Movies I have watched “lately”

Below are the movies I’ve watched in the last little while. My favorites were probably Monsters, Elegy, and Insomnia, though I’d recommend all of them.

Mary and Max
Union Station
Network
Monsters
Elegy
Clerks
Paper Heart
Insomnia
Inside Job

You're Not Hard Core Unless You Live Hard Core

I’ve seen every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  If that isn’t very impressive, I saw all of them many years before the advent of DVD.  That means that I watched nearly all of them when they first aired on network TV, and all the rest I had to catch during the rerun season.  (I saw every episode before the series was playing in syndication for six hours a day on Spike, G4, etc.)

Still, these days it doesn’t sound like much of an accomplishment to have watched every episode of a show.  Because of DVD and the internet, even casual fans of a show can see it all.  If a 10 year old kid in the early 90s was hard-core by faithfully tuning in every week, the digital age has completely changed what it means to be hard-core.

This phenomenon is even more apparent as Laura and I have been working our way through Battlestar Galactica.  (Yes, I like Sci-fi and I guess that makes me a nerd.  I compensate by trying extra hard to be cool and by subsequently developing a complex.)  At this point, it’s basically a given that a fan will have seen every episode.  Real fans, I’m discovering by watching the BSG special features, go online and participate in online communities.  They go to conventions and have action figures.  Some of them even start marriages based on their love of the TV show. 

While science fiction TV probably has an unusually devoted fan base, the bar seems to have risen for what it means to be a fan of anything.  Other TV shows like The Office or American Idol have their own cadre of devoted fans, as do performers like Miley Cyrus or the Jonas Brothers.  In each case being a fan of these phenomena doesn’t mean simply putting up a poster or talking about the characters with your friends.  Instead, it means reading about them online, knowing back-stories (that were never a part of the show/public persona/etc), and finally immersing yourself in the culture of the show or performer.  Basically, fans today are more hard-core than ever before because they’re living within the culture of their obsession. 

The result of all this hyper-fandom is that people know a lot about the things they love and, more importantly, build their communities around those things.  One hundred years ago for example, if you loved the theater, you might go every once in a while but you’d still have to go home to friends, family, and neighbors who wouldn’t necessarily share your particular interests.  Today on the other hand you can go to a cultural event and then return to people who are connected to you because of that event.  In other words your friends, family, and neighbors are determined more by your interests today than ever before.  Battlestar Galactica or American Idol aren’t just shows, they're lifestyles.

Ultimately, the communities created by fans are places where people think long and hard about what culture means to them.  I wrote before about how TV and movies might be more important than reading, but I think that the real issue here is simply that the conveyances of culture are currently visual and digital, as opposed to literary or theatrical.  With that shift our society may have lost some things (a literacy in the art forms of the past, for example), but I also believe that we’ve gained a great deal as well.  I may have a harder time being a hard-core fan (it really requires so much more work), but I think it’s good that someone is picking apart the meaning of just about everything.   

Attack of the Killer Allusions!

About a week ago Laura and I saw Monsters versus Aliens.  As fans of vintage sci-fi, the experience was a rewarding one; nearly every scene included some allusion (sometimes subtle, sometimes not) to an old 50s or 60s B movie.  

 

After the movie ended, however, I had to wonder: are allusions, by themselves, entertaining?  The producers of Monsters versus Aliens are betting so, and to some extent I have to agree with them.  The movie opened at number one and has since made well over $300,000,000.  More importantly, like being a part of an inside joke, I enjoyed recognizing the visual references to The Blob and The Thing From Another World, among others.

 

Still, I can’t imagine that re-watching the film would be very rewarding.  Yes I’ve seen Dr. Strangelove.  Yes, I’ve seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  And, yes I like those movies.  But why refer back to them?  Are the filmmakers trying to raise any thematic questions by alluding?  What would happen to the story if the reference were cut?  (In the case of Close Encounters, the movie would only lose a strange scene that highlights Stephen Colbert.)  In the end it actually seems like the plethora of references and allusions were included merely for their own sake, as if the filmmakers wanted to show off their vast knowledge of film history.  Of course it’s great that they have that knowledge, but ultimately who cares?   

 

To be fair, Monsters versus Aliens had a likable, if uneven and somewhat choppy, story.  In this sense it was at least as entertaining as other recent entries into the genre of allusion-laden CG films.  Others, like the Shrek franchise, seem to have devolved into banal pop culture pastiches based on the (mistaken) idea that allusions are the only thing a movie needs to be engaging.

 

In the end then, what’s the point of constantly alluding to older, more venerated movies?  Whereas a film like Enchanted seems to be both an homage and a deconstruction of its genre, Monsters versus Aliens and other recent animated movies simply flaunt their cinematic lineage.  In turn, these movies come off as fairly shallow, especially when compared to just about everything made by Pixar.  Finally, then, if CG filmmakers started worrying less about being cheeky and more about conveying a story, they might produce more films that are memorable and genuinely profound.