What about the fantasy-adventure genre?

Strange Fantasy 01
 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The critical approach that I'm taking for my research project is genre criticism, and the film I'm analyzing is Percy Jackson & the Olympians:  The Lightning Thief.  My understanding of this approach is that it looks at how a film fits into an established genre, or doesn't.  Science fiction and fantasy is one of those genres, as is Action/Adventure, and it seems that my film fits into both, but it's not really science fiction or action:  it's fantasy-adventure.  Beyond that, it is also part of a subgenre that features kids as the heroes. 

And there's the problem for me as well as the benefit.  It seems to me that I'm going to be trying to identify and define a new(ish) category, so there might not be a lot of material available on this genre (bad) while I will have to do a lot to explain my model (good, in terms of meeting the length requirement).  Not only that but I have to include a lot of different films if I stick to what I have so far.  The characteristic that all of them share is that the adults are not involved in the stories except as villains or advisors (and their advice is frequently ignored by the kids).  However, I think that I have to exclude all of the teen-dystopia films (like The Hunger Games), because some of them are almost horror films, going all the way back to the first Halloween, which actually is a horror film.  And that's just the start! 

This is going to take a lot of thinking.  I'm hoping to get started on my library research in the next week.

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Angry Men (Last Post for the Semester)



Angry Penguin (Photo credit:
Wikipedia)

I wrote the following last night and sent it off to my prof, just making the midnight deadline.

I learned a lot this term about men and anger, and I wasn't the only one.  One of my classmates did her analysis on the film Training Day, based on her belief that the main character's need to "lash out" came from issues with his father (who was not in the home when he was growing up).  According to what she found, there is considerable cultural support for that kind of behavior; she referred to a song by Tupac Shakur about the problem that fully described the emotions involved. 
Another student (and I can't remember what film he used) was looking at how men rank each other, and anger, that is, not showing anger, was an important factor.  It seems to me that this is actually true across the board, even in the urban setting of Training Day.   I don't enjoy crime dramas, and I think the main reason is that they tend to present people -- both criminals and police --acting out their issues through rage, which I think is a cheap way to heighten drama.  Maybe that's why I prefer science fiction (and westerns, for that matter):  the men in those films tend to need a lot of self-control to get the job done.  And maybe I've learned something else.  Are men who can't control their anger capable of accomplishing anything?   

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Rebecca and The Raven

Edgar Allan Poe's reburial and new monument,
Oct. 1, 1875. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was going to write this right after we got back from the movies, but one thing led to another, and I didn't get to it until now.  I learned a lot about Edgar Allan Poe while Rebecca and I were talking about The Raven on the way home (for the record, we both enjoyed it.  A lot.).  For one thing, I found out that she likes to play a Poe video game (you can play it for free at Pogo) that is about Poe's mysterious death, which the movie explains in an interesting way.  Reb says that there is no good explanation anymore, because everyone who might have known went to the grave without talking.  According to her, Poe's drinking problem was not that he drank too much; it was that he became very drunk on very small amounts of liquor, so alcohol poisoning (one of the popular solutions to the mystery) won't fly. 
She cracked up during the pit and the pendulum murder in the movie, because the victim was Rufus Griswold, whom she says is the big villain in Poe's life.  Griswold was a critic who managed somehow to get the rights to Poe's works after he died, and cheated Poe's aunt along with writing a variety of untrue and nasty things about Poe (according to Reb).  She thought it was pretty funny that the filmmakers killed him (and that they killed him that way).  She had a lot more to say about Poe's life, but I need to stop for now.

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Dracula Girl Goes Western

A screenshot from Dracula Italiano: Uno screenshot del film Horror Express (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It just occurred to me that I didn't mention my sister when I was writing about my research project, and I should have.  Rebecca is really into movies, and I talked to her a lot about Cowboys & Aliens.  Her favorite films are classic horror (Dracula, etc.), and she's been watching all the episodes of Dark Shadows (Netflix loves her) to get ready for the new movie that's coming out, but she was interested in how I was analyzing my movie.  She had never heard of men's studies before, and she watched the movie with me a couple of weeks ago (I had to watch it all the way through, since I kept forgetting about everything but the three scenes I was working on).  Her take on the genre-mixing was that it made it easier to nail down exactly what makes a western a western, and that is a need to show men with a purpose.  What she meant is that the guys in westerns know who they are and what they are doing -- no whining, no angst (except the drunks).  She said something like, "they show what men can be under the right circumstances."  Like when aliens show up. 

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Gimme the LARGE Popcorn!



Tomorrow begins the last week of spring semester, and I should be getting ready for finals.  But I'm not.  I'm going to the movies.  For fun.  Yay!  I don't have to think about anything if I don't want to, and that's just what I need right now.
My sister and I are going to see The Raven.  She's a big fan of Poe (she used to be kinda goth), so this is a natural for her.  I'm taking Masterpieces of American Literature over the summer, so I can pretend to myself that this will be helpful with that.  Ha!  It's funny how I feel as if I have to justify spending a couple hours away from my homework.
I hope it's better than Roger Ebert thinks.  At the very least, I can write about it later, which is good, because I still need a few more entries in my research journal (due this Friday!).

