I Don't Get It
For the last few months there has been a bit of a buzz surrounding the release of the movie Snakes on a Plane. Most of this hype has come from the internet and it apparently has influenced the movie's content. When the studio considered taming the film's goriness to avoid an R rating, the uproar on the internet helped convince the studio to make the movie even gorier. Every new development in the movie's progress has been met with a great deal of fanfare from a segment of the internet community and it seems a lot of people are eagerly anticipating the movie's release this Friday.
After hearing the basic plot and seeing some of the trailers for the movies, I find myself lost. I just don't get it. Why are so many people excited about a movie that looks so horrible.
As a fan of the Sports Guy, I'm fully aware of the appeal of unintentional comedy and I do find myself amused by it. But this seems more like intentional unintentional comedy and I can't understand the appeal of that.
Why reward a movie studio with my hard-earned money for releasing an awful movie. There seems to be enough garbage out there without me supporting a movie studio for putting out more.
Maybe it's a cultural thing. Or maybe I'm too old. Or maybe I'm not cool enough. Whatever it is, I think it's pretty silly to waste your time and money on a piece of trash. But who am I to judge, I go to summer league basketball games and it's pretty hard to come up with something that's a bigger waste of time than that. I guess to each his own.
After hearing the basic plot and seeing some of the trailers for the movies, I find myself lost. I just don't get it. Why are so many people excited about a movie that looks so horrible.
As a fan of the Sports Guy, I'm fully aware of the appeal of unintentional comedy and I do find myself amused by it. But this seems more like intentional unintentional comedy and I can't understand the appeal of that.
Why reward a movie studio with my hard-earned money for releasing an awful movie. There seems to be enough garbage out there without me supporting a movie studio for putting out more.
Maybe it's a cultural thing. Or maybe I'm too old. Or maybe I'm not cool enough. Whatever it is, I think it's pretty silly to waste your time and money on a piece of trash. But who am I to judge, I go to summer league basketball games and it's pretty hard to come up with something that's a bigger waste of time than that. I guess to each his own.
posted by The Pocho at 9:42 AM
7 Comments:
Even if this movie does turn out to be horrible, you have to concede that it's been a pretty brilliant marketing strategy .. to me, it looks like pretty standard B-movie fun, but I like that kind of stuff, so I'll definitely give it a chance
I'm not sure if it was a marketing strategy since that would suggest that the studio is manipulating the internet community. But I would agree that it was a very smart move by the studio to embrace the internet buzz rather than ignore it.
I guess I shouldn't see it as anything more than a B-movie. I've never been a fan of those type of movies so maybe that's why I'm having issues with it.
Okay, I can’t presume to speak for others, but I’ll tell you the reasons I want to see it. See, it’s not about (intentional) unintentional comedy or anything like that. It’s more about self-awareness and an utter lack of pretension. The movie seems to be embracing its status as a B-Movie, not as a Bad Movie, which are two entirely different things. There’s nothing inherently bad about B-movies, as long as they’re done well and don’t aspire to be anything that they’re not.
Let me give an example: you might or might not remember the movie MVP from a few years ago, which featured a chimp playing hockey. Now that was not a particularly good movie. More than anything else, the problem was that it simply did not feature enough of the chimp playing hockey. I don’t think he even started playing hockey until about 40 or 45 minutes in. I remember thinking at the end, “Man, that chimp barely played any hockey. What a gyp.” Now if that movie had been called Chimp Playing Hockey, that would’ve offered the promise that the filmmakers knew what the audience wanted and were willing to deliver it. We wouldn’t have been subjected to a subplot involving a deaf girl that nobody cared about, we just would’ve got 90 minutes of a chimp playing hockey. Plus, you could’ve had Sam Jackson as the coach, yelling “I want that motherfuckin’ chimp to play some motherfuckin’ hockey!” And it would’ve been a vastly superior movie.
Snakes on a Plane is like William Shatner or Vlad Guerrero. They might strike out or they might hit a home run, but you know they’re gonna be up there hacking. You know they’re gonna go for it and won’t do things half-assed and leave anything on the table. And sometimes that’s what you really want from a movie, just an assurance that it’s gonna go all out and be the best damn B-movie it can be, without trying to do anything else. Would Johnny Knoxville Pretends to Be a Retard have been a better movie than The Ringer? I’m thinking yes.
Anyway, I'll be seeing it on Sunday. I'll let you know how it goes...
That's a good way to look at it. I really hadn't considered that perspective. I'm interested in seeing what you think of the movie after you see it.
I want that motherfuckin' Pocho to write some more motherfuckin' articles!
I'll do my motherfuckin' best.
I completely disagree with Johnny Ringo, this movie was coldly calculated to be a fake "unpretentious" movie and is being aggressively marketed as such. It reminds me of Napoleon Dynamite in how clever marketing convinced people that something very mainstream and very mundane was actually alternative, subversive and cool. People are too lazy to even find their own originality these days.
It is very difficult to be ironic and self-aware and unpretentious at the same time, although no shortage of people try. Check out many of Kevin Smith's movies and see how well that works, it ends up being a wisecracking, obnoxious interesting mess.
However, it resulted in Samuel Jackson's truly awesome speech at the MTV Movie Awards and it's not going to cost me anything since I'm not watching it, so I guess it did more harm than good.
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