NicolasB
Distinguished Member
Finally got around to watching The Incredibles last night. If anyone hasn't yet seen it, see it! - it's one of the best films I've seen for years! Not only very funny, but also genuinely, edge-of-the-seat thrilling. I would actually go so far as to say that is the best superhero movie I've ever seen: it does a better job of capturing comic-book superheroism than Spiderman, X-men, Blade, Hulk, or anything else.
Anyway, this got me thinking. A recent malaise in Hollywood has been that the studios are simply incapable of releasing a "straight" movie any more. You can't just release a thriller, or a horror film: there has to be this constant nudge-nudge, wink-wink, "ooh, ha ha, aren't we post-modernist and ironic and able to laugh at ourselves" so-called "humour" injected.
IMO this is virtually always a dismal failiure. A classic example is Scream which tries to be both a stalk-and-slash movie, and also a send-up of stalk-and-slash movies. If it had tried to be one or the other I think it might have been quite successful, but by trying to do both it ruins both: the "tense" scenes are sufficiently tense and unpleasant that they spoil the comedy, while the comedy defuses the tension and prevents suspension of disbelief enough to spoil the horror.
Thinking about it I could actually come up with only one other film that I have ever seen (apart from The Incredibles, that is) that truly succeeds at being part of a film genre, and also at sending up that genre, without compromising either goal. You have to go all the way back to 1967 for it: Roman Polanski's Dance Of The Vampires (also known by the much less satisfactory title The Fearless Vampire Killers) is both genuinely unsettling, and also a wickedly effective spoof of Hammer's Dracula films.
Can anyone think of any other example that actually works?
Anyway, this got me thinking. A recent malaise in Hollywood has been that the studios are simply incapable of releasing a "straight" movie any more. You can't just release a thriller, or a horror film: there has to be this constant nudge-nudge, wink-wink, "ooh, ha ha, aren't we post-modernist and ironic and able to laugh at ourselves" so-called "humour" injected.
IMO this is virtually always a dismal failiure. A classic example is Scream which tries to be both a stalk-and-slash movie, and also a send-up of stalk-and-slash movies. If it had tried to be one or the other I think it might have been quite successful, but by trying to do both it ruins both: the "tense" scenes are sufficiently tense and unpleasant that they spoil the comedy, while the comedy defuses the tension and prevents suspension of disbelief enough to spoil the horror.
Thinking about it I could actually come up with only one other film that I have ever seen (apart from The Incredibles, that is) that truly succeeds at being part of a film genre, and also at sending up that genre, without compromising either goal. You have to go all the way back to 1967 for it: Roman Polanski's Dance Of The Vampires (also known by the much less satisfactory title The Fearless Vampire Killers) is both genuinely unsettling, and also a wickedly effective spoof of Hammer's Dracula films.
Can anyone think of any other example that actually works?
