Screencast

With Assassins Creed 3 being set in the American Revolution what movies besides the Patriot what would you suggest viewing to get in the mind set of bringing a tomahawk to a redcoats face.

This is not a question but an idea for the site: you should do an opposite feature to Defending Your Movie in which you take a popular and well-loved movie and expose some of its faults and failures. I propose you start with Titanic.

In your opinion, should a TV series get you hooked into continuing with it based solely on the the pilot?

Hi Matt and Alex,

I am pretty new to posting here but I have been listening to your podcasts for a while now and I have maybe, kind of a complicated question or maybe not, I don't know. My question has to do with the state of horror films or how pretty much horror films have always been. Personally, I am kind of a horror film addict but not in the sense that I enjoy viewing them but more that I am trying to see why, for me, they are so hopelessly devoid of any scares. For me, every horror film may have, at times, been a good movie but has ALWAYS failed at scaring me and therefore failed at its primary function. Usually, even from my childhood, the only really scary things that I saw were those weird documentaries that can be viewed late at night on the Space channel (here in Canada). Documentaries about alien abductions and ghosts, where (and this is my real point) the emphasis is NOT on character or character development but on the situation. The characters are simply HUDs for the audience and nothing more. Some of the stories even had no characters and still managed to be scarier than anything from a film. Found Footage films are a step in the right direction but still have a long way to go.

For me, those documentaries work because they alienate the viewer with their presentation style and the stories they tell focus on scaring the audience NOT the characters. The main tool used in these stories aren’t the threat of violence but of alienation. Alienation is a very underused technique in horror films and I don't know why. As a part-time sound artist, I like to scare the audience with my shows or installation pieces and when you remove all the reference points for someone and make they, themselves feel truly alone in an incredibly strange or unrecognizable situation, it ALWAYS works. And, it works for me in those documentaries and even on the youtube ghost videos. It has nothing to do with whether you believe in ghosts or not, just as horror, it completely works. So, do you feel this way? do you feel there is too much time on the characters in horror films and not enough time developing truly strange and alienating scenarios? It even sometimes feels like the threat of a supernatural presence is also made relatable for some reason, which is a huge failing. For example, a ghost has unfinished business or is the result of something done in the protagonist's past. Why isn't mystery used more in horror? What is this need to solve and understand everything about the apparent menacing force in a horror film? When you don't understand something, its infinitely more terrifying than if you do understand what's after you.

And, in the same sense, don’t you find it very cliché to focus on character when you could be focusing on something that truly is mindblowing or genuinely scary? It kind of falls under the cliché of whenever a character is presented with the “3 Challenges” cliche. Where the first two challenge tend to be the interesting ones, where the protagonist fights dragons or other bizarre challenges or something but the third one (and seemingly the most important one) tends to be the one where the protagonist faces himself. That is not interesting at all. Again, for horror films, I don’t care if the character gets over themselves or their past ,I just want them to scare me. Do you feel the same way?

Personally, I don’t care if someone gets over their past in a horror film or if they get over the loss of their wife, just fucking scare me. That’s all I care about and that’s specifically what I have not been getting. When you care about the characters doesn't it just become a thriller or action? In the same sense that the Star Wars films can’t be called Science Fiction but are more simply just action films set in space? There’s nothing wrong with that, its just a classification issue. If Star Wars is science fiction then what is 2001: A Space Odyssey? Sorry, this is off-point.

Going back to horror films, YOU should be scared, you shouldn't be scared FOR the characters. That is when it becomes a thriller or action film. I’ll leave you with an example, one of many that I have about some of the stories that I saw in these very low-budget documentaries. It was a story about a bear attack happening in a nearby forest to me. The documentary told about a couple that went to the forest to go camping. The woman in the relationship always used to carry a mirror with her. Later then, at night, they began to hear weird noises. In the morning, the man’s girlfriend had gone missing. The man began to spend the entire day and evening looking for her until he finally found something. According to his testimony, he found something the next night at around 2 AM. He said he came back to where they initially set up camp and saw a lone bear. The bear was sitting on its hind legs and staring deep into his girlfriend’s mirror that had been placed on the ground. As the man looked closer, he saw that the bear had gone through his girlfriend’s purse and had her lipstick in one of its paws and was slowly, yet very deliberately applying it to the contours around its mouth. As the man looked even closer, the bear was apparently masturbating and looking in the mirror as it applied the lipstick. This was all presented in a deathly serious manner and that's what made it so terrifying.

I’m not saying I believe any of this, just the thought of it is scarier than anything in a horror film ever released and the funny thing is this story in particular isn’t even that scary, relatively speaking. It comes down to absurdity. Absurdity treated with absolute realism is true horror.

Finally, I’d just like to say great opening song and keep up the good work. You guys are one of the best podcasts out there.

EDIT:

THE MAIN QUESTIONS ARE:

Do horror films focus too much on character and not enough on creating interesting and scary scenarios? Furthermore, what do you think of the documentary approach (not found footage approach)? In the future, could horror films just be released as faux-documentaries on youtube?

@KatyGaGa: Hey, welcome to forums! I don't think your post will get on the podcast though because it's too long. Try to condense it to maybe 3/4 sentences if you can and they'll answer it!

@theodacourt: thanks! :)

I assumed as much. I'll just add an edit at the bottom of my post with the question simply put.

It seems that ever since the end of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy Disney had at least one movie with a very high budget and a lot of marketing (Prince of Persia, Tron, John Carter...) but then they seem to abandon the franchise. So my question to you is which big film would you like Disney give another try.

Do you care much if an favorite movie or show of yours reached an special anniversary? For example, I saw the first "Godfather" in honor of its 40th Anniversary and re-lived a couple of Sailor Moon Episodes in honor of its 20th anniversary (and also edited their wiki page for the site. ;] )

Question (mostly) for Rorie regarding Princess Mononoke.

At the very end of the film, Ashitaka and San have a quick exchange of dialogue basically saying that they will go their separate ways now that the forest spirit has been restored etc. This shoots down the notion that they love each other and want to be together, they don't seem to be bothered in the slightest!

It's literally one or two spoken lines which pretty much sour the ending for me, where really it should have been left ambiguous. Does it bother you and do you think this choice is a cultural one? (i.e the Japanese audience doesn't expect them to get together).

A Blu-Ray edition of The Room has been speculated on being released. Besides the rumored deleted scene that tells what happens to Chris R. after being apprehened by Johnny and Mark, what moments of the film would you like to have an additional extra/deleted scene that fills in the gaps?

If you can't think of any, many people are probably satisfied with the film in its current (perfectly flawed) form, are you a Room purist in this sense?

A question for Rorie.

With your increased working from home routine are you keeping up with the better groomed and dressed resolution? For a stint there you were the most grown up of the Whiskey Media staff.