Ah, the great feeling of finding an
article about movies that I can simply write about instead of having
to think of my own original idea. That's the good stuff. More
specifically: “How We Transformed Into Nitpick Nation”, an
editorial by Dalton Ross, published in Entertainment Weekly in the
February 22 issue.
“HWTINN” describes that, in the
past couple of decades, television has gotten way
more prolific and original. America can't just go back to Father
Knows Best and Three's
Company for their weekly
entertainment (although the latter is some great shit) because
they've already seen The Sopranos and
Lost (and you can
never unseen Lost).
We're now programmed to watch these hard-hitting dramas and others
like them and pick apart everything and find flaws and then comment
on message boards so that everyone else will see the flaws too.
Now while Ross focuses on television
dramas such as The Following
and The Walking Dead,
I can't really go further into that because (1) this is a blog about
movies and (2) the only TV I watch includes tight clothing and Derek
Hough (well those are the only things I pay attention to anyway).
But take, for instance, the dark days
of my sixth grade year of school. Before Twilight
was an ill-acted movie with an annoyingly-large fan base of
emotionally-unstable preteens and middle-aged women, it was just an
semi-popular book among middle-schools (oh my God, sorry for all the
hyphens), one of which was me. I mean, I liked the series until
half-way through New Moon,
when it just got so Goddamn boring that I skipped a few hundred pages
and got to the part with Edward and an unconscious Bella in the
Volturi's lair in Italy. As the couple is leaving, Bella notices a
group of tourists coming down and it's obvious (except to
twelve-year-old me because I had to reread the freaking thing like
three times before I got it): the evil Italian vampires pretend to
give tours to attract people whom they then kill and feed on.
Once I
understood this, I couldn't get over how ridiculous it was. What?
Nobody had reported a loved-one missing, gone on a trip to Europe and
never come back? Left the hotel for a tour and didn't make it to
breakfast the next morning? These disappearances haven't been
investigated with no correlation found between them that all of the
people who are missing went such after telling someone they were
going on some tour in the deep depths of Italy? But then I realized
that the whole freaking story
was ridiculous. I mean, Twilight
centers around a girl who found love with a freaking vampire and must
keep his and his family's secret, along with her friend's, because oh
guess what he's a wolf.
A year
or so ago, Young Alec Baldwin sucked me into watching Beetlejuice.
The title character lives in Netheworld, and to be summoned his name
must be said three times. When he and a young girl named Lydia first
meet, she asks his name but Beetlejuice is like, “I can't tell you
because then you might tell your friends and they'll be running
around, shouting it everywhere.”
So then he goes on this whole shebang, acting out his name with
charade-like gestures, until Lydia finally guesses correctly.
Like,
okay? So this chick can still tell all of her friends what his name
is and they can summon him themselves. Why did he have to act it out?
If he's that concerned with it then maybe he just shouldn't tell
people his name. But yeah, it's a movie about “a
recently deceased young couple who become ghosts haunting their
former home and an obnoxious, devious 'bio-exorcist' named
[Beetlejuice] from the underworld who tries to scare away the new
inhabitants permanently.” (Wikipedia and sorry I'm so lazy).
Ross
ends his article with admitting that he “should be happy that the
medium offers so many exciting alternatives” and declares that
he'll “do better” with ignoring some of television's
discrepancies. I say that these writers need to get their shit
together and also that I should've never read Twilight.
