Onions, Wolves, and Wikis
There are several reasons why The Onion is America's Finest News Source.
(Keep in mind, about half of those links are taken from last week's issue. Those motherfuckers do this stuff every week. I love them.)
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My house in Mississauga has TMN OnDemand, a digital cable service that offers a selection of movies, most of which are on that edge of new between going to video and getting onto regular cable. This is, contrary to popular belief and all logic, not at all a good thing for me. Allow me to elaborate.
There's this thing that happens in my mind, when I've a buffet of essentially free things waiting for me. The TMNOD selection's decent for being functionally costless - there are a variety of genres, most of the movies have left theatres within the last six months, and those that they offer from the more distant past are generally solid pieces for whatever they're trying to be (an example - right now I could watch War of the Worlds, Junebug, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Corpse Bride, and Four Brothers, plus about a dozen others). There are, of course, the exceptions, the bad, pseudo-popular movies that flesh out the menu, like burgers at Red Lobster.
Now, if I'm going into a theatre, or even a video store, I'll strive to find something that I'll like, something dimensional or entertaining. This has mostly to do with the fact that I am spending money. I am making a tiny investment into entertaining myself, and I want to make sure that I'm going to yield a return. You could call me a conservative entertainment broker, but then we'd have to watch this whole analogy rapidly fall apart, and I'd probably just look at you funny, because that's kind of a dumb thing to call me.
But when I'm not putting anything into it but time, I will watch the most inane, forgettable crap without an ounce of guilt.
With TMNOD as my terrible vehicle, and among other things, I've watched Assault on Precinct 13, Bad Boys 2, Vlad, My Little Eye (which I was convinced was called I Spy for a second, and found the strangest and most terrifying IMDB entry of all time), and now, Cry_Wolf.
Cry_Wolf is another in the endless march of slasher flicks that do absolutely nothing new in an unbalanced way, centred on a gimmick to sell itself to a teen audience in a burst of a one-weekend box office gross that yields a profit for the studio, like a teenaged boy having really inadequate sex for the first time.
Its performances are dreadful (which you'd expect from such a hackneyed script), the direction is uninspired, and the plot does absolutely nothing new - it runs like a terrible version of Scream mixed with an extremely watered-down The Usual Suspects.
Which is exactly what I should have expected. It's what I did expect, in fact. The reason it gets my back up is that the slasher genre gets this shit done to it every time. It had a run of successes back in the eighties, made a ton of money, and then everyone in the goddamn world decided that, unlike every other genre of film, they didn't need to do anything new with it, just spit out the same stories told in the same way to the same people, over and over and over again. Occasionally, the bull-headed passion of the B-movie sect shines through, but generally we're getting mid-budget garbage.
I mean, there's even a grain of potential in Cry_Wolf. You can see someone, somewhere, behind the scenes, grasping desperately at threads of ideas and themes that, were they woven together and presented with confidence and vision, could have been a really great film. But instead we get the ghosts of that, we get the impression that someone was thinking, but that impression is ulimately drown in the lights.
Sometimes, something like The Descent happens, and you think, maybe there's hope. And then you realise that, while people are figuring out the other sub-genres of horror (the suspense-thriller, the psychological), none of them even seem to care about the slasher.
Hopefully, Tarantino gets it right with his half of Grind House, but, then, he usually gets it right. Hopefully, people will learn.
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One last thing: I'm sure many of you have realised this by now, but Wikipedia is the ultimate time killer. I've wasted countless hours on the bloody thing - particularly in its untold pages on comics and graphic novels - but there's the constant, nagging consideration of veracity and reputability behind it all. When you've got a pseudo-scholarly work cobbled together by what is the Internet equivalent of a rambunctious mob, what have you really got?
The indefatigably wonderful Mr. Gaiman linked a couple of articles about the thing on his journal recently that I think you should read. One is from the New Yorker, and is remarkably informative, balanced, and decidedly long.
The other is from The Onion.
Good night.
(Keep in mind, about half of those links are taken from last week's issue. Those motherfuckers do this stuff every week. I love them.)
--------------------------
My house in Mississauga has TMN OnDemand, a digital cable service that offers a selection of movies, most of which are on that edge of new between going to video and getting onto regular cable. This is, contrary to popular belief and all logic, not at all a good thing for me. Allow me to elaborate.
There's this thing that happens in my mind, when I've a buffet of essentially free things waiting for me. The TMNOD selection's decent for being functionally costless - there are a variety of genres, most of the movies have left theatres within the last six months, and those that they offer from the more distant past are generally solid pieces for whatever they're trying to be (an example - right now I could watch War of the Worlds, Junebug, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Corpse Bride, and Four Brothers, plus about a dozen others). There are, of course, the exceptions, the bad, pseudo-popular movies that flesh out the menu, like burgers at Red Lobster.
Now, if I'm going into a theatre, or even a video store, I'll strive to find something that I'll like, something dimensional or entertaining. This has mostly to do with the fact that I am spending money. I am making a tiny investment into entertaining myself, and I want to make sure that I'm going to yield a return. You could call me a conservative entertainment broker, but then we'd have to watch this whole analogy rapidly fall apart, and I'd probably just look at you funny, because that's kind of a dumb thing to call me.
But when I'm not putting anything into it but time, I will watch the most inane, forgettable crap without an ounce of guilt.
