Now, before I even get close to making a point about where the love is in the film critic world, I know how absurd it may seem to talk about love in a column about hate. But as the saying goes, it’s a fine line between love and hate and all of my rage comes from a place of love. I love movies and film and art and entertainment. I get enraged when things I love are threatened. Whether it’s Evil Dead or the actual theater-going experience, I try to only get mad for reasonable things. I mean, I get unreasonably mad, that’s true, but generally with good intent in my heart. But it seems these days it’s hip to be an asshole. It’s cool to shit on things before we know anything about them. It’s one thing to get mad early once in awhile – like against the new Evil Dead – but it’s another to get mad about everything early. It seems like every day my Twitter feed is full of two things. First, news. Second, people hating it. Where is the love?

In 1983, the California Institute of the Arts, being a liberal arts college in, what was then, a remote part of the Santa Clarita Valley had garnered a few reputations. It was not unusual to see helicopters hovering around the dormitory on weekends because of the “clothes optional” pool (if you enjoyed seeing naked hippy-types). There were also the drugs. It was well known that on the west side of the dorm building was the “fourth floor walk up” which was the only floor not accessible by an elevator. I visited that corridor once and it was like walking into an opium den. The air was thick with marijuana smoke and half of the dorm room doors were open all of the time. However, I believe what CalArts had become most infamous for was their Halloween party. Every year, attending students and alumni who were fortunate to call in early and request tickets would gather in the Main Gallery room for a party that resembled something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. You name it; it was there. I can best illustrate with this short story:

These costumes look terrible. It’s hard to believe that in a world that has moved beyond the Batman of the 1960s in so many ways that costumes like this could still make it down the pipeline. It’s doubly bad that they are coming from the studio that took comic book characters and made them accessible by making them inhabitants of the real world. From the beginning, Thor was going to be faced with the production challenge of integrating a God into the scientific mix or Iron Man and Hulk, but why they decided to make it tougher on themselves is a complete mystery. Get a load of the ridiculous after the jump. And put on your eye patch for it.

Robert Fure takes a much closer look at the costumes from the Summer 2009 GI JOE flick!