Links

This post on the "Ozzie and Harriet Syndrome" reminds me, once again, that no one today who invokes Ozzie and Harriet seems to have ever seen their TV show (link via Dirk Deppey). The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is not like Leave It to Beaver, where father knows best and each episode offers a little moral about proper living. The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is much more its own thing: a precursor of both the immature dad sitcoms - like Everybody Loves Raymond - and more "experimental" sitcoms -like Buffalo Bill or Seinfeld (because, of course, conventions weren't as set in stone). For instance, in one of my favorite episodes that combines these two aspects of the show, Ozzie decides to protest the fast pace of the modern world by... staying in bed all day.

I find Jim Emerson's argument that the action movie elements in The Pineapple Express are meant to be read as "stoners imagining themselves the heroes of a movie they'd like to see" unconvincing as a literal interpretation of the movie. Despite all the evidence Jim musters, Occam's Razor leads me to think that this is more of a case of bending and mixing genres than an attempt at a story with multiple layers of reality. Still, there's a lot there to mull over and tease out regarding the way conventional narrative movies mix and match different levels of "movieness".

This piece makes a compelling case for 300 as the definitive movie of the Bush era. Some other contenders: Burn After Reading, 28 Weeks Later, Darkon, Flags of Our Fathers, Hostel, A History of Violence, The Descent, The Village, and Mystic River. Looking at this list, I'd argue that genre films manage to capture the era better than movies that try to deal with current events directly because (a) they act as allegories/metaphors with multiple possible readings/meanings (in other words they're slippery) and (b) filmmakers have more freedom with how they enact/realize/shape fantastic/unreal/"genre" elements than they do with "real world" elements (in other words they're more supple).

It's quiet here...

...but I've been busy elsewhere.

Here are some comments I (double) posted on Guillermo Del Toro on Sean T. Collins's blog.

And here's a thread I started about the Universal "Gill Man" movies on nerdnyc.

Catching Up, Part II

I owe some links:

First, David Cairns left a comment on my riff off of his essay on William Wyler. David let me know that his blog, Shadowplay, is here. I've added it to my blogroll, too. Here's an example of David doing the kind of research that I can definitely get behind.

Second, Noah Berlatsky left a link to a new site he has curated, Gay Utopia. I haven't read through everything there yet, but I did like his essay on "fecund" horror (and hope to comment in more detail later). (Also - fans of erotic horror fiction - you know who you are - should check out this story ).