Category Archives: Geek Punditry
2 in 1 Showcase Episode 286: A Weekend at the Movies
I don’t always post my pop culture podcast here at Reel to Reel, but when I do, you can bet it’s because there’s a lot of movie talk. In this week’s episode, my fiance Erin gives her opinion of the new 3D re-release of Jurassic Park, then I talk about the remake of Evil Dead and the DVD release of the horror/comedy John Dies at the End. If you enjoy my movie punditry, give it a listen!
And if you, like me, have a lot of overlapping fandoms in your personal geek wheelhouse, the rest of the episode concerns such subjects as the newest episode of Doctor Who, the upcoming Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show, and the passing of comic book greats Carmine Infantino and George Gladir.
2 in 1 Showcase Episode 286: A Weekend at the Movies
How The Neverending Story broke my brain
A few days ago, my brother dropped a major knowledge-bomb on me. Limahl, the singer of the theme song to the 1984 film The Neverending Story, was not a woman, as I’d always believed. Limahl, evidently, is an English pop star, former lead singer of the group Kajagoogoo, and most definitely male. If you, like me, have gone your entire life hearing that song without seeing the music video, I have no doubt it’s as big a shock to you as it was to me.
Regardless, having gotten the movie into my head, I felt the need to watch it again. Although it was a perennial favorite of mind as a child, it had been several years since I actually sat down at watched it, and that’s just not right. So after getting home from work earlier this week, I pulled out the DVD and popped it in. If you’ve never seen the movie, I can only assume you’re in your 70s or older, blind, or have no soul. The short version is that it’s the story of a young boy named Bastian (Barret Oliver) who – having spent the day facing a distant widower father (Gerald McRaney), a mob of school bullies, and a math test – retreats to the school attic to read a book he swiped from a knowing old shopkeeper Thomas Hill). The book, The Neverending Story, focuses on a warrior named Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) who is tasked with finding a cure for a mysterious Nothing that is destroying the world of Fantasia and slowly killing its Childlike Empress (Tami Stronach).
As the story continues (and here the spoilers commence) Bastian finds himself getting pulled deeper and deeper into the book as the nature of the Nothing becomes clear. Fantasia is created from the hopes and fantasies of the human world. As people give up their enchantments, the Nothing is destroying the world of magic, and it will take the power of a human boy to save it. The biggest shock for Bastian is when he realizes the human boy the book is discussing… is him.
The movie came out in 1984, when I was seven years old, but it’s safe to say that virtually everybody who saw it at about my age had the same fantasies afterwards that I did: having that last grain of sand from Fantasia, infused with the power to grant wishes… that brilliant dream of riding Falkor the Luck-Dragon through the sky and exacting swift and just retribution on your enemies (if anyone tries to tell you a seven-year-old has no enemies ask them what it was like to be home schooled)… that sort of escapism is what has driven children’s literature for decades. Everything from Alice in Wonderland to The Wizard of Oz to the Harry Potter series is, in some way about taking a child from the ordinary world and exposing them to a place of wonder and magic. We keep going to that well again and again, because it’s as deep and rich a storytelling pool as exists anywhere.
Even as a kid I recognized that. But going back to watch the movie again today, for the first time in years, I’m realizing just how profoundly it influenced my philosophy as a storyteller as well. (I apologize for the preceding sentence, I tried for five minutes to think of a way to say “my philosophy as a storyteller” that didn’t sound pretentious as hell, but I failed utterly.) The basic concept behind the story is that all human imagination flows into and out of the same place. Sure, they give that place a name, but as I watched the film it struck me that this is exactly the concept that drove me to start this website in the first place. I definitely believe, in a very concrete way, that human imagination is based on this very same idea, that we all contribute to and draw from an ocean of inspiration, and that it’s the different ways we find to employ the ideas we all share that make for true innovation.
Looking back, as an adult, I can tell that the movie isn’t as perfect as I always gave it credit for. It feels somewhat incomplete, like there’s more story to tell. As it turns out, this wasn’t just a sort of meta-commentary on the “Neverending” part of the title. The film only adapts about the first half of the original novel by Michael Ende, and in fact, just about everything we actually see on screen, in the book, is just setup for the real story, about Bastian losing himself in Fantastica (the novel’s name for the magical world) and ultimately having to face the harsh reality of his mother’s death and his father’s emotional abandonment. Some of those ideas eventually made their way into The Neverending Story II: The Next Chapter, but most of them came forth in name only and didn’t have the same emotional impact as the book. On the plus side the movie did have the guy who played the Flash on the 90s TV show, which is something the 1979 German novel can never claim.
