Those following the strange tale of Man Boobz’ recently crowned Troll of the Year for 2012 will be intersted to know that someone calling himself Mikhael_Varpole has done a self-post on the Men’s Rights Subreddit claiming that he’s not MRAL after all and declaring me a liar. Here’s his explanation, FWIW.
I’ll be keeping him banned, in any case; even if this serial liar and sockpuppeter is telling the truth about this (highly unlikely, in my opinion), he’s still a serial liar and sockpuppeter.
Also, for the record, he wasn’t using a “similar” IP as Scooby Doo/MRAL; it was the same IP. And he was using the IP before I called him out for sockpuppeting as Torvus Butthorn — which is what he’s referring to, dishonestly of course, when he talks about doxxing.
He’s clearly just trying to stir up more shit, but it looks like the folks in r/mensrights aren’t biting.
Anyway, I guess we can consider this his Troll of the Year acceptance speech.
I think the worst park of Miike is his obvious lactation fetish, displayed prominently in both Visitor Q and Gozu.
I remember Visitor Q being more sympathetic to the sex workers.
At least the (pretentious and possibly deranged) actress from that movie agreed to what was going on. One of the reasons I’m saying that Miike has lady issues is that he extended the scenes in which one woman is beaten in Ichi far longer than necessary just because he didn’t like the actress playing the character. He thought this was funny.
And yet he still doesn’t produce the same visceral revulsion in me that the dude who made Cold Fish does. We made the mistake of watching the interview segment that came with the DVD. That was the point at which Mr C turned to me and said “some day that man is going to kill a woman”.
I’ve toyed around with the idea in the past of doing feminist reviews of horror films. If I ever actually get around to that, I may have to check this awful-sounding Cold Fish thing out.
“one woman is beaten in Ichi far longer than necessary just because he didn’t like the actress playing the character. He thought this was funny.”
Didn’t know that. That’s a weird factoid…
If you have a strong enough stomach to sit through it that thing is a goldmine of misogyny. Especially given that the plot is based on an actual case involving multiple murders and the director somehow managed to make it even worse than the real thing was.
Also, part of the plot revolves around a store that I can only describe as Hooters the Tropical Fish Emporium. The best part is that the writer/director thought that he was writing a morality play that would make the world a better place.
Another weird factoid – some of the semen in Ichi is the real thing. There was a member of the production team whose task was to collect it. You could not pay me enough to work for Miike.
I just looked up Cold Fish on Wikipedia. Apparently it won the best screenplay award at Fantastic Fest. That doesn’t speak well for their selection process.
The funny thing is that it’s not one of those things that is only horrifying to women, Mr C was all “need to go wash my brain out with bleach now” too.
Possibly only horrifying to feminists?
I am making reckless assumptions here. 😉
Horrifying to feminists, men who like women, anyone who doesn’t enjoy realistic depictions of bodies being cut up into sushi-size bits, anyone who doesn’t firmly believe that all women get off on being abused, and that the only woman who should survive at the end of a movie is the one who didn’t have sex.
Actually if we were to make a list of the horror movies in which you know that any female character who gets laid is going to die then we’d probably be here all day.
Oh, so that’s what the film entails? The Wikipedia article was very light on the actual plot elements. That sounds not entertaining at all.
There is an actual plot involving two tropical fish store owners, one of whom has been murdering rivals, business partner, etc, and his wife who’s as batshit as he is, and who then transfers her affections to the guy who kills him because apparently she just gets off on that kind of thing. Oh, and the first guy rapes the second guy’s wife, except in the middle when she tries to get away and he starts hitting her she goes all OH PLEASE HIT ME MORE YOU MANLY MAN YOU THANK YOU SO MUCH.
Like I said before, the dude who made the movie is seriously fucked up.
Well that all sounds horrible.
Yup. I’m giving Fantastic Fest some serious side-eye right now.
I hate when people (who am I kidding? It is practically always women) get hit nonconsensually and then all of a sudden realize they like it. They pulled that shit on Weeds, too. And it is basically the whole plot of 50 Shades. Ugh.
There’s no chance the director was trying to make some sort of really inept statement about the way things as portrayed in the film are wrong, is there? Or was his interview all about how awesome and true to life his film was?
He definitely thought he was making a deep and meaningful point about something, not sure what. Having seen three of his movies though (that was the last one) you can start to track the misogyny, and in particular the idea that women who want sex are evil and insane, and that being evil and insane makes women want sex. There’s a lot of Catholic iconography in his first movie, I almost wonder if that’s part of what’s going on with him, some sort of religious guilt gone horribly wrong.
@ Some Gal
Yeah, that’s the thing, this wasn’t BSDM, it was totally “see if a woman doesn’t want sex and you’re just dominant enough she’ll start to want it regardless of what she said to start with”. The way Mr C put it was that it was the most blatant example of the belief that women secretly want to be raped that he’d ever seen.
Yeah. The Weeds one wasn’t with rape (although the guy does rape her later),.which I suppose makes it better? The 50 Shades stuff has lots of rape, but since her inner goddess loves it, I guess that makes her verbal no meaningless. smh
That’s actually what I meant by saying this guy makes Miike look positively feminist. There’s a horrifying rape scene in Ichi, but the thing is, it’s still made very clear that the woman being raped isn’t enjoying it. With Cold Fish, not so much. It’s kind of like, what’s the exact inverse of empathy? That’s the way the guy who made that movie looks at women.
I think the opposite of empathy is apathy. What you’re talking about is pure loathing.
The opposite of empathy toward woman is also how I would describe the attitude of whoever made Hot Tub Time Machine except they joke about male rape, too. So, lack of empathy toward anyone on the “receiving end” of sex, which is mostly women (and all women are) and occasionally men (but they get to be other things as well). I think it is the most misogynistic film I’ve ever seen.
@atomicgrizzly
Rather than off/on, apathy/empathy, it could be a scale with something I don’t have a word for (something like combining apathy with loathing?) on one end, empathy on the other, and apathy in the middle.
That’s how I interpreted what CassandraSays said.
That one scene in Cold Fish is definitely the most misogynistic thing I’ve ever seen on film. It’s the only time I can recall that a scene in a movie has left me feeling disturbed for days afterwards. That and the scene where dude # 2 stabs the wife of dude # 1 while he’s fucking her and she just laughs hysterically like it’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened. I think what bothers me about it isn’t just the sexual violence, it’s that the director is actively removing any sense of subjectivity from the female characters and having them act out the feelings of the hypothetical angry misogynistic viewer, so he’s replacing the women’s feelings with the feelings of the viewers. It’s horrifying.
Soooooo, a “Nce Guy” (TM) wrote this screenplay?:
“There is an actual plot involving two tropical fish store owners, one of whom has been murdering rivals, business partner, etc, and his wife who’s as batshit as he is, and who then transfers her affections to the guy who kills him because apparently she just gets off on that kind of thing. Oh, and the first guy rapes the second guy’s wife, except in the middle when she tries to get away and he starts hitting her she goes all OH PLEASE HIT ME MORE YOU MANLY MAN YOU THANK YOU SO MUCH.”
You know, what’s their battle cry?Oh yes — “All women wants jerks who treat them like shit!”
Movies like make them feel justfied, though they keep forgetting that it’s what happens in actual reality that counts.
I saw all the movies you guys mentioned above. The Audition threw me for the biggest loop because it started off kinda frumpy then veered into OHMIGODOHMIGOD-land. Ichi the Killer left me with a weird kind of hang-over. Like I had spent two hours staring directly into a strobe light.