![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missroserose(Feeling much better today - thanks for all the good wishes, everyone! Now, back to your usual combo platter of snark and contemplation.)
The trailer makes Beastly look at least halfway watchable (yay Neil Patrick Harris!). It's a cute concept, and the leads appear to have some chemistry - hopefully the full-length movie won't show that to be a lie cleverly constructed by the marketers.
That said...I can't help but think PA is pretty spot on here.
Or, to quote Tycho's commentary on the matter: This "monster" looks like a fairly regular person out of BMEZine, frankly. I don't have an opinion on that continuum of human experience, other than to say that their B is their property and they can M it if they want to, what I'm saying is that the "beast" in this movie only nominally represents something undesirable, and independent of the narrative's candy shell you would have no idea that that this intense fellow was meant to be loathsome as opposed to an eminently desirable frontman astride some gloomwrought fork of Mausoleum Rock.
Being on the far end of full decade away from the 13-19 demographic, I've been giving some thought lately to how I've changed in the interim. And one of the things that continuously occurs to me is the way my constantly-expanding variety of experience has affected my outlook. As an example, once upon a time I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to join the armed forces other than out of sheer boredom or desperation. Now, having gotten to know two good friends who enjoy and have benefited from their service, I have a more nuanced idea of why someone might benefit from (and even enjoy) such a structured environment, even though it's not something I'd ever choose for myself.
Come to think of it, "nuance" is probably the key word here - other people's lives and situations are drawn in my mental landscape in significantly more varied and delicate strokes, rather than the bold demarcations that outline most issues in the teenager's mind. Which is kind of ironic, when you think about it - teenagerhood is supposed to be all about breaking away from the norm and trying on new (and often rebellious) personalities, yet almost all of those kids who shop at Hot Topic and proudly refer to themselves as "goth" or "punk" don't even really understand that the lines are drawn entirely in their head. We mentally impose such lines as a means of categorizing and tracking things, but when it comes to people, the variety is such that there aren't any clear boundaries. Just the great spectrum of human experience.
So perhaps it's not surprising that most entertainment aimed at teens is so utterly contained in the narrow set of experience marketed to us as "mainstream". Most of their target demographic have little-to-no experience with anything outside of it, so to them, the idea of a dude with tattoos, scars, and multiple piercings is scary - not because of anything he does, but because he represents a whole outside world that they're completely unfamiliar with and don't know how to navigate.
And frankly, it's that fear of the unknown - when virtually everything about the world is unknown - that I miss least about teenagerhood. Perhaps that's why I've never minded getting older as much as I thought I would ten years ago when I was certain I would live forever. The older I get, the more I learn, and the less scary the world seems.
The trailer makes Beastly look at least halfway watchable (yay Neil Patrick Harris!). It's a cute concept, and the leads appear to have some chemistry - hopefully the full-length movie won't show that to be a lie cleverly constructed by the marketers.
That said...I can't help but think PA is pretty spot on here.
Or, to quote Tycho's commentary on the matter: This "monster" looks like a fairly regular person out of BMEZine, frankly. I don't have an opinion on that continuum of human experience, other than to say that their B is their property and they can M it if they want to, what I'm saying is that the "beast" in this movie only nominally represents something undesirable, and independent of the narrative's candy shell you would have no idea that that this intense fellow was meant to be loathsome as opposed to an eminently desirable frontman astride some gloomwrought fork of Mausoleum Rock.
Being on the far end of full decade away from the 13-19 demographic, I've been giving some thought lately to how I've changed in the interim. And one of the things that continuously occurs to me is the way my constantly-expanding variety of experience has affected my outlook. As an example, once upon a time I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to join the armed forces other than out of sheer boredom or desperation. Now, having gotten to know two good friends who enjoy and have benefited from their service, I have a more nuanced idea of why someone might benefit from (and even enjoy) such a structured environment, even though it's not something I'd ever choose for myself.
Come to think of it, "nuance" is probably the key word here - other people's lives and situations are drawn in my mental landscape in significantly more varied and delicate strokes, rather than the bold demarcations that outline most issues in the teenager's mind. Which is kind of ironic, when you think about it - teenagerhood is supposed to be all about breaking away from the norm and trying on new (and often rebellious) personalities, yet almost all of those kids who shop at Hot Topic and proudly refer to themselves as "goth" or "punk" don't even really understand that the lines are drawn entirely in their head. We mentally impose such lines as a means of categorizing and tracking things, but when it comes to people, the variety is such that there aren't any clear boundaries. Just the great spectrum of human experience.
So perhaps it's not surprising that most entertainment aimed at teens is so utterly contained in the narrow set of experience marketed to us as "mainstream". Most of their target demographic have little-to-no experience with anything outside of it, so to them, the idea of a dude with tattoos, scars, and multiple piercings is scary - not because of anything he does, but because he represents a whole outside world that they're completely unfamiliar with and don't know how to navigate.
And frankly, it's that fear of the unknown - when virtually everything about the world is unknown - that I miss least about teenagerhood. Perhaps that's why I've never minded getting older as much as I thought I would ten years ago when I was certain I would live forever. The older I get, the more I learn, and the less scary the world seems.
