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Emigdio Binet
Looks like HBO is not a fan of Netflix's newest creation, their free streaming service! If you aren't a Netflix member, Netflix streaming allows users, paying about $15 or more, to access hundreds of TV shows and films instantly on their computer, or through their Netflix ready devices like the Sony PS3, XBOX 360, and Nintendo Wii as well as phones and Blu-Ray players on top of their normal Netflix rentals.
To combat this amazing deal, HBO has decided to upload several of their popular shows, including True Blood and Sopranos, onto their HBO Go service. HBO subscribers can instantly stream these shows through devices with a broadband connection.
What do you think truebies, will you be streaming your TB via HBO Go? Personally, I'll stick with Netflix and buy True Blood on DVD. I'm not about to pay for HBO! Plus HBO Go wont have my Law and Order: SVU ;)
"Ironclad " is now available on DirecTV and other on-demand providers (check your service listings) and from Netflix (DVD and Blu-ray) starting on July 26th. "Black Death" is available on Netflix (streaming, DVD and Blu-ray) and Amazon Instant Video.
When I was a kid growing up in the Seattle suburb of Edmonds, WA (aka "The Gem of Puget Sound"), my parents did everything that good, sensible parents should do to shield their kids from violence, both real and reel. I remember being innocently intrigued by the furor over "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1967, but they would never have taken me to see it with them (to their credit, since I was only six). The same held true for "The Wild Bunch" in 1969, by which time the debate over movie violence had reached a fever pitch in our national conversation. Over the ensuing decades, that conversation has become a moot point as movie violence proceeded apace, from Sonny Corleone's death in a hail of Tommy-gun fire in "The Godfather" (1972), to the slasher cycle of the late '70s and '80s (when makeup artists Tom Savini and Rick Baker reigned supreme as a master of gory effects) and into the present, when virtually anything - from total evisceration to realistic decapitation -- is possible through the use of CGI and state-of-the-art makeup effects. That's where movies like "Ironclad" and "Black Death" come in, but more on those later.
If you're looking for a rant against milestone achievements in the depiction of graphic violence, you've come to the wrong place. To me, it's a natural progression. Movies and violence have always been inextricably linked, and once opened, that Pandora's Box could never be closed. A more relevant discussion now is how the new, seemingly unlimited gore FX should be used and justified. Horror films will always be the testing ground for the art of gore, and it would be a crime against cinema to cut the "chest-burster" from "Alien" (or, for that matter, Samuel L. Jackson's spectacular death in "Deep Blue Sea"). But it's the depiction of authentic, real-life violence -- in everything from the "CSI" TV franchise to prestige projects like HBO's "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific" -- that pushes previously unrated levels of gore into the mainstream.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not praising this progression so much as acknowledging its inevitability. If you really love movies -- and especially if you've been lucky enough to make a career out of watching them -- you have undoubtedly seen a violent film that was unquestionably vile, unjustified and miles beyond the boundaries of all human decency. I've seen violent movies that earned my disgust because (1) the context of the violence was as abhorrent as the violence itself and (2) the intentions of the filmmakers were clearly indefensible. (Context and intention: More on that later.) Tolerances and sensibilities may vary, but every critic has seen a film that appeared to have been written and directed by sociopaths. Check out Roger Ebert's review of "I Spit on Your Grave" (the 1978 version) and you'll see what I mean.
The subject of war is another matter altogether. Vietnam ended decades of sanitized combat in the American movie mainstream, and Oliver Stone's "Platoon" showed us wartime atrocity as it really is: brutal, inhuman and perpetrated in the context of battle-weary extremes. "Saving Private Ryan" legitimized the kind of gore previously restricted to graphic horror films because Steven Spielberg knew it would be dishonest to hold back. We had matured enough, as a society, to accept graphic wartime carnage from an A-list director in an Oscar-worthy film because (1) that level of gory realism was now technologically possible and (2) by 1998, enough precedents had been set to mandate that any realistic depiction of warfare must not flinch from the genuine horrors of war: severed limbs, arterial blood-spray, bullets through heads and bodies blown to pieces. This wasn't the gratuitous gore of exploitative horror, bloody Westerns and street-gang melodrama; the film's violence was immune to protest because it honored the experience of our soldiers. This is what they went through; this is what they saw. This is what all soldiers go through; this is what all warriors will see.
