I’m sure it says something about me that with the exception of Doomsday—Doomsday!–I can’t remember the last time I went to a movie that made me feel good. I’m talking about feeling good thanks to what happens in film, of course, not the film’s quality. I’ve certainly seen plenty of good and even great movies in recent months, movies that make me feel good the way all great art does. But the vast majority of films I’ve chosen to see in the theater since 2005–this includes The Ruins, Rambo, Cloverfield, The Mist, I Am Legend, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Eastern Promises, Hostel Part II, 28 Weeks Later, Children of Men, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Host, King Kong, A History of Violence, War of the Worlds, and Land of the Dead–are about making the audience feel the emotional effects of cruelty, brutality, violence, and despair in some combination or other. Checking my review-link sidebar over on the lefthand side of the page I see that I also saw some movies that are slightly less interested in making one feel awful, like Dragon Wars and Grindhouse and Shoot ‘Em Up, but they were too crappy to make me leave the theater whistling a happy tune, and at any rate I’m stretching it with Grindhouse, while Shoot ‘Em Up is in many ways more bothersome than your average torture-porn flick, and needless to say all three were violent. Hell, even my feel-good flick contained a viral semi-apocalypse and dismemberments galore, while the most recent one before that was 300, which is in the same boat.
Looking back on all those movies, I would guess that becoming a horror blogger has influenced what I consider to be “must-sees” in the theater. And hey, that’s fine. Back when I did my first horrorblogging marathon while this was still mostly a comics blog, I very consciously was trying to reconnect with the genre that had given me so much enjoyment as I discovered it late in high school and throughout college. Making this a full-time horror blog was done with that in mind as well. I mean, I like being the guy with a Hellraiser T-shirt on at opening night of Cloverfield. I like being the guy my friends and co-workers turn to when they want an “authoritative” opinion about the adaptation of The Mist or I Am Legend. Moreover, I simply enjoy seeing movies in the theater. It’s one of my favorite things to do, and since horrorblogging (for me at least) is largely a subset of filmblogging, I do it a lot now, which is great.
But there have been times recently when the lights go down and the trailers roll and the opening credits finally start and I wonder to myself what it would feel like to have this experience knowing that I’m not going to see people get brutally killed in the next 90 minutes. I’ve actually forgotten!
Do you watch a lot of comedies? I thought Superbad was a great film about male adolescence. It ends on a very thruthful note about growing up. It gave me a very positive feeling.
I don’t, no. For one thing nearly every comedy has vomiting in it these days, and my wife’s emetophobia therefore rules them out for us watching them together. Meanwhile I’m much less likely to watch them on my own like I do with horror movies or dramas, in the theater or even on DVD, because so few of them tend to be great as FILM–like, I love Anchorman to death, but there’s nothing going on there in terms of interesting moviemaking. If I really want yuks I tend to revisit the same comedies: The Big Lebowski, Ghostbusters, Flirting with Disaster, The Three Amigos, Christmas Vacation, Wet Hot American Summer, Zoolander, Anchorman, the first Austin Powers, History of the World, Meaning of Life…
Now, if you had seen King of Kong, you’d be a lot happier…
I second Ken’s recommendation of King of Kong.
What I found impressive about Rambo was how un-cathartic the violence felt. Sure, those guys deserved to be punished, they were horrible, horrible people, but it wasn’t fist pumping joy at their slaughter. Just the grim reality of the job getting done.
Ian: You know, a film where Jonah Hill got decapitated would be HILARIOUS.
Dan: I actually did whoop it up quite a bit during that climactic battle in Rambo, but that was out of appreciation of how insanely over the top the violence was. It decidedly was not the comeuppance-inspired “woo-hoo!” you let out in scenes like the one from The Fellowship of the Ring where Aragorn beheads the uruk-hai who shot Boromir. You didn’t at all feel like this was a happy ending except in the most technical sense. (Which is why the “you CAN go home again” coda felt so out of place.)