Friday 18 March 2016

Nothing Politically Correct About it, you're just old.

There needs to be a term for anti-political correctness gone mad.

In the last year or so a lot of comedians, particularly of a certain age, started speaking out against millennial audiences, who in their opinion, are killing humour with their growing list of what is now politically incorrect to talk about. Like a good millennial, I sat through a number of these complaining comedians on Youtube, stewing with disagreement. But it didn't really hit the mainstream until comedy legends like Seinfeld decided to join it.


Seinfeld tells of his experience of a joke that bombs with the 'college campus type' crowds. "The way you scroll through your phone like a gay, French king" is the punchline to the joke. Seinfeld reports being able to feel the opinion of the audience: "what do you mean, gay?"

"There's a creepy, PC thing going on out there that really bothers me," he says.

Let's contrast this with the kind of comedian who is very popular with the audience he's talking about, the not at all PC Louis CK.



Here he is talking about how much he misses the word 'faggot'.

Political correctness was very much a 90s movement. Needless to say, a white comedian talking about words like 'faggot' and 'nigger' wouldn't have felt comfortable to a mainstream audience at that time. Regardless of why they were being said. Ironically, Seinfeld is very associated with this era. It was a time when he was hugely popular, and one of the things he was most known for was his refusal to even swear on stage. So by the standards of the 'political correctness' movement, Louis CK is hugely more offensive than Seinfeld. It wouldn't even be a question.

Today things have pretty much reversed. That's the problem with these complaining comedians. They have failed to notice that we're not actually living in a time of 'political correctness' anymore, we're living in a time of 'political correctness debate', there's a subtle, but substantial difference between the two.

Why can Louis say 'Faggot' on stage and still be very popular with a modern, mainstream audience? Because of how he's talking about it. Seinfeld's joke bombs because it relies on ignoring debate around LGBT issues. You're just supposed to agree 'gay' is a funny word, or that gay = flamboyant is both true and funny. You're not supposed to think too much about it, he's appealing to subconscious biases.

And indeed... any small amount of thinking about it will beg the question 'what the hell is a gay French King, anyway? Is that a thing?'

Louis CK on the other hand fully engages with a modern audiences desire to debate these issues. He's not saying 'faggot' in the hope that it'll appeal to some unconscious bias you have against homosexuals. He want to talk in a challenging way about the two meanings of the word. Now, no doubt there are still some PC people out there who don't like his crassness, or find his conclusions offensive. But his popularity with millennials shows that over all that's not an issues.

Millennials like being challenged by Louis CK. When he did his episode of Louie called 'So did the Fat Lady', where his character is ashamed to date an overweight woman, I read a lot of feminist pieces that praised the episode for asking interesting questions. Not a single one of the articles I read agreed with him wholeheartedly. Nevertheless, he wasn't vilified, because he's asking questions and aware of right and wrong ways of treating people as he does so.

In his new show Horace and Pete, he again pries into dating biases, this time looking at transgender issues. His character Horace is concerned he's slept with a transwoman. I had to pause before sharing it on Facebook, as I found it interesting, but I wasn't sure if it could offend any of the transgender people in my life. His stuff is never clean, never pandering to what people want to hear. 'Edgy' has become a word I can't take very seriously, but his stuff is 'edgy'. But it does, in a very real way--perhaps for this very reason--embodies the conversations we want to be having at the moment.

Is Seinfeld being edgy? No. That's not anyone's problem with what he's doing. The problem with Seinfeld is he embodies the attitude of not wanting to think about the issues around what is being said. Worse, he feels entitled to say what he wants without challenge. These people often cite freedom of speech, but there's no freedom in privileged people saying what they want and no one being able to question them.

Sarah Silverman spoke last year about her own annoyance at the amount of criticism that a comedian can now get over every little thing they say. But that she had come to realise she was acting like older comedians when she was young, who offended her, because they refused not to called black people niggers on stage. I think that pretty much sums it up.


   
What's funny will change with cultures evolving ideas on morality. That's a reality. It doesn't mean you have to pander to what people want to be interesting, it just means you have to be smart about it. Has comedy died? No not at all, it's pretty strong at the moment. Has a generation of comedians started to die, on the other hand? Inevitably, yes. As has happened before, as will happen again.

Sunday 14 February 2016

The 3 best rom-coms to watch this valentines day

Valentines day is here, but if your first love is cinema you might be wondering what movie to pick to celebrate the day. Let's face is, rom-coms are often the junk food of movies. And when one does pop up that manages to also explore themes on a relationship in an interesting way, they're often a little pessimistic (Annie Hall, for example).

So what movies help you celebrate love with good humour, but while exploring it with some moral integrity? Well, there are a few, and here is a list of my favs.


1. About Time

The men in his family have the ability to travel through time, and our protagonist wants to use it to get a girlfriend. But this is not just a 'get the girl' movie, it's about love, death and family... and spanning several years, it's about time. Not sci fi time, but out personal relationship to it.

This is Richard Curtis's (of Nothing HillFour Weddings and a Funeral, and Love Actually fame) most grounded and grown up movie. It has all of his trade marks, it's sweet and funny to his style that we've come to love. Upgrading Huge Grant for the wonderful Domhnall Gleeson. But this is clearly a movie made by a much more lived man. Even the beautiful American love interest that makes up all of his leading ladies, in this film has an actual personality. But you could also say that love too is finally given a personality. Love is the ultimate Mary Sue in romantic movies, but this movie celebrates it while dealing with it as a reality, something that can often be mundane, confusing, and hard to deal with.

It'll make you laugh, it'll make you cry. A very sweet film, and in my opinion, a very romantic one too.



2. Friends With Kids

When two best friends realise kids ruin all their friends marriages, they start to envy divorced parents who can go and find their 'one' without all that pressure. It's then they realise, maybe they could co-parent together as friends.

