How shit are american films?
I went to see Ted on the weekend (pretty funny, thanks for asking). Before it started there were trailers for three American films that you’ll soon be able to experience in your local multiplex. All looked depressingly bad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2X-R_PR6xs
I’m not saying that every movie ever made has to be La Grande Illusion or Apocalypse Now but those three look so utterly awful that I want to cry.
Check out The 3 Stooges. Yes, it looks like the actors texted in their performances. Yes, the pratfalls look about as funny as soil. Yes, you’d rather kill yourself with a pair of rusty nail clippers than pay to see it, but all that is by the by. The really sad thing about this movie is that it was made by the Farrelly Brothers, the geniuses who gave us the sublime There’s Something About Mary. And they used to have balls. Remember the Matt Damon conjoined twin comedy Stuck On You? Well, that sentence should tell you all you need to know. This dismal skid mark makes you want to weep for the demise of such talent.
The Watch is also the product of some people who have seen much better days (There’s Something About Mary, Swingers, Moneyball, director of Submarine). What surprises me is that they ALL agreed to make that bucket of piss. Look, I know Vince, Ben and Jonah are sometimes not very choosy, actually, fuck that; has Ben Stiller made anything not shit since There’s Something About Mary? No. So I suppose this is only to be expected from him. But this seems so obviously dire that their agents, managers, wives, a passing janitor who accidentally caught sight of a single sentence of the script as he cleaned a desk… someone should have pointed out that the whole thing smelled like a tramp’s abscess had been smeared on the page. Surely?
Last and most depressing is the latest spray of diarrhoea from the master: Adam Sandler. People sometimes tell me that his early films are quite funny (I’ve never seen any of them), and I absolutely love Punch Drunk Love and the first half of Funny People, but shit my leg to the moon, this would be a new low for him were it not for the irrefutable fact that no one can ever make a worse film than Jack and Jill. How did humanity get to a stage where there is a genre of film costing millions of dollars called The Adam Sandler Movie and it is all that is wrong with Planet Earth? Witless, hopeless, pisspoor shite for people who have been in very bad car accidents that made their brains fail, it makes you want to ring up Amnesty International and suggest an exchange programme for tortured prisoners. We’d all vote Adam into a jail to have shards of glass rammed up his johnson for a few years, wouldn’t we?
I think I shall lie down in a dark room that isn’t a cinema until they all go away.
someone in hollywood once explained to me that most movies are sold in advance. the future rights are sold, so the movie gets made. there’s no quality control element. it’s really about spreading risk, not filmmaking. which makes complete sense and explains so much.
Ben, I think Adam Sandler is a man who hates films but loves the corporate system that makes them because he found a way to milk it – juts see his budgets: Jack & Jill – $75 mil., Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry – $119,7mil. Click – $137 mil. Paul Blart: Mall Cop – $146,3 mil. Grown Ups – $162 mil.
Films that look like 10 bucks actually cost millions because they are turned into product placement orgies, and junk food commercials.
@Lubomir: You are on to something. Redlettermedia spends almost an hour dissecting Jack and Jill and how Sandler plays the corporate system. He’s a movie fraud. http://youtu.be/Z22fSyedgoE
Oh, and Stiller’s little indie Greenberg wasn’t that bad, was it?
There is now no doubt. Adam Sandler must be STOPPED.
Why do we begrudge actors so much for making money? Sure it’s disappointing when someone you enjoy ends up in a piece of shit, but shouldn’t we, as advertisers, understand that Hollywood is a business and creativity regularly gets compromised by the money-making machine? How many times has ‘a great opportunity’ landed on your desk that turned out to be more of ‘a career-killer’? If i was Richard Ayoade and they offered me a mil to ‘do that thing you do on that Briddish show’ i’d spent the first 50 quid on a dildo i could stuff right up Mark Kermode’s arse.
I don’t begrudge actors for making money. I begrudge them for making shit.
But I take your point and, on reflection, it’s a good one.
‘has Ben Stiller made anything not shit since There’s Something About Mary? No’
You mean ‘has Ben Stiller made anything not shit since The Royal Tennenbaumbs, Greenberg and I’m Still Here? Yes: The Fockers trilogy’, right?
I haven’t see Greenberg or I’m Still Here, but TRT sucks shit.
I liked Reality Bites, but that was ages ago.
I think he’s also got a real insecurity complex. He likes to get very buff in some movies (Tropic Thunder, or pretend he’s good looking enough to be a male model Poolander).
Perhaps all the talented people have moved into TV? I could name half a dozen brilliant American TV shows from the last year. Not a single film.
The trouble with Stiller is he went full retard.
Best thing Sandler ever did was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py2f38iPBeI
Overall you’ll get no argument from me but for all the likes of Paul Mart: Mall Cop movies there’ll always be a Hurt Locker, There Will be Blood…
Maybe it’s just that comedies are predominantly lame, after all it is the hardest genre to crack.
Absolutely. On the other hand, having seen trailers for The Master, Cloud Atlas and (yeah, alright, but it does look good in a genre kind of way) Dredd 3D, I’m quite excited about all of those.
Of course, they might still turn out to be shit.
America hasn’t produced a good film since about 1950.
Because 99.9% of Americans are retarded gun loving war mongerers.