But I’m not going to spend this column ranting about Betsy’s wrongness; no, Betsy does have a point about movies that are over hyped, and can only disappoint. But some movies are over hyped and just plain suck in the first place, leading me to wonder what the hell the people who hyped the movies in the first place were smoking. Now, I enjoyed The Sixth Sense, but I saw it before I was subjected to dozens of people telling me that I had to see it, how great it was, how it was just the bestest film ever, etc. Now, I picked up on the fact that something was askew, but I figured that everyone, including Bruce Willis and the kid, were dead, but realized that the “Everyone Dead” theory didn’t make sense after a little while. But I did hit on the correct explanation before my wife did, which I believe is the first time that I managed to solve a puzzle in a movie or book before her, so maybe that’s another reason why I like the movie.
But I want to talk about three movies that I was told were great, funny, intelligent, clever, and just plain entertaining. And which weren’t. At all.
Let’s start with Scream. I keep hearing that it’s great, it’s witty, etc., etc. So I rent it, we watch it, and we keep waiting for the good parts. No such luck. It was a movie that thought it was incredibly clever, full of actors who thought they were acting in an incredibly clever movie, reciting lines of dialog that someone thought… you get the idea. But ultimately it was just another slasher film, about a guy (maybe it was guys) with a knife preying on annoying actors trying to look like teenagers. The gimmick being that they knew the horrors tropes, and kept referring to them. Which quickly became tedious rather than clever. It’s a bad sign when you’re cheering on the guy with the knife, and are annoyed that he’s taking too damn long to kill off the non-knife-wielding characters. But the movie was really just dull, which is a lot better than…
Clerks. Oh, lord, how I hate that movie. I was pretty tired of it halfway through, which is where my wife went off to do something more productive, but people I knew, people whose opinions I had no reason to suspect, told me that the movie was good. So I kept waiting for the good part. Well, the movie sure fooled me. It wasn’t merely stupid, with inane dialog, completely unlikable characters, boring situations, and an overwhelming sense of smugness, no, it was relentlessly bad. I just stubbornly refused to get better, even as I stubbornly refused to stop watching a movie that was mercilessly sucking away a portion of my lifespan. I just can’t care about slacker loser characters. For the record, I also hate Catcher in the Rye, for the same reason: The protagonist is a whiny, annoying, spineless moron. But with Clerks, you get an entire castload of whiny, annoying, spineless morons.
And did I learn? No, not immediately. Because a friend of mine, a good friend, someone I trusted, told me that Chasing Amy was a good film. So I watched that, too. And here’s my conclusion: Kevin Smith is a rabidly over hyped, no-talent hack, who believes that he’s much wittier than he actually is, and he owes me four hours of my life back. Anyone who recommends one of his films to me is automatically assumed to have dubious, if not downright poor, taste in entertainment. Again, the protagonists are idiots; the only moderately likable person is the male protagonist’s roommate, who should have hauled off and hit the male protagonist with a baseball bat early in the film, thus saving the viewer from hours of painful torture. And also because Ben Affleck seems to really need a good, savage going-over with a bat to beat that smugness out of him*. And then, joy of joys, we’re treated to Jay and Silent Bob again. The theory behind them being, I assume, that if you have morons for protagonists, you want to bring in characters even more moronic to make the protagonists seem less stupid. And, hey, stupid people are funny, right? Sure, if you’re a goddamn cretin yourself.
So, yes, I’ve been burned by over hyped films, but, unlike Betsy, the films I subjected myself to (based on the recommendations of others) were truly bad, and not merely perceived as bad because of some tragic character flaw that is entirely my own. And, alas, even though I really want to punch Kevin Smith in the face, I won’t, because he’s bigger than I am and surrounded by rabid fans that are, in all likelihood, afflicted with terrible, brain-rotting diseases.