Should The Human Centipede II be banned?

Posted on by Sarah

So, the BBFC has rejected The Human Centipede II – effectively banning it in the UK, as without a certificate from the BBFC it can’t be legally distributed in this country.

In a press release, the BBFC goes into great detail about why the film has been refused a certificate. Be warned: it’s pretty grim reading. In conclusion, the BBFC says:

“There is little attempt to portray any of the victims in the film as anything other than objects to be brutalised, degraded and mutilated for the amusement and arousal of the central character, as well as for the pleasure of the audience. There is a strong focus throughout on the link between sexual arousal and sexual violence and a clear association between pain, perversity and sexual pleasure. It is the Board’s conclusion that the explicit presentation of the central character’s obsessive sexually violent fantasies is in breach of its Classification Guidelines and poses a real, as opposed to a fanciful, risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers.”

I’m trying to get my thoughts in order about this, to come up with a coherent position on it (particularly because Sarah Ditum asked me to weigh in for her Comment is Free article). On the one hand, the BBFC decision sounds reasonable: this is the job the BBFC exists to do, and it doesn’t sound like they’ve done this lightly. On the other – do we have to do this all over again? The idea that horror movies might have a corrupting influence on vulnerable minds is hardly a new one, and it feels like we’ve only just finished discussing what Saw, Hostel, and the whole “torture porn” wave that followed meant for our collective morality.

I’m not really a fan of the trend for “extreme” horror movies – but when I say that, I mean that I actively avoided A Serbian Film, The Human Centipede, and Antichrist. I am, though, a massive fan of the Saw franchise, and I think that the first Hostel film is one of the best horror movies ever made. “Extreme”, to me, maybe doesn’t mean the same thing that it does to you. Or your mum. (Or my mum!) I’m not a violent person, I pass out at the sight of (real) blood, and yet I love horror movies and watch a lot of them; I don’t think I’ve been particularly desensitised or morally compromised by these films. I don’t think watching The Human Centipede II would do that, either; it’d make me feel sick, and uncomfortable, and maybe angry, but I don’t think it’d do me any lasting psychological damage.

And yet… I haven’t seen the film, and the BBFC examiners have. If we think they’re wrong about this, we need to maybe reassess what they’re there for in the first place. Personally, I’d like to see a system that offered more information about what films contained – a series of warnings, perhaps? – so that individuals can make a more informed choice about what they want to watch. The current age restrictions seem kind of arbitrary, and the guidance info is usually pretty useless. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of banning something because it’s been deemed immoral; morality is a tricky, slippery thing, and once you start making pronouncements on what is and isn’t moral, where do you stop? And what does art have to do with morality, anyway?

The Human Centipede II isn’t a film I want to stand up for. Personally, I think it sounds horrible and I have no desire to watch it. But should that mean no-one should be able to? I’m not convinced.

I’m addicted to my mobile phone

Posted on by Sarah

Imagine you’re sitting in a pub on a Thursday afternoon, waiting for your friend. There’s nothing to read, and you don’t really want to talk to any strangers; you’re just killing time, waiting. What do you do? Play with your mobile phone, right? You check your messages, maybe text someone, or play whatever games came pre-installed on your phone (I don’t trust people who specifically seek out, download, and then actually play games on their phones on a regular basis; that’s just weird).

I used to run out of things to look at pretty quickly and end up scrolling through my phonebook, deleting any stray contacts I didn’t like any more. Your phone, in these kinds of situations, isn’t providing you with much to actually do; it’s just a defence against awkwardness, something to look at so that you don’t accidentally make eye contact with a stranger. Playing with your mobile phone says “Don’t bother me. I am a person who has friends; in fact, I’m waiting to meet one of them now. It’s all cool. Just ignore me. Seriously, I’m fine, please leave me alone.” The phone is a talisman; it’s just something to do with your hands.

Or at least it used to be. But now I’ve got a smartphone, and that means that while I’m waiting around and killing time, I have access to the internet. The entire internet. I can check my email, my Facebook, my Twitter. I can catch up on my RSS feeds. Or I can log into Foursquare and see what my friends are doing and what stupid names people who live nearby have given their homes. There’s an endless amount of information I can look at on my phone while I’m waiting for my friend to arrive. Or my bus, or my food, or whatever I’m waiting for. Because now, I look at my phone all the time.

