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Happy New Year
This is the 9th consecutive year we have published a New Year's Edition. The site began in Late 1995, just before Thanksgiving.
Demonlover (2003)
Sometimes one needs to form a lynch party to hang a hoss thief. and
sometimes it's enough just to give him some rope. Let's skip the
posse and let this movie hang itself, shall we?
From the press kit:
Director Assayas has defined art as
"when you don’t know where you’re going," and demonlover is a
search for new forms, as the artist attempts to connect with the
world around him; it may be that time itself has to catch up, as
demonlover is a movie ahead of the moment.
From a promo kit provided by the
film's US distributors:
Demonlover proves most compelling
when it feels the least coherent or grounded in reality. Rather than
keeping up with exactly which side of the game each major character
appears to be playing on at a given moment in the story, viewers are
almost better served just going along for the ride, letting the film
take them where it will.
From an interview with the director:
I think demonlover tries
to develop its own kind of narrative and its own way of dealing
with very basic questions, like how do you represent modern
reality? Isn’t it time to question the classic tropes of
storytelling, which were originally designed to deal with a
world completely different from our own? I think it’s useful,
and possibly even important, to bring back some complexity to
our representation of the world. It’s a way of bringing back a
connection to reality that we seem to be losing—in cinema as
well as in real life. I’m always a little surprised when people
have trouble understanding in movies what they have no trouble
dealing with in real life. I guess it has to do with the gradual
disconnection between the world as it is changing and the old
fashioned conventions of movie narrative.
I think you have figured out by now
that the film makes almost no sense to most viewers because it was
made by a guy who "doesn't know where he's going". It was booed at
Cannes. Think about that. The French booed it for being a
pretentious and incomprehensible piece of crap. The French
cineastes. These are people who love the pretentious and
incomprehensible Antonioni, people who in fact worship
pretentiousness and opacity as virtues, and even they find this
movie too pretentious and incomprehensible.
Now imagine how you will react.
To tell you the truth, I didn't have
much trouble with the plot. I seemed to understand it, perhaps
because I am as corrupt and jaded as the characters in this film. It
is a film about corporate espionage. When the spy is outed, her
company doesn't fire her, and the other company that she was trying to
destroy doesn't consider prosecuting her. Instead, everyone decides
to exploit her.
-
Her boss decides not to fire her
because he'd much rater sexually exploit her. After all, what can
she do? If she quits, he'll expose her. If she files a sexual
harassment suit, he'll simply retaliate by exposing her various
felonies, some of which are on tape.
-
The other company, which runs
underground porno sites which specialize in heavy-duty torture,
decides simply to use her as a victim in its films. It isn't easy to
get people to perform in these things, after all, and she really has
no choice but to go along or be exposed.
OK, to be honest, I would never actually
do these things. I would have just fired her and turned her over to
the police and the SEC - but by God these ideas would cross my mind
if she looked like Connie Nielsen! So I understood the demented
character motivations that most people with normal minds couldn't
grasp. Therefore, while I found it as pretentious as everyone
else did, I didn't find it all that baffling. Although I couldn't
follow some plot points, and lost track of some details, I got the
general idea.
What bothered me was something
completely different: the utter ignorance of the writer/director. In
theory, this is a film about big business using espionage to gain an
advantage in the internet porno market. Unfortunately, Assayas knows
absolutely nothing about any of the following:
-
Business
-
Corporate Espionage
-
Pornography
-
The Internet
These areas of ignorance make it
rather difficult to make such a film effectively. Let's take a few examples.
Business
- at a big ol' meeting, one company's rep tries to impress another
company's honchos by saying, "since we talked last, our business is
up 35% and our market share has doubled." Now this may not mean
anything to you, but it does to me, because I actually spent a
quarter of a century attending meetings like this, doing instant
analysis of just such statements, and I can do basic arithmetic.
Think about it for a second. If your market share has doubled with a
35% volume increase, what has happened to the size of the market?
You can do that on paper later, if you care to, but the answer is
that the total market has decreased 32.5%.
Needless to say, if you made such claims trying to impress
me, my response would be "why the hell do I want to be in a business
that has shrunk by one third in six months? Your market share has
obviously gone up because people are dropping out of a loser
business, and because competitors are dropping out, your volume has
gone up temporarily as well, despite the shrinking market for your
product." Now I guarantee you if you go to a high-level meeting and
make those claims, there will be somebody in the room who will
notice the true meaning of those figures immediately. Corporations
pay guys just to attend these meetings and NOT be stupid.
Corporate
espionage - so, do you think corporate espionage is done by
people who carry guns, dress like Mrs. Peel, break into other
people's homes, and poison the drinks of office rivals? Get real.
Illegal corporate espionage means one of two very boring things.
