I dunno, ita. Appreciation of horror is such a subjective thing. I think one can appreciate Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance as one might enjoy a Jacobean revenge tragedy, but I found the level of violence -- and the almost aesthetic revelling in the detail of the violence and torture in the film -- very difficult to stomach. I mean, I usually have no trouble with bleakness or unhappy endings and I've known to enjoy psychological horror, but I have to have *something* to balance it with, y'know? Some catharsis or operatic grandeur, or a tiny flicker of hope. I recall the movie looked beautiful, but mostly I remember slooooooow moments depicting unending despair and hopeless of human condition interspersed with bouts of unbearable violence and torture. Gah.

That said, I think you probably have stronger stomach for violence than I do (I am such a wuss, I couldn't even finish watching A Clockwork Orange.)

Yeah, A Clockwork Orange is one of my favourite movies. I'm squeamish in odd places. In the end, it wasn't the violence of Oldboy that did me in, just the...the choices.

Polter-Cow, have you seen the Be Kind Rewind youtube channel? The sweded trailer is... well I'm not quite sure but I love it.

Oh, yeah, I saw the Sweded trailer when it came out. I loved it too.

One of the things about genre studies is the difficulty of defining your less obvious genres because of the degree of subjectivity. I'd say that horror definitely needs a touch of that great German word, "unheimlich", which translates as something like eerie, sinister, uncanny.

To an extent, "The Arrival of the Train..." would have qualified for contemporary audiences, but it's still a smart-alec choice.

People's reaction to the film was already being parodied just a couple of years later, so I guess that makes "The Countryman and the Cinematograph" the 1900s equivalent of "Scary Movie":

[link]

Bob and I went to Twilight last night with a theatre full of girls and their moms and long-suffering boyfriends and we both enjoyed the experience. The movie is not terrible, and the audience made it fun -- there was an audible sound of one girl hitting puberty when Tyler Lautner took off his shirt for the first time -- like a strangled shriek. (The whole audience tittered in appreciative relief when she did that.) But I can't really complain about the ridiculousness of having Lautner unnecessarily shirtless throughout the movie.

I just saw Edward Scissorhands for the first time (I know, I know). I loved it.

But I can't really complain about the ridiculousness of having Lautner unnecessarily shirtless throughout the movie.

IIRC he's unnecessarily shirtless through much of the book as well.

Finally got around to Men Who Stare At Goats last night - what a giant steaming pile of horseshit.

I tried my best to separate it from the book, but turning the journalist into a believer at the end? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK, MOVIE???!?!!!! I can't believe Jon Ronson is being so polite about this film in interviews. It's just so fucking insulting.

My in-laws who hadn't read any of Ronson's stuff were also not impressed, but they weren't actively angry at it like I was.

[edit: Jon Ronson, not Ron Jonson.]

From Yahoo News: Top 10 movie flops of the decade

Some I'd forgotten about, and some I've never heard of. There was a 2007 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers?