Seminar talks at the European Graduate School. Good stuff.
There are several more videos on youtube as well. Rip the audio and listen to them on the bus.
Released in 1999 by Media Educational Foundation, this is a film of a presentation by Jean Kilbourne about how media advertising has portrayed women in sexualized, objectified, submissive and negative ways. This is not a knee jerk reactionary feminist esoteric reading of print and television ads, but a prima facie matter of simple deconstruction. Her readings are straight forward, and she supports these readings with a recognition of the purpose of advertising as well as some quotes from the inside from professional marketers and trade publications.
She utilizes several different domains of advertising for her discussion. She also presents how the depiction of the female has changed in advertising since the late 1960s until now. Of particular note is how she approached female sexuality through the form of various food and “homemaking” ads. She also approaches the topic of women in alcohol ads with a scathing sarcasm that underpins the futile oxymoron of using sex to sell alcohol, a substance which increased usage of decreases your ability to perform the other.
Kilbourne approaches the topics with occasional humor, and though her jokes are occasionally the groan worthy the practiced quips of a college professor’s stale lecture. Not all of the jokes are that way, some of them are genuinely funny…just not all of them. It is a good presentation and should be eye opening to people who have not been exposed to such criticism of the marketing machine. There is the unfortunate truth that this video was produced in the late 1990s, and as sophisticated as marketing was then we have the added dimension of the internet, social media and the increasingly difficult to read method of using ironic posture and self-depreciating truths to develop a virtual authenticity that can sometimes be more powerful than a direct sell of a products attributes (such as the turn that smoking advertisements took in the late 1990s).
You can watch the whole thing on Google video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1993368502337678412
New review up at Anthropology Review Database:
http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3571
A TV special produced in 1993. Features a lot of neat stuff on Morris Sound Studios and the Florida scene. Produced in the middle of it all, not looking back on the subject.
The full documentary, available on line. Notable for being a slicker, independent documentary take on the subject. Has a minimalist electronica soundtrack along with the black metal stuff. Definitely has a feel that eschews the normal music documentary vibe.
Review up at Anthropology Resource Database:
http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3346
New review up at the Anthropology Resource Database:
http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=1503
I heard some rumors a couple of months ago that Shia LeBeouf was going to direct a documentary on Marilyn Manson. That seemed strange enough, more because of LeBeouf’s career in the Hollywood game. How would his nice and teenage friendly image be affected by working with Marilyn Manson?
Then the LeBeouf directed video for “B0rn Villian”, a song called “No Reason” came out.
The video homages/steals from the alchemy sequence of Jodorowsky’s “Holy Mountain”. Mix that with some sequences of attempted bad touch, body piercings, weird images of various interpretations and Marilyn Manson reading aloud Shakespeare. There is a scene at the end where he puts a glass eye in a women’s vagina.
It is an interesting video as a piece of art and I must admit that I didn’t know LeBeouf had it in him. Might have been underestimating just how far he was willing to go to push those boundaries that he had some role as an actor in defining these past 4 or 5 years.
I am a big fan of Conan. I like the Robert Howard stories, the Marvel comics, I have 8 volumes of the Dark Horse Comics reprints of the Savage Sword of Conan materials. I loved the original Conan the Barbarian movie and consider it an almost perfect film. I was not much of a fan of Conan the Destroyer, but it was far better than this piece of @#$& remake that they made.
The movie is horrible. The plot is pretty lame. It is incredibly violent, and I guess that is something, but I felt like I was watching a Pirates of the Caribbean rejected script. That would have been fine for a Pirates movie, with Johnny Depp’s charm and some decent acting – but this movie had none of that.
