Homeboy Fucked A Martian Once

I’m at a point in my life (fresh out of college, working a “real job”, about to get married) where I’ve been granted a new perspective on things. I think about money not as something to be earned, but as something to be saved (For the most part. I’m working on it, honestly). I think of the future in realistic terms, sacrificing the wide-eyed idealism of youth for the hopeful truth of adulthood. I wouldn’t consider myself to be an adult per se (I might be close; I’m not sure yet.), but I wouldn’t consider myself a kid either. The term “young adult” is slung around at mere children, so I’m certainly not one of those. What am I? I really have no idea, which is why Clerks 2 was so appealing to me.

I’m going to refrain from the plot recap hooey found in most reviews and cut to the chase. Why did I like this film? Because it was a reminder of my own existence; it presented damn-near every apprehension I had about growing up in glorious Technicolor.

Let’s face the facts: growing up is total bullshit. You can’t mooch off of parents (or future in-laws) forever. There is a point where the comfortable existence you’ve established over your entire life is completely upended, and you are faced with the fundamental question posed to every moving being in the animal kingdom: Are you going to evolve or die?

The characters in Clerks 2 seemingly have chosen the latter, leaving themselves to rot in a shitty job that pays even shittier money. From what we can tell, flipping burgers is their highest form of social interaction, short of the car ride from their co-worker’s house to work. But have they really chosen to relinquish themselves to the fate of the failed American dream, or are they just off to a slow start?

I’d like to think that they are taking things slow. Extremely slow. It’s been ten years since the first film, and they don’t seem to have grown up at all. They’re still bitching about their jobs, bitching about their girlfriends (or lack thereof) and they’re still bitching about the one thing that everyone on the planet likes to bitch about: life. Has life dealt them an awful hand? Nope, they’re just lazy fucks.

This is where I come in. I’m currently working a job that I don’t particularly care that much for. I, much like Shaquille O’Neal, am in it for the money. But unlike Shaquille O’Neal, I don’t make much of it. I make enough to not sink into poverty but not nearly enough to comfortably distance myself from it. I’m not doing what I would like to be doing, and wouldn’t you know it? I don’t know what I want to do.

Like Dante and Randall I’ve sacrificed personal fulfillment for security, which is a sacrifice I’m definitely not the first person to make. I grew up with the idea that going to college would get me a job and pay me good money. Guess what. I went to college. I got a job. Compared with not working, I’d even say it’s a good one. I make okay money, but I’m not even touching the salary I was all but promised when I signed up for college.

Dante, Randall, I, and almost everyone I know are part of a group of individuals that was fundamentally duped into believing that education means something. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t go to college. If you want to be a doctor, please go to college. If you want to be a lawyer, please go to college. But if you want to be a graphic designer (like I presently am), why the fuck do you have to spend $40,000 on a degree to prove to someone that you know how to add a lense-flare to a photo using the magic that is Photoshop? It’s a job that virtually anyone can do if given a small amount of training. By “small” I mean: “Here’s the mouse, click around until you make something.” Schools like the one I went to (The Illinois Institute of Art) churn out utterly worthless graduates who get jobs because they work for cheap and don’t know any better, and because no one knows what good graphic design looks like and no one cares.

So what does this predicament have to do with Clerks 2? Well, it all boils down to disillusionment, to the fact that the magic show you thought you had waiting at the end of your high school or college career is really just a douchebag hiding a rabbit in his pants. It’s like when the trailer for a movie is better than the movie itself, except this movie is life, and the trailer is all the bullshit that your parents, peers and teachers force-fed you in high school: “Go to college, get a job, make good money.” College was boring and useless. The job where I can use my talents effectively does not exist, and everything is so expensive that, unless I plan on suing someone, winning the lottery or marrying then killing some old broad for the insurance money, I’m not going to be rolling in the dough any time soon.

But it’s not like there isn’t hope. I’m young, and I still have a lot ahead of me. I’m going to get married, eventually buy my own home and have kids. Who knows? I may eventually get a job that I absolutely love.

