Having struggled on numerous occasions to adequately sum up my (what felt like) extremely niche love of huge, colourful, stuff-packed and beautifully pointless movies (I refer you to Valerian and the City of a Bunch of Wossnames, Mortal Engines, Aquaman, Mad Max[1]…), I was really pleased to see this video from Patrick (H) Willems.
[1] Okay, some of them had some point. But it doesn’t matter.
Let me just say it.
I don’t have a lot to add to his summation, obviously I agree wholeheartedly. The creation is the point and I could watch it for days and make no further demands on the filmmaker. It’s life-force sucked out of the adorable muppets of popular culture by the remorseless dark crystal of my imagination (oh yeah, shout out to the classics, as well as Del Toro’s contributions to this area[2] which went unsung in Willems’s video but deserve a place). And I love it.
[2] I haven’t reviewed the original Hellboy movies as far as I recall, so the non-Del-Toro reboot will have to stand in, link-wise.
I may still be a non-load-bearing demographic for making these movies successful. But as my esteemed colleague and friend Mr. Bloom of Toisto says, we may be entering a phase of pop culture where the play-it-safe 200 million dollar blockbuster is unsupportable by cinema takings, allowing two hundred utterly fucking bonkers 1 million dollar streaming movies to take its place. And that is no bad thing for creative liberty.