What’s great about The Neverending Story though, both the film and the book, is how it is so firmly rooted not in what the imagination can create, but in the idea of imagination itself. There’s something powerful in that, something eternal, and something I hold to rather dearly.
If I was making the Justice League movie…
Fans of DC Comics’s Justice League franchise saw what seems to be another setback this week, when word leaked the script that has been in development is being scrapped entirely. For those who just want to see the damn movie made already, this is obviously distressing news. But my approach is slightly different. I absolutely want to see a Justice League movie, but I want to see a great movie. So if Warner Bros recognized that the script they’re working with is crap, by all means, start over and do it right.
Earlier this week over at CXPulp, I wrote about how Disney seems to be planning to apply the lessons of Marvel Studios to their recently-acquired Star Wars franchise. (For those of you who may not follow this stuff the way I do, let me briefly explain that Disney bought Marvel in 2009 and that Marvel and DC have been the two biggest publishers – and therefore the two biggest rivals – in American comic books for decades). Marvel created films for several of their characters, brought them together in their mega-hit The Avengers, and are now breaking them off into smaller films again before the next combined go-around. Comic book fans, delighted with what Marvel is doing, are asking why the hell the movies based on DC Comics – the Justice League, Superman, Batman, and many more — can’t do the same thing. Although DC Comics, for a long time, had properties with more mainstream recognition than Marvel, in the past decade Marvel has dominated superhero movies. The only hit from the DC Universe in recent years has been Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, while Marvel’s X-Men, Spider-Man, and Avengers-related films have become legitimate powerhouses.
The reason for this, I believe, goes back to the late 90s. Marvel, at the time, was still an independent company, although one reorganizing after a bankruptcy. DC, however, has been wholly owned by Warner Bros for a very long time. That means Warner Bros is the only game in town to make a DC movie. If Warner Bros isn’t interested, it won’t happen, and if Warner Bros doesn’t understand what makes the property work, we get crap like Steel and Catwoman. Marvel, on the other hand, had the freedom to shop their properties around. Universal doesn’t have the right feel for Spider-Man? Take it to Sony. Paramount can’t give us a decent X-Men film? Bring them to Fox. Granted, this system turned out its share of clunkers too (let’s not forget that some genocidal maniac gave approval to not one, but TWO Ghost Rider movies starring Nicolas Cage), but their batting average over this period, beginning with Blade in 1998, is pretty damn good.
Things are different now, of course, since Marvel is owned by Disney. But by the time of that purchase in 2009, Marvel had already launched their own film unit to make movies with the characters other studios didn’t have – Iron Man and Incredible Hulk had both already come out and production was underway on Iron Man 2, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger. By the time Marvel was a Disney property, they’d proven that they could make great films on their own, and Disney has wisely stayed the hell back and let them do it, the way they did when they bought Pixar in 2006. (Disney seems to have a three-year cycle for buying other companies, they got Lucasfilm in 2012. That means I have until 2015 to create a franchise with lucrative enough IPs that I can sell them to Disney and retire in luxury.)
This, more than anything else, is what Warner Bros needs to learn in regards to any DC Cinematic Universe. It’s not about copying Marvel’s storytelling or casting tricks or format. It’s about letting the people who know the characters do what they do best and getting out of their way while they do it.
Marvel needed to raise the profiles of their lesser-known characters or Avengers never would have been the hit that it was. DC has a different problem. Ten years ago, nobody who wasn’t a comic book fan knew who Iron Man or Thor were. DC’s problem is that everybody knows many of their characters – Wonder Woman, Aquaman – but they fundamentally misunderstand them. Aquaman is a punchline, he’s “the guy that talks to fish.” But as writers like Geoff Johns and Peter David have shown us, he can be so much more than that – a tragic monarch, a man who struggles with the responsibility of protecting two-thirds of the surface of the Earth… not to mention the fact that the physical changes necessary to allow a person to survive on the ocean’s floor would make them pretty strong and otherwise badass on land. Putting Aquaman in a movie doesn’t necessitate that you explain who he is, it necessitates you explain what makes him awesome.
So if I was in charge of the Justice League movie, this is what I would do.
