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Mommy, make the bad brain go 'way.
Mar. 18th, 2002 09:26 amLast night I started watching John Woo's The Killer for the first time. Having a DVD drive in your computer means never having to explain the screaming, right? Right... anyway. Nestled firmly in the back of my head the whole time was something ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
unseenlibrarian had said a while back as a random joke:
"76 trombones. 110 cornets. 10,000 bullets. John Woo's Music Man 2: There's trouble in River City."
This would've just been something to smile about quietly and then forget in the wake of a truly astonishing amount of cinematic bloodshed (like I said, this is the first time I've seen this movie), except that I've never been one to let a totally wrongheaded idea lie. Various people who heard the proposal started chiming in about the movie. Chow Yun-Fat for Harold Hill. One of the Anitas, probably Anita Mui, for Marian the Librarian. Jackie Chan as Marcellus, 'cos it would be easy to hear him singing "Shaboopie". Wells Fargo being owned by the Triads. (Oh the Wells Fargo wagon is a-coming down the street / Oh please let it be for them!!!) "With a capital T and that rhymes with B and that stands for BOOM..." You get the idea.
All of this was quietly coiling itself around my dendrites as I watched the movie last night, happily processing the first hour or so. I had to stop then - bedtime - but I'll be finishing tonight... assuming the unholy hybrid that my brain spawned this morning doesn't cause my brain to leap out of my head and start gnawing its way free of the office with its medulla oblongata before then.
See, I've always been a big fan of cognitive dissonance. Remember how I said once that the criterion for 'does it get into VicMage.Asia.China' was 'does it cause people to scream YOU BAD MAN and make us wonder if we're going to Chinese Hell'? Like that. The essence of humor for me lies in maintaining either a perfectly ordinary demeanor or a cheerfully sunny yet nonetheless not laughing one whilst saying or doing something that causes the listener to stare in stunned disbelief. It's essentially inducing a momentary state of mental freefall from which the only appropriate responses are laughter, YOU BAD MAN, or stunned groaning and throwing of objects. The essence of horror lies in something similar, the yanking-out of the foundations that should have held up your sanity - the sudden realization that since one or more of the unspoken assumptions on which your sense of reality is pinned no longer applies, you have no idea whether any of them apply any more.
I tend to feel that unless you're deliberately going for a cartoony feel, movie gunfights and gun combat scenes ought to be innately disturbing. They pack a bigger wallop that way. Otherwise you're just in a more stylish version of crappy old Westerns with bang-bang-you're-dead-bad-man replaced by VADABLAMAMAMAMAMAMAM-you're-dead-bad-man. There's a lot of ways to do disturbing. High realism is one of them - not just realistic depiction of what actually happens when bullet meets human, but realistic depiction of the people involved and their reactions. This is how you wind up with my younger sister's entire set of male friends screaming in terror on their way out of Saving Private Ryan - about half an hour into the movie one of them suddenly realized that they'd all signed up for Selective Service on their eighteenth birthdays, and after what they'd just seen, it suddenly hit home with an immediacy it had never had before.
This is not the avenue my brain took.
No, my brain, you see, lives inside my head. I do not think my brain ever really forgets anything, it just locks it out of my reach for a while... My brain contains my sense of horror. It also contains my sense of humor. Now it contains the first hour of The Killer. And all the songs that were on the radio on the way to work this morning, most notably "My Life", by Billy Joel. . .
My brain is busily sorting through all the cheerful shiny happy songs it knows in search of the most wildly inappropriate ones it can find, looking to juxtapose them with the bloodiest, nastiest combat scenes it can manage. Some are just for soundtrack purposes, the kind of thing that'd be playing in the background during the gun combat scene because somebody's kid had to abandon their boombox or something. Some, my brain is trying to turn into something on the order of Music Man II.
Right now there's an awful lot of leaping slo-mo gun combat trying to choreograph itself in time to the strains of "Kiss the Girl" from The Little Mermaid.
Mommy, make the bad brain go 'way....
