Why (and how) do we like to be scared? What do you think is scary?

Posted on January 5, 2008 at 5:46 pm

Before there were scary movies, there were scary plays. Before there were scary plays, there were scary stories. Scary has been very popular for a very long time. The top twenty box office champs are all scary, from Titanic to the Indiana Jones and of course the first modern blockbuster Jaws, which still has some people afraid to go into the water. Horror and terror have been popular since stories began. Did you hear the story about the man who chopped up his enemy’s children into a pie and fed them to him? It was written by the same guy who wrote about suicidal teenagers and murderously ambitious would-be kings — Shakespeare. And then there’s the one about the guy who killed his father and put out his own eyes — written around 429 B.C.

Scary movies are especially popular with teenagers. They serve as a sort of training wheels for social interaction and a way of letting off steam. Teens watch them in groups, grabbing each other and screaming, then talking afterward about the experience.

The two best pieces I have read recently on the subject of scary movies are Desson Thomson’s article in the Washington Post about the difference between what is scary and what is gory and a piece by Grady Hendrix in Slate about the grisly and very popular “Saw” movies.

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Commentary

Will Smith — the Hitler flap

Posted on January 2, 2008 at 2:49 pm

It is a shame that Will Smith’s reasonable comments have been taken out of context and he has been forced to apologize.
Here is what he said:

Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’ I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good’. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming. I wake up every day full of hope, positive that every day is going to be better than yesterday. And I’m looking to infect people with my positivity. I think I can start an epidemic.

I hope he still thinks so. What he was saying is that even people who inflict great evil on the world usually believe that what they are doing is right. Recognizing that is an essential element of understanding the nature of evil and how to prevent it. No one who understood Smith’s point — or who has ever spent five minutes observing his behavior — could imagine he was in any way endorsing Hitler’s actions. Tim Gordon, as usual, has it right: “this is a situation where an actor gave an opinion and the interviewer twisted the context only after he received an answer that left room for further interpretation.”

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Commentary

The Best Movies of 2007

Posted on December 26, 2007 at 7:30 am

My favorite movies this year, all pretty much tied for first place:
The Namesake
Charlie Wilson’s War
Atonement
Gone Baby Gone
Into the Wild
No Country for Old Men
Juno
Once
No End in Sight
Lars and the Real Girl
And runners-up:
Sicko
King of Kong
Persepolis
American Gangster
The Savages
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
There Will be Blood
Michael Clayton
Waitress
The Lookout

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Lists

Top 10 Family Movies of 2007

Posted on December 26, 2007 at 7:28 am

This was a very good year for family movies. Here are the best:
Bridge to Terabithia
Golden Compass
Surf’s Up
Enchanted
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Hairspray
Transformers
Stardust
The Water-Horse
Ratatouille
Runners-up:
Bratz
The Last Mimzy
Game Plan
Meet the Robinsons
Shrek 3
The Astronaut Farmer

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“The Water Horse” — Interview

Posted on December 25, 2007 at 8:00 am

“The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep,” a fantasy set in WWII about a boy who befriends the Loch Ness monster, is one of the best family movies of the year. I spoke with director Jay Russell and stars Ben Chaplin and Alex Etel.
How do you act with a creature who isn’t there but will be filled in later with CGI?
AE: It was really hard to act to a tennis ball on a stick. It was a challenge for me. When it first hatched and was in the teenage stages it was a puppet, so that was easier. But we didn’t film in sequence at all, so we began with my looking at a tennis ball and pretending it was Crusoe (the monster).
JR: Some of the very first things we did the creature was already an adult. Later on when we got to the stage work, the WETA Workshop built these amazingly lifelike puppets and the puppeteer was so great. He would give the creature those quirky moves. When it was an adult, that’s when they had to play make-believe. We did pre-visualization. I would take the storyboards that I did before we started, WETA would bring them to life with animation and we would have living storyboards on the set and that would help them, especially when there’s nothing there.
Why has the legend persisted?
JR: Because there are really two legends. The first goes with any body of water or in the mountains with, Bigfoot, and that kind of thing. The original legend goes back over 1000 years, kelpie or water horse, about a traveler who would come by the loch and this creature would appear to be very friendly and would want to take them across the loch and then get them into the middle and drag them to their death. Then there was the more modern notion from the 1930’s with the famous surgeon’s photo. My feeling about why the legend persists is that we want to believe that there’s something out there that we can’t understand. We have a need for magic and imagination. When I went to Loch Ness for the first time, we pulled up and saw all these tour buses looking out. Then I stood there a while looking for it myself.
BC: It’s a deus ex machina.
JR: We want it, we need it. There always will be a legend of a loch, even as recently as last May, a guy shot a video on his phone of the water and a wave with a big black thing underneath it, and it’s all over the internet.
BC: Because it’s in a loch it’s not as scary as in an ocean.
AE: It’s like it’s in a zoo.

(more…)

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Interview