First, start with this summer’s Man of Steel. The film is generating some positive buzz and I’m excited about it. I’d work in a small reference to a larger DC Universe – have some news report about Green Lantern in the background, or a page of the Daily Planet referencing the chaos in Gotham City that happened during The Dark Knight Rises. Nothing that would really influence Superman’s story, but enough to nod at the fact that he’s not – as Nick Fury said in the first Iron Man – the only superhero in the world.
Then, I’d work on putting together a phenomenal Justice League story. I wouldn’t start with the big bad that was in the previous script, Darkseid, for two reasons. First, Marvel is already using Thanos in their movies, and although Thanos was largely a Darkseid rip-off when he was created in the comics, movie fans won’t get that and will think it’s the Justice League that’s being derivative. Second, he’s too big for the first movie. Where do you build from there? You need a threat big enough to justify bringing all of these characters together, of course, but they shouldn’t go up against the biggest threat in the universe their first time out.
Next, get the recognizable aspects from the current DC films and put them together: Henry Cavill as Superman, build off the end of The Dark Knight Rises (as a spoiler consideration I won’t be more specific than that), and yes, I’d get Ryan Reynolds back as Green Lantern. That movie had problems, but his casting really wasn’t one of them. Then I’d add the characters that the public has heard of but doesn’t understand – Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash. Use this movie to showcase them the way Avengers suddenly turned everyone in America into fans of the Hulk for the first time in decades.
Don’t bother with everybody’s origin. It’s a convention of the superhero genre, true, but it’s often the least exciting part of it. You don’t need to know why John McClane became a cop to enjoy Die Hard, so why do I need to see Barry Allen get struck by lightning when I’ve already accepted a world with a man from Krypton and another guy with a magic ring? After Justice League, we’ll start spinning the other characters off into their individual movies – if necessary, work in the origins there. There’s no rule that says they have to take place after the Justice League movie just because they’re made in that order, although even then, I think a quick flashback would probably be more than sufficient in most cases.
Finally, make it clear that the Justice League isn’t the be-all and end-all of the DCU. Marvel can’t reference Spider-Man, the X-Men, or the Fantastic Four, because the rights to those characters are still tied up with other studios thanks to deals they made before they were purchased by Disney. DC doesn’t have that problem. Guillermo Del Toro is working on a movie featuring some of DC’s supernatural characters like Swamp Thing and Deadman – a Justice League movie could drop in a reference to them. Give us veiled hints or rumors about other Leaguers from the comics like Zatanna, Plastic Man, Firestorm… characters that have potential for their own films in the future, assuming of course that they’re done right. Even better – if you have some sort of huge battle for the end piece, the sort of thing that the public can’t help but notice (like the battle of New York in The Avengers, and it just shows how great that movie was structured that it keeps being the best analogy), give us glimpses of some of these other heroes fighting their own battles while the League takes on the Big Bad, whoever it happens to be.
And most importantly, make sure that the story is one that satisfies the fans but is broad enough to grab people who don’t know all of the characters. This is what Marvel has done brilliantly and what Warner Bros has prevented DC from doing for years. If you can pull off that trick, we’d have a movie that could launch not just one franchise, but an entire universe.
Of course, that’s what I would do. But what do I know? I’m just a guy who reads comics and watches movies. It’s not like I’ve got the pedigree of the man who gave the green light to Jonah Hex.
(If that line isn’t enough to convince people I should be running the show, nothing will be.)
So… J.J. Abrams.
If you pay any attention to movie news at all, you no doubt were aware earlier this week when Disney announced that Episode 7 of their shiny new Star Wars franchise would be directed by none other than Star Trek rebooter J.J. Abrams. And the internet went berserk, because that’s what the internet does. People who loved the new Star Trek loved the idea. People who hated the new Star Trek hated the idea. People who hated the ending of Lost hated the idea (even though Abrams’s contributions to that show ended some time in the first season when he got caught up in moviemaking). People who loved Fringe were too busy watching the last episode of that series over and over to notice that anything else was going on. But by the time the dust had settled, pretty much everybody had an opinion. As I created this blog specifically to have a place to pontificate about movies, I thought I’d share my opinion here.
I’m cool with it.