In Clerks 2 Dante and Randall finally have the heart-to-heart that the fans of the original film secretly wanted them to have. After the events of the first film, Dante and Randall went to college, they eventually just stopped going after wasting their time for years, perhaps something a lot of us would have liked to do. Randall sums up his feelings on education, and in turn my feelings on education, “One semester we took criminology for God's sake! Criminology! Who the fuck are we studying to be, Batman?” You go to school for years with every intent of doing professionally what you’re doing in school. What Randall is saying is, if you have no idea what you want to be, why waste your time (and money) pretending to be something?

The movie ends gloriously with a slight “fuck you!” to the establishment. Isn’t the daydream of everyone who works in a humdrum office the idea that if they ran the place, things would be different? Well, let’s just say Dante and Randall finally take the shit on the pot that they’ve been sitting on for over a decade.

Snakes On A Who Gives A Shit

I guess I should say something about Snakes On A Plane as well, everyone else has, why the fuck shouldn’t I? Here’s my thing about this movie: I want to see it because it looks hilarious. Not like Animal House hilarious but like, Red Planet hilarious or Lost in Space hilarious. I get a huge movie boner for really bad movies. Really I do. Unlawful Entry, love it. Eight Legged Freaks, fantastic. Reign of Fire, one of my favorite movies ever. So yea, I’m going to see Snakes On A Plane because I know it’s going to be terrible.

That being said, I think that’s also the reason why EVERYONE AND THEIR GRANDMOTHER is going to see it and that pisses me off. I feel like what dudes with mullets felt like when Metallica cut their hair: betrayed, angry, hurt, but still giving them money. I’ve loved shitty movies from the get go and now everyone is jumping on the shitty movie bandwagon. I hate to sound like the kid who liked Korn before they got popular, but I owned their first two records long before the quarterback of my high school football team used Freak On A Leash to pump himself up.

So fuck you to all you shitty movie bandwagon jumpers-on (proper grammar bitches.) I’m a really shitty movie enthusiast, do you even know how many times I’ve seen Jingle All The Way? Or Demolition Man? Or Captain Ron? I couldn’t even tell you, their as familiar to me as the layout of his living room is to Matt Murdock. It’s like I know it’s there but it’s just reflex so I kind of don’t know that it’s there. You dig? It’s not even that I like these movies in a slutty-girl-wearing-an-angel-t-shirt irony kind of way either, I really do like these movies and I’ll defend the shit out of them any day of the week.

We need to know what’s bad to know what’s good right? A movie like Pee Wee’s Big Top is like The Joker and a movie like say, Schindler’s List is Batman. How would we know who Batman was if we didn’t have the Joker there to keep him in check? Shitty movies keep good movies in check, otherwise we might get a Chancellor Palpatine style guerilla attack from over-blown, shit slathered “good movies” (notice how Hollywood will copy the hell out of shitty movies, but theres only one Brokeback Mountain?)

So now that I have the whiny bitch part of the argument taken care of, I’d like to take care of something else. Chuck Klosterman wrote a great article for Esquire about Snakes On A Plane where he bitches out Hollywood for turning “the blogosphere” into a virtual focus group, even going so far as reshooting scenes to fit what bloggers wanted. To an extent, he’s right. You can’t manufacture bad, bad just happens. Much like how you can’t manufacture good either. But if you try to manufacture good, then it turns out bad, but if you try to manufacture bad then it becomes down right embarrassing. Right now Snakes On A Plane is on thin ice, it can either be genuinely terrible (and if it is, it will be a treat, it’ll be like double reverse bad, some high level quantum physics electric boogloo style awful) or it will be fake bad, in which case it can be funny like Eight Legged Freaks (which worked because it took it’s self seriously) or it can be bad like Spy Hard (a spoof in an age where regular movies already do enough spoofing of themselves to render that piece of shit irrelevant.)

Anyways, what I ultimately have to say to Chuck Klosterman and the general public is: Who gives a shit? Hollywood has been slowly choking themselves to death for years and Snakes On A Plane will be another nail in the coffin. Let’s face, its like Titanic, we can either run around screaming our heads off and maybe come away with our lives or we can bust out the violin and rock this boat straight into the water. All I know is that come August 18^th, I’m gonna be kickin like Yo Yo Ma.

(thanks to Robyn for the link to Esquire Article)

Gross Misconduct: The Success Quotient and You

For as long as I’ve been nuts about movies, I’ve been made even more nuts by what exactly makes a movie a “success”, specifically when they talk about “all time highest grosses” or “record breaking opening weekends”. I think it’s pretty shady to talk about a movies “success” in terms of dollars.

