So!
This one's gonna be a drunken rant! Just opened a bottle of wine and haven't really slept in weeks!
Yeah!
Let’s do this! First blog entry since the epic classic What I Learned Today on the Tony Danza Show, and that’s been, what, about 5 years since TD got cancelled and left me with nothing to write about? Well, like Gary Glitter said, it’s good to be back.
So what’s this bullshit I’m supposed to write about this week? Oh yeah, The Big Chill, the quintessential baby boomer movie, about a bunch of so-called adults who spend the weekend obsessing over themselves and their feelings, together in a house after the funeral of a pussy bitch friend of theirs that committed suicide. (It is a well known fact that only crazy people and huuuuge pussies kill themselves on purpose.) There are something like 8 people in the cast, including Tom Berringer, Jeff Goldbloom, Kevin Kline, and really famous blonde whose name I can’t remember; but I never bothered to count all of them or even remember their names cause the movie was waaaaay too annoying to pay that much attention to. I mean fuuuuuuck, was it boring. Well, it was either that, or the fact that I’ve been drunk every day since July 22nd, when I let my dipshit self take over my happy, smart, well-adjusted self and go insane and make one earth-shatteringly bad life-decision. But I’m still pretty sure the movie sucked.
I mean, two hours of watching people like your parents cry, and moan, and blow-job themselves about their feelings, and their lost youth, and their breathtakingly selfish attempts to make up for it, all the while laughing at things that actually matter, like their own ideals, which they’ve so nonchalantly left behind in the pursuit of the same lies they were trying to get away from in the first place: security, wealth, nuclear family happy go lucky clean hands and a dirty mind bullshit.
The whole movie is these wealthy idiots (except one boner face that got his dink shot off in Vietnam, which is really, really funny. I mean, I’m pretty sure that not a single person got their dink shot off in Vietnam. Look at all the homeless veteran downtown- it’s all legs. Come the fuck on, right? We’re on to you, Nick!) who literally sit around drinking pinot noir, smoking hash, and reminiscing about what life was like before they so lavishly slid into hypocrisy, amassed wealth, fame, and grown-up hipster cred (the worst kind of cred), all while trying desperately to fuck each other to fulfill some childish idea of fulfillment.
I mean, that might sounds awesome but it’s not. Come the fuck on! It’s people like that who gave us meaningless marriage and World War 3! So intensely narcissistic and non-judgemental, they do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, regardless of anyone else’s feelings or the commitments they’ve made, and they don’t even try to keep people from fucking up because they don’t make judgements about obviously fucked up shit because it’s not politically correct! Jeff Goldbloom is seriously running around the whole movie trying to fuck his recently dead- as in still warm and edible- friend’s girlfriend, and the only problem any of their friends have with him is that he keeps hitting them up for money for his new super-cool club that’s gonna be way hotter than the other cool clubs in New York. Like, “Come on man, I can’t believe you’d come to our friend’s funeral just to ask us all for money, I mean, why don’t you keep fucking his girlfriend, cause that’s tooootally, like, awesome, doooood.” Fuck you, Jeff Goldbloom! And fuck the rest of you dirt bags for letting him be a scummy fucker! You spend the whole movie wondering if you did enough to help Alex through his depression, and how he was, “Too good for this world,” (thanks for that nugget of gold, Kevin Kline’s character), and screaming and crying that, “Alex should be here!” and waaah waaah waaaah!!! Oh boo hoo, stupid! First of all, stop being so fucking narcissistic! If somebody wants to kill themselves, they’re not going to make it obvious enough that you could prevent it in the first place. Believe it or not, despite your easy upbringing and mediocre textbook collection, you can’t save the fucking world! (see: Iraq, Rwanda, Congo… Thanks, boomers). And second, maybe if you care soooo much about your friend’s memory, you’d stop your friends from trying to fuck his grieving girlfriend! Huh? You stupid fucks.
It’s just a microcosm of the whole boomer generation: They love themselves sooooo much, they believe the world should cater to their whims, and anybody in the way- wife, kids, parents, friends- can go fuck themselves. Hence: divorce on a massive scale (they started it, we just learned it), kids raised in single parent homes with trust and intimacy issues that raise huge barriers to happiness, parents in old folks homes at the first misplaced Werther’s Original after age 45, and an entire world in flames because of a mix of their inability to control their war-boners (remember, we can change the world!) coupled with their inability to deal with reality because of their bullshit intellectualism. They can do anything they want to, as long as it doesn’t require hard work , perseverance, humility, or real sacrifice.