Whenever I have a spare few minutes, I’ll check my phone. It’s almost a reflexive action now: oh, gotta wait in this queue for a while: I’ll check my phone. I’ve woken up in the middle of the night: I’ll check my phone. My bus won’t be here for ten minutes: I’ll check my phone. My brain can’t cope with being unoccupied for more than about a minute. I’ve got to be connected, constantly. It’s not something I do because I’ve run out of other options; it’s the first thing I turn to. I don’t look out of the window on train journeys any more; I look at my phone. (I’ve even done it when I was a passenger in a car, which is just rude, really.)

It’s become an addiction, and I don’t think I’m the only one. In restaurants, you see people pull out their phones if their partner/date/friend gets up to go to the bar or the toilet. Even people just walking along the pavement are looking at their phones instead of looking where they’re going.

I need to break the habit. I’m trying to ignore the impulse to pull out my phone at every possible opportunity; I’m working on being able to be out in the world without doing anything other than sitting and looking. Doing nothing is underrated. I just hope no-one talks to me while I’m at it.

Hello world!

Posted on by Sarah

Hey, look at this! It’s all shiny and new!

I’ve been planning to do something different with my website for a while now. My old blog was struggling to do two jobs at once – to be both a professional portfolio and a personal blog – and I needed to figure out how to separate those two things a bit.

So, now there’s this. I’m going to move everything over from the old site, but it’ll be far more organised – portfolio pieces will sit under the ‘Portfolio’ tab, and more personal blog entries will go here, and the front page will be far more streamlined and sensible-looking.

I’m keeping my amazing Marc Ellerby banner, though, and I still want to keep things clean and minimal, with black text on a grey/white background. But this new layout should make it easier for people to find out who I am and what I do, and will allow me to post more regularly to my blog without worrying that the newest entry will always be the first thing visitors to my site see.

Scream 4 is awesome. No, really. It is.

Posted on by Sarah

Scream 4Due to poor performance at the US box office, it looks likely that there won’t be any further Scream sequels after Scream 4. And that’s kind of a shame, since Scream 4 was far better than it had any reason to be.

I should admit, straight away, that I love the Scream franchise. The original Scream was one of the first horror movies I saw and, as a teenager, I became obsessed. It was my gateway drug, and I actually think it’s held up pretty well. I loved Scream 2 just as much, and while I didn’t like Scream 3, it didn’t diminish my love for the franchise overall. So I was cautiously optimistic about Scream 4; I wanted to love it, but thought it might disappoint me.

It didn’t. It was wonderful. Here’s why I loved it, and why I think you should go see it:

Sidney Prescott is awesome
Any slasher movie is only as good as its Final Girl, and Sidney is awesome. She’s smart, resourceful, and occasionally ridiculously brave. Throughout Scream 4, Ghostface and others repeatedly tell her that she’s a victim; that she’s bad luck, or that she somehow deserves to have been targeted by murderers so often; that the only skill she has is to survive, as though that’s not worth anything. But she refuses to accept any of it.

By Scream 4, Sidney’s older, and wiser, and determined not to let victimhood define her, no matter how hard everyone else tries to push it on her. Sidney’s grown up through these movies, and it’s kind of awesome to check in with her and see how she’s doing.

Actually, that goes for all the characters from the original movies. It actually feels like they’ve been getting on with their lives between Scream 3 and Scream 4. Things have changed, but they’re still recognisably the same people, in a world that’s very nearly ours.

Continue reading →

Groezrock 2011

Posted on by Sarah
Groezrock beer tokens

Groezrock beer tokens

I’ve been back in the UK for about 20 hours and I’m still adjusting.

I should be working right now – it’s a Bank Holiday, but being freelance means I have to work anyway, especially since I have several deadlines looming this week – but I can’t quite switch back into work mode after spending four days at Groezrock festival in Belgium.

Twin Atlantic on the Eastpak Stage

Twin Atlantic on the Eastpak Stage

The festival was celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and the lineup was … well, a mixed bag, really, but plenty of awesome bands were playing. I went for Thursday, Twin Atlantic, Dear Landlord and Dashboard Confessional, and ended up seeing all of those plus Circa Survive, Teenage Bottlerocket, The Descendents, Streetlight Manifesto, Dead to Me, and a handful of half sets here and there.

Groezrock was my first ever festival experience, and I didn’t really do it properly: I stayed in a hotel some 15 minutes’ drive away from the festival grounds, rather than sleeping in a tent at the camp site.

