Stealing From My Livejournal Part X

As I use my livejournal for little else except for movie rants and decided to switch over here, I thought I'd recruit some older posts so as to show a history. I'll bother with new ones as they come to me.




From September 10, 2008:

"This is why I love Entertainment Weekly.

I'm really not much of a magazine reader. I'm just too lazy to bother with subscriptions and the only reason I got them when I was younger was so that I could have the pretty pictures and also just to get mail. I started reading my brother's old copies of Entertainment Weekly he had lying around the house about a year or so ago and every week, they would come in the mail for him, even though he wasn't at home, and I'd read them, since I usually was the one to get the mail anyways. And I started getting really into the magazine, reading it essentially cover to cover, sometimes skimming over articles, sometimes not.

The magazine really catches my perspective, I feel. It's smarter than a lot of the pop culture it covers, and it knows that, but it can still appreciate these things because it understands their importance in our current time. Sometimes I'm less happy about this, when I got a copy of EW with two huge articles about Twilight (one of which I read anyways), or when Diablo Cody writes her obnoxiously condescending and snobbish articles (which, unfortunately, I sometimes agree with, like in the case of her newest one, which I'll get to later). Regardless, EW is smart, a bit condescending at times, but they still bother with pop culture because, no matter that life isn't going to be solved by listening to the Jonas Brothers, it is still appealing (although not really to me).

I've been feeling really good about the magazine ever since I started really reading it attentively about a year ago now and I finally managed to get my own subscription now that I'm away at school. I received my first copy in the mail... and the cover was ripped. And it had Gossip Girl on the cover. I thought to myself, dammit, and I was hoping I could milk more than twenty minutes out of this.

But I managed to. And not because I read the Gossip Girl column anyway, but because of the other stuff. Because of Diablo Cody's actually interesting and relatable article (for once, for me), essentially about how The House Bunny is culturally important (I saw that movie and it was exactly what you expect it to be, but the best part about that is that it is still funny and Anna Faris is great in it). Because of the review for College which, instead of actually talking about the movie beyond maybe two paragraphs, instead talked about the cultural importance of Animal House, but that was totally appropriate in my opinion. Remaking Animal House isn't going to happen. College movies suck, and Animal House is fucking ridiculous, but in a way that I can't imagine being duplicated for all of the reasons the reviewer listed in the review for a different movie, which isn't nearly as good or culturally significant.

Because of the Heroes poster that was waiting for me inside, which I ripped out and is now on my wall, featuring Nathan, Peter, Angela, Claire, Noah, and Matt. Because of everything in it, really.

Entertainment Weekly embodies my perspective on the entertainment world. It's absolutely wonderful to enjoy deep, meaningful things in the entertainment world, like The Visitor or whatever novel that isn't by Stephanie Meyer or Jo Rowling that is topping the charts this week. But it's also fine to talk about the fashion at the Oscars (like how Diablo Cody looked like trash when she won one, and how Helen Mirren always looks fabulous, not playing it as if she's old or as if she's twenty, but playing it just beautifully). It's fine to drool over Christian Bale as Batman. It's fine to cheer The Dark Knight on as it hits the $500 million mark. All of which I do.

That is to say, I don't always agree with the magazine. I mean, I wonder how the hell Diablo Cody got on staff. Of course, sometimes I worry when they put High School Musical 3 on a two page spread when talking about the fall movie preview. But The Brothers Bloom got a blurb and a little picture of Adrian Brody and Mark Ruffalo, and there are some smart people working on that magazine. The cultural references they bring up make me smile and their reviews always leave me thinking, whether or not I've seen the movie/tv show/read the book/listened to the music/etc.

It's really nice to find a connection like that. It isn't perfect. Entertainment Weekly and I don't always get along. But considering that I still read it cover to cover, even if I don't find all the topics interesting, but because I have faith in the magazine to maybe surprise me by making me think about something I hadn't before, that still makes this a pretty tight connection. Yeah, it's just a magazine. And it's a magazine about pop culture and the entertainment world at that. It doesn't spend as much time covering things that are maybe more deep and meaningful. But pop culture is meaningful, even if the stuff in it isn't. EW and I get that. We're both smart, a bit condescending, but we're okay with being worried about who's going to win which Oscar.




In other news, we had our first film screenings for my History and Aesthetics of Film class. We watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. The former is German Expressionism. The latter involves a drunk pig. I KNOW, RIGHT?

And now I must run off and do my reading for when that class meets in the morning. Oh joy. A ten page pdf and fifty-ish more pages in my textbook. The funny part of this chapter is how the author is writing about the importance of make-up in Speed. Ahahahaha."