I know. Things here have been really quiet lately. There’s a reason for that, too. I’ve been working away at a novel. It’s been easy to divide my attentions lately due to a growing feeling of being disenfranchised from horror thanks to a parade of lousy movies and a incoming barrage of even lousier movies on the horizon. But yesterday something happened in Connecticut that made it even easier.
By now you’ve probably heard. You’d have to be a hermit not to have. A man named Adam Lanza killed his mother and then drove to a nearby elementary school and killed 26 people before turning the gun on himself. 20 of his victims were children in two classrooms that he targeted specifically. The dead ranged from ages 5 to 10. He specifically set out to kill the youngest and most vulnerable children in the school. You’ll understand if I don’t much feel like talking about violent movies right now or at any point in the immediate future, for that matter.
Tragedies on this level don’t usually affect me like this but I’m having a really hard time with it. Even 9/11 took a little while to really register with me but this time around I’m struggling. Ordinarily I’d just keep it to myself but my strength being writing, I feel like I need to talk this out and since I have a blog, why the fuck not here? Like an asshole, I tried to talk it out in public over Facebook but I was shouted down for not picking a side in the war of ideologies and the comments were hijacked by warring factions of the paranoid right and nauseatingly self-righteous left. So I quietly deleted the post and hoped that everyone felt for bad for being assholes. So to everyone, I apologize. Here’s hoping Obama’s New World Order secret police don’t come for your guns and implant an RFID chip under your skin before sending you to the concentration camps. And to the other side, I hope your endless Facebook lobbying for gun bans goes well and may your Prius get ever the better gas mileage. Your self worth, after all, is determined by your personal carbon footprint. I apologize for being wishy-washy in your bitter war of rhetoric but I was far too busy being gripped with fear, wondering if the next time my five year old daughter gets on the bus to go to kindergarten might be the last I ever see of her. My spare cycles were spent sympathizing with twenty six families who would be left with unopened Christmas presents under the tree this year.
The irony of being brow beaten with a pair of tacky ideologies is that everyone giving me shit for being soft on the issues was without children and you’ll excuse me if this sounds unfair because maybe it is but there’s a valuable perspective in being a parent. It shouldn’t take children of your own to see why 20 dead kindergartners is a tragic thing beyond measure but in the present American climate the battling factions in the war to see who can accelerate the decline of western civilization with greater efficiency couldn’t hitch their ideological wagons to this killing spree fast enough. The bodies were still warm as the Internet echo chamber fired up with calls for weapons bans starting at assault weapons all the way down to all guns. You had Mike Huckabee scolding America for secularism in schools. You had the usual paranoid scumbags desperately grabbing at any hold they could find to blame this on the president. The fringes are flexing their creative muscle to somehow work their usual end times prophecy shit into the discussion with claims of RFID chips and despotic police states emerging from the tragedy. I really can’t wait to see what Alex Jones makes of this.
The media certainly isn’t helping things doing as they have in the past, filling the news cycle with whatever opinion or analysis they can dredge up for the bottom feeders, trying to pin easy answers to the wall for public consumption so the disbelieving mobs can find something, anything that makes sense to them.
But this doesn’t make sense and it never will and this is exhausting. If 2012 is going to be remembered for anything, it’s the year the maniacs won. 2012 will be the year a crazy asshole under the delusion that he was The Joker hosed a theater full of people down at a midnight Batman show. This was the year another crazy asshole shot up a church full of Sikh people under the impression that they were Muslims. This was the year another crazy asshole shot up a shopping mall during Christmas shopping. This was the year a crazy asshole shot up a number of cops, killing one of them, the chief of police, when they went to serve a search warrant on his home. This happened a couple of towns over from where I live. This was the year a heinous, evil, crazy fuckhead snuffed out 26 lives, 20 of them having barely started living. Turning the gun on himself was too good for him and it came way too late. The first person he should have killed was himself.
