Unreal.
RT rating: None
Synopsis: Narrated by entertainer Steve Allen, this revealing documentary traces professional wrestling's history from its early years as a bona fide athletic event to its current incarnation as a soap opera with a referee. Interviews with fans, sports historians and wrestling stars -- including Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, Killer Kowalski, Gorgeous George and Classie Freddie Blassie -- are interspersed with footage of modern and classic matches. (Yeah. I THINK this is a mistake.)
One of the biggest problems with entertainment in the last decade is the rise of reality TV shows. What began with a simple way to get around striking writers by following police officers on the road to catch drunken, belligerent rednecks beating their spouses and in the process, ruining the good name of a white muscle shirt forever, reality television shows only managed to get WORSE in the 20 years since then. Cops attacking drunken idiots gave way to celebrating young idiots getting drunk, which gave way to giving money to people you want to beat the crap out of, which gave way to a happy ending of celebrating stupid, possibly spoiled people- preferably if they have way too many kids or are challenged with some disability that the producers can simultaneously claim they're promoting awareness of and sell to networks hoping to find people who'll laugh at the freaks.
However, no matter how bad this gets, at least they don't expect us to pay to see these idiots. Luckily, when reality TV stars transfer to motion pictures themselves, the results usually tend to involve the winner failing miserably, proving that people will only watch idiots on reality shows if they're not forced to pay for the privilege. That didn't stop producers from trying to market a short-lived and 'lucrative' mini-genre of reality movies [for people who want to say they watch documentaries to sound smart, but want to remain idiots, they're perfect], with films like "The Real Cancun" providing important examples of movies to end up in DVD stores' remainder bins and pre-owned discount racks for years to come, hoping for some idiot to pick it up and think it's an off-brand "Girls Gone Wild" video.
That brings us to the movie "Unreal", which is one of the most perfect post-modern results of the whole genre: A scripted movie with the plot of pretending it's a reality TV-styled movie. While the Rotten Tomatoes Synopsis was a visible problem, giving the wrong synopsis [while it claims to be a documentary about professional wrestling on the site, the film is actually a movie pretending to be like "Blind Date", a show that amused stoned people looking for anything to watch at 3 a.m. and people who want to see pretty colors and pop-ups alike]. While most things would have this as a problem, I actually found this perfectly appropriate for the style of this movie.
For years, I thought that the pinnacle of reality television was the VH-1 series "Hogan Knows Best". To the layperson, this series was just another of the lucrative reality TV genre of "find some '80s icon turned '00s relic and show people how they live", in this case, using legendary wrestler Hulk Hogan and his family. On paper, this would be just another show similar to "The Osbournes" and its ilk, simple, effective, and disposable. However, no one knew at the time that pro wrestling fans are as rabid about the sports entertainment that they love as the traditional sports fan would be for their favorite team. This was found out when, during a seemingly throwaway moment for this show, Hogan set his semi-essential pop star daughter up with the son of a former pro wrestler...which was soon found out by wrestling newsletters as having been rigged by World Wrestling Entertainment in order to debut her 'beau' on television- a move that showed that this "reality" television show was as staged as...well, pro wrestling. Plotlines involving two recently broken-up couples being brought together by their respective camera crews seem like a joke in the movie, but they're all too perfect for this movie's place in the whole reality genre.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Together Again for the First Time
Together Again for the First Time
One of the things that is so great about Netflix is that when you take out the fact that it's a mail service, it really is the video store that we've been dreaming of for years- one that has pretty much anything that your little heart could desire. Anything from the newest releases to the most obscure, out of print releases are available with the click of a mouse. With this benefit, how could a video store, with its outdated brick and mortar build and a finite amount of films in a store ever compete?
Well, this is an example of it- the film Together Again for the First Time, the movie that the Internet seemingly forgot. If you check on Netflix, this film is not there. Likewise, there's almost no information for it on Rotten Tomatoes, with its description being as follows:
The Wolders-Frobisher family hasn't been in the same house since their parents marriage seven years before. The long awaited reunion this holiday season would normally be cause to celebrate, if they could only stand each other's company--but they can't. Matters only get worse with the unexpected arrival of an ex-boyfriend, an unannounced television broadcast, and the revelation of a dark family secret.
Compare this to the description on the back of the DVD:
The Wolders-Frobisher family hasn't been in the same house since their parents marriage seven years before. The long awaited reunion this holiday season would normally be cause to celebrate, if they could only stand each other's company--but they can't. Matters only get worse with the unexpected arrival of an ex-boyfriend, an unannounced television broadcast, and the revelation of a dark family secret. Together Again for the First Time reminds us of the importance of family- even when you don't like each other very much.