Okay, that’s the short version. Let me talk a little bit about why I’m cool with it. The problem with this sort of speculation is that nothing made by a Hollywood studio is the result of a single auteur vision, and that makes it incredibly difficult to predict how any creator will fit a project by basing your opinion on their earlier projects — producer notes, diva actor notes, studio interference, budgetary concerns and any other number of things can and will affect any movie, and even when you have an unmitigated cinematic disaster it had be hard to accurately place blame. (Take George Clooney’s willingness to accept blame for the fiasco that was Batman and Robin. I still think Clooney, at that age, could have played a decent Bruce Wayne, but he was saddled with a terrible script, a terrible director, terrible casting for his co-stars and a studio that made them keep adding idiotic nonsense so they could produce Happy Meal toys.) That said, there’s really nothing else we can base our judgment on, so flawed or not, I’m going to look at Abrams’s previous filmography to explain why giving him this job gives me hope for a good Episode 7.
First and foremost, I trust Abrams as an idea man. True, he’s directing this film, but that doesn’t mean he won’t keep his finger in the story — I’d be shocked if he didn’t. He has relatively few movies to his credit as a director (the two Star Trek films, Mission: Impossible III and his own Super 8, which we’ll talk more about in a minute), but he had a hand in creating or producing lots of quality television. Besides the aforementioned Lost and Fringe, he was also behind NBC’s Revolution, the Jennifer Garner launch vehicle Alias, the hit Person of Interest, and the underrated (and sadly cancelled) Alcatraz. In film, besides the movies he’s directed himself, he helped conceive Cloverfield (a film I’m a big fan of). And let’s not forget his greatest success… Felicity.
(No, I’ve never seen an episode of Felicity.)
Since Star Trek is what everybody is focusing on, though, let’s talk about that for a moment. In 2009, let’s be honest here, Star Trek was dead. The underwhelming Star Trek: Nemesis had frozen any plans to continue with the movie series and, although Enterprise was an okay TV series, it wasn’t nearly good enough to wash from people’s mouths the effluvia of Star Trek: Voyager, the low point of the franchise. I was a huge Trek fan growing up, I loved the movies, I loved The Next Generation, and I especially loved Deep Space Nine (which I still contend, in terms of writing, is the best of the various Star Trek TV shows). But at that point, I honestly didn’t care if we ever saw another Star Trek property.
Enter Abrams.
He rebooted the franchise in a way that preserved the original (by creating an alternate timeline in which his series will take place), and from there, he ran wild. I’ll grant you, not everything in the reboot meshes with the original — the technology and physics of it doesn’t fit at all. As many of my more green-blooded Trekker friends constantly remind me, in the original timeline it was explicitly stated that starships were built in space because they couldn’t be constructed and launched on Earth, as they are in the reboot. And yes, Tyler Perry was in it, and was somehow the only thing not covered by a lens flare. But despite all that, the film was fun. It was full of more energy and excitement than I’d felt from Trek in years. Older Trek, the really good older Trek at least, was admittedly a more cerebral sort of thing, full of allegory and depth, whereas Abrams took the approach of “let’s blow up a damn planet”. But Abrams had a different task than the earlier films — he had to present a version of Star Trek that presented the sort of enormous cinematic landscape viewers were now demanding (thanks to films like Lord of the Rings) and won over an audience that previously was uninterested in Trek. He couldn’t just make a movie to appeal to existing Trek fans, because as the Enterprise ratings had already proven, there weren’t enough left to sustain the franchise.
Now there are, and now I’m very excited for Star Trek Into Darkness as a result.
But Trek, honestly, is not the reason I’m particularly interested in seeing what Abrams does with Star Wars. For that, my attention turns to the film he wrote and directed between Trek outings: the Steven Spielberg production Super 8.
If you grew up in the 80s and you haven’t seen Super 8, you’ve made a mistake. Even though the film is set in 1979, it’s a love letter to the sort of movies we grew up with. The slow burn of the alien threat has shades of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., but even more important than that, the interaction of the kids feels like this could have been a sequel to Goonies or Explorers. The kids in this movie are so perfectly cast and so genuine in their dialogue and interactions with one another that you could easily believe that they’d been friends their entire lives instead of pulled together by a casting director. It’s the kind of movie people my age watched when we were the age of the kids in the movies. Abrams proved with this film that he understands that era of moviemaking perfectly.
And when, my friends, was Star Wars truly great?
If Abrams can bring his 80s sensibility together with his 21st century visual skill and ability to create amazing action pieces, the new Star Wars has the potential to eclipse the prequel trilogy. (I know, I’m not setting the bar particularly high there, but still.) I’m not saying that the movie will be great, I’m saying that Disney has given it the first ingredient it needs to be great. (Well, second — getting Toy Story 3 screenwriter Michael Arndt on board was the first ingredient.) It’s still up to Abrams to gather the rest of the ingredients and put them together properly, and he may yet fail. But damned if I’m not willing to give him a chance.
