almost as much, you just have to accept it as a totally separate thing.  It's more like Invitation to Love, Twin Peaks' most popular soap opera.  It's still good and weird, you just can't get upset when sometimes it's not incredible.

Anyway, so I've been thinking about why the show is so good.  I read this awful review of Wild at Heart once that Roger Ebert wrote.  While I understood where he was coming from, and he's entitled to his own opinion and everything, he completely missed the point.  (Here's a link to it.)  He thinks that David Lynch is joking around, but he IS NOT.  (I'm getting off-topic, but it will help me articulate why I like Lynch's stuff.)  Ebert says, "The movie is lurid melodrama, soap opera, exploitation, put-on and self-satire. It deals in several scenes of particularly offensive violence, and tries to excuse them by juvenile humor: It's all a joke, you see, and so if the violence offends you, you didn't get the joke."  This is where he's obviously not getting it, not because he's not in on some joke, but because he's willfully misunderstanding Lynch's intent, especially in the last sentence, when he IMAGINES Lynch telling him that the violence is "all a joke."  There are parts of Wild at Heart that I really fucking hate (Johnnie Farragut's death scene is pretty much the grossest, most disturbing scene in movie history), but it's still probably my favorite movie.  There are things about real life that are just as ugly, and people like Bobby Peru really exist.  I'm not saying that I necessarily like those aspects of the movie, and I don't think Lynch is saying anyone should.  They just ARE.  It's also disingenuous to say that because the movie is a melodrama and a soap opera, that everything about it is just a snarky joke or a "comment" on the stupidity of mainstream Hollywood films.  During sappy love scenes between Lula and Sailor (not talking about the graphic sex ones), Lynch isn't trying to get you to laugh--he really genuinely wants you to Feel Something (I think).

And this brings me to what I originally set out to say.  Twin Peaks is very different from Wild at Heart, but the same principles apply.  I don't know about you, but I get really "touched" by some of the scenes in Twin Peaks.  Sure, a lot of it is funny and it's supposed to be, but I also find it to be extremely moving.  That's what's so great about it, I think.  It's definitely satire an self-parody, but it's also so unmistakably genuine and EARNEST.  It's Invitation to Love, a soap opera where the emotions are heightened to almost comical proportions but also really grip you a lot of the time.  Again, Twin Peaks is a lot more earnest (and tame in terms of sex and violence) than Wild at Heart, but how could you miss that?  Wild at Heart is such a beautiful love story...

Be Here Now?

Luke made a post the other day that really resonated with me (and also reintroduced me to this lady about whom I had forgotten).  In it he discusses something that I've been grappling with lately (and always):  the inherent difficulty of living totally "in the moment," of experiencing pure enjoyment, even when one feels that one is making a genuine effort to do so.  Feeling good and connected, like I'm getting the most out of my time by enjoying myself fully, is really important to me.  It's something that I'm always trying to work toward (sometimes less than I should be, don't get me wrong) but rarely get close to.  When I was little (I don't know how little) I remember trying to figure out what the "meaning of life" was; after my dad read a scene to me from one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books about a big party the prairie people had with singing and dancing, and I told him I thought that maybe that was life's point, to have fun and enjoy ourselves.  I was feeling really bad at the time about having to eventually die.  My dad said he felt that was true but I could tell from the way he responded that it was going to be a lot more complicated than that, not to mention easier said than done.  (Side note:  this was probably not actually a huge turning point in my life, it's a lot less dramatic than I'm making it out to be.)  Anyhow, Lukey says in his wonderful post,

Are we ever really “there” in our lives? It is rare and precious indeed when we feel the moment is all there is and all we need. These peak moments are blessings and between them we just have to enjoy the steady stream of life. I've hankered for explosive experiences and am having to accept that sometimes life is just life, it is a coat of many colors and the florescents wouldn't look so bold if there weren't grey days for them to stand out against.

I feel I can definitely live with this.  As long as there are some moments (hopefully more frequent than not) when I feel like I'm enjoying the fluorescents to the fullest extent I'm able, then it's Totally Worth It.  I guess if I were completely blissful all the time, it wouldn't be bliss after a while.  Also, would I really be able to recognize that I was enjoying a moment fully if I weren't able to take myself out of it, either at the moment or afterwards, and tell myself that?  I don't know if that made any sense, so I'll try and say it another way:  I feel that in order to reeeeally experience happiness like that, I have to know that that's what's going on.......even if I were able to attain it every day, I would only really be satisfied if I felt like I really appreciated how good it was and how lucky I was to be able to feel that way.

Happiness like what?  A couple weeks ago I suddenly Stumbled Upon a feeling (it lasted a few hours until I went to sleep) that I hadn't felt in a few years.  I felt so Good I didn't know what to do with myself.  Usually when I'm feeling pretty happy little doubts and uneasinesses are tugging at my mind (I guess no one's ever completely happy) for whatever reason; maybe I worry that I'm neglecting something I'm supposed to do, or maybe I don't feel entirely satisfied with my physical appearance.  There's always something, of course.  But for these few hours I was for once just completely blissful and content, so aware that this was the way to be.  I felt totally in Love with myself and everyone and everything.  I can't even describe it--I don't really have the words, and also I no longer really remember what it felt like--so I'm not going to even try.  I don't know where it came from, either.  I got there partly on my own and partly through a perfect combination of pot and alcohol, but I do know that I made the change from Regular to Indescribable within seconds.  I was so hopeful that I had really hit something, that This was the way I would feel from now on, for the rest of my life.  Alas, when I woke up the next morning, I definitely felt better and more positive than I had in days, but it was nowhere near that beautiful high I'd felt the night before.  It did tweak my perspective a little, maybe even a lot, but I was disappointed that I didn't wake up in that same mood, which was certainly naive.

(I'd felt that way at least a few times before.  I have to admit that it usually happens when I am drunk and high at the same time.  That sounds sort of bad to me, but I'm not gonna say it is...inebriation has come to be demonized in our culture (for both good and bad reasons), and not merely in our culture of course.  But it seems to me that people have been using it as a tool forever (since the dawn of time practically) to attain these sort of states of mind, for religious or spiritual purposes or otherwise...on the other hand, as I've demonstrated to myself time and again, drugs and alcohol (or whatever) often combine to have the OPPOSITE effect of that feeling I'm trying to achieve...on the other other hand, I can't blame the fact that I'm not totally happy on stuff like that, because I don't believe it's true in my case.....but anyway, I should save this for another time.)

Any way, I guess I know that it's not enough to merely will myself to feel completely joyful and connected.  It has to be a combination of that and really thinking through my thoughts, trying to make myself happy by working through what kind of thinking isn't making me happy.  I can't overdo it either way, there has to be a balance...

I haven't said all I want to say about this and I don't know if any of that made sense, but this is good enough for now.  Orrr it'll have to be.  I think I need to go think about it some more and then come back.  Thanks, Luke, I Love You, thank you for inspiring me to make my first post.  This is going to be a good exercise in self-reflection.  I have already learned that I have a compulsion to write "definitely" way too often.  Rain Man.