Moviebob's Geek Streak: Bob Chipman On Geek Culture

By Bob Chipman

The geeks have inherited the Earth - now what?

In this insightful collection of essays from his many years as a film critic, gaming writer and pop-culture commentator, Bob Chipman examines the complex world of the modern nerd - the good, the bad and the embarrassing - including such pieces as MOVIEBOB'S RE-TALES, BAT-MITT VS. OBAMAVENGERS and THE FIFTY MOST BORING OPINIONS IN GEEK CULTURE; along with in-depth looks at Disney's surprisingly-topical "Maleficent," the philosophy of C.S. Lewis, Geek Privilege and more.

While perhaps best known as the creator and star of classic Web Video series like Escape to The Movies, The Big Picture and The Game OverThinker; Bob Chipman has also published numerous volumes of written reviews, commentaries, thinkpieces and features covering the worlds of film, television, video games and the broader breadth of popular culture. Now, through The MovieBob Anthology, a selection of his best work is yours to own - selected and organized by theme by Bob Chipman himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Chipman
• Release date: Feb 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781495195037

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Moviebob's Geek Streak: Bob Chipman On Geek Culture

GEEK STREAK

Copyright © 2016 by Bob Chipman

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2016

ISBN: 978-1-4951-9503-7

Revere, Massachusetts

www.moviebob.blogspot.com

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe my success, which includes the opportunity to write these pieces in the first place and the ability to share them with you again, to many fine people who’ve enabled my career to this point: Stuttering Craig Skitsimas of ScrewAttack and Fullscreen, who was among the first to discover my work, Russ Pitts, who first reached out to me about reviewing movies professionally, and Susan Arendt, who was the original editor of a great deal of the work included here. I offer them all my sincere thanks for their help, encouragement and (most of all) their friendship.

This book is dedicated to my parents, Patricia & Peter Chipman.

The original pieces contained in this volume are culled from a variety of sources. The majority originated on The Escapist (www.escapistmagazine.com) and the MovieBob Blog (moviebob.blogspot.com)

INDEX

TWILIGHT OF THE SHE-GEEKS

On the Twilight Saga and the underappreciation of female fandom

THE DECADE OF THE NERD

The geeks have inherited the Earth – now what?

TROPE-A-DOPE

Everybody’s an expert now… or are they?

IT’S TIME TO FORGIVE GEORGE LUCAS

Let go of your hate.

THE SPOILER THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

Iron Man 2, Thor’s Hammer and the new post-Marvel world of genre film

MACHET VS THE EXPENDABLES

Two B-action celebrations, but only one gets it.

THE MOVIE NERD BIBLE – PART I

Have you seen all the must-sees?

THE MOVIE NERD BIBLE – PART II

For the post-Star Wars completist

THE PROBLEM WITH TWILIGHT

It may not be what you think it is…

STEALING FROM THE NEXT GENERATION

Do we darken-up our nostalgic favorites to the detriment of future fans?

YOU DON’T KNOW JACK

An introduction to the life and philosophy of Narnia creator C.S. Lewis

FILM THIS CHICK STUFF!

Why should only boys benefit from the nostalgia boom?

MOVIEBOB GOES TO THE RENAISSANCE FAIRE

A travelogue from the past – or, rather, King Richard’s Faire in Carver, MA

HARRY POTTER AND THE LITTLE GOLDEN MAN

Why Oscar should’ve acknowledged the Hogwarts saga.

ADVICE FROM A FANBOY: AKIRA

Live-action blasphemy – but does it have to be?

CON JOB – PART 1

What’s it really like to work a scifi/fantasy convention?

CON JOB – PART 2

More behind-the-scenes exploits on the convention circuit

NOTHING SACRED

It’s okay to have fun with our favorite properties

HYPE-ER TIME

Movies, marketing and the world around it

CONUNDRUM

Can one truly be a fanboy and also an objective critic?

RE-TALES

Personal memories of life in the lost world of video retail

LET’S REMAKE STAR WARS

Just imagine…

THE 50 MOST BORING OPINIONS IN GEEK CULTURE

Did yours make the list? Find out!

KICKSTOPPER

What will the long-term effects of Kickstarter-backed productions really be?

