THIS WEEK IN DISGUSTING: The Koch Brothers: Obamacare is coming to physically penetrate you

David and Charles Koch, tied for fourth place on Forbes' Richest People in America list, are naturally no fan of President Obama, nor of his plan to make health care more affordable to more Americans, destroy the insurance industry by giving it millions of new paying customers, and bankrupt businesses by giving them a healthier workforce.

The billionaire Brothers, notable as the founders of Americans for [the] Prosperity [of the Koch Brothers], have also sunk money into an independent group called Meaningless Platitude Generation Opportunity, which has just released the most fantastically awful series of ads aimed at convincing young people to opt out of the required purchase and assistance of the Affordable Care Act, pay the fine, and continue to be uninsured.

How to convince young people to shun a program that helps them get health care, which they might not otherwise be able to afford, and instead to pay more money to continue getting nothing?



Oh!  By telling them they'll get stuff stuck up their butts.

Everyone knows that the one thing young men hate worse than paying money is another guy's fingers in their butts.  So all they need to do is opt out, pay the fine, and their buttholes will remain untouched by everything except the cancer that might have been detected.

Wait, it gets worse:



Nothing like a little rape terror to make your political point, eh.

It's not so much that the implication of the ad is completely false, although it is.  In both the ads, the respective doctors say something along the lines of "I see you're new to Obamacare" or "I see you've signed up for Obamacare," as if it were the organ donor program.  The doctor shouldn't give a hoot whether you use Obamacare or not, any more than your digestive system notices if the food you just ate was bought with food stamps.  What the Kochs are assuming is that their target audience thinks that Obamacare is a public option (which would be nice, but that's an argument for a different day), when it's actually an assistance program meant to help people buy insurance from the already existing private insurers.  If you're insured with Blue Cross, and you used Obamacare to buy into it, all that matters to your doctor is that you're insured with Blue Cross.  Obamacare doesn't enter (physically or otherwise) into the exam room whatsoever.

But never mind: these ads are, like most mainstream right-wing arguments, targeted at the ill-informed and misinformed.

What gets me is that the commercial is so incredibly vulgar and cheap.  Bereft of real ideas, the Kochs have elected to shoot for the absolute lowest common denominator for political scare tactics.  And I don't just mean that creepy perma-smile Uncle Sam mask, which doesn't make me afraid of doctor's offices but does admittedly make me a little queasy around Burger King.

WE'RE COMING FOR YOU.

It's that the Kochs are so out of arguments that they're forced to use fear of physical penetration as their cue.  As a left-winger I'm no ardent fan of Obamacare, though it's a step in the right direction and hopefully a bridge to a more socially conscious, nationally inclusive and efficient form of health care.  It's not the simplest legislation out there; certainly there was some mode of criticism the Kochs could have followed, other than "Opt out, or get raped"?  Even a critical ad that was patently misleading about the law might be worthy of debate.  This campaign is just cowardly hogwash, preying on the instinctive fears of young people.

And at the expense of two necessary and helpful procedures, no less.  The young man is, of course, petrified of the rectal exam, because... well, he's scared at the prospect of being gay, I suppose.  I'm frequently surprised at the prevalence of gay panic in pop culture even nowadays; I was recently as flummoxed by a scene in A Haunted House (likely to be a Cinemasochism entry soon) in which the brutal rape of Marlon Wayans by a ghost is played for laughs, because he doesn't want to appear gay, yuk yuk.

The Koch ads don't play it for just yuks, although I have to assume the makers had a good ol' boy laugh while conceiving it.  They not only assume a ridiculous homophobia on its audience, but also demonize and marginalize the exam itself.  The gynecological exam is also conflated with rape, with the image of the scary Uncle Sam wielding the speculum and the young lady's legs quivering with fear.  Barf.

