It's certainly true that if a movie is badly made people will laugh at many of the moments that are supposed to evoke pathos, shock, outrage, fear...that is a failure of the film, not moral deficiency on the part of the audience.
In Japan, the concept and existence of rape doesn't seem to matter to anyone. I'm not being flippant or insensitive. Honestly, nobody seems to care about it. No one wants to discuss it. It's a non issue.
I saw the movie and while it's not a great one, the rape scene is effective at unsettling you. I found myself a bit surprised at how powerful it was given how generic the rest of the movie was. The rape is graphic, visercal, ugly... While I definitely understand the idea of a poorly filmed scene that is meant to be dramatic illiciting laughter from an audience, I wouldn't put any scenes from Last House on the Left (2009) in that category (Except for the last one, heh). Furthermore, moments before the rape scene you see something else that is pretty graphic, pretty tough to watch so you're sort if an uncomfortable headspace already by the time you see the rape. No one laughed in my half full theater... Anyone who does laugh, I'd just chalk it up to not really knowing how else to react to the scene, or just some misguided notion of "Look how little this scene bothers me, I'm chuckling at it - I'm a MAAAAAN, man!"
I'm sure rape survivors and their advocacy groups would disagree with you, or do they not count as 'anyone'?
The interesting thing about that game is that the protagonist invariably dies, either he's murdered by one of his victims or he commits suicide. It almost comes across as a belated apology on behalf of the developers.
I have seen this exact same thing happen and it has NOTHING to do with anythinig you just said, IMO. I was at the movies when Shindler's List came out and was sitting directly behind four moronic teenagers who were laughing because they actually thought the scene where the dude is just randomly shooting people was funny. They laughed as soon as the leader of their group started laughing (the whole Alpha Male thing). They knew their idiot laughing was being heard by others, and did it anyway because..ta-da..they were moronic teenagers. And one of my oldest movie memories is of SERPICO. There is a scene in that movie where this black-woman is getting raped and beaten up by these dudes. And once again, moronic teenagers start talking at the screen (as if the characters could hear them) telling the rapers to do her up the ass. They didn't do it because of some 'cry for help'. I actually saw the lust in their eyes, I was sitting in the same row they were. THEY WANTED to see her raped, anally, and all six, yes all six of them, were eagerly waiting to see if it would happen...because violence to women is 'okay' to some and many derive pleasure seeing it because their culture tells them its okay to do so... Nothing more simple the raw human brutality that can't always be explained away like an issue on OPRAH..IMO.. Rob
As I said earlier, however, the victims in the vast majority of violent scenes are male. James Bond must have killed tens of thousands of nameless male henchmen by now. This is treated as if nothing happened, or worse their killer will make a joke about it.
mmmmmm...I see where you are coming from. But when you go to see SHINDLER'S LIST you understand that the topic matter is a bit more serious than some dude trying to stop a nuclear bomb from going off while wearing a clown outfit. And unlike 007, the subject matter in Shindler's List is based on real experiences. Do we laugh when Bond kills a bad guy sometimes? Or when Kirk kicks the klingon off the cliff in TREK 3? Sure...they are written that way. And we all know both TREK and 007 are what they are. Rob
Unfortunately practiced cynicism is the current trend in this desensitized world. Those sheltered infants were probably just practicing.
Wow. Talk about missing the mark ... Only an effete reactionary would ... oh, but I can't stoop that low. I'm an "effete liberal". --Ted
I have never seen the movie, but if it's so stupid and the characters act like dogs and not humans then it is sometimes funny. However rape is funny... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C17yfGyJjM
Remember Barbara Hershey getting raped by an invisible ghost in "The Entity"? That was a creepy movie.
Of course I knew rape is funny. I mean, just check out this punchline of a 1968 comic strip example of Garry Trudeau's "Bull Tales", the forerunner to "Doonesbury". http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e326/toddmpence/bt09.jpg?t=1237330996 Interestingly enough: 83 of the 84 strips which made up the complete run of "Bull Tales" are archived at the official "Doonesbury" site - all except this one, which somehow turned up missing.
That was pretty funny. Also reminded me of the one other rape scene I could think of that was funny. Aquaman trying to stop a rape on "Family Guy." Jason
I was chary of clicking that link, but I'm glad I did. I may have to slightly revise my idea that there's no such thing as good rape humour - that song's poignant and powerful. How have I never heard it before? It's awesome. (In a deeply harrowing way) Still sickened by 99.9+% of rape jokes though. In any audience, there are going to be rape survivors. Most of them won't have got justice, many of them won't have been believed, and a lot of them won't even have ever been able to tell anybody. Rape jokes turn something which might have been fun and enjoyable and inclusive into an attack, making their trauma the butt of other people's fun. I reckon it'd have to be a pretty frickin' good joke to justify that - like, maybe the kind of joke that wipes out armies. It's the same as other shock-humour like racist or homophobic attacks. It's supposed to be funny because of the "Oh my god, I can't believe they went there!" factor. It's only funny if you're lucky enough not to live every day knowing that people go much further all the time, and not for fun and laughs, y'know?