Change Your Image
john-reeve-1
Reviews
Fast Food Nation (2006)
Bad propaganda for an idea most people can't formulate
Frankly, this wasn't the best film I evvah saw, but it was pretty nice. How often do you get the irony of college kids, failing to "liberate" cows form their pens, retiring to their own dorm pens to munch on name-brand bottled ale while talking about how engineered food just tastes better? Or how does it feel to see Bruce Willis play the meat-eating phenomenological bad guy from the Matrix? After viewing the thing, I am not sure how to take the film. I like it, though it certainly offers no way out of the messes it shows us.
When in doubt, though, I check the "hated it" reaction in these movie reviews. It's pathological (though entertaining behavior) to hate something so much that you feel inclined to write about it. And lots of folks disliked the film. On one hand, you have folks hating the movie because it was propagandistic. Well dyh! That's like going and complaining about a suspenseful Hitchcock film, or an artsy David Lynch film-- the complaint misses the point.
On the other hand there is the "the book was better propaganda" complaint. I haven't read the book, so I couldn't say it was better propaganda. Maybe it plays better as a factual written document, or maybe it is interesting to see people eat feces outside of Pink Flamingos, but it kind of depends on how we understand the message of the film.
Just like there are two obvious approaches to disliking the film, there are two approaches to understanding what the film is about. The easy reading that almost all the people complaining about it (possibly ineffective) propagandistic qualities take is that the film is trying to take on the task outlined by the naive college students. Other than the fact the film viciously mocks that position, I simply think that there is much more to the film than championing a number of so-called (neo)liberal causes. This film isn't going to change anyone's eating habits.
But there is another point to the film. Even if Zizek is a little more efficient in writing it out, the film is a classic, loud statement that we all eat a little dirt, know that fact, and enjoy it. Or, to state it better: we know what we do, but we do it anyway. That is the condition under which almost all of us work, and the only people who don't wither don't work (which is a kind of rarity 'round here) or are oblivious to anything beyond making a car payment. It's not that we don't know what we're doing which makes capitalism vicious-- it is that we know exactly what we are doing which makes the world horrible.
Some people (in the film, the boss who likes women to smell like that plant, maybe Bruce Willis, others too) enjoy this knowledge. Some of us are oblivious to the social environment in which we live. But most of us are stuck in a place where we owe money, where we do questionable things, where we work even though we're getting screwed just to be able to work, where we treat things like having a car as a natural fact, where we are fed, in a pen that we wouldn't trade for anything.
And being able to get that fact out in a film seems to me to be the better point, and one the film actually makes quite viscerally.
Sílení (2005)
It's sticky: it captures a feel and a political position
The film is nice. I suppose that if I was wanting animation I would be disappointed; the crawling meat doesn't really do anything other than serve as a transition. And strictly speaking it isn't much of a gory horror film.
I like the three part structure (at least, as another reviewer outlined the film) and it does a good job of twisting "Don't Look in the Basement;" it captures the same kind of feel. And that is no slam, either -- the film had a kind of low budget 1970s American horror film feel to it, yet it somehow makes that feel something appealing in a way that my body (to use the film's terminology) recalls from watching those kinds of films when I was young in the 1980s.
For me, the movie had a useful feel to it; it also captures an image I agree with. It is hard to say what exactly he might mean when JS talks about our present situation embodying the worst aspects of both the asylum structures during the intro. Maybe it would help to tease them out in writing: on one hand, there is the libertine, who does whatever he wants and seems to take particular joy in blasphemy on the other hand, there is the vicious authoritarian doctor, who feels legitimate in enjoying torturing the inmates even if he ciphers that enjoyment through his medical practice.
Maybe the doctor is a radical application of the libertine, if you can get around the fact that the mechanism which the libertine operates under discounts/deflates/undermines the violence the doctor seems to find so erotic. I can't make that move, and that is where I think the movie leads me: at some point, I am prejudiced towards libertine, if just because that kind of enjoyment makes it difficult to encode the suffering of others as a cipher of my own desire.
That is the problem of the movie for me; I am so stuck in my liberalism, and I can't see how the authoritarian doctor isn't simply a radical, evil libertine: the "truth" of the libertine, if you will. Ther really is a difference between the two; I know that is a fact, if just because their enjoyment is so divergent (one only enjoys foreplay, and the other, only scopic sex). I guess that inability to see the doctor for the pathology he represents IS the problem, both of the film and our situation.
Surf Nazis Must Die (1987)
Great but loose
If you don't like this film, it is because you don't really understand. Go pay your seven or fifteen bucks and plop down at the local cinemark, because if you don't stuff like this, it just isn't for you.
But if you can take a joke, then the thing is interesting. I haven't seen a bunch of Troma's catalogue, but I think it is one of the more memorable flicks there; it certainly isn't Tromeo and Juliet or Terror Firmer, but I don't understand the claim that it isn't a typical Troma film. At least it wasn't something like "Outlaw Prophet" (which put Troma on a blacklist with my wife). It was a genuine trash film, and taken as such seems as good as any other work of trash.
What makes this movie good is the fact that the kids have all given themselves new names, a fact that comes up when Smeg is talking to his mom (who claims he shouldn't call her mom). That is just choice.
Or the fact that the Nazis are all queens in hiding. I like the not so subtle homo-eroticism.
Of course, not only could both of these elements been mobilized more effectively, but there are other things it could have hit on. The apocalyptic oil pumping could have been used better, along with placing Leroy as part of the energy company pumping the beach dry. I was hoping that the fact that there is a big disjunction between the bourgeoisie expectations of Leroy and the ludicrous turf wars of the surf gangs could have been put to better use.
So to all you people who didn't like this because of the film making-- you are just wrong. This is what good ol' not so Hollywood film looks like. Like all real films, it's flaws are that it doesn't exploit everything that it could.