HOST HASTE

Stephenie Meyer wrong way to talk about widely-despised genre creators

RE-TALES II: TALES FROM THE TABLE

Another round of Re-Tales, this time involving life in the electronics megastore realm

RE-TALES III: BLOCKBUSTED

A lament for Blockbuster Video, where a generation of film-geeks earned their colors

THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE

On life as the geek expert in your social group

BILE IS THE WARMEST COLOR

What’s it like when Troma brings their… unique film-rollouts to the public

ON GEEK PRIVILEGE

Nerds run the world now, but they need to learn to run it graciously

THE ACCURACY TRAP

When faithful adaptation just isn’t enough

I MAY HAVE BEEN WRONG ABOUT MALEFICENT

Yes, Angelina Jolie got Disney to make a feminist-fairytale about sexual-assault survival.

TO SPOIL OR NOT TO SPOIL

Spoilers and what to do about them

HELP ME OUT HERE

Star Trek Into Darkness… what the hell happened there?

BAT-MITT VS OBAMAVENGERS

Marvel and DC’s big 2012 blockbusters as a metaphor for the 2012 Presidential Election.

INTRODUCTION

When I was growing up, there was no such thing as Geek Culture.

At least, it didn’t really have that name. If you’re young enough to have only ever grown up in a world where The Internet was a constant fact of life, it may be hard to understand this, but once upon a time if you were really into a specific series of books or comics or a television series or a movie and you didn’t know anyone else who felt the same way in your own general geographic area; it was conceivable that level of pop-cultural isolation could be a permanent condition of your life. Two people who both called the same obscure, otherwise forgotten piece of pop-ephemera their favorite thing ever could live no more than one town away from one another and go their entire lives without ever knowing that the other existed or that, at least in that respect, they were not alone.

I remember that world, and even to me it feels alien given how the world works now. As a kid I obsessed over my favorite cartoons, comics and movies mainly in the pursuit of keeping them alive and vibrant for myself. The idea that remembering everything that happened to HE-MAN and his friends would ever have some level of a social purpose never would’ve entered my mind – I just didn’t want to forget that I’d enjoyed it, and that this cool thing that just sort of… went away at a certain point had existed. Someone else who remembered it as well or even better than me? Preposterous.

Sure, there were comic book stores. And if there was a good one near you, maybe you could spend a few hours a week talking with like-minded people about fairly general minutiae of the medium. And sure, I knew that certain things like STAR TREK or DOCTOR WHO had devoted followings who got together at conventions – but that was only for really, really big stuff; and as far as I knew the various fandoms and subcultures didn’t mix, or at least not especially well.

By the time I was old enough to know better and fully participate in that level of the nerd scene, the Internet had come along and changed everything: Suddenly there was no such thing as genuine obscurity, as every slice of the popular culture no matter how thin could unite its fans across oceans in a matter of minutes and just as suddenly everyone wanted to call themselves a geek about something. For a minute there, it looked like something genuinely special and positive was happening.

Too bad it didn’t totally work out that way.

Make no mistake, I’m still glad to be living in the geek age of popular culture. It’s colorful, it’s fun, there’s lots of lovely things to buy and watch and consume… good times. But if there was ever any sense among anyone serious that the world was going to improve on some fundamental substantial level just because onetime nerds were now in charge of the culture I can only imagine they wound up severely disappointed by watching fans of this or that property react to pop-culture dominance by trying to shut the door behind them; which we sadly saw with sad events like GamerGate and the outrage that greeted the GHOSTBUSTERS remake or Marvel Comics diversifying their character-lineup.

Still, it’s been a fascinating moment to watch unfold, and lucky for me (and, hopefully, for you) I was writing regular columns and blogs for a lot of it, much of it for The Escapist but also for my own site and independent productions – which makes this volume a compendium not simply of my writings on Geek Culture but a record of what is was like on the ground to watch the world turn… well, geeky.

I was there, and I chronicled it all. Within this book you’ll find essays like It’s Time to Forgive George Lucas, The 50 Most Boring Opinions in Geek Culture and To Spoil or Not To Spoil. You’ll get a firsthand account of my travels to perhaps the oldest form of geek-gathering in the form of a Renaissance Faire, and a blow-by-blow of what it’s like to attend a sci-fi convention as a guest-panelist.

