An Andalusian Dog is a Cemetery Man's Best Friend: The Body in Art Cinema and Horror

There has long been the perception of art cinema and the avant-garde as something belonging to high culture and horror belonging to low culture. Joan Hawkins argues that the relationship between art cinema, experimental film and the avant-garde, and horror or low forms of cinema is much more complicated than that, arguing that “the lines between arthouse (high culture) cinema and trash (exploitation, horror, soft porn etc) have never been as clear-cut...The midnight screenings and “grindhouses… that once enlivened Times Square”... were historically the site where high art and trash cinema commingled in the United States.”i Arthouse cinema or more particularly alternative cinemas to that of the Classical Hollywood Cinema have been always been marked as being outside of traditional cinema and at this level, both art cinema and horror share this position outside the mainstream. It can also be argued that art cinema and horror share the same thematic concerns and demand similar responses from the spectator, particularly in the ways in which both art cinema and horror treat images of the body. Indeed, I first viewed Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou (1928) and Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) in a course examining the development of the horror genre. Though this has been met with surprise from academics and fellow students alike, it is not so strange when considering that both art cinema and horror often focus on explorations of the body and its representation onscreen, and often rely on eliciting a bodily response from the spectator. I would argue that it is the main aim of both the avant-garde and art cinema and horror to challenge traditional notions of narrative and therefore provide a space for an alternative experience of the cinema. But the question remains, for what purpose does each cinema achieve this?

Bryan Frye argues that at the heart of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage's work, in particular his Pittsburgh Trilogy, is a concern with “with metaphysical questions of Being:”ii

The three films: Eyes, Deus Ex, and The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, document the police, a hospital and a morgue, respectively. All focus on the mechanics of the body: how it is ordered in life, how it is repaired when broken, and what remains when the person who animates it has perished.iii

The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes has a particular focus on the body. As Frye describes, the film is set in a morgue and chronicles the process of an autopsy. Hawkins suggests that the film “encourages an uncomfortably visceral reaction in the spectator,”iv while Amos Vogel offers a slightly different perspective on the film's subject matter and Brakhage's possible intent with the work, arguing that “[the film] dispassionately records whatever transpires in front of the lens: bodies sliced length-wise, organs removed, skulls and scalp cut open with electrical tools.”v While the camera may be recording dispassionately, Brakhage, arguably, is not and demands a similarly passionate response from the viewer, especially if, if Frye is correct, Brakhage sought to represent in his work not reality, but the act of perceiving the world. A spectator of The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes is surely being asked to meditate on the human condition, to bear witness to the decay of the body. While this may not be quite the same intent of the horror film, there is still a focus on the decay of the body, with a demand that the spectator contemplate the demise of their own body.

Many of Brakhage's films, including The Dead (1960) and Sirius Remembered (1959), reflect on the decay of the body, and what happens after we die. The Dead, filmed in Le Cimitiere du Père Lachaise in Paris, uses images from the tombs of the dead, while Sirius Remembered uses images of the decay of a family dog after its death. In what way does Brakhage's analyses of death and decay echo the horror film's analysis of the same themes of mortality and human frailty?

In an article published in The Guardian, Shaun of the Dead writer Simon Pegg had this to say on the subject of zombies:

As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.vi

While Pegg may not be relating this from a perspective of art cinema, what he is suggesting echoes Frye's analysis of Brakhage's Pittsburgh Trilogy – the exploration of death and the decay of the body, and the question of what happens after we die. Not only that, but both Brakhage's films and zombie films such as Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead (2004), George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Michele Soavi's Dellamorte Dellamore (1994) reveal our fear of death and the complex relationship we have to our body – the desire to, and simultaneous fear of, witnessing the body in decay. Not only that, but they also offer an insight into the rituals and processes involved in death. For example, in Romero's film there is a theme of the improper attitude toward the dead – the film opens with a brother and sister visiting the grave of their father. The brother's lack of respect for his father's memory results in his attack by a member of the undead, resulting in him cracking his skull on a tombstone. More than anything else, for the spectator at least, the zombie film is characterised by the human fear of death, and of seeing our mortality and that of our loved ones, but as R.H.W Dillard notes:

The idea of the dead's return to a kind of life is no new idea; it is present in all the ancient tales of vampires and ghouls and zombies, and it has been no stranger to films...All these tales and films spring from that ancient fear of the dead.vii

