I can't always be a bottom-feeder...

The Cap'n realizes he's been talking about "bad movies" a great deal lately. I do apologize for that as festivals or "theme" weekends do tend to dominate the conversation in the week(s) leading up to events.

If you are visiting this site for the first time (and I've noticed some of you coming in through interesting google searches, particularly ones involving Lost Highway and Tommy Wiseau), I did want to let you know that those sorts of thematic crutches are more the exception and less the norm. I do frequently draw upon "trash" cinema, but there are a number of other topics within film I'm keen on digging into.

Alas, I don't quite have the time to delve into them right now, as there's a lot of reading left to do before Friday, but after coverage of Bad Movie Weekend, I'd like to return to the subject of adaptations / remakes and their periodic erasure of source material in the discourse of film. Eventually I'll get back into my theory of how the Drive-In culture sustained the "independent film" movement between major cities, and I have some other ideas cooking up. To prove to you this isn't some sort of ruse, I present a brief critical dissection of Joss Whedon's web sensation, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

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There were some terribly interesting discussions in American Manhood today about Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which I did finally see on Sunday. While overall I think that it's far more entertaining than Dollhouse has been so far, valid issues were raised about Penny's lack of agency in the story (other than being the "angelic white savior" stereotype, there's very little she does or says character-wise). For the most part Penny is a device (as opposed to a character), either for redemptive purposes (Dr. Horrible) or sexual ends (Captain Hammer). The absence of race in Dr. Horrible was also interesting, and there were a number of discussions that dealt with the substitution of "white" for other ethnicities and the pros and cons not explored by Whedon.

For the most part, this came up because in principle Dr. Horrible is a subversive work: it comes out of the writer's strike, bypasses television altogether by being released (initially) free on the internet. However, the project does conform to a number of normative storylines and character "types", regardless of how it works to displace masculinity. It does reinforce a heteronormative narrative despite a strong undercurrent of homoeroticism between Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer, including but not limited to the line "the hammer is my penis" or the phallic explosion of Dr. Horrible's Death Ray.

I don't mean to give the impression that I didn't enjoy Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. I did, but there is a lot of interesting critical work you can do with the short.

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Tomorrow I'm going to see I Love You Man as a part of the same class mentioned above. In addition to a brief review, I'll try to include some of the discussion around the film's role in adjusting conceptions of "American Manhood" away from classic understandings towards this new "Geek Chic". Until then, I remain The Cap'n.