Genre Cinema Today - Essay Example

According to Robin Woods’s essay:

Genre cinema today—deprived of the sustaining base of the star/studio system, replaced by a set of businessmen sitting around a conference table asking “Well. What made the most money last year?” and constructing a “package” resembling it as closely as possible but going a little further – obviously survives only in an extremely debased and impoverished form.

The writer talks about how Hollywood movies were grand and the genre pictures were made with vast movie excellence but now all that is left are mere new casts doing sequels, imitations, and remakes. Classic Hollywood movies were work of art that was devoted closely to theoretical and critical attention to the movie plot and cinematic text and ideology.

Genre analysis can be problematical though. What is called analysis or criticism is often little more than making note of superficial similarities or differences amongst films. This is true across film criticism in general. Rick Altman calls this approach to genre criticism the semantic approach—a focus on the more superficial aspects of films that fit into a given genre. A semantic examination would point out the character types, aesthetics, plot lines, etc., which are common to films.

The inevitable question that must arise from such an assessment is, “Why bother?” What good does it do to point out that noir films all make extensive use of light and shadow plot development for example, or that Westerns usually feature saloons? In this case, genre analysis is no different from a similar analysis of a given individual film. To be valuable, genre analysis must bring deeper issues to the surface.

It may be interesting to realize that movies like Superbad protagonists are often short. But examining why that is the case—or what effects it might have—is much more valuable.

In the context of this deeper, broader method of analysis, I think that genre criticism can be very useful. Qualities or incidences and similarities that seem insignificant in individual films can take on more meaning when connected with similar characteristics of other films in the genre—if we have shown the existence of the genre itself. So while the semantic approach is necessary, it is a means to an end—the end being the syntactic analysis which can then be taken up, and which can tell us something about the societies in which the films are produced and consumed. These high school comedy romance movies are a new genre and all similar movies are based on almost the same storyline.

The existence of particular genres themselves is significant as well. Given that a group of films of this high school genre share a common lot of significant characteristics, we can and should then ask why this is so. The high school movie has always been a popular, drama-comedy-filled genre for most generations are they are a source of huge earnings and ratings. With the critically heralded, uproarious "Superbad" now released, the genre looks to be getting even better. Judd Apatow (who created “Freaks and Geeks”) produced the comedy about two friends (Jonah Hill and Michael Cera) looking for sex, booze, and basically, all kinds of new experiences and trouble before they leave for separate colleges the next year.

Robin Wood discusses the difference between Western movies in terms of sex, education, literary adaptation, parents/home, gender, race, class, politics, and sexual orientation. High-school movies are also full of unease now. Yet this most commercial and frivolous of genres harbors a grievance against the world. It’s a very specific grievance, quite different from the restless anger of such fifties adolescent-rebellion movies as “The Wild One” in which someone asks Marlon Brando’s biker “What are you rebelling against?” and the biker replies, “What have you got?” The fifties teen outlaw was against anything that adults considered sacred.

But in modern cinema, no movie teenager now revolts against adult authority, for the simple reason that adults have no authority. Teachers are rarely more than a minimal, exasperated presence, administrators get turned into a joke, and parents are either absent or distantly benevolent. It’s a teen world, bounded by school, mall, and car, with occasional moments set in the fast-food outlets where the kids work, or in the kids’ upstairs bedrooms, with their pinups and rack stereo systems. The enemy is not authority; the enemy is other teens and the social system that they impose on one another... The writer discusses “Never Been Kissed,” “She’s All That,” “Ten Things I Hate About You,” “Never Been Kissed,” “Not Another Teen Movie,” “Bring It On” and many more like that.

Superbad is extreme in some of its situations, Superbad is believable primarily because of the highly interdependent friendship of two very different teenage boys. Evan (Michael Cera) is kind, intelligent, and decent. His longtime best pal, Seth (Jonah Hill), is foul-mouthed and obsessed with sex.

They share lifelong social ineptitude, which affects their dogged and desperate attempts at scoring with the ladies. Superbad focus on Seth and Evan's efforts to attend a party thrown by one of the cooler girls in their class (Emma Stone). The events that befall them would be nightmarish if they weren't so funny. Superbad writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg must have vivid memories of the awkward yearnings and frustrations of their teen years. The dialogue they create, as well as the situations, is absurdly comic. Gross-out humor abounds.

Humiliation, fear, and occasional elation are the dominant emotions for these bumbling but oddly likable young men. Side-splitting laughter, along with some powerful cringing, is likely to be the audience's dominant reaction. "Superbad" has some of that Apatow feeling. The movie is missing the gentle moral authority and most of the human warmth.