Thread #2735

worst viral marketing execution ever

Bad movies general.

Germ Z is about a zombie virus from outer space that makes people eat campers... ostensibly. But when you actually watch it it's even stupider because it follows the idiot love story of some country bumpkins and their idiot children.

THE HYPOTHALAMUS IS GROWING EXPONENTIALLY!!1

A bad "good movie" and a surprisingly good "bad movie" (pompous professorial disquisitions thereon)
One: "Salo".
"Salo" is one of the two or three "foreign" movies that are brought up endlessly on the Internet - largely for the shit-and-shock value, admittedly, but probably also with the thought in the backs of the minds of the people who raise it that it's an "art movie" and somehow has "intellectual clout". I always do my best to dispel this illusion. The great post-war Italian film-makers are a mixed bag. One or two produced inarguably great bodies of work (well, one at least in my view: Di Sica). The work of certain others is a mixture of genuine greatness and unjustified critical hype (Rossellini). But the only out-and-out charlatan among the Italain directors of the period 1945-75 was, in my opinion, Pasolini. I admire his poetry and his essays enormously - but I think that Fellini passed the only sound and enduringly valid judgment on Pasolini's film-making when he simply walked out of the first screening of Pasolini's first film, saying "This isn't cinema". Pasolini - an amazing polymath who nonetheless spread himself, in the end, too thin and across too many different artforms - took his own neglect of the mastery of the basic technical skills of the cinema director and called this neglect "a cinema of poetry". Even the films he made in the relatively restrained middle period of his career as a film-maker - like "Teorema" - are filmed too clumsily and amateurishly to be watched with enjoyment. By the end of his life, when his celebrity as a practitioner of several arts simultaneously had completely gone to his head, his movies are barely more than film recordings of things and people he happened to like the look of slapped randomly together into long, self-indulgent would-be epics. "Salo" is the culmination of this self-indulgence, and its most annoying expression because Pasolini and various well-disposed critics couldn't just leave the thing stand as what

it was - a clumsily-executed piece of gore and scat porn - but had to pretentiously and hypocritically try to slip some narrative of political insight and committment over the top of the ugly unwieldy little thing. For forty years now, "art house" audiences sitting thrpugh images of pretty naked blonde girls being made to eat handfuls of shit have been able to calm their aesthetic and political consciences with the line that this is all some sort of critique of "the survival of fascist social and intellectual structures in the democratic society of post-war Europe". I'm afraid that, for my own part, I can't see any more of this in "Salo" than I can see a critique of late capitalist social structures in "Teorema"'s ninety minutes of various individuals of both sexes begging to such Terence Stamp's cock. But even if such a "message" were there somewhere, I would contend that it is neutralized and invalidated by that very same "Terence Stamp Principle" as tended to confuse, obscure and invalidate the "political messages" of all Pasolini's films: If "Salo" is really a movie that is intended to inspire disgust and horror in us, and revive whatever dimming flame of resistance to bourgeois capitalist hegemony as may still have existed in the late 70s, why are all the tormented naked young people in it without exception so SLIM, WELL-FORMED and ATTRACTIVE? If Pasolini really had had a political, and not a pornographic, intention with that movie, he really ought to have taken more effective measures to preclude any pornographic experience of the film he made on the part of his prospective audience. All that would have been required would have been casting young actors of normal, unprepossessing appearance - and not young men and women who look like they have stepped out of the pages of Italian "Playboy" or the gay equivalent.
Two: The "Human Centipede" Movies
I mention these two movies in the same post as "Salo" because the second of them in particular has often been

compared by critics - that is, by those few critics who have even deigned to discuss a movie-series which has been generally perceived as indeed just gore and scat porn and nothing more - to Pasolini's last film. Always, though, to "Salo"'s advantage, with "Human Centipede 2" being described as, at best, occupying a far less noble and exalted part of the same thematic territory. I would argue that the comparative evaluation needs to be reversed. It is the "Human Centipede" movies, and not "Salo", that actually thematize an issue of serious political, ethical and philosophical relevance: the simultaneous horror and longing that is felt by human beings today for a total, consuming symbiosis and synexistence with other human beings. The second movie in particular far transcends the gore-porn genre and becomes a sort of meditation - albeit a lurid, nightmarish, almost unbearably crude and graphic meditation - on the theme of contemporary loneliness.

It's axiomatic that gore and porn does not a political statement make, and that the great great majority of film critics are shallow, pretentious, and blinded by the stench of their superiority complexes. I'm just wondering why you feel the need to point it out -- are you supporting a further claim?

>>2851
wait wiat, the human centipede is of philosophical relevance? I've been trolled by the best you twat. You'll need better bait

Alex! Great to see you man. Any truth to the rumor you've been ramming Gayry?