Let me give you an example. Lets say now-a-days a movie ticket costs $10 (I know what you’re saying, “Where does he get his movie tickets for so cheap?”) and the record breaking weekend gross for the current hot movie is $150 million. About ten years ago, a movie ticket would have cost around $5. Let say ten years ago the then current hot movie’s record-breaking weekend gross was only $80 million. Now which one was more successful?

You might say that the movie from now was more successful because it made nearly twice the money that the movie from ten years ago made. This is fundamentally what Hollywood tells us. But do grosses really measure the success of a movie? Can the amount of money people pay for a ticket be the sole indicator for a movies success?

This is where I call shenanigans on Hollywood. I know Hollywood is all about making themselves look good. Whether it’s cosmetically or financially, they’re all jag-offs who for one reason or another can’t afford to not be “successful” (when referencing Hollywood style “success”, I like to use quotation marks. In a city where a man shoving his own fingers into his anus and affecting a funny voice can be granted a cartoon and a sequel with a bigger budget, the term “success” should be a lot more relative than it is.)

Think about this: If 20 people pay 10 dollars to see a movie, this movie made 200 dollars. What if 40 people paid 5 dollars to see a movie, this movie would also make 200 dollars. Let me ask you again, which movie is more successful? I’ve long been more interested in how many people saw your movie, not how much money they paid to see it.

Let me put this in a historical context. In 2005, the average movie ticket cost $6.41. The top domestic grosser for that year was Revenge of The Sith which made $380.263 million in that year. So how do we find out how many tickets were sold for Revenge of The Sith? (Let’s assume that 1 ticket = 1 person, even though there are nutballs, me included, who see a movie at the theatres more than once) It’s simple, divide the domestic gross by the average ticket price and you get: 59,323,400.94 tickets sold. That’s a lot of tickets. That’s almost 1 quarter of the population of the United States.

Now lets go back 15 years. The top domestic grosser for 1990 was Home Alone, it made $285.761 million that year. Almost $100 million less than Revenge of The Sith. The average ticket price was $4.22. So how many tickets were sold? 67,715,876.78 tickets. That’s 8,392,475.84 more tickets than Revenge of The Sith. So which was more successful? Even though Home Alone grossed significantly less than Revenge of The Sith, it’s quite obvious that many more people saw it.

Now I’m not naïve enough to think that how many tickets sold should be the sole decider of a movies success. Unlike one-sighted Hollywood, I realize that there are quite a few other things to consider, but if they want to make this about money, lets make it about money:

One of the top grossers of 2005 was Chronicles of Narnia, it made $291.710 million. It made $65.556 million its opening weekend, it premiered on 3,616 screens. That’s an average of $18,130 per screen. So how many people saw it per screen. Lets divide the per screen gross by the average ticket price ($6.41): 2828.39 tickets sold per screen. Sounds like a lot, no?
Now let’s look at the total gross of Chronicles of Narnia, $291.710 million. The movie had a budget of $200 million (not including marketing). So the movie only made $91.710 million domestically. In Hollywood, a movie is considered a “success” simply because it made more than it’s budget back, in this case, they’re right. Chronicles of Narnia was definitely a financial success.

So how can we scientifically measure how successful a movie was? Obviously a movie with a high budget will be seen on more screens than a movie with a lower budget. This is also true for ticket sales, high budget (for the most part) means more tickets. If we want to get down and dirty mathematical about it, this is how I propose one would measure a movie’s success:

NOTE: We’re going to stick with domestic success. Ticket prices and screen counts overseas are too varied and that information isn’t as widely available as the information concerning the domestic box office.

Now lets calculate what I call the Success Quotient:
First we have to determine how much money a movie made, in other words, the profit made off of a movie. Take the Total Domestic Gross of the movie (DG) minus the budget of the movie (B, marketing budget won’t be included, some marketing costs are covered by other companies, there’s no way to figure out how much was spent by the studio, unless you worked for the studio). Now you’ll only be working with profit. Then take the average number of screens it was on per week. (Add each weekly screen count, divide by number of weeks in theatres to get AS). Now take DG-B and divide that total by AS, you’ll get how much money the movie made per screen it was showed during its entire run. Then divide that number by average ticket price for the year the movie premiered in (ATP) and you’ll get an idea of how many people saw your movie per screen. Let me display this mathematically:

(DG-B)/AS)
ATP

Sound good? Let use some real numbers. We’ll use Revenge of The Sith, a movie that’s been called “successful” and successful.

