Christ. What a departure from Man on the Moon. Well. Here we go.
LOL is a movie that exists. It is a film about teenagers who are rich and white with the token black friend dating a white girl. It is an incredibly bitter film about a bunch of self-absorbed assholes pretending to be friends, meaning that it's about high school. Specifically, it is a romance movie, meaning there are awkward loves scenes between characters who are probably 18, even though I don't think there grade was ever really defined.
You know how there are some films that just sort of play? Ones that aren't even bad, where you can tell the director knew how to tell people to sort of act and where the camera work is done exactly as you knew it was going to be done in that exact manner from now until the end of time? A movie whose plot follows basically the exact course you think its going to follow with no surprises, but with just enough small bumps to keep it from being boringly predictable? That's LOL. I have no emotions about it. I barely even remember scenes from it.
I will say one thing positive about this film. Nobody has ever seen it, ever, especially people here. I haven't met a single other human being on the planet who has seen this movie, and if it wasn't on Netflix I wouldn't know it existed. Demi Moore and Miley Cyprus in the same movie? Miley Cyprus in a movie? Who is she again? Oh I guess they totally are in a movie aimed at teenagers about teenagers. Or something.
Why is that a good thing? Well, nobody is going to watch it, and I know that nobody cares about it. I certainly have zero emotional responses to this movie at all. Its like watching Pirates of the Caribbean 2 all over again; images occurred on a screen and I guess there was things or whatever but I can't remember anything from that movie for the life of me. So I get to talk about stuff, and no I promise I won't talk about the gorgeous customer who comes in to work, honest. Instead I'll talk about why this movie failed where other high school movies have done well.
So disregard the six formulaic questions for today. Let's turn this otherwise terrible film in to something education.
How much did it cost and how much did it make?
For a film that has no special effects aside from a slow-motion effect, its actually rather expensive. LOL cost 11 million dollars to make, and drew only 10 million at the Box Office.
This is likely because Demi Moore and Miley Corsica are both people who already exist in the public conscious, and Demi Moore needs booze money after Ashton Kutcher was an asshole or something. There were other actors and actresses I guess, but I'm sure at least a couple million had to be split between those two. Hey, if I get famous and have to act poorly in shitty movies I'm damn well demanding far more money than the entire film is worth.
This film was also a limited release in the United States, which did not help. I actually find that rather odd, since the movie wasn't bad I guess, it was just sort of a movie. There's an audience for it, just not the one the movie seemed aimed at. Hey, nice segue.
Why is this movie aimed at High Schoolers?
There's a principle in film marketing that I am coining here and fuck off if it already has a name, mine is better. I'm calling it the principle of "Stepping Up."
When you market a movie that is supposed to be a slice-of-life for certain social groups, what you are presenting is a totally unrealistic fantasy of actors who haven't experienced anything remotely close to that in a long time, and writers who are disconnected from what normal behavior for a social or age group is. Realistic portrayals of groups requires a metric asston of research because the types of people that a writer can understand are basically people who want to be writers.
Now, even normally competent writers can create a semi-believable setting, but its all just observation from the outside. When presented to people from inside the group, its viewed as cartoonish and inaccurate, because its observations made by an outsider from an outsider's point of view. Just think for a second about the "Big Bang Theory." Its a show about nerds with things that are nerdy in it, but in no way is it actually representative of people who are nerds. There's no debates about which color in magic is the best, nobody gets in fights over tabletop allignments, there's no fights of PC vs. Consoles, nobody discusses current events in gaming or movies, or how book to movie movies sucks, there's nothing.
What LOL is is a movie written by people long removed from high school who researched what high school is like a little bit, but don't really understand it. Hell, I'm only 3 years removed or so and I barely understand it, but I remember it wasn't just one drama filled mess at all times with a bunch of people going to Battle of the Bands and going to drug assemblies. Hey, I remembered part of the movie!
What is High School actually like?
Standardized tests. Even if you don't care about high school, which I spent most of senior year doing, you still have class for like 8 fucking hours, and you're constantly being forced through standardized tests.
Lectures are common, demonstrations are reserved for science classes with a lab, and having your cell phone out gets it confiscated. Openly fighting at all in the hallway gets security called, because since all of the school shootings happened security has been beefed up a lot if the school can afford it. You often don't see the principal about misdemeanors if the school can afford counselors, and teachers are much more removed from their students. They also tend to be more candid if they are good, and will flat out tell students that they are being terrible and wasting their lives.
High school is clinical and dull. Sorry. Your good memories of it don't apply in the post-No-Child-Left-Behind world. Communication is not done in the hallways, its done at the lunch table, and students generally do not flirt with teachers thanks to the number of times teachers have gotten fired over it. Or if they theoretically would, there would at least be a mentioning of it. Oh right this is a movie.
What's the point of all of this?
Shut up, I'm talking.
My point is that the picture in the movie is of a fantasy high school. People have enough money for everything, have relationship dramas involving TOO MANY HOT GUYS TO PICK FROM which is totally realistic, have parents who only ever express their disapproval by taking away cell phones (thank god nobody has abusive parents in high school!), and everyone gets to have crazy awesome parties where they get alcohol from unknown sources. Hey kids, your parents totally won't notice if they have less beer! Yep, parents don't ever keep track of how much they drink, they'll just be like "man I guess all that beer just flew away on my magic car because wooooo."
Now a fantasy high school is going to make everyone actually in high school with any scrap of intelligence at all roll their eyes, while the people below that threshold are upset that Hulk Hogan did something daughter whatever. But, to people who are looking forward to high school, who have been conditioned to look at life through the mixed emotions of fear of the unknown and the joy of becoming closer to the magic age of 21 which you must stay for as many years as physically possible, why, that world is amazing.
So if you're a 11-13 year old girl this movie is fucking fantastic! Except that to anyone who is 11-13, a movie where they openly smoke pot, have sex, and drink is pretty much going to be totally and utterly unrelatable in any way or disallowed by their parents.
In the movie you have a character who calls every girl "ho," an ex husband who sleeps around, sexual innuendo out the ass no pun intended, more drug references than you can shake a stick at, kids drugging their grandma because they wanted to have a party, lying about sex, begging for sex, a webcam put inside of a chicken to simulate a vagina, and wow what the fuck I can't believe that scene was actually in the movie.
I've already been through high school and I can sort of relate to that stuff. Once you're there yeah, you at least can understand. Kids get high, they drink, they make sex jokes - I mean fuck, I should be slapped by every woman on the street for some of the shit I said back in high school, almost everyone should - and they do weird shit like sticking webcams in to a chicken so that it looks like a vagina. Really, they put that in. How?
When you're young, you don't really understand any of that, not statistically. There's vague concepts of what sex is; when I was 9 I kissed the girl next door (who was also 9, don't be creepy) while we were naked, and told my cousin we had sex. Why? Because I had no fucking concept of what sex was because I had never seen it, I just gathered that people had to be naked and kissing from either friends or just getting it through television. I didn't know what sex was until like 3 years later and even then I sort of only vaguely understood it until I had it.
I still don't really get it. Single and looking, ladies. Don't all line up at the same time. Haha. Ha. Oh god I'm so fucking miserable.
What should this movie have been?
This movie should've been a light hearted teenage romance movie about Miley Cyrus - yes I'll drop the island gag - trying to hook up with kind of looks like Edward Cullen dude. Not so heavy on the sex. Marketing wise, have it, because preteen girls are basically a group that is actively giving money to companies which destroy their self esteem, and telling them that they should be having sex with a boy they love, and that basically any relationship that is more serious than not at all is love, and that their first time is going to be amazing and they should stick with that boy forever is going to kill their self-esteem in exactly the most profitable way.
