Σάββατο 8 Δεκεμβρίου 2012

What I think About Stuff-It's Bullshit and You Know It!


PROTIP: If you don’t get this painting, then you’re not an asshole


ART! Or It’s Bullshit and you know it

DISCLAIMER: This is an article aiming to tear at horseshit that plague my country, the Internet and the sensibilities of idiots who try to seem intelligent by swimming along the river of shit that is the ‘avant garde’. If you are offended by this then you are one of them and do not deserve my pity. 

Way back when, in my Rogan Gosh review, I made a brief mention of my unbridled, venomous hatred toward ‘artists’. Note the fucking quotes, they’re important. 

I mentioned how Greece is chock full of bastards who grow goatees, wear Palestinian Indifanda scarves and read or say the weirdest shit, while making sure they are always surrounded by a group of cunts as blind and retardedly elitist as themselves, so that no one will ever tell them that their cucumber on a stone slab sculpture is a piece of shit and that it signifies fuck all.

Or anybody who might say, confront them on how they have been wasting their parents’ money on horse shit.


Athens, in particular, is plagued by the fruits of the works of such ‘artists’. We live, in fact, in a city of artistic extremes. On the one hand, we are proud to sell the Acropolis as an architectural and religious marvel of global significance while on the other hand, we have…

This piece of unbreakable shit in the middle of one of the most important commercial streets of the capital.

Make no mistake: I once thought that this was the epitome of coolness, suaveness and cultural understanding that we should all aspire too. Then again, I was 17 and hadn’t gone back in time to punch myself in the dick yet.

Here’s a loose definition of Art, dear reader, as shamelessly ripped off Wikipedia:

Philosophers and others who have characterized art in terms of mimesis, expression, communication of emotion, or other values. During the Romantic period, art came to be seen as "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science".[2] Though art's definition is disputed and has changed over time, general descriptions mention an idea of human agency[3] and creation through imaginative or technical skill.[4]

Let’s break this definition down, shall we?

Mimesis: term stemming from the greek word Μίμηση, which means copying or reproducing an idea or trope presented in previous works of Art.

Expression and communication of emotion: Art needs to be able to present to the viewer/reader the artists’ point of view in the most eloquent and expedient way possible.

"A special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science": Art is an extension of the spiritual and the intellectual and is, essentially, a blown-up version of the sensibilities of the time that spawned it.

tl;dr great art makes you shit bricks and understand what the artist was thinking of

Terrible art makes you think of the assholes that made it and death by burning.

I could go on and on about how much I hate ‘artists’ and how they keep trying to one-up each other while making up bullshit explanations and references to increasingly obscure shit, thus contaminating the human collective with their crap. What I’m going to do instead, is show exactly what I mean in the space of minutes, thanks to the magic of YouTube!


So maybe this did not shock you enough. God knows I wasn’t shocked, only perplexed. This scene is by far the most notorious one from the critically acclaimed low budget epilepsy-fest known as Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the lowest budget Japanese experimental horror film ever to make it on the silver screen.

AND THIS SCENE IS FUCKING MILD, MAN.

But you know what? This scene ALONE has spawned thousands of internet critics who like to paint themselves as all-knowing seers who can see the hidden meanings involved behind drill-fucking . And they themselves aren’t so bad; after all, they’re just a bunch of fuckwads who try so hard to rise to the top that they end up getting crushed with everyone else against the bottom instead.

What is so bad is the millions of mouth-breathers who agree with them and support their ridiculous claims, tooth and nail.

Hipster: the artistic equivalent of a black plague carrier rat.

So instead of wasting your time with hate-speech on overthinking assholes, here’s a crash list of 

SHIT MOVIES THAT ONLY SHIT PEOPLE LIKE THAT DESPERATELY WANT YOU TO LIKE THEM TOO

“Please God, please make everybody think I’m smart…”

ERASERHEAD:


I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: David Lynch (or his progeny) should not direct shit without adult supervision. Actually, fuck that: they should not direct shit at all.