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What I found

Image via WikipediaI mentioned last time that I have learned a lot about men's studies, but I didn't get into the actual sources.  I'm almost finished with my annotated bibliography, and here are a few of the more interesting sources.
Brod, Harry, ed.  The Making of Masculinities:  The New Men's Studies.  Boston:  Allyn and Unwin, 1987.  Like many of the books I found, this one is not terribly recent, but it was very helpful in understanding the way men's studies developed and its connections to other gender-based theories.  (It's a collection of articles, so I got several entries for my bib.  Yay!)
Cohan, Steven and Ina Rae Hark.  Screening the Male : Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema.  New York : Routledge, 1993.  This is interesting, especially with the ongoing changes in how American culture shifts with regard to how it defines masculinity and concepts related to masculinity.
Lehman, Peter.  Masculinity:  Bodies, Movies, Culture.  New York:
Routledge, 2001.  It's amazing to me how many scholarly books there are about men and film.  This one has some different ideas than the two above, and it really helped me get at how to write about film using this critical approach.
Powrie, Phil and Ann Davies.  The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema.  London: Wallflower Press, 2004.  Not finished looking at this one yet, but I have great hopes--the Bond films are not actually Hollywood films, so I need material on that.
 

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My proposal-- What's the big deal with James Bond, anyway?

Image via WikipediaI'm having some trouble narrowing down my research question for the proposal (luckily, Dr. Toffee changed the due date to Wednesday).  I had a draft ready last Wednesday, but I'm not happy with it.  Also, I've been reading some of the material I've found on men's studies, and that's given me a lot to think about, too.  The question I put in the title of this post is actually pretty close to what I'm looking for:  I want to know what men -- and boys, for that matter -- get out of James Bond films.  I mean, there are plenty of movies with similar characters and plots, but the Bond films seem to touch something in men that the others don't.  I'll keep working on this today; I've got to come up with something soon.

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Just gettin started

Image via WikipediaI meant to post last week (first week of the semester), but there was some confusion with my registration, and it took up a lot of my time.  So, here I am, trying to find a research topic for my English 102 class.  I'm supposed to start by looking at who I am and what I'm interested in.  Well, I'm 18, in my first year of college, from a middle-class family (second of three kids) in the Chicago suburbs, and I have no real idea yet of what career I want to have.  Politically, I guess I'm an independent; I don't know if I'll ever follow one of the two major parties, since I don't agree enough with either of them so far to pick one.  As for hobbies, I don't have any, at least none that I consider hobbies.  I love movies (you could say that I collect DVDs, I guess; I've got a lot of them), even silent films, although I haven't seen too many.  I like music, but I'm not obsessive about it, unlike some people I could name.  
I think I'd like to research something about movies, but I don't know what.  That's all I can think of right now, unfortunately.

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Body Talk

I've been working my way through the Tasker book (Tasker, Yvonne, Ed. Action and Adventure Cinema. London: Routledge, 2004.), and it's really interesting.  I can already see that there are ideas I can apply to my project, even though -- of course -- they are writing about different movies.  One of those ideas has to do with bodies.  Apparently Tasker previously wrote a book about what she calls "muscular cinema" (she's a Brit), talking about the action films of the 1980s, when Stallone and Schwarzenegger were the big stars.  It's easy to see where she's coming from; just think of Rambo, and you can see a picture of Stallone where he's all sweaty and bulging with muscles.  Things changed when Die Hard was released, since Bruce Willis is obviously not of the same physical type.  
About half the authors of the articles in this book refer to the body issue.  One of the articles I like so far is by Steve Neale, titled "Maximus Melodramaticus:  Masculinity, Masochism and White Male Paranoia in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema."
Unfortunately, Neale writes in a pretty dense style, from my point of view, at least.  Here's an example:
"This distinctly fetishistic adulation surrounding Maximus/Crowe's quasi-bestial masculine persona belies a return of the repressed:  a nostalgic longing for a mythic masculine essence, a phallic presence  rather than a bricolage of 'decorative' and commodified signifiers.  Of course, this is exacerbated by the generic throwback to the 1950s epic and the national masculine certitude it worked to represent" (Neale 244).
See what I mean?  Quasi-bestial?   Bricolage?
Anyway, I'm trying to figure out where Robert Downey Jr. fits in the grand scheme of things in the action hero timeline.  My problem has to do with a movie of his that I saw a long time ago, Restoration.  There's a scene in that film where RD is naked -- with feathers -- and at one point he is walking away from the camera.  Far from being a hard body (even as hard as Willis), he's pretty flabby.  Not fat, but completely untoned, if you know what I mean.  And every time I see him in a film nowadays, I have that mental picture.  I wish I'd never seen it. 

My Research Question

Image via Wikipedia

I almost forgot that I am supposed to come up with a research question this week.  It's hard to think of a way to word it.  I want to know if the Sherlock Holmes in the movie is faithful (for lack of a better word) to the SH in the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle because I think that the character in the film owes a lot to the kind of action heroes you see in movies nowadays.  In fact, there are a couple of scenes that reminded me of other movies, especially the chase on foot at the beginning of Casino Royale.

So, how about:  is the Ritchie/Downey Sherlock Holmes the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes, or is it a serious distortion?

I noticed that the film stresses a lot of the seedier aspects of the stories, but I put that down to the modern love of scandal.  The Victorians probably loved it, too, but I think the average person then didn't know much about how many terrible things were going on.  I could be wrong.  We'll see.

What do I really want?

Image via Wikipedia

So, I've been thinking about Sherlock Holmes (the movie, that is), and my father, who grew up on Sherlock Holmes (the stories and the TV series), said that I might want to look at how different the character is in the movie from the stories themselves.  That sounds like a good idea, but I don't want to settle for that right now, in case I think of something better before tonight, when I have to post it to the online discussion for the class.


One idea I had was that the movie was kind of like a James Bond movie.  I'm not sure if I think that because of the plot or because of Holmes being so active.  I always thought he was more of a guy who thinks his way through a mystery than a guy who goes out looking for clues and facing dangerous situations, but in the movie, that's what he does.  I'm not really sure where this could go.  I'm supposed to start trying to come up with a research question, and I think I can do it with this, but how do I know whether or not I'm wasting my time?  What if I do a lot of work on this idea, and it doesn't come through for me?