It’s The Odyssey… IN SPACE!
It was recently announced that Warner Brothers is working on taking the epic poem, The Odyssey, and turning it into a science fiction film. Because the internet exists, responses ranged from the cautiously optimistic to the blindly cynical to several hundred ancient Greeks complaining that Hollywood is raping their childhood like they did with that Jason and the Argonauts debacle. Amongst all the responses, though, only one took me by surprise. At /Film, Germain Lussier said, “Even in our wildest, 11th grade English class imaginations, few could have seen this one coming.”
To which my response is… “Really? Is it that big a surprise?” If anything, I can’t believe it hasn’t been done before.
The great thing about science fiction, friends, is its infinite adaptability. There is virtually no story you can’t tell in the proper sci-fi setting… in fact, many of the greatest works of sci-fi are largely metaphorical in nature. Both the Star Trek and X-Men franchises, at least early in their early incarnations in the 1960s, were often used to discuss the civil rights movement. Battlestar Galactica was known to deal with modern-day politics. Superman is often spoken of as an extraterrestrial Christ figure, despite being created by a couple of Jewish kids from Cleveland. Everything from 1984 to 2012 has taken then-current fears and put them on display through a sci-fi prism.
Then there are the stories that pick up on specific plots and tropes. Alien, as I’ve argued many times, is essentially a haunted house movie with the house replaced by a spaceship and the ghost replaced by a drippy, hard-shelled monstrosity with acid blood. Forbidden Planet shares much of its DNA with William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Throw the Swiss Family Robinson off their island — off the planet — and you have Lost in Space. That one didn’t even change the family’s last name.
Much has been written about George Lucas homaged big ol’ chunks of Akira Kurasowa’s Hidden Fortress when he wrote Star Wars. That’s probably the reason people were so willing to believe the recent rumor — since debunked — that Disney had Zach Snyder working on a Star Wars universe adaptation of another Kurasowa film, Seven Samurai. (You may know it better by the title of the American remake: the classic western The Magnificent Seven.) That story could easily work in outer space. Hell, why stop there? Take the death of Qui-Gon Jinn and retell it Rashomon style.
The Odyssey in space? Why not? Look at the basic DNA of the story: it’s about a general who has been gone from home for years who gets lost and goes through many dangers and adventures on his way home, where everybody but his wife and son believe he’s dead. Gerry Dugan and Phil Noto put that story in a contemporary military setting and called the graphic novel The Infinite Horizon. The Cohen brothers dropped it into the American south and gave us O Brother, Where Art Thou? The Civil War drama Cold Mountain picks up on parts of Homer’s epic. James Joyce loosely adapted it in Ireland at the turn of the 20th century and called it Ulysses, which the Modern Library declared the best novel in 100 years.
Hell, why stop at The Odyssey? Give us space opera versions of The Iliad and The Aeneid while you’re at it. Hollywood loves a trilogy.
Good science fiction can handle almost anything you throw at it.
2 in 1 Showcase At the Movies Episode 34: Double Feature! Django Unchained/Les Miserables
In addition to the many, many other projects on my plate, friends, I also co-host a weekly podcast about comic books and pop culture. We also have periodic “at the movies” mini-episodes, where myself and my co-hosts talk about a recent film we’ve seen. In this episode, my fiance Erin and I discuss a double feature of Tarantino’s Django Unchained and the musical Les Miserables.
2 in 1 Showcase at the Movies Episode 34: Double Feature! Django Unchained/Les Miserables
How I learned to stop worrying and love ignoring the Oscars
It happened this morning, guys… the nominees for the 2013 Academy Awards were announced, and don’t we just love award season? It’s fun! It’s grand! It’s that annual time when Hollywood assembles and tells us how great they collectively are! Before going forth and spending the rest of the year giving interviews and speeches mainly to the same effect! And then starring in a movie like Rock of Ages! Woo-hoo!
It’s hard for me now, in retrospect, to believe I once looked forward to the Academy Awards, watched the presentations feverishly, tried desperately to see all of the Best Picture nominees before the awards show so I could summon up an informed sense of righteous indignation when the winners were announced and I invariably disagreed. But several years ago something happened. I don’t remember when or how, I don’t think there was any specific incident that changed my mind, but somewhere along the way I simply stopped caring who won, or why, or about any awards at all.
