[1612] in Humor
HUMOR: Herman Hates ID4
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Fri Sep 20 10:27:44 1996
From: <abennett@MIT.EDU>
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 10:16:09 EDT
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 05:01:16 +0000 (GMT)
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1996 10:05:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com>
HERMANN HATES The Movies
--a direct-to-video column--
Copyright 1996 by Andrew Hermann
WARNING: I am not a conscientous movie critic and therefore don't
care if you haven't already seen it. I give away the ending to
"Independence Day" in this one. You few forntunate souls who've
missed it thus far, keep reading and spare yourselves the pain.
Well, I finally got around to seeing my first summer blockbuster,
"Independence Day," and now I'm CERTAIN they're using microwaves or
mind-altering chemicals in the water supply to sustain in us all
the urge to go out and pay $7.50 a pop to see this dreck. Even I,
I seem to recall, wanted to go see this movie when it first came
out. The fact that it took me two months to get around to it is
probably a testament to whatever lingering vestige of taste and
individuality I retain that hasn't been pounded out of me by the
death-ray-wielding, blot-out-the-sun Mothership known as the
American media.
Before we even get to the actual product, i.e. the movie, let's
just talk about what the cinematic experience has become. For the
price of six Happy Meals or a month's worth of cable, you and your
date get the privilege of standing in one long line for all ten
movies in the multiplex, being rudely treated by a sullen teenager
in an ill-fitting uniform, who sticks his dirty forearm deep into
the popcorn bin to get you a bag of the stale stuff at the bottom,
then points you toward another sullen teenager, who sullenly takes
your tickets and points you down a long hall, at the end of which
is a room which resembles your living room in size but which has
row after row of cramped, scratchy-fabricked seats squeezed into
barely enough space for two couches and a throw rug. If you're
unlucky enough to be at one of those rare movies that doesn't
feature paint-peeling sound effects, you can hear every candy-
wrapper rustle and tubercular cough all night.
In case you arrive early, your local cineplex has other pleasures
in store. Some marketing genius in the last few years has made two
not unreasonable assumptions about movie-goers--one, that they
probably don't have much to talk about, or they wouldn't be going
to the movies, and two, that they're probably dumber than paste, or
they wouldn't have just plunked down a serious chuck of change for
a really mediocre night out. The result of these assumptions is
that great lowest-common-denominator conversation piece, the pre-
movie slide show, in which lots of cheesy ads for local Chinese
restaurants and auto service centers are interspersed with moronic
trivia about the movie industry, in the form of memorable quotes
("I knew you would say that"--Stallone, "Judge Dredd"), and
challenging anagrams ("Mot Rueci. Hints: starred in 'Top Gun' and
'Mission Impossible'; name sounds like 'Snooze'; married to Nicole
Kidman"). No one need ever reveal personal information to their
movie date again.
Next come the trailers, which as everyone knows are the highlight
of today's moviegoing experience. If they just put together
evenings of trailers and charged $7.50 to see those, I'd be first
in line. They're crisply edited and loaded with funny one-liners,
compelling images, great music, and tersely constructed plots that
are left intriguingly unresolved. The people in Hollywood making
trailers seem to know more about filmmaking than the filmmakers
themselves.
Which is too bad, because after the trailers, of course, comes the
film. Talk about a letdown. Assuming you actually wanted to see
the movie and weren't just in search of air conditioning, what
you're usually in for is that great five minutes worth of trailer
spread out over two-and-a-half hours of plodding, maudlin, empty-
headed nonsense. Good triumphs over evil, the guy gets the girl,
lots of big cool set pieces are destroyed by big cool special
effects, and lots of fragments of album outtakes by your favorite
alternative bands get played on the soundtrack at high volume, the
better to drown out dialogue more inane than anything you and your
date ever came up with viz-a-viz the pre-movie slide show.
Take "Independence Day," which is already one of the highest
grossing films ever with the best opening day box office takes
since blah blah blah. I don't mean to insult anyone's taste,
because after all, I paid good money to see it, too, but boy did
this film suck. Whatever asshole movie critic called it this
generation's "Star Wars" either doesn't think very highly of this
generation or was paid very handsomely to say that.
