Apparently not everyone's sold on the trilogy. Take Richard Brody.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/05/before-midnight-after-birth.html
What happens to Linklater, one of the better American filmmakers, when he takes on this couple whose lives seem so close to his heart? His best films (including last year’s “Bernie”) are ones in which the subject itself is inquiry, in which deception and reality are themselves at stake in the action; in which mirror games of performance are built into the drama, in which he devises a method that poses questions. In the “Before” trilogy, he films in a way that delivers the answers in advance. He has run up against the bedrock of his character, the part of himself that isn’t up for questioning—his secular faith in an idealized vision of love. His essential repudiation of his own art in the face of this faith makes the movies curious and even touching. It’s rare for filmmakers to reveal so much of themselves in movies that reveal so little. It doesn’t make the watching of them any more satisfying or substantial to watch, but it certainly renders their dullness more interesting to consider afterward. [emphasis mine]
And why might Linklater not question this part of himself? Slate dutifully reports.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/05/30/before_sunrise_inspiration_before_midnight_is_dedicated_to_amy_lehrhaupt.html?wpisrc=flyouts
Now some folks get the idea that characters who function as icons of ideals or times or cultural values are lame if the iconography involves spandex.
Despite Berlatsky's interesting observations about Jane Austen and avowed work on a pending Wonder Woman book the invocation of Klosterman doesn't establish that the rebooted franchises are without empathy. In fact the Klosterman quote can be wielded as a double-edged blade. After all.
Fiction connects you to other people—or as Chuck Klosterman said, "Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you."
Who says this has to be an act or process of empathy rather than narcissism? If memory serves when Joss Whedon was asked what made superhero films and stories unique he said that there's no pretense or necessity for subtext of the sort you'd have in some other genre that has a story discussing or presenting ideas about the nature of humanity and human societies. You can just get the competing ideals out in the open.
When you put it that way the problem with the superhero genre is that it has already turned Republicans into red-headed skull-faced monsters, right? :) People will continue to lament the shift through which Superman stopped being a champion of populist leftist ideas but to this one can propose that perhaps populist and leftist (and rightist) do not have to be the same thing. Grant Morrison has articulated well enough that the plebian/patrician divide between the working class Clark Kent and the billionaire Bruce Wayne was bridged by their respective reluctance to kill (and in both cases that's a later editorial accretion, it's worth noting that the old-school Supes who was more a working-class hero could show quite a bit less remorse about adversaries dying).
We live in an era in which the pop culture mythologies we embrace are frequently affiliated with other ideological commitments and one of many side-effects is that if there's something we don't enjoy or dislike we tend to have identity politics and cultural indicators serve as stand-ins, as shorthands for why we don't like something that we may dislike for less rational and more visceral reasons than we may be able to articulate. I could say I dislike romantic comedies because of Matthew McConaughy (sic) but that wouldn't be true. I love Pride & Prejudice but I also enjoy Batman Begins. When the Nolan film came out Ebert said it was nice to finally see a Batman movie that was actually about Batman. Even Charles Mudede spoke up in favor of Nolan's film as a blockbuster in which a billionaire was thinking about what role he and his family's legacy could play in making a better society. Dislike the movie if you want but to find it wanting compared to actual political theory when Nolan's made a popcorn movie is moving the goalposts. Mudede's an ardent enough Marxist that for him to say such things was saying something. :)
But in a political climate in which "one percent" is invoked as an indictment the idea that Batman has always existed as a kind of folklore for what Americans think would be the ideal "one percenter" will get translated into "no empathy" by someone. We live in a time in which Star Trek fans who were watching the original show in the 1960s could complain that the new Star Trek has no heart even though we know there were no Eugenics Wars in the 1990s and that Khan never existed. The utopia of Trek will never happen but as optimism goes the dystopia of the Eugenics wars and the War to End Tyranny (ha) didn't happen. Nuclear Armageddon didn't overtake us as so many feared it would. There's a sense in which the pop culture franchises that can seem fusty now (whether Star Trek or James Bond) are franchises that retain their iconic and, yes, emotional appeal, but which have labored under a kind of survivor's guilt having gone so many decades beyond the Cold War milieu in which the franchises were initially conceived.
Except for Batman and Superman. Those two comics titans developed in the pre-World War II period.
While some film critics may not like the rebooted franchises or the iconography some of us don't see the point in watching films by Linklater that can be so readily read through as a great what-if built on a one-night stand that happened decades ago. Capturing that feeling may have been a laudable goal for somebody but it's not necessarily more "real" in emotional range. Art is not necessarily about seeing yourself in something that's not you, after all, it can be about you investing yourself into something or someone that's not you. It may be that all entertainment is, in that sense, capable of being middle-brow narcissistic self-affirmation in the guise of "art".
Which is why in film Wenatchee's got no problem admitting to an appreciation of pulpier stuff.
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