After reading Louis Proyect’s article on the superhero movies we don’t need, I thought I’d send you a few suggestions of superhero movies we do need.
I’m thinking specifically of scripts based on the culturally significant visual-literary work of Gilbert Shelton.
For a superhero saving the people from themselves story, I recommend: WONDER WARTHOG!
For a buddies in tough situations saving their own asses (which is super-heroic for them), I recommend: THE FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS.
For a heartwarming story of brave animal intelligence (again, moving from in extemis to luxuriant satisfaction): FAT FREDDY’S CAT.
Who could doubt that with today’s enhanced appreciation:
– of the medical powers of marijuana,
– of the need felt by many for popular guidance by a superior critter,
– and of animal intelligence and nobility,
that films about:
– community self-help action with cannabinoid assistance (THE FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS),
– powerfully superior critters upholding traditional American standards (WONDER WARTHOG!),
– and animal triumphs in their struggle for pleasurable survival in the human world (FAT FREDDY’S CAT),
that the films suggested wouldn’t be mega-hits?
As to movie audiences today being dumber than those of the ’70s being blamed for the current low-brow level of Hollywood movies, maybe that’s just a sour grapes complaint of old film-makers; but then again, look at book-reading audiences then and now. Who reads books anymore? Who reads at all?
The reason today’s Hollywood is an artificial-lack-of-intelligence (LA-I) corporate juggernaut ejaculating epileptic fit-inducing visual-aural spasms of explosive drivel, and the book publishing industry is disgorging boatloads of pre-use waste paper packaged as oversized double-spaced big-font low-word-count sophomoric stories and inane self-help vacuities, is that the multitudes of cerebral vessels needed to absorb culture and sustain the craft industries of producing both cinema and literary art, have atrophied en masse more rapidly in the last four decades than the melting of the Arctic Ice. In fact, the Great Mass Self-Pithing may be the root cause of the Great Melt.
So, why should Hollywood and the book-corps do anything else today?, after all: it’s all about the money. They might as well get as rich as they can as quick as they can to be as flush as they can when our world sink-holes and desiccates on itself. As Saint Morrison instructed and prophesied half a century ago: “I don’t know what’s gonna’ happen, man, but I wanna’ have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.”
I must send this to you now, before P.G.&E. cuts off my electrical power in another of California’s new involuntary mass sacrifices to Aeolus, God of the Winds, and Vulcan, the God of the Underworld, to not cast their combined fiery breath on our shriveling patch of the once Halcyon Fields, tonight and tomorrow.
What was once art is now comic-book, because what was once intelligence is now superstition.