FUN WITH CURMUDGEONRY

(Ed. Note: Today's grouchiness brought to you by the NYPD, who kicked in the front door of the author's building this morning!)

The passing of Ronnie James Dio led to a bit of cogitation. I've never really liked metal—the closest I get is Zeppelin (who weren't really metal) or Guns 'n' Roses (who weren't either)—but it's always seemed like everyone else in the world does. This is why I'm reluctant to say “metal sucks” even though I think and feel it all the time.

Metal is not the only thing I don't get (by any means). Horror movies, wrestling, salad dressing, the nobility of the underdog . . . the world is full of things that make me scratch my head, which subsequently causes other people to scratch their heads at me (“Why the fuck don't you put dressing on your salad? Why the fuck do you root for the Yankees? What the fuck do you mean you think of Roddy Piper as the guy from They Live? Are you fucking kidding me, you never saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre until you were 31?”)

This prologue should cushion the shock that will result from the admission that there are a few movies out there that everyone loves that I not only don't get but occasionally kind of despise. If you're a fan of any of the following, I ask only this: do not leave comments asking me to watch any of these fucking movies again.

Every movie Christopher Guest has made since The Princess Bride

One of the biggest mistakes I ever made in my life, outstripping even my failure to realize that hot Filipina chick in high school wanted me to ask her out, was watching Waiting For Guffman. Holy fucking shit that movie is mean-spirited, unfunny, and truly ugly in its judgment of ordinary, guileless dreamers. Someone once argued that my take on Waiting For Guffman was flawed because Christopher Guest's character comes off like a dipshit too, but he's being judged just as unfairly, with just as much unearned superiority, as any of the suburbanites. These poor fuckers are guilty only of wanting to put on a play. Oh, you mean they're not brilliant actors? SCANDAL! (The My Dinner With Andre lunchbox, an admittedly genius touch, cannot save this monstrosity.)

Ever since, Christopher Guest and his repertory company have been remaking the same movie: a mockumentary—with emphasis on the “mock”—about some subgenre of people Guest finds ridiculous, be it dog show owners, folk singers, Oscar aspirants. None of them are funny. They've gotten a little less mean-spirited over time (not difficult to do, Guffman was fucking hateful) but no funnier. How the hell was this guy responsible for Spinal Tap?

The Shawshank Redemption (1994) dir. Frank Darabont

This one I don't hate. I just don't love it. I have a theory that people who've never seen any prison movies see Shawshank and go “wow, that was fucking great, I've never seen anything like that before!” and that this is responsible for its bizarre reputation as one of the best American movies of the 1990s. Morgan Freeman is great in this because he's Morgan Freeman, but there's nothing at all to his character except the archetype of the wizened old lifer. Tim Robbins has his moments in this, but his character is so inscrutably aloof that it's hard to see why anyone gives a shit about him.

Bob Gunton is awesome as the warden, but the thing about having seen a lot of prison movies is that you come to realize after a while that the warden is always awesome in a prison movie (no further proof needed than Joan Allen being so terrific in the Death Race remake; when you can put the words “terrific” and “Death Race remake” in the same sentence, larger metaphysical forces are at work), if it's any good at all. The warden is a big scenery-chewing part, because he's always the bad guy. This is not to slight Bob Gunton. Bob Gunton fucking rules, and he fucking rules very very hard. But I still like him better in Demolition Man and on Greg The Bunny and 24.

The Shawshank Redemption is a well-executed by-the-numbers prison movie, but when it wasn't even one of the five best movies (and barely even one of the ten best) of 1994, let's ease up a bit on the all-time classic foolishness.

Moulin Rouge! (2001) dir. Baz Luhrmann

I have a theory about how Baz Luhrmann came to exist: it involves eugenics, the Necronomicon, and an attempt to plant Andrew Lloyd Webber's brain in Michael Bay's body gone horribly awry. As to why he exists, I couldn't tell you. He's yet to make a watchable movie, and the way he carried on in the press is insufferable at best.

Moulin Rouge! doesn't really belong on this list, since a lot of people don't like it. But the fact that anyone does is an outrage, especially any of those people have ever claimed to actually like movies or music.

Casino (1995) dir. Martin Scorsese

This one hurts. I love Mr. Scorsese. His best pictures are some of the most exciting, deliriously alive works in the history of cinema. But when he fucks up, he fucks up big. Casino might be his biggest fuckup, even more so than the endlessly frustrating Gangs of New York or the wrist-slasher that was New York, New York. Let me count the ways:

(1) A three-hour running time infers a story that takes three hours to tell. Casino is basically a three-character chamber drama about Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Sharon Stone. That warrants literally half the running time.
(2) The amount of rote repetition of not only been-there-done-that move Vegas cliches but also whole scenes concerning the dissolution of De Niro and Sharon Stone's relationship is staggering. A good hour could have been trimmed off the picture just by losing the third through twelfth times Sharon Stone threatens to leave De Niro.
(3) NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS FOR THE ENTIRE FUCKING MOVIE.
(4) Everybody in the movie seems to have been given about a pound of coke and the acting note “Go as over-the-top as you can.” This is disastrous in a movie with James Woods in it.
(5) When we're shown that Robert De Niro's car blowing up didn't actually kill him, it's a horrible disappointment. If it's not Cape Fear or Bang The Drum Slowly, you should not be rooting for Robert De Niro to die. Something has gone very wrong if you are.

Fortunately, De Niro was in a good three-hour crime movie that came out in 1995. And Scorsese has since redeemed himself. But I swear, I never want to hear one more fucking person claim that Casino is one of Scorsese's best movies.

John Hughes' Shermer, IL cycle

I'll be kind, in light of Mr. Hughes' premature passing last year. He did write the
script to one of my favorite comedies, National Lampoon's Vacation. I liked Uncle Buck. I liked the first Home Alone. But I have major moral issues with his teen angst pictures. These issues often don't hold up to arguments with John Hughes fans, so I won't embarrass myself again by cataloging them. But even if I'm a lousy rhetorician sometimes, I still cannot endorse picking Andrew McCarthy over Jon Cryer, Anthony Michael Hall getting stuck writing the essay while everyone else goes off to make out, or Alan Ruck destroying his father's car instead of just going to his room, fapping to Mia Sara, and taking a nap. (Though if #4 on this list was actually the case, I would do a 180 and wholeheartedly support Ferris Bueller as one of the best movies ever made).

Eraserhead (1978) dir. David Lynch

And last, but not least, the one that's probably going to piss more of you off than any of the previous ones put together. Yes, that's right, Eraserhead can eat a dick. Granted, David Lynch comes from such a different place than me aesthetically, philosophically, and intellectually that we might as well be two different species, so of course I'm not going to get him 100%, but I like Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Dr. However, I could not find any way to get into Eraserhead. I don't know why it's not a short. I have no idea why it (and not, say, Dark Star) is the ur-Cult Movie. I suppose I never will. Hell, when I saw Eraserhead the first time and was so stoned that I slept through about an hour of it, when I woke up, a devoted fan of the movie told me I didn't miss anything. I rest my case.

Happy Monday folks! Leave hate mail and/or your own things you hate that everyone
else loves in the comments!