Sunday, April 25, 2010

Reasons I Liked the Film Doomsday

I recently watched the movie Doomsday. I wasn’t expecting much when I decided to see it. I’d been playing a lot of Fallout 3 and wanted to watch a movie set in post-apocalypse. It was between Doomsday and The Road, and Doomsday finished downloading first.

Did I say downloading? I meant I legally rented a copy of Doomsday at my local video entertainment rental emporium. Yes, that’s the ticket…


If you’re thinking of downloa—I mean exchanging money for a licensed copy of Doomsday, I highly recommend it. It’s legitimately good. Here are some reasons why.

Bob Hoskins Adds a Touch of Class to Everything He Does

The film has a lot of very classic relationship archetypes and Bob Hoskins pulls his off the best as the main character’s boss/mentor/father figure. This film would still be good without him, but as an actor he just brings a certain sense of legitimacy to the film that helps you enjoy it that much more.
See? Classy.
Doomsday Borrows a Lot from Other Movies and It Doesn’t Hide It
In the film a deadly hyper-contagious virus forces the government to wall-off Scotland and a talented British agent is sent back in several years later to look for a cure. The whole plot borrows a lot from 28 Days Later and Escape From New York (and Escape From L.A. but only because John Carpenter is a fucking hack). Not long into the film there’s a big speech amongst the crazed society of rebels where their leader whips his followers into a frenzy while they eat handfuls of really gross meat. This reminded me of Dennis Hopper’s speech to The Smokers in Waterworld. Just then I realized the whole scene was a blatant rip-off of the big gang meeting in The Warriors. Just when I was beginning to think the writers either A) didn’t realize all those films were still covered by copyright, or B) didn’t realize that they were stealing these concepts, I saw this:
That’s right. That's a fucking Baseball Fury.

The people behind Doomsday knew exactly what they were doing and not only did they not care, they happily reveled in it. I have to respect that.
This Movie Has a Sense of Humor
As you might have guessed, this movie knows not to take itself too seriously. It plays up tension and drama when it needs to, but most of the time it wants to have fun. Still, it manages to walk the delicate balance between not taking itself too seriously and outright laughing at you for wasting your time on it.
You reading this, Brendan Fraser? STOP MOCKING ME WITH YOU CAREER.

Most movies wouldn’t know how to both dedicate themselves to their own storyline and throw in gags about the villain driving around the corpse of his brutally evil girlfriend, but Doomsday does and it totally works.
Corpse humor: Often attempted, rarely perfected.
It Knows How to Portray a Strong Female Lead
Movies suck at portraying strong female characters. Maybe it’s because actual strong women scare the hell out of most people. Maybe it has something to do with a disproportionate ratio of the filmmaking workforce, from directors and writers to grips and sound engineers, being men. Maybe it’s that most actresses are cast for looks, not their actual ability to realistically portray combat ability.
No offense Milla Jovovich, you’re still a fine actress, but I’ve seen greyhound dogs with a higher BMI.

Most strong female characters are either so unrealistically stoic they make Christian Bale’s Batman look histrionic, or they break into tears the second some aspect of their childhood/shoe-horned romantic interest/any personal trauma is brought up.
Indiana Jones never cried this much and he once saw his father get shot by Nazis.

Doomsday avoids that emotional dichotomy brilliantly. The main character has personal investment in finding a cure for the virus and seeing what has happened to Scotland, but she never gets all weepy about it like an emo kid who just dropped his ice cream cone. Similarly, while she does have the classic little drama moment when her Redshirts die, she’s almost immediately back to killing bad guys while racing a BMW backwards. That’s neither callous nor over-emotional: It’s awesome.
Find something that is not awesome about this. I dare you.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my over-analysis of a two-year old English B-movie. Come back next time when I’ll almost certainly be writing about more random crap.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Things That Are Killing The American Sitcom Pt. 4

Censorship

Censorship kills a lot of things: creativity, avant-garde cultural change, a young boy’s ability to masturbate to basic cable programming (well, in theory). But censorship is also sticking a knife between the ribs of the American sitcom.

Censorship in action.

This may at first seem an odd argument. Isn’t the sitcom a paragon of storytelling so traditional, inoffensive, and simplistic that it makes "Ziggy" seem edgy? Well, yes, but the best sitcoms, those considered not only historically and culturally significant but extremely popular as entertainment, are also those that were widely considered offensive for their time. Shows like All in the Family, MASH, and The Simpsons have had to struggle with censorship, and in doing so became popular for taking a stand.

Taking a stand against censorship.


The problem is all of these shows came to be before there were any real alternatives besides fighting censorship if you wanted anyone to see your show. While cable television has existed since the 1940s, it didn’t really take off until the late 1980s, just around the time we stopped seeing shows that challenged the status quo on broadcast TV. Sure legitimately good shows have come out on broadcast networks since the advent of cable, but even the most innovative of them don’t really push the envelope, so much as make the most of where it is. With the advent of the internet and premium cable channels becoming more popular, even basic cable programming has seen a brain drain.

As previously discussed.

The problem with this is that the American sitcom, like all creative endeavors, are defined by their medium. When you take the sitcom off broadcast television, and eventually off of television entirely, it fundamentally changes its very nature. If you think it’s an exaggeration to suggest censorship could eventually send all situation comedy innovators to the lawless wastes of the internet then you’re clearly unaware of the lengths writers and other artists will go to avoid being censored.

“I don’t get it.”-NBC Programming Executive

When I wrote a sex column for my college newspaper I once had an entire column rejected by my editors for being about blowjobs. Specifically, the column was about the etymology of the term “blowjob” and didn’t actually discuss the act itself at all. It was rejected because several years before my column another writer wrote an entirely different column with a step-by-step guide to giving a blowjob. That column passed through the editorial process and was published during the university’s annual Parents’ Week. Needless to say, angry letters and mass firings ensued. Because of all this the current editorial staff was wary of blowjobs….so to speak, and nixed my column immediately. The fact that my blowjob column couldn’t have had less in common with the earlier offender was considered irrelevant.

“Huh huh ‘Blowjob Column.’”

My point is that I wasn’t really all that inconvenienced by the incident. Writing the column only took about an hour, writing a new column took about the same amount of time. I didn’t get in any trouble, I just got a talking to about “boundaries” and “acceptable content.” And I got paid the same pittance either way. Even so, I was upset. I had been told that something I had created and worked hard on and truly cared about wasn’t acceptable. It was dirty and wrong and was held as an example of what I should never do again. Because of this I was tempted to outright quit writing the column. While I didn’t quit over it, I’m still so mad at that editor that below is his name and picture.

This is Chris Etling. He’s still Editor-in-Chief of the Northern Arizona University Lumberjack. He’s been pursuing a Bachelor’s degree for the past seven years. He is a cockbite.

Ahem. Where was I? Oh, right. Censorship. See, this is exactly why censorship is killing the sitcom. Simply put, censorship kills comedy, situation or otherwise. It creates the kind of anger that not only makes artists (loosely defined to include sitcom writers and college sex columnists) want to quit, but also leads to uninteresting blog rants years after the fact.

Do you see what you’ve done, Chris Etling of Flagstaff, Arizona, phone number 267-436-5063, birth date March 11, 1985, SSN 532-64-1416, with a fatal allergy to peanuts? DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU’VE DONE?

Come back next time when I’ll be putting all this behind me and starting a new topic: Observations on the Film Doomsday, because I just watched it and I’m profoundly lazy.