Why do we as film fans or even just as consumers of “art” indulge those products which make that which we detest or at the very least loathe with an apathy of disdain so prolific? Why do we allow our boredom to give untalented people credibility and worse yet fail to hold them to any kind of accountability? When you watch movies such as Transformers Rise of the Fallen or you watch mindless offensive claptrap such as Big Bang Theory you are allowing the outright hacks to gain “credibility” and you are empowering them to further drag down the quality of their surroundings by making crap marketable. What I mean by this is that as a consumer of media, be it electronic or printed, it does not matter what you like or don’t like, only what you consume. Everyone hates romantic comedies but they are watched by a vast number of people for the sole purpose of “seeing how bad they are” and by doing so these works of shit are given a status of success. I am far from innocent in this regard myself when it comes to awful media, I seem to value exploitative schlock on the same level as I do intelligent thoughtful art but I am also unwilling to go into some places and those are the places that you all seem to revel in the slop.
Found Footage
What do I mean with all of that claptrap? I mean there are things we all hate and yet we consume them anyway. “Found Footage” movies for example. “Found Footage” is easily the worst and laziest sub-genre of film out there and yet it proliferates worse than any disease spread by infected whores… why though? I get it that it’s (relatively) cheap but I have to ask… do you not have any standards? Found footage is almost universally reviled by fans, it’s uncreative in every possible way, it strains even the remotest credibility of story and most of all it’s fucking ANNOYING. In 2014/2015 there are no less than 30 “Found Footage” films coming out and judging by past transgressions of this sub-genre not a one of them is any different from the other sans the details… they all carry the same beats, the same generic characters, the same style and worst of all the same problems. So why persist in this (long dead) sub-genre other than for reasons of not giving a shit about quality? Why do so many filmmakers just fall back on this instead of coming up with something unique or different? Hell even the fake newscast/fake documentary is still more original at this point and that has been done to death. What can you (we) do about this though? STOP SEEING A MOVIE THAT IS FOUND FOOTAGE!! Seriously, I see on website after website, magazine after magazine that people bitch and complain about found footage and then just prance along and go see the next one anyway and I have to ask WHY THE FUCK DON’T YOU JUST STOP SEEING THEM THEN? I have. If I see that a film is found footage it immediately dissuades me from wanting to watch it and that is just what I do… I don’t watch “Found Footage” movies and neither should you (if you have any self respect at least). I get screeners of films all the time and when I read the press materials as soon as I hit the sentence “Found Footage” I throw the DVD on the stack of forgotten discs never to be watched. I will not indulge this sub-genre any longer for any reason and neither should you… so why do you? The most common answer I get is “I was bored so what the hell” which says more about you than the movie, that you are so uncaring as to your own self respect that you will willingly subject yourself to a movie you will hate merely out of “boredom”. It is cinematic masochism and you all are cinemasochists attempting to use pain as the cleanser. Seriously, 30+ movies in the next year are coming out that use the “Found Footage” gimmick and I bet most of you that read this will see at least half of those and then turn around and bitch that you are sick of “Found Footage” films.
Other Genres
“Found Footage” is not the only genre that has this odd convergence of hate and self flagellation but it is the one I see with the (arguable) highest profile. Romantic comedies, no budget horror and the like multiply in an unending wave of awful mediocrity which only breeds more of the same and pushes out the few quality ideas because at that point anything different becomes “risky”. You want innovative smart movies and yet Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters boasts attendance numbers dwarfing that of John Dies At The End all because Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters was a DUMBER film and therefore easier to digest. “Found Footage” is the same thing, you claim to want something better but then when that better thing comes along you pass it over in favor the thing you (claim) to hate. I will never understand this as you HAVE to know that you are only dooming quality in favor of mind-numbing mediocrity.
The other excuse I get for why people go and see this shit is “how can I know it’s shit if I don’t see it”? While this is technically true it also leads into the ideal of… if it looks like shit, smells like shit and has the consistency of shit… it’s most likely shit so why bother? So you have hated every “Found Footage” movie made since 1995 and yet you bat your wings pointlessly against the glass either hoping you will encounter a good one (highly unlikely) or you simply are the submissive who will follow the other lemmings over the cliff. Why not make a stand and NOT go see “Found Footage” films? Why allow them to spread in a herpes kind of outbreak, with no end in sight? Because you know that if they keep making money that the creatively bankrupt will continue to keep making them and by your “this is going to suck, it’s great” attitude you are only giving them what they want? They don’t care about making a quality film (that much is painfully clear) they only care about making money and apparently they are smarter than I gave them credit for as they have you all lined up and ready to give them your wallet at a moments notice. When they get your money there is no care given as to WHY you paid them, simply that they got paid.
Other Media
EL James became the highest paid first time writer EVER… not by skill or unique vision but due to the apathy and malaise of a population who cared not for class or value of the written word but for tawdry manipulation leading to prurient self indulgence and validating the worst thing to be labeled as “literature” in a rather significant period of time. The most common thing I hear about why people read the 50 Shades “books” is not that they were mentally engaged in the story (such as it is) but that they heard how awful it was and needed to see for themselves if it was as bad as they heard… all the while EL James gives no fucks whether you LIKED the books… only that you read them and you gave no fucks back that you helped push the destruction of the written word back 50 years just so you could fool yourself into thinking you did something with your time.
Unfortunately we now use movies and other forms of media as nothing more than SOMETHING to do, we no longer seek out something GOOD or something ENLIGHTENING to do, just someTHING and that says more about how our culture wastes what it has for no reason other than to have something… anything happen. We watch movies now just to “kill time” and not because we want something that stimulates us and that right there spells the death of us as a competing species for the top organism on the planet.
Why do you not care what you watch, knowing full well that grabbing that shot-on-shitio zombie movie that treats you like a person of sub-human intelligence will only allow the plague of garbage to fester and proliferate? Have some standards damn it and stop patronizing “turn off your brain” movies just because… if you bitch about how “Found Footage” is an awful sub-genre STOP going to see the movies therein only to bitch after each and every one “man that sucked, why do people still make Found Footage films, they always suck”. Don’t you see you are no small part of the ongoing problem and you don’t care, you just can’t be bothered to care and yet you still complain about the circle jerk you gladly and willingly engage in. That is narcissism there people… and with the excuse for doing it mostly being “boredom” that bodes a horrible future for us all.
Tell me to shut the fuck up a 1201beyond@gmail.com or contact Alex to fire me at alexjowski@gmail.com and make sure to leave a comment.