#eli roth

Borderlands (2024) Well now… this really is a spectacular show! Right, I’ll be very clear once again: it’s based on a video game… and those who’ve played the game are bound to be disappointed yet again, as this comment shows: “Yet another one! Yet another film adaptation of a video game that’s fit only for the bin! More cringe-worthy than anything else. It’s awful!!!” Basically, for those of…

Menuda película se nos viene con el director Eli Roth, mucha gente se va a escandalizar, aunque nos queda claro, que esta cinta va un poco de lo que en los años ochenta fue Los Niños del Maíz, aunque claro más sádica y visualmente gore a más no poder. (more…)

this is a bro who is just a meathead shooting gay porn. look at something like hostel. tell me that movie isn't just gay porn and it has a frank and refreshing honesty precisely cause it knows it's just gay porn. having the writer bro namedrop kafka is so eerily apropos. this film is gay porn in the exact same way kafka is, yet rawer and harsher in that frat boy mid-2000s nu metal way frotting like the scabrous wound has turned to rust.

it's like the fantasy of a european packing trip turned butcher nightmare is coming very organically through the same lens of old testament judgement implied in older slashers, but in a more studied and refined manner, very sportsman-like but also lived in. to have the prettyboy blonde student of literature gagged and sliced by the achilles tendons in that black guy dies first sorta way feels so incidentally deconstructionist. it feels it's not only striving for realism in a visceral and formal sense -- to heighten the geekshow atmosphere, the voyeuristic thrill -- in a way which is collegiate, knowingly mythic, but there's a real identification in the author's background that comes from a personal vision stemming from a people with a lived experience, and the moral reckoning of naive americans being butchered precisely cause their insulatarity and material abundance has left them disprectful and vulnerable feels like earnest mutual-identification.

eli roth, though a decadent, seems to display an earnest repulsion for a moral rot at the heart of our culture, and the sense of culpability and delusion is where he tends to draw his horror.

all this to say, eli roth often feels incidentally literary by not trying to seem literary, and yet... in exposing the bones below the meat, you can gleam what seems an inherited literary sensibility.

tarantino feels very... much in comparison like he wants to tell other ppl's stories cause he doesn't like himself very much and has nothing to say.