Snakes on My Last Nerve
Someone told me recently I should lighten up on this; that I should just give myself over to the stupidity of it. I assure you that I have a laundry list of things that are genuinely stupid that I’ve been able to stand on such a platform for, so it’s not like I’m incapable of dumpster diving for entertainment purposes (paying to see Jackass springs to mind). I am not one of those people who can’t have a good time. I can get down with the silly or surreal as much as the next guy dressed in a Klingon outfit. I'm all about the dumb.
But I can’t do that with this movie, this motherfucking-Snakes-on-a-motherfucking-Plane.
If the movie were a genuine attempt to poke the film industry in the eye or to satirize horror flicks or to show the power of mass opinion to keep an idea alive or even to just pay Samuel Jackson’s rent this month, I’d get it. But that’s not what this phenomenon - and it is a phenomenon - is. It was an earnest attempt to make a dumb movie just like any other dumb movie and it happened to have the dumbest title for a movie ever. And, like all record-breaking things, someone noticed, someone with a modem and too much time on their hands. Someone who thinks banality and inanity is cool in a look-at-my-Babylon 5-DVD-collection sort of way. It’s a bad movie with a stupid title that isn’t lampoon, isn’t satire, isn’t political - isn’t anything, not even entertaining - that, due to the hype that only a rabid mob of internet trolls strung out on Tarrantino flicks who live in their mothers’ basements, could generate.
Movie companies - some of the largest producers of human waste as industry in the history of mankind - dream of campaigns like this. It caters not only to the attention aimed at their product, but it doesn’t cost them anything. They have inadvertently, through their own apparently bottomless lack of imagination, tapped into a group sentiment of cynicism so pervasive that we would skip a hundred other noteworthy films to experience how god-awful this one must be.
And while I could see rallying behind a movie that legitimately attempts or strives to be the worst film of all time in Ed Wood-like fashion, this is not that film. It is not so cheesily made that you could laugh at the wires on the leaping snakes or the fake blood or the bad acting. It is simply a moderately executed attempt at a piss-poor idea. It is not Plan 9 from Outer Space or C.H.U.D. or Rocky Horror Picture Show. It is a boring, insipid movie that people have conned themselves into thinking might have even bad movie merit. I assure you that it does not.
I hate this film. I hate it for the same reason I hate Cowboy Troy (though not to the same degree): because you can feel the manufacturer’s prints all over it. You can smell the board room meetings about how to sell it wafting from the screen, see the dollar bill plates laid out behind every poster under the marquee. It is something so rife with Hollywood’s bullshit that you can taste it in the back of your throat, no matter how much popcorn you thrust into your maw. I hate being able to feel the pandering of it, feel the push of nerd groins at their monitors in an attempt to make a bad movie even worse...and succeeding.
Now, I’m not suggesting that I’ve not been taken in by some crafty advertising and a pretty wrapper before; we all have, and we will all be taken again. But sometimes - sometimes - the machinations of unoriginality and hype are so blatantly obvious that it almost hurts your eyes to look at it directly. It’s like looking at an eclipse and realizing that you’re really looking up from the bottom of a toilet bowl and someone’s sliding on to take a dump on your head. It is, in fact, very much like that.
Bad movies are bad movies. But allowing bad movies to snake their way into coolness without anything cool to show for the trouble is just dumb. And I hate feeling dumb. And we've all allowed this idiocy to pervade our attention so much that it's only sprung the door wide for more of the same. We can expect to see 12th generation copies of this copy of a bad film(s), or worse, a sequel.
You can track the brown flake that started this shit-snowball to a *blog* by one of the screenwriters, for God’s sake. They shot more footage and inserted the only genuinely Jackson-esque like line in the movie AFTER the internet frenzy had begun. And despite all indicators of a truly blockbuster weekend, the distributors still refused to screen it for critics.
Which brings me to the other sordid chapter in this debacle of common sense: the critics.
