Man, I didn't mean to be away this long. This blogging stuff is HARD! Crap, everyday I get a hundred new ideas of things to write about, and when I finally decide what to do, the day is almost over!!
Oh well, let's get to it.
Snakes on a plane.
Mother-FUCKING snakes on a Mother-FUCKING plane. As Robin Harris would say, Ain't that a Bitch??
You're on a flight that's already gone down the tubes because the Mutha-phuckin FBI has commandeered Mutha-Phuckin First Class. So the First Class passengers have to sit with the Mutha-Phuckin peasants from coach, and the people from coach have to put with the Mutha-Phuckin attitudes of the Mutha-Phuckin Bourgeosie.
And then, guess what? Halfway through the flight, right over the Mutha-Phuckin Pacific Ocean, MUTHAPHUCKIN SNAKES get out of the shipping crates they were in and invade the MUTHAPHUCKIN PLANE!!! I mean, you wanna talk about some bullshit??
And everyone was in Mutha-Phuckin Hawaii, so clothes are not a big deal. Nobody's wearin Mutha-Phuckin trenchcoats or Mutha-Phuckin Timberlands. Everybody's wearning thin-ass shirts and Mutha-Phuckin Flip Flops! It's a Mutha-Phuckin Snake Buffet!!!
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First of all, let me say this to all you who believe that it's no longer cool to talk about SOAP. This is a movie that was super-cool, red-hot cool between Mar and May of this year. Then, the inevitable fatigue set in -- after June SOAP was yesterday's news. Then, in July tons of shit started to go on sale on Cafe Press. Suddenly, it was cool again! Then, came August 1st and it was cold again. Sam Jackson was on the cover of Entertain Me Weakly. "Fuck that movie its gonna suck. "
But now, you see the movie IS cool again! It's RETRO cool. It's been a full SIX MONTHS since netizens first started talking about the film and all the hoofahrah, so the inevitable post-modern cool has settled in. SOAP may be old hat to the senior citizens in the room, but there are kids who weren't born six months ago, for whom Snakes on a Plane is brand new! So there you go. I defend my right to continue to talk about SOAP. So there.
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Snakes on a Plane is an unholy riot. It's easily one of the stupidest films you'll ever ever EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVVVVEERRRRRRRRRR see. But damn do you get your $20 bucks worth. If the quality of a movie can be determined by the number of times you say "OH SHIT!!!" then SOAP is Citizen Mutha-Phuckin Kane. You will go "OH SHIT!!!" a number of times.
OK -- HERE COMES THE SPOILERS!!!!!
The film has (as of noon on Saturday) a rating of 62% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Now many of the critics are just Hating on SOAP: 1) because it's another popcorn movie, and not some art-house flick from Linklater or Almovadar and 2) because New Line didn't screen it for the Mutha-Phuckin critics. Now personally I feel that was a mistake, because although a good number of critics were going to pan it, and though the film had good awareness factor, it didn't have total saturation in the media marketplace. Several of my older co-workers didn't have a clue about it.
Any mention of the film was absent from the Washington Post on Friday.
Sixty Two percent is good but not great; a lot of the bickering from critics is like this:
It seems that nearly everyone who still goes to the movies (as opposed to those who just wait for things to show up on DVD) feels he or she has an ownership stake in "Snakes on a Plane." For months now, moviegoers have been tickled by both the absurdity of the title and its blunt descriptiveness, and we've had a ball trying to imagine what a movie called "Snaked on a Plane" might be like. Who needs marketing when the title of a movie alone is a parlor game of the imagination?
The expectation, I think, was that "Snakes on a Plane" would be a good bad movie, a picture that would free us from having to worry about quality and allow us to concentrate solely on dumb thrills and laughs. But it takes a degree of skill to make a good bad movie. And "Snakes on a Plane" never even allows itself to be truly dumb. The picture feels like a stunt, an exercise; it's winking and knowing every minute. This is a self-parody of a concept that's essentially beyond parody, a joke we're all in on to the point where it really doesn't matter whether we've seen the movie at all.
This guys’ just wrong. Granted. Yes there is some winking: (Juliana Marguiles’ character says:”I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but does anyone here have any experience flying a plane?”), but overall it's NOT a comedy or spoof or camp. It's played straight and that's part of its charm. So essentially, according to this guy, the film fails because it failed on HIS terms, not the filmakers'. And yet, "web geeks" are in the wrong for interjecting what THEY wanted in the film.
But Cinema Blend gets it right:
There is only one man who could possibly confront such an odd disaster as Snakes on a Plane: Samuel L. Jackson. Somehow, Jackson’s presence removes the ridiculousness of the situation. Maybe it’s because he delivers his lines with such serious devotion to making this situation real. Maybe it’s because Jackson is the everyman, an actor who brings something to the table that everyone can relate to. Probably, however, it’s because we want to watch Jackson trash some snake ass, which he does, from the moment he first encounters the slithery reptiles until the very end. You can’t help but hoot and cheer as Jackson dispatches the snakes with various weapons, leading up to his signature line which has a good chance of having the audience yell out with him. After all, they’re the ones who inspired it.
What makes the movie work is that Snakes on a Plane is fully aware of how silly its situation is, but it doesn’t try to take a tongue-in-cheek approach. It makes no apologies, but doesn’t make fun of itself either. The movie is played straight, completely formulaic as an action flick without actually making fun of the action genre.
