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We saw the Kato Green Hornet movie with a group of cap_ironman fans last night, and it was surprisingly fun and significantly less cringe-inducing than I expected it to be given Seth Rogen's presence in it. For example, Cameron Diaz is treated far better in/by the narrative than women in Judd Apatow movies ever are (Judd Apatow movies being my previous cringe-inducing exposure to Seth Rogen and the reason I was afraid the Green Hornet movie would suck).
I could have done without the way-to-long "stupid fight where we beat each other up" scene, which was mean-spirited in a way the rest of the movie wasn't and went on at least twice as long as it needed to, but other than that I thought it worked really well as a send-up of superheroes.
I loved that the mobster villain's decision to embrace costumed supervillainy was just as fundamentally lame as Britt and Kato's "OMG we'll be superheroes and it will rock! We have a really cool car! Uh, so, what do we with do with the cool car and the kick-ass weapons now that we have them?" attitude, right down to his stupid name and horrible rhyming catch-phrase, and that even after finally attaining some degree of coolness and competence-in-a-fight in the final fight scene (you can actually see him getting progressively better with the gas gun as the movie went on, which was a nice touch), Britt is still too much of a wuss to go through with the manly action hero "pull the bullet out of your shoulder" kitchen table surgery thing. I also liked that Lenore initially chose Kato over Britt because he's the one who doesn't continually hit on her in a painfully bumbling fashion, then refused to date him either when she found out that he'd tried to use the fact that they'd gone out with each other to score points off Britt. And that instead of being the hot, blonde doorprize at the end of the film for either hero, she's going to be their partner in crime(fighting).
Kato was hands-down my favorite, though. Especially the cool cars, pin-up girls, and Bruce Lee fanboy sketches on his drafting table (nice shout-out as well as a nice character touch) and the general tech-geekery and omni-competance and the fact that he's every bit as much of an over-enthusiastic frat boy dork as Britt. Just, you know, a significantly more intelligent over-enthusiastic frat boy dork. "Look, I added a flamethrower to the car!" "Awesome! You should put in an ejection seat." "That would be stupid and pointless. But I'll do it anyway because it would totally rock. Also I made you a gas gun." "How come you don't have a gun?" "Because I'm too awesome to need one whereas as you really, really suck at beating people up." "Nuh-uh, I totally kicked that one guy in the face, like, twice!" "Just keep telling yourself that, babe. I'll go add more machine guns to the car. And a missile launcher. No, six missile launchers." "Can it have a slurpee dispenser, too?" "No."
The entire thing was so insanely slashy that I'm tempted to sign up for Yuletide next year just to request Midnight Racer/Chauffeur fic for that imaginary Green Hornet rip off radio show that Steve Rogers and Nick Fury are supposed to have listened to as kids, because that's basically Green Hornet but without Seth Rogen and probably the Midnight Racer is actually worthy of the Chauffer's affections rather than still several years of "learning not to be a loser-jerk" away from that point. But I can't read slash for the movie itself because gah, Seth Rogen. It's like my Bill Murray problem all over again.
The Bill Murray problem goes thusly: have you ever run into a situation where you like a pairing/character, they totally fits your kinks, and you even pretty much ship it in canon, but for some reason you just can’t read porn for them because your brain insists on ruining it for you by continually stumbling over one random element that jars you right out of the fic?
For example: I like the Real Ghostbusters cartoon, love the gen fic for it, and in theory vaguely ship the entire team + Janine in some combination or another. In practice, however, every single time I try to read any slash for that fandom with a rating that goes above PG, my brain immediately flashes on Bill Murray and game over. In gen fic, they all look like real-life versions of the cartoon characters and not at all like Dan Ackroyd, Harold Rami, et al., but once the sexytimes start, I’m incapable of not thinking about Bill Murray making out with Harold Rami/Dan Ackroyd/Ernie Hudson and for some unknown reason, Bill Murray is the anti-porn.
I don’t even know why, either. It’s not that he fails to be sufficiently attractive, because I can cheerfully read fic about Rorschach or Deadpool having sex and find it hot. Physical attractiveness isn’t necessary if a character hits my kinks, and Peter Venkman hits several of them, and RGB Peter doesn’t even look like Bill Murray in canon anyway. Yet somehow I still can’t find him hot because... something, IDEK. I can read gen h/c epics dedicated to him and Winston being trapped in the negative zone* while the other half of the team thinks they’re dead and on noes the drama, but just. not. porn.