I mean morally that's fucking bankrupt, but if you're just trying to make money sure, exploit the dreams of these little girls some more. The movie even has a built in spiel about how they're all being empowered or something because they can choose which man makes every decision in there life, especially when a police investigator tells Demi Moore they're getting drinks at 3 in the afternoon. Healthy too!
Hey little girls, you know what will make you smiling and happy just like this person you look up to who is in this film? Smoking, drinking, and sex. People who smoke and drink and have sex with people that they've been dating for like two weeks and have no future at all - its okay he's in a band - are the happiest people on the planet. Look at all the happy marriages that come out of those relationships and the great lives that people live. See, Miley Cyrus is happy! And your confused hormone filled brains can't really make sense of the changes going on around you, and your parents certainly haven't prepared you for this. They're still stuck in the mindset that you'll never have sex with anyone, and they've been teaching you to save yourself for marriage or you'll be spoiled for the man. Great.
I get it guys, I do. Preteen girls are bratty and loud and can whine their parents in to spending money still. They like being princesses, and they have role models. But I'm really getting sick of this shit, okay? They're not adults, they can't think like adults and make choices like adults. Their values aren't formed yet, they're little girls and you can't tell them these different things about life and expect them to come out of it happy.
All the people in that movie who were popular and had an awesome time? I know them. Most of them are losers working low paying jobs, who spend all of their money on weed or booze. Half of them got their girlfriends knocked up and will spend the rest of their miserable lives regretting their choices. The girls are stuck to assholes with no future, and they never learned to deal with hardship, so when it hits them for the first time they just crack.
Life is hard and it sucks, it sucks everywhere and for everyone. Movies about fucking relationship problems like this? Fuck you. Guys cheating on their girlfriends isn't the worst thing they can do. Hey how about a movie where it tells little girls who are like 11 or 13 that if they get an abusive boyfriend they can leave him and that he's lying if he says nobody will love them except him? How about a movie that tells little girls they don't need a man in their lives, or tells them to deal with their problems openly rather than sleeping with people for revenge? How come we can't have that?
You won't ever have the problems in this movie, you won't ever have to worry about having too many pretty men fighting over you, ever. That isn't a conflict people deal with. The unfortunate reality of life is that 90% of people are going to have to struggle with who they're going to settle for, and the 10% that are lucky enough to have someone they're happy with are just that. They're lucky.
You know what the world is? Its having sex with your girlfriend in the middle of the forest because you can't afford a car or an apartment and spending half an hour holding her while she has a breakdown because some errant thought triggered her PTSD. Its laying next to the girl you lost your virginity to and hearing her sleep talk about getting raped by her brother, and not knowing what to do. Yeah, its not always fun, and usually its sad and uncomfortable.
I changed my mind. I have an opinion on this movie, and movies like it. Fuck them. Fuck this shit. Thank god it was a limited release, because this kind of shit has to stop. If you just keep telling any group of people that they're worthless without another? Guess what, they'll believe it after a time.
That shit has consequences that we can all see. If it isn't already obvious my two little scenarios are shit I've had to deal with and its a product of shit like LOL. And I'm fucking done.
This movie is bad. Don't ever watch it, don't watch movies like it, and if you have kids go tell them you love them, because apparently you're going to be one of the few people who will ever actually mean it.
DONE LOL Alien Origin Man on the Moon
TO DO Barbarella Queen of the Galaxy
FAN PICK FRIDAY
Its still on, pick it. Whatever.
Two things. 1) Could you start linking to imdb at the top? I haven't really heard of any of these movies except Barbarella. 2) Are you ever going to start reviewing half-decent/semi-famous movies? Just wondering. 3) Why do people make so many goddamn movies about high school? It's all been done. Every trope. Every type of movie you can possibly make about high school has been made (this was also true 20 years ago). Give it up. Please. Actually just give up making movies about one particular age group at all. (This movie you are writing about, for example, just sounds like that shitty movie Thirteen, which was about sex, drugs, and either high school or 8th grade, depending.)
