And Then There's the Gladiator Genre

Gladiator fights at "Brot und Spiele", Germany's biggest Roman festival (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Everytime I think I'm starting to get a handle on things, I come across a new source that forces me to rethink everything I thought I had resolved.  This time, it's my mom.  I was talking to her yesterday about how much work this is turning out to be, and she wanted to know all about it.  When I told her about my neo-mythology idea, she said, "you mean like gladiator movies?"  Aargh!  So, I had to ask what that meant, and I'll just summarize her explanation.

Gladiator movies, according to Mom, were all over the place in the '50s and '60s, especially at drive-ins and on late-night television.  The hero was obviously a bodybuilder and was usually dressed in a way that exposed his chest and most of his legs.  He always won his fights through his superior strength, and you could never remember the storyline afterwards.

This sounds to me like what they call pepla, and I'll have more to say about that next time.

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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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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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A Plan of Action

Image via Wikipedia

I'm getting a jump on next week; I just checked the course site, and Toffee has posted the journal prompt for week 9 of the semester.  She wants us to talk about how we "want to compose" our essays.  This is kind of an interesting idea.  I've never written about what I plan to write, unless you count outlining, which she says not to do for this entry.

I think I actually started doing this in the last couple of entries.  I selected Nathan Heller's review/article about the film because it's representative of all the reviews that complained about Sherlock Holmes being too action-oriented to be faithful to the Conan Doyle stories.  I'm thinking now that the point I brought up last time about Watson might just explain the difference; I talked to my father about it, and he agrees (gave me a few good ideas, too).  In all but a couple of the stories, Watson is the narrator, and we see everything from his point of view.  For a former army officer, Watson is also pretty stuffy and judgmental -- a real Victorian, according to my dad -- and it's clear in the stories I've read so far that he doesn't tell us everything he knows that we would like to know, too.  That bit I quoted from "The Musgrave Ritual" is a good example, and I think I'll use that story as my main comparison with the film.  He also brushes over a lot of action, especially travel.  SH really gets around, according to Watson, but the doctor just says that they went from point A to point B (and sometimes the whole rest of the alphabet) without giving any of the details of the trips or describing the places they travel through.  The film, however, does NOT use Watson's point of view, and now that I think of it, I guess I've never seen a SH film that does (and thanks to my dad, I've seen plenty).   I read something in one of my sources, which I guess I'll have to find now, about Watson being an "unreliable narrator."  That seems to sum up the problem I see.  He has his own personality quirks that lead him to criticize Holmes for various things and to praise Holmes for things that he (Watson, that is) approves of.  Watson isn't ever going to talk about things he thinks should not be talked about in public, and he's not going to tell us stuff that he thinks we should already know, like what Mayfair looks like as opposed to Stepney (which he does describe, in "The Six Napoleons"). 

So, it appears that my thesis is being revised already!  I'm not sure how to word it, but it's something like how everything Heller is noting as a deviation from the stories is only a deviation if you believe that Watson's point of view is the only point of view that matters.  Well, this is going to take more thought than I thought it would.

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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. 

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?