Warning, No Doodles in This Post : A Rare Sharpie Doodles Rant

Hello my darlings!

First, some news. I've installed an "email subscription tool" to this blog. Yes, you can now have Sharpie Doodles delivered right to your door, rose bushes, sidewalk, or through your front window (speaking, of course, in Internet terms) Look for the subscription tool on the left hand side of the window. It will ask you to enter your e-mail and then badda boom! You no longer have to spend the 15 extra seconds actually coming to the blog to read it. Ain't technology great! Special thanks to Kelley for sending me that link.

Now, Kelley, I must apologize because this post might be a little long winded. In fact, you might just want to stop reading now because there ain't gonna be any pretty pictures to look at either.

Okay, here we go. It's a Rant, yes, and not very funny, but please read it. It means a lot to me.


Spring is here and Summer fast approaches, dear readers, and that means lots of things. Baseball, cookouts, mowing the grass, sunburns, 200% humidity, shame and embarrassment at various beaches and lakes...

...but it also means movies. Lots of em, new ones out every week, and, here's the thing, most of them will be pure escapist entertainment.

Which is totally fine with me. Yes, I'm a cinema snob but not near as much of one as nearly everybody I went to school with, and I'm certainly not as much of a snob as your average newspaper movie critic. I love movies that make me think, that make me question, that I don't know how to feel about...but the summer movie season is what it is and I roll with it joyfully. I plan on happily crunching my extra butter popcorn, scarfing down my peanut M&M's, and slurping my medium (twenty five cents will take you up to a large, sir) cherry coke while Christian Bale kicks butt in the Dark Knight and Harrison Ford relives his glory days in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I'll see the action movies because they are fun and I'll see the monster movies and thrillers because they are also fun. I like to watch things explode and I like to root for the good guy and I really, really like to watch Batman save the day.

I don't like to see people getting tortured.

But apparently, most of America does.

I'm talking about movies like Saw and Hostel of course. Those are the most well known examples but there are others, countless others. If you haven't seem them here is the basic plot.

1) People get captured by a sadistic madman.
2) People are realistically tortured for an hour and a half. There is much screaming.
3) People mostly die. One person may or may not escape. Sadistic Madman remains on the loose.
4) The end.

Movies like these aren't escapist entertainment. Pirates III is escapist entertainment. It may have sucked by crimminy, but at least it was harmless and fun suck.

No, movies like Saw and Hostel aren't entertainment. I don't even want to call them movies. Lets just refer to them by what they really are, shall we? Pornography.

Gore Porn.

Pornography doesn't have a plot. It doesn't have a story. Any story that porn does have is just a thin excuse to witness an act. In the case of gore porn, the act is torture.

Pornography doesn't have subtlety. It holds nothing back, it strips an act down to it's most base nature. Violence in cinema is a hot topic these days, but if you pay attention to most action movies, they don't really show you everything. Not like Gore Porn does. And if they DO show you everything, it is usually to make a point. Take No Country for Old Men. An extremely graphic movie. Very violent. But the violence in that movie was used as a tool by the Coen Brothers to make a statement about how violence affects humanity, how greed affects violence, etc...

The violence in Gore Porn IS the point. It's there just for you to watch and "enjoy" and that's it.

In pornography there are no consequences for the act being witnessed. The same in Gore Porn. This is one of the most disturbing trends to me...the sadistic madman always gets away with it.
Again, don't try to argue me into a corner here. I'm not saying that movies where the villain gets away with stuff are bad. To the contrary, I think those type of endings make for great storytelling. But that's just the thing. STORYTELLING. In an actual movie, when the villain gets away with things it's for story reasons. He faces consequences. He is changed in some way good or bad by what he has done. Or he isn't changed and WE as the audience are changed by wondering why HE hasn't been changed...etc.

In Gore Porn the only reason the madman lives is so there can be more Gore Porn.

And there will be, oh yes, there will. Because our culture has taken to this specific brand of pornography, hasn't it? After all, there are FOUR Saw movies to date. TWO Hostel movies. Dozens and dozens of stand alone films in the last three years alone. Why? Because Gore Porn makes a CRAP TON of money. You have no idea. You really don't.

So, where do we stand so far? Gore Porn has no value as cinema. It doesn't make you think, it doesn't touch your emotions (except perhaps disgust, if you are lucky) and it doesn't tell a good story. Which leads me to believe that the only reason that people see it is for escapist entertainment.

Wait a second. Millions and millions of people in America watch torture every year as escapist entertainment?

Yup. There isn't any way around it. And what's worse is THEY TAKE THEIR KIDS TO IT. You know it's true. Go to any ten o'clock showing of any R rated movie and I will give you a cookie if there isn't a five year old somewhere in those rows of stadium seats.

And then we wonder why we have a group elementary school children plot to kill their teacher with duck tape, rope, knives, and blunt objects because she reprimended one of them during class. They brought this stuff to SCHOOL ya'll. They were going to do it. Tie her up and kill her. Not across the country. Not in Detroit. Here. In an Atlanta suburb.

Here.

Here.

I'm ashamed.

I'm ashamed of my generation, a generation that profligates the making of Gore Porn by it's very insensitivity and apathy and unwillingness to speak out against it. We are a generation of causes. Global warming, yes. Darfur, sure. Gay rights, okay. But does anybody care that we are losing our very humanity ticket by every loving movie ticket?

I'm ashamed of my generation, a generation that profligates the making of Gore Porn by GOING TO SEE IT TIME AND TIME AGAIN. Hollywood makes Gore Porn because Gore Porn makes money. Period. I'm infuriated when I see one of these movies listed on someone's "Favorites" on the Facebook or Myspace or whatever. If you are not disturbed by the images in Gore Porn, you should be worried. Something is broken inside of you. You have a problem.

You are the problem.

I'm ashamed of my nation. Gore Porn is only the latest apparition of a greater problem, our society's complete loss of sensitivity: to beauty, to art, to violence, to the basic tenants of what it means to be human.

I'm ashamed of my species. We have such capacity for evil. It is a part of us. But I believe, I HAVE to believe, that our capacity for good far exceeds that.

But I feel like we aren't trying very hard. Not very hard at all.

I'm ashamed. Just so damn ashamed of us all.

What a waste.