Not Everyone Is A Critic, But They Damned Well SHOULD Be

Hey, All You Siskels and/or Eberts!

As a member in good standing of several communities on Google + I'm constantly amazed by what people consider to be good creative works.  Now, I'm a big proponent of the concept that every movie, game, book, comic, band and T.V. show has its own built-in audience but I also know that sometimes things just plain suck.

My dad, bless his heart, used to take me to the theater quite a bit as a little kid.  Unfortunately his taste in movies was questionable at best.  I remember, even at that discriminating young age, sitting through such diverting but sketchy dreck as The Cat from Outer Space, The Land that Time Forgot, Caveman (starring Ringo Starr and Barbara Bach!) and the truly deplorable Hangar 18.  This last one was a particularly memorable experience for two reasons:

1. After being knocked out and slung over the hero's shoulder, an anonymous goon reaches up to keep his hat on his head.  Ohhhhh...
2. Before the movie started the theater inexplicably decided to show what amounts to a modern red-band trailer for a British sex comedy.  Since the audience that day consisted mainly of hormone-addled, desperately horny pre-teen boys who had never seen boobs before, the denizens of the theater (present company included) promptly lost their shit without further ado.    

As a kid, if someone asked me about a film that I was lukewarm on I'd often say something boring and non-committal like: "Well, yeah, I guess it was alright."  Looking back on it now, I'm convinced that what I really wanted to say was "that movie sucked like a Hoover".  I think I served up these milquetoast dismissals mainly because I was too polite or lacked confidence in my own judgement.  Honestly, there's nothing wrong with saying "it blows", "it rawked" or even "it was m'eh" just so long as you can articulate your position reasonably well.  Until you can do that, then you're just kidding yourself.  

So why do we do this?  Why do we have such a hard time admitting when something is wrong and/or terrible?  Perhaps it's because we've just laid down our hard-earned money for the privilege of hearing new music, reading the latest bestseller or catching up on last week's home video releases.  Even though I firmly believe that we shouldn't pirate stuff and that artists should always get paid, sometimes I can't help but feel that, half-way through a crap movie, I've been hoodwinked somehow.  After all, a fool and their money will inevitably be parted.

My interest in formal criticism was sparked years before I read the works of John Locke, Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger in University.  In fact, it all began in 1983 with the release of a little indie picture called Reveng...er...Return of the Jedi.  Now I've already recanted my troubled relationship with that flick in anal-retentive detail elsewhere (here and here for all you completest types) but a brief summation still bears repeating.

In 1983 I was totally obsessed with all things Star Wars.  I completely and utterly enthralled by the first two parts of the saga.  But after watching the final film of THE HOLY TRILOGY, I was left feeling strangely cold somehow.  It was if my best friend had been replaced by one of the Pod People from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  

I couldn't put my finger on it by I felt let down by the film somehow.  The revelations seemed ludicrous, not to mention kinda icky.  The movie looked relatively cheap and slapdash.  Compared to the modern mythos established by the first two films, the tone of Jedi felt completely juvenile and flyweight.

Since I was still completely under the thrall of Lucasfilm, I had a really hard time giving breath to my secret misgivings. If one of my friends tried to solicit my opinion about Jedi, I'd always play the apologist.  "It's good!" I'd enthuse, sounding suspiciously Stepford Wife-ish.  "I don't know if it's as good as the first two but, y'know, it's...good."

And then came that fateful day when I picked up the November 1983 issue of Starlog Magazine.  I didn't know it at the time but this historic periodical would also soon introduce me to the wild and wonderful world of Dungeons & Dragons.  But even before that happened, I bought this issue purely for noted sci-fi author Norman Spinrad's review of Return of the Jedi.  

As soon as my thirteen-year-old self was ensconced in the back seat of the family car for the return trip home I whipped open the magazine and went right for the review.  Since everything that Lucas and company had touched thus far had immediately turned to gold, I fully expected that Norman's review would act as a positive, geeky bulwark to protect my unflagging Star Wars fandom against the rising floodwaters of doubt.  But as soon as I read those first two paragraphs, I began to feel a cold chill creep over the sub-cockle region of my heart:

"I had my trepidations about reviewing Return of the Jedi and by extension, the completed Star Wars trilogy before I saw the film, and now that I have, I'm even more nervous about committing the act of lese majeste that honesty requires.  This is a dirty job but someone has to do it.