Of course, the new FX technologies can be abused and trivialized as much as the old ones were; the "Saw" and "Final Destination" franchises (to name but two) are nothing if not showcases for cleverly contrived ways to maim, disfigure and kill, giving FX artists ample opportunity to hone and perfect their craft. But if the goal is to honestly and justifiably depict the terrible things that can happen to human flesh and blood, you have to hand it to effects artists like the KNB EFX Group (founded by industry veterans Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger), who can design and execute virtually any kind of movie violence and make it look horrendously real.
Even before the rise of makeup wizards like Savini, Baker, Rob Bottin, Greg Cannom and the guys at KNB, I realized, early on, that there are as many ways of responding to movie violence as there are ways of depicting it. A severed head can be freakishly satisfying (James Earl Jones's fate in "Conan the Barbarian"), nightmarishly shocking (as when Brando drops Frederick Forrest's severed head into Martin Sheen's lap in "Apocalypse Now") or outrageously funny (Stuart Gordon's "Re-Animator"). Cartoonish, over-the-top violence (as in, say, Peter Jackson's "Dead Alive" or Edgar Wright's "Shaun of the Dead") can be both gruesomely extreme and comically cathartic. It's all about context and intention.
By the time I was ten, my parental restrictions eased up a bit: I'd developed a voracious appetite for relatively tame horror and science fiction movies on TV, and I was allowed to see PG-rated horror and sci-fi at the Lynn Twin, a two-screen cinema in Lynnwood (the neighboring suburb, due east from Edmonds, where I currently reside). Movies like "Taste the Blood of Dracula" (1970), "Tales from the Crypt" (1972) and "Westworld" (1973) delivered relatively "discreet" violence, mostly in the form of bright red, stylized bloodshed and not-always-convincing severed limbs made from crude rubber moldings. This was cool stuff for movie-loving kids like me. I didn't have an unusual "sick kid" appetite for it, but I never shied away from it, either. That's still true today: I don't seek out movie violence, and much of it (as always) remains abhorrent, exploitative and genuinely disturbing both in context and intention. But if violence is an integral part of the story you're telling (by which I mean, if it serves the integrity of your story), then it seems to me that depicting it honestly and graphically is not only justified but necessary.
To those who abhor all movie violence and yearn for the good ol' days of bloodless bullet-holes and carnage-free battlefields, the same options still apply: Don't buy a ticket to that violent movie, don't watch that violent TV show, and familiarize yourself with the parental controls on your TV and computer that prevent your kids from seeing that stuff. Just don't fool yourselves: If your kid is curiously inclined to taste forbidden fruit, they will find a way to pick it.
Like many kids, I knew when a movie death had been sanitized. I grew up with those bloodless bullet-hits and too-clean battlefields, when filmmakers faced a strict, cultural mandate to avoid any graphic depiction of realistic violence. Kids today don't have that historical perspective; assuming they have access to it, they can see and (this is where it gets troublesome) interactively participate in pretty much any kind of graphic violence, so while the Department of Defense recruits warriors of the future based on proven skill in violent-battle video games, we still need to ask ourselves what a steady diet of violent imagery can do to a young person's mind. Violent death and dismemberment is virtually ubiquitous, especially in video games. Gratuitous violence is more prominent than ever; body counts have risen exponentially, and desensitizing kids to violence is still a symptom worthy of serious concern. Parents need to be more vigilant than ever in controlling what their kids are exposed to. That's as it should be.
But here's the deal: As a kid watching all those bloodless bullet-hits and fully-intact corpses on miraculously crimson-free battlefields, I felt vaguely patronized, condescended to and cheated. That's not death, I thought, and that's not war. I'd seen actual battle-carnage photos. I knew that movies were sanitized and I understood why, but I still felt like "the grown-ups" were not being honest. If you're going to show people killing and dying, then why not show it for real? Sanitizing it was a cheat -- not just a cultural expression of institutionally-imposed discretion and decorum by way of the MPAA ratings system (an arbitrary and inconsistent system of moral watchdogging if ever there was one), but a deliberate denial of the truth: Violent death is just that: violent, gruesome, and horrible. The only thing worse than showing it, I thought, was cleaning it up and denying its reality. Gratuitous violence will always be with us; it's got a track record of easy profit. But if you're going to make a film about warriors at war, regardless of the era or extremity of battle, then isn't it dishonest to shy away from graphic authenticity?
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