The 5 types of movies I dislike the most

1. Saturday Night Live Spin-off comedies

Saturday Night Live is not funny. Saturday Night Live is extremely stupid. People laugh at SNL skits because they smoke dope and drink beer on Saturday Nights. They may also be watching the show after sex, which means that they are in a good mood. In short people laugh at this 'humor' because they are fucked up, not because the comedy is good.

The humor itself is template, stock, off the shelf, re-heated in the microwave, cliche, obvious, non-insightful rubbish. Often it is extremely stupid implementations if cliche & rehash jokes about political figures or events. By no means and under no circumstances does this humor push the envelope. It is completely rule-bound, and governed by the laws of political correctness as handed down by University Professors across the nation.

The foremost practitioner of this crap is Will Ferrel. I avoid his intensely stupid movies like the plague.

2. The Chick Flick

Fried Green Tomatoes, Steel Magnolias, Hope Floats, The Notebook, The Wedding Date, The Wedding Planner, Bride Wars, Serendipity, Hannah and Her Sisters, Micky Blue Eyes, Enchanted, Must Love Dogs, etc.

Did you know that--by Federal law--a movie cannot contain references to brides, weddings, grooms, and dates without officially being a chick flick... under penalty of false advertisement? Chicks like movies that are steeped in dialog. They want dialog in which characters don't decide what is going to happen. Things just happen, and the characters talk about how the feel about it. They also like movies where the guy and girl instantly know that they are going to have sex. The subsequently spend 95% of the movie talking about it, and 5% of the movie doing it... Behind closed doors.

These are chick flicks. Does that sound good to you?

3. JAFECS -- Just Another Fucking English Class Story

These movies include everything and anything written by Jane Austin or including Helena Bonham Carter in it. Essentially, you have a story in which a lower class female marries-up into a higher class family. Much drama ensues. Love usually conquers all. Dady is rich. Mama is good looking. Everybody is finally happy by the end... even if Junior missed his chance to marry a rich woman. Even 65 year old women find these films charming.

There are other forms of JAFECS which follow Marxist lines of social analysis. These are usually more interesting, but far more toxic, as some people think they actually have a strong bearing on reality.

4. Woody Allen Movies

Even proponents of Wood Allen admit that he has 3 basic templates for movies. He keeps making the same 3 films over and over again. Detractors of Woody Allen, like me, will tell you he has 1 template for a movie, and he keeps making the same film over and over again. Every movie Woody Allen has ever made has been a remix of Manhattan and Annie Hall. He is truly a one-string guitarist, sitting in the corner strumming 1 note all day long.

Some New York wise guy should have done the job on him by now.

5. The prestige picture

Honestly, the things the Motion Picture Academy thinks are cool bother me to no end. The things they regard as interesting, I do not regard as interesting. The things they regard as important, I do not regard as important. The things they think are artistic, I regard as rubbish. The strange bandwagons that get rolling in Hollywood are incomprehensible at best. I can dispute most of the best picture nominees and winners for the past 10 years. The last time I totally agreed with a best picture winner, it was 1995 and Braveheart won it all.

Ain't Nobody Gonna Say Hooray for Hollywood this year.

The Motion Picture Academy has completely lost touch with the sensibilities of the common man, and they have become totally locked away in a pseudo-artistic Ivory Tower. The is a dangerous cleavage (and I am not talking about the fake tits on the red carpet) which is damaging the so-called Female Super Bowl. The Oscar broadcast is often called the Female Super Bowl because--at least in times past--the ratings were gianormous and the price of advertising during the broadcast was ungodly.

Now I am looking at the list of highly nominated films, and I see the weakest field I have ever seen. Hardly an entertaining or memorable movie in the lot of them. This field sucks.

This former institution is diminishing rapidly, and it is all because of one thing: The Academy has gotten locked in an artistic ivory tower, and they have lost touch with the people. So why is this true?

• One Oscar boss observed "This ain't the people's choice awards." He is certainly right about that... and it's not a good thing.
  
• There is now a describable type of film that can be nominated for and win an Oscar. These films are usually off-beat and on bizarre subjects. Frequently, they challenge common morality. The are loosely typed as "Prestige Pictures".
• Prestige Pictures suck: They are almost never entertaining. They usually don't make money. Rubbish like American Beauty, The English Patient, Million Dollar Baby and Crash are already well forgotten. I never liked any of these films in the first place, and I would not have voted for them.
  
• The big studios aren't supporting prestige pictures anymore: The hardened pragmatist inside the 5 major studios wonders why the firm wastes big money on movies that win Oscar gold but don't entertain or make money. They aren't even remembered well in retrospect. The result is that movies like The Wrestler, and Milk have been put out in extremely limited release. The studios know full well that these movies won't make money, even if they win the gold. The consequence is that very few people have seen these highly nominated films, and very few ever will.
  
• You can't predict victory: Odd ball movies frequently walk off with the title. How about last year's winner No Country for Old Men? That was an odd victory. A studio in financial trouble like Paramount may intentionally engineer a film like Benjamin Button with the objective of winning Oscar gold, but this is no recipe for making money or getting out of financial trouble. Further, Paramount is not guaranteed to win an Oscar this weekend. It could well be Slumdog Millionaire.
  
• When you nominate Milk instead of Wall-e, you have committed both an artistic and a marketing blunder. Milk has less than 2% of the artistic merit of Wall-e, and it has 1.0e-23% of it's long-term commercial value in terms of residual income. Wall-e will be popular for the next 50 to 75 years. Milk will be totally forgotten in the next 2 or 3 weeks.
• On the 2/20/2009 edition of All Things Considered, NPR's evening news broadcast, film critic Bob Mudello openly declared that if the Academy wants to reverse the negative slide in Oscar ratings, they are going to have to start nominating movies like Wall-e and the Dark Knight. You can listen to that audio HERE. Nominating these films would drastically increase the number of people who had seen one of the nominated films, and give the people a sense that they have a dog in this fight to cheer for.
• Speaking of not seeing any of the Oscar nominated films. MarketWatch.com printed a very nice piece in which they showed that the films nominated for Best Picture have the lowest combined box office total in the 81 year history of the Oscars. This is the pure effect Ivory Tower made manifest in dollars and cents. People don't like the shit that has been nominated. They won't pay money to see it, regardless of what the critics and the Academy says. You can read that story HERE.
  

So what have we learned?

1. Prestige pictures suck
2. The studios know it.
3. The people won't buy tickets for that crap.
4. The studios won't market that crap
5. The Academy nominates these crappy pseudo artistic, pseudo important, pseudo intelectual films and gives them the gold
6. Ergo the rating of the Female Super Bowl are sliding.
7. A lot of women are just going to watch for the fashion show.