Culture

The writing/directing team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, responsible for the pair of Crank films, deliver an epic cartoon with a messy-mix of politics, corporate greed, mind control, internet porn, gore, bloody violence and wacky ideas. Forcing us to swallow a huge pill, Gamer oddly enough seems to work.Beginning with a title reading, “some years from this exact moment,” the Gamer's overstuffed plot begins to unfold, telling the story of a world where “Gamers” can now control interactive death row inmates that serve as real-life avatars. Anonymous users fight it out on rubble-strewn battlefields in a virtual reality game. The convicts battle each other in the biggest globally viewed TV game show of all time called “Slayers.” If one con makes it through 30 battles, he is supposedly released. So far no one's been that fortunate.Another game option is a neon-colored world called “Society” wherein actors in lavish, scantily clad getups wander around, commanded by Internet slouches. Here's where the desperate can whore themselves out to virtual deviants who want a taste of anything they choose, like, as you probably guessed, sexual acts. Yes, it's porn.

Once upon a time, if you saw a short film, you saw the work of someone who wanted to make a short film. Nowadays, that ain't necessarily so.
In 2006, Shane Acker's 10-minute computer-animated 9 was nominated for a Best Animated Short Oscar – but by that point, Tim Burton was already working with Acker to develop it into a feature. It became the latest in a line of “calling card” shorts: works created by inexperienced filmmakers hoping to get a full-length movie out of their efforts. In just such a way, Jared Hess's short Peluca became Napoleon Dynamite; Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's Gowanus, Brooklyn became Half Nelson. Sometimes, the raw material was there for something bigger and richer. Sometimes, it's not. In its expanded form, 9 remains a dazzlingly innovative vision that showcases Acker's skill as a director. But in trying to develop the mythology behind his story, Acker loses sight of its appealing mystery.
The title refers to the number scrawled on the back of a rag doll (Elijah Wood) who wakes up with no knowledge of the world. Wandering through a crumbling, corpse-strewn city, he soon spots a similar figure marked as 2 (Martin Landau), and learns that a mechanized predator stalks the streets. But how did these sewn-together bits of burlap achieve sentience? What happened to all the humans? What is the significance of a strange dome-shaped artifact 9 carries from the place of his birth?

Halloween 2 is so seriously and extremely brutal that it takes violence for violence's sake to a whole new disturbing level. Director Rob Zombie's track record started with homage/tribute to slasher/horror movies of the late '70s and early '80s, making House of 100 Corpses and The Devils Rejects and both have their moments of pure genius. With these two under his belt he ventured out into remake land. His Halloween was fairly reverent to the original with added Zombie-isms and more hyperkinetic violence. Now, as he finds his “voice,” it's becoming more incomprehensible to fathom his vision. Pushing psychedelic visuals aside, he abandons creativity for one big grisly CACHUNK after another.

We need to stop living in the past. People complain how the youth of today knows nothing of history, when in fact they know far too much. Everything they do, create and think is compared unfavorably to what came before. Maybe we could forget the influences of The Beatles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jack Kerouac, wipe the slate, and start again. Like overbearing older siblings, the titans of the past set everything new in claustrophobic shadows. Will any band ever be as vital as The Beatles? You'd think not from the constant noise of nostalgia. (See this month's cover of Rolling Stone.)
It sounds fascistic – but perhaps we could put a ban on talking about culture prior to this millennium? Particularly that period that inspires such obsession – the '60s. We've all internalized, by osmosis, the major movements of the era. They've been cartooned over the years, the truths of the time reduced to cultural shorthand. Tie-dye t-shirts, LSD, camper vans, peace, sexual revolution – it all means both too much and nothing at all. It could be argued that the last 40 years have been shaped, politically and socially, by waves of '60s glorification and/or backlash, rather than by the decades' actual events.