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Project Ludovico

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Athene said:
I'm going to be doing some solo reviews to help deal with my feelings of guilt and powerlessness, because its an important element of a lot of fiction and because I feel it will help me.
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I want to reiterate it's not your fault, even if you already intellectually know that. You are a victim along with Dissmech, and no one is blaming you for anything.

If you start feeling bad or anything, remember it isn't your fault. And probably go eat some chocolate or something and maybe get a hug and a nice talk with someone or even pop onto IRC and mope about it, there will be people who will wish (virtual) hugs and good feelings towards your way. Just don't sit there and feel bad.

Because it's not your fault.
 
You just survived a douche landmine, don't feel bad, simply watch something good for the moment.

I just watched Amreeka. Best advertisement movie for the people who also sponsored Harold and Kumar.
 
Athene said:
So as some of you may be aware, Dissmech was attacked by someone near our apartment. She's physically fine, she's just in the recovery phase and things are a little rough for her.

I'm going to be doing some solo reviews to help deal with my feelings of guilt and powerlessness, because its an important element of a lot of fiction and because I feel it will help me. Sorry for the delay, things have just been really tough.
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Holy SHIT! This is the first I've heard about it!

@DissMech, we're thinking of you here. You hang in there, okay?

Athene, you too. You just get better, alright?
 
So lets talk about a pair of movies, Death Wish and Death Sentence.

Death Wish, based loosely on the book of the same name, is a movie about a buttfucking liberal named Paul Kersey who learns about real power. He starts the movie as the straw man that a 1970s conservative unthawed from a block of ice would talk about on reddit. He's a bleeding heart. He was a pacifist in Korea. He doesn't believe in death camps. This all changes when his wife and daughter are sexually assaulted in their home by intruders, killing his wife and making his daughter a vegetable so she can be raped again in the sequel, yes that happens. After a trip to Arizona he's gifted a gun and kills a mugger in self defense. He goes home, vomits and gets down to going into the night to kill.

And kill he does. He needs to merely ride the subway around to be constantly threatened by various hoodlums, who he mercilessly guns down. There isn't any catharsis or motivation for Kersey to do this, its for the audience. See, the 1970s and 1980s were a bad time for American cities like New York City. At one point a quarter of people living in NYC knew someone who had been a victim of violent crime. Vigilante violence appeals to a dark part of ourselves and is very seductive to cheer on. Kersey isn't getting revenge though. He's not getting back at people who wronged him or his family, he's shooting down entirely unrelated people to the cheers of the people. Muggings instantly go down 50%, the press asks if vigilante killings are the solution to the crime problem, the police let him go because they're huge fans, a single tear rolls down the face of Otto Skorzeny, the works.

There isn't any way around this: This movie is pretty fascist. I hadn't seen this movie since I was a teenager and good fucking lord. Early in the movie a coworker of Kersey says that the solution to the crime problem is concentration camps, probably one of the few PosMens you'll see for them in American Cinema. New York is portrayed as a nearly apocalyptic hell hole where the decent people float on top of a sea of filth, identified here as minorities and the poor. Paul Kersey teaches them to stand up to them with violence and intimidation. The Hard Hat riots get a hat tip, because of course they do. Kersey doesn't even get vengeance he just likes killing, and we're supposed to side with him. The author was apparently horrified at the adaptation, because rather than being a story about a man's descent into darkness, it instead wishes to bring out the inner darkness in all of us, to appeal to the basest of desires.

Death Sentence is an adaptation in name only of the sequel book to Death Wish, again, of the same name. What it is, is essentially a remake of Death Wish, only its heart lies in a different direction. Nick Hume has an amazing family and an amazing life. He has a slightly conservative streak arguably at the start but he is basically a moderate yet well off everyman. One day on the way home one day, his oldest son is attacked and killed in a gang initiation. He gets a look at the banger that did it, but he escapes and is hit by a car soon after. With him being the only witness, no physical evidence and a potentially sympathetic case, the DA tells him that the most they can do is get him a guaranteed 5 year sentence on a plea deal.

Look - I get a banger off the street. A year or so, somebody does my job for me. He doesn't get out of there alive - fine with me. He finds Jesus - fine with me. But we get religion and go to trial - as much as I'd love to - and the defense starts working on "when was your last eye exam?" and "what do you have against inner city youth?" And how unfair it is for them to grow up so violent. How they're forced into initiation killings or face execution themselves. Do you want a jury feeling sorry for this fucker? Huh?
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Rather than accept this, Nick sabotages the case and the kid goes free, with Nick following him to find out where he lives. He then goes out into the night to kill the person that killed his son and brings death and destruction upon everyone he cares about. See, to quote Frank Miller's Year One: "Even scum has family". Not only does the killing not bring Nick any inner piece and the leader of the gang is his victims brother. Now he wants vengeance and is fully prepared to also go outside the law to get it. They find Nick and try to kill him outside his office but he manages to fight them off and kill another member of the gang. Its a war now.

This thing stops right now. God knows why you're still alive. But you're being given a second chance. You think that officer's out there protecting you? He's protecting you from yourself. He'll haul your ass right to jail if I say so. You want your retribution and you kill a couple of punks, and it brought you what? Huh? Everybody think's they're right in a war. Everybody still dies in the end. You are never going to win this, Mr. Hume. Nobody is.
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The gang manages to kill his protective detail and shoots him and his remaining family. His wife is killed and his son is in a coma he might not wake up from. Nick escapes from his protective detail and decides to wage a final battle against the gang. He loads for bear and shaves his head, assaulting the gangs turf. One by one he brutally kills them in a fight for survival until finally, he and the gang leader are alone, both severely wounded and sitting on a pew in the chapel of an abandoned building.