"Not to leave you in suspense, let me say at the outset that, in this reviewer's opinion, Return of the Jedi is a bad film.  It is bad on almost every possible level.  As science fiction, it is massively illogical.  As drama, it is anti-dramatic.  As action-adventure, it manages to make about two hours of almost continuous fast action and spectacular effects boring.  And as the capper to the Star Wars trilogy, it is a dreadful letdown that betrays most of what virtues the first two films in the trilogy had.

"On to the sad task of autopsy."

I was complete gobsmacked.  Over the course of four vitriolic pages, Spinrad went on to mercilessly savage the film.

At the time, I remember thinking to myself: 'Well, clearly this guy is an idiot.  He doesn't even know anything about Star Wars!'  After all, Jedi had a lot more plot then Blade Runner, which Spinrad had positively orgasmed over in a prior review.  Far from having "little or nothing to do with the rest of the film", the rescue of Han Solo served to illustrate the maturation of Luke Skywalker and his marked development as a Jedi Knight.  And never in the entire saga have the words "nuclear power" ever been uttered.       

I remembered throwing the magazine down in disgust.  If Spinrad likened his review to an autopsy then I was convinced that he should be sued for malpractice.  He even went so far as to raise the nasty specter of incest.  Incest?  In a Star Wars movie?  Seriously?  At the time I felt like a devout Muslim who'd just watched someone defile a copy of the Qur'an right in front of me.

But eventually I started to calm down and I read it again.  Yes, a lot of what Spinrad had written was ill-informed and inflammatory, but it also made me think.  The script did kinda suck.  The Luke / Leia / Han love triangle had been boringly dispensed with.  The second Death Star was a creatively bankrupt concept.  Jabba's courtiers were disgusting, the Ewoks were transparent marketing ventures and every alien looked woefully fake.  And if Lucas was aware of the relationship between Luke and Leia all along, why the hell did he let them make out with one another?  Seriously, that's just gross.

I'm telling you this because I know that it's difficult to dislodge our entrenched perspectives, even in the face of irrefutable evidence.  Slaying sacred cows often leads to irrevocable complications.  But I'm here to reassure you that it's downright imperative to do this from time to time.  Every day that goes by I grow increasingly terrified that society is getting more and more ill-informed, narrow-minded, obstinate and less discriminating.  We're far too willing to accept things at face value and embrace the mediocre.

I also know that the sort of paradigm shift that I'm proposing won't be easy since the exact same thing happened to me again as an adult back in 1999.  It took months for me to admit that The Phantom Menace makes Return of the Jedi look like friggin' Shawshank Redemption.

The moral of the story is: ask about the source of your pablum.  Take a peek behind the curtain.  Don't let your scared inner child force you to bury your head in the sand when you know full well that something is undeniably bad or terribly wrong.

EPIC REVIEW  Here it is folks, Norman Spinrad's historic diatribe against Return of the Jedi, in all its gory vitriol.  Man, talk about your Rancor monster...

(Make sure that you right-click and open each page in its own tab to read it better.) 

EPIC PLUG  You can catch my own brand of persnickety at my sister blog Entertainment Tourettes.   

THE CONSEQUENCE OF FAIL-URE  Not only will listening to our inner critic save our world, it might also cut down on some of these godawful parody movies...

  

  

       

"A Creative Force"- Part III

After poring over the arcane secrets provided by the good people at Random House I threw the Jedi storybook down in disgust.

"This can't be what really happens!" I raged. "After all, didn't 'Starlog' say that some of the actors got fake script pages just to keep the secrets safe? Maybe the storybook writer got some of those fake pages by mistake..."

But it was not to be. When I saw the film a few months later my worst fears were confirmed. Amongst my issues with the film:

* Wow, another "Death Star", huh? Real original...
* What's with all the fake-looking Muppets? Half of the creature masks look like they were cobbled together by Don Post on an adrenochrome bender.
* Han Solo may have been thawed out, but apparently he left his balls back in what was left of that carbonite block.
* Boba Fett, who's been built up as the galaxy's greatest bad-ass, dies accidentally with all the majesty of an actor in a public service television ad for workplace safety.
* Why is everything burping? Isn't there any Pepto Bismol equivalent in "A Galaxy Far, Far, Away?"
* Why is Carie Fischer acting like she's all strung out on coke? Oooooo, eeeee, sorry 'bout that...
* Leia and Luke are brother and sister?!! Look, I can handle Leia just picking Han, but this is a f#@%ing cheat! And Lucas has the gall to tell us he had this planned all along? Well, I call bull$#!% on that unless Georgie Boy had a very unconventional relationship with this sister as a kid.
* Yoda's dead? Why?! One minute he says: "Soon I will rest" and the next minute he's deader than the escaped salamander I found underneath my radiator last week.
* Ewoks. Sweet, suffering Christ I hate these fake-looking little Jeezlers. They bean themselves in the head with their slings, single handedly annihilate dramatic tension whenever they're on screen for more than five seconds, say sickeningly cutesy crap like 'Yub! Yub!" and turn in the worst piece of music at the end of a movie since "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" drove a stake through the heart of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Anyway, you get the idea. Up to this point in time, George Lucas was my creative hero. I didn't understand at the time that the first two films succeeded in spite of Lucas, who has long since proved to be a conceptual and editorial genius but a complete moron when it comes to dialogue and working in collaboration with real, talented human beings.

