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.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
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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