(1) One company pays the employee of
another company for information or to exert influence. This can be
done during the regular course of business activities, without
clandestine meetings or coded messages. People go to lunch all the
time.
(2) Some geek sits in his house and hacks into the
system of one company, then another company pays him for what he
finds. This is far better than method number one above, because it
offers complete deniabiity. The geek is not an employee of either
company. He is an independent contractor working on his own. If he
is caught, the company that would have purchased info from him
doesn't even know who he is. If he is traced, the trace goes to his
own computer, not to the offices of the company that benefits from
his trickery. If anyone buys from him, they charge it off as
"independent programming contractors".
Neither of these methods make for
very good movie magic, and the participants probably look like Comic
Book Guy on The Simpsons. Not very sexy stuff. So directors want to
show it all being done by sexy people in leather suits climbing
walls like Spider-Man.
The Internet
- the best line in the movie, referring to some
internet torture site, The Hellfire Club: "that site is very hard to
find, and very profitable". Yeah, those two things go hand in hand,
don't they? You can really make a killing by making your web site
impossible to find. Of course, there are some products, like yachts,
which can make a lot of money despite being hard to obtain because
the manufacturers make a phenomenal profit per item, but this is not
a web site which costs $100,000 to be a member. We see some suburban
kid paying for the site with his dad's credit card. Oh, and by the
way, he didn't seem to have any trouble finding the site! Oh, those
kids today, with their fancy dial-ups and their so-called
"keyboards". I'll bet he
used one of those fancy new-fangled things they call a URL. You
know, like
www.thehellfireclub.com.
Adult sites
- Sure, just like this movie says, the adult internet
business is just one big monolith, controlled by some big corporations
with Lear Jets and fancy offices, all in league with the Russian
mob. And we have to buy expensive Japanese animated porn to keep
everything exciting. The next time you guys need any vodka or white
slaves or anything, just let me or Mr. Skin know, and we'll bring
them back from our next trip to Moscow. Gosh, I hope I can land my
Sikorsky helicopter in your backyard when I deliver the goods. I
think I can safely say that the guys who run worthwhile celebrity
sites have no interest in barnyard animal sites, and even the
barnyard animal guys have no interest in torture and snuff films. If
you want to make a bazillion dollars on snuff films, you had better
charge about a bazillion per film, because there's about one guy
actually interested in this kind of material.
If you think this director is no damned
good, I have misled you. Assayas knows quite a bit about filmmaking.
This movie will be incomprehensible to most people, but Demonlover has a
really cold and slick look and feel to it, similar to De Palma's
Femme Fatale.
But ol' Assayas don't know jack shit
about his subject matter. And that is something of a shame because
he wants to comment on modern life, and he really has no clue what
happens in modern life. Oh, sure, he could have brought in some
businessmen to advise him on how things really work - but that would
have been too darned easy! More to the point, if he had done that he
would have had to give up his ignorant point of view, and that point
of view is what prompted him to make the film in the first place, so
there wasn't any chance he was going to strive for any semblance of
truth. He simply didn't want any facts to get in the way of his
preconceived opinions.
The Human Stain (2003)
I was hopeful that the screener for this film would
result in much better images than we had before. The Kidman images
are somewhat improved, but not that much. The Barrett images are not
even an upgrade.
Sorry guys, I guess we'll be waiting until the DVD.
Good movie. Heavy with sadness, but also touching
and profound in some ways. But it's one depressing mofo. Great cast:
Hannibal Lecter, Kidman, Ed Harris, Sinese. Comments here.
MAILBOX:
Dear
Scoopy:
Just thought I'd drop you a note to say HAPPY NEW YEAR and wish you
the Best in 2004! I look forward to reading your site every day
(that I'm in the country, that is...some folks HAVE missed a day in
years!), and continue to think that it's the best of its kind (if
not the best site on the entire www).
Just today, for example, your link to the Nebraska coed ticketed for
public nudity (can you say "career move," boys and girls?) enabled
me to contact her directly and arrange to feature her in the "NudesWorthy"
issue of Sleuth, with personal exclusive interviews and
private pics. As our colleague Senor Skin would say; "Our parents
must be very proud."
Again, keep up the superb work...you're a credit to our
genre...field...profession...uh, crap archives.
Best,
Sleuth
======================
Is there any truth to a Jessica Simpson video starting to float
around where her and Nick were secretly taped during the filming
of the MTV show? Hope it's true.
Thanks
Frankly, I don't know. There
were some rumors to that effect about a month ago, but nothing has
surfaced. The original rumors did specify that it would be some time
before the tape surfaced.
======================
Dear Uncle Scoopy:
Sorry to hear of your bout with the flu, I've got the same problem
myself.
I have figured out what the main problem is with the Matrix’s two
sequels. It is this; the Wachowski Brothers exhausted the source
material in the first film. No I don't mean Alice in Wonderland.
