So, You Want to Be the Voice of Your Generation…

Dear Mr./Miss [YOUR NAME HERE]

Congratulations! You have made a wise decision, no doubt after much consideration and with no malice aforethought. You want to be a representative of your generation on The Internet. Good for you!

In today’s hyper-realized mega-culture, too many voices constantly clamor for our attention, leaving us numb to any sort of reasoned thoughts that might exist in the aether, and often incapable of recognizing those thoughts when we stumble across them.

This is where YOU come in. Yes, you! Are you not chock-full of the attributes that constitute your arbitrarily and narrowly defined “generation?” That makes you the perfect person to step out of the crowd and make your voice heard over the din! Be an “influencer!” A “taste-maker!” Why, if you play your cards right, you might one day become “an Internet Sensation!”

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? But, hold on there, Eager Beaver. Before you go running off, nilly-willy, and start banging on your keyboard like a belligerent grotesque, there are a few things you’ll need to know in order to be the best, most intensely saturated version of your digital self that you can be. These simple principles will ensure that you appeal to the broadest possible swath of humanity, who are most often going to experience you in their worse possible state of mind, such as sitting on the toilet, or waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Five Things That Are Ruining Movies

1. The misuse and over-application of the word “trope.”

2. The misuse and over-application of the concept of a “plot hole.”
3. Deeply unqualified people telling me why the movie sucked.

4. Catastrophically angry people excoriating directors, producers, and writers for not doing enough.

5. Eagle-eyed detail-oriented people ticking off all of the mistakes a movie made, implying that the film would otherwise be a cinematic gem if X hadn’t gotten in the shot or if the scrambled eggs didn’t stop moving around on the plate in that one scene.

There’s an old saying that Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth. Well, movies are a collaborative effort between the actors and around seventy or eighty cooks. Mistakes get made. Movies aren’t a perfect story-telling medium and never have been. What they can do, they do very well, and more effortlessly than ever these days, thanks to ginormous budgets and super sophisticated computers. But “perfect” or “nearly perfect” movies are so rare, and I can’t think of a single one made after 2001.

In Defense of Bad Movies Part 2: FLAAAASSSHH!

Check out the muscles
on Blonde Conan!

In Part 1 of  In Defense of Bad Movies, I outlined the disconnect between film critics and the general public. If you want to read it, you can certainly do that. Now that I have made this particular bed, I’m going to lie in it by taking a pipe wrench to the skull of a film most beloved and personal to the Geek Nation. Let’s all watch some people’s heads explode. Fun!

Since I mentioned Flash Gordon (1980) in Part 1 as an example of a bad movie, I thought it would be worthwhile to explain why I think this is so. Before you start typing your hate mail, there's some objective criteria below that you ought to look at. I put pictures in the post, so you wouldn't have to just take my word for it. If you make it all the way to the end and still feel triggered, just follow this link over to my Facebook page and let fly with your invective. I'm bracing myself for impact. Okay, enough of that; let's go tip some sacred cows!

In Defense of Bad Movies Part 1: Somewhere Between High Art and Cult Classic

I’m writing a lot about old movies at the moment on both of my current blogs. Finn’s Top 5 is happening over at the Finn’s Wake blog, and my biased look back at the fantasy films of the 1980s that informed our Dungeons and Dragons games is happening over at Confessions of a Reformed RPGer. I like writing about film; I have been a professional reviewer and critic for many years now, and I’ve been named one of the top movie reviewers in Texas by the Associated Press Managing Editors several times. You may also know that I am co-owner of a movie theater in North Texas that plays first-run movies on two screens, which is kind of like a unicorn in today’s market.