David Aaron Clark took me to my first genuine serious BDSM club.
Whether we were checking out a new K-pop singer, attending a medievalist wedding, or standing in line at a book signing, David Aaron Clark was always kind to me. He was not a self-serving fair weather friend or a hater bad weather friend; David Aaron Clark was a real friend to me.
David Aaron Clark is one of the last people still fighting the good fight who really knew me, not my digital persona, not some press, not some rumors, not the guarded self I now present to new people, but the real me. Was one of the last people, not is. Damn it.
David Aaron Clark wrote the first big feature review of Blue Blood magazine in print.
Later, Blue Blood wrote up David Aaron Clark’s first video project which he directed, wrote, acted in, and literally spilled his own blood for.
David Aaron Clark was a brilliant writer. He had a knack for turning even the most mundane video review into something truly entertaining and readable. He was my labelmate at Masquerade/Rhinoceros with his novels The Wet Forever and Sister Radience and the Ritual Sex anthology he and Tristan Taormino co-edited. He and Charles Gatewood collaborated on the blood fetish book True Blood for Last Gasp. DAC was a prolific writer and his talents were seen in many venues from magazines and newspapers to screenplays. A lot of people will probably remember him for his porn video writing and directing, but he created a diverse body of work.
Things were really looking up in 2009 for David Aaron Clark. Evil Angel had actually given him the creative freedom to show some of his true artistry with the Pure movie, produced by Aiden Starr and starring Asa Akira. He used to joke that AVN created a Best Asian Feature category just so they would have an award to give him every year. I think he won for Best Screenplay too and they didn’t invent that award only for him. He was a good person and would really give himself to what he made and I always felt he deserved even more recognition than what he got. David Aaron Clark always deserved an award for his creative work across multiple forms of media because of how much he put in.
David Aaron Clark and I have known each other for approximately sixteen years and ten months. He welcomed me into his home when we lived far apart and I had to travel to see him. We live so close together in Los Angeles, I wish I’d made the time to see him more. Lived so close, not live so close. With the internet, it is so easy to keep up moderate communication and, being an adult, it seems like it just gets harder and harder to make in-person time.
The last thing I said to him was the trivial thought that I wish there was going to be another season of 4400. I wish there was going to be another season of the notorious DAC.
I keep wanting to add details like how he played a non-sex role as a pirate in Joone’s Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge, but I could go on all day listing cool interesting bits and pieces about his life. He lived an adventurous and interesting life, dated wild women, had unusual sex, went cool places, and left behind a significant body of work. That is more and better than a lot of people, and I know this is trite, only I wish he were still here; I feel he got taken way way too soon.
When I can stop crying for any extended period of time, I’m going to look for some photographs Forrest Black and I took of him and post them.
In March of last year, Los Angeles was blanketed with some kinda misogynist-seeming billboards in promotion of a movie called Forgetting Sarah Marshall. You can check out a post April Flores wrote on the topic for an in-depth analysis of the ad campaign, but the gist of it was finding humor in being insanely hateful about an ex. Not insanely hateful with wit, just insanely hateful. I often find hostile humor funny, but this was just stuff on the cleverness level of “you suck” and “my mommy thinks you suck too”. So, at any rate, I didn’t bother to see the movie.
This weekend, I was feeling a little under the weather and I get free On-Demand, so I thought without much optimism that I’d give a comedy a few minutes to draw me in. I turned on Forgetting Sarah Marshall, fully expecting to turn it off within less than five minutes. Go figure.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall is actually a really nice romantic comedy. The humor is done with great humanity and one of the most notable aspects of the movie is precisely that nobody is the villain. Kristen Bell might be the sadistic Elle on Heroes, but, as the character of Sarah Marshall, she plays the role in a fully humanized sympathetic way. Writer and leading man Jason Segal’s jilted Peter Bretter is precisely not the sort of guy who would be really horrible to an ex. Which makes the situation he finds himself in — at a resort where Sarah Marshall is hanging out with her new beau rocker Aldous Snow of Infant Sorrow, played by a hilarious Russell Brand — all the more humorous. Peter Bretter is very sympathetic and he is treated with kindness by front desk hospitality agent Rachel Jansen, played by a very beautiful Mila Kunis. I don’t want to include any spoilers, but the whole cast is amazing and everyone has just perfect comic timing. Maybe it is the writing. Maybe it is first time director Nicholas Stoller’s direction. Mostly, it seems like just a really nice alchemy of big talents coming together. Other notables are SNL’s Bill Hader and Liz Cackowski as the stepbrother Brian Bretter and his wife, Paul Rudd as a cute surfing instructor with limited short term memory, Jonah Hill as a waiter who is just a little too forward, and 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer as a religious innocent who gets honeymoon coaching from Aldous Snow. Plus more fun cameos and a killer spoof of CSI, which Jason Segal actually also had a recurring role on.
