purposed irony is our way to sincerity

When New Sincerity emerged in the early scatters of the millennium, as has been well-espoused in this blog, the pundits all unverifiably claimed irony itself finito. dunndada. see ya later innovator. We, the culture of our collective esteem, were on an exacting track toward a struggle of extremes - a struggle we're still in the midst of & trying to find compromise & consummation in.

Did you catch my rhetorical wink-nod using unverifiably? wah wah wah.

Thing is, Life, our very root existence itself as gamed by Godhead, is an inherent contradiction. We are of the most dynamic romantic dramedy. But, you know what God wants of Us... extraordinary me and you, to finally become God. The elder statesman, the mama-papa bear's getting old (somewhere in Time), and the Will's been signed. But before we can inherit the diaspora of splendor, cool things of great worth & superfly magic vision, as only a well-meaning, somewhat masochistic parent would, God has given his children a series of obstacles, or rather holistically speaking, one very labyrinthine obstacle. A divinely assembled coalescing of temptations, vanities & intellectual smut to test our emotional reasoning, also known as our soul power. Judgment Day, or those last filial nudges a parent gives to their son or daughter whom is transitioning from the immaturity & apathy of adolescence to the actionable, focused resolve of young adulthood.

...From young adulthood, it'll be up to us to become sage, but first thing's first, let's work on presence and now.

In this struggle, irony has become a surgeon's knife, albeit sometimes blunted & not always disinfected. First out of a young generation seeped in sarcasm's yearning for something real, or more real, instead of the contrived hypercapitalist gloss they were born & cultivated in. Not to say, we're not contrived & mirror-adoring, we are, but we understand it, we self-mock it. Therein lies the intervention of our self-involvement, our supreme sense of self-authorship.

Rather than the closeted, nose-thumbing & wrap-around perverse exploitation of it, the impossible blockbuster action movie with meta-erectile dysfunction or the male hegemonic packaged rom-coms with meta-silicone sandbags pawning themselves off as this is how it should be. We embrace it. We were raised, innocents, in the pinnacle of postmodernity's takeover & took with us the sardonic sword & have learned the fullest grasp of aesthetic. We have all the tools of the hegemony to use against it. And we're more skilled & less self-deceiving about it. We've used self-effacing kitsch & irony to deconstruct every gloss-lipstick of former cultures, pop & otherwise, integrating them tongue-in-cheek into our hyper-mash-up style. Now the final piece of the puzzle, the consummation: Can we find focus of our potential? Because irony without purpose is a dead end. Rather, irony, ultimately speaking, that deconstructs without the intention of reconstructing is ironic, tragically so. So, can we get our tongues off outta our cheeks & smile sincere?

The above trailer, Van Damme's newest, is an exemplar of this deconstruction, this perceptive & economical shift that promises one step closer to sincerity, or as I like to see it, our kingdom of heaven.

midnight meat train

Saw this contemporary horror classic a few weeks ago at the Fantasia Fest in MTL. The word on the street's that due to some internal studio politics the movie got only a very limited release, a fuck-all shame in my opinion. This one garnered much buzz being a Clive Barker bullet, and with sure-handed direction from Asian import Ryuhei Kitamura it didn't disappoint - and actually surpassed my expectations. Kitamura's one of the rare Asian horror imports that didn't implode under the anxiety of cultural turn-over. Though, he did have some issues with capture and pace with the few domestic-related scenes, but gets a mulligan. Midnight Meat Train was a kitsch, moody, gory, technically-adept crowd-pleaser, all the components of a solid post-millennium horror flick. The separation from its inept, manufactured contemporaries lies in its meta.

Firstly, the fact alone that it had exegesis should be applauded in a film. You could say MMT was a riff on Blow-Up, but cultivated from one of the premier exemplars of postmodern manifest, Clive Barker. He asks us: Who is the killer, the actionable party or the voyeur capturing the action? Who is the grander perpetuator, the media who feeds us or us who feed the culture of the media? Who's more perverse, who's the pervert, the criminal? The line's atom-thin between perpetrator and perpetuator. The voyeur becomes what he shoots. His perception of reality suffers and turns into depraved disillusionment.

