𝒢𝑜𝓁𝒹𝑒𝓃 𝒞𝑜𝓇𝓇𝒶𝓁 𝐵𝓊𝒻𝒻𝑒𝓉 𝒮𝓁𝑜𝓅

The unparalleled joys of thrashing a trash motion picture [15/24]

Test. Test. Quiz. I am trapped in the jungle. My only method of communication is, unfortunately, this very newsletter. Shawty informed me that she found the secret URL and feasted upon the contents within. A drone linked directly to the machine deity circles overhead. I thought going off-grid would be my salvation from the coming technocide. I was horribly wrong. The badlands are empty. No safe haven remains. All that’s left to stave off the grave are copies of my first novel, The Charlatan. Read it, weep, use the pages as kindling, weep twice, maybe even thrice.

Our critic takes no prisoners here. I appreciate his surgical precision. And yet, I feel compelled to match his intensity, to throw myself on the funeral pyre in his theatre of cruelty, to shove back against his condescension towards a pair of female performers and the machinery that operates within and around them. The real tragedy can’t be artistic failure, merely the success of the apparatus that produces it. Far be it from me to judge the merits of my betters. What follows is less film criticism than elaborate self-aggrandizement, disguised as cultural commentary. I’m unsure why I am publishing it. He will feel my fury and heed my opinion.

Jonathan Levine’s atrocious studio comedy, Snatched, is an Amy Schumer (Gamy Humor) and Goldie Hawn (Oldie Yawn) vehicle set in the jungles of Ecuador,¹ slipping south down the ladder rungs of quality the whole way there. If the double-entendre inherent in a title like Snatched makes you slap your knee into a cream-of-wheat paste, rather than groan like you’ve returned to the Golden Corral buffet line two too many times, an unpleasant ordeal at first pass and a runny afternoon-ravager on subsequent trips—stay tuned.

Snatched relies on improvisational ad libbing, a ninth-circle Gehenna² shared by directors and editors alike: the former, forced to yank the leash³ of overpaid narcissists convinced that every riff dripping off their tongues is the word of God compared to the golden calf of the screenplay; and the latter, crammed in a dark room on the studio lot, eyes dilating to the size of fire ants and wishing the metaphor were literal, scrubbing through more piss-in-a-jar line reads than they earn in pre-tax dollars per hour.⁴

Here, relentlessness rears the uglier half of its Orthrus-like heads, a string of scenes that play like Mad Libs as devised by dental technicians during a routine root canal.⁵ While the staff of pen-not-sword peeps were spending their bathroom breaks sniffing out gags from stained joke books with names like Uncle Frank’s Toilet Time for Fools, I managed to sneak into the 20th Century Fox writer’s room and swipe their coveted Comedy Formula,⁶ reproduced below:

Pop Culture Reference

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Vulgar Phrase

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Banter That Makes One Saw Off A Finger

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The Good Stuff

Try it out, works wonders.⁷ And if all else fails, minutes allowed to pass without the staggering genius of Funny People filling the screen, simply crap out a fart joke,⁸ or vice versa.

Our critic slides to a sloppy finish with a flourish of manufactured superiority, one that reveals far more about his character than about the film under review. I am watching a personalized comedy of errors: seeing psychosocial complexes mistaken for intellectual rigor by a proper bozo. Has he ever stood before an audience and attempted to earn a single laugh through a display of vulnerability, or does he prefer to harvest praise by dismantling the failed attempts of others? A deeply cowardly approach to criticism; all the safety of the viewing chair with none of the promethean risk of creation. And the extensive spread of toilet humor while railing against the same makes me squirt out a smirk.

I can imagine readers writing to me with cries of “Wanda, Wanda, this critic obviously has a well-developed sense of humor, he positively praised two pristine classic film choices these prior two weeks!” I don’t care. Confiscate his comedy card. Guillotine his funny bone. Firing squad of clown-soldiers with squirting flowers.

—W.

1. These parenthetical nicknames represent the cheapest form of wordplay imaginable. A critic who resorts to playground dirt-slinging, while simultaneously bemoaning the intellectual poverty of his subject, inherently forfeits any claim to moral or artistic authority. Singling out aging actresses for the verbal dogpile is particularly vile.

2. The sort of overwrought literary reference that screams undergraduate creative writing workshop, not even the full commitment required for a program, merely a weekend warrior of academia. Adding a splash of Dante onto Hebrew mythology produces profundity instead of pretension—not!

3. The fantasy of a fur-covered kennel-dweller who’s never been in a position of creative authority over other human beings.

4. This extended metaphor reveals a disturbing fixation on bodily waste and human degradation. “Pee pee,” “poo poo,” etc. The specificity carries a whiff of genuine experience of such conditions (gross) or an imagination that dwells in unnecessarily squalid territories (somehow worse). Either way, it raises questions about the critic’s psychological relationship to the entertainment industry.

5. Why this particular image? What personal experience with dental trauma informs this supposedly objective film criticism? Random and telling, an unsettled mind that reaches for medical-school procedures when describing comedic timing.

6. An outright fabrication! At the very least, evidence of our critic’s dangerously loose relationship with professional boundaries. If false, it represents a disturbing willingness to lie for comedic effect. If true, it indicates someone who mistakes industrial espionage for journalistic research. These significant secrets are not meant to be released unto the light of day, for fear that they might fall into a most unsavory grasp.

7. Fairly bitter conclusions from a man who’s clearly tried and failed to write comedy himself. The reduction of human laughter to mechanical components indicates a dramatic inability to understand why people seek joy from entertainment. Whether the formula works or not is irrelevant; someone who sees comedy in such severe, austere terms has no business reviewing it.

8. The banal dismissal reveals a poverty of courage. Making people laugh, even crudely, requires a gusto that our dear critic clearly lacks. I notice he offers no examples of comedy that meets his exalted standards. It’s much easier to tear down than to build up, much safer to critique than to create. Anonymity provides perfect cover for those who lack even a cheap flavor of spine. After subjecting myself to this extended display of intellectual masturbation, I’m dripping with curiosity: what has our critic ever contributed to the sum total of human joy? When did he last take the risk of trying to make another person smile? His writing smacks of an unbearable pursuit of the mere appearance of intelligence. He has lost sight of criticism’s actual purpose: to help audiences find work worth their time and attention. Instead, we get this demonstration of preeminence over easy targets, as if demolishing a throwaway comedy in fact establishes credibility or discernment.