Never mind that the right wing has yet to heed constant warnings to stay away from rape and to stay out of the OB/GYN business.  This one manages to tackle both!  The image that pops into my mind when Uncle Sam descends on the poor scared girl isn't of President Obama, but of Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia or Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, or any of the Republican governors and legislators who've enacted laws that require doctors to do essentially what Uncle Sam's doing in that second video, to women who've elected to terminate pregnancy.

The ads are a logical and political mess, but it's that desperation that makes them really awful.  They're so base, condescending and just downright dirty.  I don't mean dirty in the sense that they're unfair or untrue, although they are.  But they're also just icky.  Slimy.  Gross.  Creepy.  The Kochs' and Generation Opportunity's proposal that young people ought to stay uninsured is ridiculous, but the notion that this concept would appeal to anyone--that anyone would take it seriously enough to be scared by it, or worse, that anyone would find it clever or funny--is insulting.

TWITTUR'D!

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Torturously Okay is now on Twitter.  To be honest, we've never been much the tweeting type, but we're interested in participating the entertainment twitterverse along with personalities much more established than us.  So there might not be much original material other than links to blog stuff and entries aimed at other shows/comedians/games/etc. we like (Doug Loves Movies, Team Coco, Jimmy Fallon, etc.).  But anyway, here we are.

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THIS WEEK IN CINEMASOCHISM: The Devil Inside (2012)

This Week in Cinemasochism takes a look at movies that have been notoriously rejected by the mass populace, and tells you if you might perchance be missing a classic.  Or not.


The Devil Inside is a quick cheapie built for a swift box office draw: the kind of horror movie that's being made more and more often since Paranormal Activity spun a few thousand dollars into 100 million.  According to IMDb, Devil cost about a million to make and brought in $33 million on its opening weekend: modest for a major-studio movie, but more than enough.  The reception among critics and fans, however, was not as successful; it may have gone down as the most hated movie of 2012.  It scored a 6% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is not easy (The Oogieloves is listed at 27%), and appears to be generous at that.  Let me quote from the critics who "liked" it: "Exorcism horror gets the cliched shaky-camera treatment," "The less said about that ending, the better." The bad reviews aren't just unfavorable; they're downright nasty.  Peter Travers: "The Devil Inside manages not only to scrape the barrel's bottom but to drill a hole in said bottom and funnel deeper into the scum."

Ouch.  I, uh, I kinda liked it.

I really don't see what all the vitriol is about.  The Devil Inside is a competently made, well-acted, quickly paced and enjoyable thriller.  It's unambitious, but, well, so what?  Sometimes a demonic-possession movie doesn't need to be ambitious.  It's certainly more entertaining than The Conjuring, a dull would-be shocker that's been heaped with praise.  Will it fill you with dread?  No.  But if you're the kind who enjoys demonic screaming and flailing, levitating objects, crosses that burn your skin, possessed women shouting something that rhymes with "Your mother sews socks that smell," and pea soup that flows like water--all things which we hold near and dear to our hearts--then the film will not disappoint.

It begins with that old portentous signal "Based on true events," which is the second-most meaningless caption in the film.  It's followed by the most meaningless, which says that the Vatican did not in any way endorse this film.

Yes, I wrote in my review of The Conjuring that the old, old based-on-true-events trick is the kiss of death for a horror movie.  But that's only if the movie takes itself seriously, which The Devil Inside doesn't.  Though it plays itself straight, it's content to be nothing more than a romp with the devil through a series of body-bending exorcisms.

An ominous, anonymous call is placed to 911: "Three people are dead." Police arrive to find... well, I'll leave you to discover it.  Flash forward twenty or so odd years and Isabella Rossi (Fernanda Andrade) is traveling to Rome with a couple of rogue exorcists (Simon Quarterman and Evan Helmuth) and the camera crew from The Blair Witch Project at her behest.  Isabella Rossi (no relation to Ingrid Bergman) hopes to exorcise the demon that she believes has possessed her mother (Suzan Crowley).

