| Haters
always bag on a movie based on their own preconceived relationship
with the buzz surrounding it, as if the movie, even while
they watch it, exists in name and small-talk only. There are
two kinds of haters: Bandwagon haters and Anti-haters. Bandwagon
haters hate what everybody else hates (e.g. Battlefield
Earth, Catwoman, Alexander), whereas
Anti-haters hate what everybody else loves (e.g. Forest
Gump, Lord of the Rings, Titanic).[1]
So that when they go to the movies it’s not a matter
of suspending their disbelief so much as their belief that
what they’re about to see is straight fucking poops.
Sometimes haters are right (The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen was a big boring STINK) and sometimes haters
are wrong (Crossroads starring Britney Spears ain’t
that good, but it ain’t that bad either); in either
case, it has nothing to do with a genuine and visceral reaction
to the movie and everything to do with a studied reaction
to their own watching of the movie in relation to everybody
else watching.
Which
brings me to Gigli. Score 1 for the Bandwagon haters.
Director Martin Brest confounds even the most blank-slated
non-hater with this totally inept dramedy as catastrophic
embarrassment. Brest directed the Oscar®-winning (Best
Actor for ham-on-legs Al Pacino) Scent of a Woman,
and you can tell he thinks this is his As Good as It Gets:
but in place of a Grump (Jack Nicholson), a Bore (Helen Hunt),
and a Fag (Greg Kinnear), we get a Pig (Ben Affleck), a Dyke
(J.Lo) and a Retard (Justin Bartha). With crass monologues
to tickle our wit and a family proxy to warm our hearts, how
could this total piece of shit go wrong? That it’s all
set to the aimless rhythms of my least favorite kind of soundtrack
music (the post-Tarantino hip wacky crime jazz of the Get
Shortys of the world) is the least of its problems, and
there’s no one to blame but writer/director/producer
Brest. Well except Affleck. And J.Lo. And the Fake Retard.
We watched this movie all the way through in fastforward and
rewind at least 3 times trying to find the scene in which
the Retard gangsta-raps so we could show the uninitiated just
how offensive tonal ineptitude could be. What we showed them
instead was a nonlinear appreciation for whatever it was they
were doing before they made the mistake of walking through
our door. I swear to God that scene exists, but I have empirical
confirmation that the scene in which Affleck makes womanly
gasm faces as he gets fucked by an inexplicably clothed J.Lo
is in fact extant; as are the multiple (3? 5?) endless monologues
during which J.Lo fails at being smart and/or tough with such
thoroughness she even fails at failure; as is the Fake Retard,
parading about in the background with a bucket of heartstrings
and a hard-on for disembodied Aussie voices and the mediated
bodies of Baywatch. Frequent movie companion Harris (though
we watched this independently of each other) pointed out that
the movie looks like the obviously fake movies that people
on television watch, as if the implicit message of this movie
is that we’re all television actors watching fake movies
for the benefit of some other, extra-televisual audience that
knows better. Or doesn’t know better, tuning in as we
age from prime time into syndication, contextualizing the
intimate moments of their lives with “It’s like
that life episode when they say it’s like that Simpsons
episode, when Homer — ” or “This totally
reminds me of when it reminds life of when George from Seinfeld…”
I guess even I can be a hater sometimes.
_________________________
[1]
This is of course excluding the Anti-anti haters, who are
like Bandwagon Haters but with an extra dimension of compensatory
hate, as well as the infinite regression of variants thereof
(anti-anti-anti haters, etc.); to me they’re all just
permutations of the Bandwagoners and Antis. As are Inverse-haters
(haters in love clothing), since their love is really a compensatory
hate for the hate they perceive as emanating from everyone
else toward the movie they then claim to love. Opinions
defined in relation to the hater lexicon and therefore
within the hater paradigm such as 'It's so bad it's good'
and 'guilty pleasure' are dead give-aways that an inverse-hater
is in your midst. Unless these are said in all sincerity,
though personally i think 'guilty pleasure' is a misdiagnosis
of 'taking pleasure in guilt,' which seems like a semantic
nit-pick until you really think about it. |