Thursday, September 15, 2011

Fair Warning

At some point, some of you will be reading this and you'll either be delighted, laughing your ass off, or quite possibly, offended, particularly since I've already shown a tendency to skewer pop culture that I think is dumbing us down as a culture. The other day for example, I groaned and lamented the chorus line of celebrities showing off their pregnancies on the covers of magazines. Beyonce Knowles, whose profile is stratospheric right now, is just the latest example in what, to my mind, is a tired trend that needs to END. The first time I'd ever seen it, it was done boldly, and without apology by Demi Moore in the 1990s. And she wasn't just "a little pregnant". She was, as the old King James vernacular would put it, "great with child". Now, leave aside the arguably self-promotional aspect of it, the piece was a gutsy move. She took some considerable heat for it. The shoot was done by Annie Leibowitz, which gave it the artistic imprimatur it might not have otherwise gotten. It remains, as I said before, a startling iconic image in our popular culture, whatever you may think of it.

Problem is, you can only pull a stunt like this once.
It's like Daffy Duck swallowing explosives and...well, EXPLODING.
It's difficult to come back from that. And what do you do for an encore?

So I get a little annoyed at how lacking in originality our Hollywood driven popular culture can be. We've lived through a decade of re-cycled, re-booted, re-purposed EVERYTHING. And I'm not necessarily against re-invention, strictly speaking. But when, for example, Spider-Man becomes a movie franchise in 2002, and needs to be "re-booted" a mere decade later, I have to scratch my head. Hollywood made 3 movies starring the wall crawler and may as well have been legitimately printing its own currency.
Yet some executive said the franchise had grown "tired". It needed a "re-boot".
Seriously?
After what, nearly $2.5 BILLION in worldwide box-office, I would think some studio executives could have well retired. Instead we need a re-boot.

So what is my point here?

Just preparing my readers for the eventuality that you will disagree with me perhaps a bit.
Or perhaps I'm preparing myself. After all, some folks can get mighty heated if anyone says anything about Beyonce. Or Mariah. Or Britney. Or... you get the idea, that isn't reverent.

So fair warning, dear readers...

I'm not what could be called the reverent sort. It's probably why I sleep in on Sunday mornings instead of going to church.

More Later

KCD

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