Movies

I find it incredible that I can walk into a video rental store (in this case Movieland on St. Catherine), wander the aisles for fifteen minutes looking at, I don't know, maybe 20, 30,000 titles? and not find a single one of them that I'd be tempted to watch.

What kills me is that probably each one of them was an expensive production involving hundreds of people -- casting, crew, writers, actors -- well, you get the picture -- and 99% of them are dreck. I mean, two hours of complete and utter waste of time.

Okay, okay, I admit that if you went to any library and looked at books, and realised that human beings had taken the time out, in many cases years of their lives, and 95% of the books were still dreck, but those probably involved a maximum of ten people to come up with. Not 1,000 people.

How can 1,000 people, day after day, churn out so much garbage? Why was the writing/editing/casting/concept so inept yet the movie was made anyway? Didn't anyone along the way stop and say "Hey, hey, guys, TIME OUT. This is a horrific movie and no one, including my own daughter, is ever going to watch it. So why don't we all go home NOW instead of bothering to finish this stinking piece of shit and save ourselves all the aggravation?"

But the miracle is, that they don't. So I wander the aisles looking at title after title -- randomly, maybe "Alien Versus Predator," "My Cousin Dupree," "Battlefield Earth," anything with Meg Ryan or Adam Sandler and on and bleeding on until your eyes blur, and realise that most of them are complete and utter pieces of shit, yet a lot of people made those pieces of shit.

Well, for an example, why don't I quote an analysis of the movie "Catwoman" from Wikipedia? "The Village Voice summed up reviews of the film under the title "Me-Ouch." The movie was the winner of four Razzies for Worst Picture, Worst Actress, Worst Director (Pitof), and Worst Screenplay. Berry arrived at the ceremony to accept her Razzie in person (with her Best Actress Oscar for Monster's Ball in hand), saying: "First of all, I want to thank Warner Brothers. Thank you for putting me in a piece of shit, god-awful movie . . . It was just what my career needed."

And this movie probably cost around $100M and involved thousands of people.

Or, about a movie called "Alone In The Dark," this absolutely brilliant quote: "Critic Rob Vaux states that this movie is so bad that "the other practitioners of cinematic drivel can rest a little easier now; they can walk in the daylight with their heads held high, a smile on their lips and a song in their hearts. It's okay, they'll tell themselves. I didn't make Alone in the Dark."

I swear, I need a career change. This stuff is hilarious.

Unbelievable. Okay, last night we were able to rent four movies, one of them the excellent "Backbeat," but it's hard to imagine a more wasteful use of human ingenuity than moviemaking.

Unless it's hockey.