THE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW that this movie was forgotten by mankind. No Netflix examples, no Rotten Tomatoes. Through the Rotten Tomatoes website, only two people can verify reviews of this to prove that, at one point in time, this movie was ever made...and now, from picking it up in this haul, so can I.
What does this tell me when seeing the movie?
Quite frankly, I would have been happier with my purchase if, when putting the DVD into my Playstation 3, I put in through the DVD menu and saw Sadako come out of my TV screen. In both cases, the film quality would have been just as similar- the only difference is I would 'actually' die in seven days after seeing it as opposed to merely wishing to die.
This film was forgotten for no real reason- unless you consider that the film is the same old shit we get every Christmas. No matter what year, there's always going to be some movie that comes out to show the pain of the commercialization of the holiday, only to let us all reveal that true Christmas spirit comes in the love of your family- which can only be shown by taking out a second mortgage to buy everyone you know expensive presents. If you've seen one of these movies, you've seen them all, really- so it's hard to say much about it. There's nothing this mystery film could give you you wouldn't get from any of a hundred Christmas movies more easy to find.
One of the things that is so great about Netflix is that when you take out the fact that it's a mail service, it really is the video store that we've been dreaming of for years- one that has pretty much anything that your little heart could desire. Anything from the newest releases to the most obscure, out of print releases are available with the click of a mouse. With this benefit, how could a video store, with its outdated brick and mortar build and a finite amount of films in a store ever compete?
Well, this is an example of it- the film Together Again for the First Time, the movie that the Internet seemingly forgot. If you check on Netflix, this film is not there. Likewise, there's almost no information for it on Rotten Tomatoes, with its description being as follows:
The Wolders-Frobisher family hasn't been in the same house since their parents marriage seven years before. The long awaited reunion this holiday season would normally be cause to celebrate, if they could only stand each other's company--but they can't. Matters only get worse with the unexpected arrival of an ex-boyfriend, an unannounced television broadcast, and the revelation of a dark family secret.
Compare this to the description on the back of the DVD:
The Wolders-Frobisher family hasn't been in the same house since their parents marriage seven years before. The long awaited reunion this holiday season would normally be cause to celebrate, if they could only stand each other's company--but they can't. Matters only get worse with the unexpected arrival of an ex-boyfriend, an unannounced television broadcast, and the revelation of a dark family secret. Together Again for the First Time reminds us of the importance of family- even when you don't like each other very much.
THE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW that this movie was forgotten by mankind. No Netflix examples, no Rotten Tomatoes. Through the Rotten Tomatoes website, only two people can verify reviews of this to prove that, at one point in time, this movie was ever made...and now, from picking it up in this haul, so can I.
What does this tell me when seeing the movie?
Quite frankly, I would have been happier with my purchase if, when putting the DVD into my Playstation 3, I put in through the DVD menu and saw Sadako come out of my TV screen. In both cases, the film quality would have been just as similar- the only difference is I would 'actually' die in seven days after seeing it as opposed to merely wishing to die.
This film was forgotten for no real reason- unless you consider that the film is the same old shit we get every Christmas. No matter what year, there's always going to be some movie that comes out to show the pain of the commercialization of the holiday, only to let us all reveal that true Christmas spirit comes in the love of your family- which can only be shown by taking out a second mortgage to buy everyone you know expensive presents. If you've seen one of these movies, you've seen them all, really- so it's hard to say much about it. There's nothing this mystery film could give you you wouldn't get from any of a hundred Christmas movies more easy to find.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Video Remainder Project 2: Slackers
Slackers
RT rating: 10%
Synopsis: When the school geek discovers three fellow college students scamming the system, he blackmails them to win over the school's most popular girl.
Once, the ten greatest directors in the world had each told about how they would, to a man, be willing to pay ten million dollars to go to a film festival where they would get to see each of their ten favorite movies- for the first time. This was a tale of the importance of how that first view of a movie can be. While you get to see a movie, no matter how much you like it, no matter how many times you see it again, it'll never match the first time you saw it. It's like with sex- you never remember that time in college when you were both drunk, or that one-night stand, but you always remember that magical night when Father McGillicuddy took you into his rectory.
That's the joy of seeing a movie for the first time. But how much joy do you get from seeing a movie that you hated the first time again? Sometimes you enjoy a film better the second time than you did the first...but that's more for films you didn't care about the first time more than films you didn't like, or films that you didn't see in the right frame of mind the first time. Seeing a movie that you actively thought was terrible, on the other hand? That takes too much time to make the heart grow relatively fondly to make it work. But every once in a while, when you're looking at a number of movies, a film you hated on first glance catches your eye and you say "fuck it, I'll try again."
