These are films that I either suffered through, or whose trailers assaulted me while waiting to see something else.

These are two individuals who made careers out of dehumanizing others. Yet, we're supposed to sympathize with them because one was a repressed gay man and the other a woman who faced off against men and is now suffering from Alzheimer's. Fuck them both. There are many legitimate ways to approach biopics about interestingly evil people (e.g. Downfall), but a liberalized understanding is not one of them. 


I've previously expressed my horror at seeing simple 2D cartoonish figures rendered in photorealistic 3D detail. Who needs to count the black lines in Scooby's iris or see the snot dripping from his nose to get into the plot? But this grotesque disfiguration has really reached its aesthetic nadir with Spielberg's adaptation of the comic famous for its clear line style, Hergé's TinTin. Rather than believe Spielberg can't see how hideous these deformed monsters look, I suspect that this kind of adaptation is really a simulation of a live action adaptation. Ultimately, it's a portent of a later stage of the technological revolution in which actors and much of the old film crew will be out of a job. A perfectly realistic CG star can't join a union. Of course, that'll only happen if they can digitally create the voices, too, which brings me to why the Muppets are dead and should not be brought back as zombies. Maybe Gallagher and Sam Kinison can be safely simulated by a close relative, but there is no muppet without the original muppeteer. Kermit and Fozzie might look the same, but they're obviously defective clones, being revealed as recovering stroke victims upon opening their mouths. (Not that I've ever been much of a fan of the Muppet movies, which tend to identify more with the lame humans than the characters of interest.)


While neither of these films is going to be on the American Nazi Party's must-see list, they continue a certain racist tendency in Hollywood filmmaking where all race relations are filtered through white consciousness. It's hard to frame minority struggles within a heroic plot since said struggles tend to be collective, working against oppression through attrition. But Hollywood loves heroism, so they use tricks to accomplish the heroic arc. One such framing device is the journalist (e.g., Cry Freedom or any number of American-made films about African struggles). The struggle won't be resolved at the end, but the audience feels a comforting closure from the journalist getting out alive and/or reporting the tragic story to a snoozing public. Another device is to use a person of privilege who heroically uses his or her privilege to help the oppressed minority in some way. This allows the audience a feeling of uplift at the edification of the privileged in spite of the fact that there's not much edification in just being oppressed (e.g., Schindler's List). Set in the early 60s, The Help combines both of these strategies, effectively reducing the Civil Rights movement to an inspiration for a bunch of black maids to help a well-to-do Southern belle write their story. What's noxious here is that the focus of the film isn't the subject of liberalized belle's story, namely the plight of black maids in the South at the time, but her success in getting the story published. Why not a story about the black maids without the white frame?

Cowboys & Aliens provides a likely answer: liberal modern white people like to feel good about themselves. In their entertainment, they feel better in retrofitting their own contemporary moral views onto the less liberalized past. As I've already argued, instead of questioning whether the American Indians wouldn't have better reason to side with the alien Other, thereby bringing into question just how much the modern white audience is or would've been really against white hegemony back in the 19th century, the film lets us off the hook by assuming the Indians would've naturally found common cause with the whites. The white heroine of The Help functions in much the same way as this fantasy of the evil other that negates our differences: i.e., a way of patting ourselves on the back for accepting our common humanity with no actual challenge to how we might've actually acted in such highly racist circumstances.


There was a line of Star Trek: The Next Generation books that all took place on the holodeck. The advantage for Trekkies was that they never had to leave their little simulated microcosm to experience any other type of literature. Potentially, some work-for-hire writer could just place the beloved characters into any genre and, voilà, they have some hack's version of the classics filtered through a TV-reading level. I don't know if they're still making those, but we do have something like its music equivalent, Glee. Of course, the show and movie barely cover what anyone could reasonably call music classics, but if you ever wondered if Journey had any kind of soul, just listen to the simulation. Is The Rocky Horror Picture Show just too much in reality that people now need a more controlled, sanitized version existing within the Glee-Matrix? This is homogeneity masquerading as heterogeneity. It's the aesthetic equivalent of living in one those prefab small towns that are nothing more than malls with condos. Corporate-sponsored pseudo-individuation for people who would've swallowed the blue pill.

Contagion approaches the society of spectacle from the opposite direction, by showing us the pragmatico-scientific benefits of converting the private into the public. Getting used to having our images taken by all those cameras, with Big Brother becoming naturalized by the willful projection of our daily lives through Twitter or Facebook mediation, might someday save lives. Or, if it doesn't stop a mugging or the spread of a disease, the global panopticon will at least tell us whodunnit. No, that's not a good reason for giving up privacy, nor is it a good reason for seeing this film. Millions died, but the filmmakers mistake a MacGuffin for the point. It's Day of the Dead without the zombies, but missing the existentialism of Garfield Minus Garfield.

The only thing more mundane than a drama about some life-altering disease (e.g., 50/50) would be that drama without the disease.

I already shared my distaste for Captain America and Priest. Otherwise, these films look like shit (Suckerpunch and Green Lantern being the ugliest by far) and couldn't come up with one non-generic action sequence among them, so 'nuff said.

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