Look at you. You look like one of us. Look what I made you.
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Nick wins in that he is the only one left standing at the end, but just barely, and one way or another his life is over. Rather than move on with his life and protect his remaining family, accepting a lesser punishment in a bad situation, he destroys everything. His wife is dead. He's dying. He has a remaining son that just pulled through to find out he's an orphan. He lost everyone and he didn't do a damn thing to deserve it. What was the point of it all?

Death Sentence is a repudiation of Death Wish. Death Wish was disturbing in ways it didn't intend but appealed to the deepest, darkest parts of us. The desire for vengeance is primal, base, wrong. Death Sentence manages to be entertaining but its a dark fucking movie. There is no winner, its not a celebration of how awesome it is to go into the night and kill, its about how awful an idea it is. What point does it serve?

Having someone you care about be hurt is one of the worst things that can happen to you. I never expected it to be this hard and I can understand the basic need to re-exert control, to not be helpless, to get even. Its something programmed into us on an instinctual level but it should be fought. Vigilante movies appeal to a more basic level of right and wrong but movies like Death Wish aren't about vengeance, they're about violence as a tool of domestic politics. Its not about Paul Kersey avenging his wife, its about him making himself powerful.

And making yourself feel powerful brings out the worst in us. Death Sentence is on the unique end because it says maybe Nick Hume should have just healed and helped his family heal?
 
I may not have seen Death Wish, but I do know that Cannon Films made two sequels to Death Wish, Death Wish 2 and 3, with the Cinema Snob (A character done as a parody of pretentious Film Snobs, who reviews really bad porn and Exploitation films, done by a fellow Illinoisan Brad Jones) doing a review of Death Wish 2.
 
Cyrus 21 said:
I may not have seen Death Wish, but I do know that Cannon Films made two sequels to Death Wish, Death Wish 2 and 3, with the Cinema Snob (A character done as a parody of pretentious Film Snobs, who reviews really bad porn and Exploitation films, done by a fellow Illinoisan Brad Jones) doing a review of Death Wish 2.
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This man is known to us.
 
I enjoyed Death Wish 3 when I was young. It's still not bad as a slice of 80s cheese. But the first one? No. It expects me to take it seriously, therefore I can't.
 
Cyrus 21 said:
I may not have seen Death Wish, but I do know that Cannon Films made two sequels to Death Wish, Death Wish 2 and 3, with the Cinema Snob (A character done as a parody of pretentious Film Snobs, who reviews really bad porn and Exploitation films, done by a fellow Illinoisan Brad Jones) doing a review of Death Wish 2.
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I referenced Death Wish 3 when talking about Lifeforce, it's the movie where Michael Winner was a complete fuck to Marina Sirtis. Well, one of them anyway...

The movie in fact has 4 sequels, the last being infamous for how old Brosnan visibly was.
 
Athene said:
The movie in fact has 4 sequels, the last being infamous for how old Brosnan visibly was.
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Isn't the last one where the police have started protecting criminals from Kersey?

The whole series is actually really interesting because, while they individually proclaim that vigilantism is cool, taken as a whole they kind of become anti-vigilantism. Kersey kills a bunch of people, retires, and then returns to killing because oh-so-surprisingly his sprees were a temporary solution. Society progressively breaks down, criminals get worse and so does Kersey. Each of his interventions makes the next more likely. It turns into a series where a dude thinks the entire world should die if it means he gets to do what he wants.
 
Sufficient Juice said:
Isn't the last one where the police have started protecting criminals from Kersey?

The whole series is actually really interesting because, while they individually proclaim that vigilantism is cool, taken as a whole they kind of become anti-vigilantism. Kersey kills a bunch of people, retires, and then returns to killing because oh-so-surprisingly his sprees were a temporary solution. Society progressively breaks down, criminals get worse and so does Kersey. Each of his interventions makes the next more likely. It turns into a series where a dude thinks the entire world should die if it means he gets to do what he wants.
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I always felt that the title of the series was key. Paul Kersey has a death wish. Losing his family broke him inside. He wants to die, but doesn't want to kill himself. So he kills those he feels are responsible for the environment that caused his family's death in hopes that one day one of them will kill him instead.

Of course, that's just my head canon.
 
Sufficient Juice said:
Kersey kills a bunch of people, retires, and then returns to killing because oh-so-surprisingly his sprees were a temporary solution.
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Well, the problem is that he lives in LA in 2 and when he visits NYC again in 3 it's in a different area of the city, against gang crime rather than random muggings, a decade later and it's mentioned that he "went pro" after 2. He left before the killing was "done" before but in 3, well.



In 4 he's back in LA and goes after drug dealers after his girlfriends daughter has an overdose.

In 5 he's in NYC again but instead of Street Crime it's organized crime and his own dignity.
 
Athene said:
Well, the problem is that he lives in LA in 2 and when he visits NYC again in 3 it's in a different area of the city, against gang crime rather than random muggings, a decade later and it's mentioned that he "went pro" after 2. He left before the killing was "done" before but in 3, well.



In 4 he's back in LA and goes after drug dealers after his girlfriends daughter has an overdose.

In 5 he's in NYC again but instead of Street Crime it's organized crime and his own dignity.
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Let's be honest, by 5 neither Kersey nor Bronson had much dignity left.
 
Sorry it wasn't like, a laugh a minute review guys. In the future I'll hopefullyou be back soon to funny
 
Oh hey, Death Sentence! I saw that movie!

...It was REALLY depressing. I liked John Goodmans character though.
 
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