Two more fun things about Forgetting Sarah Marshall to endear it to me: First off, as many of you probably know, SLC Punk is one of my favorite movies of all time and the part of Mike, the angry fighting sort of Positive Force punk in the movie, was played by Jason Segal. Secondly, there are muppets by the actual Jim Henson workshop in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Vampire muppets.
Have you ever felt you should get a pass for misbehaving because of your extensive zombie experience? Heck, we’ve all felt that way. But Woody Harrelson is doing something about it, with his tried and true Mistaken for a Zombie Gambit. Allow me to illustrate.
Forrest Black and I photographed special effects artist André Freitas (pictured) in his AFX Studios by Atlanta, Georgia for a feature in Skin Two. At the time, his most current project was developing a scary wrestler character. His most recent project has been makeup on the scary special effects for a movie called Zombieland. The movie is directed by Ruben Fleischer and written by Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese who previously worked together on the Joe Schmo show. Although Zombieland reportedly just wrapped filming, it is still technically in development, so the final cast list is still more rumor than confirmed. For sure, André Freitas’ special makeup effect must have been really damn scary.
It is known that Woody Harrelson is in the Zombieland movie. According to IMDB, Woody Harrelson plays a character named Albuquerque. According to the Sony Pictures publicity department, Zombieland will not be in theaters until a Halloween-ready release of October 9, 2009, but they believe Woody Harrelson plays a character named Tallahassee. It seems a safe bet that Woody Harrelson is at least somewhat in a movie called Zombieland and does play a character named after a city. Based on posts on the director’s site, principal photography for Zombieland took approximately two solid months and was completed the middle of this week.
According to Alan Duke reporting on CNN, Woody Harrelson finished shooting Zombieland on Wednesday in Atlanta, Georgia and he and his daughter landed at La Guardia Airport that night. I know that personally, if I had to make a list of times I would least like to be photographed, when I had just landed at an airport after working in Georgia would be very high on my list. Allegedly, Woody Harrelson broke a camera belonging to a photographer/videographer who was trying to film him and his daughter. After this alleged incident, the photographer went on to bust out a cell phone camera or some other smaller snapshot deal and shot more video of Woody Harrelson and his daughter. The photographer alleges that Woody Harrelson assaulted him in the ensuing scuffle. Although a police report was made, no charges against Woody Harrelson have been filed at this time.
Woody Harrelson did, however, issue a statement which I believe clears the whole thing up. The actor explained, “With my daughter at the airport I was startled by a paparazzo, who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie.” Quite understandably. Mistook for a zombie. Could have happened to anyone.
CNN and others are reporting that Woody Harrelson plays “the most frightened person on Earth” in Zombieland. In point of fact, had any of them managed to check with Sony, they would have learned that Jesse Eisenberg plays the most frightened person on Earth in Zombieland. Jesse Eisenberg is perhaps best known for his role as Jimmy Myers in Wes Craven’s Cursed, where he spent the movie trying to escape werewolves. Apparently there is something about Jesse Eisenberg which makes monsters want to chase him. Then again, CNN used the usually reliable IMDB as their source and IMDB reports Jess Eisenberg’s character is named Flagstaff, while Sony Pictures publicity department calls him Columbus. Still, once again, both names are cities. Not that big a difference in a name.
The big difference is that Woody Harrelson’s city-named character is actually the bad-ass in the movie. to be specific, the Sony Pictures press releases on the movie states, “Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) has made a habit of running from what scares him. Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) doesn’t have fears. If he did, he’d kick their ever-living ass.”
Given that anyone who has seen Natural Born Killers (which is everyone I know) can see what a convincing dangerous bad-ass Woody Harrelson is, I can only conclude that paparazzi don’t get to the movies much. Or read magazines. Apparently there is something about Woody Harrelson which makes paparazzi want to chase him. Another paparazzo is currently suing Woody Harrelson for allegedly attacking him outside Hollywood nightclub Element in 2006. (Although it might have changed ownership since then, the last time Forrest Black went to this particular venue, he complained of having to endure watching a performer flog a balloon, as opposed to a hot girl. But I digress.) At any rate, Woody Harrelson has made it clear that, like anyone, he does not love having strangers up in his face with cameras at all sorts of annoying times. Unlike just anyone, he has already made it clear that he is prepared to defend his privacy strenuously. Unlike just anyone, he is also the son of a man serving multiple life sentences for contract killing a Federal judge. Does a famous actor have to actually kill a paparazzo in self-defense before people back off?
Even if common decency fails to stop paparazzi from non-consensually photographing Woody Harrelson, you’d think common sense might kick in. As I don’t even like to lift a camera to my eye until a model release is signed, the whole paparazzi phenomenon really kinda baffles me. I don’t think harassing a man, when he is exhausted from gainful employment and travel in service of same, is what the founding fathers had in mind when they guaranteed us freedom of the press. There are areas of scandal where I feel the newsworthiness of a public figure is relevant, but I don’t get what is newsworthy about what an actor’s daughter looks like after a plane trip. Then again, Woody Harrelson is an activist for marijuana legalization, so maybe this will make the press take up his cause in the hopes that he will become a little more chill.
