Posts Tagged ‘Mr. Peter Hyams’

Doofus ex Machina

Monday, June 6th, 2011

Girls are stupid.I hate them.

I do my best, as you know, to see as many movies as I can in the theater.This makes for a very short Netflix queue (our version is called, rather unfortunately, Lovefilm), as generally if I haven’t seen it, it’s unlikely that I don’t want to, and I want to see everything, so I have seen it. Moving to the UK, there were bound to be limitations, as some movies just don’t come here.I’ve come to avoid looking at American movie sites, as the kind of movies I like to see (baffling FX laden mistakes, anything made by Mr. Peter Hyams, exorcist prequels – basically, films that are postponed, tested, reshot, postponed, tested, reshot, postponed, tested, reshot and then finally released.After all that, how could they not be perfect?) just don’t come here, and then I get sad.I mean look at Love, Marriage, Commitment, Soul-Crushing Ennui and Shopping or whatever it’s called.It got a 0% on rotten tomatoes.A 0%!How could I not see it?Technically because I cannot.

Sadly, I am unable to use this excuse for not having seen the great, great Rubber in the theater, since it did actually play here.No, the excuse, sorry the reason for this unforgivable lapse is that girls are stupid, and I hate them.I was totally going to see Rubber, at the one showing that it was given in the UK, midnight, at the Duke of York’s in Brighton. But I was talking to a girl (Italian), and I made a judgement call: see the movie, or keep talking in the hopes that I would at some point get the courage to ask for her number.Given what I only now in hindsight see as the inevitable outcome (I did not), let’s just say it’s a situation not unlike the second drink: just as the second drink drives reason from the brain just enough to forget that the third, fourth and eighteenth drink are inevitable, cuteness encourages you think you might be brave, when you are not.It’s a problem that can only be solved with a second drink.Oddly, the same exact situation happened for Drive Angry 3D – midnight showing, girl (Greek) at bar, not getting the number, and I would have stayed and remained just as paralyzed, and just as convinced that I wouldn’t be, except my friend Richard was waiting for me at the theater.Boys are stupid.For reminding me that boys are stupid.

And yet, it is the human race, consisting as it does of boys and girls, that imagined, filmed, distributed, and then sent via post a blu-ray of Rubber.This is a film, of which you have probably heard, yet for some reason have not seen, about a tire that comes to life and begins to kill people with its mind.The critics are convinced that this act of cinematic terrorism, that it is deliberately an attempt to make no sense.As it happens, so is the filmmaker himself, as he introduces the film with a sheriff getting out of a trunk of the car and explaining how all the great films have ‘no reason’ behind them.Alternatively, Rubber may be a ‘meta’ film, where an Audience in the desert watches the aforementioned tire go through its adventure through binoculars in a post-modern comment, well, at this point I think the only thing that post-modernism can comment on is post-modernism.Both of these viewpoints are tricks.Do not listen to them.Filmmakers never know what they’re talking about.Only the films do.

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