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The Elephant and Centipede
Our Prime Minister is this far away from putting a giant, solid gold statue of himself on top of Parliament House. Watching the news these days is so depressing.*
I'm getting my stuff ready for next semester, and today that entailed buying DVDs for my screen theories class. We won't be studying The Usual Suspects, but we will be studying the usual suspects: Casablanca, Battleship Potempkin, Un Chien Andalou, Vertigo, etc. They're classics for a reason, obviously, but wouldn't it be interesting, just once, to study genre and narrative in, say, The Muppet Movie? Or discourses of masculinity in, ooh, Dude, Where's My Car?? That'd be fun. Anyway, where I bought my DVDs they had a big Superman promo, obviously getting ready for the soon-to-be-released new movie. Underneath a poster of New Superman was a display of DVDs of all the Old Supermen - the dopey looking boy from Smallville, the other TV one with Teri Hatcher, Christopher Reeve, George Reeves - all wearing the blue suit. How odd to see so many similar-looking men dressed identically!
Thinking about The Muppet Movie got me thinking about Kermit and Miss Piggy and what an odd couple they are. Either she is a miniature pig or he is the world's biggest frog. What sort of freaky mutant children would they spawn? After tonight's depressing news bulletin I was flicking through the channels, and so caught an advertisement for some sort of Airwicks home deodorant product, featuring an female (cartoon) elephant saying how her trunk was sensitive to bad smells and how Airwicks had helped disguise the smelly feet of her husband... a centipede. That's even less likely than a frog and a pig.
* Except for this story, about a man who stole more than 50,000 $2 coins from the Royal Australian Mint by hiding them in his shoes. I was also briefly entertained by news of an outbreak of sugar cane smut, until that turned out to be a Very Bad Thing.
I'm getting my stuff ready for next semester, and today that entailed buying DVDs for my screen theories class. We won't be studying The Usual Suspects, but we will be studying the usual suspects: Casablanca, Battleship Potempkin, Un Chien Andalou, Vertigo, etc. They're classics for a reason, obviously, but wouldn't it be interesting, just once, to study genre and narrative in, say, The Muppet Movie? Or discourses of masculinity in, ooh, Dude, Where's My Car?? That'd be fun. Anyway, where I bought my DVDs they had a big Superman promo, obviously getting ready for the soon-to-be-released new movie. Underneath a poster of New Superman was a display of DVDs of all the Old Supermen - the dopey looking boy from Smallville, the other TV one with Teri Hatcher, Christopher Reeve, George Reeves - all wearing the blue suit. How odd to see so many similar-looking men dressed identically!
Thinking about The Muppet Movie got me thinking about Kermit and Miss Piggy and what an odd couple they are. Either she is a miniature pig or he is the world's biggest frog. What sort of freaky mutant children would they spawn? After tonight's depressing news bulletin I was flicking through the channels, and so caught an advertisement for some sort of Airwicks home deodorant product, featuring an female (cartoon) elephant saying how her trunk was sensitive to bad smells and how Airwicks had helped disguise the smelly feet of her husband... a centipede. That's even less likely than a frog and a pig.
* Except for this story, about a man who stole more than 50,000 $2 coins from the Royal Australian Mint by hiding them in his shoes. I was also briefly entertained by news of an outbreak of sugar cane smut, until that turned out to be a Very Bad Thing.