I have recently found a similar problem with another fandom that I was sucked into against my will by the sexiness of warped vow of fealty kink (sworn warrior/liege-lord apparently still gets me like almost nothing else even when it’s a warped relationship of backstabbing and mutual betrayal rather than sworn loyalty and devotion) + fighter planes. Hello, pairing that hits my kinks, involving character archetypes I generally have no problem reading about. Why do you have to be about robots? That turn into cars? I can get along decently well pretending I’m reading about human-machine hybrid cyborgs who somehow turn into cars and planes and things a la the Utena movie, and then I’ll get to a sex scene and the writer will use the word “chassis,” and WHAM, it’s like being slapped in the brain with Bill Murray all over again.
It’s a little better with seeker-centric fic because I can pretend I’m reading about a part-cyborg version of a gargoyle from Gargoyles or something (picture Coldstone, except without a tail, and not green) making out with the War Machine armor (grey color scheme + large canon = War Machine if we’re trying to think of sexy things) and anyway, the twisted power games kink and eternal lure of fighter planes can make up for a multitude of sins (wing kink is actually sexy when the wings involved have ailerons rather than feathers. Who knew?). But I still keep running up against those Bill Murray-style moments when the fic insists on reminding me that they’re giant robots no matter how hard I try to picture people with sexy cyborg wings.
And now I have the same problem with Green Hornet. I enjoyed the movie. I liked both characters in the movie even though they were both basically immature frat boys. I shipped Britt and Kato like burning. I want to go hunt down fic for them. But I just can’t combine sex and Seth Rogen in the same thought without my brain waving giant DO NOT WANT signs. Even when he’s not playing a character I hate in a movie I hate directed byJudd Apatow a director I hate, he’s still Seth Rogen, and he still has the same annoying face that I hate. I see his face, and I think of Superbad and Knocked-Up, and not even Bill Murray or the libido-crushing reminder that you're reading porn about a tractor trailer can equal the thought of those movies for the fic-reading equivalent of a cold shower.
Am I the only person who has this problem with Bill Murray, by the way? I suspect I must be, given how weird and arbitrary it is, but I can’t be the only person who has some random actor that’s pure lust-kill for them.
*I don’t think it’s actually called the negative zone, but Marvel fandom’s over-written that memory file for me.
I could have done without the way-to-long "stupid fight where we beat each other up" scene, which was mean-spirited in a way the rest of the movie wasn't and went on at least twice as long as it needed to, but other than that I thought it worked really well as a send-up of superheroes.
I loved that the mobster villain's decision to embrace costumed supervillainy was just as fundamentally lame as Britt and Kato's "OMG we'll be superheroes and it will rock! We have a really cool car! Uh, so, what do we with do with the cool car and the kick-ass weapons now that we have them?" attitude, right down to his stupid name and horrible rhyming catch-phrase, and that even after finally attaining some degree of coolness and competence-in-a-fight in the final fight scene (you can actually see him getting progressively better with the gas gun as the movie went on, which was a nice touch), Britt is still too much of a wuss to go through with the manly action hero "pull the bullet out of your shoulder" kitchen table surgery thing. I also liked that Lenore initially chose Kato over Britt because he's the one who doesn't continually hit on her in a painfully bumbling fashion, then refused to date him either when she found out that he'd tried to use the fact that they'd gone out with each other to score points off Britt. And that instead of being the hot, blonde doorprize at the end of the film for either hero, she's going to be their partner in crime(fighting).
Kato was hands-down my favorite, though. Especially the cool cars, pin-up girls, and Bruce Lee fanboy sketches on his drafting table (nice shout-out as well as a nice character touch) and the general tech-geekery and omni-competance and the fact that he's every bit as much of an over-enthusiastic frat boy dork as Britt. Just, you know, a significantly more intelligent over-enthusiastic frat boy dork. "Look, I added a flamethrower to the car!" "Awesome! You should put in an ejection seat." "That would be stupid and pointless. But I'll do it anyway because it would totally rock. Also I made you a gas gun." "How come you don't have a gun?" "Because I'm too awesome to need one whereas as you really, really suck at beating people up." "Nuh-uh, I totally kicked that one guy in the face, like, twice!" "Just keep telling yourself that, babe. I'll go add more machine guns to the car. And a missile launcher. No, six missile launchers." "Can it have a slurpee dispenser, too?" "No."