This is the reason that I get to the movie Slackers. When I saw it in 2002, I hated it. The movie tried being dark and failed miserably, it tried being a teen comedy and only barely worked, and ended up at a level where the absolute best it could have hoped for was being a generic fiasco, forgotten to time. However, with a cast that was relatively good at the time, it couldn't be generic or lost to time. It ended up at the worst case- a teen movie that wasn't even good.
The problem with this film in second viewing was the fact that, in the end, teen movies will be at their best when you're a teen. The further out you get from being a teenager, the worse it will end up. Only a genuinely good movie or a movie that holds genuinely good memories for you will end up succeeding past its prime. That could turn a movie like The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller's Day Off into an iconic film for all time, can turn a movie like American Pie into a forgettable but important piece of your teenage years...but it can also turn a shitty movie like Slackers into a shitty movie that's also dated and brings back bad memories.
RT rating: 10%
Synopsis: When the school geek discovers three fellow college students scamming the system, he blackmails them to win over the school's most popular girl.
Once, the ten greatest directors in the world had each told about how they would, to a man, be willing to pay ten million dollars to go to a film festival where they would get to see each of their ten favorite movies- for the first time. This was a tale of the importance of how that first view of a movie can be. While you get to see a movie, no matter how much you like it, no matter how many times you see it again, it'll never match the first time you saw it. It's like with sex- you never remember that time in college when you were both drunk, or that one-night stand, but you always remember that magical night when Father McGillicuddy took you into his rectory.
That's the joy of seeing a movie for the first time. But how much joy do you get from seeing a movie that you hated the first time again? Sometimes you enjoy a film better the second time than you did the first...but that's more for films you didn't care about the first time more than films you didn't like, or films that you didn't see in the right frame of mind the first time. Seeing a movie that you actively thought was terrible, on the other hand? That takes too much time to make the heart grow relatively fondly to make it work. But every once in a while, when you're looking at a number of movies, a film you hated on first glance catches your eye and you say "fuck it, I'll try again."
This is the reason that I get to the movie Slackers. When I saw it in 2002, I hated it. The movie tried being dark and failed miserably, it tried being a teen comedy and only barely worked, and ended up at a level where the absolute best it could have hoped for was being a generic fiasco, forgotten to time. However, with a cast that was relatively good at the time, it couldn't be generic or lost to time. It ended up at the worst case- a teen movie that wasn't even good.
The problem with this film in second viewing was the fact that, in the end, teen movies will be at their best when you're a teen. The further out you get from being a teenager, the worse it will end up. Only a genuinely good movie or a movie that holds genuinely good memories for you will end up succeeding past its prime. That could turn a movie like The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller's Day Off into an iconic film for all time, can turn a movie like American Pie into a forgettable but important piece of your teenage years...but it can also turn a shitty movie like Slackers into a shitty movie that's also dated and brings back bad memories.
Reign the Conqueror
Reign: The Conqueror
Non-Movie
AnimeNewsNetwork Bayesian estimate: 3.507 (Not really good-.49), rank: #3460
One of the reasons it becomes easier to bury the video store is the nature of niche markets. With the death of the video store, seemingly the important nature of a niche market died with it. RedBox has basically killed renting a niche title on its own merits, only storing the newest of new movies in handy, ubiquitous vending machine form. Netflix has become the only hope for a fan of niche genres to get the things they desire easily.
On paper, this would be a problem for anyone who's a fan of niche series. In practice, you have a series like Reign.
As an anime fan for what seemed like a short period of time, only getting into the genre in college, it seems hard to remember the timing of series. Going from the early part of the decade, when anime and manga had began to come to the United States at a clip of huge amounts of new series, with popularity for the genre rising to an all-time level and it seemed like everything we could see was amazing- finally to all the companies getting too big for their own good, the economy collapsing, companies that import the series going the way of the dinosaur. By the time we're in 2010, the stream of anime has fallen dramatically, albeit with more episodes than we thought and generally decent quality. Despite this, it becomes interesting to see the series that go through this fall- with series like Reign, which, with its pedigree of the director of the anime movie Metropolis and the creator of Aeon Flux, managed to get enough of a buzz that it had made it to Adult Swim [then, as now, the pinnacle of an anime series, with its ability to turn pretty much anything into a smash hit]- end up in 2010 forgotten: Never given a re-release in a full-series pack, ending up another DVD on the liquidated shelves.
