Too Cool for Film School

There’s a certain attitude towards cinema which drives me to despair, which I’ve previously dubbed ‘too cool for film school’…

This peculiar mindset is one that would rather watch an obscure bad movie ironically than spend that same 2 hours watching a universally lauded good movie. So, instead of sitting down to watch Southern Comfort you’d instead waste your life suffering thru Streets of Fire. Instead of enjoying Scorsese at his best with Goodfellas you’d be tortured by Scorsese at his worst with New York, New York, supposedly so that you could spend your time laughing at its awfulness (except that it’s too awful to even sneer at, you just sigh; depressed and confused). Preferring to watch an obscure bad movie ironically than a universally lauded good movie I find inexplicable. It’s the same impulse that would en masse see a faculty meeting to decide a Victorian literature course begin with “We can all agree, no Dickens”, and a cheer.

Is it a hipster mindset? This is The End has a wonderful barb when Emma Watson accuses Jay Baruchel of being a hipster by asking him if he loathes films that are universally beloved. And that is certainly part of the thinking that prevailed when the Screen cinema in 2010 did a season of 1980s action movies, and left out Die Hard. Now Die Hard was an obvious choice, but that’s because it’s so obviously better than every other action film from that decade; especially Red Dawn, which was screened, presumably because it’s so bad it can be watched with impeccable irony. We seem to have reached belatedly in the cinema the position literature reached years ago where to be popular is in fact a mark against a work in critical esteem, unless it’s a critical intervention elevating low culture.

It’s a mindset of two halves. What is important is that, having eschewed what is popular, the people who are too cool for film school reveal their superiority of taste to the easily pleased and shallowly-informed rabble by unveiling an alternative which few people have either heard of and which may be offbeat or just plain awful. What’s truly terrifying is that it really doesn’t matter whether the film is either offbeat or just plain awful – the difference between good and bad, garbage and quality has been erased; it just needs to be something that few people have either heard of in order to get the kudos of really knowing your movies. It seems the advent of Netflix, and its padding of its catalogue with terrible old films they were able to scoop up, is only encouraging this viewing mindset.

Hollywood Babylon, Dublin’s Midnight Movie Film Club, is tonight once again hosting a Saturday night screening at 10:45pm at the Lighthouse cinema focusing on 1984. Their schedule is somewhat baffling. There’s good movies to be sure; Beverly Hills Cop, Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom (September 14^th), The Terminator (October 19^th); but there are also questionable choices; Dune (August 17^th), Revenge of the Nerds (July 13^th); and then there’s the plain ghastly picks – Purple Rain, Streets of Fire (October 19^th). What exactly is the purpose of choosing Purple Rain or Streets of Fire? Or even Dune or Revenge of the Nerds? There are better films from 1984… For a fun Saturday night why not pick Ghostbusters or Gremlins? For something more offbeat why not pick Luc Besson’s freewheeling debut Subway? Is it impossible to have fun without being ironic?

I’m not saying that if we want to watch movies from 1984 that we have to watch The Killing Fields, The Natural, and 1984 and nod our heads respectfully before turning to Broadway Danny Rose for some relief. I’m just saying we should exhaust the good movies that we all know are out there first before we all start scrabbling around to find justifiably forgotten bad movies to watch ironically.

Red Dawn Remake Reignites Korean War

Red Dawn sat on the shelf for three years as the studio worried that its replacing of the original Soviet villains with Chinese villains would hurt it in the Chinese market. Little did they suspect their ingenious post-production fix would reignite the Korean War writes B. Bradley Bradlee from Pyongyang.

This horse is confirmed by three deep background sources to have worked on The Hobbit films as a saboteur for North Korean intelligence.

The evil empire of Soviet Russia never once held the same importance as somewhat Communist China does now when it comes to overseas box-office receipts for the American film industry. So it was that the studio behind the remake of Red Dawn, regularly cited as one of the top 5 films of the 1980s alongside Raging Bull, decided to use extensive CGI to convert the film’s invading Chinese army into an invading North Korean army. Sources refused to comment on whether the marketing department planned to use even more extensive CGI to convince Chinese cinemagoers this CGI villain-swap-out never happened.

But now that Red Dawn (2013) has finally been released in overseas territories around the world it has had the unexpected effect of reigniting the Korean War. Since M*A*S*H ended its run in 1983 the conflict has been justly dubbed the forgotten war, and, bar a flurry of interest around the time of the season one finale of Mad Men, has not troubled the public imagination until the recent reminder that the War never officially ended – an armistice had just put it on permanent suspension; not unlike the dormant 2012 Campaign of Rick Santorum for the Republican Nomination for President.

Little is known for sure about Kim Jong-Un’s character or his foreign policy intentions, but a number of recent off the record comments from former classmates at his elite Swiss school suggest an ironic love of bombastic action movies. This must make us fear the worst according to a senior analyst at the FBI who specialises in cinematic cliché. Clearly Kim Jong-Un has seen the remake of Red Dawn, and, inspired by the film’s first act depiction of an invasion so successful that Washington DC cedes Washington State to North Korea, has ramped up the rhetoric on the international stage.

He does so with an ace up his sleeve, derived from his father’s complete collection of David Mamet-scripted films. Kim, inspired by 1998’s satire Wag the Dog, obviously intends to convince his people that they have successfully attacked mainland America by screening selected scenes from Red Dawn on state television as news footage of their invasion. Recurring Hawaii Five-O guest star Will Yun Lee will be hailed as a great hero of the North Korean people. There can be no doubt that Kim is counting on his people’s ignorance of Chris Hemsworth’s career. He did not suppress Thor for nothing…

B. Bradley Bradlee is the fictional editor of The New York Times. This article was first published in the weekly German magazine Die Emmerich Uhr.