I am proud to announce that Steven Seagal’s first picture, ABOVE THE LAW, will be playing this Thanksgiving weekend on American Movie Classics. What this means, in my opinion, is that ABOVE THE LAW is officially an American movie classic. A classic movie created in or around America. This puts it in an elite group with CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, AMERICAN GRAFFITI and THE GRADUATE, which will also be playing on Friday. It also puts it alongside DR T & THE WOMEN and LOOK WHO’S TALKING TOO which will be playing the day before. Congratulations to Steven Seagal, the cast and crew of ABOVE THE LAW, and of course everyone who has ever watched ABOVE THE LAW more than once.

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My new piece is a DIVORCE DOUBLE FEATURE of THE SQUID AND THE WHALE and THE WEATHER MAN. Also I forgot to link to my review of another new Seagal picture, BLACK DAWN.

Which reminds me I want to thank Andrew J. from Melbourne for pointing me to a web sight I didn’t know about called SEAGALOLOGY.COM. This is kind of a bummer to me obviously because the title and premise is very similar to my book SEAGALOGY that I’ve been working on for, what, must be three years now. And I definitely believe the guy has been influenced by my works and if I’m right about that it would be nice if he acknowledged me or replied to my email. Because of manners.

But after looking over some of the sight I realized there’s really nothing to be upset about. We’re in the same field of research but we have completely opposite approaches and philosophies. It seems to me that he is coming from the angle of purely making fun of Seagal. I genuinely love Seagal’s movies, from the completely awesome (OUT FOR JUSTICE) to the completely silly (ON DEADLY GROUND). It is a delicate balance of laughing, understanding and paying respect to, not just picking on a fat guy with a pony tail. So it will be pretty different.

And it also seems to me that the Seagalology approach is a cursory glance at the movies based on plot summaries from other web sights. He isn’t even dedicated enough to watch the actual movies. I’m not saying he doesn’t know what he’s talking about (although I did notice a few errors). But on alot of the summaries he says that things “apparently” happen which means he’s not even pretending to have watched them. Maybe he wants you to know that he hasn’t.

Now I’m not trying to say that’s a bad approach, or lazy, or an academic fraud or nothing. The last thing I want to do is spark a deadly feud between the serious field of Seagalogy and the snake oil quackery of Seagalology. But I just want to assure you that mine is about attention to detail. Trust me, I’m goin deep. I don’t even want to give examples because now I’m gettin paranoid about academic espionage. My goal since day 1 has been to study each one of these movies closer than any sane person would, come out the other end alive and then present my findings. So it’s taking longer but for me anyway it will be worth the wait. Hopefully somebody will agree.

And really, more competition in the field of Seagalogy can only mean stronger work. So this should be exciting for all fans of cinema studies and direct to video theory.

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