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Snakes On A Plane: everything everyone has been hoping for.
I just got back from Snakes on a Plane.
It's everything everyone has been hoping for.
Discuss.
It's everything everyone has been hoping for.
Discuss.
Comments
oh wait.... he was Shaft
But still, overall, it was quite entertaining.
Still it was hilarious, really great movie that i enjoyed a lot!
*has a weird image of snakes in little biplanes dive-biting people*
I'm a film critic, this is what I do. Take a wild guess what I think about this movie.
Normally I wouldn't give thought to a bad movie like this but after I saw a movie studio exploiting hype and manufacturing bullshit and witnessing the mainstream audience eat it up with a spoon, well, I just had to shake my head.
Not only was the movie just God-awful, but it felt thrown together, repetitive (c'mon, at one point it was about 20 minutes straight of screaming people), and... ultimately boring (something I didn't expect, actually).
I'm still not sure what we're supposed to think of this whole thing; I think on some level, the movie tried to get back to being serious, and that ultimately harmed it, but I still don't know if that's what they were going for.
Go around the web and you'll see tons of animated gifs, remixes, video clips, photoshops, etc. all derived from existing popular movies, anime, music and tv shows. In many ways people are starting to care less about the works themselves, and only care about what they can derive from those works. Think of Star Wars not as a movie, and an end unto itself, but as raw material which can be refined and remixed by the masses into more and much greater things. As movies Star Wars 1-3 are pretty bad, as raw material for other awesomes they are more valuable than platinum.
Snakes on a Plane is a significant film not because of the film itself, but because it was a film created at the demand of the remixers. It's significant because it is the dawn of a new era in popular entertainment media consumption. Up until now Hollywood has provided raw materials, and the rest of the world has been forced to work with whatever they decided to provide. This time the remixers have basically dictated to Hollywood what raw materials they want to work with, and SoaP came through in spades. The Juggernaut bitch was just the first taste of what is yet to come. I seriously predict a Chuck Norris movie within a few years.
The movie studios may have finally figured out what the record companies can only wish they had discovered sooner. People are abandoning the old media because the new media gives power to the consumer, among other reasons. The only way to sell to such a group of people is to allow your customer to decide what art you will produce for them. The Internet culture has become a single gigantic patron of the arts, and the world is better and more intersting for it. Even though SoaP is a terrible movie in its own right, the community in which we all live is going to take that raw source material and entertain ourselves with it for years to come.
Yes, I am saying that in the future the movies, music, tv and anime which will be the most successful are the ones which Fark, 4chan and Something Awful can have the most fun with.
The question for me is just how successful is the studio. SoaP is decidedly the movie the internet demanded be made, but I'm still not sure just how successful the movie industry was in translating the 'net's desires into film. I mean, I point to the D&D movie as an example; a movie was made attempting to pander to geeks, and it totally failed in its attempt.
I feel SoaP was kind of disappointing in its execution, so I consider it a bit of a failed foray into the realm of Internet pandering. This could simply be because it's one of the early attempts at doing so, but if that's not the case and this is what we're going to get, then where does that leave us? It could be that no single attempt at pandering will ever meet the standards that we set for it; I could forsee that being something of an annoying occurence, sort of like someone constantly dying at the first goomba in Mario.
The thing I like about the premise is that its taken away the usual shit that goes with action movies, the 'Jack Bullet is just trying get back to his family', come other guy is wrongly convicted of some shit and mus avenge the killers of his pet llama and cuts right to the stuff that people want. Namley the violence and the swearing.
The stupid surrounding shit is the reason I hate most action movies, I love seeing things blown up, if I want to see a movie with a plot I'll go and see a movie with a plot I'm seeing Sophie Sholl the final days tonight. But if i want to see snakes on a plane I'll go and see Snakes on a motherfucking plane!
I know I have no talent for art. I can tell what is good and bad, generally, but as far as creating it on my own, I'm completely useless. If you were to ask me if I'm capable of writing the plot for a movie, then executing it, I would say absolutely not. Who in their right minds would want to pay to see a movie that I made? I attest nobody would, and rightfully so.
So now, instead of just saying that it's just MY bad movie, let's say that it's EVERYONE'S bad movie. Everyone sat around, made little inside jokes, got all giggly, made Samuel L. Jackson to yell into an intercom and say things about snakes and planes ... and halarity is supposed to pop out? My feeling is that things don't work like this. Once you start pandering to an audience, you're no longer making art, but kitsch.
That said, I'll be seeing this cinematic masterpiece later this week, so I'll reserve final judgement until then ... let us hope it can pull through for me.
Seriously, though, culture is rarely about really "new" ideas anymore. It's all about remixing. We've got too much art and we've not played around with what makes it art. Kitsch is where you've failed to make art, but not for lack of components. It used to be that mediocre artists had no idea how to make art, and so produced purely boring stuff. Now, everyone knows the core components, and it's all about hitting the right mix. This is half skill and half luck: Every star or star director has a flop. Because the core components of the story are there, however, rather than easily dismissed droll you get kitsch. Half-baked movies: Not immediately recognisable as missing the most vital ingredients, but not fun to consume, either.
Goddamn, I can't wait to see Snakes itself, though. I've got NO FRIENDS up here in WA. I'll have to go with a bunch of people who've probably all seen it already when I get back to good ol' RIT.
Based on its relatively poor box office takings, I predict this movie has put back the cause of Internet-feedback-driven productions by several years. Despite the fact that it is the old media's fate to die in the fire that is Web culture, and be reborn, phoenix-like, into a "new entertainment" world, they will look at this as evidence that the Internet is not (as yet, anyway) a reliable method of marketing a big movie. They're wrong, of course, because people avoided this movie due to the fact that it's a steaming turd of a film.
But it was totally worth it to hear Jackson's now-famous line near the end of the piece. Any moron (i.e., me) could tell the line was edited in poorly (the burst of emotion was completely out of place), but he executes it so well that it just doesn't matter. I couldn't help but smile.
Oh yeah, and while I was waiting for the show to finish, I came up with a tag line for the sequel:
Snakes 2 - Snakes on a Space Station:
The Snakes Have Just Got Higher