As Brakhage's films and their release prior to Romero's Night of the Living Dead will attest, it is not simply Hollywood or even narrative cinema in general that has examined these themes of death and mortality – as an alternative to narrative cinema, the art film can engage directly with the spectator on these themes and privilege emotion and sensation rather than the intellectual processes of film spectatorship. However, as Kyle Bishop points out, the zombie is primarily a visual manifestation of the human fear of mortality, and thus can engage the spectator in a similar way to that of Brakhage and his peers, arguing that “because zombies do not speak, all their intentions and activities are manifested solely through physical action. In other words, because of this sensual limitation, zombies must be watched.”viii What Bishop suggests is that because the zombie is limited to the sensual, so must the spectator. There is virtually nothing to do but watch the degradation of the human body, and watch it attack the living as an extreme metaphor for mortality. Again, this echoes Frye's estimation of the images in Brakhage's The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes:

The key image of The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes is quite likely the bluntest statement on the human condition ever filmed. In the course of an autopsy, the skin around the scalp is slit with a scalpel, and in preparation for exposing and examining the brain, the face of each cadaver is literally peeled off, like a mask, revealing the raw meat beneath. That image, once seen, will never leave you.ix

Not only that, but Brakhage also limits his images to the realm of sensation, by not using sound in these particular films. Once again, both the zombie film and Brakhage's exploration of the body both demand a purely visual and emotional response from the spectator at the sight of the body's decay. Though one is placed within a traditional narrative framework, the slow-moving advance of a silent being onscreen arguably disrupts the narrative and goes beyond it – as it asks for nothing more than a sensational response.

Michael Koller writes that within his work, Luis Buñuel reveals perhaps an intention to “shock and insult the intellectual bourgeoisie.”x The film opens with the title Il etait une fois (Once Upon a Time), then we cut to the image of a barber, played by Buñuel himself, sharpening a razor. He walks outside and looks up at the full moon. We then cut to the barber holding a woman's head in place. Drawing the razor up to her eye, he holds it open. Then, we cut to the full moon being sliced by a cloud, and it seems the spectator can make the assumption that the slicing of the woman's eye will not be shown, the cloud cutting the moon acting as the visual metaphor for what is about to happen to her. Instead, Buñuel cuts back to an extreme close-up of the woman's eye as the razor slices through it, spilling open the contents. It is also worth noting that the eye slicing, for all intents and purposes, is real. Buñuel used a dead calf's eye in place of the woman. This is also not the only scene to feature dead animals – in a later scene a man drags a grand piano piled with dead donkeys.

While this opening image is indeed shocking in its immediacy and proximity to reality, and many fellow students loudly exclaimed with shock and surprise during the viewing in our class on the horror film, there is also another dimension to this scene in the film. This is the boundary between the the body that is seen, and the body that is unseen. There are films in which this boundary is revealed to be flimsy at best and nonexistent at worst. Clover argues that this is also part of the fascination audiences have with the horror film, citing examples from Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974):

Beyond that, the slasher evinces a fascination with flesh or meat itself as that which is hidden from view. When the hitchhiker in Texas Chainsaw 1 slits open his hand for the thrill, the onlookers all recoil in horror – all but Franklin, who seems fascinated by the realisation that all that lies between the visible, knowableoutside of the body and its secret insides is one thin membrane, protected only by a collective taboo against its violation. It is no surprise that the rise of the slasher film is concomitant with the development of special effects that let us see with our own eyes the opened body.xi

Clover argues that the horror film and the slasher film in particular has opened up a new way of seeing the unseen – and that this has changed the way spectators regard depictions of violence onscreen, arguing that in the modern horror film “we see heads being stepped on so that the eyes pop out, a face being flayed, a decapitation, a hypodermic needle penetrating an eyeball in close-up, and so on.”xii Indeed, it appears that she can also add 'eyeballs being sliced with a razor' to the list. She argues that this is a new trend within the cinema and especially the horror film, and that these advances in technology engender a new, more complex spectator response:

With this new explicitness also comes a new tone. If the horror of Psycho was taken seriously, the “horror” of the slasher films is of a rather more complicated sort. Audiences express uproarious disgust (“gross!”) as often as they express fear, and it is clear that the makers of slasher films pursue the combination.xiii

While Clover's main focus is on the development of the horror film and the pattern of representation of gender within it, she may have overlooked that this phenomenon in film is not limited to the horror film, and neither is it mutually exclusive with advancements in special effects technologies. In 1928, Buñuel and Dali were employing the same techniques that later makers of the slasher film would employ, and it is an effect still experienced in the present. Koller argues that the opening image of Un Chien Andalou is still shocking today, and the reaction of my classmates in the viewing of the film would seem to testify to this. This onscreen fascination with revealing the inner workings of the body produces a particular effect in the spectator and again, the kinds of audience response to these images in both art films such as The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes and Un Chien Andalou in particular is again linked inextricably to the horror film.