They changed so much that Conan was no longer just some average guy. Of course they had to build up the Joseph Campbell Hero’s Myth story so much that Conan was more like Luke Skywalker or something. Battle born, his mother died in warfare defending herself during a raid. His father performs an emergency Cesarean and pulls Conan from his mothers stomach, a badly faked plastic fetus with a ridiculously large penis. I guess they wanted to make the point that Conan was well hung even as an infant. This laughable sequence is representative of the rest of the movie, they try so hard to make this movie have a massive erection that they fail to provide anything but the most laughable of insecure action scenes and big dumb words coming out of the mouths of characters. One decent line is all I ask. And woe I am denied.
The actor who portrayed Conan was terrible. He was to skinny and all depictions of Conan, going back to Howard’s description of “thighs like tree trunks” had him as a stacked totally muscular dude. Despite Arnold Schwarzenegger’s history as an actor he was believable as Conan. The fact that he could barely string an English sentence together made him that much better in the original movie. This actor just made me sad.
The action sequences were hyper-violent and well shot. The sound design seemed to build impacts into explosions. It is a very loud movie. The CGI blood is noticeable sometimes, but you might as well get used to it because they are gonna keep using it. There were a lot of fight scenes. In fact the movie is paced so faced that by the time they reached the end of the second act I thought the movie was over, but they kept on digging…lord they kept on digging that hole.
All this majesty of visual blood and guts and gore cannot mask the fact that this is a PG-13 level plot with some R-rated scenes of a guys face getting destroyed by a sword. There is not a subtle moment in this film, not a character moment where inflection is not amplified into the bombastic level of pantomime. There is not a moment of character interaction that doesn’t introduce cringes and voyeuristic embarrassments in the viewer.
The dialog is vapid. Whereas the original movie was quotable this movie did not have hardly any intelligent statements let alone memorable lines. The original had Oliver Stone as one of the script writers. One should assume that this movie was written by a roomful of prostitute elves.
Now I am very aware that this representation does not negate the previous interpolations of Conan that I enjoy. Those things are still there and still exist and I can still enjoy them. The problem is that before this movie I had to convince many people of the intellectual value of Conan when I admitted that I was a fan. Now there will be a whole bunch of 2o year olds that when I mention the inherit philosophical value I find in the Conan character (minus some of Howard’s racist contents) they will know only this horrible movie. I am shamed by this perversion of the character. If I ever do meet someone who enjoyed this movie I am not sure I will still like that person or trust their perspective on the movie, as well as their perceptions of reality.
It is not that they didn’t make the movie I wanted to see. These movies, based on intellectual properties that have to encompass large chunks of mythos, are bound to vary from source materials. They are not Harry Potter movies where textual deviations are the deepest and most onerous of sins. X-men First Class was way different than the source materials but was still a great movie. The problem is not the skinny Conan. The problem is that this is a horribly stupid movie that is of questionable execution both in form and content. It is really bad on an objective and formal level. It is a badly made movie that should not have had the Conan name on it. It actually reminded me of the movie Pathfinder, which was a better movie by far.
To put this piece of undigested slime in perspective, I enjoyed Pluto Nash more than this sociopathic violence wrought on the projection screens throughout the world. What movie was worse than this movie? In my opinion one might say Good Burger, but that movie might be better. In fact I know it is. Maybe the remake of Car 54 Where Are You? Close. Battlefield Earth and Bloodrayne combined could only achieve the level of crap that this movie contains. If it does succeed it is because it is a pretty set of fight scenes that should have been called Xthoth the Barbarian. This movie has shamed me for being a Conan fan in way that only The Phantom Menace has been able to achieve. Only that film has shook my faith in a mythos as strongly as this stench ridden piece of committed celluloid atrocity that smells of the worst David Croenenberg body horror. I do not have words to fully articulated my disdain for this film. The only way I can express my disappointment is through the body fluid triple threat of spitting, urinating and defecating on an icon representation of the film in the form of a movie poster, Blueray copy or hard drive with the film as video file on it. Lest ye think this is hyperbole on my part…well you are probably right. Still, the trauma does make me emotional.
I posted a review at the Anthropology Resource Database: http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3697
