Science Fiction

Defending Trash

Defending Trash: In Defense of Mac & Me (1988)

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I love Mac & Me. No, really. I love it. Yeah, I know. It has been pilloried and ripped to shreds countless times. We covered it on Torture Cinema. Paul Rudd has made a joke about it for years (the Rudd Roll, if you will). And I will even admit that it is a ridiculous film that by most standards would be considered legitimate “trash.” But I love it nonetheless, so much so that I appeared on Fine Beats and Cheeses in April 2025 to talk about it with the fine hosts of the illustrious show. For years, I’ve made fun of so-called “bad movies” on The Skiffy and Fanty Show, from Plan 9 from Outer Space to Birdemic, from Batman & Robin to The Black Hole. The whole point of the Torture Cinema podcast is to give films most people think are terrible a humorous-but-critical look with the understanding that film criticism is often subjective. Sometimes a film doesn’t deserve the hate it receives (and vice versa). Ultimately, I think we ought to give trash movies a bit more love. After all, some of the most enjoyable movies of all time aren’t exactly good. Even the editorial team at Rotten Tomatoes has a list of bad movies they actually love. The Mummy (1999) is one such movie; it has a 62% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes (it was lower when I started writing this), and I’m told that David Annandale despises it with a passion not seen since the Pharaohs actually lived. Yet, audiences rather like that film, and its reputation has spawned amusement park rides, miles of merch, numerous sequels (and a spinoff of sorts), and 1999’s most important eye candy in the form of Brendan Frasier’s Rick O’Connell (seriously, he’s so pretty). Of course, the popularity of a thing doesn’t tell us whether the thing is any good, but I also don’t think the popularity of a thing can be dismissed.

Book Lists

A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)

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Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:

Film Lists, Random Stuff

A Definitive Absolutely Accurate Ranking of James Bond Theme Songs

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The title says it all. Mostly. It doesn’t tell you why I have decided to put together a ranking of every James Bond theme song. I could tell you that there are great reasons for this, but I would be lying. The real reason: I’ve been watching and re-watching James Bond movies on and off for years, both as a kind of weird comfort watching and because the culture critic in me wants to understand them. The other real reason: cause I want to. In preparing for this, I had to consider two factors: first, what criteria to use to judge these songs, because no ranked list would be valid if we didn’t pretend to some kind of objective measure; and second, how to use such a list to incorporate my brother’s feedback, as he was coaxed into participating in this fiasco for our mutual amusement. The second of these, I simply decided that we’d use the ranking average of our two scores for the final score in one of the criteria categories. The more difficult task was coming up with the criteria in the first place. And so with much deliberation with myself, a little with my brother, and a little more with other folks who also have opinions about things, I came up with this list of five:

SF/F Commentary

Fan Fiction vs. Tie-In Fiction: A Framework

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Every once in a while, fandom is beset upon by a series of somewhat aggressive arguments about the function of accuracy in film/tv adaptations. The best of these follow my own path, which involves assessing the work on its own terms before going back to look at how it functions as an adaptation. The worst of these, however, fall into a familiar trap of damnation by comparison — typically by comparing an adaptation to fan fiction. Essentially, the argument goes, substantial deviations from the source material make a work more fan fiction than adaptation; by doing so, these works become worse off. Fan fiction, in other words, is, by implication, a lesser form of art. None of this, of course, is particularly surprising. While many fan fiction writers and the community which surrounds them find great value in fan fiction and its various related works (fan art, etc.), there has always been a side of the broader fan community which views such works as a lesser fan pursuit, artistically weak, or, in the most brutal rejection, contemptable garbage (sometimes verging on a kind of moral decay).

Film Reviews

An Adventure in Style Over Substance: Snyder’s Army of the Dead (2021)

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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.

SF/F Commentary

Towards an SF Canon: Curiosities

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Due to circumstances beyond my control which involve several people raising interesting ideas in reply to my tweets about my essay “Why the SF Canon Doesn’t Exist,” I’m now neck deep in a massive research project on the formation of literary canons and their placement in SF scholarship (and wider discourse). In reality, I’ve been curious about this for a while, but I’ve never taken the time to do the deep dive because my research has demanded my attention elsewhere (ugh, tenure needs) and there hasn’t been an urgent need to do the work. After all, most people are either pretty satisfied about there being no official SF canon OR perfectly fine with the de facto canon, which we can piece together through a combination of “important anthologies” and aggregating the works people decide are Important™.1 One might, for example, start with NPR’s reader-selected list of the Top 100 SF/F books and its related list of the 50 best SF/F books of the 2010s.2 I, however, want to look more deeply at why these types of lists and the “de facto” argument are so prevalent in SF discourse AND what efforts have occurred to put together a legitimate canon of SF works. With that in mind, I’d like to turn to two curiosities on the path towards canonization in SF: Robert Silverberg’s The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929-1964 (1970) and Mark R. Hillegas’ “A Draft of the Science-Fiction Canon” (1961; in Vol. 3, Issue 1 of Extrapolation). Two other groups also exist. The first argues that there is a canon — or, at least, that there are classics — and then yells at other people about it. The second hates that the canon — or, at least, the classics — doesn’t much care for that version of the canon and hates being told they have to read that stuff (though some of them may read those things anyway). ↩ For the record, I don’t think general popularity is a good way to form a literary canon. It should be considered, of course, but we must also consider factors such as influence, presentation, representation, etc. More on that another day. ↩

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