But it’s not just about pop-observation and first-person nerdery. You’ll also find unique essays on culture and politics filtered through a geek-culture lens: Bat-Mitt Vs. Obamavengers framed the contentious 2012 Presidential Election through the supposed rivalry between a pair of Hollywood superhero franchises. On Geek Privilege asks the new lord of popular-entertainment to examine their behavior. Bile is The Warmest Color looks at Troma rolling out their socially-conscious horror comedy RETURN TO NUKEM HIGH. I May Have Been Wrong About Maleficent grapples with the realization that Disney and Angelina Jolie teamed up to make a family fantasy movie about rape survival.

Every effort has been made to get these pieces properly organized, cleaned up and made as readable as possible both for old fans re-experiencing their favorites and new readers. However, you may notice some stray issues popping up here and there: For one thing, you may notice abrupt shifts in quality and style; given that these reviews were written on a (largely) weekly basis amid an evolving career and posted to multiple platforms – which often meant a change to style-guide, a change in editorial staff or both. In the interest of preserving what were often design-oriented choices in writing, I elected to not impose a singular stylization over the entire book; which means these pieces appear largely as they originally did online, though there has been some minimal editing to remove or reword references that were originally designed to work in-tandem with HTML hyperlinks.

I’m especially glad to be able to include all three of my Re-Tales columns here. These three pieces served as a reflection on my days in the now largely-vanished video retail industry, the dearly-missed (well, sort of) minimum wage world where a whole generation of film geeks cut their teeth and first learned how to turn their particular knowledge and skills into a career. I didn’t do a lot of personal-narrative writing in my weekly gig, but the Re-Tales pieces came from a place I was really happy to finally be able to share.

The pieces I selected for this particular volume mean a lot to me, as many of them represent a few of the rare occasions where I got to stop writing about whatever new movie was out or old movie could be connected to a recently-popular event and talk about what was really going on in the so-called Geek Culture. It’s been a fascinating decade, and in curating this compilation I was genuinely struck by how much has changed and how much still seems poised to. I sincerely hope these pieces are as fun for you to read as they were for me to write – and to live.

Thank you so much for reading, and for listening.

Bob Chipman.

TWILIGHT OF THE SHE-GEEKS

(Originally published November 2009 on The Escapist)

So. Much. Ink was spilled by film critics trying to make sense of the (comparatively) brief mega-popularity of the insipid Twilight Saga. Looking back, I don’t think I came closer than anyone else to working it out here, but at least I wasn’t as clueless as a lot of the other thinkpiece blubbering going on at the time.

Here's a sentence I never could've guessed I'd be writing: A publicity photo of a shirtless Taylor Lautner convinced me to read the entire Twilight saga.

I should probably elaborate on that, huh?

A few months back, Summit Entertainment's publicity machine made a big deal out of its first group shots of the New Moon werewolves. In any other genre film, this would mean a money shot either of CGI creations or actors in extensive makeup appliances. In Twilight, however, this means a handful of young male actors, uniformly bronze-skinned (Twilight's werewolves are all Native Americans) and model-buff, standing around aloof and shirtless. Just as uniform as their look was the reaction of male movie-geeks, including yours truly:

Heh! This looks like gay porn!

Now, for those of you who don't speak guy fluently, looks like gay porn is sexually-insecure-straight-male for I immediately recognize that this depiction of the masculine figure is intended to be arousing, and said recognition makes me uncomfortable. Thus, having caught myself in a less-uncharacteristic-than-I'd-like-it-to-be moment of Tucker Max behavior, I found myself faced with a question: Is this what women have been trying to tell me all this time?

Let me first explain: There's no getting around the fact that these visions of the Twilight werewolves are patently ridiculous, even more so when you consider the pretzel-logic behind their existence: In Twilight, werewolves are humans who flash-morph into truck-sized canines, so they go about shirtless and in sweatpants so they can quick-strip and avoid having to constantly buy new clothes. The question, of course, as to WHY this magical-transformation can't simply also explain the vanishing/reappearing of clothing (it makes just as much sense as several hundred extra pounds of muscle and bone appearing out of nowhere after all) need not be asked, as it is likely rather obvious: The Twilight engine runs on (heterosexual) female lust, and having it work this way allows author Stephanie Meyer an in-plot excuse to send a whole team of tanned, toned boys galloping near-naked through the woods. It's fetishism and objectification; nothing more, nothing less.