In her article 'Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess,' Linda Williams relates that she and her young son look to view films that “promise to be sensational, to give our bodies an actual physical jolt.”xiv These are films often categorised as being 'gross', and she identifies these 'gross' films as belonging to a wider genre she calls body genres. These are films that trade almost exclusively on images designed to elicit a bodily response from the spectator:

What are the pertinent features of bodily excess shared by ...'gross' genres? First, there is the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion...The body spectacle is featured most sensationally in pornography's portrayal of the orgasm, in horror's portrayal of violence and terror, and in the melodrama's portrayal of weeping.xv

For Williams, what separates these genres from other film genres that elicit a physical response from the spectator, such as comedy, is the idea that there is too much emphasis on the physical response on the spectator, and indeed too much emphasis on the spectacle of the body, and this is why they are deemed 'gross': their focus on sensation rather than narrative is what evokes disgust. Not only this, but Williams argues that because of this, spectators feel manipulated by body genre films – they feel they are being, in effect, forced to have an emotional and bodily connection to the images onscreen.xvi

One may suggest, from this, that while avant-garde filmmakers such as Brakhage, Buñuel, Dali, and Deren may on the surface reflect the same thematic concerns and engagement with the spectator as makers of horror films such as Romero, Pegg, Wright, and Hooper, the intention is completely different; artist filmmakers do not seek to manipulate the spectator, but only ask for an alternate way of experiencing the cinema. As Joan Hawkins notes, so the argument goes that films like The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes “use sensational material differently than many body genre films do...[and] are deemed to have a higher cultural purpose, and certainly a different artistic intent.”xvii The first response to that argument is that in the study of spectatorship the emphasis is on the way in which the spectator interprets the images, and not an examination of the intent of the filmmaker. And whether the artistic intent or cultural purpose is different or not, as Joan Hawkins observes, film audiences tend to feel similarly toward art cinema as they do toward horror:

Clearly designed to break the audience's aesthetic distance, the films encourage the kind of excessive physical response that we would generally attribute to horror. Furthermore, their excessive visual force...mark them as subversive. Banned, marginalised through being screened exclusively in museums and classrooms, these are films that most mainstream film patrons will never see.xviii

And while the former is elevated to a higher cultural status than the latter, film audiences traditionally feel a certain amount of frustration with both, because of their existence outside the boundaries of narrative. They are both either banned from public theatres, or restricted to viewing in galleries. Both can be difficult to access for people interested in these films. This frustration with the art film's apparent refusal to have an easily accessible meaning or structure would arguably lead to a similar feeling of manipulation or disgust with the images the spectator is presented with.

Buñuel and Dali both argue that Un Chien Andalou is a conscious attempt to reject meaning, with Buñuel himself stating that “our only rule was very simple: No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.” Buñuel went even further, explaining that “We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why.”xix This statement is interesting, because when it comes to the cinema and the spectator, it is almost impossible for the consumer of an image not to attempt to make meaning from the images, despite the aim of the producer of the image. The simple act of viewing a film involves deriving meaning from a set of seemingly randomly assembled images. What causes perhaps an alternative viewing experience when the spectator views a film such as Un Chien Andalou is the refusal of the film's images to allow for meaning or narrative structure, and the spectator's natural desire to derive meaning from the images. Koller asserts that due to the nature of the film and the intent of filmmakers Buñuel and Dali, the film is “open to a myriad of interpretations, rendering such analyses redundant.”xx

The film appears to provide a space in which to contemplate two aspects of the cinema and its engagement with the spectator; the desire to see the unseen, and the extent to which a film can evoke a response from the spectator at a bodily level. The experience of viewing Un Chien Andalou is apart from that of a narrative film, and this is heightened, perhaps ironically, through the use of the conventional editing techniques of narrative cinema, most notably, devices for the structuring of time (titles such as Once Upon a Time, and 8 Years Later). Dali asserts that the aim of the film is “to disrupt the mental anxiety of the spectator,” and we can already see that the film demands a particular kind of viewing experience separate from traditional narrative films.xxi The film demands an emotional and bodily response, as an intellectual response is refused at all points both within the film and by the filmmakers themselves. In this way, the link between the film and horror is clear. These techniques all serve to evoke a response from the spectator that deals primarily in sensation, not interpretation.

