Tendentious people are tendentious (and frequently dumb).

It will surprise no one who read my previous post to learn that the folks at Big Hollywood loved The Expendables exactly as much as they are ideologically required to anticipated. Still, John Nolte’s review is a teleological marvel. What he likes about the film is

the simple straight-forward plot, all the B-movie mayhem you could possibly ask for, and two unapologetic hours of masculinity—which may be two hours more than we’ve seen in all of the last decade put together. These boys smoke cigars, drink beer while piloting airplanes, and return us to those glorious pre-Oprah days when stoicism was still a virtue and real men didn’t gush about their inner-emotional lives like 13 year-old girls drunk on Dr. Pepper at a slumber party.

Maybe someone should tell him that the reason flat characters don’t “gush” about “their inner-emotional lives” is because they don’t have them. Maybe I should. I suppose I will. Please, Mr. Nolte, continue:

Sylverster Stallone’s glorious throwback to the brawny 80s is also about something, and it’s not Bourne-ian self-discovery. It’s about something that actually matters. And in this age of nihilism when believing in anything bigger than self is considered old-fashioned, unsophisticated and naïve, that’s both refreshing and important.

If you insist on italicizing the word “about,” you might want to indicate what that “something” that it’s about actually is. Sorry, I’m being rude. Mr. Nolte, you may continue:

The story opens with a well-crafted action sequence involving Somalia pirates that not only establishes how deadly competent our guys are, but also that they’re not cold-blooded killers. These are men with a moral code and one of their own breaking that code will be the root cause of deadly complications and a couple over the top action sequences to come.

So these are mercenaries who only ever fight the good fight? If I may, Mr. Nolte, let me recommend my friend Adam Roberts’s post on Iron Man, in which he notes that that film adheres to

the dream narrative of US military involvement in the Middle East: one American is able to go to Afghanistan, kill only the bad Afghans, leave all the good Afghani men women and children alive and leap away into the sky.

That “dream narrative” isn’t the product of a moral code, but simply a denial of the reality of reality. But I should let you finish:

The plot gets a nudge courtesy of a self-referential Meeting of The Titans. Ever in search of a job, Barney meets with “Church” (Bruce Willis), a CIA spook in need of some housecleaning that won’t make headlines and Arnold Schwarzenegger, a long-time rival. Cinematically this is far from a great scene—

First, stop pretending to be German. Second, I think you’re starting to realize that you didn’t even like the film. You call it a “B-movie,” rate its action scenes as “over the top,” and now you’re criticizing how it films a conversation. What did you think of the dialogue?

[T]hese aren’t men who talk a whole lot, and when they do it’s usually in the form of affectionate crowd-pleasing insults that might not move the plot or add character dimension, but once again Stallone (who co-wrote the screenplay with Dave Callahan) knows his audience.

I definitely think you hated this film. I mean, you’re praising dialogue that neither advanced the plot or added depth to the characters because, to your mind, Stallone’s audience consist of people who prefer pointless banter. I can’t even tell whether you’re insulting them more than your own intelligence here or vice versa. Wait, I have a test:

There’s also a kind of validation that comes with the price of admission, especially for those of us who couldn’t figure out why in the hell anyone would call metro-sexuals angsting over calling evil what it is and apologizing for America an action movie.

“The Expendables” proves us right.

Matt Damon sucks and the eighties freaking ruled.

I’m still not sure, but I will say this: your intelligence deserves to be insulted, because the reason you’re saying “Matt Damon sucks” is that he starred in movies with “Bourne-ian self-discovery,” whereas The Expendables “freaking ruled” because it was of the 1980s. Guess what? So’s The Bourne Identity (1980) and, of course, The Bourne Identity (1988).

Hate to burst your bubble, Mr. Nolte, but your precious ’80s were a bit smarter and more “inner-emotional” than you’ve chosen to remember them as.

Comments

[Matthew Merlino]

Tomemos, like I wrote before, there's not enough text here to garner any sense of tone. My initial comment simply asked if, whatever our feelings about Sly Stallone's nonsense are, we could agree that we want some sort of hero that's, well, heroic.

The answer to that question was uniformly "no." Which, while not an outright defense of Cera (which Scott certainly did undertake by accusing me of hoping *Scott Pilgrim* bombed), is a defense of the characters he has embodied.

And it's sort of hard to be the supercilious one in a thread in which commenters are feeling quite brave for attacking a moronic right-wing blog post about a Sly Stallone flick. I mean, come on, I thought it was a contest of smug superiority!

Finally, Rich, I have no idea what you're talking about. "Luther Blissett" is a group name, and I never claimed ownership. But the "Luther Blissett" who has commented here and at The Valve and at Crooked Timber and at the Chronicle and elsewhere is me and me alone. Sorry if you think that's impossible, but it is so.

[Ahistoricality]

Just because you're young doesn't mean you're not perpetrating a declensionist argument that has no basis in reality. Just because you're a regular doesn't mean that you're not trolling this discussion. Just because we find your statements here to be inane in the extreme doesn't mean that a competently-made argument against the prevailing sentiment won't get treated seriously, as it usually is. I don't always agree with you as Blisset, either - for the most part our comments pass by each other without ever touching on the same topics - but under that name you're usually a better writer and interlocutor.

