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| 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.
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| 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…
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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
|
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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
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| 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
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| 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.”
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| 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’
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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.
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| 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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