Judging a Movie by its Cover
One advantage of having no sense of taste at all, is that I can enjoy highbrow stuff like Shakespeare and Milton and Homer, but also I can enjoy simple pleasures with undiminished affection.
After all, highbrow stuff is just lowbrow stuff with more good stuff in it, by which I mean, in the case of Shakespeare, ghosts and witches and fairy kings and people getting run through with swords, and in the case of Milton, war in heaven between archangels clad in gold and adamantium. In the case of Homer, there are more fight scenes on the windy plains of Troy than there are in Jackie Chan’s DRUNKEN MASTER, which consists of a fight scene leading to a fight scene with a fight scene in between, and Jackie’s doomed friend Patrocles donning his armor to face the ninja-assassin master Hector, unless I am confusing the two. Then, of course, Jackie is out for revenge, and so he has to undergo intense training with the help of a magic book of fighting techniques, or maybe his mother the goddess gets him better armor — one of those two. I remember there was fighting. Then Luke blows up the entire invulnerable city of Troy with a lucky shot into the lower thermal exhaust port. Which the stolen plans revealed was the only point of Achilles not dipped in the moat of hell, and therefore his one hidden weak spot.
So this appeals to me. Take a look.
But there are some lowbrow movies that just have titles that makes me wish I had been inspired or bold enough to come up with them. COWBOYS VERSUS ALIENS. Tells you everything you need to know in three words. That is true art. Three words, the middle one of which can be abbreviated into two letters.
If wanting to see Cowboys shoot and be shot by Aliens is wrong, I don’t want to be right. Yee-hawh. MONSTERS VERSUS ALIENS might be a prequel, KRAMER VERSUS KRAMER and of course GODZILLA VERSUS THE SMOG MONSTER has the all important word “VERSUS” in it.
Now, Hollywood often mucks with superheroes, but in this short commercial, I did not get that “They made Green Hornet from a Racketbuster into a Dork” vibe. Instead I see all my favorite things: power lantern, crashed space ship, the guy is a test pilot, thank you very much, and Kyle Rainer is not the real Green Lantern. The look of it is very good.
Will it be better than Homer’s ILIAD or the Bruce Timm’s JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED cartoon? These are high threshold difficult to cross. But, after a lifetime of being a small and despised ghetto, we science fiction geeks and gekkettes finally have major Hollywood movies made about the stories at the very core of our weird little hearts, and an occasional disappointment in a film will not take that away.
Our parents read books, like Hemmingway’s TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, or GONE WITH THE WIND, or Raymond Chandler’s THE BIG SLEEP, or TRUE GRIT, and so in our parent’s day they made films out of the books their audience knew and loved in youth, so nostalgia helped bring in ticket sales. Our generation read comics, played video games, and watching television sitcoms, so we get SPIDERMAN and MORTAL KOMBAT and GET SMART. BUT also our favorite books come to the screen, and at no point previously could what our imaginations demanded from books been placed on the screen.
The includes some of my favorite books of all time.
Now, if they would only make SLAN by A.E. Van Vogt or EMPHYRIO by Jack Vance into a faithful movie adaptation, my happiness would be complete.
Slan by Van Vogt
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
