---Changing the water of the Nile to blood (fucking trippy, see The Shining for proof)
---Egypt shall teem with frogs (the French are an acquired taste . . .)
---All the dust shall become lice (with all the sand in Egypt, that's even worse than it sounds)
---Swarms of flies (been to a barbecue lately? That shit sucks)
---All the livestock will die (God's tough enough to deal with them becoming vegans)
---Festering boils (yuck)
---One motherfucker of a hailstorm (self-explanatory)
---Locusts (one thing I really dig about Old Testament God, He knew when to stick it in and break it off; the flies should have been bad enough, but sometimes you gotta remind motherfuckers who's God)
---Darkness (sounds kind of all right, especially to nocturnal types like me, til I remember how bad my uncle flipped out the winter he spent in Stockholm when the sun never came out)
---The slaughter of the first-born (“Too Jewish.” ---Hedley Lamarr)
But one thing that, without any of this other shit being necessary, would have brought the Pharaoh to his knees would have been to set loose some fanboys to post thirty times a day on Pharaoh's message board. Holy shit fanboys are fucking annoying.
Now, I'm a nerd myself. Let's be perfectly clear, I am not putting all of nerdity on blast. What I'm talking about is the kind of shithead who offers the following type of complaint following an extremely generous review of a comic-book FX movie:
“When are you planning to hire someone to review these kind of movies who actually likes these kind of movies?”
and offers the suggestion
“[Hire] someone who's enthused about the films in question.”
Now, full disclosure necessitates the concession that the author of the above quotes does offer an articulately composed defense of this position, and those quotes are taken out of context. However, the sentiment is fucking odious. Not only does the idea of a critic paid to gush indiscriminately about big-budget FX pictures do nothing but serve the interests of the evil-white-guy-run multinationals who in turn run the studios (which contradicts the whole point of big-budget FX pictures, which is to have men in armored suits keep the world safe from evil white guys), the whole fucking point of being a critic is to discriminate.
Fanboys cannot handle the idea of their chosen object of fandom being reviewed by anyone other than a fanboy. Movies are not the only medium where this happens—Old Testament God help any music critic who dares to admit s/he still likes The Bends and OK Computer best when reviewing a new Radiohead album—but the movie bitching is the most obnoxious, considering that the movies the fanboys get all bent out of shape over are so insubstantial.
The bile vented over Ang Lee's Hulk movie, for example (which I liked, but me and my buddy saw it smashed out of our minds on tequila with our feet up on the railing at the Ziegfield, and when you have that much style, my friends, the petty concerns of mortals are irrelevant) and the nuclear Internet wars over whether the Louis Leterrier one (which I haven't seen) was better really pissed me off. Not only because of the nastiness involved, but because the fanboys would even turn on critics who liked their favored version for not liking it for the right reasons. Or for mentioning Lou Ferrigno. I hate to break it to all them, but the Hulk comics fucking suck. The TV show had the same cultural merit as The Rockford Files, only if James Garner was green and less articulate. Sure, I'm all for someone trying to make a good movie out of that bullshit, but the movie needs to be judged as a movie, not by whether the director committed blasphemy by using the Frank Miller origin story rather than the Jack Kirby origin story (I honestly don't care whether there's any real comic that both of them wrote for).
Another point regarding summer action movies with a shit-ton of CGI. When a critic calls out an action movie for having shitty action scenes, that's not an automatic indicator that the critic doesn't like action movies. Let's take me for an example, since this is my blog and I know more about action movies than the Pharaoh knew about getting fucked in the ass by God. When I see, say, Transformers, and I say, say, “These action sequences suck hammerhead shark dick,” I'm not saying this as some tweedy shithead who can't handle anything more violent than the introspection in a Bergman picture. I'm saying this as a guy who knows what the fuck good action is. It's the car chase in The French Connection. It's Jet Li fighting Fujita. It's Daniel Craig chasing the parkour guy in Madagascar. Hell, just so you know I'm not pissing on CGI, it's Neo fighting a hundred Smiths. The action scenes in Michael Bay movies suck because he cuts so fucking much you can't see what the hell's going on anyway, and they're so goddamn long, and in Transformers they're between these big, generic robots where you can't even tell who the good guys and who the bad guys are. They are thus shit. And I'm the target audience for Transformers, I had all the toys when I was a kid, I read the comics, I would have been more than happy to enjoy a Transformers movie. But, ya know, it's gotta make sense as a movie. Or, at the very least, you should know who the good guys and bad guys are, since I know Michael Bay wasn't making a philosophical statement about moral ambiguity (though if he was that would be some delicious trolling).
