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picket line, do not cross
Sunday, 29 May 2005 09:39 pmI am so on strike. I have done that classic post-submission thing (in this case submission of the revised PhD to the publishers, and return of two batches of essays to students - no B&D here, move along, please) and done a complete mental shut-down. This appears to be a necessary process for sanity retention. I have spent the last three days (a) playing ShadowMagic, (b) re-reading pulpy fantasy randomly selected from my bookshelf, and (c) watching either bad TV or bad videos hired on, yup, again, the R50 5-movies-for-a-week special.
This last has led me, once again, to confront head-on the sad fact that I don't appear to apply the same quality filters to movies as the bulk of the movie-reviewing public. Even leaving aside my four-S fixation (superheroes, swordfighting, spaceships and siege engines), which leads me to sit through otherwise quite dreadful assaults on cinema sensibility, I more often than not find myself enjoying things that are generally considered bad, and hating things that are generally considered good. This is a little alarming, given that something like the last fifteen years of my life have been the site of a determined effort on the part of the university system to impart to me the rudiments of critical thought. Generally, they've been pretty successful. Except with movies. Either that, or the entire reviewing mechanism of Western culture is up a tree. (Not a bad theory, in itself).
Case in point this weekend: Red Planet. Generally hailed by critics and public alike as the sf lemon of the decade. I kinda liked it. Obvious Hollywood plot cheese aside (romantic outcome and happy ending obvious approximately two and a half minutes into the movie), it had some interesting ideas and made a vague attempt at realism - those felt like actual people reacting, to me. And the feline robot thingy was just way cool. Likewise, Star Trek: Nemesis. Remarkably coherent for a Star Trek film, and some actually quite tight and layered play with themes. Way, way better, in my view, than First Contact, although practically everyone I've heard ranting about Star Trek thinks that FC was the better movie. And, by way of counter-illustration, we needn't re-open the Incredibles debate. The movie just annoyed me. Did I mention that I also loathed Finding Nemo? Likewise, almost anything nominated for an Oscar that is also a Serious Drama is guaranteed to get right up my nose on the grounds of pretention, heaviness and lack of irony.
Really, what it comes down to is that I seem to filter movies through a different set of assumptions than I do novels; specifically, I think I tend to accept genre movies, in particular, pretty much on their own terms. Possibly, this means that they're not Work, TM, and I deliberately switch off the critical wossnames. Or it could be the simple result of being television-deprived until my early 20s. No filter circuits. Tragic, really. But generally productive of interesting arguments with friends, if nothing else.
Cape Town is very, very damp. This is making me very happy. The cats are more or less permanently glued to the heaters. (They spent two days staring fixedly at either the sofa or the bookshelf in the living room, for minutes at a time, and then eventually someone found the mouse and killed it. RIP, mouse). I risked a mad and joyous dash through the rain this afternoon to spend an enjoyably geeky afternoon watching Firefly with Lara and Co. Must so get the DVD player to work again. Sigh.
This last has led me, once again, to confront head-on the sad fact that I don't appear to apply the same quality filters to movies as the bulk of the movie-reviewing public. Even leaving aside my four-S fixation (superheroes, swordfighting, spaceships and siege engines), which leads me to sit through otherwise quite dreadful assaults on cinema sensibility, I more often than not find myself enjoying things that are generally considered bad, and hating things that are generally considered good. This is a little alarming, given that something like the last fifteen years of my life have been the site of a determined effort on the part of the university system to impart to me the rudiments of critical thought. Generally, they've been pretty successful. Except with movies. Either that, or the entire reviewing mechanism of Western culture is up a tree. (Not a bad theory, in itself).
Case in point this weekend: Red Planet. Generally hailed by critics and public alike as the sf lemon of the decade. I kinda liked it. Obvious Hollywood plot cheese aside (romantic outcome and happy ending obvious approximately two and a half minutes into the movie), it had some interesting ideas and made a vague attempt at realism - those felt like actual people reacting, to me. And the feline robot thingy was just way cool. Likewise, Star Trek: Nemesis. Remarkably coherent for a Star Trek film, and some actually quite tight and layered play with themes. Way, way better, in my view, than First Contact, although practically everyone I've heard ranting about Star Trek thinks that FC was the better movie. And, by way of counter-illustration, we needn't re-open the Incredibles debate. The movie just annoyed me. Did I mention that I also loathed Finding Nemo? Likewise, almost anything nominated for an Oscar that is also a Serious Drama is guaranteed to get right up my nose on the grounds of pretention, heaviness and lack of irony.
Really, what it comes down to is that I seem to filter movies through a different set of assumptions than I do novels; specifically, I think I tend to accept genre movies, in particular, pretty much on their own terms. Possibly, this means that they're not Work, TM, and I deliberately switch off the critical wossnames. Or it could be the simple result of being television-deprived until my early 20s. No filter circuits. Tragic, really. But generally productive of interesting arguments with friends, if nothing else.
Cape Town is very, very damp. This is making me very happy. The cats are more or less permanently glued to the heaters. (They spent two days staring fixedly at either the sofa or the bookshelf in the living room, for minutes at a time, and then eventually someone found the mouse and killed it. RIP, mouse). I risked a mad and joyous dash through the rain this afternoon to spend an enjoyably geeky afternoon watching Firefly with Lara and Co. Must so get the DVD player to work again. Sigh.
