pornokitsch

Super 8 and the Big But

So, we finally got around to watching JJ Abrams' Super 8 a few nights ago, and it was really fun! I enjoyed it more than I expected. Jared enjoyed it more than he expected. It fell into that particularly robust niche of (arguably peculiarly American) storytelling: a boy reconnects with his estranged father. Their story opens with them as far from each other as they can be; by the end of it, they’re playing catch.

There’s a second, interrelated story being told, too: The kid is weird, man: awkward, geeky, likes monster movies and comic books. You know the type. And the father? You know his type, too: distant, damaged, normalized; doesn’t really know how to connect with his kid. In Super 8, the kid’s a model-making weirdo and his dad is deputy sheriff.

The story ends the same way, though: they still wind up playing catch. No matter how different they are as people, the can come together as normal fathers and sons do.

(‘Playing catch,’ I don’t need to point out, is a metaphor. Though often a literal one! In Field of Dreams, they play catch. Literally! Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? They ride off into the sunset together. Literally! You get the picture. Fathers and sons, finally seeing eye to eye.)

I’m an American. I grew up with these stories. They’re everywhere. They mean a lot to me. They resonate.

I’m also a geek. I grew up with those stories, too – how weird kids connect with their ‘normal’ authority figure parent-types. (Or normal kids and their weird parents, but that’s a slightly different kind of story.) Everyone comes to understand each other a little better. Ties are bound. These stories also mean a lot to me. They also resonate, y'know?

But you know what else I am?

Female.

On Criticism: Pornokitsch, Memes and the Shadow of Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert, the eminent American film critic, died on Thursday night. He was seventy. As ill as he had been for the last decade, the news of his death was still shocking. I followed him on Twitter. I read his reviews. I read his last announcement, made the day before he died, that he was going to be slowing down in his reviewing going forward. It was still a shock. As of now: a world without Roger Ebert.

Movie criticism was, for maybe 20 years, the first form of criticism people encountered. Reading the Friday papers, with their reviews of the week's new releases, very often informed the weekend's activities. And even if one didn't get to the cinemas before the film left, or the movie one was interested in wasn't showing anywhere accessible, it would be on the shelves of the local video store in less than a year. Watching a film, and agreeing or disagreeing with the review of it one had read: well, that's critical engagement in its purest form.

The first form of criticism they encountered, I should qualify, that mattered. We were certainly all encouraged to engage critically with school texts, for example, but that was work. Engaging with movies, and with movie reviews - that was fun.

Revisiting Jurassic Park

If there were three things we knew, back in the spring of 1993, they were this: 

1. There was a movie coming out in June.

2. It was called Jurassic Park.

3. It was about dinosaurs.

And then we learned a fourth thing: it was based on a book.

Naturally I got a copy and read it.

And it blew my mind.

Now I can talk about how mind-boggling the film was till the cows come home, but the film was an event because of the special effects. (You must remember how extraordinary it is the moment Sam Niell and Laura Dern gazed up at their first live dinosaur... and then Spielberg cut to the brachiosaurus, lovingly panning up its saurian length from its massive tree-trunk legs to its tiiiiiiiiny head, like a billion feet in the air? My mom still talks about the special effects in Star Wars with awe - how it made her feel to see them on the big-screen, not expecting or even understanding what they'd be like. That's kind of how I feel about the effects in Jurassic Park. Two hours changed forever what I expect from special effects.

Five. Friday Five.

Hi! Gosh, it's been a while, hasn't it? To make up for having left everyone dangling for months, I'm doing my very own Friday Five, all by myself. And my subject, of course, is James Bond. Because if there's one subject I can carry on (and on... and on) about, it's James Bond.

Also, the Bond film franchise is fifty years old.

Favorite Bond films:

5. License to Kill
4. Goldfinger
3. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
2. Casino Royale
1. Thunderball

I expect you might be surprised by License to Kill above; it's a deeply flawed film, but I appreciate that it was an effort to make Bond more brutal and violent and thoughtful. Thunderball remains my favorite because it is monumentally insane, and because that extraordinary underwater battle is utterly hypnotic.

More after the jump!

The Trembling Footloose Skies Fall Modestly at First

I saw five movies last week, and, for lack of a planned post, here's my definitive ranking of them:

1) "Tremors" (1990): Pure unadulterated awesome. Brilliant, charismatic lead characters (which include the female 'love interest' who is a) brilliant and b) never needs rescuing). Plus gooey monsters, a poop joke and extraordinary guns. It manages to combine tension with comedy in a way that few monster movies succeed in doing. Plus, monsters!

Five and a Half Superhero Films (almost)

It's Friday, it's gorgeous out (I just popped up to the 16th floor on a boring errand and wound up spending five minutes gaping at a hazy early-morning London), and I've got a full pot of coffee to keep me going.

So let's talk about superhero films! Good ones, bad ones, and very inbetween ones, superhero films delight and perplex and awe and disappoint, often simultaneously. We live in an era chock-full of 'em, arguably kicked off by 2000's X-Men but, more likely, the result of the runaway success of 2002's Spider-Man.

