An Adventure in Style Over Substance: Snyder’s Army of the Dead (2021)
There are times when I turn on a thing and realize it was a mistake. Sometimes it’s a terrible 80s horror film like Edge of the Axe (1988) or a TV series you don’t realize will leave you disappointed until it’s too late (ahem, Jupiter’s Legacy). This time, it’s Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. If I’m honest, I came into this with high hopes. Unlike most people over the age of 25, I actually quite enjoy Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (2004) – even though I agree that the original is a better film. I thought the film handled its zombie universe well, built up meaningful personal stakes for its characters, and had sufficient tension to make for an occasionally terrifying adventure. It is upon that experience that I came into Army of the Dead with certain expectations for the kind of film we’d get. Alas, a heist-y Dawn of the Dead we did not get.
Brokeback Mountain (2005) and the Unbearable Violence of Gay Love
In 2005, the United States found itself in a renewed culture war over the place of homosexuality in society. Just two years prior, the Supreme Court overruled Bowers v. Hardwick to establish sodomy laws as unconstitutional. None of this was new to civil rights activists, of course. Gay rights had been part of the national conversation for decades, especially in the wake of Stonewall (1969) and the DSM’s redefinition of homosexuality as non-pathological (1973). By 2005, the year Brokeback Mountain blew up the box office, Massachusetts had legalized same-sex marriage and a flurry of bans had swept the country, ushering in an era not just of tacit acceptance of bigotry against gay people but also of systemic, government-supported bigotry. All this was hot on the heels of decades of brutal murders of gay people, and an especially tumultuous 1990s, which saw well over a dozen murders and executions of gay men (and women), some of them so high profile that they would eventually lead to legislation designed to protect gay people from (or at least create greater punishment for) murderous homophobes. For a young man raised in a deeply homophobic culture, all of this was a bit of a shock, not least of all because my mother was a gay woman, and for about a decade up until 2005, my life had been packed with gay people being people with regular people problems. And here we were being asked as citizens to determine if other citizens had the right to live their lives without government interference. For me, there was no question that same-sex marriage should be legal.
So Much For Rules: The Zany Sports Massacre of Space Jam (1996)
In 1996, a young 13-year-old me didn’t so much drag my family to see Space Jam as convince them by osmosis that this would be the most important film of our lives. In retrospect, I was wrong, but that doesn’t change the fact that of the animated films for kids in the 90s, Space Jam had a surprising impact. It earned $230mil worldwide on an $80mil budget in an era before one expected a blockbuster film to near or break the $1bil mark. And it spawned new merchandise and even its own video game (not exactly surprising for the era, but still a fun fact). While folks today look back at the film with humorous horror, critics of the day didn’t exactly hate it. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel both gave it a thumbs up. Leonard Maltin in his 2010 movie guide praised Michael Jordan’s performance and the understandably impressive visual effects for the time. Others were more critical, such as Looney Tunes director Chuck Jones, who apparently did hate it and whose views are understandable given he directed numerous Warner Bros. productions and gave us Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (1975)! Meanwhile, 1996 me, a most esteemed critic, would have told you that we repeatedly rented and eventually owned the VHS to Space Jam, and we played it quite a lot.
Ape Lincoln: The Beauty and Terror of Planet of the Apes (2001)
As Palpatine would say: long have I waited to discuss this film! A film reviled for its infamously confusing ending, its gleeful presentation of punk apes and other humanistic ape-eries, and its attempt to convince us that Mark Wahlberg earned his way onto an expensive Air Force ape research space station while still getting away with calling apes monkeys every ten seconds. A film that shockingly made a decent chunk of change and almost got a sequel. It’s Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes (2001)! Call it a remake or a reboot or a reinterpretation, Planet of the Apes has rightly earned its place as one part visual marvel and one part disastrous narrative — beauty and terror fused into one glorious package. Its position in the Planet of the Apes oeuvre has, alas, earned it additional and unfavorable comparisons to its more successful and narratively compelling predecessor and successor. Have the twenty years since this film’s release helped its perception?
A Tale of First Series: Heroism and Binaries in Record of Lodoss War
Heroism is something I find myself coming back to a lot in these especially trying times. After all, we hear about heroes from time to time, and yet so few of the stories we see are about heroic people. The hopelessness of that reality is hard to fathom even as I sit here contemplating a TV show that has little interest either in the ambiguous and oft-hidden heroisms of reality or the gritty heroisms of fantasy. Record of Lodoss War just isn’t that kind of show. For those that don’t know, the 13-episode OVA (original video animation) Record of Lodoss War (1990-1991) is the first anime adaptation of Ryo Mizuno’s novels of the same name, themselves based on transcripts (or “replays”) of RPG sessions created by the Japanese gaming company, Group SNE (co-founded by Mizuno). This particular anime production generally follows the plot of the first novel and loosely borrows elements from several others (primarily in its final five episodes). A later anime series (subtitled as Chronicles of the Heroic Knight) ran for double the first series’ length and attempted to retell the story through a more faithful adaptation. This background should give you an idea of the kind of story you’re walking into when you pop in those delicious RLW DVDs (or VHS tapes, if you’re so lucky to own them).
Fragile and Varied Masculinities: Road Trip and the Odd World of the 2000s
The 2000s were weird, y’all. Really weird. If, like me, you’ve taken a strange trip down the road of 2000s romantic and (teen/college) sex comedies, you’ll have noticed the curious similarities between so many of them. The 2000s trend probably began with the release of American Pie in 1999, a film that I actually quite enjoy mostly because, unlike most sex comedies of the long-noughties, it actually bothers with the (admittedly incomplete) effort to rehabilitate its immature male protagonists. 1999 was, after all, a transitional year, and sex comedies in the teen/college bracket are, naturally, transitional narratives. In almost all cases, that transition is into some form of adulthood, even when the characters are well into their adult years anyway. Unlike American Pie, though, Road Trip (2000) contains numerous false starts, owing that failure to its inability to grapple with its underlying ethical quandary: what does a man do if he’s the one who has cheated on his girlfriend? But let’s step backwards through time for a hot minute…