1. Sure 2. I'll actually be reviewing movies that are out in theatres from time to time. I will do whatever movies are on netflix. I like to mix the good and the bad. 3. Because high school students are a lucrative market. Shows that attract high school students can have TV spots that are worth millions. If you attract the high school crowd you can make a shitzillion dollars.
My take: 1. Good call about IMBD
2. He did review Man in the Moon which was a pretty high profile movie
3. That's like asking why people make movies about "work". Ebert interviewed Scorsese once and they both agreed that anyone that says I don't like movies about __ are idiots. It's about the character, not the situation. I don't like bad movies about high-school, sure. But there are plenty of good ones yet to be made, I'd wager.
Hmm. What they have in common, though, is that they aren't high school movies. No Cusack, no Hughes. I really do think the high school movie's time has come and gone. Maybe I'm being narrow-minded, but I just don't see Hollywood breaking away from the American Pie framework anytime soon.Ebert interviewed Scorsese once and they both agreed that anyone that says I don't like movies about __ are idiots.
Obviously, yeah. But ... my problem is people just make the typical high school movie. It's awful. I do tend to forget (which is a good thing, because it means I was focused on plot and other stuff) that Donnie Darko is a high school movie, sort of. So is 21 Jump Street. Etc.
American Pie is essentially a recent version of the Porky's franchise. These movies have been around for many years and will be around for many more. It's not the setting, it's the character arc. Rebel Without a Cause, Dead Poets Society, Rushmore, Napolean Dynamite, and nearly all John Hughes Films are all "high school movies". There will be many, many more that are interesting because the story is interesting. Saying "high school movies time has come and gone" is literally like saying "movies about the workplace" have come and gone.
movies about the workplace have come and gone. who can top Haiku Tunnel?
When I say "high school movies," I basically mean '80s high school movies. I honestly don't think you can make a Ferris Bueller or a Sixteen Candles today "unironically" -- or what have you. (Ironic is in, on the other hand -- see Superbad, Napoleon Dynamite, 21 Jump Street, Clueless.) High school as a setting isn't going away ever, though I wish we all could at least take a sabbatical in order to come up with some original plots. Transformers was sort of set in high school, at least the first one was. And so on. But high school as a memetic (keep in mind I originally mentioned the high school trope, not the high school movie; different animals -- realistically I know it won't vanish but I don't think we'll ever see the Porky's style again per se.
Garden State was basically Ferris Beuller's Day Off done for millenials. When you say "the high school trope" you're basically talking about "coming of age romances" which are not going to go away. I would argue that Boy's Town was as much a part of "the high school trope" as Breakfast Club and it was long enough ago that Mickey Rooney played a 15-year-old. You want original plots? Go watch Brick. Report back for science.
Yeah, I've seen Brick. Falls into the movies set around high school but not "high school movies" (coming of age romances, sure) category. It seems to me that what's largely replaced the sort of movie you mention is the mid-twenties rom-com, the Adam Sandler/Jennifer Aniston/Ashton Kutcher stuff. My main problem with arguing this is that I watch good movies almost exclusively. So my data set is incomplete.
3a) because the 18-24 market is far and away the most desirable to moviemakers
3b) because "high school" is the time when our emotions are at their most raw, our need to belong at its most acute and our sense of adventure as it relates to our personal lives at its most advanced
3c) because relationship movies about people who still make dumb mistakes and can't figure out that the girl likes them are easier to execute than relationship movies about people who have it all figured out. Breakfast Club was in development at the same time as The Big Chill and St. Elmo's Fire. The three movies are identical, for all intents and purposes - one deals with teenagers, one deals with 20-somethings, one deals with 30-somethings. The only difference between the movies are the problems faced by their protagonists - as they get older, their problems get more nuanced. The elephant that won't light up in shop class becomes dealing with coke-addled sheiks becomes getting your best friend to impregnate your wife because you can't conceive. Which of the three has the most fans? People are going to be making "movies about high school" until the sun is a cinder.
