I haven't written anything in a while. That has its reasons, which will probably be the topic of a later post, if anyone cares.
Going to Ikea on a Saturday is never a good idea but it is an especially bad idea to go right after payday. This means that it will be even more crowded than it usually is.
As always, the place is laced with a slight feeling of general mass-hysteria.
It started in the restaurant, where we came to have lunch after our 2 and a half hour car ride just to get this mekka. Rows and rows of people lined up like cows on their way to the slaughter. It was as if we were all animals being fed. Pigs at a trough. Although the lines were long everything was surprisingly efficient and a mere 15-20 minutes later we had our food. Salmon and steak. My dad and I had salmon, my friend Nina had steak. It was actually not bad.
Then the actual walk through that maze of furniture began. Since I was with my father, who could possibly win a gold medal in department store sprint, if there was such a sport, there wasn't much time to look at anything. Besides, it was too crowded and too noisy for me to be able to find the peace of mind to really take anything in. If I'm in a store and it's crowded and people are all around me grabbing on to things and everybody is tripping over each other, I can't manage to buy anything. I get stressed out by the frenzy you see in some people's eyes. Shopping is bloody serious business, so you better not get in their way.
So we run a marathon through the store, and both have to use the washroom, one after the other, since we both have this inclination to do number 2 every time we're in a store. My mom says it's psychological. Apparently I inherited this particular trait from my dad, because we both have to do it every time we set foot in a department store. It's odd. Anyway, it always boggles the mind how serious people seem to take Ikea. It's like they're on a mission. It's serious business.
I suppose I must do it myself, without knowing it. Let's face it, all those things, all those lamps, carpets, pictures, bed linens, it's mesmerizing. Although I'm never willing to put myself through long lineups and insanely crowded stores, even for a bargain sale. When it comes right down to it, it's just things and I don't need it that badly. However, I love coming out of a store with a bag full of goodies. I love piling things into the shopping cart. I feel like such a moron if I walk around with an empty basket. Like a pauper who can't or isn't allowed to join the party. An outcast. Like there's a group that I'm not a part of and I shouldn't even be there.
This time my shopping bag was meager, since I only emerged from the store with a measly 4 drinking glasses and two sets of bed linens. Oh but I musn't forget the big bag of toffees. That was the first thing I added to my shopping bag.
So we drove the 2 and a half hours home. Kelly got a hot dog since we forgot to bring her dinner. And those were the adventures of the day.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Contemporary horror movies...bleh
I just don't like today's movies nearly as much as I do those from earlier decades. I will gladly watch an 80's movie, provided that it's not an action movie, but when it comes to newly released movies I'm very picky. This is especially the case when it comes to thrillers or horror movies.
Atrocious is the only word that comes to mind.
It boggles the mind that movie makers of today seem to have learnt nothing from their predecessors. The only director who comes close is Wes Craven, and even he goes overboard with the gore sometimes. The body count doesn't need to be 200 for the movie to be good.
Sadly, I decided to watch Rob Zombie's version of Halloween, and I wish now that I had chosen a more fun activity, such as going to the dentist or jabbing a fork through my forehead. Anything would have been better than the utter garbage that Hallowen a'la Rob Zombie offered up. I have fervently tried to forget ever having watched that, err.."movie"... but unfortunately it still lingers in my mind, and not in a good way.
It seems that the only aim of horror movies today is to gross the audience out as much as possible, unlike the older generation of horror movies, such as Halloween, whose aim was to freak us out in a psychological way.
To me, seeing some guy saw off his own foot is gross but it doesn't scare me. All that accomplishes is making me feel slightly nauseous. What I want is the kind of drawn-out suspense that we see in Halloween, Friday the 13th and Jaws, where we don't at first see the killer, we see everything from his/her point of view. By not being so damned literal and graphic, the movies were that much more scary. Less really is more. Understated really is a thousand times more effective than over the top, something that Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter and Bob Clark (director of 1974's Black Christmas)understood. Today's movies are loaded with graphic violence and gory details, almost as if the directors feel the need to shove as much as possible down the audience's gullet just to satisfy their need for gore and special effects. The reason for this is that people have become so desensitized that without a certain level of violence they won't find the movie interesting. This is a rather disturbing trend if you think about it.
Although no one can accuse the older horror movies of being intelligent, it's almost as if audiences have become dumber. They can't think for themselves anymore. They need everything served on a platter, and in large quantities.
With the older generation of movies, such as Jaws and Friday the 13th, the audience had to rely more on their own imagination to get scared. It's like children having too much entertainment at their fingertips, so they're never forced to invent their own games, and thus never really develop the creative skills that kids 50 years ago had to in order to amuse themselves. In a similar way, when we watch horror movies where we can't see the menacing creature/killer, we are forced to imagine what or who it might be and what it looks like. The unknown threat is always much scarier than what we can see.
I'm referring mostly to horror movies here but in fact I find contemporary movies in general to be lacking something. Some of them are really good and I highly enjoy watching them, but there hasn't been one single movie in the past 10 years that I have felt like "Ooh, I need to buy the DVD and keep it for my collection so I can watch as much as I want!".