The movie delivers far more guffaws than frights.  Was that intentional?  It doesn't matter; it does.  The first scene between Isabella and her mother is a delight, in which the mother spouts ominous warnings in several different languages and accents, and boasts a body covered in markings of upside-down crosses.  Since the crosses point in many directions, I don't know how the characters know they're upside-down.  The exorcism scenes are actually quite well done, with some excellent stunt work from contortionist Pixie Le Knot at key moments.  The performances are earnest and surprisingly good, particularly from Crowley as the possessed mum.

Director William Brent Bell works handily within the well-worn "found footage" template, and never cheats on the point of view.  The quieter scenes fail to achieve the kind of brutally honest emotion that other documentary-style horror films have, such as The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Blair Witch.  As a result some confessional (in the reality-TV sense, not the Catholic sense) scenes are extraneous, and the movie feels a little padded at barely 75 minutes followed by the slowest scrolling end credits you'll ever see.  But the film is punctuated by some truly entertaining, gory and kinetic scenes.  The ending has been much maligned, and the film doesn't so much end as it does stop, but Bell throws in a few delicious set pieces near the end.  I'm thinking in particular of one memorable baptism scene in which... well, I'll just say I didn't see it coming.

** 1/2 out of ****

Is it really that bad?: Yes.  Which is to say not at all.

Pain level: For horror fans, non-existent.  For others, moderate. 

THE CONJURING (2013): The Eh-xorcist

"This is based on a true story."

Maybe that's the kiss of death for The Conjuring and movies like it.  Horror films that profess to tell a story of a real-life haunting are rarely effective, since they're usually afraid to create their own world in which demonic possessions and hauntings exist, and are left to attempt to convince us that they exist in this world.  I get the sense that director James Wan really wanted to have fun with this story, but was limited by the "true-life" account of what happened.

The movie's limitations were no doubt dictated by Lorraine Warren, a demonologist and rare lay authority on demonic possession in the Catholic Church.  She was a consultant on this film and is also a character played by Vera Farmiga.  Lorraine and her husband Ed (Patrick Wilson) consult on supernatural occurrences and, in some cases, refer them to the Vatican for exorcism.  When a family movies into a Harrisville, Rhode Island, home and is set upon by a malevolent supernatural force, Lorraine and Ed are called to the rescue.

The movie starts off well.  It's clear that Wan is at home in the haunted house movie, rather than the gory Saw movies that gave him his start.  He's adept at building spooky tension based on limited points of view.  He calls our attention to the blurry peripheries where things are happening that the characters don't see.  And in one masterful scene, he gives us a character who sees something in the dark that we don't, but through that character we still sense it.

The movie's first half is a gleeful celebration of creaking sounds in the night, voices in the dark, shapes under sheets, things behind the door, and an especially creepy porcelain doll that I'll be expecting under my bed shortly.  Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston are believable as the unsuspecting parents, and I liked their massive family of five daughters and how each is affected in a different way by the haunting.  I enjoyed the Poltergeist-like contraptions that Ed and Lorraine use to capture evidence of the ghost, like the thermostat-rigged cameras that go off whenever there's a temperature change in the room.

Once all the action is set into motion, the movie has nowhere to bring it.  The backstory behind the ghost that haunts the house is perfunctory and dull.  The big climactic exorcism is a total dud.  Vomit is spewed, blood is thrown around, Latin is shouted, and pretty much everything you expect from a movie exorcism is done, nothing more.  The movie seems afraid to make too many fireworks, possibly because it doesn't want to stray too far from the actual events, possibly because the sequel has already been greenlighted.

I think the movie's biggest sin, however, is the introduction of a room at the Warrens' house that's filled with possessed objects from the numerous homes they've visited.  They include the aforementioned creepy doll, as well as a Genghis Khan-like statue and one of those stuffed monkeys that plays the cymbals.  In a world in which Cabin in the Woods exists, there is no place for a movie in which all of these things do not come alive by the end.  The movie teases us with that prospect several times, but it doesn't come through.  Just as with an on-screen gun, a creepy doll introduced in the first act needs to come alive and kill someone by the third.