Williams notes that all forms of cinema are characterised by their opposition to conventional narrative cinema:

The repetitive formulas and spectacles of film genres are often defined by their differences from the classical realist style of narrative cinema. These classical films have been characterised as efficient action-centred, goal-oriented linear narratives driven by the desire of a single protagonist, involving one or two lines of action, and leading to definitive closure.xxii

Both art cinema and horror films most often operate outside of the 'classical realist style of narrative cinema.' In this regard we can consider them as belonging to a cinema with an alternative system of constructing meaning from sets of images. Both art films such as The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes and Un Chien Andalou and horror films such as Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre use images of the body in order to challenge the spectator and evoke an alternative response from them. According to Aristotle, "objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies."xxiii All of the aforementioned films use the reality of the body in such a way as to allow the spectator to witness and reflect on mortality and the unseen parts of the body and in that way also push the boundaries between the cinema screen and the audience. And as Hawkins argues, these can be used to both “challenge and titillate:”xxiv

...one kind of audience pleasure – doesn't necessarily preclude the other. It is possible for someone to be intellectually challenged and physically titillated; and it is possible for someone to simultaneously enjoy both the intellectual and physical stimulation.xxv

Arguably, it is a testament to the power of alternative forms of cinema such as art cinema and body genres such as horror that they can produce both of these sensations in a way that stands apart from the more traditional forms of cinema, and this goes beyond questions of high and low culture and perhaps even gender, as it is a phenomenon that takes place entirely in the body of the spectator engaging with the images onscreen. The images these films produce must not only be watched – they must be felt, too.

So....there are endnotes, but I can't copy them on my computer. They will be here soon, promise.

I. Need. To. Know.

For a while now, possibly the greatest defence of the cinema and graphic novels has remained in literature form. Never has a novel been better suited to a visual rendering than The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and yet there is hardly any info on a film version. But then, I found this.

If this is true, a note to the director currently attached to the project:

DON'T FUCK IT UP. KTHNX.

If you haven't already, please read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon. Buy it. You need it. We alllll need it.

He was handsomer than anybody I'd ever met. He looked just like James Dean.

Last year Russh magazine combined two of my favourite things: Badlands and clothes. Disappointed they used a blonde model to play Holly but I'm still in love:



One of the best things ever. Tried to rip it off in my film, but had to cut the scene that paid homage to Malick's pure brilliance.



Bless.

Hmmmm...

In my quest to be cynical and mortified by Hollywood remakes (and check for awesome pictures of Robert Downey, Jr - can you say 'New Johnny Depp?'), I stumbled across Empire Magazine's list of The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made.

The number one is pretty bad, but when I think of bad movies, I think of ones that I've hated as soon as they started, or bad dialogue, or you can see the ghost of an amazing film hovering around the bad film. It doesn't necessarily mean the film is poorly made or the acting is unconvincing - it usually means the storyline is weak or the style the director has employed doesn't suit the narrative.

My number one for this list will always be Tony Scott's Domino (2005). See above paragraph for why. Did really love Keira Knightley's haircut, though.

Thoughts, etc?

Boats and Ho's

So. I'm in the middle of writing this amazing blog about what I like to call the 'bromantic comedy' and what it reveals about representations of masculinity onscreen and particularly representations of heterosexual masculinity. I wasn't always in the middle - last night, after weeks of thinking about it, random moments for the last two years when I thought it might be an interesting subject to pursue after I wrote an essay on traditional representations of masculinity and couldn't find any literature that actually spelled them out, choosing instead to shout MASCULINITY IS IN CRISIS. Ha, yeah. It is. Because instead of tracing the historical development of representations of masculinity in film people have just been using it as the norm and defining everything else around it. Silly gooses.

I had an awesome lead-in quote from Robin Wood about critically analysing films from all different approaches to discover all the ways in which the film is communicating particular ideologies. I used the theory that everyone derives based on Joe Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces - you know, in Western civilisation the initiation rituals other cultures have for adolescent boys to transition into manhood have been, for want of a better way to say it, replaced with the myth of the quest and how these myths are proliferated through films like Star Wars - essentially, society in effect learns how to interact on a social level through popular culture and subsequently that means that we get most of our cultural and social information from the cinema.