There are many reasons for this, but it seems like the best one involves the most simple idea: Reign is a piece of crap.
This series, intended to be an anime retelling of Alexander the Great's life, managed to do things that seemed impossible with Alexander the Great and making it far gayer than most things involved with Alexander's life: The many films of Alexander, the many stories of Alexander, and so on. Strangely, I believe that Reign managed to out-gay the all-male porn parody of Alexander the Great's life. When it's watched, it begins to see why many of the people who watched this seemingly sure-fire hit on AnimeNewsNetwork saw it as terrible, why it's slipped under the cracks and is forgotten about, and why it would end up forgotten. Indeed, it seems to say the problem with the anime industry as a whole: At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much advertising you give a series, what network you get the series on, or any of those things. When it all boils down to it- if the series is good, people will love it. If the series is terrible, then no one will care.
Non-Movie
AnimeNewsNetwork Bayesian estimate: 3.507 (Not really good-.49), rank: #3460
One of the reasons it becomes easier to bury the video store is the nature of niche markets. With the death of the video store, seemingly the important nature of a niche market died with it. RedBox has basically killed renting a niche title on its own merits, only storing the newest of new movies in handy, ubiquitous vending machine form. Netflix has become the only hope for a fan of niche genres to get the things they desire easily.
On paper, this would be a problem for anyone who's a fan of niche series. In practice, you have a series like Reign.
As an anime fan for what seemed like a short period of time, only getting into the genre in college, it seems hard to remember the timing of series. Going from the early part of the decade, when anime and manga had began to come to the United States at a clip of huge amounts of new series, with popularity for the genre rising to an all-time level and it seemed like everything we could see was amazing- finally to all the companies getting too big for their own good, the economy collapsing, companies that import the series going the way of the dinosaur. By the time we're in 2010, the stream of anime has fallen dramatically, albeit with more episodes than we thought and generally decent quality. Despite this, it becomes interesting to see the series that go through this fall- with series like Reign, which, with its pedigree of the director of the anime movie Metropolis and the creator of Aeon Flux, managed to get enough of a buzz that it had made it to Adult Swim [then, as now, the pinnacle of an anime series, with its ability to turn pretty much anything into a smash hit]- end up in 2010 forgotten: Never given a re-release in a full-series pack, ending up another DVD on the liquidated shelves.
There are many reasons for this, but it seems like the best one involves the most simple idea: Reign is a piece of crap.
This series, intended to be an anime retelling of Alexander the Great's life, managed to do things that seemed impossible with Alexander the Great and making it far gayer than most things involved with Alexander's life: The many films of Alexander, the many stories of Alexander, and so on. Strangely, I believe that Reign managed to out-gay the all-male porn parody of Alexander the Great's life. When it's watched, it begins to see why many of the people who watched this seemingly sure-fire hit on AnimeNewsNetwork saw it as terrible, why it's slipped under the cracks and is forgotten about, and why it would end up forgotten. Indeed, it seems to say the problem with the anime industry as a whole: At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much advertising you give a series, what network you get the series on, or any of those things. When it all boils down to it- if the series is good, people will love it. If the series is terrible, then no one will care.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Video Remainder Project 1: Taking 5, or "When Inessential Music and Inessential Movies collide"
Taking 5
Synopsis: Two geeky teens kidnap the world's most famous boy-band in an attempt to make them play at their high school and thus boost the girls' popularity.
RT ranking: 75% fresh
In life, one of the most important things is cheese. Whether it's cheesy movies, cheesy music, or cheesy TV, the one thing everyone knows about pop culture is that it's the really bad stuff that's just the most fun to watch. When they said television was a vast wasteland, they forgot that this is exactly the way that people want it.
This brings to mind the first movie to get added to the Remainder Project, Taking 5. Nowhere short of Wisconsin are you going to find this much cheese in one place. A cheesy kids' movie, built around the band The Click Five and their one-hit wonder music, and all in a package that seems like it was tailor made to be a cheesy made-for-cable movie. Put all of these things together, and you get a movie that is perfect to work in this project- a movie with all the style of High School Musical and its ilk with none of the essential nature that comes from being a countrywide phenomenon.
When I ended up picking this film up, it was the classic liquidation purchase, the all important "I could use something to kill some time, I didn't hate the Click Five's one hit...fuck it" move. Because of this, I ended up giving this film a chance, which soon became the first attempt at a generic choice.
End result:
At the very least, I learned the answer: Any time you have a generic tween movie built around a one-hit wonder, you have to take it. Likewise, anytime you have a generic tween movie built around a one-hit wonder and you are not a tween, you will probably try to gnaw your own foot off to escape the bear trap.
The best thing I could give it is that it took a little longer than I would have expected in theory for me to want to tap out to this movie. This says the film isn't as bad as it could have been. As Abraham Lincoln said, "This is the type of thing you'd like if you like this type of thing."
That's all well and good, but this isn't the type of thing I like.
Success/Failure: Minor Fail
Synopsis: Two geeky teens kidnap the world's most famous boy-band in an attempt to make them play at their high school and thus boost the girls' popularity.
RT ranking: 75% fresh
In life, one of the most important things is cheese. Whether it's cheesy movies, cheesy music, or cheesy TV, the one thing everyone knows about pop culture is that it's the really bad stuff that's just the most fun to watch. When they said television was a vast wasteland, they forgot that this is exactly the way that people want it.
This brings to mind the first movie to get added to the Remainder Project, Taking 5. Nowhere short of Wisconsin are you going to find this much cheese in one place. A cheesy kids' movie, built around the band The Click Five and their one-hit wonder music, and all in a package that seems like it was tailor made to be a cheesy made-for-cable movie. Put all of these things together, and you get a movie that is perfect to work in this project- a movie with all the style of High School Musical and its ilk with none of the essential nature that comes from being a countrywide phenomenon.
When I ended up picking this film up, it was the classic liquidation purchase, the all important "I could use something to kill some time, I didn't hate the Click Five's one hit...fuck it" move. Because of this, I ended up giving this film a chance, which soon became the first attempt at a generic choice.
End result:
At the very least, I learned the answer: Any time you have a generic tween movie built around a one-hit wonder, you have to take it. Likewise, anytime you have a generic tween movie built around a one-hit wonder and you are not a tween, you will probably try to gnaw your own foot off to escape the bear trap.
The best thing I could give it is that it took a little longer than I would have expected in theory for me to want to tap out to this movie. This says the film isn't as bad as it could have been. As Abraham Lincoln said, "This is the type of thing you'd like if you like this type of thing."
That's all well and good, but this isn't the type of thing I like.
Success/Failure: Minor Fail
First post...
Welcome to the Video Remainder Project!
With the recent death of most video stores [especially in my sleepy mid-level suburb in a declining, broken-down, forgotten state], there's just no major way to get the most important thing for all fans of movies- the all-important film you just see from the DVD cover. Sure, Netflix allows you to see a small cover, and Redbox may get a cheesy movie once in a while, but where's that feel that the classic videogoer has of "That looks so fucking cheesy, I have to watch it!" or "That cover looks terrible, but the chick on it is relatively hot- eh, I'll give it a shot..."
The end of the video store- whether it be a mom-and-pop joint all the way up to Hollywood Video, Movie Gallery, or Blockbuster, is the end of an era not just in moviegoer's experiences, but in bad movies as a whole. When will there be the luck of seeing a bad movie when you're just getting it in a small, generic white slip or a generic clear slip, only the art on the DVD telling you if you're in for a good movie or not? Where are the stroke of luck that the megaplex will give you a movie like Standing Ovation (or the rare example of a generic ripoff B-movie getting a theatrical release)?
Luckily, where these video stores go out of business, there's also huge discounts before their movies are liquidated. From there, that's where I strike- trying to find the generic fare of yesterday in hopes of finding the cheesy cult classics of tomorrow.
With the recent death of most video stores [especially in my sleepy mid-level suburb in a declining, broken-down, forgotten state], there's just no major way to get the most important thing for all fans of movies- the all-important film you just see from the DVD cover. Sure, Netflix allows you to see a small cover, and Redbox may get a cheesy movie once in a while, but where's that feel that the classic videogoer has of "That looks so fucking cheesy, I have to watch it!" or "That cover looks terrible, but the chick on it is relatively hot- eh, I'll give it a shot..."
The end of the video store- whether it be a mom-and-pop joint all the way up to Hollywood Video, Movie Gallery, or Blockbuster, is the end of an era not just in moviegoer's experiences, but in bad movies as a whole. When will there be the luck of seeing a bad movie when you're just getting it in a small, generic white slip or a generic clear slip, only the art on the DVD telling you if you're in for a good movie or not? Where are the stroke of luck that the megaplex will give you a movie like Standing Ovation (or the rare example of a generic ripoff B-movie getting a theatrical release)?
Luckily, where these video stores go out of business, there's also huge discounts before their movies are liquidated. From there, that's where I strike- trying to find the generic fare of yesterday in hopes of finding the cheesy cult classics of tomorrow.
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