Stuff I hate that everyone else likes...

A few weeks ago the Onion's A.V. Club (the only bit on the site I'm inclined to read nowadays) had a short bit entitled, "Classic Movies it's Okay to Hate". A poster on the site pointed out that this is the type of 'controversial' piece usually saved for Entertainment Weekly or Us magazine. They list Network, The Shawshank Redemption, Star Wars, A Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist, Fantasia, Caddyshack, Roger and Me, Carrie, and The Big Lebowski as talking points in their theme. Fair enough, but it kinda got me thinking. I'm sure everyone has their "Pfft. You gotta be kidding!" moments when it comes to popular movies (and t.v. shows), so I thought I'd just beak off on mine...

Network- I'm totally on board with their assessment of this one. Paddy Chaefsky's script is smug, self-righteous, and condesending. Coming out when it did, in the 70's, beating on televison would be like beating on a cripple in a wheelchair with one hand tied behind his back. Every character is shrill and didactic. It's Chaefsky's passive-aggressive revenge on an industry that didn't kiss his fat ass enough in the thirty-odd years he wrote for it. Of particular contempt: Max Schumacher's (William Holden) wife's speech to him after he informs her of his affair with Diana Christensen(Faye Dunaway). Up to this point, she's been essentially a non-entity in the film. After Max confronts her over his infidelity, we get this bit of histronics...

"Get out, go anywhere you want, go to a hotel, go live with her, and don't come back. Because, after 25 years of building a home and raising a family and all the senseless pain that we have inflicted on each other, I'm damned if I'm going to stand here and have you tell me you're in love with somebody else. Because this isn't a convention weekend with your secretary, is it? Or - or some broad that you picked up after three belts of booze. This is your great winter romance, isn't it? Your last roar of passion before you settle into your emeritus years. Is that what's left for me? Is that my share? She gets the winter passion, and I get the dotage? What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to sit at home knitting and purling while you slink back like some penitent drunk? I'm your wife, damn it. And, if you can't work up a winter passion for me, the least I require is respect and allegiance. I hurt. Don't you understand that? I hurt badly."

Boo-fuckin'-hoo. Then she drops off the face of the movie. The actress, Beatrice Straight, won a best supporting actress Oscar.I envision Chaefsky sitting in front of his typewriter, cackling to himself about how he'd love to see the faces of every network executive when they screen his little magnum opus. What was his reaction, I wonder, when Network got all those Oscars in '77? It's too bitter and heavy-handed to work as satire. In an interview at the time, he disingenously claimed that, "he wasn't writing satire; all t.v. execs aspire to be Diana." Bullshit.

I'd argue the Onion's other choices are just attacking mainstream entertainment for doing its job. I mean, come on, no one is going to compare The Shawshank Redemption to, say, Renoir's Grand Illusion. And their take on 'The Big Lebowski' is wrong. Just. Plain. Wrong.

So here's some of my other personal picks for Movies (and T.V.) that everyone likes but I think suck:

Napoleon Dynamite- I am told that this is a comedy. I am told that the title character is a loveable outsider with a eccentric family. I've been told it is a coming of age tale that takes a loving look at growing up in small-town Idaho. I had to turn this movie off about two-thirds of the way through. The main character comes across as a victim of Asperger's syndrome in such a chronic manner that he could replace Dustin Hoffman's Rainman character. When another student crushes his cache of tater tots in his cargo pants, I felt a small twinge of pleasure at Dynamite's abuse. Because the character is closed off from everyone else in the film, you can't empathize with him. In the South Park t.v. show, one comedic bit is to have a character say or do something incredibly absurd, then cut to a reaction shot of other characters giving that character a blank stare of hostile incomprehension. The whole movie of Napoleon Dyanamite's humour is essentially relying on the audience staring blankly in hostile incomprehension at the goings on in the movie. There's another bit where Dynamite is part of an extracuricular school club called 'singing hands', where he and some blank-faced girls wave their hands about to sappy new-age music. There's a cut to their audience, some other blank-faced students. (If we had got a shot of a student snickering at this display of absurdity, followed by being cut short from a faculty member's disapproving stare, THAT would've been funny.) I felt exactly like those kids after watching this.

Sex and the City- It's been mentioned that if a man truly wants to understand women, he will watch this show. In theory, it has a lot on its side; modern single women seeking sexual gratification for its own sake, and not suffering any backlash or societal disapproval for their actions. It's not hard to figure out why it was so popular during its run. The main characters have vibrant, successful lives, and the conflicts that they face in the course of the show are the type of problems that their audience would give their eye teeth to have.

The problem for me, after I bit the bullet and actually watched a few episodes, is that it's like some odd disease swept through Lower Manhattan and removed any trace of empathy or selflessness or altruism from every single human being in that region. While some of the dialogue is clever, I'm reminded of a point the television writer, Maria Semple, made. If anyone ever said to her even one of the things that the people on sitcoms routinely say to each other she would probably burst into tears and go running out of the room. When the four main characters get together to 'dish' about their love lives, I got the impression that they hung out together not because they had formed a sisterhood of like-minded mutually suportive libertines, but that the unspoken agreement amoungst them was, "I'll endure listening to all your petty whinging, but in return, you all have to listen to my epic life story, because I am such a fascinating and unique person, and no one in history has ever faced the dillemas and struggles of me." It would've been more interesting a series if it was revealed that the four main characters in fact, hated each other, and sought to undermine the others at every opportunity. In reality, I've endured self-obsessed 'tards like this many a time in my life, and the only reason they aren't dead, or beaten within an inch of their lives, is because it's illegal for me to inflict damage on them...

As an example, one of the episodes I saw had as it's plot the dilemma Carrie Bradshaw faced when her apartment went condo, leaving her facing the inconvience of apartment-hunting in Manhattan. In steps her boyfriend of three months, offering her to move in with him. Just as she is about to accept, her friend Meredith reveals that Carrie's boyfriend went shopping with her for an engagement ring for Carrie. (Why Meredith didn't try and give Bonehead the "aren't you moving kinda fast?" speech isn't explained.) I missed the rest of the story, but let me guess-Carrie finds her own place, refuses boyfriend's offer of marriage, Samantha makes some comment about her cooze you'd expect to come from a crazy homeless woman of sixty, The End.

I hate to get all preachy on you, but if this show, is in fact, how all women everywhere aspire to be, then I must chop my genitals off and fling 'em into the ocean. It's based on a series of columns by a woman named Candace Bushnell, written, no doubt, in the same smug,devil-may-care-hurray for sexuality tone of the series. I can't help thinking, however, about some single mother in the midwest stuck making under twenty four grand a year at her shitty, dead-end job with no real free time for a social life watching this show and being made to feel like she's not only missing the party, but that she's not welcome in the first place.