And the very worst fucking part of it all is that they had the audacity to name kids in the 80’s “The ME Generation.” Are you fucking kidding me!!!??? Your marriages last as long as your wives give you an instant boner, you start wars because you think it’s a good way to win a new pal, and you left all your ideals at the door of every sick, fucked up multi-national mega corporation in America.
Hey fuckfaces! You know what started on my watch? Local produce, organic farming, safe sex as a matter of course, a growing re-commitment to marriage, small business consortiums as an answer to mega-corporations, voting in our demographic that you pussies never came close to. You remember what started on your watch? Two of the worst economic collapses in American history, TWO LAND WARS IN ASIA (WTF EVER HAPPENED TO STAYING OUT OF 1!!!), Bear Stearns, Bank of America, etc., the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, Van Jones, health care destitution among the non-affluent, and the FIRST peacetime national debt in our country’s history, which we’ll be paying for forever and getting nothing in return.
And you have the gall to call us “Generation Me?” Why, because you did voter registration in Alabama? Or were too big of pussies to dodge a draft which allowed for unconscionable mass murder in a foreign country? Or was it because you had the selflessness to do drugs, have an orgy, get an anthropology degree, and become a republican that votes against health care reform? Yeah, you got us, mom and dad! Good job! You’re so brave! So awesome! I wish I could be just like you!
So if you go watch the Big Chill, remember what conversations like that entail: the end of the world. This movie gets four baby-boomer stars.
I’m drunk.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
Primer: What exactly is a Baby Boomer Movie? You probably know more than you think.
Baby Boomer Movies are the god damn worst. If you're watching a movie full of smug, middle aged asswipes talking down to kids (because they themselves were never inexperienced), glorifying their own generation (who's number one accomplishment was divorce), and somehow getting laid depsite being old, ugly, cynical, self-righteous, narccissitic pricks, then you're probably watching a Baby Boomer Movie. The point of this blog is to point out BBMs, review them, and explain what makes each a part of the worst/best genre ever. Hopefully, after reading this primer and some reviews, you'll be able to suggest other BBMS for the blog.
Let's start with what BBM movies are not. Don't get me wrong- just because there are babies boomers in the movie doesn't mean it's a Baby Boomer Movie. There are very few BBMs made before 1995, and many BBMs since have starred baby boomers with otherwise good resumes, such as Clint Eastwood, whose Gran Torino is fucking sweet, while he inexplicably took one of the biggest dumps in movie history with Space Cowboys. My point is that one has to be discerning when picking out BBMs.
The BBM is its own sub-genre whose defining characteristic is that when you watch it, you get the same wrenching knot of hatred in your chest that you get when you see cops beating up poor people, or your mom telling you that your friend can't sleep over for no reason at all (what a total bitch), and the only way to release the anger is to go to Seattle and fire-bomb a cop car, or wait 'til you're 18 and go nuts, fucking/drinking everything you can get your hands on.
George Clooney's career makes for a great lesson on what makes a BBM a BBM. Take two movies: Michael Clayton and Up in the Air- Two movies made within a couple years of each other, both critically acclaimed, one a powerfully subtle exposition on the ties between big business, oil, blahblahblahblahblah; the other an orgy of baby boomer self-fellatio, a tribute to the collossal superiority of smug, domineering, wrinkly-bagged old fucks and how the world isn't fair, and wuv is weawwy weawwy hawd and boo hoo hoo, and how "these kids just don't get it," and how maybe, just maybe, if our grey-maned benefactors would deign to stoop below the Olympian clouds and impart merely a pinch their melifluous wisdom, there may still be hope for the future. They're not betting on it, but maybe. It's basically a 2 hour expansion of the scene in Ferris Beuller when they go to the fancy restaurant and the dick-head maitre d stiffens his back and says, "I weep for the future."
Baby boomer movies can also be horrendously shitty comedies geared directly toward baby boomers (Couples Retreat), romantic comedies for baby boomers (Something's Gotta Give), or even movies that didn't intend to reach out to The Shittiest Generation but slide comfortably into our category because if you like it, you're either a baby boomer or retarded (Save the Last Dance). (I had a super-bangin girlfriend in high school who never let me anywhere near her privates whose mom saw Save the Last Dance by herself (because get this- she was divorced! No shit! A divorced baby boomer! No way!) and said she loved it cause it, "Has a great message!" Only baby boomers say shit like that and, upon watching it I realized that the message was the only redeeming thing about it, and thus it blows, and thus it's a BBM.)