Though, my only dissatisfaction of MMT was the concluding anti-hero nihilism: that you, in fact, become in the flesh what you shoot, embody it and redemption turns a way of succumbing. I mention "anti-hero" because in a grander postmodern sentiment, Bradley Cooper's character's a guardian of sorts, maintaining the equilibrium of two disjunctive realities from colliding. This, though quintessential artifact of the last whimpers of postmodernity, works as a sterling reminder to our moment that cuts the glossy crust away from manufactured sincerity and aesthetic dismemberment that still pervades.

horror for your soul power

I proclaim this without exagerration: The Signal possesses (semantically deliberate, it POSSESSES) one of the most intensely and triumphantly frightening introductions in horror cinema history. In every cinematic facet, the first 30 minutes, or Transmission 1, are near flawless evocation of carnal horror.

The flick is segmented into 3 sections, or Transmissions, and each is composed and directed with variant and purposeful tone by three singular minds, with extraordinary results. The Signal, thus far, is the nearest to New Sincerity horror, in execution and purpose, I've yet to see. An apocalyptic narrative set in a city aptly named Terminus, The narrative follows a man searching for his love as the existence around him crumbles into primordial violence and irrationability stemming from a seductively-mysterious transmission coming from all forms of airwaves. Transmission 1 may be the hallmark of the 3 transmissions, filmed in a unsettlingly realist style, and works in the broader conceptual theme as Modernity - linear and at-your-door.

Transmission 2, however, derails the momentum that its predecessor builds by escaping into a satirical, sitcomesque tone. Though, in itself a letup, this segment is equally deliberate and vital to the film. It's not only necessary, but a sacrifice on the part of the craftsmen in favor of the greater meaning of their work. I applaud their nobbility even if the results sour the film's entertainment value. The surrealism of Transmission 2 is that of postmodernity - the detachment and satirization of the present danger, one of which we all know very well and one that still lingers in our collective consciousness.

In Transmission 3, the conflict of the film is fully realized: the abstraction of reality by aforementioned transmission, the perversion that has led us to unravel and in the process, lose our self-identity, our soul. This last trasmission an exemplary artifact in examining the artistic tenets of New Sincerity. Throughout, it weaves seamlessly, even deceivingly (but relative to postmodernity, with purposeful aim), between linearity and perceptional disorientation. Compositionally and tonally, it flows with naturalistic style, like the natural world, unsentimentalized, but at the same time, grounded and romantic.

The degrading transmission is not just that of media. No, it is that of meaningless aesthetics and nothingness. These are such perversions of our reality that corrupt our identity and the potential of our current reality. Before the film comes to a close, we are thrown a last deception, one that flashes forward and shows the two main characters successfully escaping from Terminus, alive and lovingly in each other's warm embrace. But we are jolted back into the blunt reality, that this was only a daydream. The woman lies still, numb, comatose, and the man desperately scrambles to save her from the sickeningly-convuluted transmission. The prior would be a cop-out, a submission to the transmission itself. For the ending would be sentimentalized and void of true repercussion, and thus, true redemption. Because in our current juncture, we may be there, but we are not yet. This struggle of ours is still fragilely open-ended. Will we find again our identity, muddled and masked behind all the hollow currents of transmission? Will we find our purpose, the art that is us?

The Signal ends, or rather begins, with the man sliding headphones onto the woman, seated, wrestled and suffocated by the transmission into a state of empty stagnation, and as a cover of Joy Division's "Atmosphere" fills her ears, a tear falls. Feeling, emotion, if even only a glimpse. Through all the barriers of transmission that have cheapend and robbed us of emotion and sincerity, she rediscovers such with the help of meaningful art.

cheap thrills leave me quickly

Saw The Eye last night, the original version directed by The Pang Brothers, not the recent remake with Jessica Alba. I'm developing a feature horror screenplay titled The Trail of Dead and this 2002 Chinese import magnified some elements I want to address about contemporary horror.

The Eye was a mediocre Hollywood popcorn horror at best (except in Cantonese). Andy, who somehow stumbled into theaters for the American remake and watched the original with me, determined that the remake was surprisingly, sadly more polished than its source artifact. I already had a sneaking suspicion... The Pang Brothers got their shot at the American pie with 2007's The Messengers and needless to say, underwhelmed. Their direction of the The Eye epitomizes the fundamental stylistic praxis that have corroded the appeal and potential of the horror genre in the scope of cinema -- praxis that are outdated manifestations of postmodern quick-fix American slasher flicks.