Festival-goers heading to the main stage

Festival-goers heading to the main stage

Even with daily access to a proper shower and a real bed to sleep in, though, I ended up grubby and sweaty and gross both days, after trudging through mud, drinking too much beer, and eating too much awful festival food. While the festival toilets weren’t as grim as I’d been led to believe, they still weren’t very pleasant. I spent almost 10 hours travelling yesterday, including several hours spent hanging out at the train station in Brussels, and now I’m home, and my feet hurt, and I’m tired.

But it was a hell of a lot of fun.

Dead to Me on the main stage

Dead to Me on the main stage

The indisputable highlight, for me, was seeing Thursday — twice. On Friday, they played their album Full Collapse in its entirety, and on Saturday, they played a proper set of old and new songs, including Jet Black New Year, which was incredible. Dashboard Confessional’s acoustic sing-along was amazing, too. The whole festival was just a mess of crazy energy and excitement.

I think I’ve forgotten what real life feels like.

Heat Rash #1

Posted on by Sarah
Heat Rash issue 1

Heat Rash #1

The first issue of Los Campesinos!’ new zine, Heat Rash, hit doormats today, and, look! It’s so pretty!

Announced back in October, Heat Rash is a quarterly zine-and-music bundle that features exclusive writing, artwork and music; it’s a channel for the band to release some DIY-style informal material outside of their official album releases. I signed up for Heat Rash in January, and had pretty much forgotten all about it, so it was a nice surprise to find it in my postbox this morning.

Issue #1 is romance-themed, and the zine contains all sorts of stuff, from a track-by-track guide to LC!’s last album, Romance Is Boring, to a three-course romantic dinner menu and a top 5 list of romantic Nick Cave lyrics. As you can (kind of) see, the artwork and design is stunning. The two new songs, available as MP3s as well as on the bundled 7″,  are classic Los Campesinos!, all honesty, awkwardness, and longing.

If you like Los Campesinos!, even a little bit, you need this in your life.

www.loscampesinos.com/heatrash

New female film writers wanted

Posted on by Sarah

So, this is kind of awesome: Sight & Sound magazine is running a competition to find new female film critics, after recognising that there aren’t enough of them about.

The prize is a year-long mentoring programme with some of Sight & Sound’s female journalists, as well as a commission to write a feature for their website; they’re making an actual commitment to finding and nurturing a new writer, providing a great opportunity for the winner to kickstart her career.

Obviously, one new female writer isn’t enough to really balance the scales,  but it’s a start. Sight & Sound is also planning to publish a series of features about women’s film criticism, which begins with this piece by Hannah McGill.

The idea that we need more perspectives on film and pop culture than just the traditional white male viewpoint was basically the inspiration for Re/Action, but it’s brilliant to see a mainstream magazine like Sight & Sound committing to adding more voices to the conversation.

Women in Horror Month: Jennifer’s Body

Posted on by Sarah

Jennifer's Body posterSometimes, rarely, I’ll fall completely in love with a film. And it’s usually not a perfect film, or even a great film. But when you’re falling in love, superficial flaws hardly matter. I am utterly smitten with Jennifer’s Body, and I have been ever since I first saw the trailer.

The title references a Hole song, which is a good start. The plot sounds like it was lifted straight out of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: a terrible indie band try to sacrifice a virgin to the devil to get a record deal, but since the girl they kill isn’t a virgin, she becomes a demon – and the only person who can stop her massacring teenage boys by way of revenge is her nerdy best friend. The soundtrack features Panic! At the Disco, Dashboard Confessional, and Hayley Williams; the dialogue is stylised to breaking point; and it’s stunningly beautiful to look at.

What really works about this movie is the way it draws its relationships between women. The boys are almost incidental; they’re mostly just plot devices, used in much the same way female characters are frequently used in other films. What’s at stake in Jennifer’s Body is the relationship between Jennifer and Needy; it’s about the things girls do to one another, and why. Jennifer’s victims are chosen deliberately to hurt Needy, and Needy can only defeat demon Jen by yanking off her BFF necklace; it’s not difficult to see through the Buffyesque high-school-is-hell metaphor. Teenage friendships are often intense, and competitive, and Jennifer’s Body absolutely nails that.

