American Pie
If I were still a stupid teenager all hopped on model glue, American Pie would be the only movie I’d need. It would be my everything, my Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Star Wars and Sorority Sluts all rolled into one.
The World's Most Important Fake Critic
If I were still a stupid teenager all hopped on model glue, American Pie would be the only movie I’d need. It would be my everything, my Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Star Wars and Sorority Sluts all rolled into one.
What makes American Movie work are the scenes of average guys, like us, living in our dirty houses, driving beat up old piece of shit cars, dealing with nasty toenails, working crappy jobs, and also pursuing our dreams.
As an audience, we’re turned around. I went into American Beauty expecting the same-old satire of suburban life, nailing the same old targets. I expected the Hollywood goat-cheese-eaters to say that people in the suburbs are boring, conservative and only care about property values, because Hollywood loves saying they’re better than the rest of us.
All of the actors who passed on the script for Alone in the Dark smelled this heap of shit while it was still in the mail truck down the street. But Slater, Reid and Dorff either didn’t smell it or thought it had the pleasing odor of their own farts.
Almost Famous is brilliant moviemaking for all the people in their forties who bitch about today’s music and still listen to their shitty Pink Floyd records. It’s great nostalgic cinema for a time when rock and roll was at is worst and its fans were at their most moronic.
I love movies about average people, but what I love is for the characters to be “average” and not genuinely as dull and lame as the real average. I want them to subtly exceed the boundaries of the mundane and serve as inspiration, amusement or a lesson to the rest of us living in dingy apartments near railroad tracks.
Solaris raises interesting questions, and then it answers them before it dares let an audience do anything as dangerous as think for itself. There are long, dull passages of dialog that don’t illuminate the issues. Instead they lay them out like a textbook.
The story starts slower than a 400 meter race at the Special Olympics. You sort of want to shake the participants and yell “Go that way and speed it up!”
It shows us two things. One, that it is damn near impossible to avoid the lessons our parents taught us, no matter how fucked-up they are. Two, it teaches us that Coburn became an asshole through the same process and probably against his will.
The plot, which hit us in drab greasy blobs of expository dialog is some goth kid’s wet dream about cloning and a perfect society collapsing because the clones are beginning to remember past lives, and some asshole who wants to live forever killing off women who get pregnant because that means no clones.