Aaaaaannnnndddddd.....back to the whole masculinity thing. I'm seeing a whole bunch of films that seem to be expressing this confusion over representations of masculinity. What they suggest to me is that these films appear to suggest that heterosexual men don't know how they're supposed to act and these representations of masculinity are confused, which may make straight dudes even more confused? Sure, there is one genre of film that doesn't seem to be confused about heterosexual masculinity, but I think they make it even more confusing - well, I watched one example recently Crank 2 with Jason Statham. It both sucked and blowed. I'd be offended if I was a guy.

Maybe it's just as confusing for women, but I feel that there is a lot of film and television that present a confusion on the part of heterosexual men and the way they're supposed to behave, particularly around each other. It manifests itself in a lot of gay jokes and similar (watch the 'you know how I know you're gay?' scene in the 40 Year Old Virgin for an incredibly obvious example), but a lot of films that present male relationships in interesting ways.

Cue awesome analyses of Superbad and I Love You, Man and how they seem to be in a genre I like to call the bromantic comedy. I Love You, Man in particular seems to be about how heterosexual men negotiate the balance between relationships with their partner and with other men. And this film, to me, represents the way two men developing a friendship can be just as awkward and intense as developing a sexual relationship - and heterosexual men always seem to be ill at ease at the thought that their feelings toward other heterosexual men are being mistaken for sexual desire. I love this film because it seems entirely aware of this constant state of confusion and tension that guys live in sometimes.

And I talked about this moment in Superbad where Evan and Seth profess their love for each other and how the film sort of suggests that their relationship is becoming too codependent and it's time to move on with girls. But there's this look between them at the end that suggests that they're aware that they'll probably never be as close as they were ever again.

And now, photos of bro-love from each film:





AWESOME. Yeah, except that after working on it for two days, I was logged in to a different email address to the one I use for this blog and I....LOST IT. I finished it, went to publish and it wouldn't do it - was unable to process my request. Fuck you, motherfucker! And when I went back to the last-saved draft, it was just after I'd written a synopsis of the plot of I Love You, Man. How the fuck am I supposed to use that to go on to my awesome, awesome theory?!? Hence, this lazy version of the sheer brilliance I produced last night.

"I love you, man": The Bromantic Comedy

Oh. Em. JESUS.

I was going through my posts and I discovered I'd written a little about the bromance in film before (I recently wrote a list of the best ones in honour of Robert Pattinson needing a good bro in the wake of his embarrassingly public cuckolding at the hands of Kristen Stewart and Ruper Sanders.

I wrote this ages ago and for some reason it didn't post and I was devastated and too tired to start again so I wrote another post about it all (how self-reflexive) and I. JUST. FUCKING. FOUND. IT.

I also noticed that I didn't even finish it. Geez. And I also noticed that I thought I was the first person to use the term 'romantic comedy.' What a fucking moron.

Here goes:

One of the main theses of the late, great Robin Wood was that the goal of critical film analysis was to examine a film from more than approach, in order "to suggest something of the complex interaction of ideology, genre, and personal authorship that determines the richness, the density of meaning, of the great Hollywood masterpieces."

And I think that ole Woodsy was onto something, and not only that, I think there is a meaning to be found within not just the great Hollywood masterpieces, but also some of the recent 'blockbusters' and films considered 'below' the high purpose of critical analysis - I believe in my very half-hearted research into something one of my lecturers once told the class I stumbled upon an article championing indie films over blockbusters because it was so difficult to apply Wood's approach to formulaic and repetitive commercial films. Pretty sure Wood would turn in his grave if he knew - considering the Hollywood films theorists like Bordwell, Thompson and his good self developed a particular set of patterns and formulas to communicate certain ideologies. Massive fail for you, modern film critic.

You may have noticed recently that there have been more than a few films that would initially present themselves as 'guy movies.' My examples are films like Step-Brothers, Role Models, Superbad, The Hangover, and I Love You, Man. Films that feature little to no female characters, and if there any they're either screaming harpies hellbent on crushing the male characters' soul or objects of sexual obssession.

