Martyrs was good. I know I babbled at length in email at you ono that one, but after a couple of months I've got this itch to rewatch it even knowing it's really not an easy thing to sit through. There's something weirdly compelling now that I know how it turns out to go back and see how things unfold. I'm trying to track down Irreversible to turn my brain to mush (most of my French cinematic experience has been pure crack - Arsene Lupin and Atomik Circus are so delightfully weird) but no luck at the rental place. I may have to turn to the internets.
It's been bugging me and I finally hit on what ASF reminds me of: Out Are The Lights and Other Stories by Richard Laymon, where the main story is a theatre that shows grindhouse style horror movies that turn out to be actual snuff films but in a more slasher horror way rather than porn (and no babies!). The only way some detective finds out about it is because he was trying to date a deaf girl and she could lip read, while the movies themselves were dubbed. The deaf girl had a jerk of an ex boyfriend, thus her involvement with a detective. I don't remember the rest of the plot, but I think the dude that was making the movies had a motive to make them other than that he could. There may have been some kind of comeuppance with the jerk ex in a movie, but I haven't read this since high school.
So the plot for ASF isn't anything particularly revolutionary or new, which means I'm really not at all buying into the director's claims of deep and meaningful socio-political commentary based on the Wikipedia article. Maybe he really believes it, or maybe he's trying to find a way to spin it to justify the movie he made. At least Tom Six was honest about THC.
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2011-05-15 10:25 pm (UTC)It's been bugging me and I finally hit on what ASF reminds me of: Out Are The Lights and Other Stories by Richard Laymon, where the main story is a theatre that shows grindhouse style horror movies that turn out to be actual snuff films but in a more slasher horror way rather than porn (and no babies!). The only way some detective finds out about it is because he was trying to date a deaf girl and she could lip read, while the movies themselves were dubbed. The deaf girl had a jerk of an ex boyfriend, thus her involvement with a detective. I don't remember the rest of the plot, but I think the dude that was making the movies had a motive to make them other than that he could. There may have been some kind of comeuppance with the jerk ex in a movie, but I haven't read this since high school.
So the plot for ASF isn't anything particularly revolutionary or new, which means I'm really not at all buying into the director's claims of deep and meaningful socio-political commentary based on the Wikipedia article. Maybe he really believes it, or maybe he's trying to find a way to spin it to justify the movie he made. At least Tom Six was honest about THC.