Have you seen the previews for the latest shoot 'em up muscle bikini explosion movie?
Ain't it tempting? I think I'll have to wait for the video version to come out on that one.
Even better, I'll go rent one of the other myriad videos with the same plot and characters.
I am so bored of being bombarded with trash where you can tell what the whole movie is
like from a thirty-second clip, though they sometimes conveniently leave out the plot twist
near the end. Not that it's hard to guess that either, of course, since they only give you
a few choices in this type of multi-million dollar garbage. First, the good guy wins, and
he always get the scantily (or intermittently) clad chica bella. Also, he almost always
gets forced to kill the bad guys in the line of duty. Despite his best efforts to keep the
villain alive and bring him to legal justice, he is forced by circumstances to kill or be
killed, and the choice then is obvious. Even if there IS a twist at the end, how surprised
could you be if you were paying any attention at all?
Since the whole plot and character archetypes can be synopsized in the length of a
preview, why would we bother watching the whole thing, we've seen it all before. If I'm
gonna pay $7.50 to watch a 75 minute movie, I expect not only to be entertained, but provoked,
instigated, and prodded to think. Unfortunately, the average American moviegoer must have
something else in mind. The average American moviemaker must think that people WANT to see
trash, or they wouldn't spend so much money making it.
On the same note, the average television sitcom is a horrible waste of film as well. How
many times I have heard my roommate or neighbor (sitting docilely in front of the TV screen
with eyes propped open and tongue hanging out) leaning on the channel-up button because there's
nothing good to watch. Eventually he gives up and settles down to the nice quiet mediocrity
of Friends or Erkel, or if the gods ares really in a bad mood, he'll settle on Singled Out and
send all the sentient life screaming out of the building. These well-paid, highly-trained
morons are popular? When did stupidity get so charming? For contrast, I call to the stand
one of the previous decades' standards of comic visual entertainment: Monty Python's Flying
Circus, a group of smart people doing clever, and stupid, things and getting laughed at.
Today's TV culture (including but not limited to the MTV not-quite-counter culture, the Ricki
Lake subculture, and the friends of Friends) seems to be comprised of stupid people doing
stupid things and getting laughed at. If this is what the "non-existent" gestalt TheyTM want
you to think is entertaining, something has gone very wrong....Did you ever wonder they call
television shows Programming? It was an accidental burst of honesty. TheyTM
program You, but you're not supposed to know.
Ironically enough, society deems it to be entertainment. Forget thinking. Why bother
when you can watch a show where everything is all better in the end, or a movie that allows
you to be unreal and see things that you thought were never possible, without any effort on
your part. Screw books and imaginations. All the kids these days just have the computer
read it to them with animation and music (no parental figures required since the kids can
handle the computers better anyway). Anything that actually makes people think is simply
labeled as "incomprehensible art" and thrown aside by the majority.
People don't like to think. Simple as that. It's easier to be stupid. The true
"American Dream" is to exist as an abysmally numb blob who subsists, mesmerized by the
all the pretty colors and catchy slogans. This dream is the dream of the common sheep
that make up such a large segment of our society. ("I'm voting for this moron candidate
cuz the rest of the elephants in my herd are." kind of people, you know the type?)
The worst part? It's a vicious cycle. The less people discriminate between good and
bad when they watch movies and television, the less the producers will care if what they
show is worth watching, and the quality decreases. But since so few of the viewers care
what they see (as long as it's eye candy), nothing gets done about it... ever.
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