Yesterday, my wife and I with another couple went to see a movie - I won't tell you; I am embarrassed that the wives made us go. (Oh, it was the Hunger Games thing and I must tell you I enjoyed parts of it; I try to be a snob, but I'm just so lowbrow!!!)
Anyway, the 6 trailers that preceded the film were for exceedingly strange and "unreal" movies. Vampires and robots and a modern Frankenstein, etc. Nothing approaching a real world, unless you count a real world being overtaken by aliens or the undead or whatever.
I know there have always been films like this. I saw them when I was a kid, but one of them said - after the deafening and last of the trailers - "It's no wonder your students are so messed up."
And it was a bit of a joke, but I've been thinking about it ever since. The things they take in obviously influence them, and surely we're all due some escapism. But this orgy of unreality made me feel a little nauseous and sad. I had the most ever students this term opt to write research papers on things like werewolves, strange phenomena, and video games than ever before. And I understand it in part.
It baffled me, is what I'm saying; like that's a shock.
Ugh, the Frankenstein thing. Granted, I've seen exactly one trailer, and I'm not sure whether they're (once again) mixing up Frankenstein and his monster, but either way, it's an atrocity. Van Helsing was one thing. That Poe movie was awful. This is a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad idea.
ReplyDelete(And I study pop culture. I've sat through some truly terrible tv shows/films in the name of keeping current. I think I'm one of the least snobby people ever. And I still think this is going to be awful.)
DeleteIt can be done well, and be based entirely on Mary Shelley's character. The "monster" was a thoughtful, articulate being with something of a conscience; his ugliness made him repulsive to normal people, but I've seen love stories, pretty well done, in which his love interest is blind. For that matter, remember that his first attempt at human contact was an appeal to the blind patriarch of a little peasant family in whose outbuilding he was sheltering.
DeleteThe movie doesn't look promising, but it *could have been* interesting.
And I think students expect us to somehow do the same sound effect/things-blowing-up/flying things and other special effects in the classroom.
ReplyDelete"Rush" was great, though.
DeleteThe Onion beautifully mocked the desire for things-blowing-up etc with "Science Channel refuses to dumb down science any further."
DeleteAll of which feeds into larger discussions about education vs entertainment, that I'm too tired to enter into here. Where's the Scotch?
I have the students in my upper division hamster computation course write a paper on some topic that is relevant to the class. Got them in last week.
DeleteLooked at the first one and having read the breathless first paragraph with it's exclamation points and many, many adjectives I really wanted to write "Holy Discovery Channel documentary, Batman!". It was that bad. I am going to have to have a talk with her about the proper tone of a paper in scientific hamsterology.
I hate feeling old, and a trip to a megaplex makes me feel 200 years old. I vowed to always remain hip, connected, aware of what the new pop culture was, not because I value it over anything else, but because it's the culture of the people I teach, and have taught for 30 years.
ReplyDeleteBut I've had a similar experience with movie trailers and I just don't understand what world this is I live in anymore. I love some modern stuff, and the rest just mystifies me. I feel so ancient in conversations with freshmen. I was once a handful of years older than them, and now I'm older than most of their parents. It's difficult to bridge that, and although I don't believe we have to "get" them entirely, or their culture, it does make it harder to connect with them and solve their academic problems when we don't.
Its not so bad, actually. The trailers are geared to the audience of the movie actually being shown, in your case for teens and tweens; if you go to see a James Bond flick, the trailers are all movies with a Fast & Furious or Jason Bourne theme; if you go and see Before Midnight the trailers would all be for The Notebook or Eat Pray Love and their ilk.
ReplyDeleteSame goes with the very long stretch of advertising before movies (or, at least here in snowy Canuckistan, where the megaplex chains have lucrative deals with advertising firms for a fully integrated media culture experience).
"Best Man Holiday" would not have done so well if people still didn't want to see movies about humans and their relationships (not that romantic comedies don't have escapist elements.) I just want to know why, in most of these fantasy worlds, the white men still have all the heroism and most of the dialogue.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the current fashion for the supernatural is that different from medieval romances full of dragons and fairies, or various mythologies with supernatural beings and alternate worlds--or even the Romantic fiction that created Frankenstein and the modern vampire. Literature concerned with the fantastic has a much longer history than realistic fiction, particularly when it comes to popular audiences. That's not to say that many of these films are any good, but I don't see anything wrong or disturbing about them. (Personally I'd go for vampires and robots over a car chase scene full of gunfire and explosions any day)
ReplyDeleteOooooooh, good comment!
DeleteThis goes along, somewhat, with a detail of the Chekhov passage Peter K posted yesterday: the professor is complaining about college students' devotion to beer and opera. What counts as lowbrow, or at least alarmingly escapist, changes over time.
DeleteYes, thanks for the perspective. I do see what you're saying.
DeleteI agree Brunnhilde. And yet, it is a fact that the I, Frankenstein trailer is awful. I get stupider every time I watch it. The Divergent trailer looks alright, though. My niece will definitely want to go see that.
DeleteI publish in this area and teach a course every few years in popular paranormal/urban fantasy literature. Mostly, we compare "old" texts to see what they show about the ideology in "days gone by" and current texts to see what they reveal about our consciousness today. Almost any student in the class will groan at the movie adaptations of the texts because they recognize that movies are made for the 14-year-old boy/girl.
DeleteMovie adaptations are often atrocious (I think the Peter Jackson LOTR trilogy was a pretty good adaptation of the novels, but "The Hobbit" hasn't lived up to my expectations). That doesn't mean the text itself is horrific.
I haven't seen the Frankenstein movie, but based on the trailer, I will likely wait for it to come out on DVD and in class, we will mock it. :)
I teach Film History. Here's something heartening: students are enthralled by good cinema when introduced to it.
ReplyDeleteSeen in a major chain bookstore in the last year: a section headed "Teen Paranormal Romances".
ReplyDeleteNow, I am not one to make fun of anyone's choices in genre fiction--I have my own library of cheap paperbacks---but that seemed like a very specialized label to me.
You can thank Stephanie Meyer for that entire category, as copy cat writers piggy back their way to success. When, oh when, will Edward's influence subside? At least my own 15 year old finally got over it!
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ReplyDeleteOne of my all-time favorite RYS posts was "May Your Perfidy Ramify Through Your Life" (on May 21, 2007). It included:
ReplyDelete"I have read your stories about anime characters, complete with super-deformed doodles, your tales of extraterrestrials and werewolves and vampires. It is interesting that your eyes turn to the supernatural world so often, since you have such an impoverished notion of this one."
But hey, all is not lost (yet). The trailer for the new Godzilla movie for 2014 is now out! Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0UtESBx5ZM
That one beats the official trailer.
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