Domestic Gross: $380,263,000
Budget: $115,000,000
Screens By Week: (3661, 3663, 3650, 3322, 2923, 2371, 1759, 1355, 988, 667,
429, 359, 300, 307, 268, 213, 166, 99, 49, 38, 27)
Weeks: 22
Average Screens: 1267.33
Average Ticket Price: $6.41

(380,263,000 – 115,000,000)/1267.33
6.41

So why do all these numbers matter? Domestic gross is how much money was made off of a movie. Budget is how much the studio spent to make the movie. You need to subtract the budget from the domestic gross to find out how profitable the movie was. The more money a studio spends on a movie, the more money the movie will make (for the most part). So by using only the profit made from a movie we can get a look at how financially successful a movie is. Higher profit = more people saw your movie. If a movie grosses under budget then that can hardly be considered a success.

You need the average number of screens a movie was shown on because movies with higher budgets will be shown on more screens. We need to divide the profit of a movie by the average number of screens to determine how much money was made per screen. A big budget Hollywood movie will be on more screens and be in theatres longer than a small independent movie. Since more screens means more money, a per screen average is the simplest way to compare the financial successes of movies.

Dividing the per screen average by the average price of a ticket sold during the year of the movies release will get rid of the “financial success” angle that Hollywood loves to use. Like I mentioned earlier, the more money you charge for a ticket, the more money you’ll make. It’s not about how much, it’s about how many.

So what was the Success Quotient of Revenge of The Sith? 32,653.44.

That means that nearly 33,000 tickets were sold per screen. That’s about 41,382,684.12 tickets sold against the profit of the movie. That’s $265,263,005.18 of profit.

I understand that a lot more goes into how successful a movie will end up being. There’s international box office, DVD Sales, Rental Sales, TV Sales and all other kinds of revenues. But, for the most part, a movies theatrical success domestically is fairly indicative of its success in other arenas. If a movie does well here in theatres, chances are it will do well overseas and on DVD (once again, for the most part).

This also doesn’t say anything about the quality of the content of the movie, i.e. is it a good movie? This merely measures how many people saw the movie, not how many people liked it.

I’m going to start compiling a list of the Success Quotient of as many movies as I can, of varied “success”. I’d like to include plenty of big budget movies, but I also can’t wait to start calculating the success quotient of smaller films.

There’s all kinds of information out there regarding everything I’ve discussed, but not every movie ever made has this kind of information associated with it, so if you have a suggestion, keep it recent.

All information for this article was gathered from 3 sources:

Budget and Gross information from:
The Internet Movie Database

Lee’s Movie Info

Average Ticket Price Information from:
National Association of Theatre Owners

Walk for your lives!

Zombies have plodded across the silver screen in almost exactly the same way—slowly—for about as long as the modern zombie convention has existed. Here and there, a film would bend the rules—Return of the Living Dead, for instance, had a few pretty spry zombies—but for the most part, filmmakers piously followed the doctrines set down by zombie-film granddaddy George Romero.

In the past four years or so, however, a couple of filmmakers have taken the initiative and portrayed zombies that moved damn quickly—as fast or faster than survivors. The trend began in 2002 with Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and continued with Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. Granted, Danny Boyle would tell you his film isn’t a true zombie movie, since its “Infected” are living people with a disease. That may be so, but popular culture saw the film as an innovative take on the zombie genre. Dawn 2004’s runners wouldn’t have been possible if Danny hadn’t gone there first.

Now, this is only two zombie movies out of hundreds that have been made. Films have been released since then featuring good-old shambling revenants—Romero’s Land of the Dead, the loving British send-up Shaun of the Dead, and other, less notable films. Zombies in other media continue to shamble, like in Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide and its upcoming sequel, and Capcom’s recently-released Dead Rising (which, aside from having zombies, is completely different from that other Capcom franchise. Yes, I’m talking about Mega Man.)

