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Hancock

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est:
Saw a trailer for this the other day.  It looks like an excellent "things exploding" movie.  Anyone else excited to see a drunk, nigh-impervious Will Smith throwing kids into the upper stratosphere for smart-mouthing them and stopping a runaway train by standing in front of it?

Boro_Bandito:
Hancock is a perfect example of GENERIC EVOLUTION. Generic evolution is a syntactic variation of the semantic elements that define a genre, most notably the Iconography, Character, Narrative Structure and Themes. In lamens terms, it is the knowlegable manipulation of the material that makes a movie, in this case the superhero movie, to fit contemporary culture and tastes. According to Thomas Schatz, a well known generic theorist, every genre goes through four stages of generic evolution, the last of which is baroque, which is the stage at which reflexivity overrides the core ideals of the genre. Other movies like Super Hero Movie(or whatever it was called, by the guys who made Scary Movie) represent the parody, or really in there case a farcical view of the genre. Hancock seems to be more of a Post-modernistic view of the superhero genre, because it really doesn't seem to show a knowledge of the genre's history or traditions, or even really refer to the history of the sub-culture of comic books that the superhero movie came from in the first place. It's just a superhero movie based on the set of guidelines that other superhero movies has built, its media made from media, not from a source material (the comic books).

Do I actually understand what the hell I just said?! Only vaguely, goddamn Genre Theory class. The movie looks like it'll be good for some action entertainment and some laughs, and I'll fully be able to judge the movie on itself, not on its predecessesor or a comic book or novel that it's based on. That usually is a good thing. I'll go to see it in theaters, and unless its really bad I probably won't have anything bad to say about it. Things that go boom, woo.

Jimmy the Squid:
I saw a trailer for this on Friday, I reckon it's going to be pretty good. A superhero movie that I can only compare to the genre itself rather than any source material sounds like fun and I'll be honest, I like Will Smith and judging from the trailer this is a nice departure from the "serious" films he's been doing lately.

Surgoshan:
1)  Boro, try going through your post and expanding some of the more abstruse terms, providing definitions.  Then for every term which has multiple meanings in different fields (I doubt 'reflexivity' means the same thing in generic theory as it does in linguistics, for example), do the same.  Provide one or two examples where needed.  Then divide it up into paragraphs.  Do that and not only will you start making sense, but you'll have provided a good introductory post for a much more in-depth discussion of the genera which, more likely than not, will be buried in a few days if it ever gets off the ground.  In any case, you'll probably have gotten more out of the class.

2)  I want to see this movie.

sean:
Phil I am sorry but what the fuck are you talking about? Can you explain in stupid people terms? All of that went straight over my head.

Anyway, unless this thread tells me this movie is amazing when it comes out I will probably pass and wait for DVD. I remember seeing a trailer when I went to go see Iron Man and thought "eh."

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