** out of ****

THE ABCS OF DEATH (2012): U is for Uneven

Horror anthologies are, I suppose, back in style after a hiatus.  I must admit I've got a soft spot for them, having been raised on the succinct, economical horror of EC Comics, their TV progeny "Tales from the Crypt," and the works of Freddie Francis like Dr. Terror's House of Horrors and Tales That Witness Madness.  V/H/S, a collection of several 20-minute video-shot fables from different directors, was a success, and has a sequel coming soon.  In the meantime, here is The ABCs of Death, an anthology of 26 short horror films of varying types of terror and varying quality.

The premise: 26 directors from around the world are each assigned a letter of the alphabet.  They each pick a word that starts with the letter as the basis for their films.  "A is for Apocalypse," "B is for Bigfoot," etc.  Each film runs about 4-5 minutes.

The results are middling, not the least because 26 different films in row are a lot to sit through.  Also, it's a lot harder to be truly scary in under 5 minutes; horror usually requires mood and patience.  That's why many of the films rely heavily on gore and shock value for effect.  A few of the films, like Banjong Pisanthanakun's (Shutter) very funny "N is for Nuptials," in which a parrot proves to be an unreliable ally in a man's proposal, would be better off without the Death requirement.  Simon Rumley's "P is for Pressure" is an interesting montage of poverty that's unfortunately punctuated with a moment of violence that doesn't quite fit.  Most disappointing is "M is for Miscarriage" by Ti West (The Innkeepers), who's one of the best horror filmmakers working, and whose submission here is a big nothing.

A few too many films choose sex as their focus; while sexual perversity is a tried-and-true theme of the horror genre, the films' affinity for the naughty bits grows tired very quickly.  Timo Tjahjanto's "L for Libido," the film that leaves the longest aftertaste, takes place in an underworld in which men are forced to masturbate while watching increasingly disturbing performances.  This sequence knows how to disgust, but isn't particularly necessary, or good.  Noboru Iguchi's "F is for Fart," about a lesbian relationship enhanced by intestinal distress, would have benefited from restraint (although "F for Fart" sounds like an amazing Orson Welles parody).  By the time we get to Bruno Fornazi and Helene Cattet's surreal, well-made "O is for Orgasm," we're sick of sex altogether.

A few of the films are superior and worth checking out a la carte.  Xavier Gens's (Frontiers) "X is for XXL" is one of the few to balance extreme gore with real emotion.  Jason Eisener's (Hobo with a Shotgun) "Y is for Youngbuck" is a memorable synth-music-driven story of images about a young boy who gets revenge on his molester.  Marcel Sarmiento's "D is for Dogfight," told entirely in slow motion, is a surprisingly moving story.  Lee Hardcastle's hilarious animated episode, "T is for Toilet," shows us the worst potty training imaginable.  Andrew Traucki's "G is for Gravity" is an effectively realistic first-person account.  The best overall is Kaare Andrews's "V is for Vagitus," set in a Robocop-like dystopian future; it's the one that most effectively fits into the format, though it's so intriguing that we wish it were longer.  Jon Schnapp's "W is for WTF" is an enjoyably wacko stream-of-consciousness journey into a creative mind gone mad.  And I'm perplexed as to what exactly is going on in Yoshihiro Nishimura's (Tokyo Gore Police) "Z is for Zetsumetsu (Extinction)," a mishmash of nuclear paranoia, Nazi imagery, phallic symbols, and infomercials, but it isn't boring.

** out of ****

WORLD WAR Z (2013): Cowboys & Zombies

World War Z is an acceptable summer blockbusterization of the usually low-budget and quiet zombie movie, if nothing more.  While other high-profile entries in the genre, like "The Walking Dead" and George Romero's Dead series, have focused on the abandonment, loss of civilization, and loss of humanity that comes from the rise of the living dead, World War Z shoehorns zombies into the classic alien attack template.  Faceless, identity-less intruders attack humanity.  Humanity defends itself.