There are lots of little reasons, I suppose. The awards shows themselves are frequently long, boring stretches of self-congratulatory puffery occasionally punctuated by a good musical number. Far too often one of the winners will climb a political soapbox and simultaneously lower my opinion of them personally and my enjoyment of the show in general. (I don’t care what your political leanings are, I just don’t think your MTV Movie Awards acceptance speech for Best Kiss is the appropriate place to whine about the plight of the Indonesian Fruit Bat.) And finally — and most importantly — the winners themselves almost never resemble what I (or most people I know) consider to be the actual best of the year.
I know I run the risk of sounding like the woman who was shocked when Richard Nixon won the presidency because “nobody I know voted for him,” but the Academy Awards aren’t the same thing. Anybody of-age and registered can vote in a presidential election, whereas the voting body of the Academy Awards is a relatively small group of people, selected by invitation only, who do little more than inflate their own importance by declaring what they think makes a quality motion picture. Let’s look at the last ten Best Picture winners for a moment, shall we?
- 2011-The Artist
- 2010-The King’s Speech
- 2009-The Hurt Locker
- 2008-Slumdog Millionaire
- 2007-No Country For Old Men
- 2006-The Departed
- 2005-Crash
- 2004-Million Dollar Baby
- 2003-The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
- 2002-Chicago
Of these ten films, I’ve seen a grand total of — drumroll please — three. Of those three, the only one I wholeheartedly agree deserved its win was The Lord of the Rings, and I still believe that award was given to Peter Jackson and company primarily because they snubbed the trilogy so badly in the previous two years that if they didn’t give it the whole enchilada that time, the Geeks of the World would turn against them in a violent uprising. Now to be fair, of the seven winners I missed, almost all of them are movies on my perpetually-growing “I swear I’ll watch this movie some day” list, a.k.a. my NetFlix queue. I also thought The King’s Speech was an excellent movie, but if I’m being honest I thought True Grit, Inception, and Toy Story 3 were all a little bit better.
I know I’m running the risk of sounding like a sort of hipster here, but my point is not that I’m cooler than anybody because I didn’t see The Hurt Locker. My point is that if I haven’t even seen most of the winners (let alone the nominees) of the past ten years, why should the awards have any real significance for me anymore?
And this is the Oscars I’m talking about. That’s to say nothing of the dozens of other awards shows out there. The Golden Globes? Give me one reason it should matter to me what the Hollywood Foreign Press Association thinks is the best movie of the year. Screen Actor’s Guild? I actually kind of respect that as an in-industry honor, something given to a person by their peers, but that doesn’t mean it should be relevant for those of us who aren’t out there making the movies with them. The People’s Choice Awards? I’ll give them this — they’re probably a more accurate gauge of popularity than any of the other awards shows you can name, but popularity and quality are very often at odds with one another. I have a few friends — Harry Potter fans, specifically — who are despondent that Twilight beat them in the “Favorite Movie Fan Following” category this week. I’ve never heard of this category before. I’m not even I’m sure what it means — were people voting on which franchise has the “best fans?” That’s like if the NFL had a poll for which team had the “most dedicated supporters,” and the results would be almost as predictable. (The awards would go to the teams in the largest market, probably Dallas since there are two New York teams to split the vote and nothing in Los Angeles at the moment. Also, Roger Goodell would find a reason to penalize the New Orleans Saints 50,000 votes up front, just to be on the safe side.)
Hey, Harry Potter fans — cheer up. This award is utterly meaningless. And even if it wasn’t, Twilight won mainly because of the year in which the award was presented. Think about it, Harry Potter is a year and a half removed from its final movie and almost six years from the last book, whereas the last Twilight book is just four years old and the last movie (more importantly) is still playing in some theaters. Twilight is simply going through that final crest of popularity at the moment. Make yourself feel better by going to Universal Studios, confident that there will never be a Twilight theme park because nobody wants to get on a roller coaster where you climb the first hill for three hours and then somebody stops the car and talks you into walking back down without incident.
I love talking about movies as much as anybody. Obviously. And I like debating the relative quality of movies and I even like ranking my favorites, just like everybody else. But I don’t see any point in wasting my energy caring about awards shows anymore, because whether I agree or disagree with the winner, in the end the only thing to discuss is whether or not my opinion is the same as an unknown number of faceless strangers whose life experiences and biases are probably leagues removed from my own.
And honestly, once I have the answer to that question (potential answers, by the way, are simply “yes” or “no”), what else is there to possibly say?
Reel to Reel 