Mr. Lynch’s EraserHead is a perfect example of shock-value art for its own sake. What probably started off as an attempt to make a horror film on parenting turned into an artsturbation marathon that has since launched a thousand ‘critics’ and ‘auteurs’. It has also helped to make the unnecessarily weird a mainstream thing, with millions of mouth-breathing ‘artists’ constantly seeking to outdo each other.

Oh I’m sorry, am I being too hard on Mr. Lynch? Are you a butthurt little fanboy? Okay then you little subjective shit; let’s look at a more mainstream work of his like, say, Dune:



Scene breakdown: 

David Lynch has a great sense of style and that’s probably why people love him. Everything in this scene looks awesomely put together. However…

His pacing, infodumping and presentation are a jumbled fucking mess. Yes, the Dune books are a plain mess of fluff that requires extensive reading that is totally worth the goddamn effort

Except for this one. This one deliberately makes no goddamn sense.
But here, David Lynch goes like: “Oh that’s quite alright, we’ll just jam every bit of exposition into 9 minutes and pepper the entire movie with information the audience won’t want to find out”. That’s the narrative equivalent of slipping on a banana peel and into a sewer, right fucking there.

In short, David Lynch became famous because his movies look good and his style sticks to your forebrain. EraserHead is all style, no taste and no goddamn sense for the sake of becoming famous and it is a titanic waste of time on your part.

EXISTENZ:


Existenz is a dumb name for a dumb movie that only cunts like the people who keep praising it on IMdB can enjoy. It tries to sell itself as a critique on the rapid advancement of videogame technology and the evils of online immersion and people losing touch with one another.

What we get instead is body horror porn, a dumbass movie-within-a-movie-within-a-game plot and a twist at the end that would make M. Night Shyamalan go

Dude, like, seriously?
I remember people I knew (who I considered intelligent human beings up to that point) praising the everloving fuck out of that movie and detailing the genius behind it. But you know what? No. Existenz isn’t smart. It’s not witty. It’s not even fucking intelligible.

If Existenz was a person, it would be the annoying little pseudo-nerd at the front of the class. He’d wear glasses and play the part of the smart know-it-all flawlessly, but instead of words, his mouth would only eject babbling and feces at 60 miles an hour.

First off, let me go on record saying that I like Mr. Cronenberg’s work enough to watch every Scanners movie. And that’s not a statement to be made lightly. But this…

Okay, breakdown time:

Existenz is supposed to be a game and it is also supposed to work like a game well if this is a game, then no one will fucking buy it. By gaming standards, it is extremely linear, has little to no freedom of choice, character customization or plot development and feels more like you’re being dragged through a story while on Skype with a friend, occasionally stopping to fondle each other. 

Existenz tries to sell itself as a game within a game within a movie, in order to bring its point across instead, what we get is a jumbled mess with shitty performances and sub-par acting on everyone’s part and a tiny little moral at the end that might as well have been

I’m an old fuck who likes to cash in on vidyagames but doesn’t know how the fuck they work. I also hate all those young people playing them online.
Last but not least, Cronenberg’s body horror is seriously slipping on this no, I mean, seriously. Allow me to present my point via actual comparison:

The Fly, made in 1986. This is the movie that made me lose at least two lunches and a dinner.

Now compare that shit to:

The vagina-boob console complete with analog clitoris and…

The cock-phone that Jude Law desperately tries not to let it touch his face.

THE WHITE RIBBON



It is my personal belief that there is justice in the Universe and that it dictates that the sons of bitches who make movies like The White Ribbon as well as the faux-intellectual crowd that supports them will descend into Dante’s Dis and there dwell entangled to each other’s flesh, forced to feed on each other’s farts for eternity.

Furthermore, I would like to state that I wish for the city of Cannes to be struck by firestorms and the ground be sown with salt, so that nothing grows again and any mention of its film festival be struck from the annals of history.

That’s how fucking much I hate this movie. Why? Well mostly because it’s a 180 minute artsturbation festival with wonderful photography where NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS.