[JPool]

Matthew,
You get called a troll when you behave trollishly: ascribing positions to people that they haven't espoused; not responding to people's points directly, but rather insiting that their response reveals something about them; redirecting discussion of any particular work to a generalized complaint about the culture. None of these moves result in productive dialog but instead seem designed to insult/piss off the people you're writing to.

If you want to be a cultural reactionary, that's fine (I mean, I'll fight you on the barricades, but in that ineffectual post-structuralist "yes, and"/"no, but" way), but you still have to actually make arguments for your critical judgements and not just insist that those who might disagree who you are ... something or other.

[Rich Puchalsky]

""Luther Blissett" is a group name, and I never claimed ownership. But the "Luther Blissett" who has commented here and at The Valve and at Crooked Timber and at the Chronicle and elsewhere is me and me alone."

I wasn't saying that it is impossible for a single person to have used the Luther Blissett pseudonym in a group of related blogs over a long period of time. I was saying that I was disappointed if this were so.

I'm disappointed because, again, this is self-contradictory rhetoric. Luther Blissett is a group name, and no single person can claim ownership of it. But claiming ownership (well, authorship) is what you're doing, within a context that may be limited to a number of years and a group of blogs, but that is still the entire context that you expect us to have seen comments by LB in.

Are you really sure that you are the sole and only LB within this context? If someone else had once gone to the Valve, or somewhere, and posted a comment as LB, would you have noticed? Complained and said that you were the true LB in this parish?

[Julian]

This identity crisis reminds me of Martin Guerre, which also gave me an idea:

Michael Cera in a Martin Guerre remake updated for the Iraq/Afghanistan/facebook/hipster set.

[Matthew Merlino]

This is ridiculous. I began by addressing the core concern of the post Scott was fisking: the hero in Hollywood film. Scott was going after an easy target, while clearly holding up Scott Pilgrim as some sort of antidote. So I wanted to suggest that, while Stallone heroes are worthless, the Cera hero is equally played out. No trolling there. Just disagreeing, and asking Scott to question his own assumptions of value before knocking those of the Big Hollywood thugs. Physician, heal thyself and all that. It was the stupid personal attacks - and accusations of trolling are nothing but personal attacks - that shifted the conversation off topic, as you all circled your wagons to avoid thinking critically about your own sacred cow.

[SEK]

Scott was going after an easy target, while clearly holding up Scott Pilgrim as some sort of antidote.

I was, but not because of Michael Cera. I specifically mentioned Edgar Wright because, as director and the writing partner of Simon Pegg, his films (Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) have consistently been playing with genre conventions instead of into them (as The Expendables does). In short, I was saying that we can have summer fare that revels in its obsolescence, or material that at least attempts to be interesting. I said we ought to support the latter, which has nothing to do with Michael Cera except for the decision to cast him in this role. (And honestly, casting a young, disaffected Canadian to play a young, disaffected Canadian doesn't seem like much of a stretch to me. This is the kind of role in which Cera's shtick works because, if it's true to the books, his ironic distance is persistently undermined.)

[Matthew Merlino]

Scott, two points:

1. The Big Hollywood reviews don't really big up the issue of genre or convention. So to argue with them on that point seems misguided. Instead, they address the issue of the figure of the hero. I brought up Michael Cera not as an actor but as a certain kind of hero -- and my problem with that kind of hero is mostly the fact that it's being overdone by the same actors over and over again. I meant "Michael Cera" as a metonymic reference to that sort of hero. Personally, I have a plague on both houses position here: the Sly Stallone and Michael Cera heroes are equally worthless. I feel like they are two sides of the same coin: stereotypical physical presence with no emotional depth, and stereotypical emotional messiness with no physical presence.

2. This whole "playing with conventions" defense troubles me as well. It's what I heard so many times with *500 Days of Summer* -- "See, it's not another cliched rom-com; it's a self-referential, arch rom-com." Except that rom-coms since the 40s have been arch, and merely playing with conventions is not enough to make an effective piece of art. Lady Gaga plays with conventions, but she's still terrible.

[asdfsdf]

"I feel like they are two sides of the same coin: stereotypical physical presence with no emotional depth, and stereotypical emotional messiness with no physical presence."

Now I think that is a valid critique, although I have not seen many Michael Cera movies. You can combine them to get The Hurt Locker, but this is fairly rare; more commonly, you get a lopsided combination, as in Inception, for example. Competently produced, balanced enough to be decent, etc. Not a masterpiece, but most of us do not have tastes as critical as this readership's.

I rather liked Inception, but I belong to the tribe of semi-casual watchers who can only understand why a movie affected them the way it did after a great deal of retrospection and introspection. I do believe that an emotional movie can stand on its own much more effectively than an action movie, but good movies often require a combination of both.

In other words, most people here will probably agree that you can make an excellent movie with a near total emphasis on emotion and character, while you cannot make an excellent movie by ignoring those factors. Compare Citizen Kane to Transformers 2 (An unfair comparison, but I cannot think of any movies that fit into the latter category and have stood the test of time. Telling).

It seems to me (despite how admittedly untrained and lowly my critical mind may be) that you object to a movie that has no action and relatively weak characterization more than you do to one that has no characterization and decent action, which is a fair complaint. An action movie, after all, can still delight us with big booms and macho catchphrases, although we forget about it the very next day.