Against the Crowd Blogathon 2016: Dell's Entry and Day 3 Recap

You may know Thursdays have become a popular day in this little corner of the blogosphere. It's the day I normally suggest a trio of movies based on a topic chosen by Wanderer at Wandering Through the Shelves as part of Thursday Movie Picks. However...

I'm on blogathon duty this week. Against the Crowd 2016 is going strong with another solid day of entries yesterday. I'll get to those in a bit. First, I want to get in on the fun.You guys have been railing on overrated crap and praising misunderstood gems all week. I would like to do the same. And so I shall...

So many movies you guys love have drawn my ire. My biggest task is narrowing it down. In previous years, I took on the late, great Stanley Kubrick and the one many of you mistakenly think is great, Terrence Malik. In a move amounting to me going "eeny meeny miny moe" I just scrolled down the list of the imdb's top 250 films to see what jumped out at me. Needless to say, there it was. It's one of those movies that's been romanticized to the nth degree for no reason at all, at least not a good one. I'm talking about the ultimate in spoiled brat cinema, none other than...

By the way, did you notice I ended each of the first three paragraphs with an ellipsis? If you're not sure what an ellipsis is, well...no, you didn't notice. Anyhoo...

Let's talk about this movie you all told me was so great. It's based on a true story of one Chris McCandless, here played by Emile Hirsch. The dude graduates from high school with honors. Instead of going off to college, he entertains the grand notion of taking time off to "find himself." He gives away all the money he and his parents have put away for him, cuts up all his credit cards, but gets in his car and hits the road.

Can we pause right there? I feel we must, in case you missed the reality of how this story begins. An old saying goes, don't sell the car for gas money. This fool gives away all his gas money and started driving. Yup. He lets us know right off the bat the book smarts he used to graduate high school, with honors no less, do not translate into survival skills. Trust me, this is important. Back to the story.

This brilliant young man takes off with absolutely no idea where he's going, what he's going to do, nor when he's coming back. Neither does he have a clue about more concrete things such as how the hell he's supposed to eat. To top it all off, he doesn't tell anyone in his family what the hell is going on, and flat refuses to talk to them for fear they might actually ask him to reconsider what he's doing. Oh, let me tell you, he's pissed at them. Royally pissed for no discernible reason whatsoever. Yet, they're the assholes. Sigh.

Sorry, here is where I have to spoil the movie. Skip over this part if you must.

He basically travels north along the western coast of North America, though not necessarily in a straight line. He starts in California and ends up all alone in an abandoned school bus somewhere in Alaska. He dies there after eating some random berries that, oops, turn out to be highly poisonous. The End.

As I watched this play out, I kept thinking he's going to let me in on either what he's so mad at his family for, and the point he's trying to prove. The problem is he had nothing to be mad about and no point to make. He was just stupid. I don't say this to make light of the fact a human being lost his life. I say this to point out the fact of why he lost his life. He did nothing smart starting the moment he took off his cap and gown. Director Sean Penn gave it the full-blown lyrical film treatment, made use of some wonderful cinematography and well chosen poems by Sharon Olds (one of my all-time faves, by the way) in an attempt to pass this off as some kind exploration of the human condition. You people ate it up. You were tripping over yourselves to tell me how profound this film is. Oh boy, did you guys wax poetic on this one. Telling me stuff like...

"Even in its harrowing final moments, it reaches a spiritually transcendent pinnacle - the idea of ending one long, strange trip and plummeting into an even-greater unknown with both fear and elation. A stirring American drama of comfort and conflict." - Nick Rogers, Suite101.com

"A spiritually transcendent pinnacle?" What? He must have seen the super-duper extended version of the director's cut.

I could go on quoting people who dropped their most poetic prose on this movie, but just look back at the image above, the one with the rating. Check out the consensus. General consensus is that Into the Wild is "an accessible and poignant character study." Poignant? POIGNANT? That word suggest a level of depth this film, and this story, simply fails to achieve. It tries mightily to make its protagonist a symbol for youthful rebellion and freedom. It succeeds at making me think he's an idiot. Instead of an esoteric experience inspiring me to contemplate the meaning of it all, I came away with one rather simple lesson: when you do a bunch of dumb things, dumb things are bound to happen to you, so don't do dumb things.

So many people dug so deep into a story which did not warrant it, I am baffled you guys only skimmed the surface of, and therefore failed to appreciate...