Reviews of the film have been largely more favorable than they have any right to be. Critics who have given thumbs down or low grades or meager stars to films with genuine intention, merit or production values - aye, even a fucking story - have been lauding the entertainment value of snakes biting people’s genitalia on a Boeing 747. For instance:
Ty Bur (BostonGlobe)
- SoaP: A-
- Pirates of the Caribbean II: C-
- Nacho Libre: C
- Tsosti: B
Bob Longino (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
- SoaP: B-
- The Omen: C+
Kyle Smith (New York Post)
- SoaP: B
- Pirates II: C+
- My Super Ex-Girlfriend: C-
Manohla Dargis (New York Times)
- SoaP: B
- Lady in the Water: C+
- My Super Ex-Girlfriend: C
- Tsotsi: C+
Claudia Puig (USA Today)
- SoaP: B-
- Pirates II: B
- The Omen: C
- Tsotsi: B
This is what happens when you don’t have to pay $8 to see a movie anymore. Seeing grades like this from audiences fed a diet of Sam Jackson quotes (or, in this real-life worst-case scenario - feeding HIM quotes), snake iconography suitable for *blogging* and Mountain Dew for the past few months, I understand. They’re nonsense-addled. But did the critics receive blows to the back of the head upon entering the theater to review this film? Are we all in some wall-less high school and the critics want to hang out with the popular kids in the lunch room, so they tell them how cool their favorite movie is? Snakes is easily one of the most predictable, nonsensical movies I’ve seen all year, and yet here are the “critics”, blowing smoke up everyone’s asses and conning us into spending money on a movie that has no redeeming value whatsoever. For all their talk about originality, standards and value systems and clichés, they have given the thumbs up to a film that has no originality, doesn’t even have the standards to be its own film, doesn’t even have shock value, and is so rife with clichés that almost every director of a horror film in the last twenty years should be filing a lawsuit against it.
Now, a roller coaster ride doesn’t have any redeeming value either. Nor do 90% of the video games I own. But I don’t go around heralding these things as must-do events with the importance that a social issue - let alone a good movie - would kill for. We can’t get half the country to vote, but we can con them into going to see this tripe on the strength of an inane title alone? ALONE?!
America is doomed.
But I can’t do that with this movie, this motherfucking-Snakes-on-a-motherfucking-Plane.
If the movie were a genuine attempt to poke the film industry in the eye or to satirize horror flicks or to show the power of mass opinion to keep an idea alive or even to just pay Samuel Jackson’s rent this month, I’d get it. But that’s not what this phenomenon - and it is a phenomenon - is. It was an earnest attempt to make a dumb movie just like any other dumb movie and it happened to have the dumbest title for a movie ever. And, like all record-breaking things, someone noticed, someone with a modem and too much time on their hands. Someone who thinks banality and inanity is cool in a look-at-my-Babylon 5-DVD-collection sort of way. It’s a bad movie with a stupid title that isn’t lampoon, isn’t satire, isn’t political - isn’t anything, not even entertaining - that, due to the hype that only a rabid mob of internet trolls strung out on Tarrantino flicks who live in their mothers’ basements, could generate.
Movie companies - some of the largest producers of human waste as industry in the history of mankind - dream of campaigns like this. It caters not only to the attention aimed at their product, but it doesn’t cost them anything. They have inadvertently, through their own apparently bottomless lack of imagination, tapped into a group sentiment of cynicism so pervasive that we would skip a hundred other noteworthy films to experience how god-awful this one must be.
And while I could see rallying behind a movie that legitimately attempts or strives to be the worst film of all time in Ed Wood-like fashion, this is not that film. It is not so cheesily made that you could laugh at the wires on the leaping snakes or the fake blood or the bad acting. It is simply a moderately executed attempt at a piss-poor idea. It is not Plan 9 from Outer Space or C.H.U.D. or Rocky Horror Picture Show. It is a boring, insipid movie that people have conned themselves into thinking might have even bad movie merit. I assure you that it does not.
