All posts by David DeMoss

Movies

Jor-El Was Right #1: On the False Dichotomy of “Arthouse” & “Mainstream” Cinema

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What is "arthouse"? What is "art"?
What is “arthouse”? What is “art”?

by General Zod

Arthouse (n) [art’howss]: (1) a film playing in cheap, rundown theaters inside the urban cores of major cities; often foreign or made independently of the Hollywood Studio financing System. May be retroactively applied to films made within the Hollywood Studio System, and film-making techniques used by those in the System’s employ, that the speaker particularly likes, but never as a pejorative. For the pejorative usage, see definition (2)

(2) A pejorative term for boring films made by even more boring film school graduates steeped in arcane theory and purposefully obtuse jargon-speak, because sounding smart is much easier than being smart. And if people were smart, we wouldn’t need terms like “arthouse.” See definition (3)

(3) A branding label for a lifestyle demographic that (like all demographics) is the largely-imaginary composite construct of marketing executives at distant advertising companies who don’t give a fuck about you, or any of the Actually Important Questions. Like, “What is art? What, therefore, is ‘arthouse’?” Who cares? There’s money to be made off the poor suckers and rich fools who think the source of their movies matters more than the movies themselves. (“People like that exist?” Yes, unfortunately, and here’s the real ass-kicker: there are more of them than there are of you.)

Continue reading Jor-El Was Right #1: On the False Dichotomy of “Arthouse” & “Mainstream” Cinema →

Movies, Reviews

Godzilla’s Revenge (1969)

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Huh...feels like we've been here before.
Huh…feels like we’ve been here before…feels so familiar…

What to do when your movie franchise’s swan-song becomes an international cult phenomenon? You desperately scramble to paper over the hilariously wrongheaded conclusion that your franchise was on its last legs. In plain language: you cash in.

But by the time Destroy All Monsters‘ recipes arrived, Godzilla’s owners at Toho Studios had already doubled-down to their dismissive “giant monsters are for the kid’s after-school TV” attitude. They committed most of their spare change, and Godzilla’s original creator/director, Ishiro Honda, to the submarine war/Mad Scientist/Lost Island epic Latitude Zero. Meant to be another international hit (starring Citizen Kane‘s own Joseph Cotton, and TV’s The Joker, Cesar Romero!) it became one long cost over-run, remembered now only by fans of Japanese sci-fi, the director, or the actors involved. If at all. Desperate, out of cash, and biting nails over their experiment in using gaijin stars and Spy-fi gadgets, Toho hired Honda to direct one last Godzilla movie. The results would prove to be the most controversial entry in the series. Continue reading Godzilla’s Revenge (1969) →

Movies, Reviews

Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox (2013)

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Artists conception of Your Humble Narrator's reaction to news they were making a Flashpoint movie.
Artist’s conception of Your Humble Narrator’s reaction to news they were making a Flashpoint movie.

As I said in the Superman Unbound review, DC Comics uber-writer Geoff Johns got his job thanks to his love of those first two live-action Superman films (and The Goonies). Because of this, he talked himself into a  job playing step-n-fetch-it for director Richard Donner. Because of this, young Geoff found time to make some friends at DC Comics while he and Donner were in New York, working on that Mel Gibson-led X-Files rip-off no one remembers anymore, Conspiracy Theory.

Within a few months, former Superman writer (now DC Group Editor) Eddie Berganza secured Johns a job penning Justice Society of America. “Written” at the time (though some of us suspected it was “written in name only”) by Notable Hollywood Screenwriter David S. Goyer, JSA evolved, under Johns tenure, into an occasionally-quite-nice microcosm of its home universe. While the modern Justice League is usually composed of characters with true cultural clout, instantly recognizable to even the least-literate among us, JSA thrived by combining characters from comic’s Golden Age with impetuous youngsters either inspired by their example or straight-up continuing some poor dead person’s legacy.

That’s the thing I’ve always liked about the DC Universe: a meta-textual awareness of its own history. Unlike Marvel Comics, where all roads lead back to Captain America and everything else gets shunted a decade or so down the time stream by Editorial Fiat whenever continuity headaches become epidemic, DC’s heroes come in distinct, generational blocks. The Old Guard started putting on masks and punching bad guys at some point in the mid-1920s. They did it for their own reasons, came together for World War II, and then drifted apart again for other reasons no writer seems interested in addressing, save obliquely, through peeks at Wacky Alternate Dimensions (like the Watchmen universe, which outlawed masked heroics in the 70s with its Keene Act). The New Guard of the “perma-modern” world, usually beginning with Superman, chose to go the “thong-and-blanket” route partially because of that preexisting heroic tradition. This adds historical depth to DC’s fictional world while eliminating the need for any one character to bare the full weight of being “the world’s first super-hero” (though Superman’s usually handed that title by sympathetic friends in the media). Continue reading Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox (2013) →