MOVIES -- THE DUMPING SEASON: Part One

The Dumping Season:  Part One

The Least Wonderful Time of the Year

(by Chris Wimmer)

Yep, it’s winter … and in Hollywood, that means only one thing:  it’s once again time to take a giant collective shit on the movie-going public.  January through March is the annual time of year when Hollywood expels the waste that it’s stored up over the previous calendar year, or the year before that.  Somewhere along the line, between eight-martini lunches and trips to the Beverly Hills Ferrari dealership to gaze at the new models that they hope will make everyone even more jealous, Hollywood executives realized that the movies they intend to purge from the system during this time period were horrific, even by Hollywood standards.  So, the movies get corralled like a herd of ornery steers and sent to the slaughterhouse during the dead of winter when they know you’re less likely to go to the theater because you don’t want to put on 19 layers of clothes just to go out to the garage to start your car.

 

Think I’m crazy?  Here’s a great link to a site that lists the release dates of the movies that came out last year.  You can scroll back through the years for further proof of this phenomenon:http://www.movieinsider.com/movies/-/2012/

Now, to be fair, I’m not saying that EVERY movie released during the Dumping Season is a pile of shit.  The vast majority of them?  Yes.  But every now and then a solid one sneaks through.  Just last week, Oscar-favorite ZERO DARK THIRTY was released wide to the general public.  Now technically it was released in five theaters in New York and L.A. in December so it could qualify for the 2012 Academy Awards but unless you lived near one of those five theaters, you didn’t have the chance to see it.  And you have to go back to 2005 to find a movie that was released in the Dumping Season that was nominated for an Academy Award – MILLION DOLLAR BABY.

But let’s get back to this year.  The season kicked off last week with the release of GANGSTER SQUAD.  BANG!  BANG!  Sweet!  Did you see that trailer???  Just gunshots galore, huh?  Soooo dreamy.  Yeah, so are Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.  I get it.  (damn, she can wear a red dress, can’t she?)  Right, sorry …

This one is particularly painful because I’ve always thought that a great, untapped secret in Hollywood has been a movie about organized crime in Los Angeles.  L.A. in the 40’s and 50’s had all your classic criminal enterprises – racketeering, extortion, gambling, murder – but without the cramped, gloomy alleys of New York or the depressing weather that seem so commonplace in gangster films.  You take all the juicy nuggets that are the hallmarks of mafia movies and drop them into a place with the glitz and glamour of the movie business, flamboyant characters, perfect weather, beaches, canyons, drugs and palm trees – never forget the palm trees – and you could have a pretty good movie.  But instead of actually doing something gritty and interesting – “real,” for lack of a better word, like we think of when we think of THE GODFATHER – they made a glossy, threadbare movie that looks like a parody of the gangster movies that were actually made during the 40’s and 50’s.  It’ll be flashy, full of the aforementioned gunshots and explosions, and will even have the requisite love story so that guys will be able to force their girlfriends to go see it, but it’ll be thinner than the last line of coke at Charlie Sheen’s house on New Year’s morning.

This movie will be like the feeling you get when you drive past a used car dealership and there's a shiny 1965 Mustang convertible sitting right out there on the curb gleaming in the sunlight.  You look at it and think, "damn, what's that car doing on that lot?"  The answer:  underneath that bright shiny exterior, it's probably a piece of shit.  They slapped a coat of paint on it and buffed until you could read an eye chart in the reflection, but all they did was cover up a body that's got more holes than a meth addict's mouth and an engine so worn out that it'll fall out when you hit the gas.  Enjoy.

Moving on, this coming weekend – January 18^th – is the bitch of the bunch.  Holy lord, if you like shitty movies, pack a fucking lunch and plan to be at the theater all day.  This weekend is for YOU.  I’ll get to the full list in Part 2 of this diatribe, but the highlight is, of course, THE LAST STAND. 

This one holds a special place of rancor in my heart because I read the original script four years ago and thought it was absolutely atrocious.  Even knowing what I do about the Hollywood process, it was hard to swallow that this one was getting made.  And yet somehow, when I saw the first trailer, it actually got worse.  I didn’t think I could be surprised anymore by the bullshit Hollywood produces, but there I was, sitting at my computer, staring at the sheriff of a small Arizona border town, who, with the help of his band of merry men (and one woman, of course), was trying to stop an escaped drug dealer from hauling ass to Mexico in a Corvette. 