They used stuntmen for this scene, on account of it being so goddamn fraught with excitement.
It’s a story of a German village at the beginning of the 20th century, months before the beginning of the First World War. Is it a family drama on the collapse of the feudal system of Germany and the fall of its Empire, as presented by the radical changes of the status quo? 

NOPE.

Is it a subtle reference to the class struggle between the old bourgeoisie and the farmers living under its yoke, brought about by the advent of communism?

NOPE.

Is it even a movie about oppressed kids doing fucked up shit to get to their asshole priest dad?


Then what the fuck is it about? You’ll ask. It’s about NOTHING. NOTHING AT ALL. NOTHING HAPPENS. NOTHING IS RESOLVED, PRESENTED, PLAYED OUT.  You just get to watch a bunch of backwards asshole Germans being assholes and backward for 180 minutes and then the movie ends and you want to punch the old lady who keeps asking you why you don’t like it in the mouth.

The photography is pretty good though but that amounts to sweet fuck all, of course. After all, even a monkey could make Art, given enough time and feces.

AMERICAN BEAUTY


Like the White Ribbon, this movie stars a bunch of cunts being cunts doing sweet fuck all. I love how the movie goes to great lengths to show off its piece of shit ‘artist’ character and tries to sell the little teenage slut as someone who is borderline likeable.

Thank God Kevin Spacey is in it I know, right? The guy can sell a goddamn movie simply by being there. Hell, he even made Superman Returns look good. Well, he actually made Luthor look good. Well, he couldn’t; not really, not with the shitty way he was written.  Oh, what the hell?

All in all, American Beauty is the kind of movie that belongs to the DVD rental aisle that’s just next to the porn stand. Had Kevin Spacey not been in it, no one would have given a shit about it. Now, back to the point of…

SUPERMAN RETURNS


This is the worst goddamn superhero movie ever and I’ve sat through Steel. It’s not just horribly written or performed, it’s also the movie that wanted to one-up Christopher Reeves’ iconic Superman and expand on the Universe and failed so bad that it fell into the Nega-Universe

Where even its miserable denizens, deprived of light and hope, also hated it with all their hearts.

There’s a Greek saying that kept popping up in my mind the entire time I was watching that fucking trainwreck of a movie and that was “Who’s the kid’s father, you slut?” 

The movie, instead of being about the Last Son of Krypton’s glorious return and his clash with the deadliest human mind was instead about Lois’ hypno-rape baby, her stoic boyfriend who had to put up with her shit and Lex Luthor trying to get moar land and twirling his goddamn moustache at us.

It’s boring, it’s idiotically directed and the premise is for cunts.

The airplane rescue scene was good though yep, 10 minutes of awesome, drowned out by the thunder of a million assholes farting in unison for 80 minutes.

Π


I harbor a deep and lasting dislike for Mr. Aronofksy’s work. I consider it trite, pretentious and that he deliberately goes out of his way to create grim, depressing sequences for the sake of manipulating his audience. 

If you look closely into his movies in fact, you can even see the points where Mr Aronofksy deliberately manipulated them for the sake of creating certain emotional responses, or peppered them with occult or philosophical references in the interest of selling this movie to people who want to convince everyone that they’re smart.

Π is the classic example of a forced-smart movie. It is supposed to be about the dark side of mathematics, the impossible applications of Π, the life and horrors of its cloistered half-mad character and about the burden of true power in the form of the Word of God.

What we get instead is a jumbled mess about Jewish Gematria, intelligent computers killing themselves, an unlikable asshole protagonist, pretend economics and general shit-flinging that is built up for 60 minutes and resolved in 10.

The presentation is haunting, however monkeys and Art baby, monkeys and Art.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE


The cunts among you reading this article will automatically assume I am doing this for trolling value. The intelligent ones among you will keep reading and pay notice to my own point of view and perhaps attempt to refute it without acting like butthurt children.

A Clockwork Orange is a movie loosely based off the balls-trippy but excellently written book by Anthony Brugess, who makes love to the English language in ways that most of us would wish we could even picture in our heads. Here’s his most famous book quote:

“Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers.”