They had apparently forgotten all about Lewis Carroll by the second
film.
I realize that someone else has to have noticed this but I don't
recall ever reading it any of the reviews.
A cursory overview of the Matrix, strongly indicates that it was
based on Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
Before you dismiss this as an Elvis Sighting, consider;
From Hero With a Thousand Faces
Chapter I:
The call to Adventure Matrix:
Follow the white rabbit
Refusal of the Call Matrix:
Hell no, I'm not climbing out on the ledge
Supernatural Aid (AKA meeting the wizard) Matrix: AKA Morpheus
The crossing of the Threshold Matrix: Taking
the red pill
Into The Belly of the Whale Matrix: Being
taken aboard Nebuchadnezzer (this has to do with entering a new
world)
Okay admittedly these are all pretty standard plot devices. From
here, I could make a better case for all these points but you
probably want to read a thesis on Campbell as badly as I want to
write one. To continue:
Chapter II:
1. The Road of Trials Matrix:
Getting bounced on the pavement?
2. Meeting the Goddess (getting advice) Matrix: Meeting
Oracle
4. Apotheosis (Becoming more than human) Matrix: Neo’s
resurrection
Chapter III:
2. The Magical Flight
Matrix: Superman thing.
On the face of it my argument is still thin, but I am just going by
chapter headings. There's quite a few subtleties that I'm not
bothering to cover. His relationships with Morpheus, Trinity,
Cypher and Agent Smith would shore this up quite a bit.
At this point my Uncle Scoopy is thinking, “Regardless Cataline old
son, you’re forgetting something important. Religious treatises are
not high on the Wachowski brothers reading list. One them just
reads S&M manuals, the other only reads comic books.”
True enough. It was the one that reads comic books who came up with
idea. The odds of that three hundred pound Comic Store Guy from the
Simpson’s, Andy Wachowski, not having read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman
(principal character named Morpheus) are pretty close to
nonexistent.
Neil Gaiman has been mining Hero With a Thousand Faces for a decade.
Wachowski probably didn’t spot it himself but Roger Zelazny did, in
an introduction to one of Gaiman’s collections.
Anyway they had a real problem when the ink dried on the contract
for a sequel. Namely that the Hero had finished the Hero’s Journey
as outlined by Campbell. This doesn't allow for a sequel.
This has to have created a crisis of confidence in them. The only
thing they could do was go back to HWATF and repeat most of the
themes they used before plus a few that they didn't have time for
the first time through, (i.e.) The Woman as Temptress, The Earning
of the Keys, Rescue from Without, Master of the Two Worlds.
The result was that they knew they were making a retread and it
showed.
What do you think?
Cataline
Scoop's response: I don't
know The Hero With a Thousand Faces, but I think I agree with your
basic premise, which is that the original film was inspired by
source material, and that the sequels were written after the basic
source material had been exhausted, stranding the Wachowski's with
their own strained devices. I've noted that there are a lot of
similarities between The Matrix and John Carpenter's They Live. Of
course, The Matrix is a gazillion times better movie, but write a
one paragraph summary of each, and they are about the same, except
one version of the matrix is a computer program, while the other is
mass hypnosis; one is about aliens, the other is about machines -
but you could interchange any of those concepts without
substantially altering either film. The basic concept is also
somewhat similar to another S/F masterpiece Dark City.
I don't know where the
Wachowskis got their ideas, but I like The Matrix. Too bad about
those sequels. (I haven't seen #3 yet. I thought #2 was better than
people said.)
OTHER CRAP:
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Fresh Faces - Rednecks and Strip Poker
-
Worst Songs of the Millennium. Yeah, right. This is
credible. No mention of Good Morning Strarshine, and NOT ONE song
from Air Supply.
- The champions in the
2003 Dead Pool
-
U.S. Album Sales Fall in 2003 But End on Up Note:
"Sales of compact discs, which make up 96 percent of all sales,
fell 2.1 percent. But last year's decline was a much steeper 8.7
percent, and the last quarter of this year was actually UP almost
6%."
- The trailer for Robert Altman's
THE COMPANY, starrign Neve Campbell.
- Here's the trailer for
The Spongebob Squarepants Movie
-
2003 box-office receipts dipped for the first time in 12 years,
down about 1 percent from 2002. That is based on
dollars. Based on actual ticket sales, the decline was 4%.
-
USA Today's third annual pop culture quiz.
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Police defent Jacko bust with videotape. Oh, Jacko, you
are SO busted.
-
Limp Bizkit, Creed Worst Bands of Year - Poll: I guess
Air Supply isn't recording any more, eh? Time flies.
-
Favre sets about a jillion more records in Packers' win,
including breaking Cal Ripken Junior's record for most press
coverage.