Which is, well, fine, if the theater is air-conditioned and it's hot out.  But those looking for something more than the average action movie diversion will be disappointed.  World War Z is well-made, well-structured, well-acted, and never boring.  It proves that Marc Forster (Stay, Monster's Ball) can direct an action movie, when it might have shown how he could elevate the action movie to his own level.  Look at what Joss Whedon did with The Avengers.

Loosely based on Max Brooks's book, which took the template of a historical document, the movie World War Z creates a hero, Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), who I believe is the first action hero ever to be named Gerry with a G.  Disaster strikes his hometown of Philadelphia very early on.  A disease is zombifying humans rapidly in the usual way, though (as in 28 Days Later) humans turn to zombies within seconds of being bitten.  Gerry and his family are whisked away to a U.N. aircraft carrier stationed in the West Indies, where the Deputy Secretary of Defense (Fana Mokoena) needs his help in finding the origin of the disease.

The everyman action hero was never Pitt's forte, and it shows here.  He's much better at playing the complex antihero than the Bruce Willis-style ass-kicker, and his work here is a waste of his talent.  In early scenes Matthew Michael Carnahan's screenplay makes him less a hero than a guy who's there when the action is happening.  The movie's plot consists mostly of following Gerry around the world as he puts the pieces together and is chased away by zombies.  Forster stages his action sequences well, and allows for a personal point of view of the chaos rather than a sweeping, grandiose Michael Bay-like approach, but Pitt's character is a flimsy hook on which to hang this huge a movie.

Much of the movie's first two acts are made up of good-looking if cookie-cutter action scenes.  Production troubles and postproduction tinkering are evident, as actors--Matthew Fox, James Badge Dale, David Morse, and most notably Elyes Gabel as a young neurologist--pass in and out of the film without much consequence.  Gerry's wife (Mireille Enos) and children are conspicuously dismissed after the first act.  We're taken on a brief jaunt to Israel, where the leadership makes an incredibly dumb mistake, though this sequence does lead to an admittedly great horror movie moment set on a plane.

Then at the halfway point, the movie ditches the global action and relocates to a W.H.O. center in Wales.  These scenes are quieter, tenser, and more believable than the disjointed first half.  We get closer to the zombies, who become more threatening than the faceless CGI masses we see in the first half.

The change in tone is no accident.  The movie was supposed to have ended with a climactic battle sequence in Russia, but budget constraints and disagreements over Pitt's character arc necessitated a complete rewrite of the movie's third act.  "Lost" writers Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard were brought in to deliver an ending that was more character-driven.  Their ending isn't more character-driven--Gerry is still a monotonous shlub--but at least for these scenes the movie sharpens its focus and the action seems to have a purpose.

There were myriad ideas for exactly what World War Z was supposed to be, and it appears that nobody quite reached an agreement.   Like Cowboys & Aliens (which also had a late rewrite by Lindelof), it's a summer blockbuster made by committee that's fun enough to half-please everyone.

** 1/2 out of ****

THE GREAT GATSBY (2013)

I didn't think that Baz Luhrmann was an ideal candidate to direct a film version of The Great Gatsby, but upon seeing it, I can't really think of anyone more suited to the job.  He deals in highly stylized, overly lavish excesses: not the sort that you'd go to for an adaptation of a well-known novel set against a real period in American history (Luhrmann is Australian, to boot).  But the style actually works, and the surprise is that Luhrmann understands the novel and doesn't upstage the material with pyrotechnics.  He also avoids the over-reverence that usually affects adaptations of well-known and popular material, and adapts it into a movie of his own.

It's not a perfect film, as no adaptation of a highly regarded novel should be expected to be.  To ensure that F. Scott Fitzgerald's prose isn't tossed aside, Luhrmann frames the film by having his narrator, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), write his account of the story to a psychiatrist.  The device works, since Nick's narration suggests that his story is told in the form of a book to begin with.  Still, the voice-over narration grows tiring, as the film depends more and more on Nick's voice than on what it shows us.  I'm convinced that the best way to adapt a book to the screen is simply to translate the story into the language of film and ditch the prose.  We may lose much of Fitzgerald's genius, but so what?  The Great Gatsby is meant to be a novel and a novel it shall remain.