Shut up and kiss me, you bastard.

The book is the story of Alex, a right old asshole and destructive force of nature, who is evil as fuck and tries to present himself as the poor little oppressed little boy and near convinces most of us, except the dumb shits who go ‘he’s not evil, the poor thing he just needs a hug’


PROTIP: No. No he doesn’t.

It was only natural that Stanley Kubrick would pick this ambiguous work of fiction to make into a movie and he does a great fucking job bringing it to the screen. Here’s the problem, however:

The book works because it is a book and we can only work with the subjective presentation of the horrible fucking bastard that is our narrator, who manages to fool us with his suaveness and intelligence.

The movie does not work into painting Alex as sympathetic, mostly because the unreliable narrator’s ever y word is immediately contradicted by the objective representation of how much of a monster he is.

Also, the movie lacks a catharsis. I was pleased as punch to see Alex beaten down and torn apart by the people he plagued and I loved it when they took away his brain and turned him into a pansy. I like seeing evil people punished for their atrocities in fiction, mostly because in the real world such retribution cannot usually take place.

Alex is a monster and he deserves every bit of punishment he gets. In a movie that seeks to show us exactly how much of an asshole he was (and yes, there are people who think that Kubrick was trying to represent ‘oppression of the elders to the younger generation’. You are free to spit in their mouth), there is really no payoff. Yes, the book shows Alex coming out on top, but the movie needn’t have.

There’s a reason why people watch Hollywood movies more than, say, those of Cannes. It’s because Hollywood provides tropes and payoffs that show the clear victory of good over evil and light versus darkness. When Kubrick had the son of a bitch protagonist come out on top, he hurt his movie and also created a horde of asswipes who immediately assumed that this was because Alex was really an okay guy all along.

Psst, asshole, here’s a tip: Kubrick simply wanted to troll everyone by making you hate Alex even more. He didn’t want you to think he was the good guy. He wanted you to get mad. In a way, he trolled you so goddamn well that it became your reality now.

The fact that you are dumber than a bag of bricks really didn’t help toward getting that point across.

Addendum:

People think I hate every movie I watch. That’s mostly because I love milking the hate-humor that these movies generate, while I keep good movies close to my heart and let their wonderful light nourish me.

So here’s a list of artsy movies that I treasure and cherish. It’s not the most original list on the Internet, but it’s my list and I love it. 

Der Untergang (AKA Downfall)

The story of the final days of the Third Reich and the best fucking Hitler on screen, complete with excellent direction. This movie has broken my heart every time I’ve watched it and you should fucking watch it too.


Die Welle

Serving to defend the ideal that not all German directors are a bunch of stuck-up cunts, Die Welle is a masterfully directed movie that seeks to make the German people come to face the dangers of another rise of fascism in their country. It succeeds so goddamn well that you feel like an asshole afterwards.



The Final days of Sophie Scholl

Okay, pinkie promise: last German movie dealing with fascism on the list. This one’s the most powerful thing I’ve seen and the trial scene alone is so fraught with emotion that I snuck into the theater just so I could watch it all over again


Mongol

The rise of Temujin, who was to be Genghis Khan, from an orphaned boy in the steppes, to absolute master of half the known world. This is not a movie that’s about Genghis being awesome and kicking ass, no sir. It’s a tale about a man who can stare down Batman and make him go home crying to Alfred. It’s a story about the triumph of will and dream over all.



I saw the Devil:

Thought not in itself an artsy film, this movie takes the good old crazy slasher torture porn trope and turns it on its fucking head so masterfully that you wish it would remain so from here to the end of days.


Zebraman:

I have a very hard time taking Japanese films seriously. With the exception of Battle Royale (GO WATCH IT NAO) their style and over-the top approach to everything doesn’t work for me. There are exceptions, however, where over-the-topness and intentional parodying of these tropes makes for awesome movies. Zebraman is just this case: made by a Japanese director considered ‘avant garde’ by his country’s standards, it’s a movie about a superhero/power ranger brought to life via fiction embedding itself in reality.



It’s meta as hell and I love it.

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