![]() Of course, the new FX technologies can be abused and trivialized as much as the old ones were the " Saw" and " Final Destination" franchises (to name but two) are nothing if not showcases for cleverly contrived ways to maim, disfigure and kill, giving FX artists ample opportunity to hone and perfect their craft. This is what all soldiers go through this is what all warriors will see. This is what they went through this is what they saw. This wasn't the gratuitous gore of exploitative horror, bloody Westerns and street-gang melodrama the film's violence was immune to protest because it honored the experience of our soldiers. We had matured enough, as a society, to accept graphic wartime carnage from an A-list director in an Oscar-worthy film because (1) that level of gory realism was now technologically possible and (2) by 1998, enough precedents had been set to mandate that any realistic depiction of warfare must not flinch from the genuine horrors of war: severed limbs, arterial blood-spray, bullets through heads and bodies blown to pieces. " Saving Private Ryan" legitimized the kind of gore previously restricted to graphic horror films because Steven Spielberg knew it would be dishonest to hold back. Vietnam ended decades of sanitized combat in the American movie mainstream, and Oliver Stone's " Platoon" showed us wartime atrocity as it really is: brutal, inhuman and perpetrated in the context of battle-weary extremes. The subject of war is another matter altogether. ![]() Check out Roger Ebert's review of " I Spit on Your Grave" (the 1978 version) and you'll see what I mean. (Context and intention: More on that later.) Tolerances and sensibilities may vary, but every critic has seen a film that appeared to have been written and directed by sociopaths. I've seen violent movies that earned my disgust because (1) the context of the violence was as abhorrent as the violence itself and (2) the intentions of the filmmakers were clearly indefensible. If you really love movies - and especially if you've been lucky enough to make a career out of watching them - you have undoubtedly seen a violent film that was unquestionably vile, unjustified and miles beyond the boundaries of all human decency. ![]() But it's the depiction of authentic, real-life violence - in everything from the "CSI" TV franchise to prestige projects like HBO's "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific" - that pushes previously unrated levels of gore into the mainstream.ĭon't get me wrong: I'm not praising this progression so much as acknowledging its inevitability. Jackson's spectacular death in " Deep Blue Sea"). Horror films will always be the testing ground for the art of gore, and it would be a crime against cinema to cut the "chest-burster" from " Alien" (or, for that matter, Samuel L. A more relevant discussion now is how the new, seemingly unlimited gore FX should be used and justified. Movies and violence have always been inextricably linked, and once opened, that Pandora's Box could never be closed. If you're looking for a rant against milestone achievements in the depiction of graphic violence, you've come to the wrong place. That's where movies like "Ironclad" and "Black Death" come in, but more on those later. Over the ensuing decades, that conversation has become a moot point as movie violence proceeded apace, from Sonny Corleone's death in a hail of Tommy-gun fire in " The Godfather" (1972), to the slasher cycle of the late '70s and '80s (when makeup artists Tom Savini and Rick Baker reigned supreme as a master of gory effects) and into the present, when virtually anything - from total evisceration to realistic decapitation - is possible through the use of CGI and state-of-the-art makeup effects. The same held true for " The Wild Bunch" in 1969, by which time the debate over movie violence had reached a fever pitch in our national conversation. ![]() I remember being innocently intrigued by the furor over " Bonnie and Clyde" in 1967, but they would never have taken me to see it with them (to their credit, since I was only six). When I was a kid growing up in the Seattle suburb of Edmonds, WA (aka "The Gem of Puget Sound"), my parents did everything that good, sensible parents should do to shield their kids from violence, both real and reel. "Black Death" is available on Netflix (streaming, DVD and Blu-ray) and Amazon Instant Video. "Ironclad " is now available on DirecTV and other on-demand providers (check your service listings) and from Netflix (DVD and Blu-ray) starting on July 26th.
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