Now, the script was full of your stock, archetypal action movie characters:  the middle-aged sheriff, the hard-ass deputy who aspires to work in a big city, the goofy deputy for comic relief, and the hot female deputy who just wants to be taken seriously and somehow started her career in the asshole of the desert.  But after seeing them onscreen for the first time, they were even more gross than on the page.  It felt like the director, Jee-woon Kim (who has made some pretty good Korean movies – I SAW THE DEVIL, in particular) decided to make all the characters even more quirky than before … just for the sake of being quirky … and possibly borderline retarded, as well – jackasses, if you will.  Johnny Knoxville’s character’s name is Lewis Dinkum --pretty sure that’s all I need to say about that … except that he appears to be bastardizing one of the most beloved characters in cinema history by is doing his “best” Uncle Eddie impression from National Lampoon’s CHRISTMAS VACATION. 

 

“Shitter was full!”

“Ahhh.  Did you check our shitters, honey?”

Sorry about that.  Had to be done.  Anyway, it’s a plague on both their houses.  The only response I can think of to combat this tragic and sacrilegious parody of a cherished piece of my childhood is turn my back, tilt up my nose, and say good day, sir.  I said, good day!

Our only hope as a society, is that YOU, the idiots who would normally see a movie like this, stay home this weekend.  Maybe there’s a monster truck rally on TV, or a rerun of Swamp People.  Or you got your hand shredded in the blender when you dropped your phone in it while making your sixth batch of margaritas – after you already ran out of tequila and started making them with Pabst Blue Ribbon but didn’t care because you were too drunk by that point to taste the difference anyway – and reached in to get it while the blender was still going and had to be rushed to the emergency room.  

Movies like this get made because people like you buy $200 million dollars worth of tickets to see FAST FIVE, which signals to Hollywood that all you want are shitty movies that require you to do nothing more than slobber on your popcorn, drool on your shirt, and merely absorb the “entertainment” through your ocular muscles before forcing it down behind your nose so that it never reaches your brain … like you forced down that last shot of Jager at the end of the night which it sounded like a good idea at the time but on some subconscious level you knew was a terrible idea and you would regret it the next morning.  Remember that?  Probably not, but it hurt like a bitch anyway, didn’t it?  Yes,YOU, the drooling mongoloid, are the reason Hollywood produces shitty movies. 

Here’s a quick historical recap:  the movie studios sold their souls to corporate giants a long time ago.  The stockholders of these massive corporations only care about money, therefore the corporations only care about money, therefore the movie studios only care about money so that they can satisfy the corporation’s stockholders and keep making themselves rich.  Since the movie studios are easily the riskiest business venture in the corporation’s portfolio, they can’t afford to take risks with the movies they make, lest their Ferraris and mansions in Malibu get wrested from their greedy little fingers.  So, they produce the same shit over and over again because you’ve proven over and over again that you’ll see it and pay them their money (three MEN IN BLACK movies, five FAST AND FURIOUS movies, two HANGOVER movies with a third on the way – come on, the second one was crap and you know it … and yes, I’ll admit a slight hypocrisy here:  I saw the second one in the theater with the hope that this time they might actually break the standard comedy sequel model of simply recycling the exact same jokes that worked in the first one.  My hope was crushed, yet again.  Well played, Hollywood, well played).

But, to show that I have a sensitive side, too, I understand that we live in a free society and in a free society, you have the right to be a drooling mongoloid if you want to.  You have the right to see any damn movie you please – it’s your choice.  BUT, like all choices, it has a consequence:  if you choose to see THE LAST STAND – or anything resembling it past, present, or future – you automatically forfeit the right to bitch about the quality of movies that get produced by Hollywood.  You have no idea how many times people have asked me, when they see a new preview on TV, “how does this shit get made?”

It hurts me a little to say it, but the answer is always simple:  YOU.  YOU’RE the reason shit like this gets made.  Well, no, okay, maybe not you, but probably the guy next to you.  If he stopped shelling out dollars in record numbers to see these movies, Hollywood would stop making them.  I promise.  But if he keeps it up, we’re all doomed.  It’s time to pack our shit and get down to bunker.  The apocalypse is coming. 

TO BE CONTINUED …