Author Archives: Thom Yee

He Says/She Says: Grosse Pointe Blank

21 Saturday Sep 2013

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He Says

by Thom Yee

Grosse Pointe Blank poster

Grosse Pointe Blank images courtesy of Buena Vista Pictures

Remember when you’d talk to your high school guidance counselor?  He’d ask you what you would do if you had a million dollars, if you didn’t have to work.  And invariably whatever you’d say was supposed to be your career.  So, if you wanted to fix old cars you’re supposed to be an auto mechanic.

Hopefully the reason that sounds familiar to you is because you can pick out movie quotes pretty easily and not because it’s a reflection of your life.  It’s a cliche.  I never spoke to my high school guidance counselor; I’m not even sure if my high school had one.  Frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever had a serious conversation about what I wanted to do with anyone.  Careers are a tough thing to get a handle on.  When somebody asks you what you do, do you just tell them where you work?  What your title is?  What you actually do?  Or do you make something up that sounds a little more impressive?  Are you happy with where you’ve ended up?  Is it at all what you imagined?  Does it even vaguely resemble what you would do if you had a million dollars?

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The World’s End

31 Saturday Aug 2013

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by Thom Yee

World's End - poster

The World’s End images courtesy of Universal Pictures and Focus Features

I like British stuff.  British cars, British landmarks… even British people.  There’s just something about their fundamental sensibilities, a mix of pride, integrity and understanding combined with an over-developed sense of perversion.  Now that’s pretty easy to say having not grown up there and having never visited, but everything British I’ve been exposed to — whether it was the Daniel Craig James Bonds, football hooligans, Warren Ellis, or even Top Gear — all seemed to have a certain wit (even if it didn’t need to), a certain understanding that there’s always more under the surface and that that’s where everything important is.  When it comes to British comedy, it’s not about landing jokes, it’s about hiding something funny in everything you say and the certain understanding that the only audiences worth pursuing are the ones picking up what you’re putting down.  It’s not about fast-paced wisecracks or sophistication (and in many ways it’s the polar opposite of those), it’s the winking notion that you only really recognize if you get it.  That moment at the end when you lay your soul bare to the only person you’ve ever really cared about, and all they say, all they have to say is, “I know.”

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Shaun of the Dead

17 Saturday Aug 2013

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by Thom Yee

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Shaun of the Dead images courtesy of Rogue Pictures

As much as our popular conceptions of zombies come from 1968 and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the zombie has existed in one form or another since the Bronze Age of man.  These days, people talk about zombies like they’re some sort of fad, a phenomenon that can most easily be traced back to late 2010 when The Walking Dead (the TV show) started gaining attention on an international level, but I don’t feel like zombies are ever going to go away like the vampire fad.  The thing that separates them from their horror contemporaries in popular media is that zombies never really had to sell out.  There’s an inherent strength in the concept that transcends the need for short-sighted, ruinous contemporizing like sparkling in sunlight or… I don’t actually know anything else about Twilight.

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Simul-Review: The Wolverine

03 Saturday Aug 2013

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by Thom Yee and Grace Crawford

The Wolverine images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

The Wolverine images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Thom:  If you asked me who my favourite member of the X-Men is, I would say Cyclops, a character I understand because he grew up shy and unsure of himself and became a hero through discipline and belief in a worthy cause.  He’s also got a great design; if you see him in a comic book, that distinctive visor — something he needs to wear at all times to not kill anyone just by looking at them — tells you right away what his power is.   If you asked me who my second favourite X-Man is, I would say Colossus, because he’s another example of great character design.  If you asked me my third, I would say Sunspot — who’s more of an extended member as he was never a full-on X-Man — for the same reason (and I love Kirby Krackle).