So, you see, as a category or genre, it's pretty broad, yet somewhat discriminating. BBMs are usually dramas (Up in the Air) , but they can also be comedies (Couples Retreat), action movies (The Expendables), or any number of crazy miscellaneous movies who's standard category is harder to pin down (Save the Last Dance, Space Cowboys). What they all have in common is smugness. What most of them have in common is that middle-aged know-it-alls are generally worshipped and glorfied in ways that simply don't exist in real life. There are good movies about Baby Boomers; Baby Boomers have done a lot of cool, admirable things in the world; but as a generation and sub-genre of movies, they are the god damn worst.
(I would like to take this opportunity to give credit where credit is due. I didn't come up with the idea of BBMs on my own. The inspiration, if not the outright idea, came from this aweseome article in Vice Magazine from a few years ago, and from discussions with my equally-hateful brother who is way more knowledgeable about movies than I. Read the whole article and remember why you hated your parents and all their friends when you were a kid).
Let's start with what BBM movies are not. Don't get me wrong- just because there are babies boomers in the movie doesn't mean it's a Baby Boomer Movie. There are very few BBMs made before 1995, and many BBMs since have starred baby boomers with otherwise good resumes, such as Clint Eastwood, whose Gran Torino is fucking sweet, while he inexplicably took one of the biggest dumps in movie history with Space Cowboys. My point is that one has to be discerning when picking out BBMs.
The BBM is its own sub-genre whose defining characteristic is that when you watch it, you get the same wrenching knot of hatred in your chest that you get when you see cops beating up poor people, or your mom telling you that your friend can't sleep over for no reason at all (what a total bitch), and the only way to release the anger is to go to Seattle and fire-bomb a cop car, or wait 'til you're 18 and go nuts, fucking/drinking everything you can get your hands on.
George Clooney's career makes for a great lesson on what makes a BBM a BBM. Take two movies: Michael Clayton and Up in the Air- Two movies made within a couple years of each other, both critically acclaimed, one a powerfully subtle exposition on the ties between big business, oil, blahblahblahblahblah; the other an orgy of baby boomer self-fellatio, a tribute to the collossal superiority of smug, domineering, wrinkly-bagged old fucks and how the world isn't fair, and wuv is weawwy weawwy hawd and boo hoo hoo, and how "these kids just don't get it," and how maybe, just maybe, if our grey-maned benefactors would deign to stoop below the Olympian clouds and impart merely a pinch their melifluous wisdom, there may still be hope for the future. They're not betting on it, but maybe. It's basically a 2 hour expansion of the scene in Ferris Beuller when they go to the fancy restaurant and the dick-head maitre d stiffens his back and says, "I weep for the future."
Baby boomer movies can also be horrendously shitty comedies geared directly toward baby boomers (Couples Retreat), romantic comedies for baby boomers (Something's Gotta Give), or even movies that didn't intend to reach out to The Shittiest Generation but slide comfortably into our category because if you like it, you're either a baby boomer or retarded (Save the Last Dance). (I had a super-bangin girlfriend in high school who never let me anywhere near her privates whose mom saw Save the Last Dance by herself (because get this- she was divorced! No shit! A divorced baby boomer! No way!) and said she loved it cause it, "Has a great message!" Only baby boomers say shit like that and, upon watching it I realized that the message was the only redeeming thing about it, and thus it blows, and thus it's a BBM.)
So, you see, as a category or genre, it's pretty broad, yet somewhat discriminating. BBMs are usually dramas (Up in the Air) , but they can also be comedies (Couples Retreat), action movies (The Expendables), or any number of crazy miscellaneous movies who's standard category is harder to pin down (Save the Last Dance, Space Cowboys). What they all have in common is smugness. What most of them have in common is that middle-aged know-it-alls are generally worshipped and glorfied in ways that simply don't exist in real life. There are good movies about Baby Boomers; Baby Boomers have done a lot of cool, admirable things in the world; but as a generation and sub-genre of movies, they are the god damn worst.
(I would like to take this opportunity to give credit where credit is due. I didn't come up with the idea of BBMs on my own. The inspiration, if not the outright idea, came from this aweseome article in Vice Magazine from a few years ago, and from discussions with my equally-hateful brother who is way more knowledgeable about movies than I. Read the whole article and remember why you hated your parents and all their friends when you were a kid).
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