And there’s more. The title’s about more than just a song: it’s about the ways in which Jennifer, as a character, is reduced to little more than her body. The evil musicians who sacrifice her to their own egos don’t see her as any more than a body, and neither do most of the teenage boys she murders. The demon inside Jennifer uses her body like a weapon. The fact that it’s Megan Fox in this role, an actress who’s frequently reduced to little more than a body by both filmmakers and audiences alike, an actress who’s both desired and hated for her looks rather than anything else, is kind of brilliant. (And for the record, I adore Megan Fox. Like Robert Pattinson, she seems like one of those celebrities who knows that the amount of attention she receives from the press is ridiculous, and deliberately says bizarre things in interviews just to fuck with us.) Jennifer’s Body isn’t the most feminist film that’s ever been made – it’s too concerned with having fun to worry too much about making statements – but it’s deliciously subversive in all kinds of ways nonetheless.

Jennifer’s Body is a horror movie written by a woman, Diablo Cody; directed by a woman, Karyn Kusama; and it’s about the relationship between two teenage girls. It’s hardly groundbreaking cinema, and like I said, it’s not a perfect film. But it’s a film that feels like it’s from a parallel universe where horror movies directed by, written by, and about women aren’t a rarity. In that parallel universe, that’s not a remarkable thing; every film directed by a woman doesn’t have to say something about gender and filmmaking, it just is. It’s a parallel universe I’d like to live in, where stories by and about women are just as common as stories by and about men. But since I don’t live there, I’ll just have to make do with the ones I’ve got.

Women in Horror Month: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Posted on by Sarah

Buffy the Vampire SlayerFor a few years in my teens, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the most important thing in my world. I watched the original movie on TV one night and became obsessed with it, to the point where, when the TV show started, I almost didn’t watch it. I couldn’t imagine Buffy being played by anyone other than Kristy Swanson. But then I succumbed to temptation, and fell in love with Buffy all over again.

Joss Whedon imagined Buffy as the antithesis of the usual horror movie heroine: she wouldn’t be a victim, and she wouldn’t scream and run away from monsters. Instead, she’d actively seek them out – and she’d be the thing they were afraid of. While the movie was camp and fun, the TV show took things far more seriously than the daft-sounding title suggested. Buffy felt like a real person. She had a family, and she had friends, and she fell in love with inappropriate men. She didn’t always know all the answers, she was far from perfect, but she could stand up for herself. Her monsters were my monsters – over the years, she had to fight school bullies, evil boyfriends, awful fast food jobs, and many many feelings of inadequacy and despair – but she always had a clever comeback … and she had superpowers. She was awesome.

Beyond Buffy herself, the show provided a variety of different roles for women. There’s Buffy’s new best friend, the shy and nerdy Willow who, over the show’s seven seasons, would gradually overcome her shyness and develop magical abilities powerful enough to save – or destroy – the world. There’s mean girl Cordelia, who gets slowly drawn into Buffy’s world, learning that there’s more to life than popularity contests and perfect hair, and eventually moving onto the Angel spin-off show to become one of its most rounded and interesting characters (before being abruptly written out, but that’s not relevant right now). There’s bad girl Faith, and snarky ex-demon Anya, and quiet, calm, shy, lovely Tara, and bratty Dawn, and all manner of female villains and tertiary characters. No-one was ever quite what they seemed on this show. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a show on which women didn’t have to wait for men to rescue them, ever. Usually, it was the other way around.

Lots of films and TV shows give their female characters guns or karate skills, call them “strong female characters”, and think they’ve done something revolutionary. But that’s not what strong female characters really are – ideally, strong female characters are well-written characters, who have flaws and are conflicted and interesting, fully fleshed out human beings. Buffy wasn’t a perfect show, and perhaps no TV show that runs for 140+ episodes can ever be entirely consistent, or get everything right every week, but Buffy certainly had a good go.

Although the show was devised by a man, there were several prominent female writers on staff, most notably Jane Espenson, who’s gone on to work on Battlestar Galactica, Gilmore Girls, and Dollhouse and Marti Noxon, who now works on Mad Men. Noxon also took over from Joss Whedon as show runner for the final two seasons, and many episodes were directed by women. (Although not as many as were directed by men, admittedly.) Buffy wasn’t just a show about a hot girl killing monsters, as fun as that sounds; it was a show with women both in front of and behind the camera, on which a range of female characters got to be heroes and villains and everything in between.

For me, as an awkward teenager, it was a show that told exactly the stories I needed to hear. And I loved it desperately for that.