The Bloody Chamber

I happened to walk through a book fair a few weeks ago on my way to something else and felt compelled to purchase something considering I had interrupted an enthralled group of people listening to an angry man with dreadlocks talk about how capitalism has ruined culture in this society. One of the books that caught my eye was the The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter.

It is an anthology of short stories which mostly originate from traditional fables and western fairytales. Carter has used well-known stories and created new stories from them in which I believe she explores more modern concepts. I also find that her writing has a feminist angle to it. I saw this mostly with her re-telling of the 'bluebeard' story entitltled 'the bloody chamber'. This story has more of the same qualities of Clarissa Pinkola Estes' analysis in 'Women Who Run with Wolves' than the classic story.

I also enjoyed her three wolf stories which go from a morbid re-telling of Red-riding Hood to highly sexualised version that explores the budding sexuality of the Red Riding Hood character and then one where the reader is not completely sure who exactly the wolf is.

For me, the most interesting two stories are the two different retellings of the 'Beauty and the Beast' story. The first gives a more classical view of the story while showing the more human side of 'Beauty'. Yet 'The Tiger's Bride' provides a different format to this classic story by inverting the roles of transformation.


All in all it was an interesting anthology of stories. Carter is very talented with description and prose and the stories in this collection were very compelling.

True Reality

I am a reality TV fanatic! I am saying this without sarcasm, irony or anything else the higher brow members of society use to slap some form of commentary on this evolution in television. I seriously love them all, The Kardashians, The Braxtons, The Real Housewives!

The reason why I am now unashamed to mention this is because I had an epiphany last night which made me realise that reality TV is actually the cleverest, most realistic commentary on the society in which we live.

Critics of reality TV go on and on about how fake it is. Ofcourse its fake! It's meant to be because quite honestly as a human race we can't handle the truth! Think about those home videos your parents took while you were growing up. All those birthdays, school sports days, concerts, talent shows. Theres not even any point recording these things because no one watches them afterwards! It's not entertainment, the sound quality is bad, the picture is grainy and too dark or too bright, much of what people are saying is inaudible, there are many, many awkward silences.

Reality TV is the alternative to that. You want to see people's spotless mansions, not their filthy carpets which were last cleaned in 1982. You want good lighting, makeup, fashionable clothing. You want to be able to hear everything people are saying, so that you can follow the storyline. Instead of those amateur family videos you want to be able to view someone else's family, friend, relationship dramas that echoe your own, except theres are in HD format.

We're living in a society that is constantly plugged in to many if not all forms of media and craves constant entertainment. The amount of films, documentaries, series made every year is not even enough to satisfy that. Reality TV is a hybrid form of media, it combines the need for people to see their world reflected on screen, to connect with people they feel are real while also providing pure entertainment, interesting storylines, dramatic climaxes etc.

People often view the watching of reality TV to be a voyeuristic past-time, a fulfillment of perverse desire to look into people's lives. However I argue that reality TV is exactly the opposite of this. In fact I believe that reality TV is deliberately removed from true reality. Think how much cheaper and easier it would be if people just chased normal people with hand-held cameras but the high production values of reality TV suggest that there is a deliberate distance inposed so as not to appear voyeuristic. Think how the Kardashians drift off to sleep with a full face of make-up and perfectly coifed hair. We do not want to see them drool, or notice their eye crispies!

 Honestly I think the producers of relaity TV are geniuses! To be able to create storylines around mundane issues, to direct untrained actors and cleverly balance their material between home video and all-stops-out, flash sitcom or drama series is very daring and very admirable.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

I hadn't heard all that much about this film before I watched it, the other day. I hadn't even seen the trailer, however I did read one synopsis of the film that described it as a more intelligent Waterworld. When Waterworld was released in 1995 it was given the title of being the most expensive production ever made. It's returns at the box office didnt match the amount spent to make it and the reviews told a decidedly more tragic tale. 'Beasts of the Southern Wild', on the otherhand, used a budget of 1.2 million dollars to produce a far more profound, far more aware film. Without a bevy of special effects the film is able to create a far more ominous warning about the state of our planet.

I see this film as succeeding in doing what many other films have sought to do yet failed. In Avatar we get the allegory of a race of people who live in harmony with nature while the humans plunder and purge their planet of natural resources. Apart from the obvious laughable point of their main natural resource being named 'unobtainium', the allegory was too far from home. The film was too sentimental and sickeningly preachy, despite the fact that this extremely big budget production could not seriously have been all that green.

