"Smosh: The Movie" Trailer: This Is The Closest We've Gotten To A Millennial Auteur

Alo Party Peoples.

If there's one thing I'll admit is a real downside to the Digital Age and the democratization of information, it's that it has greatly reduced the value of that information. The prime example is probably still books. The printing press made the written word accessible to the common man, rather than just the nobility and the clergy, and the worthy price paid was that once anyone can write a book, you eventually end up with Divergent.

The same thing happened with film-making and YouTube. Now pretty much anyone with a cellphone can try their hand at film making, but now doing so is far less special. "If everyone's super, no one is."

This trailer for Smosh: The Movie, based off of a long running online sketch comedy show of the same name, is exactly what you would expect from a broader, dumber version of something that was already pretty broad and dumb to begin with.

This is the digital age equivalent of Cool as Ice or Freddy Got Fingered, taking some inane fad that infatuates the youth and only works (relatively speaking) in its native medium (music, television, online video) and forcing it into a format that it just can't work in.

As for Smosh specifically, it looks pretty bad. Online video is already a medium dominated by people that never quite grew up, you could even say that it is the Millennial Medium in the worst possible way. So it's not a surprise that the plot of Smosh: The Movie, which seems to involve the titular comedy duo leaping into YouTube to pull a video down from the inside, feels like something thought up by a hyperactive fifth-grader, right down to the juvenile humor and amateur - even for an indie production - effects work. This hits theaters on July 23rd, and it's sad to think that this is as close as we've gotten to a Millennial auteur.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Inside Out": Pixar's Got The Magic Back (PG - Disney/Pixar - 1 hr, 42 mins)

Directed by Pete Docter and
Ronaldo Del Carmen
Written by Pete Docter,
 Meg LeFauve, and Josh Cooley

Dear Pixar,

Once upon a time, and not really that long ago, you were America's gold standard for theatrical animation. Disney was a fallen titan, DreamWorks was a pandering celebrity-cameo factory, and you were the actual artists in the field. The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature - an award created during your initial heyday - used to be called the Pixar Award in the popular parlance, because you kept winning it by earning it.

There's an entire generation for whom your name conjures the same kinds of memories as the Disney Renaissance does for the Millenials, and I'm part of that generation. The Incredibles was the first time I thought I needed to see something in theaters. The first press screening I ever went to was Ratatouille, your name became a seal of quality, one that ensured that whatever it was attached to would be an inventive take on a subject - and probably something that people would enjoy.

But ever since Up, you've been letting yourself fall further and further behind, and the rest of the field has been catching up to your Golden Age. From the nostalgia exploitation of Toy Story 3, to the cynical cash grab of Cars 2, to the tragic misfire of Brave, you just seem to have lost the magic, and in the meantime everyone else has figured out how it works. DreamWorks gets lavished with praise by critics now, Warner Bros. brought their animation department back from the dead, and people are shocked that their movie about Lego didn't get an Oscar nomination. Disney embraced CG animation and, after some early stumbles, rediscovered how to make films with relatable characters in interesting twists on established genre-staples. (fairy tales, video games, superheroes, etc.) They've taken your job, and they're doing it well.

So Inside Out is the project that either proves you have a serious problem, or the project that brings you back from the brink. You didn't seem to have much confidence in it, the first teaser felt less like an ad for Inside Out and more like an ad for "The Pixar Collection: BluRay Edition", which combined with greenlighting sequels to Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, two of your most lauded successes, added yet more credence to the idea that you h ad finally lost your creative soul to the Disney Empire, and are now wholly dependent on nostalgia for the period when you were still relevant...

... until now. Old friend, I'm glad to see that you've gotten your act together. Not only has Inside Out brought you out of your downward spiral, but it may just be some of your best work since, well, probably since Up. It feels like you had some emotions to work out of moving in with Disney, and you decided to make a film about the emotional struggles of a young girl going through the major life change of moving to a new home.

