AudioShocker

A friend of mine recently asked me if I was interested in going and seeing the new Kevin Smith movie, Zack and Miri Make a Porno. I had to politely decline; I’ve never been a fan of Kevin Smith. I never could even make it through the entirety of Clerks. The appeal of his films is beyond me. I guess Mallrats was okay, and that part in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back where Jay raps a rap with lots of swearing (another friend of mine, back in college showed me just that clip from that movie, knowing that I would find it to be funny even though I don’t like Kevin Smith (Culturology Rule of Comedy #1: Swearing is Funny)). In fact, its been a pretty rugged Autumn for movies this year. Or maybe it’s just because there were so many good movies that came out last year (the highlights of last year being Eastern Promises, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood).

Actually, though, its good to know that last year was good for movies. As much as I’d like the motto of Culturology to be “Live for Now” (I looked for an audio and/or video for the Iron Cross song to match that, but unfortunately couldn’t find one), it seems to be more the case that I will always feel not quite up to date when trying to confront popular culture on a weekly basis. But other then the new Bond movie in a couple of weeks and the new Darren Aronofsky movie coming sometime in the winter, there ain’t a whole lot to be looking forward to, movie-wise. But I really brought up Kevin Smith so that I can brag about my one connection to Kevin Smith movies:

In the movie Dogma, early-on, I think (I’m not really sure, I only saw the movie once, and that was a long time ago (can you believe it? I don’t like movies that are supposedly edgy comedies with religious-conservative values at their core), the Devil takes the main female protagonist to a Mexican restaurant (maybe the restaurant is hell or something?). But at any rate, the Mexican restaurant at which they shot that scene is right down the street from where I grew up in Pittsburgh. I’ve eaten there many a time. Even funnier, the Mexican restaurant in question is in the middle of the suburbs, and is called the Ben Franklin Inn. That’s right, they’re not even trying to pretend to be authentic in anyway. But I guess their pseudo-Mexican decor was good enough for Kevin Smith!

My attitude towards Kevin Smith is in some way similar to my attitude towards Oliver Stone. They both seem inexplicably popular to me. Both have maybe made a couple good movies, but seem to be extraordinarily overrated given that they tend to produce flawed, oftentimes just plain boring films. I pretty well buy into the cult of the director-as-auteur (as already intimated, many of my favorite directors are definitely in this category (P.T. Anderson, the Coen Brothers, David Cronenberg (I recently had a reference to the movie Scanners fall utterly flat at a Halloween party I was attending–pretty awesome (both the movie and the failed reference to it)), Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, etc.). But somehow Smith and Stone have these cults that surround them even though their movies are mostly crap.

Maybe it’s an issue where trying to make a distinction between movies and films would be useful. Though that kind of distinction-making is hard to do without just falling into blatant elitism, perhaps we can say that a film defines its own parameters for being viewed/read, and movie operates unironically within excepted style standards as defined by studios and marketers. Smith, almost certainly, would agree that he’s interested in making movies; Stone I’m not so sure of. And don’t just think that I call things that I like that are all artsy-fartsy “films” and swill that I hate “movies”–there are definitely good movies (see “Things that it is Okay to Like #1″) and just as many bad “films” as there are bad “movies” (in fact, they’re probably even worse). But I figured I’d introduce the notion (film vs. movie) here to see if it’s actually functional.

It’s generally accepted (I think) rhetorical praxis to consider all cultural artifacts as texts that can be read, whether music, film, books, clothing, design, or whatever. What this distinction between movies and film might be useful for, then, is determining how, exactly, a given cinematic artifact wants to be read. Michael Bay certainly wouldn’t want us to approach his movies as anything but mindless entertainment (for a great joke about Bay, see South Park’s “Imaginationland” episodes) and compare him to, say, Bergman, but Jim Jarmusch almost certainly begs for the comparison to Bergman. I think it’s generally the case that a given movie/film tells us how we want to consider it. For example, Donnie Darko (yes, it’s a movie that I never get tired of hating on), begs its viewers to see it as a David Lynch-esque dark, complicated film, but in fact it’s just another nostalgia-driven suicide-fantasy movie. Or American Beauty, with all of its pretensions and quasi-independent trappings, still being a run-of-the mill, shallow, misogynist suburban melodrama movie.

And of course, given these distinctions in readings, the measures of success are different as well. American Beauty, like, won awards, right? It was (maybe) a great movie. But appraised as film, it falls well short of being readable on its own terms. Somewhere lurking behind this discussion is the broader issue of capitalism versus socialism and the cult of art for art’s sake, with the central inquiry being whether the profit economy can ever generate cutlural goods whose truth-value trascend their exchange-value, but I probably shouldn’t get into that here (or, not yet, anyway). I’m mostly curious–is it reasonable/useful to try and make this distinction between art film and commercial movies?

Things that it is Okay to Like

4) AC/DC. They only enter into this conversation (the conversation of things that are okay to like) because of their recent decision to have their latest albums distributed only through Wal-Mart. I think the problem with this is clear, since Wal-Mart is one of the evilest things in existence these days. I haven’t actually listened to the new album as of yet (I refuse to shop at Wal-Marts so it may be a while), but it’s been pretty well received/reviewed, so far as I can tell. It’s generally not the case that I personally have AC/DC recordings on hand to, like, rock out with when the urge for such out-rocking calls, but I tend to think their music, like, rocks. Good tracks. I can only assume that they’re getting old, and some marketing people said something to the extent of “The album is a dying concept anyway, blokes, and if you release it through Wal-Mart only, we’ll pay you this much more.” Or perhaps even more likely, the decision may well have been barely theirs to make, so I struggle to hold it particularly against them. My approval of them as likable I suppose just has to do with the fact that they still exist, and that seems fine. Sort of like how it’s impossible to dislike the Rolling Stones, even though they’ve been making boring-ass terrible music since, oh 1971 or so.

Things that it is Not Okay to Like

4) 30 Rock. I’ve only watched one or two episodes of this show. I guess they weren’t terrible. But what’s with the hype surrounding it? Alec Baldwin and Tracy Morgan are actually funny, but it seems like the show gets most of the “buzz” that it gets (or has gotten much of the “buzz” that it has) because of Tina Fey. She was the head writer on SNL during its worst-ever years (though, I guess I wasn’t really watching it in the ’80s, and apparently it sucked then too), and sucked at everything that she did on the show. Mean Girls? Totally overrated. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and argue that people like 30 Rock because Tina Fey is a woman, and thank God, we finally have a funny woman on the TV, writing funny things for people that want to laugh. Post-feminism at its worst. And I’m not arguing that men are funnier, or that women are inherently not funny (I think Amy Poehler is very funny, for instance (especially in her non-SNL endeavors)), just that people give Fey more credit than she deserves only because she’s apparently bucking the patriarchy. I’d like the patriarchy to be bucked just as much as the next guy. I just wish it was someone funnier doing it.