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Quite noticeably, if I want, I could talk to my friends and family almost endlessly about ludo-ontology, politics or more recently the beginnings of theories of learning, but do I? Well on occasion, but certainly it would make life unbearable for them if every conversation was an oppressive monologue about a subject they couldn’t care less about. Paulo Freira, a Brazilian educator and learning theorist, correctly ascertained that “dialogue liberates, monologue oppresses” (you can see a little more in my research notes on Bates’ Learning theories simplified). So if they want to talk about things and learn more then I’m more than willing to oblige, yet I try never to be condescending about it. Shoot 'Em Up is exactly the sort of thing I can take to the pub and talk about with my friends, if I ever went to the pub. “Hey, you seen Shoot 'Em Up?” “Aye. Not bad for a laugh like”. That’s the sort of film criticism that passes for mainstream conversation and it’s probably the most direct way of reviewing a film. If my mate thinks “it’s alreet like”, that’s a good enough verdict for me to watch it. He/she/They/Zhe etc.. don’t need to talk about mise en scene, camera angles, shot reverse, diegesis or how the film works as a metaphor for the struggles of the proletariat. They just need to say it’s alreet and that’s a language we both speak. I’ve said it many times before that in studying English the more I learned the more I understood what other people were saying and the less they understood me. For a while this was quite frustrating, I had all these new words in my lexicon to throw out. When using them I knew they wouldn’t understand what it was they meant but I couldn’t resist showing off that new word. This is why in a lot of my academic work there is always an underlying irony to the over use of language. I take pride in being deliberately obscure at times and at others, break my proverbial back to make things fit either with consonance or assonance. Believe me, coming up with titles like “Discontinuity, direction, divides, datasets, différance, datatexts, divergence: Discussing DH dilemmas” is not something one undertakes to be exacting or serious. It’s the inherited ludic way of thinking. Shoot 'Em Up is playful, it doesn’t take the rules of continuity seriously, so what if the amount of shots fired doesn’t add up. The film isn’t about how many bullets a gun can hold, even when in a scene it is dependent on how many shots are fired. Its solely about the thrill of the action, the fact that it has a compelling love driven sub-plot in which two people who have tragedies of their own reunite through adversity and emerge better people only adds to its spectacle. It’s so unapologetically good at what it is. At no point did the mismatch of rounds, phones, finger nail paints or any of the other continuity errors or general mistakes matter. I’ve raised a baby, but I didn’t even think to question why they were trying to give it baby food instead of bottled milk. I mean who really cares about that kind of stuff? Does it really detract from a film clearly directed towards being gun-centric? No, this is what critics ignore in their search for ‘two-clicks’ art-house films. Don’t get me wrong, I love some of the works by Samuel Beckett because they’re complex and difficult to understand or just really off the wall but that isn’t my nature, that’s something I learned to appreciate. We can all agree that fine dining is good every once in a while, but so is junk food, both of them are a break away from the home cooked meals of everyday. Shoot-em up for all its faults and continuity errors just makes sense as a good film. It’s authentic even if it’s not accurate (something I recently read about Total War: Rome – yet another example of the disconnect between producers and buyers).
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