EXACTLY

It says something about a movie if the best thing you can say about it is that it is, at least, aptly titled. I realize I’ve said about “the Fountain” that it was aptly titled, and I still stand by that, but the aptness of “the Fountain” can hold no candle to the aptness of “Superbad”, the truly horrendous piece of regurgitated swill I almost forced myself to sit through yesterday.

And I ask myself now; “Why do I do these things to myself?”, why am I so stubborn in leaving a movie theater that I force myself to watch the interminable boredom of “Cashback”, why do I suffer the badly acted thinly veiled morality play that is “SawIII”, why, why, why?
Why? Because I am a movie-masochist. I secretly like nothing better than watching a bad movie for the slight chance of seeing cute people badly acting their way out of a paper bag. That’s why. That’s why I sat through “Cashback”, and “Saw”. Not that my efforts were rewarded or anything, but I live in hope that one day, out of the blue, the next Josh Duhamel will accidentally strip of in American Pie 65 and I can see I at least saw him naked in his first ever movie when he is a big star.

This did not happen, or had any faint hope of happening, during “Superbad” yesterday. Other things that didn’t happen during this truly terrible movie (or at least the 45 minutes I sat through before Housemate evoked the safety-word of movie-leavage) were: Something even remotely funny for those not humor-deprived since birth, the wolverine-vs-freddy style sla(sh/y)ing of that truly annoying and shite-ugly fat kid, the moment the “friends” of the fat kid finally told him to shut the bleeding fuck up and other thigns I really would like to have seen.
Ok, I am being a bit unfair, we did see fat kid’s throat being slit by a security guard, something that pleased me enough to whoop a little mid-movie, but that turned out to be a scene from fat kid’s imagination, something that pulled a well-meant “CRAP!!” from my toyed-with emotional psyche.

Ok, sorry, “Superbad”, movie about three guys, all nerdy, almost all acceptably nerdy for a standard high-school-movie, on their quest for pussy and suchlike, as one has now come to expect from high-school-movies. The three guys: Fat Kid (FK) who seems to be the leader of this little group of misfits but is more than likely just the guy the others hang around with just so people will spit on other people. Nerdy guy (NG) the classic nerd. Glasses, dark hair, pasty. Nerdlike, and therefore to my mind slightly endearing, but massively overshadowed by the sad fact he is friends with FK. And Average Guy (AG) who doesn’t really stand out in either direction, could be cute, could be ugly, but is nothing really. Dresses in brown.

After the initial set-up and introduction of this threesome, the movie tells us basically three things: They are all after girls, they are all idiots, and they should all die. So far, so same as every other high-school movie ever. Not exactly the same, as this movie sucks, whereas most HSM’s do have a certain charm to them. This one does not. From the first moment to the moment where I walked out, with the exception of the times FK was not on screen and the moment his throat was slashed, all it was was pure and simple crap.
Crap. Fucking crap. Effing crap. Rotten-corpse-of-Douglas-Adams flinging crap. No sign or show of any form of humor, charm or elegance in it’s execution, no power behind it’s convictions, no pure and simple movie magic in it’s make and pedigree.

I am certain the acting, however, was flawless. The three K’s did their very best, and did put down two reasonably believable characters and one truly atrocious one. But good acting of bad characters does not make a movie fun to watch. That said, the rest of the theatre was in stitches with every unnecessary “fuck” and every over the top allusion to the character’s rampant latent homosexuality, so it is possible the jokes just passed straight over my head (pun intended).

Is this it? Is this where we are headed? At least the “Naked Gun” movies had some planning in their badness. “Police Academy” lost it after a while but started smart enough through their bad jokes. “Revenge of the Nerds” had charm, “American Pie” was in places really, truly funny. But now we are getting these movies that seem only intend on being disgusting, stupid or demeaning, and if they can at all manage it, they go for all three of those. I thought I’d seen y worst movie with “Date Movie”, and I was wrong.
The worst part is that this movie is praised critically and through box office acclaim, it is “the next big thing” and the actors are lauded and feted around Hollywood. WHY? WHY in the name of all that is good and beautiful in the world WHY are we celebrating the type of jokes that special kid in the back of the class used to make until he was put into remedial teaching?
Honestly people, saying fuck fifteen times in a row is NOT funny. Showing an 8-year old drawing dicks is NOT funny, even though some of the dicks absolutely were. Watching a woman drink from a fat of her own fat is NOT funny. All these things, however, are happening in movies RIGHT NOW and there are audiences the world over that are laughing their retarded heads off watching this execrable garbage.

Can’t we get back to a world where humor was not based on excrement? I understand Mel Brooks’ statement that tragedy is when I cut my finger, and comedy is when you fall into an open sewer, but really, there is a massive difference between schadenfreude and filth.

Ah well, I am rerunning my episodes of the office to get the taste of FK out of my brain, then to go on to some actually funny things that don’t make me cringe.

Stripes at 00100, by now a well-known combination.

Grtz,
Kevin