Jackson = Gregory Peck in The Omen. You’ve got a patently ridiculous situation, and you need someone to uplift the material to the point where the audience can buy into it. That’s Jackson. (although let’s be honest – 12 years later and he’s STILL riding on the afterburners of Pulp Fiction. Not sure if that’s something to be proud of or not.
Meanwhile from the "Stick-Up-My-Ass" portion of the pack:
Cheap thrills have rarely been this boring. But go see it if you've convinced yourself that you must. Help pad Mr. Jackson's bank account. Reaffirm the studios' assumption that marketing is more important than creativity. Then come up with some funny titles for the sequel.
And if that doesn't sound fun, you could always go see a real movie.
and same goes for Peter Travers from ROLLING STONE:
And so after all the Internet hype about those motherfuckin' snakes on that motherfuckin' plane, the flick itself is a murky stew of shock effects repeated so often that the suspense quickly droops along with you eyelids. It's not so bad that it's good. It's so bland that it's boring. Not even worth a hissss.
If these guys really think SOAP was “boring” then they’re just burned the fuck out.
Look there’s a chronal – displacement element that can’t but take place in movies. So many major critics are white guys in their 40s and 50s and have seen 10,000 movies. At that point you’re probably like a porn stud about to do his 20,000th scene. You can DO it, sure, but you’re not turned on anymore. The chick you’re about to do could be hotter than Kiera Knightley, Beyonce and Giselle combined, but all you really wanna do is wrap it up and get back to your PS2.
Hey, I’ve seen the best of the genre that SOAP is in. I’ve seen the best horror flicks (Exorcist, The Omen, Carrie), I’ve seen the best disaster flicks (Airport, Airport ’77, Poseidon Adventure, and the grandaddy of ‘em all, The Towering Inferno), and I’ve seen all the cheesy Jaws knockoffs that came out circa 1977 – 1979 (Orca, Tentacles, Piranhas, Day of the Animals, Ants!, etc, etc, etc)
But yet, somehow, I allowed myself to inhabit the film, or conversely, allowed the film to have its way with me. I surrendered, and the film didn’t reject me. Travers’ and other critics are just being too caught up in the META-factor and worse, they go into the film with their minds already made up.
A lot of people have been questioning Roger Ebert’s sanity over the last few years: (GARFIELD????) but at least he’s not forgetting what movies are supposed to be about and that everybody hasn’t seen 20,000 flicks like he has. (Of course, he also understands that being on TV he can't be a film curmudgeon and call everything that's mass-market "a steaming pile of penguin crap". )
Maybe its because Ebert still finds the time to go see films with a real audience. Y'see most critics get the special screenings where they're in a near empty theator with only other critics or theater owners or studio pollsters doing their research before opening night. Critics, like many writers, live in an unbelievably insular world.
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But there’s another undercurrent running through most of the reviews of SOAP:
That of the snobbery of movie critics. Here’s Travers again:
Snakes on a Plane, SoaP to the Internet faithful, is a movie of the people, by the people and for the people. Or so New Line, the studio releasing it, would have you believe. Once Web geeks heard that irresistible title, they began creating their own posters and dialogue and sending in their ideas. New Line, sensing a new golden goose, listened and obeyed. Instead of making the safe, cheesy PG-13 crowd-pleaser they intended to call Pacific Air Flight 121, they made the safe, cheesy, R-rated horrorthon you see today.
So in other words, “web geeks” are what’s responsible for forcing this film onto him, and without it he could have just as easily ignored it. How DARE these internet surfin’ slackers – failed film students one and all -- begin to think they could actually determine the kind of film they want to see. How DARE they??
It can’t help but remind one of the current debate currently shading the Connecticut primary. Democratic strategists were shocked and appalled. How DARE the people of Connecticut vote for the guy they wanted? How DARE they!!!!
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There is legitimate criticism, though, from efilmcritic:
John Heffernan & Sebastian Gutierrez’s script take a long time to establish each and every one of these people; complete with quirks or clichéd one-dimensions and then throws their potential cooperation or deterrence out faster than a snake strike. Why introduce the rapper’s Howard Hughes complex for touching if he’s not going to be thrust into a position where contact could save his life or, God forbid, another? Instead, he nonchalantly shakes someone’s hand without hesitation as some sign of progress. The eyewitness is so anonymous he could have starred in Supercross. Could the dog be used to retrieve something the humans are too fearful or too big to venture into? What about the kids? Have they learned nothing from their [Marine] father to become a few good men? [Original director] Ronny Yu would have found something creative to do with the kickboxer instead of giving white women piggybacks. Only the guy with video game training gets to show off his skills in an even more hamfisted bit of misdirection than introducing the film’s only Irwin-esque set piece, which is more like the deleted bit of Jackson’s demise from Jurassic Park.
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That IS somewhat valid. The film does spend a lot of time on setup only to treat many of the passengers as mere empty vessels. Marguiles’ character is going to law school; the two kids have a Marine officer for a dad, the honeymooner is a Monk-like paranoid who’s freaking out before he even gets on the plane, the totally obnoxious guy from first class is a doctor…none of things things comes into play during the course of the film.
But to sum up: let me quote The Toronto Star:
"In short, Snakes on a Plane delivers exactly what it promised and then some. And how often can you say that about a movie these days?"
and what the hell…let’s give some love to Satan’s Paper the New York Post
If loving "S.O.A.P." is wrong, I don't want to be right.
Amen to that, brother.
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posted by Seth Janklowicz @ 10:28 AM
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