February 23, 2016
Hello, blog readers, this is Neil again. This week's assignment was to do something similar to last week's, which was defending a band or musical artist I like from hypothetical haters. This time, it's defending a movie I like from hypothetical haters. The term "movie", however, is somewhat hard to define nowadays. Most people that desire high-quality writing and storytelling in this day and age go for television (the most consistently cited TV channels for high-quality work are AMC, BBC America, FX, HBO, Cinemax, IFC, Showtime, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Instant Video, and many say that Adult Swim, Comedy Central, USA Network, Cartoon Network, Disney XD, and Hulu are beginning to reach similar levels with their programming), and thanks to the advent of binge-watching, TV seasons are often organized like longer movies now. Plenty of my favorite things nowadays (The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit trilogies, The Lego Movie, the Jurassic Park series, the original Back to the Future and Ghostbusters films, The Wizard of Oz, the Disney Animated Canon, Pixar, DreamWorks Animation) are movie franchises, so those could all serve as traditional "movies". The TV shows I like (The WB/CW's Smallville; BBC's Doctor Who; Adult Swim's Moral Orel, Rick and Morty, and The Venture Bros.; Cartoon Network's Ben 10, Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated, Steven Universe, and We Bare Bears; Comedy Central's South Park; Disney Television Animation's Gravity Falls, Kim Possible, and Star vs. the Forces of Evil; Fox's American Dad, Family Guy, Futurama, and The Simpsons; FX's Archer; Netflix's BoJack Horseman and F is For Family; Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender/The Legend of Korra, Danny Phantom, and Invader Zim; and most of the anime I watch) could all be seen like movies when viewing certain episodes in a certain way at a certain time, and thanks to both people editing clips together on YouTube to make them appear to be movies and the popularity of Let's Play videos, the video game franchises that I like (Portal, Mortal Kombat, Okami, games in the Super Mario Bros. franchise in which his brother Luigi has a major role) can be consumed in a similar manner to movies. I remember in one of last year's assignments, the one in which I had to describe the five movies I would want on a deserted island with me, I decided to make one of them a 10-hour Let's Play, which is not a movie in the slightest and would need to be on a computer with internet access to work at all, something that is unlikely to be available on a deserted island, and justified it by a fellow classmate playing fast and loose with the assignment by turning it into a very odd story before describing the films, and none of the movies were even movies she liked; she only included all of them because they all had character actor Adrien Brody in them and it added to the paper's "humor". Now I realize just how ridiculous I was being and shall choose a genuine movie for the subject of this blog post. Perhaps, rather than do a blog post on one of the films or film-like products above, I shall write about a film I saw recently and liked a lot- Deadpool.
Deadpool is my favorite Marvel Comics character, and a movie for the character has been desired by many fans for a very long time now. The first time didn't end very well, with a bizarre in-name-only character appearing in X-Men Origins: Wolverine played by Ryan Reynolds. He was a fan of the character and knew that this take on him wasn't very good, so he set out to make a more faithful adaptation of the character, which finally came to fruition a little over a week ago. The movie was, for the most part, critically acclaimed due to Reynolds' performance and the meta-humor, though a handful of critics criticized the film for the exact same reasons. People's opinions varied, with the most common negative one being that some felt that the movie was over-reliant on juvenile humor that would only be found funny by teenage boys too young to see the movie, and some even going so far as to say that it is disgustingly bad, uses terms it doesn't truly understand to feel narcissistically smart and self-serving, and will set up a wave of other bad films trying to emulate its style. Something that often happens to movie critics is that they believe that their opinion is the only one that matters, and that they are the end-all-be-all of consumer media quality and the ethical, intellectual, logical, and philosophical ideas that come with it. Maybe I'm wrong in how I view movies. Maybe I am wrong for not seeing what these people see as problems as such. And yet, I suppose that the only people who truly know whether it's "correct" to find humor in lowbrow jokes are all dead. I didn't find the film to rely too much on them, and think it had a perfect balance between Deadpool's man-child behaviors, meta-jokes about the superhero film genre, gun-and-sword slapstick violence, and a surprise sense of heart buried under all of the rest, but maybe that's because I'm not as enlightened as those who go into journalism. Is a critic's job to simply provide opinions or to protect the public from poor-quality media and ensure that they see the high-quality media?
Regardless, the point is simple- Deadpool is awesome and expressing dislike of it on grounds of juvenile humor while acting like all educated people that hear you say that will agree with you is digging yourself in a very deep hole of pretentiousness. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week.
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