You know a lot more about this than I do, so let's move on to a new question -- have these coming-of-age high school movies gotten actively worse? In the late '70s/early '80s came most of the acknowledged classics of the genre (exceptions like Rebel without a Cause [or the period piece movie based loosely on A Tale of Two Cities the name of which escapes me] aside, this is when I would guess the concept of the "high school movie" came about?) So if high school coming of age romances are still being made, are they not being made well anymore? I'm not talking about Brick or Donnie Darko style, I'm talking about American Pie etc.
This will not be as short an answer as you might like. John Hughes was the king, no doubt about it. But you'll note - he wasn't making Porky's. He was making Sixteen Candles and Some Kind of Wonderful and Pretty In Pink and movies where they lead with heart and let the humor fill in around it. You could say the same about Goonies or Stand By Me - they're funny, but they aren't just funny. They're about people who care about each other and believe in things. They are not Animal House or Better Off Dead. Those movies do still exist, but they're less common. Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a funny coming of age movie. It's also one of the first things written by Cameron Crowe, who also did Almost Famous. Almost Famous is a movie that cares about people and is a coming-of-age film (that is also about Led Zeppelin). It was not sold as a coming-of-age movie, though. Not really. Boys and Girls is also a coming-of-age movie. It's squarely in that "teen" "high school" territory - it's about college freshmen. Yet if you watch the trailers, they're trying to sell it like Porky's... or American Pie. And there's the trick. The genre was pretty much dead until American Pie came out, which was raunchy by any standard. So everyone attempted to remake American Pie. Even when what you had wasn't American Pie, you sold it as American Pie - 10 Things I Hate About You is The Taming of the Shrew. Legit. Straight up Shakespeare re-cast in High School. Yet watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWmjzCZr0Jw ...*American Pie.* It didn't take long for people to decide that, rather than pretending their movies were American Pie, they might as well make them American Pie. Because raunch sells. Consider: Judd Apatow really broke out with Freaks and Geeks, perhaps the most heart-filled "coming-of-age" TV show in a generation. If you haven't seen it, watch it. It legitimately leaves My So-Called Life in the dust. But it lasted one season and was cancelled. From there, he went raunchier, but with still a little heart - he made The 40-year-old Virgin. From there, it just got raunchier - Knocked Up. Pineapple Express. Dewey Cox. All the heart went out of it, and into that void jumped fucking TWILIGHT. So now your teen coming-of-age movies are at a nadir. It'll get better. But yeah. There's a cycle to everything. One of my friends pointed out that the landscape is ripe for a decent, well-written, well-acted, well-directed romantic comedy because we haven't had one in almost a decade. It's all The Hangover and Bridesmaids and other crass bullshit that is completely without any heart. The most romantic film we've had in forever is Sideways and even that gets fucked up by Paul Giamatti not being gay.
You know, for someone my age or a bit younger, it's almost impossible to imagine good romantic comedies coming out on a semi-regular basis. There just hasn't been one since I've been cognizant of movies. I mean, audiences actually put effort into enjoying 50 First Dates and Hitch for that very reason. They desperately wanted to meet the genre halfway. Zooey Deschanel breaks hearts and sells movies/shows/albums because her life seems like some kind of rom-com. What a joke. Give me another Intolerable Cruelty at the very least, which is clever in a sort of obvious way. Give me Clueless. It's a crying shame, because romantic comedies are "easy listening" in a way not approached by anything currently except the vapid Marvel movies. A good romantic comedy has staying power. /opinion or whatever. I just like smart movies and lately films have to pick only two out of romance, comedy and intelligence.There's a cycle to everything. One of my friends pointed out that the landscape is ripe for a decent, well-written, well-acted, well-directed romantic comedy because we haven't had one in almost a decade. It's all The Hangover and Bridesmaids and other crass bullshit that is completely without any heart.
