YOU PEOPLE SUCK

GO ON, KEEP ON SITTING UP STAIRS IN YOUR IVY LEAUGE TOWER AND MAKE FUN.

I BET YOU COULDN'T MAKE A MOVIE LIKE THIS EVEN IF YOU WNATED TO.

SO GO RIGHT ON AHEAD AND KEEP ON SAYING WHATEVER IT IS YOU WANT TO CONTINUE SAYING ABOUT IT BECAUSE I'M NOT GOING TO BELEIVE YOU BECAUSE ITS NOT TRUE ANYWAY, OK?

I BET IF IT WAS DIRECTED BY SPEILBERG AND STARRED TOM CRUISE AND MEAGAN FOX YOU WOULDN'T BE MAKING FUN OF IT WOULD YOU? NO I DIDN'T THINK SO.

Inspired by the thread tag here, I want to remind folks of two key factors: definitions and relative taste. All this nonsense about bad movies, dating back to the truly retarded (in the dictionary sense of the word) Golden Turkey Awards book by the Medved jerks, fails to recognize the definition problem: what do you include under the heading of movie. If you include pornography within the definition of a movie, or latterly I guess videos (VHS and DVD), then the whole race-to-the-bottom debate perpetuated on IMDb, with its utterly meaningless Bottom 100 list, falls apart. There must be 10,000 or more different porno videos manufactured every year including compilations. Back in the 1970s they were making 1,000 or 2,000 films per year, including no-name, no-credits 16mm and 8mm junk that will never be documented on IMDb or anywhere else. This has created a porno universe rapidly approaching a MILLION titles. The fact that a large percentage of them are already "lost" films (thrown away by the makers and distributors and probably not saved by any packrat collectors) does not detract from the point I'm making.

Porn fans on IMDb, who relentlessly and misleadingly lament the "junk" of recent porn and long for the Glory Days of the 1970s and 1980s, are fun to read. But the fact is, to paraphrase the great Theodore Sturgeon's anecdote about Science Fiction, that 99.99% of porn is garbage. Any film, indie, amateur, whatever, that does not rely on the crutch (don't go for any puns please) of porn content cannot compete with the sheer boredom and worthlessness of porn films -endless repetition of the same roster of required shots, including the "money" shots. So if porn is included in one's definition, any list of stinkers would have to reach about #38,000 before getting to a regular, non-porn film. And nobody could live long enough to sit through (honestly sit through, no cheating!) that many.

That brings up my second point: relative taste. Here porn is quite instructive. The nostalgia freaks who write endlessly about GREAT porn films of the '70s are making it all up. Porn appreciation is strictly a matter of taste, or fetish. People remember fondly some masturbatory experience, that seems even more exciting in retrospect. Russ Meyer liked (fill in the blank, it's easy), Radley Metzger preferred (blank), while Joe Sarno was all about (blank) and Gerard Damiano specialized in (blank). I'm mixing softcore with hardcore here on purpose: in the 1960s, especially during 1969 and 1970, there were many hundreds of softcore porn films ground out until hardcore lessened their ilk, and these are watchable precisely because they were forbidden to show the endless hardcore shots now necessary to get people off. I like certain porn content, just like anyone else who isn't a prude or hypocrite. I'm not ashamed to call them fetishes; yes Russ Meyer had them too. But it is precisely whether or not a porn film/video satisfies the PARTICULAR viewer's PARTICULAR fetishes that makes it bad or good to THAT VIEWER. Beyond that, the clowns who pretend this or that porn title is great or a classic are full of it! They have merely identified a porn film that satisfies their prurient interest, and in this Brave New World of social networking and narcissism, feel the urge to share their tastes with other people, somehow expecting them to have identical fetishes. The folks who made these films know the truth: they had an audience (I heard the fans referred to condescendingly in a voiceover commentary by Jack Hill recently as "DG's": porn director's shorthand for degenerates) and they tried to satisfy the audience's needs. One can easily see a parallel in the world of non-porn exploitation and, yes, horror films: plenty of junk to go around, and to satisfy this or that horror fan's own particular horror fetish.

As a film critic, among the reviews I wrote would include that of an occasional kung fu (and related) film in the 1970s and 1980s, and I soon discovered a disconnect between myself and that particular audience, one I had not experienced when evaluating Oscar-caliber cinema. I was looking for the subtlety or cinematic maturity of a Jean Renoir, a Raoul Walsh, a Bergman, an Antonioni, or even the experimental bent of a Deren, Anger, Emshwiller, Baillie or Brakhage. Pretty useless and inappropriate. I learned that here too was the world of fetish: certain levels of violence and depictions of outre technique are what the martial arts fans liked, period. They didn't mind the bad dubbing, repetitious plotting and other drawbacks to the genre. Perhaps a tiny dollop of humor or panache as displayed by Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan or Sonny Chiba would turn them on. Later on in the ersatz Hollywood world of Steven Seagal, the credibility of SS seeming to actually injure fellow actors or stuntman was what got the fans' rocks off, not any conventional filmmaking artistry.

And please don't get me started on today's phony cinema appreciation. The whole public relations/marketing concept of Visionary Filmmaker (I advise you to look up the word visionary in the dictionary -you're in for a shock!) has become ingrained in a generation of slavishly conformist film buffs, who have been indoctrinated into watching films with a instructed Mystery Science Theater or Rocky Horror Picture Show audience participation mindset that discourages individual reaction or thought. It's called brainwashing, just what the ultra-right wing Medveds (I saw Michael on C-Span years ago giving a speech to the John Birch Society of all things) did with their idiotic book.

Track of the moon beast officially sucks balls!

Do it Doug!!!!
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