Tuesday 26 June 2012

abraham lincoln: glib cash-in


Smashing Zach Baron piece on Grantland about risk-averse summer blockbusters, in which the cynical Abraham Lincoln movie counts as one of the year's most 'original' offerings. This paragraph about the writer is brutal:

It's hard to know what to make of the Seth Grahame-Smith era. Grahame-Smith, who adapted Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter from his 2010 novel of the same name, specializes in public domain horror — he also wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for all you Jane Austen fans out there, and his other film credit so far is Dark Shadows, Tim Burton's slack adaptation of the campy '60s soap opera (Megan Draper's pals are always auditioning for it on Mad Men). Dark Shadows got most of its laughs from Grahame-Smith's knowing references to late Summer of Love culture as it might appear to us now, or to an aristocratic vampire who'd been locked in a coffin for the past 200 years — at one point, Johnny Depp's Barnabas Collins calls Alice Cooper the "ugliest woman I've ever seen." Which is pretty much what Grahame-Smith does, now that he's not writing paeans to the porn industry: He retrofits the past with big winking jokes about whatever is hilarious and in vogue in the present.

Someone on twitter, and I can't remember who, pointed at this Scotsman story about American creationists teaching kids that Nessie is real. It's only a few schools, and I wonder what the lack of wide reporting of it means. It certainly looks like troll-bait, but the Scotsman is a real paper.

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