The Pig Proposes to Deck Uwe Boll

[gothwalk]

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

The Pig, head writer at Wandering Goblin, has published an open letter to Uwe Boll on foot of Boll’s offensive 9/11-related opening to Postal, recently leaked on Youtube. His proposal is to fight Boll, in a boxing match, face to face, and if he wins, Boll is to agree to cut the opening sequence from his film. It’s an interesting proposal, and seeing as Boll’s methods of promotion appear to consist of being ever more offensive, I do hope it’s taken up - and that the Pig wins.

Comments

[ulaire-daidoji.livejournal.com]

He's done this before. Uwe Boll is an ex amateur boxing champ apparently. He beat the crap outta 4 guys before, the 4 guys thought it was a publicity stunt. Penny arcade did a piece on it as well.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/ragingboll.html

[tobinjt.livejournal.com]

Another two people have now given him the publicity he intended to generate. Yay! If you really want to harm him, ignore him. Or even better, publicise the film: if it's going to be as offensive as is claimed then surely the backlash against Boll will be so bad the man won't be entrusted with enough money to make another movie - Hollywood is governed by the laws of economics and public opinion after all.

Possibly you and the The Pig should ponder where the suggested actions would lead, and take pity on the poor geek quaking at the end of the room when the bully wants his homework. What's that you say, there's a difference? In each case one party offers to fight the other party to determine what course of events occurs (Boll removes scene from movie, geek hands over homework); the difference is that my example is a few steps down the slippery slope.

I'm impressed by the audacity shown by The Pig in criticising Boll for generating publicity by staging a boxing match in the letter in which The Pig suggests exactly the same thing; I'm just not positively impressed.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

I stopped being a believer in the power of inaction when Bush got elected (the first time). Before that, I would have gone for the "ignore him" method, as I did then with politics and politicians ("Don't vote, it only encourages them"). However, inaction is not going to have any effect in this case. Raising awareness, as with any important topic, is essential.

The "any publicity is good publicity" school of thinking has been fairly solidly discredited at this stage, I think. The market being able to make decisions regarding quality is, I fear, completely inaccurate. [Several examples of each removed for irrelevance; if you want I can put them back]. The only course left is to draw attention to the issue (as is being done here) and to challenge Boll on his own ground.

As to the slippery slope, you should be aware that Boll is an ex-champion boxer, and the Pig is, by his own description, distinctly unfit. What he's saying is not "I'll fightcha for it," but "If that's how you want to settle things, I'll take a few bruises to prove my point" - which I can only applaud. This is the geek standing up for himself, rather than quaking.

[tobinjt.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard of this movie before your post, and I probably wouldn't have paid it any attention otherwise, but to be honest I'm interested in seeing it now. Maybe I'm just odd.

I'm not suggesting that the market will make decisions based on quality, I'm suggesting that it will make decisions based on public opinion. A recent and quite relevant example is Mission Impossible III underperforming at the box office by at least $150 million in the USA alone, because public opinion changed when Tom Cruise appeared on Oprah with some very bizzare views about childbirth. Tom Cruise is also largely unemployable at the moment because producers reckon he has offended the majority of female viewers.

"Any publicity is good publicity" doesn't apply once someone is popular enough, but when you're small then you couldn't pay for the amount of publicity something like this will generate. It's also exactly what Boll wants.

The issue here is . . . what? That Boll is making a film featuring material which some people will dislike? That could be said about the vast majority of directors. Did anyone protest when Rambo killed indescrinately in Afghanistan or Vietnam? How about when people were butchered in a decade of slasher movies, or those deaths parodied in a later decade? (Bear in mind that slasher movies are based on real killers and victims, with some poetic license applied.) I've seen and heard parodies of "the gunman in a school tower". Criminals kill in movies and on TV every week, but somehow the world continues without any uproar, despite the number of victims who may be offended (9000 murders in the USA annually, according to statistics I heard during the week; I can't vouch for their accuracy though). We've had war movies a-plenty, movies depicting anyone who isn't white as sub-human, Eddie Murphy's recent string of fat-people-are-bad-and-should-be-derided hits, . . . the list goes on. The difference here is that 9/11 is a holy cow which must be tiptoed around.

I know Boll was a boxer; I read about his fights a few months ago. Despite The Pig's take on the fights, the journalist in Total Film who fought Boll knew exactly what he was getting himself into, and knew in advance that there was very little chance of him coming out the better of it.

I think "If that's how you want to settle things, I'll . . . " could just as easily be justification for 9/11, given that the USA has been running black ops in any country it felt like since WWII. Indeed since the USA invaded Iraq to effect regime change that argument could easily be used for assinating Bush. I had hoped that humanity in general would have moved past "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth".

It's interesting that The Pig's attitude to Boll's film is a microcosm of the USA's attitude to other countries and cultures.

The letter has highlighted one thing for me though, to give it credit. 9/11 needs to have its teeth pulled, so it's not used as justification for more invasions, more wars, more erosion of human rights. I imagine that we'll be in agreement there at least.

Right, lunch is over - back to work for me.