Twelve years and eleventy-billion dollars later, both Spider-Man and X-Men have been rebooted (if you consider First Class a reboot, which I think I do); Iron Man has revitalized Robert Downey, Jr's career, and The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises have blown everything ever out of the water ever ever kerzomg etc. I mean, crikey. This genre is serious buisness.

So let's talk about them! Because it's Friday, and why not? I'll list a few opinions about a few superhero films (and, erm, one superhero Saturday morning cartoon), and you all should take profound and noisy issue with me in the comments and on Twitter, because it's Friday, and why not?

Friday Five: Movies I Love

I've been working up a good head of steam over Batman since seeing it last weekend - enough of a head of steam, indeed, that I haven't even finished the rough draft of my rant. And I've been working on it for two days. (Also, apparently, I'd really like to wind up on some fanboy hitlists. That's how you know you've arrived, isn't it?)

And I've owed a Monsters & Mullets review for a dog's age. I haven't finished that yet, either.

Fortunately, I've had this post knocking around my harddrive for a few months. So, for today's Friday Five, I present to you Movies I Love. It's just a nice list of a few films I find myself watching regularly. They're not quite comfort films, though there's certainly an element of comfort to them; they are films I engage with every time I watch them, even though I watch them regularly. And they're not guilty pleasures (because I don't believe in those.) These are just films I love, plain and simple.

What are a few of your favorites? Why? And what are you going to be watching this weekend, when you just can't stomach another second of Olympics coverage?

Friday Five: Favorite Children's Films

We've spent two weeks talking about the books we loved as children - today we take a step to the side and consider our favorite childhood (and children's) movies, instead. From the great to the awful, the films we watched (and rewatched, and rewatched again for the billionth time - sorry, mom!) had the potential to be as profoundly meaningful to our adult selves as the books we soaked up.

We're delighted to be joined for today's Friday Five by Lauren O'Farrell and Gary Northfield.

Lauren is a force of crafty nature: an author (Stitch London, Knit the City and Stitch New York), traveller, artist, graffiti knitting pioneer, photographer and giant squid wrestler. She's the founder of Stitch London and has been sneakily stitching graffiti knitting as Deadly Knitshade since 2007. She's also responsible for unleashing Plarchie upon the world - an 8-metre giant squid and our favorite predatory cephalopod.

Gary has been writing and drawing kids comics for nearly 10 years. Famous for his crazy (and creator-owned!) Beano character, Derek the Sheep, he has also worked for Horrible Histories, The DFC, The Phoenix, National Geographic Kids and The Magical World of Roald Dahl. Gary's illustrations can also be found in Stories of the Smoke. His graphic novel about little dinosaurs comes out in 2013 from Walker Children's Books. 

Why not share your favorites in the comments?

Lauren: ET - If you've never put on a hoodie and pedalled your bike at warp speed pretending you've got a giant cross between a hairless dog, a pair of binoculars, a packet of glowing Twiglets and a bag of potatoes in the front basket then you've never seen ET. And you ought to be ashamed of yourself.The film that first taught us that government men in hazard suits are the scariest thing ever, that frogs deserve freedom, and that no matter what Drew Barrymore did in later life she would always be our Gertie.

What we talk about when we talk about The Avengers.

The thing is, "we" in this case is you, devoted Pornokitsch readers, and me. Not Jared and me, because Jared hasn't seen it yet. So I'll pop all the spoilers under the jump, and Jared will have to sit on his hands and wonder. 

Okay, you guys. Avengers Assemble (is a stupid title and I'm just going to call the film The Avengers from now on) is really pretty good. It is not perfect, but it's excellent, and that's a very good start. It's also better than several of the more recent Marvel titles - particularly the paint-by-numbers Captain America, but also Wolverine (I'm still upset about what a waste Taylor Kitsch as Gambit was), and X-Men 3, and Spider-Man 3, and the Fantastic Four films... essentially, Avengers was right up there with the best of the recent run of comic book adaptations, and definitely one of the best of the Marvel canon.

And, come on. We all had a bit of a fanplotz when we learned that The Joss would be directing the film. Whedon is at his best when he's running a tightly controlled show about a group of smart, powerful people, and there was every possibility that he'd bring his A game to this, his first really mainstream feature. 

And he did. Did he make some missteps? Yes, yes he did. I haven't read any interviews with or articles about him in years, so I don't know if he wanged on about his feminism with regard to this film the way he has about everything else he's ever created. Hopefully he didn't, because his portrayal of women was here, as everywhere else, flawed.

That's what we'll talk about first - and then we'll get to the good stuff. 

Monsters & Mullets: Predator (1987)

We’ve all seen Predator, probably more than once. In fact, we’ve probably seen Predator 2. Maybe Predators. And Alien vs. Predator. And Alien vs. Predator 2. We might have read the comics. (Yes, the Dark Horse comics too.)

Here’s the thing. We all know that the predator is an alien. We’ve known that the predator is an alien since 1987. We can never unknow the predator’s fundamental alien-ness.

And that does Predator a disservice.

Because, burbling away under Predator’s veneer of action movie dumbness, there lurks a pretty good horror film.

And because of that, because of its carefully calculated combination of over-the-top kersplody Rambo-esque Dudes with Guns styling and thoughtful, deliberate exploration of horror tropes, I’m going to make a bold stand. Predator is actually… really good.