But are they really? On the one hand you could argue that yes, these women are symbols of the hideously narrow view of femininity, but if we stick with Wood's way of thinking, the message being communicated is one primarily for the men watching the film; a way of showing the male audience member the most desirable heterosexual union - in layman's terms: This is the wrong kind of girl, this is the right kind of girl. Which brings me back to why I was investigating my admiration for Wood - the thing my lecturer David Boyd told our class once. I wish I could remember who he was talking about - it may have been Wood - that every Hollywood film was about the reformation of the couple. Every single genre, this argument goes, is essentially a romance.

And yes, almost all Hollywood films feature a (let's face it) heterosexual union, no matter what the plot or genre, but this isn't really what this argument is referring to. If you look closely at a lot of films, the main line of action involves two characters meeting in an interesting manner (what we call 'the cute meet'), often hating each other immediately. But through the course of the film, they learn to value one another and become united. Does this sound familiar?

It's not just the plot of every romantic comedy, it's the plot of Lethal Weapon. On the director's commentary of Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright mentions that in the original script the character of Danny Butterman had a girlfriend, but in the end they decided the relationship between Nick and Danny was more important and scenes that were originally between Danny and his girlfriend sort of became incorporated into the scenes between Nick and Danny. And to me, it's a very deliberate decision.

One way to read these films is to look for the obvious homosexual subtext. And that is a perfectly valid analysis, one that I would like to research in the context of these films. But what interests me at the moment is the way in which these films seem to be expressing something about male relationships to a male audience.

The films that interest me the most, or the ones that seem to lend themselves rather well to this term 'bromantic comedy' (god, I hope I invented this)are Step-Brothers, Superbad, Pineapple Express, and of course I Love You, Man. The latter film is essentially the blueprint for the generic conventions of the Bromantic Comedy.

I should probably stop just reading the first section of Daniel Chandler's An Introduction to Genre Theory and actually read it properly before I research this further, because as he observes, "the attempt to define
particular genres in terms of necessary and sufficient textual properties is sometimes seen as theoretically attractive but
it poses many difficulties. For instance, in the case of films, some seem to be aligned with one genre in content and
another genre in form." So while it would be tempting to group these films together and pretend I've invented (or at the very least identified) a new genre, I must first ask; what are the common themes, devices, stylistic choices that bring all of these films under one umbrella? The magic Bromantic Comedy umbrella?

Well, Mr Chandler and members of the filmgoing public, I shall tell you. Well, I'll try, anyway. And I must point out that because this is a blog and not my PhD thesis, I'm being really lazy and just spewing forth random wisdom. And as you may have guessed, not referencing academically. But shout outs to Robin Wood, Chandler and of course, my secret boyfriend (so secret he and his wife know nothing about me), David Bordwell for making me the lazy writer on film I have become.

The common theme is pretty apparent - all of these films focus on the relationship between men. Or teenage boys becoming men in the case of Superbad. Superbad is sort of an interesting point of comparison with I Love You, Man, actually because each film deals with a lack in a male character's life in completely opposite ways. The second thing that unites these films, I Love You, Man and Stepbrothers, more so than Superbad, and I Love You, Man most of all, is its adherence to the generic conventions of the Romantic Comedy.

I Love You, Man, directed by John Hamburg, is most unashamedly a romantic comedy. It's just the couple united at the end that's different. The story is essentially this; Peter, played by Paul Rudd, gets engaged to his girlfriend, Zooey (Rashida Jones). When she tells all of her friends about the happy news and discovers Peter doesn't really have anyone to tell, she realises that he doesn't have any male friends and subsequently no best man. So Peter decides he needs to find a best man for his wedding. After a serious of tragic meetings that seem more like disastrous blind dates than attempts to find mates, Peter finally meets Sydney (Jason Segel) and a friendship begins to bloom.

A Prayer

While I do believe that The Prayer by Bloc Party is the most super awesome superhero getting in the zone music, it's also inspiring my current need to write a public plan; a Mandatory to-do List for my very own soul.

* Write my next blog about films in a genre that I would like to tentatively dub the Brom-Com (bromance films, or bromantic comedies).

* Get started on all of these 'upcoming' projects.

* Look into doing a podcast.

* Help found a film society/film festival thing.

* I will not let full time work, post-uni blues or reverse culture shock distract me - my credit card can't take it.

* I will use aforementioned full time work to save like a motherfucker and piss off to New York with a view to an internship.

But for now it's waiting on my Topshop and Urban Outfitters purchases and going for my consultation with the hairdressers for my hair extensions.