In other words, the same thing that the rest of genre fiction (read: science-fiction, fantasy, horror, etc.) has been doing to its female characters since the first cro-magnon stepped back from his cave-painting and, after a moment's consideration, concluded, Yeah, those could stand to be bigger.

It was dawning on me, then, that myself and every other male geek currently rolling our eyes at the laughably-obvious, pandering sexual-objectification of these Playgirl werewolves had at many times throughout our geek-existence been confronted (or, at least, needled) by our she-geek female compatriots about the laughably-obvious, pandering sexual-objectification of...well, damn near every depiction of the female form in geek culture.

And you know what? If we even tried to defend the point, we probably fell back on explanations and excuses every bit as shaky and transparent as Twilight's nonsense about its wolf men's limited wardrobe budget: In this future, spacesuit-polymers can be skin-tight and sufficiently-protective! Power Girl's costume has what amounts to a cleavage-window because she's still deciding on a logo! Female ninjas probably would use their sexuality as a weapon! Women in medieval-fantasy don't need to armor anything but their nipples and crotch, cause their fighting-styles rely on flexibility! Especially the Elven Wenches!

Long story short, this moment of clarity (or, at least, objectivity) got me to thinking that maybe I ought to try and actually read through the saga from this same perspective, i.e. is this really that much worse than similarly silly franchises aimed more at, well, me? Answer: Yes, yes it is. No amount of perspective or extra effort on my part (or anyone's part) can turn Stephanie Meyer into a better writer or help her creations rise above the level of the absolute worst kind of genre-fiction - something discovered too late by directors Katherine Hardwicke, Chris Weitz and soon-enough David Slade. (But this isn't the place to dwell on that - you want a thorough-savaging of the franchise itself, go watch the review.)

I bring these three disparate threads together - Twilight being awful yet massively popular, Twilight's sexual-objectification of its male characters and the rest of geek-culture's sexual-objectification of women - because I've come to regard them as interconnected: Female-targeted fetish-objects like the Twi-wolves (I'm blanking as to whether or not they had an official group-name) look preposterous to the mainstream (read: male) geek audience because the amount of geek-culture material actually aimed at a female audience is scandalously small, and that's why crap like Twilight is able to become so popular - nature abhors a vacuum.

It's the same principal by which Tyler Perry has made his ill-gotten fortune: Hollywood has done such a poor job in creating entertainment that appeals to the African-American middle class that almost any sufficiently well-marketed entry into the void was going to turn a profit. Just as Perry's terrible films (and plays, and TV shows) stake their claim by being the only game in town for black audiences looking to see their community onscreen in something other than a low-end comedy (looking at you, Martin Lawrence) or gangsta shoot-em-up; Twilight offers younger female genre fans a world that, however shabbily-constructed, speaks to their perspective, experiences and fantasies (romantic or otherwise) in a way that almost nothing else on the radar does.

Face it, the vast majority of sci-fi and fantasy fare - and I mean books, movies, videogames, comics, and so forth - are written by and for men and boys. That doesn't mean they don't have female fans - far from it - but do take note that it's a one-way street: The modern geek universe is littered with fellow travelers of the fairer sex who've found something to relate to in the ostensibly testosterone-dripping realms of the X-Men, or Star Wars with its instantly-erect laser swords and near-helpless slavegirl princesses; and the newer incarnations of quintessential boy-and-his-toys hero Dr. Who certainly have their lady admirers, but how often do you really hear about a female-targeted franchise crossing-over with men? (And no, Buffy doesn't count: Hot high-school chicks wrestling with monsters was aimed at guys to start with; that Joss Whedon is a good enough writer that his geek fetish-doll heroines were genuinely relatable to women doesn't change that fact.)

When it seems like nobody is paying attention to you, the slightest bit of attention paid by anyone can seem like a huge deal - come to think of it, it's often one of the first things however-unconsciously noted by real-life Bella Swans right before they wind up in abusive, co-dependent relationships with the first real-life Edward Cullen who shows