Rob Dean examines the overlooked, unappreciated or unfairly maligned movies. Sometimes these films haven't been seen by anyone, and sometimes they've been seen by everyone - who loathed them. This is Missing Reels.

Sometimes it's easiest to tell the most personal stories - the ones that really lay bare your feelings - by disguising it behind something truly bizarre. If something is seen as weird or ridiculous, then it's easy to dismiss and thus easy for the storyteller to not be hurt by the criticisms. By dressing an intimate truth in the costume of the outrageous, it offers some shelter to the fragile psyche of the creator. After all, critics will go after the garish or surreal before addressing anything deeper or more profound in a work. It's easier, for critics, to deal with the superficial and the shallow, to tackle the obvious and overt, than it is to peer deeper into a work. To be fair to critics, deeper readings of films usually reveal a lack of depth and not a hidden profundity. Sometimes a tentacle is just a tentacle, or a headshot is just a headshot.

And so the time honored tradition of Trojan Horsing other layers in populist work. Take whatever is popular in mainstream entertainment and hit all the same notes, adhere to the formulas, while subtly slipping in breadcrumbs of your ulterior motive. Sometimes this technique is used for political purposes, other times it's a deconstruction of the entire genre. But, occasionally, it's a way for the artist to reveal something that would leave him ultimately vulnerable, except that it's done in a way that's easy to disavow. "I'm just telling a story of a guy fighting a three-headed alien - I don't see where you get all this 'father issue' stuff!"

Today's film, Super, told a very universal story with immensely personal elements all wrapped up in a genre fare that could be dismissed by naysayers as ultraviolent or "just another superhero flick." Super is a fun flick that has some great scenes of action, lots of WTF moments and great comedy. But, as I was watching it, I couldn't help but sense that something else was going on - there was another layer to this whole story that seemed to be occurring just beneath the surface. The movie ended and I took to the interwebs and found Devin Faraci's excellent review. It was well written and the only one that I could see that openly dealt with what I thought this movie was about: dealing with a devastating break-up.

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A Nerd PSA that finally shatters the silence...

(Via Topless Robot)

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I've Got All My Sisters In Me...wait, that can't be right...

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The Face of the Future?It's quite possible that Paul F. Tompkins, using little more than a pithy rejoinder and Facebook, may one day be regarded as the man that completely altered the way companies determine what entertainment to release. But let's back up...

As networks and production companies become subdivisions of mega-corporations, their output gets tied closer and closer to the financial bottom line. This means that the artistic decisions are falling to people who are more comfortable with balance sheets than they are with scripts. Additionally, there is now an overload of sources of entertainment - beyond just internet, video games, movies, music, live events, there's also movies-on-demand, thousands of cable channels, Hulu, Netflix Streaming and other ways that people can find some distraction. This oversaturated market, overseen more and more by people with interests in accounting rather than creativity, is making it tougher for programming to differentiate itself, stand out and become popular while also shrinking the window of time available to make such a splash. The result is lots of excellent, original projects are either being lost in the shuffle, canceled or pulled from screens before people have a chance to see them and/or appreciate them.

And what of those fans of these discarded flashes of brilliance? Once their beloved shows or movies are shunned by the public and by corporate masters, they turn to the internet to sign petitions, start social network groups, drum up support or simply whine on their own sites (hey!). The internet has provided these people with something that was utterly unavailable a mere 15 - 20 years ago: a sense of belonging.

While Patton Oswalt has decried the death of that singular rush and empowerment experienced when loving something in a vacuum, the majority of people are comforted to find they are not alone in their love or their interests and that they are not utterly weird or wrong for liking what they like. Misery may love company, but nerdy passion loves it even more. But ultimately, even though there may be an invisible army of like-minded folks banding together to enthuse over their shared interest, rarely does this fanbase clamoring lead to anything productive outside of fanfic or cosplaying. The corporate masters of these properties simply have no way of correlating the intensity of a clique with the possible profitability of its niche interest. That's where Paul F. Tompkins comes in...

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