This is a movie that wastes its first forty minutes introducing
lots and lots of peripheral characters, all of whom are later
either killed off or incorporated into sappy incidental plots that
bog down the latter two-thirds of the movie. This is a movie in
which marauding aliens with fifteen-mile-wide attack saucers, each
of which can blow up a major city every twenty minutes or so,
somehow miss a large village of RV's trucking through the desert
AND Will Smith flying a helicopter back into a trashed army base to
rescue his girlfriend. This is a movie in which the federal
government actually has the prescience, when they sink a downed
alien spacecraft two miles below the surface of the earth for top
secret research, to build an escape chute right over the thing in
case they ever got it running again, which of course they do
(personally, I would have found it much more entertaining and
realistic had they discovered that the feds built this gigantic,
ultra-secure repair shop around the spacecraft and didn't leave an
opening big enough to get it back out again).
I could go on, but it hardly seems worth the effort. Picking apart
"Independence Day" is like shooting fish in a barrel. Suffice it
to say that I can hardly wait for the sequel, which will
undoubtedly be called something like "Labor Day: The Day We Clean
Up." I mean, the aliens levelled virtually every major city on the
planet in this movie! What's left? Scranton? Pensacola? Is the
entire EEC going to huddle together in Dusseldorf? Some happy
ending. I just hope some screenwriting whiz kid in Hollywood
notices that bringing down a fifteen-mile-wide spacecraft full of
exo-skeleton-clad little green men isn't likely to kill them all.
Otherwise, the highlight of part two is going to be Jeff Goldblum
figuring out how to turn alien scrap metal into plumbing.
And by the way, when is Hollywood going to acknowledge that half
its box office is in the foreign market and stop making these
rabidly jingoistic movies? I can sort of see Bob Dole's point (God
help me) about the moral bankruptcy of Hollywood, but he's
certainly got nothing to worry about when it comes to mindless
flagwaving. You would think aliens come to blow up the world would
arouse the concern of some other world leaders, but if they fire
any nukes or hatch any retaliatory schemes of their own,
"Independence Day" sure ain't interested. When we finally catch a
glimpse of some non-Americans in the last ten minutes of the film,
they're all huddled together in tents and bomb shelters, where
they've been presumably playing pinochle or something. They
certainly haven't been fighting back. "The Americans have a plan
to stop the aliens!" some beturbined bedouin cries jubilantly.
"Well, it's about bloody time," says the token fruity-voiced UN
official. Now the argument could be made that this is a fairly
accurate portrayal of international crisis management--everyone
sitting around with their thumbs up their collective asses, waiting
to see what the Americans will do--but I can't imagine the world at
large will take kindly to being portrayed this way cinematically,
especially when what they're lounging around during here is
supposedly nothing less than the Total Annihilation of All Human
Civilization.
And as an American, I can't say I found it particularly reassuring
that our salvation came in the form of a drunken redneck Randy
Quaid (at least I think it was Randy Quaid under all that drunken
redneck makeup) whose last words before he flies a nuke up the
aliens' deathray sphincter are, "Up yours!" It took a crack team
of script doctors days to come up with that line, folks, and they
probably got about a hundred grand apiece to do it. Clearly I'm in
the wrong line of work.
The amazing thing is that what it takes to bring together these
sub-moronic filmmakers and their drooling idiot audiences (and I
must wipe my own chin before continuing) is nothing less than sheer
genius. The best and brightest minds of their generation, I'm
convinced, are the ones wielding the death ray up at Mass Marketing
Mothership Central. And as the filmmakers get worse and worse at
their jobs (I mean, look at this summer's so-called blockbusters--
"Eraser"? "Mission: Impossible"? Come on), the media whiz kids
are getting better at theirs. Where the trailer for "Independence
Day" literally brought audiences to their feet cheering, the movie
left the audience I saw it with weary and glassy-eyed. While the
poster campaign gave us lines like, "Warning: Your next stop might
not be there," the movie gave us lines like...well, I can't
remember any off the top of my head, except of course the infamous
"Up yours."
So maybe it isn't microwaves or drugged water that's making us pony
up for this mind-numbing sludge. Maybe it's just good old-
fashioned American hucksterism. We are all the children of P.T.
Barnum's famous saying.
So there you have it--the modern American moviegoing experience in
a nutshell. Maybe next time you should save yourself five bucks--
fifteen if you bring a friend--and just bring home a video. Be
warned, however: they're putting trailers for upcoming theatrical
releases on videotapes now. Really good ones. Trailers, that is.
One last thing--whoever you people are who stand up during the
credits but stay at your seats, WILL YOU PLEASE GET OUT OF THE WAY.
Believe it or not, some of us actually want to know where the film
was shot, or who did that weird cover of "I Can't Help Falling in
Love," or we just want to scan the credits for goofy names and job
titles ("bug wrangler" is still my all-time favorite). And of
course, most filmgoers from my generation are still hoping against
hope that Matthew Broderick will come on at the end and tell us
when it's over.
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