Are We Really the Idiots They Say We Are?
I just suffered through one of the worst movies I have seen in a long time. I wasn’t planning on writing anything about it; I was just going to let it pass and hide my shame for even having voluntarily seen the film because I should have known better. However the filmmakers appear to have a huge marketing budget that they’re using to push the damn movie relentlessly through posters at every bus stop and an ad during every commercial break. The movie is “Gamer,” and being one myself, it got me thinking about what the film says about this very unique and diverse classification of people.
Before “Gamer” I had never seen any other films by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor who’d both written and directed it and I had no idea that they already had a reputation, of sorts. Their previous movies are Crank, and Crank: High Voltage which I’ve heard many describe simply as “hectic.” (They are also currently working on Crank 3, said to be in 3D, and finishing up Jonah Hex, which IMDb has explained like this: “In the Wild West, a scarred bounty hunter tracks a voodoo practitioner bent on liberating the South by raising an army of the undead.”)
In the special features of the “Gamer” DVD they themselves said, “Watching [our movies] is like audience torture. We were talking about this the other day, like, not only do we torture our characters [...] but we torture our audience. It’s like hitting them over the head with a ball pein hammer for 90 minutes.”
It sounds like they are both very committed artists of the cinema. Intellectually, I am guessing they must be real geniuses too. Taylor and Neveldine, again from the “Gamer” DVD’s special features:
“I think, at times, they wanted us to pull a lot of the creepy, weird, wild stuff that we do out of that -”
“- and we battled and we kept as much as we could in.”
“And that, at the end of the day, is the big difference between making a cheap movie and an expensive movie. …Is the kind of, like, how far can you push it? How far can you go? You want it to be more accessible, for a bigger audience.”
Of course while they say this the “making of” featurette editor cuts to some behind-the-scenes footage from one of the film’s sets. In the footage you see an actor asking the camera and production crew for some direction, all while he’s wearing skin-tight white spandex from head to toe and doing pelvic thrusts into another guy suspended from the ceiling in a harness.
So just to make sure I have this straight you two – you’re saying the difference between a cheap movie and an expensive one is how much money you spend on it, and on how great of a job you do in making it creepy, weird, and wild? And further, loading it up with that kind of stuff and pushing cultural boundaries also just happens to be how you make a film more accessible and appeal to a bigger audience?
Golly, that’s so difficult to wrap my mind around that it just has to be smart!
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