Thursday, January 13, 2011

Things I Learned From Movie X: The Expendables

It's a new year, so I've decided that I'm going to use this blog as an archive for the stuff I have written for other places, not just for myself. I still plan to write reviews and articles here regularly, but I realised that I write so much for other people, most of which are not readily available if I want to look them up, that it makes more sense to post links and little bits of explanatory text alongside the real reviews.

So, here's the link to my latest Things I Learned From Movie X column on The Expendables. I've been writing these columns for about six months now, having taken over the feature from one of the other writers at boxofficeprophets.com when I started writing for them, and I've really enjoyed writing them. Initially, I tried to emulate the style of the original writer, Tom Houseman, which were pretty strongly connected to the actual films themselves and specific lessons that could be taken from them. The first few columns I wrote were pretty good at that, but I found that pretty restrictive when it came to films like The Bounty Hunter and Couples Retreat, which are not just terrible, but boring, so they didn't really provide all that much material for column.

I took a few months away from the column, but when I returned I decided to use my own spin on the idea of lessons, using the columns as more free-associative essays that often have little to do with the film being discussed. I've found this approach much more in tune with my more discursive style of writing anyway, and it allows me to make leaps that I never might have if I was limiting myself, such as the moment in The Expendables one when I compared Dolph Lundgren to the Brobdingnagians from Gulliver's Travels.

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