I hate this film. I hate it for the same reason I hate Cowboy Troy (though not to the same degree): because you can feel the manufacturer’s prints all over it. You can smell the board room meetings about how to sell it wafting from the screen, see the dollar bill plates laid out behind every poster under the marquee. It is something so rife with Hollywood’s bullshit that you can taste it in the back of your throat, no matter how much popcorn you thrust into your maw. I hate being able to feel the pandering of it, feel the push of nerd groins at their monitors in an attempt to make a bad movie even worse...and succeeding.
Now, I’m not suggesting that I’ve not been taken in by some crafty advertising and a pretty wrapper before; we all have, and we will all be taken again. But sometimes - sometimes - the machinations of unoriginality and hype are so blatantly obvious that it almost hurts your eyes to look at it directly. It’s like looking at an eclipse and realizing that you’re really looking up from the bottom of a toilet bowl and someone’s sliding on to take a dump on your head. It is, in fact, very much like that.
Bad movies are bad movies. But allowing bad movies to snake their way into coolness without anything cool to show for the trouble is just dumb. And I hate feeling dumb. And we've all allowed this idiocy to pervade our attention so much that it's only sprung the door wide for more of the same. We can expect to see 12th generation copies of this copy of a bad film(s), or worse, a sequel.
You can track the brown flake that started this shit-snowball to a *blog* by one of the screenwriters, for God’s sake. They shot more footage and inserted the only genuinely Jackson-esque like line in the movie AFTER the internet frenzy had begun. And despite all indicators of a truly blockbuster weekend, the distributors still refused to screen it for critics.
Which brings me to the other sordid chapter in this debacle of common sense: the critics.
Reviews of the film have been largely more favorable than they have any right to be. Critics who have given thumbs down or low grades or meager stars to films with genuine intention, merit or production values - aye, even a fucking story - have been lauding the entertainment value of snakes biting people’s genitalia on a Boeing 747. For instance:
Ty Bur (BostonGlobe)
- SoaP: A-
- Pirates of the Caribbean II: C-
- Nacho Libre: C
- Tsosti: B
Bob Longino (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
- SoaP: B-
- The Omen: C+
Kyle Smith (New York Post)
- SoaP: B
- Pirates II: C+
- My Super Ex-Girlfriend: C-
Manohla Dargis (New York Times)
- SoaP: B
- Lady in the Water: C+
- My Super Ex-Girlfriend: C
- Tsotsi: C+
Claudia Puig (USA Today)
- SoaP: B-
- Pirates II: B
- The Omen: C
- Tsotsi: B
This is what happens when you don’t have to pay $8 to see a movie anymore. Seeing grades like this from audiences fed a diet of Sam Jackson quotes (or, in this real-life worst-case scenario - feeding HIM quotes), snake iconography suitable for *blogging* and Mountain Dew for the past few months, I understand. They’re nonsense-addled. But did the critics receive blows to the back of the head upon entering the theater to review this film? Are we all in some wall-less high school and the critics want to hang out with the popular kids in the lunch room, so they tell them how cool their favorite movie is? Snakes is easily one of the most predictable, nonsensical movies I’ve seen all year, and yet here are the “critics”, blowing smoke up everyone’s asses and conning us into spending money on a movie that has no redeeming value whatsoever. For all their talk about originality, standards and value systems and clichés, they have given the thumbs up to a film that has no originality, doesn’t even have the standards to be its own film, doesn’t even have shock value, and is so rife with clichés that almost every director of a horror film in the last twenty years should be filing a lawsuit against it.
Now, a roller coaster ride doesn’t have any redeeming value either. Nor do 90% of the video games I own. But I don’t go around heralding these things as must-do events with the importance that a social issue - let alone a good movie - would kill for. We can’t get half the country to vote, but we can con them into going to see this tripe on the strength of an inane title alone? ALONE?!
America is doomed.