We're used to our horror being centered around loud, invasive noises contrived to jolt, abrupt editing technique and camera angles asunder to evoke pseudo discomfort and tension. We're so use to cheap thrills, fractions of seconds of underdeveloped scenes that make us jump, then immediately leave us... and then we breathe and the cycle repeats itself. Us waiting and fiending for the next pseudo scare. Us anticipating the next fix. I'm not implying that these postmodern adornments in horror cinema are wholly irrelevant, only that they're meant for supplement not primary emotive device -- the jump-out-of-your-seat scare similar to slapstick in comedy, meant as minor accompaniment in the grand genre orchestra.

It's an intriguing cultural dynamic the variations between Chinese, Japanese and Korean cinema -- especially in horror where J-Horror and K-Horror are at the genre's forefront, but not 'C-Horror'.

...If you've been following my conceptual dribbles then you've caught breath of my personal cinematic recalibration, meaning as aesthetic. Horror (along with Science Fiction, Fantasy, etc.) because it lives and derives its truth from a polarized state of human reality, finds exception. It requires aesthetic to help achieve its end.

homage is the new spoof

This blog's been a month delayed seeing as Meet The Spartans is essentially out of theaters.

The contemporary spoof is outdated, and a purely capitalistic detriment to the transition toward romantic movement. It was dug up in the late 90s with the Scary Movie franchise, which in itself was necessary to deconstruct the frivolous slasher films that also saw revival. But since, and reflected by the latter Scary Movies, the genre has promptly become archaic, especially in this collective post-millennium esteem. Fundamentally, how can it be a "spoof" if the spoof itself is more inane than the original materials it derives itself from? The term "stupid funny" inherently and tellingly postmodern.

Sure the argument could be made that its precursors Airplane!, Naked Gun, Hot Shots worked on the same premise, but the distinction is that the former had, or at least aspired for some cinematic validity. Analyze the current stock-crop of spoofs (i.e. Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans) and an effort for credible narrativization and overall production value is neglected. These, sadly products on an assembly line to get in, get your money and get the hell out.

These soulless products (Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans), which are mass-distributed by FOX and unconsciously shat out by Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, are wholly founded in mean-spirited provocation, which again separates the former from the latter; the former lot of old-school spoofs exploiting haphazard mirth for its humor. But do we blame FOX for distributing this romantic degradation, or even the two douche bags, Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg? No. We, as a collective, must signify these movies as problematic. Because hypercapitalism has no ties to us. It'll just keep insatiably satiating itself.

There's already a compromise in place: kitsch cinema, as delineated by the Grindhouse features Deathproof and Planet Terror, Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and James Gunn's Slither or even, Roth's Hostel. The homage is the new spoof. Cinema that is existentially satirical, but founded in genuine admiration of its root material.

fleshing it out

The flesh-insecurity theorem:

A hotstove topic over the years has been the depiction of violence in visual media, especially cinema. The graphic exploitation of flesh in American cinema becoming more apparent and explicit in recent years. Overblown whistle-blowers were concerned about the societal ripple effect. I don't completely disagree with them, but I don't agree either. It's the romantic idealist in me that sees it as necessary revelation. Take Tarantino and Eli Roth for example, two primary auteurs of this conversation. Their exaggerated, hyperreal approach to graphic violence actually more honest, and closer to reality than previously before. In Hostel, that's how an Achilles looks when it gets slit. Violence IS graphic. Lurid. This is the key: depicting it in such a kitsch, pornographic way abstracts it, makes it unreal. It makes the viewer only a voyeur, not actionable. This extends to video games. It becomes existentialized, becoming more a vicarious release (though, I do see video games in a more problematic sense - the deprivation of active imagination).

This visual oppression of gore, the mutilated flesh, and the flesh in general, carries a simpler intonation in us: fear of mortality, imperfection. As with any thing that reminds us of this, we insecurely subjugate it. But, I compare works like Grindhouse and Hostel to the transition being expressed in pugilistic entertainment. The transition from contrived, insincere violence (WWE) to fighting that carries real consequence, the mixed martial arts of UFC.

As exploitative and grotesque as may seem, this honest visualization of the flesh has allowed for the most profound human act to finally be sincerely celebrated: the female giving birth to child. Before it was always close-up on woman -hair perfectly styled, make-up newly applied- whimsically pushing, then cut to: Whoosh! pleasant, little bundle of joy gift-wrapped directly from the heavens. No sweat, no struggle, no signs of an umbilical chord, no beauty. In recent years, however, we have finally seen the true beauty of childbirth. Messy, harrowing, and heroic. To name a few works that celebrate this beautiful struggle: Children of Men, Knocked Up, and Eastern Promises.