The last time I felt that movie magic was with Forrest Gump. I can't remember one movie after that where I got that same feeling. I mean there are movies I really appreciate, such as Bridget Jones' Diary, About a Boy, but none that I ever feel like I must own. Maybe I'll feel differently when a sufficient enough time has passed and I can look at them through nostalgic lenses. Could that be the why I prefer older movies to newer ones?
No, certainly not in the case of horror movies. I still contend and will always contend that the art of making good horror movies is a thing of the past.
There has not been one single remake of the old horror classics that I can honestly say that I liked, with the possible exception of When a Stranger Calls. I think they did a pretty good job with that one. The Hills Have Eyes however was atrocious. I don't often turn off a movie and I've never walked out on a movie in the theatre, but with this one I turned it off 20 minutes into it. It was just so obviously violent and in bad taste and in the kind of way where they just shove in your face in an attempt to gross you out as much as possible. Yes, Friday the 13th was also violent, but it was harmless and not so...in your face. With The Hills Have Eyes, I took no joy in watching a girl get raped by some misfits while her parents got murdered and mulilated, one of which got burned at the stake. Lovely!
Hence, I turned the damned thing off.
The original one didn't have to employ such cheap tactics to get under its audience's skin, why did the remake?
And my poor Black Christmas, the classic stalker horror movie, did not deserve to have such a horrible "remake" with the same name. The two movies don't even fall within the same class, not even close.
Same goes for the remake of Friday the 13th.
Please! Directors, watch the old horror movies, pay attention, learn!
Atrocious is the only word that comes to mind.
It boggles the mind that movie makers of today seem to have learnt nothing from their predecessors. The only director who comes close is Wes Craven, and even he goes overboard with the gore sometimes. The body count doesn't need to be 200 for the movie to be good.
Sadly, I decided to watch Rob Zombie's version of Halloween, and I wish now that I had chosen a more fun activity, such as going to the dentist or jabbing a fork through my forehead. Anything would have been better than the utter garbage that Hallowen a'la Rob Zombie offered up. I have fervently tried to forget ever having watched that, err.."movie"... but unfortunately it still lingers in my mind, and not in a good way.
It seems that the only aim of horror movies today is to gross the audience out as much as possible, unlike the older generation of horror movies, such as Halloween, whose aim was to freak us out in a psychological way.
To me, seeing some guy saw off his own foot is gross but it doesn't scare me. All that accomplishes is making me feel slightly nauseous. What I want is the kind of drawn-out suspense that we see in Halloween, Friday the 13th and Jaws, where we don't at first see the killer, we see everything from his/her point of view. By not being so damned literal and graphic, the movies were that much more scary. Less really is more. Understated really is a thousand times more effective than over the top, something that Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter and Bob Clark (director of 1974's Black Christmas)understood. Today's movies are loaded with graphic violence and gory details, almost as if the directors feel the need to shove as much as possible down the audience's gullet just to satisfy their need for gore and special effects. The reason for this is that people have become so desensitized that without a certain level of violence they won't find the movie interesting. This is a rather disturbing trend if you think about it.
Although no one can accuse the older horror movies of being intelligent, it's almost as if audiences have become dumber. They can't think for themselves anymore. They need everything served on a platter, and in large quantities.
With the older generation of movies, such as Jaws and Friday the 13th, the audience had to rely more on their own imagination to get scared. It's like children having too much entertainment at their fingertips, so they're never forced to invent their own games, and thus never really develop the creative skills that kids 50 years ago had to in order to amuse themselves. In a similar way, when we watch horror movies where we can't see the menacing creature/killer, we are forced to imagine what or who it might be and what it looks like. The unknown threat is always much scarier than what we can see.
I'm referring mostly to horror movies here but in fact I find contemporary movies in general to be lacking something. Some of them are really good and I highly enjoy watching them, but there hasn't been one single movie in the past 10 years that I have felt like "Ooh, I need to buy the DVD and keep it for my collection so I can watch as much as I want!".
The last time I felt that movie magic was with Forrest Gump. I can't remember one movie after that where I got that same feeling. I mean there are movies I really appreciate, such as Bridget Jones' Diary, About a Boy, but none that I ever feel like I must own. Maybe I'll feel differently when a sufficient enough time has passed and I can look at them through nostalgic lenses. Could that be the why I prefer older movies to newer ones?
No, certainly not in the case of horror movies. I still contend and will always contend that the art of making good horror movies is a thing of the past.
There has not been one single remake of the old horror classics that I can honestly say that I liked, with the possible exception of When a Stranger Calls. I think they did a pretty good job with that one. The Hills Have Eyes however was atrocious. I don't often turn off a movie and I've never walked out on a movie in the theatre, but with this one I turned it off 20 minutes into it. It was just so obviously violent and in bad taste and in the kind of way where they just shove in your face in an attempt to gross you out as much as possible. Yes, Friday the 13th was also violent, but it was harmless and not so...in your face. With The Hills Have Eyes, I took no joy in watching a girl get raped by some misfits while her parents got murdered and mulilated, one of which got burned at the stake. Lovely!
Hence, I turned the damned thing off.
The original one didn't have to employ such cheap tactics to get under its audience's skin, why did the remake?
And my poor Black Christmas, the classic stalker horror movie, did not deserve to have such a horrible "remake" with the same name. The two movies don't even fall within the same class, not even close.
Same goes for the remake of Friday the 13th.
Please! Directors, watch the old horror movies, pay attention, learn!
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