-
Pop star Natalie Imbruglia wed Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns
in a secret New Year's Eve ceremony at a balmy tropical resort.
Ben Stiller performed the ceremony, pronouncing her
name im-BRUG-lee-ya.
-
Did pornography help to topple the French monarchy?
Quick, somebody get Prince Charles a copy of Hustler.
- The bad news: Michael Bay to produce a remake of
The Amityville Horror. The good news: we don't have to
worry about him ruining the original.
-
CHLOE Sevigny has been dropped by the William Morris agency
because of her oral sex scene in the arthouse abomination 'Brown
Bunny.' " And that's a bad thing because ... ??? She is
now being repped by a new agency with a high tolerance for oral
sex, William Jefferson Clinton.
-
The President's new year's resolutions include clearing some pesky
brush, and sparking the apocalypse.
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TOP OF THE FLOPS - UK list of the 20 worst songs of all time
. I guess Hair never made it to London, because I don't see
Good Morning Starshine on that list, to which I can only respond,
in the oft-cited words of Winston Churchill, "Gliddy glup gloopy
nibby nabby noopy la la la lo lo, Sabba sibby sabba nooby abba
nabba le le lo lo, Tooby ooby walla nooby abba nabba"
-
Weekly World News: "Sumo wrestling is the hottest new fad to hit
the United States since Hula Hoops and transistor radios swept the
country in 1959."
-
Secretary Ridge Raises Terror Level in Response to Threat to His
Car: "Mr. Ridge was quite shaken when he was reading
the note", the source said. "He cupped his hand over his mouth and
started crying profusely. I think he might have even pissed
himself."
- The upcoming film on my own must-see list?
Billy Jack for President
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Nude awakening: A-list actresses are baring all in the name of art:
"Never before have we seen so many top actresses so
matter-of-factly go as far as they are going. " "Nude scenes are
no longer the means for a B-list starlet to grab attention before
her star fades for good; they're no longer what a young actress is
forced to do before she makes it big and starts demanding those
"no-nudity" contract clauses. Nudity -- and, often, explicit sex
scenes -- are what you do if you want to go gunning for a prime
spot on the A-list. If you want to be looked upon as a real
actress." The article also mentions that there are seven
additional minutes of naughty Meg Ryan footage in the European
version of In the Cut.
-
'Metrosexual' Is 2003's Top Word. The 2002 winner was "nukular"
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The Hiltons' Christmas Card (Paris top right)
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David Wells leaves Yanks, signs with Padres.
- Christian Science monitor picks the
most interesting websites of 2003
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Las Vegas Nightlife - Party Pictures. Plenty of nudity
and near nudity.
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We Didn't Smacko Jacko, Say Calif. Cops. What did you
expect them to say? Oh, yeah, we slapped him around, but he had it
coming.
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You fucked up your car, and these guys are putting pictures on the
internet.
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'A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Danny
Pearl' to be filmed. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston
have bought the rights to the story of the reporter who was killed
in Pakistan.
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Terry Gilliam has revealed more about The Brothers Grimm,
a $90 million picture starring Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, Jonathan
Pryce and Monica Bellucci."
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Remember the Piranha Brothers, and the "other, other plan".
Well, if you don't pay ... these guys will give you porn. That's
right. And they'll keep giving you more and more porn until you
pay. Then they start to give you new cars and furs for your wife.
And they won't stop until you pay them.
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Bare-it-all babes boogie woogie back to the stage in Japanese
clubs.
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Early next year, Ireland will become the first European country to
ban smoking in virtually all workplaces -- including pubs.
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Male Chastity Devices.
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Guess who topped the 'Entertainment Tonight' Hot List?
It is based on the number of times the celebrity was mentioned on
their program during the year.
- The New York Times said
CBS paid Jacko one million dollars for that interview.
CBS denied it.
Other crap
archives. May also include newer material than the ones above,
since it's sorta in real time.
Click
here
to submit a URL for inclusion in Other Crap
MOVIE REVIEWS:
Here
are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.
- The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the
review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
- If there is a white asterisk, it means that
there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined
there might be something else of interest.
- A blue asterisk indicates the review is written
by Tuna (or Junior or Brainscan, or somebody else besides me)
- If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too
ashamed to admit it.
Other crap archives.
May also include newer material than the ones above, since it's
sorta in real time.
Click
here
to submit a URL for inclusion in Other Crap
MOVIE REVIEWS:
Here
are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.
- The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the
review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
- If there is a white asterisk, it means that
there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined
there might be something else of interest.
- A blue asterisk indicates the review is written
by Tuna (or Lawdog or Junior or C2000 or Realist or ICMS or Mick
Locke, or somebody else besides me)
- If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too
ashamed to admit it.
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