So sprinting zombies hardly have a monopoly on the genre. They barely have a foothold. Even so, a lot of zombie enthusiasts are taking umbrage at these speedy corpses. George Romero understandably prefers his own shambling type, reasoning that rigor mortis would probably result in a slower zombie, though he has expressed his respect of Dawn 2004. Folks on message boards throughout the internet have been far less tactful. On the flip side, there are those who see running zombies as a welcome change from their slower brethren and the inevitable next step in the evolution of the zombie flick. What is so fundamental about a mere difference in speed that has people divided?

I’ve frequently said that the difference between the fast zombie and the slow zombie is the difference between terror and horror. The difference is subtle but important: “terror” is merely intense fear; “horror” is a combination of intense fear and revulsion.

Your casual horror fan will probably prefer the fast zombie. The fear it creates is much more visceral than its shambling counterpart. When something rushes at us with intent to feed, whether on screen or in real life, our limbic system initiates our bodies’ fight-or-flight response, pumping us full of adrenaline. It’s a similar feeling to the thrill we get from riding roller coasters. Unfortunately, it’s not very cerebral. It’s scary merely because it’s gonna eatcha.

The slow zombie, on the other hand, has a more cerebral effect. Its slow, shambling gait, clumsy movement, and vacant eyes are almost alien to us; we’re used to seeing human bodies imbued with intelligence and purposeful, or at least controlled, movement. Something human is clearly missing from slow zombies. The spark of life is gone. Even if we don’t grasp that at a conscious level, we realize it on a level higher than the primal instincts which give fast zombies their appeal. Fast zombies at least move like living things, even if the exposition tells us they have no pulse. Slow zombies move more like we would expect dead things to move if they were imbued with some monstrous animating force. In other words, slow zombies pull off the whole “dead” thing far more effectively.

Being more deadish makes slow zombies not only scary (still gonna eacha!) but repulsive. Death as a concept is anathema to thinking beings; as humans, we have a lot of psychological hang-ups about the phenomenon. Corpses make a lot of people really uncomfortable; moving corpses doubly so, since they blur a line we’d much rather have distinct. Now give one an appetite for living flesh, and you’ve got a recipe for true horror.

Slow zombies are clearly not as dangerous as their speedy counterparts. In countless flicks, the lone hero (or, frequently, heroine), having out-survived the other main characters, must make his or her way through a crowd of flesh-eaters in search of safety or help, often with little or nothing in the way of weapons. This would be impossible with fast zombies. But fast zombies, no matter how decomposed they might be, don’t invoke death as an abstract and they don’t effectively blur the line between cadaver and living creature. As a zombie fan, I can’t get enough of either. But as a sophisticated connoisseur of undeath, I’ll take horror over terror any Night, Dawn, or Day of the week.

TOP 7: Ways To Make The Dark Knight Better Than Batman Begins

It was announced last week that production on the sequel to Batman Begins, tentatively titled The Dark Knight, would begin this coming January. Along with the news that all major players from the first film would be returning (with the exception of those that died, and Katie Holmes), it was announced who had won the much-coveted role of The Joker.
Heath Ledger is officially signed on to take this role and let me tell you, I couldn’t be more excited. Until I saw Brothers Grimm and Brokeback Mountain I never would have pegged Ledger to be a legitimate actor. His performance in Brothers Grimm was innocent and understated; while in Brokeback Mountain he stole the show. The Joker will be an interesting role for him to take, one that’s vastly different than ANYTHING he’s ever done and as long as he doesn’t ape Jack Nicholson’s amusingly retarded interpretation of the character, I think he’ll be fantastic.
That said, Warner Bros. has an opportunity to make a movie that kicks even more ass than the first one. Batman Begins, to me, was near perfect. It had everything I’d ever wanted out of a Batman movie, nay, a Batman story. It was dark as hell yet still hopeful. It treated its material REALISTICALLY, which is more than I can say for Tim Burton and that other cunt.
Notice I said NEAR perfect, so that means there is still room for improvement and the following is a list of the top seven ways to make The Dark Knight as good as it can be:

1. Make It Darker; A Lot Darker: Batman Begins was dark not only figuratively, but literally as well, as Batman should be. The content of the story went to the dark and sticky parts of our psyche and explored more dysfunction than Superman, Spiderman or any other do-gooders ever would. With the Joker on board as the villain, you can go to places never seen in a superhero movie. I’m talking murderous rampages and elaborate pranks that always end up with someone dead. Just because this is a big budget Hollywood picture doesn’t mean you have to pull any punches. They didn’t with the first one, so why start now? Take into consideration the Alan Moore scribed Bat-tale, The Killing Joke. That’s how fucked up the Joker is.

