Tag Archives: pop culture

Another blog to check out

25 Sunday Mar 2018

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496265_22437560bycristinaI’m in the process of completing two new long-form horror movie reviews, and if I’m lucky, I’ll get some more written during the week.

I have a great love of most forms of media and multiple genres. I consume so much music. I watch so much genre film and TV (granted, usually years behind everyone else). I’ve been a voracious reader all my life. But I’ve only ever felt qualified to write about horror movies. That’s a niche where I feel comfortable, where I have enough of a foundation to explain what works and what doesn’t, and I’ve read and written enough horror that I like trying to figure out what fixes could have improved a weaker script. I feel comfortable having opinions that might differ from the rest of the critics, and I’m usually pretty good at explaining why.

I think the fact that I can find the good even in the mediocre speaks to a real love of horror, and I sometimes feel like you have to love something to properly criticize it, because then you know any negative criticism isn’t an indictment or dismissal of the entire genre, or even of the movie itself.

Outside of horror movies, though, I like to joke that I have no taste. I just like what I like, and there’s no shame in that.

And I almost always add that my brother has far better taste than I do. He consumes even more media than me and has many more thoughts on the matter, with a greater critical understanding of a broader variety of entertainment. I do horror, and I love talking with him about horror movies, because it’s one of the few things where I feel I come from a place of authority. When he was younger, he used to be terrified of horror, but I slowly helped introduce him back to it when he grew up and our relationship was changing from that between two children to two adults. So we kind of built a new relationship around that.

But he does everything, and I love to read his takes on the rest of popular culture and critical response. We grew up on geek culture, and we’re both unapologetic nerds. We just went in slightly different directions with it.

Do check him out, and start with his ranking of the movies of Stephen Spielberg HERE.

Too Late to be Popular

24 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by in A Few Thoughts

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i do what I want meme

I have a curious tendency to avoid popular things until they’ve stopped being popular. It’s not a hipster thing; I’m too square to be hip. It’s like my extreme introversion bleeds over into other things that you wouldn’t think of. Popular things have lots of people talking about them, analyzing them, critiquing them, judging them, espousing their qualities, and being a part of it is like being a part of a crowd. And being part of a crowd means I feel all the feelings and bleed energy out in fountains.

Even when I’ve been in a popular fandom (I’m an old HP geek), I’ve stayed on the darker fringes rather than wade into the biggest shipping wars. The closest thing I got to popular was enjoying Snape/Hermione (my reasons are my own, and my personal ship was far more unsuitable, and all the more interesting because of it).

I don’t know—I guess I feel like the people into popular things are a bit rabid. The criticism and judgment tends to leach all the fun out of anything, because then I have other people’s more unpleasant words echoing in my head while trying to enjoy something on my own.

It’s part of the reason I love superhero movies but rarely see them in the theaters (OMG Marvel fandom is like an evangelistic religion). It’s part of the reason why I finally bought Lady Gaga’s earlier albums to enjoy them in their entirety (I’m still not completely over the religious criticism over every fucking album, especially all the commentary about Born This Way). I’m just starting to listen to Hamilton (my earphones are crap, so I have to wait until I’m in the car, and it’s a lot of words to take in). I still haven’t watched Game of Thrones or The Vampire Diaries or most of The Walking Dead. I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly well after they’d been canceled. I think the only reason I’ve seen the new Star Wars movies is because I joined my parents when they went to see them.

People are just so intense when they ask you whether you’ve shared pop art experiences—it wears on my introverted soul. Slightly less intense when you say you haven’t seen it, because at that point, all they can do without spoiling you is insist you have to see it.

I think I just prefer to enjoy pop phenomena after the fervor has died down, so everyone else’s energy can’t assault me in the same way, and so I can formulate my own opinions rather than get my echo chamber of other people’s opinions going too strongly in my head. It’s really not that I don’t want to participate; it’s just that I don’t want to experience everyone else’s participation at the same time.