A guess: Rom coms can't be "event" movies. They aren't "must sees." Now that the average movie release, with P&A, costs $100m, there isn't any way to get people to go out to see a movie that isn't a "must see." You can make a $150m sci fi epic that everybody has to go see. You just can't make a $150m romcom. Something I've been dealing with personally is the propagation of tiny little movies that just go directly to Netflix. I think we'll see more of that as the studio system continues to lock out anything that isn't a nine-figure pre-existing property. It'll be a while, though; it's really tough to make a decent movie for under $300k of a quality that will be accepted by the average audience.
It's happening with tv shows, so I assume movies are next -- but I don't know how the money works there. I mean, what do a few episodes of Arrested Development cost compared to an independent film? What exactly can Netflix afford? Not a movie with George Clooney in it, surely. And until then it'll be a limited market. (Hell, maybe Netflix can afford that shit -- I saw a statistic bandied about a while ago that claimed that any given evening X percentage of bandwidth is being used on Netflix streaming, and it was an insane number.)Something I've been dealing with personally is the propagation of tiny little movies that just go directly to Netflix.
It's nothing compared to porn and spam. Netflix's bandwidth is high, but considering their traffic rides on Amazon's servers, it's hard to say for sure. As to the rest of it, read this.
For the record, Porky's was brought in to this conversation by me. I want to make it clear that my point was that Porky's was a T&A franchise, much like American Pie. These types of movies aren't going anywhere. Thoughtful coming of age movies like Sixteen Candles aren't going anywhere either. But I was not comparing Porky's to this genre.
It isn't sloth that causes films such as this, it's cowardice. It's far easier to get money for a movie where you can point at something very, very similar that happened to make money. This is why remakes happen: You can say "look, but it made money the first time, unless we really fuck it up it'll make money this time." What's diminished are standards. The remake if Clash of the Titans did a lot worse than the original Clash of the Titans and the orignal Clash of the Titans was considered enough of a failure that nobody bothered with a sequel. The remake? Yeah, its sequel was greenlit a week after open.
Clash of the Titans (2010):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXttqg0RWU8 Wrath of the Titans (2012):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs7fzOrUopc Clash of the Titans, 1981, did $41m business on $15m budget. It didn't quite scrape the top 10 for 1981. Granted, it's a hell of a list - but the '81 version was beaten out by fucking Time Bandits. Clash of the Titans, 2010, did $163m domestic on a $125m budget. It did triple that foreign, which makes it about doubly successful as Eragon, widely regarded as a total stinker. It's $300m short of Lion, Witch & Wardrobe (which, admittedly, cost a lot more). It came in at #14, behind True Grit and barely ahead of The King's Speech. But it got a sequel.
Fan Pick: The Room I'm not even going to link a trailer because the trailer does not do the movie justice.
down with the room. People need to stop obsessing over shittiness.
This movie is honestly one of the funniest I've ever seen. I've seen it about 5-6 times because I really do enjoy this sort of humor. I understand that there are bad movies, but this one literally transcends bad into a realm of humor I've never seen before.
Very well written. I love these kinds of rants. I've been wanting to start doing some film review myself to write these kinds of things and encompass all of our culture. I mean, it's al I spend my time doing anyway, watching films, and I haven't been writing as much as I'd like to, so why not do both? It's good that there are a good amount of people aware of how dangerous this kind of film-making and marketing is to the next generation. It should be derided perpetually, and hopefully by doing so it'll eventually reach enough people that when they have children, they won't do the same things to them.
Well I'm glad you saw it before I gave into it. When looking for bad movies it just jumps out at me on netflix. e: Also, pick for friday is Ice Spiders - it is my wife and I's favourite bad movie.