Bottom Feeders: Everyone Sits On My Lap

Welcome to a very special bottom feeders.  It’s very special because this week I don’t review a shitty movie and tell you about it – I talk to you about all the shitty movies I’ve seen and what I’ve learned from them.  So roll up your sleeves, pull up a chair and sit backwards in it.  Good – now twist your ball cap around backwards and God you look just like me at your age, because it’s time for a father-son talk about what life means, specifically life while watching movies.  It’s the bottom feeders version of those “best of” sitcom episodes where they talk about previous seasons and show clips.  Don’t worry, I hate those too.  We’ll make this quick.

Two important things have happened to me recently.  The first is I started watching a lot of bad movies in a really short amount of time.  I’ve reviewed fourteen movies for you already and for every one of those there’s usually two or three that I decide aren’t quite worth reviewing and those are just the bad movies I’m trying to watch.  Not only that, but I actually lied to you in my very first article.  I don’t write these two hours before they’re due.  I said that to look cool, and I did.  But the truth is that I write these five or six in a week with all the spastic, sloppily focused attention I can muster.  Watching shitty movies for weeks on end and trying to answer how they came out so retarded really gives you a lot to chew on and you start to notice some interesting patterns.

The second thing is that someone straight up explained all those patterns and musings to me when I read Writing Movies for Fun and Profit – a book suggested to me by Mike Gravagno.  For those of you who don’t understand the complex relationships between the Popfilter writers, Mike is basically my cooler older brother, except sometimes I’m pretty sure people think we’re fucking.  If you don’t know about the book, it’s Tom Lennon and Robert Ben Garant’s guide to writing movies that make a ton of money.  You know their faces from Reno 911 but you’ve probably seen at least three of their movies without even realizing it. They make the point right away that theirs is basically the only book about making movies that isn’t full of shit, and they’re pretty much right.  You should fucking read this book.  It gave me a lot of insight into the world of high-dollar movie making and also managed to make me feel like quite an asshole for writing about movies while managing to know very little about how they’re actually made.

This perfect storm of events is what led me to really sit down and think about what it all means.  Here is what I came up with:

1. Making movies is fucking hard.  It takes a lot of people and a lot of money and something called ‘movie magic’ that I don’t want to get into because I don’t know all the spell names yet, but basically it’s complex shit.  That they manage to get made at all is basically a testament to man’s ability to work together towards a common goal – like that time they made a movie about landing on the moon.
2. Bad movies are rarely one person’s fault, but the worst of the worst usually are.  Also most of the great ones.  If I had to say why, I’d probably quote a very wise man who once said “A camel is a horse designed by committee.”  Camels are ugly little bastards and they spit but you can still ride them and you know you’re getting a camel every time.  Most movies are camels.  Letting a single person take control of everything means that all the awesome ideas are right there mixed in with the shitty ones.  It’s an ice cream machine that’s also hooked up to a septic tank and you’re not going to know whether that’s chocolate or shit until you get your tongue in there.
3. I am an asshole.  I said this already but it’s double true, so I double said it.  My job is to review movies that a lot of people put a lot of hard work into and say they suck.  That’s an asshole thing to do, and I’ve been going about it in an asshole way, mostly by naming individual writers, directors or producers and calling them assholes.  I’d like to take this opportunity to admit that I am not a Hollywood actor, director, producer or screenwriter.  I’m not actually a Hollywood anything.  In my entire life I’ve tried to make one movie and I quit right in the middle because I got limp all the sudden.  I’d also like to take this opportunity to apologize to Bennifer, George Lucas, Lindsey Lohan, Kaos, Shyam-wow, Shyam-wow again, whoever did Pat, Eddie Murphy, Mark Neveldine/Brian Taylor, Bob Rod and anyone else I forgot for insulting them.  I’m sorry I hated your shitty life’s work.  I’m probably not going to stop because it’s way easier to write this stuff when you have a villain.
4. Making movies is fucking hard.  That’s right, another repeat, but this one comes with a twist.  Making movies is fucking hard BUT…you should treat it that way. A very common theme through all the worst of these movies is that you can practically see the actors having fun and bullshitting around.   Not the characters, the actors themselves.  You can’t see the director but I bet that fucker’s all smiley too.  Here’s the thing, making a movie is like high school – you have tasks you need to accomplish in order to graduate with good grades.  It’s easy to graduate, but hard to excel.  Now think back to your high school experience.  What are all the people who had fun and chilled out all the time doing now?  That’s right, none of them are good movies.  Sure, you can have fun making a movie but you still need to focus on what they’re paying you to do – your fucking job.  Stop enjoying it, start doing it well.
5. Have fun.  Only for comedies.  And still, not that much.

And that’s it.  I actually didn’t learn a whole lot.  Just some facts about movies, some half-formed opinions based on those facts and how to avoid watching shitty movies for a few more days.  Thanks to Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant for writing an awesome book and to you guys for reading English.  Not enough people do that.  Unless I think of another way to stall, I’ll be back on schedule next installment with a review of whichever one of Lennon and Garant’s movie I decide will be easiest to pick on.

Finally, it’s time to answer that age-old question: Is life worse than Did You Hear About The Morgans?  No, and thank God.  Life is a giant dog bowl.  There’s water in there that we need to survive, but there’s also bits of wet, disintegrating dog food and a dead fly and a bunch of our own hair that we’re gonna have to sort through just to get a sip.  That sucks but so does being dead.  Being dead is probably even worse, but scientifically I can’t vouch for that.  Either way, Did You Hear About The Morgans is worse than death, so by default life wins.  Keep paying your student loans on time and shut your fucking mouth, living folk.  You could easily be that movie.

What You Should Watch Instead: Life, man.  You should watch Life.