This is When Harry Met Sally but updated to be both more true to life and more fun to watch. It manages to say a lot about relationships, in fact writer, director and star Jennifer Westfeldt is often referred to as the female Woody Allen. But I think of her more as Woody Allen for people who either get too bummed out watching his films, or just get sick of the lack of polish in the final product and want to watch a real 'movie'. Either way, I love her.

Great casting, no dull moments, and upbeat feel while dealing with real conflicts. This is a very underrated film.


3. Don Jon

Jon prides himself on being able to have one night stands with perfect 10s, but in secret, he can only really lose himself when he's watching porn. He desperately wants to find a girl who can fix this for him, and so sets his sights on a character played by Scarlett Johansson. After all, how could someone that sexy not be the solution?

It's not a perfect movie, so I get why it loses a few people, but I love it. It's got a lot going for it. We're a generation that try to use things in place of real intimacy and what feminist Joseph Gordon Levitt (writer, director and star) has to say about this is worth the ride. We start out in a fairly cartoonish world, which can at moments be pretty funny, or horrific depending on your sentiments. But as we follow Jon's journey in becoming more self aware, a more realistic aesthetic starts kicking in, and at this point if you're on-board with the message, you get some surprisingly beautiful moments.




Some honorary mentions 

Trainwreck was a huge rom-com this year. And I so wanted to love it. From the first scene, I was onboard. It was funny, it was fresh, it explored an interesting problem you don't often see explored... but then it lost me at the end. It was almost like writer and star Amy Schumer didn't know the answer to the problem she was looking at so just relied on rom-com tropes. A total departure to the rest of the movie. Still, I think a lot of people really enjoyed it, and my 'meh' about it has more to do with how good I know this film could have been.

Speaking of, I was very aware that I wasn't listing a Judd Apatow movie. I'm not too surprised, I think they do clever things to invite men into the rom com world, and they have some more interesting content, but they're also not very romantic. With the exception of Trainwreck they tend to just make relationships feel like a drag. If I was to mention one, This is 40 I think has the most valentines day appeal. Not because it's romantic, but because it's at least fair to both genders in how it mocks marriage, and you don't leave wishing they'd break up.

Not all Woody Allen movies are a downer. There are some that are very sweet or even romantic, but I didn't list them because the reality is he's still actually pretty niche taste. Everyone Says I Love You has a lot of charm but, being a musical, is hard to recommend. Mighty Aphrodite is great fun and probably one of his best films, but want does it really say about romance when you get down to it?


No all, in all, I think the above three films are unusual in how they blend romance, comedy, and thinking into the perfect film for valentines day.


Meaning our winner is... About Time


Wednesday 6 January 2016

Are we getting New Years Resolutions wrong?


New Years resolutions chronically don't work. They're essentially wishes we make each year. At the beginning it's fun to pretend we'll keep them up until the reality kicks in a few days/weeks later--there were reasons we'd never X-ed before. Whether X is quitting smoking, going on that diet you've been thinking about since your last one failed, or learning something new like a language, it's all the same story.




Meanwhile, people can actually have a lot of success setting goals and achieving them during other days of the year. So where do New Year resolutions go so wrong?

They're normally always things that (a) one doesn't really want but just feels some pressure to attain (smoking/dieting/new language can all fall into this category). Or (b) one does want but has substantial reason why they've not already achieved it, which they've not really thought about enough to resolve. Overeating can be symptomatic of some larger emotional or mental health issue, for instance, and when this is the case dieting becomes the easy part. But even things like 'being too lazy' to go to your new class to learn X can really be about other, larger problems.

But there is something symbolic about a 'new year'. A fresh start, if you will. So perhaps News Years Resolutions themselves shouldn't be thrown out with the bath water. In this case the 'bath water' being: how terrible we are at making them. Because maybe that's the point. The ones we make are made badly, and that's why we can't do better at keeping them.

This year I'm trying out a new approach. I've set myself a New Year resolution for something I have evidence that I want, have spent a lot of time thinking about why I haven't done, and have realised (and this is the crucial bit) that it's mostly fear that stops me. In this case that thing is: to learn to draw bold and competent pieces from my imagination. I know that I'd like to do this, because I do draw a lot (so it's clearly something I'm serious about). But I always sketch portraits from photos and my biggest frustration with it is that, although I can try to communicate a lot about the person in how I draw them, that's a very limited form of creative expression. Meanwhile I can often see in my head drawings I'd love to put down, but I lack the skills. So that's my evidence that I want to do it, but I'm also aware that the reason I haven't already is fear, fear, fear.

The mean, self-hating part of my brain tells me how for some magical reason I'm the one person in the world who'll just never understand how to learn this, and even if I did they'd all be crap because I have some creativity clamp in my brain that stops me from having better drawing ideas. But aside from that delusion, it's also just hard to go back to being bad at drawing, having got my sketches to a place I'm reasonably proud of. You have to face frustrations you've long forgotten. And it might be a while before you have anything you'd be proud to show people.

The nice thing about fear being the obstacle, though, is you can face fears in a way that you can't easily 'face', for example, emotional and mental health problems. The latter takes time and often some professional help. The former can slide away by just ramping yourself up to believe you can do it, and finding a nice manageable step to start you off. And is it just me or is the New Year the perfect time to feel 'ramped up'. You look back on your year, you look forward to a new one, and you find yourself feeling like 'is this holding-back fear really worth it?' When the answer is no, it's the perfect opportunity to get started on this old goal. Enjoying the easy measurement of a calender year to note your progress.

I'll have to see over the year if this approach works, but I'm liking it theoretically. And a week in, I'm enjoying learning about drawing. I'd share one hear, but for the time being, they don't look much better than this little guy: