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.
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Thursday, July 22, 2010
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)