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Happy birthday, awils1!

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Happy birthday, coffeeandink!

Hand me my Archetypal Codfish

Oh dear, I'm sure they're very nice people and all that, but how annoying is this?

They tend to play slackers who have lost their girlfriends, their jobs or their sense of purpose – or all three. More than anything, their films are buddy movies. And they have managed to transform their losers into winners – of sorts.

"I have a great theory about the rise of the loser," Pegg says. "The genesis of it was the death of the 80s superman; you know, the death of the Terminator, which was the ultimate expression of masculinity at that time in action movies. The man had become so ridiculously masculine that he was metal. Then came John McClane, with Bruce Willis, an action hero who was a little bit flawed, who allowed us to see masculinity as imperfect, and that ultimately led to me and Nick being the lead in films. Or Seth Rogen."

So they are the new anti-action heroes? "No," says Pegg, "but men don't have to be inhuman testosterone… Michael Cera, Steve Carell, classic examples. You can chart the social, sexual growth of masculinity in films to the point where, like in reality TV, the ordinary person has taken over. It's loving the nerds."
....
Pegg has yet another theory, although it could be part of the same one. "It's all to do with our collective psyche and the archetypes and absolutes we recognise as what masculinity means. Everything evolves. It's interesting that women are only just beginning to get that – the female archetype is still Angelina Jolie or Megan Fox, the classic beauty."

Mi higher codswallop/utter bollox, let me show u it.

'Little man' loser heroes? An infinity of sitcoms and annoying advertisements, and, er, haven't these guys ever heard of, you know, Charlie Chaplin? or a bit more recently and perhaps even more relevantly, Hope and Crosby in the Road to movies? The recently obituarised Norman Wisdom? Get Smart?

Going back even further, the Little Tailor, and huge numbers of folkloric youngest sons who set out with nothing but their amazing naivety.

And, Mr Pegg, women totally get that thing about archetypes, and have been critiquing accepted conventional expectations of femininity for, oh, what, since Mary Wollstonecraft? What on earth do you think feminism is about? - not to mention recent furores around women and ageing? You are not being deep and thinky, you are showing yourself as massively ill-informed.

Grrrrrrrr.