To wit, Inside Out is about a girl named Riley, and the little voices in her head. Those voices are her emotions, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear. For eleven years, Joy has been the dominant emotion in Riley's life, dominating practically every new memory of her idyllic existence in Midwestern Rural Tranquility Land. Until one day, when her father gets a new job out in California, and moves the family out to San Francisco. Naturally, what with leaving her friends, staying in an unfamiliar environment, catching brief glimpses of her parents' financial troubles, Riley's emotions start to fall into chaotic discord, resulting in Sadness corrupting and releasing her "core memories", i.e. the experiences that define her personality, nay, her identity, and forcing her and Joy out of the brain's central command, leaving Riley's actions in this crucial point in her development to be governed by Disgust, Anger and Fear. The only way to stop that is for Joy and Sadness to make the trek back through her memories and keep her from having a complete mental breakdown.

It feels like you dealt with the emotional shock of living with Disney by getting incredibly drunk, and your last three movies have been a really bad hangover. But now, you've sobered up, you're ready to start the day new, and you're getting back into the field, having become stronger through that struggle and channeling it into your comeback. You've dealt with some real depressing thoughts running through your head, and you get something that most existential angst-ridden teenagers don't. You get that sadness isn't inherently negative, that it's more of a release valve for emotional tension, that sometimes you just need to let it all out in order to move on to something positive.

And you've just plain got the technical chops, man. You never really lost the ability to make things look pretty, and Inside Out is no exception. Your colors are still bright and vibrant and well chosen, your voice cast perfectly embodies the emotions they depict, you come up with imaginative ways to depict the inner workings of the brain (dream production studios, vast labyrinthine memory archives, literal trains of thought), and at the core of it all, you've rediscovered how to tap into the emotions of the audience. I never thought I'd see an audience close to tears at one of your films after Toy Story 3, but you pulled it off. Hell, you even managed to do 3D well, you didn't have to do that, it's beautiful just the way it is.

Inside Out is arguably the best Pixar movie to date, but besides that, it is a cracking good adventure story that has more to say about how people deal with complex emotions than most grown-up movies do. I'm impressed, old friend, keep up the good work.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Spy": Diet "Kingsman" (R - 20th CenturyFox - 2 hrs, 0 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

Directed and Written by Paul Feig

Spy is another Melissa McCarthy vehicle written and directed by Paul Feig. The last time that happened was The Heat, which starred her and Sandra Bullock in a broad riff on 80s buddy cop movies. Spy goes back further to do a broad riff on 60s spy movies, and in particular Golden Age James Bond. If you saw Kingsman and thought "This is good, but I'd like it more if it were less witty and broader. Oh, and all this blood is just too much for my sensibilities.", then you will probably enjoy Spy, and if you didn't think that, you still might enjoy Spy, because it's still really funny.

Melissa McCarthy is a CIA mission controller who's field agent/boyfriend dies on the job trying to stop a Chechen nationalist terror cell from obtaining a nuclear bomb. Since the last thing she saw on her camera feed was one of their higher ups reading off a list of active CIA agents, they have no choice but to send McCarthy in to pursue the case. That's it, that's the whole setup. Oh, there are twists and double-crosses and plot complications, but any sharp eyed viewer will probably spot them coming a mile away, and they aren't what Spy is interested in.

The main focus of Spy is making a broad physical comedy in the confines of a spy movie, which it does with great success... and that's all I can really say without giving away the jokes. That's the hard thing about talking about any form of comedy. "Analyzing humour is like dissecting a frog. No one is interested, and the frog dies." (E.B. White) I could talk about how Paul Feig has figured out how to do visual comedy, or McCarthy's fantastic chemistry with Rose Byrne as a fellow supervisor turned super-sleuth, or how Jason Statham commits grand-theft-cinema in a supporting role, but then those things would be less funny to you when you saw them. Aside from a confused thematic line where traditionally attractive agents get to work in the field while someone that looks like Melissa McCarthy is kept out of sight at base (wow, subtle), there's not that much to talk about.

So, all I can really do here is say that Spy is hilarious and hope you trust me on that.

All in all

Have a nice day.

Greg.B