I’m tired of this. I’m tired of violence. I’m tired of people finding any excuse to validate their stupid fucking opinions at the expense of dead people. I just want to let this be what it is. I don’t want it to represent a side of a larger argument. Right now all I can think about is how I have children coming up in a world where not even the littlest ones among us are safe. We can put up a wall and bring them up as best we can and love them with everything we have in us but how can I know that the next morning she goes to school or on a day we send him to school some mad man with a gun didn’t take his medication that morning and is on his way to their classroom to settle some imaginary beef?
Cinema Suicide is going on a bit of a hiatus. Not forever. I’ll be back but right now I just want to write a book, read a thousand books and try to make sense of a world where even very young children are fair game for mass murderers. I’d rather not spend my time watching violence on the screen and be critical of it when it’s all around me in the world I live in. Things are coming apart around us and our entire culture is on the verge of critical mass. I’d rather do something positive with my time for the time being. The Twitter feed, however will stay open since I like having a laugh with you guys and that’s a pretty good way to do it.
I’m sorry, everyone. There’s a number of you guys who are reading this now who have been coming around for a long time and you’ve been extremely supportive. I appreciate that. I really do. Thanks for making this all worthwhile and I’m sorry I turned this into an emo LiveJournal but I needed to get this out of me. My heart goes out to everyone who lost someone yesterday. From one parent to another, I’m so sorry.
It’s a hallmark of proper exploitation to produce a low budget version of a theatrical sensation and even though Ninja Assassin seems to have slipped through the cracks of this year’s much-bemoaned short box office dollar, there’s certainly room for imitators because ninjas are timeless, baby! Who doesn’t like a good ninja movie? More to the point, who doesn’t like a bad ninja movie? In the 80′s, Golan Globus and Sho Kosugi carved veritable video store empires with a series of godawfully shameful ninja flicks, many of which starred round eyed gaijin holding high ranking positions in a tradition of martial arts that is historically exclusive to the Japanese. This, itself, is hilarious but it’s also an artifact of 80′s racist policies about Western audiences embracing ethnic hero archetypes in their schlocky, stupid fucking movies. Still, it’s an ironic breath of fresh air to find that this policy is alive and well in 2009.
I admit, this is kind of a cop out since I’m keeping it short this time but I’m in a hurry tonight and you’re hungry for some new Halloween trivia. So I’m taking the high road, a little sexy makes the bitter pill go down easier so here you go. The following list is the common result of a chain email that has been circulating since the late 90′s’. If you’re on the internet, you have received dozens of these. None of them ever seem to have a point and what’s weirder, they never seem to be selling anything. They just threaten your personal safety unless you send it along to ten of your friends. This one has probably popped up in some bad stand-up comic’s routine at some point, as well. As much as I love Halloween, I take issue with the comparison of Halloween over sex, but that’s just me and who’s to say you can’t combine the two?
The first Marvel Zombies series was a lot of fun as Earth’s (and otherwise) mightiest heroes were infected with a disease that turned them into zombies. Aided by their individual powers, they managed to eat the entire Marvel Universe, including Galactus! But the power of the ducket cannot be denied and Marvel launched a second series, picking up exactly where the first left off, leaving only a handful of human survivors on Earth under Black Panther’s protection. Unfortunately, the covers to Marvel Zombies 2, zombie spoofs of classic Marvel Comics covers from the past, were the best part of the book and the whole concept managed to jump the shark by the final pages of issue number one. Suffice to say, I rode it out through a few issues and then let it go.
Do you like Kung Fu? Do you like Jet Li? Well, you’re in luck because I have one copy of the upcoming Dragon Dynasty release of Jet Li’s The Enforcer (aka My Father Is A Hero) to give away to one lucky winner.
Here’s a genuinely weird twist on the usually neglected state of horror movies, particularly zombie flicks. The J. Michael Straczynski script for Brad Pitt’s Plan B production company has been in limbo for some time and I was pretty certain that this movie would never be made. Looks like I was wrong.
