Posts Tagged ‘A-Scene-Where-Ism’

The Comfort of Trailers

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

I think I mentioned how certain great films ruin cinema forever, and it occurs to me that Evil Dead 2 is one such example.  Not that people copied the frenetic style and non-stop gag after gag pace; not even Mr. Sam Raimi could do that.  No, they always copy the stupid parts, and in this case, it was Mr. Raimi’s willingness to admit that The Evil Dead, while pretty good, just needed a quick do-over.  And with the extra fifty bucks some idiot gave him, he may have called it a sequel, but in making it, he just strapped a camera to a 2X4 and remade 1 as the masterpiece we know as 2.   Thus the requel was born.  And no, I’m not sure if anyone has come up with that port-manteau before, and you know I’m not going to check, in case it was copyrighted by the people who are bringing you the remake of Citizen Kane, written, directed and starring Ms. Gwyneth Paltrow, told in chronological order, from one perspective.  And no that isn’t a real thing; I send it thusly into the zeitgeist so that it might become one.  Future you, you’re welcome.  Also, don’t cross the street on October 11, 2035.  Or you’ll get bitten by a zombie Gwenyth Paltrow.

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Coked-out self-congratulation addict, all too coked-out self-congratulation addict.

Friday, July 15th, 2011

Last Wednesday, I was attending a seminar on Nietzsche’s short essay ‘Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense’, which was required reading for participation.This was a lucky break for me, since Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon had just come that same day.I was going to have to read it anyway.

The little ditty in question, ‘TALIANMS’, begins quite concisely: ‘Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing’ (and no it doesn’t say ‘invented autobots and decepticons.‘Nietzsche just wasn’t that prescient), the gag being with a multiplicity of viewpoints and consciousnesses, there is no way to establish which one sees what is real, since that would mean you already knew which one did, AKA: ‘Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions’.The implications of this would be serious if reality was super important, but as someone who has seen every movie ever made can attest, reality is fine and all, but only for making films, which allow me to escape it.

Of course, like all the other jokers before him, as soon as Nietzsche correctly disproves the idea of a ‘true’ reality, he immediately posits his own, which, unlike all the others, is the right one, or simply put, reality doesn’t exist, except for mine, which does.As a fan of action movies, I detest illogic, and hoping to really get into it with the resident Nietzsche guy from Dublin about whether metaphysical realism is purely phenomenological or based on a longing for ontology.

It’s the simple things.

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