Whee! The Brattle has a new print of Small Change this coming weekend/week. I haven't seen that since I was in High School.

Scrappy is indeed wise.

And I do think that, just as it's cornflake-pissy to pick apart someone's mindless fun, it's equally cornflake-pissy to walk into a thread where people are happily chattering away and insist that they stop (one blogger I found while Googling "Moff's law" proposed that anyone who takes the time to register on someone else's blog just in order to post "Some people have too much time on their hands" be summarily punched in the crotch by, like, the entire rest of the planet). Some people's cornflakes are thinkier cornflakes, that's all.

The ones that always boggle me are the people who post on Sociological Images complaining that everyone needs to stop taking it all so seriously and just enjoy it. Seriously? I mean, not that that site in particular doesn't occasionally crawl up its own ass, but that should really come as a surprise to exactly nobody, ever. These are sociology professors talking about their undergrad coursework! They do this for a living! Their day jobs are the entire reason for the website's existence! What the fuck did these yahoos think they were going to find here?

And I do think that, just as it's cornflake-pissy to pick apart someone's mindless fun, it's equally cornflake-pissy to walk into a thread where people are happily chattering away and insist that they stop (one blogger I found while Googling "Moff's law" proposed that anyone who takes the time to register on someone else's blog just in order to post "Some people have too much time on their hands" be summarily punched in the crotch by, like, the entire rest of the planet). Some people's cornflakes are thinkier cornflakes, that's all.

JZ is me!

And, hello, Sociological images, not, I don't know, NakedAndWet or VincentChaseinIceCreamTopping.com(What? no, there isn't such a site, but if there were, I'd have bookmarks.) That person flunks reading comprehension, too.

And, hello, Sociological images, not, I don't know, NakedAndWet or VincentChaseinIceCreamTopping.com

I'm sayin'! And it's multiple people, often doing the same thing over and over again over the course of months. And each time they seem sincerely surprised and baffled that these sociology PhDs still haven't taken their advice and retitled the site "LOLCATS and Boobies Yay!"

Hey Erika! Yes, we're bringing the Hat back. I'm posting a call for submissions this very month. In fact, I should post it today.

Sociological images

Love that place if only because I have just been introduced to a Ewan/Chiwetel version of Othello. WANT!

of course you do...who wouldn't? Cool, Corwood, bunk.

'Cause I enjoyed Die Hard and I don't feel that I've lost my credentials as an intelligent being by snickering at the obvious jokes and impossible stunts

I don't think analyzing a movie means "judging it solely on how realistic it is, since that is what makes movies good."

I'd probably take "That was fun," as a good starting-point for conversation. Because then you start thinking about, well, what made it so much fun? Why are many similar action movies not as fun? What did it do differently? And so on.

There's plenty to analyze about Die Hard if you want to. The whole nature of structuralist critique is to provide a tool to address texts which are not just capital-A "ART!" Any cultural product is going to be informed by layers and layers of intended and unintended meanings which reflect on the biases of the culture and the creators.

To note just an obvious example, Bewitched can easily be read as the tensions of being gay and passing as straight in a repressive American culture. A point which is almost explicit in the show considering how incredibly gay the cast was.

Men, Women and Chainsaws is a classic critique of slasher movies which overturned a lot of feminist thinking on the genre.