Contradicting Popular Opinion: Update from the Road

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Contradicting Popular Opinion:
An Enquiry Concerning Why Your Favorite Movie Sucks

A Report from the Road

August means vacation. A lot of folk out there go exotic places for summer holiday.

I go to Western New York. Not NYC mind you (f*ck New York City), but the Buffalo area. It might not be exotic, or exciting, or hip, or terribly interesting, or worth visiting, but…

Wait a minute. Lost my train of thought there.

The good thing about Buffalo is that they know how to deep-fry things, shake them in hot sauce, and dip them in bleu cheese dressing. This combination is a marvelous one as it affords one the glory of vinegar, the beauty of mayonnaise, and the wonder of grease all in one fell swoop. Buffalo is also known for its “beef on weck” which is, apparently, a sandwich slightly more esoteric than the Monte Cristo in non-Buffalo areas.

But after I’ve had my chicken finger subs and picked kimmelweck seeds from my teeth, I know, to the very core of my being, that it is now time for the DRIVE-IN. The Drive-in is, like hot sauce and bleu cheese, a marvelous combination. It combines the glory of the automobile, with the beauty of film, and the wonder of making out. Is there anything more American than that combo? Plus, the drive-in snack bars are more likely to stock cheese fries and odd, foodish, items.

Now, it would seem odd that the Drive-ins are very much a rust belt thing. New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio all have more than their fair share of Drive-in picture shows. These are states where, for the majority of the calendar year, sitting in a parked car for 5 hours isn’t something sane people would want to do. Why would there be so many drive-ins in places where they can only operate a fraction of the year? Perhaps it is part of a grander celebration of the summer. July and August mean more to Buffalo than they do to San Diego. But I digress.

It was with great sadness that I was informed that my home Drive-in, the Grand View on Route 5 in Angola had yet to open this summer. It is not yet known for certain whether it has gone the way of roughly 3,500 drive-ins before it, but things weren’t looking very good.

Luckily, being in Western New York, I was not out of options. There is the Buffalo Drive-in, the Middleport Drive-in, the Sunset Drive-in, and where we ended up, the Transit Drive-in. The Transit is the largest Drive-in in the state. It has four screens and a 19 hole mini-golf course. It’s been operating for over 50 years now. For a while in the ’70s, they even played movies in the winter, giving patrons heaters with their speakers.

Yeah…

What does one see at the Drive-in in late-August of ’06? Why, a double feature of Snakes on a Plane and Clerks II.

SoaP was spectacularly and wonderfully bad. It was a film of pure B-movie honesty, right down to the title, and fully worthy of the drive-in experience. Snakes on a Plane boldly exposes plot holes, and says, “so f*cking what?!” It drops sub-plots like hot potatoes. It strives to introduce as much irrelevant information about the characters as possible, and then taunt the audience with mocking cries of, “oh you thought that was going to be important? SUCKER!”

Our arch-villain does karate for no good reason in the first act, and then doesn’t even show up in the third act. Our love interest, is “one day away from retirement” to become a lawyer, and it doesn’t affect things in the slightest. A champion kick-boxer is on the plane who never gets to kick anything!

I’m a little ambivalent about that Kenan Kel guy, though.

Kenan and Kel are two people.

Just because the man is fat, doesn’t mean you have to insult him!

And thus ends “Newsradio” rip-off theatre.

Shockingly, the Clerks sequel ate the meat missle. My god was that a shitty movie, and not in the way that SoaP was a shitty movie. Clerks II just made me feel depressed. What the hell happened?

Granted, Kevin Smith was never one of our finest film-makers. Clerks was a cheapie film featuring non-actors. Mallrats is a goofy comedy that was jumbled too much in the editing room. Chasing Amy is mostly a bunch of really inept advice about relationships and people, with a couple of good comic book jokes thrown in for good measure. Dogma is a whiny movie for Fideists, who want to “spiritual” without being “religious.”

But somehow, someway, Smith was able to connect with an entire generation. All right, maybe mostly by means of pop-culture references. As is usually the case with these sorts of things, what was hip and “with it” ten years ago, is neither today.

Some of the references are funny. I definitely appreciated Randal’s version of the LOTR trilogy. Being less cool that you used to be is not a fatal flaw in a film. Being insipid and predictable is. Clerks II is too much of a re-hash, not enough sequel. Once again we have Dante working a job that he feels is beneath him, treading water. Once again he somehow has two women to choose from, one he thinks he wants, and the other the one that is obviously “right for him”. But where the first movie had no-budget appeal, and B-movie sensibilities, this film has a Jackson 5 dance number, a Smashing Pumpkins montage sequence, a go-kart racing montage, the main character learning how to dance, and an happy ending featuring the “music” of Alanis Morrisette (I refuse to look up how to spell her name). Clerks II feels like a movie that was written in less time than it takes to watch.

It is the first film in recorded history that could’ve benefited from more Ben Affleck.

But f*ck it. Afterwards they re-played, Snakes on a Plane. I will never get sick of those motherf*cking snakes on that motherf*cking plane.