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.
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.
It’s better written and deeper than I expected, and it feels pretty damn real and sincere up until it’s last thirty minutes.
Adaptation is a movie that people in Starbucks would probably call “meta” something, without really knowing exactly what that means. Fuck knows I don’t.
In the end, it is Christopher’s complete lack of commitment to any story that makes this movie stink like sun-cooked vomit.