Stoke-on-Trent
May. 4th, 2010 12:06 pmAm in Stoke-on-Trent stopping with Rachel for a few days, after a lovely bank holiday weekend in London. Thanks to everyone it was lovely to meet!
May. 4th, 2010
There is a continuum between "parody" and "a movie made playing with the established conventions of a genre". A parody is one of the most obvious examples of highlighting the conventions of a genre, but not the only one.
For instance, Airport! is a disaster movie. Airline! is a parody of a disaster movie, because it's a long string of things that are incredibly funny if you know what to expect from a disaster movie. However, it is not, itself, a disaster movie. It's a comedy.
However, stories like Foucault's Pendulum and Watchmen are based on re-examinations of conventions of the genres of vaguely-occultist conspiracy-thrillers like Dan Brown and Super Hero comics respectively. For this reason, people sometimes describe them as a parody. But most people also accept that the content of both stories is interesting (if not always morally laudable) in its own right, for many of the same reasons as the original genres were.
From one perspective, Watchmen is a satire of superhero comics. From another, it's an example of a particularly good superhero comic! In fact, it shares a lot with both descriptions, and so neither is accurate. To some extent, but not entirely, people are predisposed to one view or the other based on their preconceptions of the genre: whether they think raising difficult unpalatable non-black-and-white moral questions is the complete opposite of superhero comics, or an important part of superhero comics.
(Disclaimer: this is based entirely on the view of the film, with no knowledge of the comic, which I know some people feel very strongly about and think would change the following analysis in possibly uncomfortable ways.)
Thus, people commenting on Kick-Ass tend to take one of several opposite views. Either "It was totally awesome! It was like a super hero movie, but good" or "It was totally awesome! It was a brilliant satire of super hero movies". Or "one of the above, but was not awesome, because a 13-year-old child violently and graphically killing people is just not justified, even to make a point pro/con super hero comics"
Particularly, several people linked to Roger Ebert's review. If he wants to say that the graphic violence is unacceptable, I would definitely accept that: I didn't feel that way myself yet, but it is a good position to take for many reasons. (Although I think he'd come across better if he put his case convincingly rather than whining about how "cool" people were going to disagree with it.) However, he seemed to take two contradictory views at once: that the film depicted violence in an unusually serious and consequential way, but that because it's mainly full of enjoyable moments, and doesn't spell out in words of one syllable that because it's normally bad to brainwash a young child into being a killing machine, that the film is not meant to be seen with that recognition.
I admit you don't have to interpret it like that. I'm sure many people don't look beyond "hit girl was cool" and didn't recognise that something bad can sometimes be cool as well. But honestly, I don't think the message that "this is fucked up, even if it can be turned to good" was missing from the film.
ETA: PS, I don't blame Ebert for criticising. I'm told he actually writes really good reviews. Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw said something good about him, which puts him in extremely, extremely distinguished company, with about five other things EVER. Unless you're willing to accept "better than physically mutilating yourself spork" as a compliment, and even if it's better than "WORSE than physically mutilating yourself spork", I still don't think it can be described accurately as a compliment. I obviously have no objection to "I don't like/understand X so I am going to rant about it because I think people will find that interesting" -- I'm going it right now. But the point is, that even if I don't object to him saying it, I still think that on this instance, he happened to be wrong (or at least, unjustified :)).
For instance, Airport! is a disaster movie. Airline! is a parody of a disaster movie, because it's a long string of things that are incredibly funny if you know what to expect from a disaster movie. However, it is not, itself, a disaster movie. It's a comedy.
However, stories like Foucault's Pendulum and Watchmen are based on re-examinations of conventions of the genres of vaguely-occultist conspiracy-thrillers like Dan Brown and Super Hero comics respectively. For this reason, people sometimes describe them as a parody. But most people also accept that the content of both stories is interesting (if not always morally laudable) in its own right, for many of the same reasons as the original genres were.
From one perspective, Watchmen is a satire of superhero comics. From another, it's an example of a particularly good superhero comic! In fact, it shares a lot with both descriptions, and so neither is accurate. To some extent, but not entirely, people are predisposed to one view or the other based on their preconceptions of the genre: whether they think raising difficult unpalatable non-black-and-white moral questions is the complete opposite of superhero comics, or an important part of superhero comics.
(Disclaimer: this is based entirely on the view of the film, with no knowledge of the comic, which I know some people feel very strongly about and think would change the following analysis in possibly uncomfortable ways.)
Thus, people commenting on Kick-Ass tend to take one of several opposite views. Either "It was totally awesome! It was like a super hero movie, but good" or "It was totally awesome! It was a brilliant satire of super hero movies". Or "one of the above, but was not awesome, because a 13-year-old child violently and graphically killing people is just not justified, even to make a point pro/con super hero comics"
Particularly, several people linked to Roger Ebert's review. If he wants to say that the graphic violence is unacceptable, I would definitely accept that: I didn't feel that way myself yet, but it is a good position to take for many reasons. (Although I think he'd come across better if he put his case convincingly rather than whining about how "cool" people were going to disagree with it.) However, he seemed to take two contradictory views at once: that the film depicted violence in an unusually serious and consequential way, but that because it's mainly full of enjoyable moments, and doesn't spell out in words of one syllable that because it's normally bad to brainwash a young child into being a killing machine, that the film is not meant to be seen with that recognition.
I admit you don't have to interpret it like that. I'm sure many people don't look beyond "hit girl was cool" and didn't recognise that something bad can sometimes be cool as well. But honestly, I don't think the message that "this is fucked up, even if it can be turned to good" was missing from the film.
ETA: PS, I don't blame Ebert for criticising. I'm told he actually writes really good reviews. Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw said something good about him, which puts him in extremely, extremely distinguished company, with about five other things EVER. Unless you're willing to accept "better than physically mutilating yourself spork" as a compliment, and even if it's better than "WORSE than physically mutilating yourself spork", I still don't think it can be described accurately as a compliment. I obviously have no objection to "I don't like/understand X so I am going to rant about it because I think people will find that interesting" -- I'm going it right now. But the point is, that even if I don't object to him saying it, I still think that on this instance, he happened to be wrong (or at least, unjustified :)).