Best Deconstruction: Unforgiven, Superman 2, Logan, The Incredibles, Thor Ragnarok
Worst Deconstruction: Batman vs Superman, The Last Jedi, Ang Lee's Hulk
Best Deconstruction: Unforgiven, Superman 2, Logan, The Incredibles, Thor Ragnarok
Worst Deconstruction: Batman vs Superman, The Last Jedi, Ang Lee's Hulk
Since Unforgiven turned up a couple of times without either of these films being mentioned...
Best:
- The Wild Bunch
- Ride The High Country
Actually I think it was them throwing something against the wall to see if it would stick. It did.
It certainly felt like a parody, like Woody Allen doing Casino Royale. Completely out of any previous context, and completely devoid of any weight to what should have been the most emotionally dramatic moment in the MCU to that point.
That was my problem with the movie. It just felt so out of sync with itself. Here is horror and end of the world stuff going on over here and then lets have a bunch of over the top jokes going on over here. It was like two movie crammed together making one bad movie. Thor Ragnarok is not a great movie tone wise and yet everyone eats it up and overlooks how sloppy it is.
Sam Peckinpah's THE WILD BUNCH (1969) is so profoundly great in so many ways, it almost seems beneath it to say it's a deconstruction. But it is in that it describes the decline of the Old West and serves to put to rest the tired conventions of the Western.
Deconstruction, however, either has to be really great or it fails in being a shadow of the thing it tries to deconstruct. HEAD (1968) by Bob Rafelson is an example of someone destroying the thing he created--the Monkees. It's not that there aren't brilliant bits in the movie, but the film deconstructs the charm of the Monkees to such an extent that the four performers were left to pick up the shards of their careers after this movie came out. I feel particularly bad for Davey Jones who put so much effort into his song and dance numbers for the picture, only to have the rug pulled out from under him by a director so self-involved he didn't care who he hurt.
Not quite as loathesome but much harder to sit through is Jean Luc Godard's SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL (1968). As with HEAD, individual bits and pieces of the movie are entertaining to watch, but Godard tortures the viewer with these incredibly long takes and non sequiturs. From an artistic perspective, I understand what the director is doing--and on that level he's far more admirable than Rafelson--but if you love the Rolling Stones then it seems like abuse to suffer through this movie for their sake.
Deep Space Nine was great at deconstructing Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, something its successors Enterprise, the Abrams movies, and Discovery only touched upon. But moreso, the deconstruction served to help strengthen and make more concrete certain Trek tropes.
"It's easy to be a saint in paradise."
It kind of reminds me of a Mel Brooks movie that he wrote and starred in called "Life Sucks". There's a scene in the movie where a homeless person the Mel Brooks character befriended dies on the street and he finds the body. They tried to find way after way to make it funny and Brooks finally realized, there is no way to make it funny because it's not funny and he realized he was going to have to film a deadly serious scene which he did. Unfortunately, "Thor Ragnarok" feels to me like two hours of it's not funny but let's play it as if it is.
Obviously, most of the audience ate up the fluff.
Power with Girl is better.
Is that what Batman Returns kinda did though? Penguins always been a bit of a freak who pined for being accepted by the upper class of society. In Returns he became the Mayor to reclaim his birth right yada yada and then lost it when Batman showed them how despicable he really was and he got rejected.
Worst: Batman vs Superman and Ang Lee Hulk.
Best: The Incredible and Ant Man.
Last edited by Commander Wort; 08-16-2018 at 10:11 AM.
Scream was so successful of a deconstruction of horror movies that it turned into a genre of it's own.
On a similar note, I'd also recommend Behind the mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon, which is like Scream from the killers point of view. How a wannabe killer sets everything up to follow the horror movie rules.
Got to thinking about it. The Addiction might just be a really great bit of deconstruction of "Vampire" films.