"Its all about the girls for you guys..." -- Tulkinghorn
Case in point:
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
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6 comments:
You're right about that: Unless the movie is misrepresented by the trailer, there is absolutely no reason to see this unless you love sex and violence (and, if that's not too PC for you, violence against women).
I've said it before and I still maintain that a lot of the films in the cinematic canon of the late sixties through the early eighties are there precisely because of the immaturity of the contemporary critics -- and their attempts to explain their love of sex, violence, and noise to the broader society. Pauline Kael gave them cover and a vocabulary to do so. Also she was a genius.
Take, for example, all of Brian de Palma, whose star fell at precisely the same time that the Paulettes began to have children and mortgages.
David, as a greybeard, is largely immune to these things now -- but clearly not entirely.
Just to be clear: I do not exempt myself from this criticism at all -- although I was then, as now, a mere fellow traveler in the worlds of the arts.
In fact I can remember in the 80s sitting in a theatre on 42nd Street-- that was so intense that they didn't even lower the lights during the features -- watching a double bill with David that included a movie called "The Toolbox Murders" about a misfit who killed people with nail guns, chainsaws, and the like. (Was the other movie Ms. 45?)
I kind of thought that this was justified by something other than my revenge fantasies against the group of Manhattanite lovelies who preferred the company of others....
Not true.
You remember correctly. Both films directed by Abel Ferrara.
As to the trailer itself, I detect major eye-of-the-beholder, reading-in-what-you-assume-will-be-there action.
What I see are mostly images of a girl (not especially glamorized) kicking guy's asses with flamboyant Thai boxing + hip hop moves. With a revenge plot and a dollop of social critique as per usual in exploitation -- what David Friedman used to call The Square Up.
My suspicion is that you're using this elaborate construct to keep the temptations of your youth at bay, a ploy that would not be called for if you'd truly risen as far above as you imply.
There you go again with the dime-store psychology.
As is the sign of all pseudo-science, it is unfalsifiable, since it's structured this way:
1)Chute believes X.
2) X is proven by the very fact that Tulkinghorn denies X.
or, put another way:
3) If Tulkinghorn agrees with X, X is true. If Tulkinghorn disagrees with X, X is true.
The ploy is not a ploy: I wouldn't watch that movie for pay.
It's remarkable how uninteresting discussions can be when they degenerate into pop-psychology.
Anyway, I'm off on vacation for a week and will be back with tales of foreign lands...
I think the term I'm looking for is "reductive" -- "To make smaller by removing some of the material it is made from."
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