October 2010 Archives

Time Bandits" class="mt-image-none" style="" height="303" width="540"/>

This is a still frame from the final scene of Time Bandits, an overhead shot that pulls back, farther and farther away from the risible suburban subdivision where young Kevin live(d) with his father and mother. You can see the top of Kevin's head -- he's standing on the lawn very near the center of the frame. Above him in the image, on the sidewalk, are two smoking piles of rubble. Those used to be Kevin's parents. Well, he warned them.

I was pretty young when I saw Time Bandits -- 12 years old, I think -- and this ending, Gilliam having Kevin's mum and dad exploded before his eyes by a pile of smoking rubble from Hell, had a profound effect on me. For one thing, it was an attack on parents who don't listen to their children. For another, it greatly expanded my idea of what was possible in a film narrative. A director, playing God as merry prankster, could detonate the very pillars of the 20th-century suburban household, throwing the future of a young boy into complete doubt just as he rolls the credits. Who does a thing like this?

It was a wicked thing, but it was a delightful thing as well. It prepared me, in some ways, to tackle Buñuel, Bergman, and the likes just a few years later. And in its rudeness it's stuck with me as surely as any scene from any movie I've seen over all these years.

I spit on your grave, twice.

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I Spit on Your Grave one-sheet design" class="mt-image-none" style="" height="800" width="540"/>

If you know what I Spit on Your Grave is, you may understand why this one-sheet design initially struck me as one of the more breathtakingly offensive pieces of graphic art in the history of film marketing, conflating sex appeal and victimhood in a single appalling image. (In short: it's a remake of an artless 1978 rape-revenge film starring Buster Keaton's grand-niece.) When I first stumbled across it on the web, I found it to be in tremendously poor taste, and I don't squirm that easily.

I Spit on your Grave" class="mt-image-none" style="" height="806" width="540"/>

I was surprised to realize later that it clearly takes the most notorious poster promoting the original film as a model. I never found the earlier image especially problematic -- beyond its obvious decision to dehumanize the woman by cutting her off at the head -- which makes me wonder what it is about the new one that I found so grossly unwholesome. I can only conclude that it's the obvious expertise of the image-making that gets me -- the woman's body turned demurely away from the camera, her sculpted ass ready for a swimsuit issue, and rendered in high-contrast tones that resemble a line drawing or charcoal sketch set against a professional white background as crisp as the inside of an Apple Store. (The remake's poster might be even more striking if the designer had found a way to incorporate the original tag line: "No jury in America would ever convict her," instead of relying on a call-out to "Day of the Woman," the first film's original title, to suggest the vigilante-justice angle.)

It's also about the 21st century context. This image is like some movie marketer's raised middle finger to all the hand-wringing concern and moralizing that followed the original film's release, including Ebert's famous pan. It's now 30 years on and the world has become leaps and bounds more sensitive to issues of rape and recovery, not to mention highly sexualized violence in general, and yet we have made the same film and now we will market it essentially the same way. And I have to admit, the strategy is cynical, but effective. Now I'm suddenly curious about the fucking movie.

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