* First things first: Don’t miss the morning edition of today’s Carnival!
* Also, for a few hours I had all the videos from my 80 Great Tracks from the 1990s list behind a jump, until I discovered that you can’t actually access the “after the jump” part of the post anymore. Sigh. Back into the main body they go; my apologies if this has the same deleterious effect on your browsing as it does on mine. I don’t like to metablog, but I want to assure my long-suffering readers and commenters that steps are being taken to drastically improve your Attentiondeficitdisorderly experience.
* Hey look, it’s a website and teaser trailer for Dash Shaw’s next animation project, The Ruined Cast. Shaw’s collaborators on this one include John Cameron Mitchell and Frank Santoro. For real. (Via Eric Reynolds.)
“The Ruined Cast” / Dash Shaw – demo teaser from Howard Gertler on Vimeo.
* Today on Robot 6: Download Jim Rugg’s Rambo 3.5 for free!
* Even though I have no brief with either of the two films it’s nominally about, I love this Matt Zoller Seitz piece on why we need more “adult” movies–movies that can’t be fully understood or enjoyed by children or the childish, as he puts it; “movies that let you spend time with morally compromised characters and that sort of hang back a bit directorially, letting the scenes and situations breathe, and mostly resisting the urge to tell you what the movie thinks of anyone, preferring instead to simply present the characters and let you feel however you want to feel.” I have to say, between this and his earlier, infamous “superheroes suck!” piece (Peter David notwithstanding), becoming a bit of an aesthetic scold is a good look for Seitz, much more so than it’s been for Roger Ebert, say. (Ebert’s been there for decades, of course.) I feel like there’s a connection to be made here between the mainstreaming of nerd culture and subsequent militant embrace of its most simplistic and bankrupt aspects and the way the recent acceptance of genre by comics’ smart set seems to have severely curtailed the discussion of non-genre work, but that’s probably poorly thought-through overreach and I know several smart people who tell me I’m just plain wrong about that anyway.
* Adam Lambert makes out with the Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears while Katy Perry films it, and Judith Light makes a cameo. If that fails to sell you on watching this video, I give up. (Hat tip: Matthew Perpetua.)
Aw, I dunno Sean; I look at that Seitz piece and I mostly get a pretty straightforward plea for a slower, contemplative style of commercial genre picture, exemplified by one example that’s admittedly “part of a highly ritualized subgenre of romantic comedy” and another concerning “an assassin… graphically killing a couple of people and having sex with a beautiful prostitute who can barely get through a whole scene without taking her clothes off.” It’s advocating a particular aesthetic for ‘adult’ commercial genre material, which doesn’t strike me as relevant at all to the notion of genre discussion, by its very proliferation, crowding other comics out of the conversation.
If anything, Seitz is a participant in the genre discussion, designating slow, ‘contemplative’ pacing and the simple presence of unresolved motivational uncertainty in characterization as ipso facto the stuff of Adult concern; this only quite makes sense if your point of comparison is commercial Hollywood genre formula — I mean, nobody tell Marco Bellocchio his Vincere was poised best for widdle babby; god, how I had to beat those texting teenagers off, Sean! — and your intent is to apply the Adult as a corrective salve.
(That also sometimes results in sorta-interesting, sorta-bland, semi-self-serious fluff like Salt being hailed as the virtuous alternative to Those Awful Blockbusters by sheer conviction of aesthetic restraint, but that’s another topic…)
A-ha, one of the smart people who tells me I’m wrong about this!
You’re obviously right about Seitz’s take on “adult” being applied to genre pictures in this case, but the genre aspects seemed super-incidental to his case, and indeed he kind of shrugged them off–in the wedding movie’s case he appeared to regret it was a wedding movie at all. Surely his citing two genre movies had more to do with them being two movies he saw recently than genre being an inherent part of the argument he was making. I mean, knowing Seitz’s interests as a critic and filmmaker, I’m pretty confident that’s the case. Also, that there are other routes to Adulthood seems like the kind of thing you can take as read, rather than reading the absence of an explicit statement thereof as a sign that he’s constructing his case in a Hollywood-genre-only world. (Although Hollywood is clearly and explicitly his target.)
Regarding the comics conversation, I think genre’s newfound respectability post-Nadel/Santoro, which seems to have reached its apex in this the Summer of Fusion, has given people the street-cred cover they need to talk about a certain spectacle-driven brand of sci-fi-fantasy all the livelong day. Not that there’s anything wrong with that–as longtime readers of Attentiondeficitdisorderly’s film “coverage” can attest!–and maybe I’m just refusing to join any club that’d have me as a member, and maybe it’s just where I’m looking, and maybe it’s simply that you and the Thought Ballonists and Blog Flume and to a certain extent Spurge are either posting less often or reviewing fewer books, and maybe I’m overreacting or ignoring obvious evidence to the contrary or simply wrong, but…yeah.
Whoa. You read my mind. Genre art comix is sort of over for me personally. It’s been five years. I’m goin “classical”. Charlie Parker with strings.
Wow, could I have used the word “case” any more often in my reply to Jog?
Why do I feel like Adam Lambert is making out with everyone but me? 🙁