The real good that will come out of this unfortunate incident, however, is that, from now on, I am going to excuse all hostile behavior by explaining that I was startled by someone who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie.
The 2009 version of Last House on the Left bears the tagline: If bad people hurt someone you love, how far would you go to hurt them back? The 1972 version of course famously had a tagline which became a catchphrase: To avoid fainting, keep repeating it’s only a movie, only a movie, only a movie . . .
Well, Last House on the Left was initially intended to be an envelope-pushing 70’s porn feature and its legacy as a movie has been far beyond that of the average only a movie flick. There is the notion that the current spate of torture porn horror movies is something new, but people like Wes Craven and Sean S. Cunningham pioneered the genre more than three decades ago. Wes Craven, most famous for Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, wrote and directed the original Last House on the Left and Sean S. Cunningham, most famous for Friday the 13th, produced it. Before you even take into account the legions of movie-makers influenced by Craven and Cunningham, the legacy of Last House on the Left is huge simply for how its creators built on their own work. For the 2009 Last House on the Left, Craven and Cunningham both serve as producers. The director of 2009’s version is Dennis Iliadis whose main previous credit is the movie Hardcore, about two prostitutes who fall in love.
The initial torture porn grew out of 1970’s porn porn. At the time, partly because video not being used yet, any porn flick more involved than a tiny stag loop tended to be approached as a feature. A lot of the underground creative work at the time was about exploring taboos, so there was not as much differentiation in which taboos could appear in which medium. Today, if you want to feature nonconsensual sex acts in your work, you must put the violence in an R-rated movie for theatrical or DVD distribution. You may not put nonconsensual sex acts in material distributed in adult industry channels. This is not solely because the government might crack down on you if you repeatedly dare them too like Rob Black of Extreme Associates; the primary issue is that major trade publications and video distributors will not accept adult videos which feature nonconsensual acts (yes, even when it is just acting, even if it is bad acting) and companies which process payments for adult websites will not accept credit cards for material which features nonconsensual acts. Exploitation cinema is not something new for the new millennium. Where the violence and horror end up in the marketplace and where the sex and nudity end up all boils down to the restrictions of varied distribution channels.
Nonetheless, in the original Last House on the Left, most of the forced boy/girl sex and forced girl/girl sex and watersports all got left on the cutting room floor and the violence stayed in. The violence was still shocking to theatrical audiences at the time and reviewers tended to express . . . well, horror. Last House on the Left features horrible chainsaw brutality before Scarface or Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Here is how you know Wes Craven is an original creative mind: He acknowledges his influences. He looked to Ulla Isaksson’s script for Ingmar Bergman’s Jungfrukällan or Virgin Spring for the plotline for Last House on the Left. And Wes Craven is a strong enough and secure enough creative person that he can say where he got the idea without diminishing himself.
Living in Hollywood and working on the internet, I am often exposed to people who try to come up with tricks for success. These tricks are the creative person’s version of get-rich-quick schemes and just as likely to fail. Some of these desperate tricksters come up with all these little rules about how the best way to succeed is to get inspiration from someone more innovative and deny where the inspiration comes from. Which is right up there with the notion that anyone who has ever done anything for mature audiences must be somehow crossing over and rising up if they do anything for a different distribution channel or that doing anything adult means one must be consigned to exclusively producing adult material.
Wes Craven’s oevre ably demonstrates the only two unmalleable requirements for creative success: Be really good at what you do and work at it.
The talented Robyn Von Swank directed the video of Combichrist’s “Sent to Destroy”. The music video features Andy LaPlegua and pals in a dystopian future cyperpunk sort of scenario.
Quarantine opens in theaters everywhere today. Check out this video about this classic style horror flick about the modern day dangers of being trapped between chemical warfare and the CDC. The video features star Jennifer Carpenter, writer/director John Erick Dowdle, writer Drew Dowdle, actor Johnathon Schaech, actor Jay Hernandez, yours truly, and more.
What would you do if you thought you might be in danger of being killed by people infected with a mysterious disease? What would you do if you were trapped with the people who might murder you and an illness which might kill you if you catch it? What would you do if you were quarantined?
In the forthcoming Mirrors movie, Kiefer Sutherland plays Ben Carson. Ben Carson is a burned out ex-cop with a drinking problem, forcibly retired over a bad shooting, and alienating his family with his rage. I guess Alexandre Aja, the writer/director of The Hills Have Eyes, is, like me, a 24 fan too. Kiefer Sutherland is not battling terrorists in Mirrors, however, but evil forces who use mirrors as entryways to our world.
He goes to work in a haunted old department store where the previous night watchman may have met a disturbing demise. I would usually post the redband trailer for one of our advertisers here and assume that a Blue Blood audience is well able to handle a little gore. But Mirrors is actually a very grisly movie, so I’ve posted the standard teaser above. You can view a gallery of pictures from the Mirrors movie in the gallery section. The less faint of heart can view the good stuff after the jump below. (more…)