But at this point in time a thirteen year old kid was suddenly inspired to try and do better. It's all well and good to say something sucks, but it's another to point out exactly why it sucks and then to make it better. This is what I became fascinated by.

I'd already been encouraged to start writing back in 1979 when my Super 8 Star Wars film fell apart. I'd written an extended story based on the Disney movie The Black Hole and soon I'd find myself up in front of my class reading my latest chapter to them, serial style. The saga gained so much renown that my principal at the time took my Hilroy-scribbled manuscript and promised that he's return it only after it had been typed up and copies were made available to any student who wanted one. Wow, my first publishing offer!

Well, I'm still waiting. Asshat.

Yes, that's right, MY F#@$&*% PRINCIPAL LOST MY FIRST BOOK! Hey, I know it likely sucked like a Hoover, but I would have preferred a scathing diatribe in "The Literary Review" versus completely excising it from reality. After all, Battlefield Earth still exists, am I right? Who knows, maybe he was a mole for Disney studios and was tasked to destroy any unauthorized fan fiction on sight? I hope he didn't catch up to Mike...

Discouraged, I fell into a creative lull. Eventually my spirits were buoyed considerably by a pair neo-hippie school-teacher friends of my parents who had a Golden Retriever named Gandalf (how pimp is that?) and a huge library. They lent me a slew of books like Stuart Little and Jacob Too-Too Meets the Hooded Fang, both of which were considerable departures for me. After all, despite being a budding cinephile, up to then I'd really only read comic books and film novelizations, half of which were written quite competently by Alan Dean Foster.

One particular book of theirs that caught my attention was James Clavell's Shōgun. This was fascinating to me since I'd often caught fleeting glimpses of the miniseries on T.V. and was captivated by it. You mean books could be adapted into movies and not just the other way around? Fascinating!

So inspired, my first "original" novel was Amazōn (complete with bitchin' macron) which detailed the harrowing tale of a crew of Western sailors in the 1930's being ship-wrecked on the eponymous island, which is filled with savage tribesmen, snakes, piranha, and...rather inexplicably, dinosaurs. It was kind of a fusion between King Kong, The Most Dangerous Game and a piece of poo.

Despite it's dubious quality, Amazōn did well in local circles (read: my Grade Five class) so a sequel was soon green-lit.  Return To Amazōn also acquitted itself nicely, despite featuring a team of futuristic fighter pilots (?) now crashing on the deadly island and trying to cope with ever-escalating dangers. In order to come up with "futuristic" names for the characters I was forced to steal fabric names from my mom's electric iron settings. This resulted in the regrettably dubbed "Rick Dynel" and "Dan Fortrel" as protagonists in the novel.

With space and the future as a re-occurring theme my next novel was a real quantum-leap, the post-apocalyptic sci-fi opus Enter the Oblivion.  Oblivion was set on Earth after a nuclear war nearly destroys humanity. An advanced "friendly" alien race happens by not long after and attempts to shepherd humanity back from the brink, but, naturally, they have ulterior motives.  You knew you were reading a hard core, speculative sci-fi masterpiece when one of the characters at one point employs the use of a "thermal injector unit" to make toast.  Sheeesh.

Enter the Oblivion was never completed, mainly because I was about around the age in which I'd seen Return of the Jedi.  I'd to come to the harsh realization that what I was writing was nothing short of awful.  Enter The Oblivion was merely a blatant rip-off of the television mini-series The Day After Tomorrow and Arthur C.Clarke's Childhood's End.  I needed to find an original voice.

At the same time, as I've discussed prior, we as student in school were being encouraged more and more to abandon creative pursuits and concentrate on our Sciences and Advanced Math.  Except for occasional diversions in English or Language Class, my germ of creative writing was left to fallow.

But it would eventually return with a vengeance.

EPIC:  I've actually seen worse recruiting methods...

FAIL: Could be an omen, could be an ottoman...


And also, here's this week's Star Wars-themed comic...