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X-Men: First Class

27 Saturday Jul 2013

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by Thom Yee

X-Men - First Class poster

X-Men: First Class images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Remember childhood? Baseball? Dinosaurs? Weird Al? Those things you were supposed to like seemingly just because you were a kid, but you really never liked them at all? For me, a comic-book-nerd kid, X-Men was that thing (though I didn’t like those other things either). To me, the appeal of the X-Men never reached beyond the obvious attraction of a bunch of cool-looking characters with different powers. While that was cool, I always liked the Avengers and Justice League-related characters a lot more, and I think that’s down to the fact that I could buy in to the basic idea of standing up for truth and justice more than I could X-Men’s persecutional allegory. I can see it’s there, it’s a conceptual characteristic very obviously worn proudly and prominently by the series, and it’s apparently a big part of why the franchise has reached so many people, but I just never felt it. I just never understood the central conceit that people in the Marvel universe would draw a line between mutants born with powers and people who got them from serums or accidents or suits of armour. They both have powers; they’re both saving lives and fighting bad guys; why would it matter how they got their powers?

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Simul-Review: Pacific Rim

20 Saturday Jul 2013

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by Grace Crawford and Thom Yee

Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures.

Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures.

Grace: Chaos. Destruction. Ruin.

Why is it that we love to watch as our world falls apart? Whether it’s for real, like a riot in a far-off country or another celebrity splattering their bad choices all over the Internet like a monkey throwing its feces, we love to watch a train wreck. It’s why we crane our heads to see an accident on the highway on the way to the office, even though we know it’s making us (and everyone behind us) late to work. It’s why we laugh uproariously when some sixteen-year-old kid on Youtube flubs a skateboard trick and slams his junk against a metal bar, most likely making him a soprano for life. The Germans have a word for it: schadenfreude. It means, “taking pleasure from another’s misfortune.”

That basically defines the entire monster movie genre. Cities are leveled, lives are destroyed, and people run amok in the streets, screaming their heads off and looking for someone to save them. And someone will: a hero, marked by fate (or by the screenwriter), will stop the monster threat and save the city… or what’s left of it.

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Community (Season 4)

13 Saturday Jul 2013

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by Thom Yee

Community - season 4 front

Community images courtesy of Sony Pictures Television

For those of you who’ve missed out on one of the best sitcoms of all time (and for you, this, then, must be the darkest timeline), Community is ostensibly the story of Jeff Winger, an attorney disbarred for having a fake undergraduate degree who enrolls at Greendale Community College where he ends up forming a study group with six disparate students.  And as the years pass, these disparate students grow closer, as the study group becomes a surrogate family.

Really though, Community is about the conceits, tropes and conventions of mass media — movies and television especially.  Community is a satire of the sitcom genre, an examination of pop culture in general, and occasionally a profound critique of how we are all affected by the mass media we consume.  And it’s one of the smartest and most ambitious comedy series of all time. Or at least it was.

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Simul-Review: Man of Steel

22 Saturday Jun 2013

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by Thom Yee and Grace Crawford

Man of Steel poster 1

All Man of Steel images courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures

Thom: The superhero concept has been around since 1938 and the debut of Superman in Action Comics #1. Superheroes have been with us long enough that, for a lot of people, they form a modern mythology more appealing than established faiths, a rich tapestry of stories instrumental in forming a set of core beliefs. Certainly for me, superheroes have been incredibly important and meaningful, and their stories have helped to inform who I am and most of everything I do. Of course, I would never claim that I regularly act heroically in any significant parts of my daily life, but every time I help someone out when I don’t need to, every small kindness, every moment of compassion comes from my view that good is its own reward and that we owe it to everyone to do right by them. And for me, most of those sensibilities came from reading comicbooks. If I was going to offer a theory on why superheroes endure in society and why, for many, they maintain fan followings into adulthood more so than many of the other elements of our childhoods, I would like to think it’s because they teach us about truth and justice in an unbreakable, intractable way; they help us to become the great people we can be and wish to be by giving us the light to show us the way. And in a world where religions destroy civilizations, where the Bible Belt won’t let go of its guns, and where priests are more associated with molestation than divinity, they do it in a way that we can actually be proud of.

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