The Government Shutdown and This Is the End

I watched two movies this weekend, the overwrought but fairly entertaining Prometheus and the under-baked but often funny This Is the End. Both made me think of the current debacle that is the United States of America, a farce that would play out funnier than Satan with a giant CGI penis if it wasn't for the fact that what's happening is arguably a bigger threat to our constitutional democracy than Watergate.

Don't worry, I have a reason. See, despite the fact that it is totally obvious that the shutdown amounts to nothing more than blackmail by a few extreme right-wing congressmen who have taken over the House, the media goes along with their constant narrative that both sides have created disfunction. This happens for a number of reasons, but the most obvious in the current political landscape is that if the media called these people on their shit when they got out of line, the media would be regarded as even more biased than they already are because they would constantly be calling them on their shit. So they feel they have to walk the line - even when it is as obvious and damaging as it is now.

Film criticism (I hesitate to even call it that these days) is a lot like news journalism at the moment. This Is the End currently sits at 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, and while this is simply an aggregation of up or down votes, its average score is a 7.1, not too shabby. And yet This Is the End is not very good. In fact, as a movie, it is decidedly worthless. The script is almost non-existent, the dialogue seems to have been invented on the spot, and it is shot like a drunk person trying to take a picture of the toilet after they threw up. On the other hand, as a piece of mindless entertainment, the film is perfectly acceptable. This Is the End ranks so far above total excrement like Grown Ups 2, released in the same summer, that its surprising they share a medium. Similarly, Prometheus, an admirable but ultimately generic action/horror sci-fi think piece, might be dumber than it first appears to be, but it is still loads better than After Earth, which manages to be both an offensively forced attempt to turn Jaden Smith into the new Will Smith and another in the long line of M. Night Shyamalan clusterfucks. So it's really no wonder that critics who were forced to sit through every awful film the studios release would be thankful for the opportunity to bask in some quality stupidity for a change.

But this is where the bar has been lowered to in the past decade or so. Hollywood movies have become so bad, and the variation in topics and intelligence so narrow, that critics are forced to wade through the garbage to find the simply redeemable. It's why Fast and Furious 6 gets a fresh rating and The Avengers tops 90% despite being a film about cartoons blowing up behind men wearing capes and helmets. What other option do they have? Like journalists, reviewers must avoid spending their time spoiling everyone's fun or no one will listen to them again (or so they assume). It's no coincidence that just as both professions have turned towards populism and the broad base, their jobs have become much less essential as more and more people turn to aggregation sites like the Huffington Post and Rotten Tomatoes.

Just as we (or at least half of us) might not want to hear over and over again that the Republicans are doing crazy shit but we need to hear it, so too do we yearn for someone to tell us what meaningless forgettable blockbuster is a good way to pass two hours when what we really need is for someone to shine a light on the movies that make an impact. At some point we have to reject the garbage that is handed to us by the people we are supposed to trust to hand us sustenance.

Of course, sometimes what we really need is garbage, and that's what This Is the End, along with many other shitty but lovable Hollywood movies, is for. (Prometheus is more admirable - an attempt at an intellectual blockbuster that ultimately doesn't come together and is too rigorous in its conventionality to seem unique. It's just sad that this now represents the vanguard of Summer cinema, the pathetic excuse for the thinking man's movie.) But I don't need someone to tell me which garbage pail is the one that doesn't have the dead raccoon in it, and I certainly don't need anyone to treat politics like a mysterious land of nebulous facts with two sides to every story. I don't really think giving the public what they need instead of what they think they want is going to change many minds. But if it's your job, you should at least give it a fucking shot.