Today's pulp survival tip is #18. When people start screaming and vanishing into rustling patches of grass, CLIMB. Go back to rule #7 and break out the ammo while you're at it; you're gonna need it.
unseenlibrarian had said a while back as a random joke:"76 trombones. 110 cornets. 10,000 bullets. John Woo's Music Man 2: There's trouble in River City."
This would've just been something to smile about quietly and then forget in the wake of a truly astonishing amount of cinematic bloodshed (like I said, this is the first time I've seen this movie), except that I've never been one to let a totally wrongheaded idea lie. Various people who heard the proposal started chiming in about the movie. Chow Yun-Fat for Harold Hill. One of the Anitas, probably Anita Mui, for Marian the Librarian. Jackie Chan as Marcellus, 'cos it would be easy to hear him singing "Shaboopie". Wells Fargo being owned by the Triads. (Oh the Wells Fargo wagon is a-coming down the street / Oh please let it be for them!!!) "With a capital T and that rhymes with B and that stands for BOOM..." You get the idea.
All of this was quietly coiling itself around my dendrites as I watched the movie last night, happily processing the first hour or so. I had to stop then - bedtime - but I'll be finishing tonight... assuming the unholy hybrid that my brain spawned this morning doesn't cause my brain to leap out of my head and start gnawing its way free of the office with its medulla oblongata before then.
See, I've always been a big fan of cognitive dissonance. Remember how I said once that the criterion for 'does it get into VicMage.Asia.China' was 'does it cause people to scream YOU BAD MAN and make us wonder if we're going to Chinese Hell'? Like that. The essence of humor for me lies in maintaining either a perfectly ordinary demeanor or a cheerfully sunny yet nonetheless not laughing one whilst saying or doing something that causes the listener to stare in stunned disbelief. It's essentially inducing a momentary state of mental freefall from which the only appropriate responses are laughter, YOU BAD MAN, or stunned groaning and throwing of objects. The essence of horror lies in something similar, the yanking-out of the foundations that should have held up your sanity - the sudden realization that since one or more of the unspoken assumptions on which your sense of reality is pinned no longer applies, you have no idea whether any of them apply any more.
I tend to feel that unless you're deliberately going for a cartoony feel, movie gunfights and gun combat scenes ought to be innately disturbing. They pack a bigger wallop that way. Otherwise you're just in a more stylish version of crappy old Westerns with bang-bang-you're-dead-bad-man replaced by VADABLAMAMAMAMAMAMAM-you're-dead-bad-man. There's a lot of ways to do disturbing. High realism is one of them - not just realistic depiction of what actually happens when bullet meets human, but realistic depiction of the people involved and their reactions. This is how you wind up with my younger sister's entire set of male friends screaming in terror on their way out of Saving Private Ryan - about half an hour into the movie one of them suddenly realized that they'd all signed up for Selective Service on their eighteenth birthdays, and after what they'd just seen, it suddenly hit home with an immediacy it had never had before.
This is not the avenue my brain took.
No, my brain, you see, lives inside my head. I do not think my brain ever really forgets anything, it just locks it out of my reach for a while... My brain contains my sense of horror. It also contains my sense of humor. Now it contains the first hour of The Killer. And all the songs that were on the radio on the way to work this morning, most notably "My Life", by Billy Joel. . .
My brain is busily sorting through all the cheerful shiny happy songs it knows in search of the most wildly inappropriate ones it can find, looking to juxtapose them with the bloodiest, nastiest combat scenes it can manage. Some are just for soundtrack purposes, the kind of thing that'd be playing in the background during the gun combat scene because somebody's kid had to abandon their boombox or something. Some, my brain is trying to turn into something on the order of Music Man II.
Right now there's an awful lot of leaping slo-mo gun combat trying to choreograph itself in time to the strains of "Kiss the Girl" from The Little Mermaid.
Mommy, make the bad brain go 'way....
Today's pulp survival tip is #18. When people start screaming and vanishing into rustling patches of grass, CLIMB. Go back to rule #7 and break out the ammo while you're at it; you're gonna need it.
