I'm hoping Anakin won't whine so much once he turns evil.

I'm thinking he probably doesn't turn evil until 2 hours into the movie. So I don't care if he does stop then.

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If I remember correctly, we hear a burst of shots and then silence, indicating that he is, indeed, dead.

I just checked -- we hear tires squealing and sirens and a lot of shouting in the distance. I can barely hear it with the volume at "deafening" so whatever's going on certainly isn't meant to be clear.

I think of horror films as mostly relying on shocks along with the gore, and RD seems to rely more on trust and distrust.

Heh, that is actually the argument, now that I've got my reference book handy:

It outwardly resembles things we've seen before, but it works like a horror film: its first goal is to surprise and shock. [...] Part of the fascination of Reservoir Dogs is that you never know exactly what genre you're watching, or where it could possibly be going, and yet you know that a train wreck is in progress, so you excuse every betrayal of traditional storytelling.

Again, he's not saying it's a horror movie in terms of theme or plot. I think he's commenting on the style and effect. And I'm doing the piece a disservice if I'm making it sound like that's all he talks about; it's a few paragraphs out of about 20 pages.

But QT always has a brutal moralism in place.

I'd agree with that in his other movies, but in RD? The characters demonstrate varying degrees of honor & loyalty, and they all die brutally for it. I don't think we're left with any kind of moral system at the end.

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Did I just miss discussion of the new Batman trailer or could it be I'm the first to squee over it? Cuz, good!

(here's a direct link to the fullscreen version, if you want to avoid iTunes redirection)

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Dear sweet mother of god. A little more than 6 1/2 weeks away, right?

I really dig Christian Bale as Batman, if I haven't already said so a gazillion times. And the Batmobile is so. fucking. cool.

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Honestly, I was worried after the last trailer. Because I didn't really dig the Qui Gon esque training sequences. But this one totally gives me a happy.

And yeah, CB is the PERFECT batman.

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Because I didn't really dig the Qui Gon esque training sequences.

Nepal does look suspiciously like Tatooine in some of those shots.

But Christian Bale is so perfectly cast. Yum.

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And yeah, CB is the PERFECT batman.

I think the "bat" part of that sentence isn't really necessary.

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Oh, my. It's not quite "Does it come in black?" but I feel I must have been a very good girl to be getting HHGttG, Batman and Serenity in one year. It almost adds up to a hobbit movie.

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I figure I've been good to get Batman coming out close enough to my birthday for me to be able to beg a babysitter, and for Serenity to have been pushed back to later in the year.

Now if I could find a way to see HHGttG in a theatre, I think I'd start believing in Santa Claus

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The characters demonstrate varying degrees of honor & loyalty, and they all die brutally for it.

Well, but within the framework of an honor society, as posited in Reservoir Dogs or in your basic Hong Kong gangster movie, death or even painful death isn't punishment. The point isn't that the cop dies; that's a given from the first frame of the movie. The point is that, before he dies, he confesses his betrayal. At that point in the film, Harvey Keitel is arguably mortally wounded; help on the way; the cop could just keep his mouth shut for another 10 minutes and die with his secret or survive with it; but honesty is too important in that situation.

In Rififi, another honor/gangster society of a sort, Tony le Stephanois knows he's walking into death to rescue Jo's son; but he's the one who put the boy into danger, so he'll get the boy out again even at the cost of his life. Not because he's an "innocent child" but because Tony FIxes Problems, and to do any less would make him a lesser man.

I think horror movies work out various anxieties about body horror: disfigurement, dismemberment, the undead, transformation, etc. Morality isn't the point since they're passion plays designed to jerk the lizard brain around in the uncanny valley.

Do you think the rules are different for written horror vs. movie horror, then? Because I can posit a couple of instances of written horror in which body-fear is not a major factor. I do think that most horror gets its surface effect from, as you say, jerking around the lizard brain, but that jerking around can involve sensations like loneliness, sorrow, isolation, and generalized anxiety, too. Actually I find the horror that stays with me most connects to an emotion in addition to your basic draw-back-from-a-snake reactivity; a shock is just a shock, but feelings involve me.

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