The entire thing was so insanely slashy that I'm tempted to sign up for Yuletide next year just to request Midnight Racer/Chauffeur fic for that imaginary Green Hornet rip off radio show that Steve Rogers and Nick Fury are supposed to have listened to as kids, because that's basically Green Hornet but without Seth Rogen and probably the Midnight Racer is actually worthy of the Chauffer's affections rather than still several years of "learning not to be a loser-jerk" away from that point. But I can't read slash for the movie itself because gah, Seth Rogen. It's like my Bill Murray problem all over again.
The Bill Murray problem goes thusly: have you ever run into a situation where you like a pairing/character, they totally fits your kinks, and you even pretty much ship it in canon, but for some reason you just can’t read porn for them because your brain insists on ruining it for you by continually stumbling over one random element that jars you right out of the fic?
For example: I like the Real Ghostbusters cartoon, love the gen fic for it, and in theory vaguely ship the entire team + Janine in some combination or another. In practice, however, every single time I try to read any slash for that fandom with a rating that goes above PG, my brain immediately flashes on Bill Murray and game over. In gen fic, they all look like real-life versions of the cartoon characters and not at all like Dan Ackroyd, Harold Rami, et al., but once the sexytimes start, I’m incapable of not thinking about Bill Murray making out with Harold Rami/Dan Ackroyd/Ernie Hudson and for some unknown reason, Bill Murray is the anti-porn.
I don’t even know why, either. It’s not that he fails to be sufficiently attractive, because I can cheerfully read fic about Rorschach or Deadpool having sex and find it hot. Physical attractiveness isn’t necessary if a character hits my kinks, and Peter Venkman hits several of them, and RGB Peter doesn’t even look like Bill Murray in canon anyway. Yet somehow I still can’t find him hot because... something, IDEK. I can read gen h/c epics dedicated to him and Winston being trapped in the negative zone* while the other half of the team thinks they’re dead and on noes the drama, but just. not. porn.
I have recently found a similar problem with another fandom that I was sucked into against my will by the sexiness of warped vow of fealty kink (sworn warrior/liege-lord apparently still gets me like almost nothing else even when it’s a warped relationship of backstabbing and mutual betrayal rather than sworn loyalty and devotion) + fighter planes. Hello, pairing that hits my kinks, involving character archetypes I generally have no problem reading about. Why do you have to be about robots? That turn into cars? I can get along decently well pretending I’m reading about human-machine hybrid cyborgs who somehow turn into cars and planes and things a la the Utena movie, and then I’ll get to a sex scene and the writer will use the word “chassis,” and WHAM, it’s like being slapped in the brain with Bill Murray all over again.
It’s a little better with seeker-centric fic because I can pretend I’m reading about a part-cyborg version of a gargoyle from Gargoyles or something (picture Coldstone, except without a tail, and not green) making out with the War Machine armor (grey color scheme + large canon = War Machine if we’re trying to think of sexy things) and anyway, the twisted power games kink and eternal lure of fighter planes can make up for a multitude of sins (wing kink is actually sexy when the wings involved have ailerons rather than feathers. Who knew?). But I still keep running up against those Bill Murray-style moments when the fic insists on reminding me that they’re giant robots no matter how hard I try to picture people with sexy cyborg wings.
And now I have the same problem with Green Hornet. I enjoyed the movie. I liked both characters in the movie even though they were both basically immature frat boys. I shipped Britt and Kato like burning. I want to go hunt down fic for them. But I just can’t combine sex and Seth Rogen in the same thought without my brain waving giant DO NOT WANT signs. Even when he’s not playing a character I hate in a movie I hate directed by
Am I the only person who has this problem with Bill Murray, by the way? I suspect I must be, given how weird and arbitrary it is, but I can’t be the only person who has some random actor that’s pure lust-kill for them.
*I don’t think it’s actually called the negative zone, but Marvel fandom’s over-written that memory file for me.