2. NO KATIE HOLMES: The worst thing about Batman Begins was Katie Holmes, she stuck out like a sore thumb covered in day-glo orange feces. Having her acting along side some of the greatest and most consistently good actors of our time is a bit like Verne Troyer challenging Manute Bol to a slam-dunk contest. “Out of your league” doesn’t begin to describe it.

3. Love Interests Are Bullshit: Batman is, for the most part, a solitary guy with barely enough time to care about himself so why would he get involved with someone else? Between running a major corporation, being a millionaire playboy and gallivanting around town in a Halloween costume, the logistics of maintaining or even establishing a relationship just don’t make sense. When is he going to go on date? Before or after tying up bank robbers and jumping off of tall buildings? Batman chose to be Batman and he shouldn’t sacrifice that role for some hussy. I’m not saying there’s no room for a love interest in a Batman story, but just don’t toss someone in for the sake of having some T & A to throw onto the movie poster. If you absolutely have to have a love interest, do it well.

4. Introduce More Characters: Batman’s been in comics for the better part of a century now, he has, at last count, a jillion and one characters waiting to be brought to the fore front for movie glory. Talk about balls using Scarecrow and Ra’s Al Ghul as your villains for the first one, two characters that though popular, are in no way the selling points that The Joker, The Penguin or Mr. Freeze could be. Harvey Dent has GOT to be in this movie. Not necessarily as Two-Face, but introducing his character and having him get close to Bruce Wayne (i.e. Batman: The Animated Series) will make a great set-up for the third Bat-movie. Speaking of set-ups, why not introduce Selina Kyle, the woman that eventually becomes Catwoman, as well? Hey a lady! That means love interest. (Also an opportunity for Warner Bros. to redeem themselves after that Halle Berry fronted piece of shit.) It wouldn’t be a bad idea to throw in a reference to the Grayson’s as well.

5. Keep The Gadgetry to a Minimum: The fault of the previous incarnations of Batman was that they made Batman into a superhero version of James Bond, with all kinds of doohickeys and what-who-zits. The Batmobile should have some modifications it would only make sense to adapt it to Batman’s ever growing needs. But turning it into a missile? Or tricking it out with Neon hubcaps? Why don’t you just throw some fucking spinners on his 24’s and a plasma screen on the back while you’re at it? Honestly though, we don’t need a Bat-Credit Card or Bat-Shark Spray or any of that Bat-Bullshit. Batman will have what’s useful, and only that.

6. Batman is established: We’ve done year one, got that figured out. Lets pick up a couple years into it and now he has a reputation in Gotham that he has to maintain. Lets also figure that this reputation is beginning to make Batman a little jaded, he’s being more aggressive and starting to lose it a little a bit. The lines between Bruce Wayne and Batman are starting to become a lot more blurred. He needs something to bring him out of it; he’ll need something to remind him why he became Batman in the first place. Nobody is perfect, especially Bruce Wayne. No one can be expected to throw on a costume every night and fight the bad guys. It’s got to be physically and emotionally taxing. Show us that! Show us Batman going nuts! (Here’s a suggestion: Batman beats the piss out of the Joker and instead of letting Batman go through with it, the Joker snaps his own neck. Now everyone thinks Batman killed a guy. That’s how you end the movie, that’s how you set up the third one. The people of Gotham will be claiming “Why do we need Batman?” The third movie can answer that question. Not only that but it would be a fucking sweet reference to The Dark Knight Returns.)

7. No Bat-Nipples: This one is self explanatory.

NOTE: I completely understand that the movie is already written and my advice means little, if anything, to the powers that be in Hollywood. But the glorious thing about the Internet is that I bitch and complain all I want in a vain attempt at reaching out to those who are completely and utterly out of my grasp. So here it is, my call for attention you fuckers.