I have to ask... which critics are calling Roth a genius? I
know Stephen King recently called HOSTEL 2 'interesting on an
artistic basis', but I suspect he was being kind. I've
certainly not seen much in the way of good reviews -- quite
the opposite, in fact. And which movies did Roth make on big
budgets? He's very deliberately avoided making movies on big
budgets and it's the fact that his extremely low budget
gorefests (CABIN FEVER was made for $1.5 million; HOSTEL for
$4.5 million -- tiny budgets; HOSTEL 2 was $10 million, which
is still tiny by today's standards) have made so much money
that's spawned so many imitators. The same was true of SAW,
which was made for about two dollars and a button and grossed
(that being the operative word) over 50 million in the
US.
Al
--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "GB" <mnc_fb@...>
wrote:
>
> Charlie Huston is probably my favorite writer of the
new crop and
> I've been recommending him to every Spanish-speaker
I know who can
> read in English. I also used to enjoy Rex Miller
back in the day
> although he's not exactly new (BTW, I've been
waiting for someone
to
> collect his short stories and any unpublished stuff
he might have
> left behind. I'd love to know if there are other
Eichord stories
> around).
>
> It's not the violence (or the ultra-violence if you
will) in the
> stories that's wrong. Sometimes you need exactly
that to tell a
good
> story. For instance, I don't think the cat torture
scene in
Huston's
> Caught Stealing was unnecessary, as shocking as it
was. For
starters,
> it served to illustrate the viciousness of the thugs
Hank Thompson
> was up against. American History X is another such
case. I don't
> think you could tone it down and what the characters
did in the
movie
> is just the type of things skinhead and ghetto gangs
do in certain
> situations. The same goes for the shower scene,
which as we all
know
> is pretty common in prisons everywhere.
>
> Movies like Hostel, Saw, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre
remake, etc.
or
> the wave of noir films from the UK such as Guy
Ritchie's, Sexy
Beast,
> etc. are different in that they genuinely strike me
as the product
of
> a teenager who thinks he's being cutting edge by
devising over the
> top scenes. The violence doesn't shock me, it's just
that it seems
> unnecessary for story purposes as well as
unrealistic in itself.
You
> don't really need to have experienced things in your
life to talk
> about them but I think that if you're going to make
violence an
> integral part of your work, then you should justify
its inclusion
> within the context of the story (you could do
without half of
> Hostel's torture scenes and the story would remain
the same) as
well
> as make it more realistic. Nonetheless, what bothers
me the most
> about these works is not that I find them worthless
(other people
> might enjoy them and more power to them) but how
critics almost
> unanimously fawn over the supposed "genius" (is
there a more
overused
> word these days?) of Tarantino and his clones or
people like Eli
> Roth, who's basically producing slasher films with a
bigger budget
> than their predecessors from a few decades
back.
>
> -GB.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 04 Jul 2007 EDT