Most people can sit back, relax, and kick their feet up on the proverbial chair and watch a summer blockbuster with an unscrupulous eye. Bruce Willis pummeling away at a terrorist threatening to destroy the American Way of Life, a cartoon rat chef and the troubles of his wait staff, or the implausible hilarity of a schlubby Jew like Seth Rogen impregnating the blond surgeon blend away into a seamless 90 minutes of mindless entertainment. However, me being me, the me, who at times is incapable of enjoying movies, has a harder time of it than just sitting back and watching.
I always get caught up in the minute details of movies, much to the chagrin of my companions. Just ask Jack or Emily when they naively asked me to watch an 80s classic Gross Anatomy. They thought I would be able to relate to the trials and tribulations of Mathew Modine as the rogue, yet brilliant, medical student or the uptight, yet casually hot, Daphne Zuniga (post-The Sure Thing, the most awesome John Cusack film ever, and pre-Melrose Place). Instead of a quiet, yet thoughtfully observant viewer, I was snarky throughout the film which exasperated Emily to no end (at one point, she paused the movie and told me to just watch). I kept pulling out plot implausibilities and saying things like, "I'm in medical school. That would never happen!"
I was an English lit major in college, and I think this is partly why most people find me annoying to watch movies with. I wish I could just let the pictures wash over me in a mindless, soothing wave, but I feel like even the dumbest movies with the dumbest, most obvious imagery, has some larger meaning. For instance, I really thought that Jim Carrey's latest crap-fest The Number 23 had shades of film noir in it. Am I right? Only Joel Schumacher knows, I guess.
Another favorite pastime while watching movies is to belittle and ridicule the deep allusions to poetry popular films use since, I, of course, am the literary scholar with a B.A. degree, mind you, from a first-rate institution, and not some smarmy producer, who uses (gasp!) Spark Notes to pepper the script with deep sounding quotes from Whitman or Donne. For example, while watching Tristan and Isolde (with James Franco, who does one of the worst English accents to grace the screen), I grew irate when the photogenic couple read "The Long Morrow" by John Donne in the movie. Why, you ask? Because Donne wrote in the seventeenth century, a full 500 years before the setting of this dumb movie! Implausibilities are one thing, but anachronisms, especially in period films, should be, like, outlawed or something.
Another time I one-upped Hollywood was with The Notebook, an all around girl classic. The movie is littered with allusions to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, specifically his poem "So Long." The director completely misses the entire point of the poem, which is a rather wholehearted attempt to piece together America by giving it a cohesive unity in a rather chaotic, fragmented, ruinous time - the post-Civil War period. The director seems to think the lines of the poem are super romantic and are particularly swoon-worthy when hunky Ryan Gosling reads them, all brooding and Southern. All of this makes me so mad, but at the same time, I feel happy that at least I am one viewer who is not suckered into all the weepy, Hollywood romance when the director is committing such a serious, intellectual faux pas.
In the end though, what's the point? Who am I one-upping? I am sure Ridley Scott doesn't give a flying crap that I found his glaring anachronism with my speedy Google skills. Nick Cassevetes, similarly, doesn't give a shit that Whitman's poem was wrongly contextualized as romantic for the purposes of his weepy chick flick. Because at the end of the day, those trailer editor guys got me with their slick promos, and I paid my $9 to go see these crappy movies, which only added to their weekend grosses. So, ultimately, I guess it's Mariam: 0, Hollywood: billions of dollars and counting.
--By Mariam, who finds the prospect of summer ending horrifying.
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5 comments:
Well, thank God we have you to look up the meanings of poems and novels in todays literature review journals. Aren't you supposed to be in Nicaragua right now?
Nice blog, Mariam . . . but you shouldn't have forgotten how insufferable you were when we watched the Exorcism of Emily Rose.
Sally, if I didn't have so many anti-histamines in my system, I would have been able to pay better attention to this blog. I suppose I'll leave a better comment when I'm not so drowsy.
ok, now that I'm not doped up on medicine, I actually read your blog. There is nothing to be ashamed of with your snobby movie tendencies. I am a music snob, and sometimes other people don't like when I point out weak cliched chord progressions. I don't mind so basically I can watch movies with you and agree with your literature based assessment of the plot flaws, and you can go to concerts with me and agree with my pretentious assessment of the lyrical and melodic flaws. It's like a match made in ... um... Toledo!
someone as obsessed with detail should proofread their blogs. You meant to say "Donne wrote in the seventeenth century, a full 500 years AFTER the setting of this dumb movie!" not "Donne wrote in the seventeenth century, a full 500 years BEFORE the setting of this dumb movie!" Goodness, i am disappointed in you. I expect this shit from Farrah, but not you.
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