Nick arrives in West Egg, the Long Island home of the nouveau riche, as a young bond salesman on Wall Street.  His neighbor, the mysterious J. Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), is the talk of the town, a thrower of gigantic open-invitation parties attended by everyone from senators to movie stars.  Nick's cousin is Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), who he learns is an old flame of Gatsby's.  Gatsby painstakingly arranges, through Nick, that they meet again, and that she might fall in love with him again.  Daisy is married to the insufferable bully Tom (Joel Edgerton), who's having an affair with Myrtle (Isla Fisher), the wife of his mechanic.

Both the movie and the novel are set not in a realistic version of 1920s New York, but in the version of Nick's memory.  Gatsby and company are meant to inhabit a grandiose, flamboyant, cartoonish world of extremes.  The Great Depression had not happened yet when Fitzgerald wrote the novel, but it makes sense for the story to be told through that lens, as a remembrance of a booming, gaudy, extravagant era that is long gone.

Luhrmann wisely doesn't portray the wild parties in a condescending way, as Jack Clayton did in the dour 1974 film.  Rather, he gives us a visual spectacle that, if it doesn't approach the parodic glitz of Moulin Rouge, gives us a reason to believe Nick's attraction to Gatsby and the identity he's created.  Nick Carraway is not what you'd call a critical narrator, and we only see Gatsby through his positively rosy lens.  The doe-eyed Maguire is perfectly cast.

Luhrmann resists the urge to make the film into a circus; though the film is hardly spare when it comes to visuals, he knows when to let them drop away.  The crowdedness and cacophony of the early party scenes makes way for a loneliness that comes later on.  The hip-hop score, produced by Jay-Z, is an appropriate representation of the jazz age in today's terms, though there is one irritating and awful Lana Del Rey weepie that wears out its welcome and refuses to go away.

As Daisy, Mulligan pins down a character that is difficult to capture.  Her heart is required to travel in so many directions that it's a task not to turn her into a squawking mess (as Mia Farrow did in 1974), but Mulligan's performance is authentic throughout.  As Tom, Edgerton is a perfect bully: loud, brutish, childish, cowardly.

Because the movie is economical in its treatment of its supporting characters, it loses some of the verisimilitude of the novel.  We see a lot of Gatsby and Nick, but very little of the people that make up their environment.  There's far too little of Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), the sharp-witted golfer who's fixed up with Nick by Daisy and Tom.  Debicki, whose second film this is, ambles away with what little screen time she has.

There's also too little of Myrtle and her husband George, who in the novel give an idea of the rich classes' ambivalence toward the poor, as well as the corrupted American Dream represented in Myrtle's desire for Tom.  Isla Fisher and Jason Clarke are good in these roles, but Luhrmann doesn't pay them much attention.  Still, an early Manhattan party scene is memorable, and Adelaide Clemens (last seen as the apple of Benedict Cumberbatch's eye in "Parade's End") is a scene-stealer in a brief role as Myrtle's obnoxious sister Catherine.

Like Daisy, Gatsby is a difficult character to find, as he's always putting on a show for someone.  DiCaprio knows this, and gives his Gatsby two personalities: the Jay Gatsby he wants the world to know, and the James Gatz he actually is.  The elevated tone with which he utters "old sport" sounds casually false, as it's meant to.  DiCaprio ably finds the purity in a character who is rarely genuine to anyone.

Gatsby's drive captures the attention, and later the sympathy, of Nick, and Luhrmann's success is that he shows us how Nick comes to idolize him so.  It works because Luhrmann brings a restraint that's not common to his other films.  The ending, in which Nick finishes the "book" he's been writing, would be silly in a film that didn't earn it, but this one does.  The final shot, quiet and sad, is what I've always pictured the ending of The Great Gatsby to be.

*** out of ****