With TMNOD as my terrible vehicle, and among other things, I've watched Assault on Precinct 13, Bad Boys 2, Vlad, My Little Eye (which I was convinced was called I Spy for a second, and found the strangest and most terrifying IMDB entry of all time), and now, Cry_Wolf.
Cry_Wolf is another in the endless march of slasher flicks that do absolutely nothing new in an unbalanced way, centred on a gimmick to sell itself to a teen audience in a burst of a one-weekend box office gross that yields a profit for the studio, like a teenaged boy having really inadequate sex for the first time.
Its performances are dreadful (which you'd expect from such a hackneyed script), the direction is uninspired, and the plot does absolutely nothing new - it runs like a terrible version of Scream mixed with an extremely watered-down The Usual Suspects.
Which is exactly what I should have expected. It's what I did expect, in fact. The reason it gets my back up is that the slasher genre gets this shit done to it every time. It had a run of successes back in the eighties, made a ton of money, and then everyone in the goddamn world decided that, unlike every other genre of film, they didn't need to do anything new with it, just spit out the same stories told in the same way to the same people, over and over and over again. Occasionally, the bull-headed passion of the B-movie sect shines through, but generally we're getting mid-budget garbage.
I mean, there's even a grain of potential in Cry_Wolf. You can see someone, somewhere, behind the scenes, grasping desperately at threads of ideas and themes that, were they woven together and presented with confidence and vision, could have been a really great film. But instead we get the ghosts of that, we get the impression that someone was thinking, but that impression is ulimately drown in the lights.
Sometimes, something like The Descent happens, and you think, maybe there's hope. And then you realise that, while people are figuring out the other sub-genres of horror (the suspense-thriller, the psychological), none of them even seem to care about the slasher.
Hopefully, Tarantino gets it right with his half of Grind House, but, then, he usually gets it right. Hopefully, people will learn.
--------------------------
One last thing: I'm sure many of you have realised this by now, but Wikipedia is the ultimate time killer. I've wasted countless hours on the bloody thing - particularly in its untold pages on comics and graphic novels - but there's the constant, nagging consideration of veracity and reputability behind it all. When you've got a pseudo-scholarly work cobbled together by what is the Internet equivalent of a rambunctious mob, what have you really got?
The indefatigably wonderful Mr. Gaiman linked a couple of articles about the thing on his journal recently that I think you should read. One is from the New Yorker, and is remarkably informative, balanced, and decidedly long.
The other is from The Onion.
Good night.
posted by jeereg at
6:47 PM
9 Comments:
I use wikipedia all the time, but I'm not sure how I feel about trusting it. Once I protested the use of Wikipedia by changing the pronounciation of some guy's name to something silly. I still wait for the day that someone pronounces that guy's name in that way so I know they got it from the false wikipedia article. I'll laugh.
The main problem with this plan is that I don't remember who's entry I changed. So I can only assume that next time I hear someone's name and it is silly, that they got it from my wikipedia update.
That's flawless logic...flogic, if you will.
jon: I don't really trust it for a second. But it's a handy piece of reference work and, when you do find them, the well-written articles are pretty wonderful - the pieces on American minstrelsy and vaudeville were the launching pads for one of the best essays I've ever written.
I don't see Wikipedia or use it as an objective or academically soundproof resource. I see it mostly as a child of the Internet, representing some of the best things the Internet does, and that is it democratizes the process. It gives people the oppourtunity to write down something they might know about, during that process of writing they realize that, 'Hey, I don't know enough about it and they research it some more.' People then read/check what they have written and know something else about the topic and they then create an antithesis or an additional piece, which ultimately creates a synthesis. It isn't perfect, but it offers platforms to further develop, also offering insights aspects of things that you don't get in a lot of academic writings, because a) the writing and concepts are a little bit too much for you, and b) you get another person's journey to this knowledge that isn't academic, and I think shows a kind of passion, that often times doesn't come through in a lot of academic work.
So while I will never rely on Wikipedia, I don't see it as unreliable.
-Derek
P.S. I'm sure there are a couple of dick on Wikipedia as well.
Derek: It's not that it's entirely unreliable, it's that it's patently impossible for it to be reliable. There's absolutely no guarantee or marker of truth or scholarly intent. I love the damn thing, it's hugely educational, incredibly interesting, and its successes are successes of society, and of people, and of co-operation, but it's still a ways a way from being what it set out to be - knowledge, made free.
Greg, I that what you are saying is basically what I am saying. I think your confusion lines in the last line. The meaning of that line especially the first word 'rely' was meant to convey that I am not going to cite it for an academic paper, but while I won't cite it, I do not think of Wikipedia as unreliable. Get my meaning??? What I'm saying is that I approach Wikipedia not from a point of view where I question it's veracity (I'm talking about academic veracity, not that that is objective) but that I approach Wikipedia as what does this person have to say about this, and where did it evolve from. Just trying to clear up any confusion.
-Derek
Derek: I wasn't confused. I was agreeing with you. Actually, I was just sort of expanding on what you said, and what I meant in the first part.
"A young man shows off his phantasy : an erotic and childish metaphor of paternal milk."
Certainly strange imdb results, indeed.
-Fae
Fae: Wow, I didn't even see that one until just now. "Handjob with boy next window" sent me reeling on its own, mostly because of the impossible grammar.
By the way, do I know you outside of the digital world, or did you just stumble on the blog? I'm sorta new to this, so I'm always a little surprised when someone I don't know finds their way here.
Yep, I realize that... now.
Derek
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