chiller blog

Posted Mar 18, 09 04:57 PM

Let’s Get the Hell Outta Here!

The cineplex floor’s Sprite-sticky… and yet you slurp from the bicuspid-disintegrated straw one last time, extracting precious fountain syrup from bite-sized glaciers of melting ice.

Meanwhile, smack in front-uh-yer smacker – the reason why you’re surrounded by Surround Sound in the first place -- random histrionic twenties-playing-teens who’ve never heard of Stella Adler bicker over Who Killed Who Last Summer. Or maybe a crack crew of Bazooka Joes sent in “to do the job” is in the midst of a fiery-collapsing ceiling, exploding tunnel, or alien-populated cavern. Or even scientist Richard Chamberlain reasoning with nuclear plant chief Jose Ferrer (pre-locust) in “the ultimate ‘B-film’,” Irwin Allen’s The Swarm.

Never fresh. Always interchangeable. It’s the cinematic equivalent of an unstarched white flag. Creativity be damned, here comes the line. Again:

“LET’S GET THE HELL OUTTA HERE!!!”

You know, it’s not just bad dialogue. It’s laaazy dialogue. The kind of worn-tattered, oil-sludge howler that cross-jaws you out of the movie. It’s where suspended belief officially un-suspends. You don’t know whether to laugh or be bored, but chances are, you’ve heard it before so 1) it’s no longer funny and 2) you’re already stone-bored to begin with.

So you go back to checking out.

Checking out your watch or mobile device for the time. When did this movie start? Checking out the math in your head. Add the ad and trailer minutes -- subtract from the recorded message about the running time. Let the countdown begin.

You can make it, camper.

Suddenly, onscreen, some supporting actor – probably from some mid-level agency, not GQ but more Better Homes & Gardens – launches himself self-sacrificially between the innocent lead and a fire-breathing latex creature. (I don’t mean Joan Rivers.)

And here comes that line:

“SAVE YOURSELF!!!”

You seriously start to wonder just how difficult it can be to write a script – after all, how many movies have you seen in your lifetime? You could do it…

But for the time being, you give serious brow to those un-popped kernels. It’s essential to grind them slowly, and only with the molars. You don’t want to chip a molar.

The small talk of the mind. It’s interesting what one’s thoughts engage in when they’re just not engaged in the movie you paid to see, usually because the people who made the movie weren’t engaged in creating a new project but recycling an old one that they were hoping you would pay to see. Back in my college days in Florida, a “TV” “pilot” “producer” once advised me “it doesn’t matter what you make, it’s the journey that counts.” He “rented” an abandoned store space in a half-abandoned mall frequented by Vaudevillian clowns, “catered” Dominos and put a “ten year-old” “rapper” “onstage” “performing” “Funky Cold Medina.”

Somewhere, that “journey” is on VHS in a dusty moving box in the back of his garage.

“Same, but different” refers to repackaging – with different points of view – tried and true narratives dating back to ancient Greek storytelling and latter-day refinements by screenwriting gurus Robert McKee, Syd Field and – my hero – Save The Cat!’s Blake Snyder. But “same” was meant to refer to structure and character archetypes; “different” should emphasize contemporary style and metaphors and a re-inventive point-of-view. Somewhere along the line, dialogue landed – plop -- in the “same” pile.

And, for the time being, that strands you with one hundred forty-five minutes in the dark with only theater-designed wall sconces set one notch up from low to baby-sit your caffeine-fragile attention spans. You could also stare at your fellow ticket buyers until they uneasily stare back – like the dude in the gortex jacket or the lone woman in the beehive do with the industrial-size popcorn. But that would be rude.

It began so promisingly. That movie ad teased you down: the Thursday edition printer ink so seductively air-dried – flaunting all of its popular show times like a little black book that “accidentally” opened for everyone to “see”. Maybe you caught a TV spot, the kind that blared, “The critics agree!!! It’s the _____ est _____ of the year!!!” But mind you, those didn’t include sources like Roger Ebert, The New York Times, Variety or the Hollywood Reporter -- you know, people who know what they’re talking about. But you didn’t read the fine print and got hornswaggled outta fifteen smackers because you had to go and listen to some Har Har doing the weather reports out of an AM radio station in Knoxville.

Hornswaggled. I like that word. I’m also partial to hoodwinked, flimflammed, bamboozled and “the old one-two.”

It’s hard for me to walk out on a movie (I’ve done that once – Bill Murray’s frighteningly unfunny inherit-an-elephant tale Larger than Life). At least I can fast-forward my Netflix. It’s hard to give up hope on flashes of brilliance.

Sort of like parking yourself outside Gomorrah to admire all the pretty lightning.

Eh, hope. It just costs you time. What is time but experience, and what is a bad experience but one that makes you savor the good? If it weren’t for bad films, I’d never fully appreciate the labored greatness of a Bride of Frankenstein, the stylized paranoia of a Repulsion, or the atypical anticipation of the import Let the Right One In.

Then again, if it weren’t for bad films, and checking out in them, I’d never get my grocery list done, either.