'Beasts of the Southern Wild' differs in that it focuses on one community, one family, one child and one story. Hush Puppy is a young girl living in a fictional community in Louisiana, USA called The Bathtub. The time is not clear but this world is so closely related to ours that it could be ten years from now, maybe two, maybe even now. This community lives cut off from the 'civilised' world of factories, supermarkets, highways. They live in excess when there is plenty, they live frugally when nature is not giving much. They all live with the awareness that the polar ice caps are melting, meaning the tide will rise and eventually swallow up their community and everything they know and love. The film centres not only around this realisation but also around the relationship between Hush Puppy and her father, Wink, who is dying of an unnamed illness. Wink tries to get Hush Puppy ready for when he's not around and she will have to fend for herself. In this we see the most primal of relationships between parent and child. The fight for survival, that occurs in nature.

The film, itself is beautiful. I haven't been so moved by a film in a long time. The cast of non-actors fill the screen with raw emotion and the music aids the mood and tone of the film at every turn. By far the best thing about the film is the sweet, defiant and strong narration by Hush Puppie. Seeing this world through a child's eyes gives incredible insight into an issue that too often goes over people's heads. What I enjoy about this film is that while it does give us a view of where our planet is headed, it's not self-righteous nor preachy about it. But tells us that we have lost touch with our purpose as a planet, we've lost touch with our role in the functioing of the world in which we live.

My top 5 most disturbing movies of all time.

I recently saw a list, online, of someone's top ten most disturbing films. Albeit I hadn't seen most of them but it made me want to check them out. So I decided to think up a list of movies that were the most disturbing to me. Sometimes a movie doesnt neccessarily have to be a horror in order to disturb you. I think it has more to do with how it upsets your mind or rather how it upsets how you view the natural balance of things to be...

1. The Unseeable(2006):
I watched this 2006 Thai horror at the Durban Film Festival and eventhough I was in a cinema full to capacity, I felt like running out. It's one of those films that builds up fear gradually but when you reach the climax you're too scared to contain yourself! At this point to Asian horror craze was just starting of. I think the reason why people were so transfixed by this film as well as other films that came out of the japanese, thai and korean film insustry is because of a cultural difference between the East and West that allows for spirits and unknown entities to be ever present, they need not be explained away nor do they exclusively haunt old, dilapidated mansions. Rather they attach themselves to people, they can exist in the newest of apartments, they utilise the newest of technologies. In the case of The Unseeable, a ghost could really be anyone and often the most unlikely character.

2. The Asian horror craze brings me to my next movie on the list...The Ring(2002)
I don't mean the Japanese version but rather the 2002, English Gore Verbinski version.
I actually have watched the Japanese Hideo Nakata version and read the origin novels by Koji Suzuki. While the novels did freak me out a little, the movie that really scared me was the english version. I think its down to the talent of the director that he created such a moody and surreal landscape in which to set this film.  A lot of remakes of asian horrors came after this, like The Grudge and Shutter, in my opinion they failed by trying to make the english version a doppelganger of the asian one. In the japanese version of the film the protaganist already transforms from a crusty male journalist, to a young single mother. the English version retains that as well as changing the setting from Japan to Seattle, USA. As well as these changes there are also changes in terms of the mythology around the haunting of the videotape. I like the aspect of investigation in the english version and quite honestly the ghost is just scarier.

3. The Human Centipede (2010):
There was a lot of hype around this movie and when I finally watched it many things disappointed me. The quality of the acting was substandard, the dialogue was so badly written I think you could hear better dialogue in a soft porn movie. And the actual story is very two dimensional and extremely implausible. However when you finally get to the scene where the three tourists are finally attached and they wake up as almost, but not quite one entity, you are so repulsed and so...disturbed that its difficult to continue watching. This movie is not going to win any awards for being a movie but the very idea it poses is enough to make your skin crawl.

4. The Elephant Man(1980):
Ok, this is not a horror movie and its actually very tragic, and thought-provoking. But let me give a little bit of context as to the first time I watched this movie. I was only 10 years old and my dad thought it would be a good idea for me to watch this classic film. He warned me not to play the rented VHS before he got home but I didnt listen. Therefore my first contact with the screen verson f John Merrick was as a monstrous, and alien being that filled my 10 year old self with dread and revulsion. However maybe that was the type of insight I needed, imagine how children during the 19th century would have reacted to the real-life figure on which the film is based, Joseph Merrick.
I also think that as a child you're so conditioned to disney happy-endings and toned down emotions that when you see something truly sad and unfair, completely unlike what you thought the reality of life was then you will be disturbed.

5. The Hills Have Eyes (2006):
I watched this for the first time at a very isolated chalet in the Limpopo province, conincidentally there was a hill, there was also very bad TV reception, so we ended up watching this on a laptop. The whole mutant community thing freaked me out but more than that the rape, the breast-feeding scene, the canibalism! this was just an all round terrifying and disturbing film. I think Alexander Aja is a really talented director, because eventhough this is a remake its proabably become more famous than the original Wes Craven film. I also watched Piranha 3D recently and was really impressed by Aja's ability to eccentuate B-grade to a level of being so bad that it becomes good.