I know, vulgar, crass, gratuitously violent, yada yada. You saw the first one, right? Okay then, let's skip passed that stuff because you folks loved the first one. This time around, I don't know what you were thinking...

Oh...

before I forget...quick story stuff, in case you missed it...

This time our hero, the eponymous Kick-Ass, has been out of the crime fighting game for awhile but gets dragged back in by Hit Girl. She's dealing with her own issues since her father did not make it out of the first film alive...oops. There should be a spoiler alert there in case you haven't seen the first one, either. Anyhoo, the two fall in with a not so merry band of like minded heroes. Meanwhile, former good guy Red Mist is now a major bad guy. His father was also killed in the first film...

Red Mist blames KA for this and forms his own team for the express purpose of killing our hero.

Let's start with the obvious stuff you should have seen. Vulgar, crass, gratuitously violent, yada yada. What's not to love? Seriously speaking, the performance of young Chloe Grace Moretz is absolutely fantastic. True, she shines far brighter than the actual star of the movie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), but she is so good it doesn't really matter. Enough you really did recognize how good she is, so I won't harp on that aspect. Let's move on.

The part you really missed is that, like its predecessor, this is a whip-smart spoof on the world of comic books. The way characters spoke, dressed, and behaved all make a sharp commentary on that world. Everyone seemed to understand this the first time around. Even then, some things were missed. For instance, I think a lot of younger viewers completely ignored the outstanding work of Nicolas Cage because they had no idea what he was doing. Now, I know you're young, but you're a movie blogger with a great blog and a keen sense of cinematic history, so I know YOU got it. The rest of those simpletons, I'm not so sure. You know he was doing a brilliant parody of Adam West's Batman from the movie and TV series of the 1960s. Not knowing that does not preclude you from enjoying the film. In this case, not knowing something is a bigger problem because it is so front and center.

I'm talking about two things, actually. The first is that this film is relentlessly lampooning 2009's Watchmen. Being oblivious to this means jokes are constantly flying over your head. Second is that the team of henchmen Red Mist puts together is made ridiculous as a statement on the way comic books typically handle characters, particularly non-white and/or non-American characters. When Red Mist hires the people he will use to go after our hero, he gives all new super-villain names. All of those names are based on a stereotype relating to that person's race, ethnicity, and/or physical attributes. The black guy is The Black Death, the little guy is The Tumor, the Asian guy is Genghis Carnage, the Russian lady is...well...Mother Russia. This is the way comic books and other superhero fare have done things since the beginning. In case you didn't think this was done on purpose, Red Mist, who's real name is Chris, gets called on his shenanigans by his only friend Javier (John Leguizamo) who is helping him pick out his hired guns.

Javier: All right, we've got, uh, an ex-Triad member looking for work.

Chris: Easy, "Genghis Carnage."

Javier: Come on. You gotta quit with the racist stereotypes, Chris.

Chris: Archetypes.

The reply archetypes is the most ridiculously perfect answer he could've given. That is a word often used to justify racist, one-note characters in comic books. The practice is reducing characters to caricatures in this manner is still a problem. If you don't think so, have you seen Suicide Squad? The black guy is dealing with serious baby-mama issues, the Latino is a gang banger with tats on every square inch of his body, the Japanese girl is a sullen warrior with a mystical Samurai sword, and the Australian dude is a thrill seeker named Captain Boomerang.

Nah, no stereotypes, here.

I rest my case.

Oh, one more thing...

In case you lost track of the number of ellipses...um...we're at...um...twenty.


As the title of this post informs, this is also a recap of yesterday's entries in the Against the Crowd Blogathon 2016. Thanks to all who have entered so far this week. Hopefully, we'll have two more solid days of posting from you guys today and tomorrow. Yup, Friday's the deadline.

Day 3 Posts:

Mettel Ray is rather hateful of a Tarantino flick because she said so.

Flick Chicks have some serious problems with Scorsese, but not with flying journalists.

Myerla's Movie Reviews thumbs his nose at a French New Wave classic and loves up on a dopey robot.

If, somehow I missed your post, drop a comment below and my co-host KG will get it on tomorrow's recap. Oh, that's right, I haven't mentioned my excellent co-host, KG of KG's Movie Rants. Please stop by his place and check out his fantastic blog.

Earlier Posts This Week:

Day 1

Day 2