Getting back to Iron Man, where this all started, I saw the first movie and liked it, because the idea of Robert Downey, Jr. headlining that kind of movie was bizarrely hilarious before you saw Iron Man and made perfect sense afterward (by which I mean, of course, that he was really good). Some of the effects were kind of cool. But the action scenes were the least interesting thing in the movie. Again, not because I have something against action movies—bitch please—but because they weren't interesting. CGI robots fighting against each other are fucking stupid. In order for an action scene to be interesting, the hero needs to be kind of an underdog. Take Jet fighting Fujita again, Fist of Legend. Jet's a little guy. Fujita's six foot plus. Jet's whole trip is that he's graceful and his moves are breathtaking (though he can do one-armed pushups and other tough guy stuff) whereas Fujita can hammer nails through boards with his hands, break dude's necks with his pinkie, and is completely, utterly, totally invulnerable to pain. How does Jet beat him? By shooting lasers out of his fucking hands? Nope, by listening to what Funakochi told him: “If you learn to adapt, you'll always be invincible.” Jet adopts Fujita's style, learns his self-mind-fuck to nullify the pain, and eventually cuts Fujita's head off with a sword that he's swinging with his belt. Badass? Badass. Now take Iron Man as a counterexample. He's already invulnerable, to the extent where the way they had to make him an underdog in the climax (of the first movie) was by making the power on his suit low for some contrived, retarded reason. Which, ya know, doesn't make the movie not good, but in order for a climactic battle to have any weight, the adversary needs to be more badass. Iron Man's too fucking awesome for anyone to put up a good third act fight, which, hey, if you're going to have a problem, your protagonist being too cool is a good one to have, but nonetheless, it's a debit for an action movie.
Anyway, back to the point. The only reason to care about fanboys is that now that the movie business has evolved to the point where their bread and butter is fanboy-driven franchises, suddenly a bunch of poorly socialized obsessives are dictating the thrust of the modern cinematic narrative. Now, I say this as a poorly socialized obsessive. But even though the summer is entirely devoted to making fanboys happy, the motherfuckers still aren't satisfied. Any critic writing a review of a comic book movie needs to have read every issue of that comic thirty times and hold the exact same set of opinions on it as the fanboy. Even if those criteria are met, some other fanboy, in a rival camp with a different set of opinions, is going to declare that critic's opinion worthless. This is why the Internet sucks.
Now, being a nerd with a blog who's in the process of being very cranky about movies, I'd be a gigantic hypocrite except for one thing: what I'm pissing and moaning about is that I want there to be variety out there. Sure, the odd comic-book FX picture is nice. The Dark Knight was great, the first couple Spider-Man pictures were fun. But I want choices. What the fuck's wrong with putting out something like Lawrence of Arabia as a summer blockbuster? Or The French Connection? Or an SF picture with ideas, rather than just “Hey, there's some aliens! Hey, let's blow 'em up!” (granted, Inception, if it delivers, could satisfy this particular desire). Why the fuck do we have to wait til December to get intelligent pictures, and why the fuck do all of those have to be so fucking depressing?
But, no matter what kind of pictures there are coming out, we need to get off the critics' balls. We need to remember that no matter how many hardcore devoted fanboys there are out there, civilians are where the money's made in this business, and they need to know whether it's a good movie, and insider lingo alienates civilians. Fanboy circle jerks are better kept to blogs no one reads.
Wait, what . . .?
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