99th Best Film - Envy
Director: Barry Levinson Starring: Ben Stiller, Jack Black. Part of my 100 Best Movies in History Series.
So, one day, I got these advanced screening tickets from someone, and the movie was Envy. I laughed, the person I was with laughed, everyone in the theatre laughed. A few months later, my ex-girlfriend’s sister calls me up just to say to me, "Caio, I just saw the best movie in the world. It’s about SHIT!" And I said, "Envy? That was the funniest movie in history!"
The real odd part about that is that before she saw Envy, she used to try and beat me with things because I was sexing her sister, and because I’m Catholic and she’s Serbian and I think they kill Catholics and shit. But after that, we were best of friends, just because of that movie. I want you to contemplate that for a moment, dear readers: This movie fixed the conflict in the Balkans. Bulgaria and Romania just joined the EU and before this movie came out, they were building rape camps for each other’s children to be raped in.
So, I figured seeing as everyone I know who has seen this movie has loved it, I just figured it was universally accepted as a classic. Well, I did a bit of hardcore internet research just a few minutes before I started writing this and it turns out it’s considered a massive failure. What the fucking shit? I’m still trying to figure out the dystopian backwards-universe I woke up in this morning, but I think I have a theory why this movie didn’t take off:
This is a message movie but also basically a big long joke about dog shit. People who like message movies consider themselves too good for dog shit jokes, and people who find dog shit jokes funny don’t really like being preached to.
Hey yes, I’m intellectual enough to base my moral decisions on what Steven Spielberg tells me about potato aliens, but damnit, I’m not going to pretend I’m smart just because I take my life-lessons from fucking two hour movies. I mean Jesus fucking Motherfucker, if you get your fucking intellectual inspiration from movies, you’re not fucking in any place to consider yourself too good for something.
Of course, the critics are a school of pretentious fish. When a couple of "smart" critics say they don’t like a movie, the rest swim along just so they can look like goateed fucking snobs too. Hey asshole critics: My French is a bit rusty, but I’m pretty sure ‘café society’ doesn’t translate as ‘write ten page essays about how Matrix changed your life and weigh five hundred pounds’. Wanting to eat Trinity and/or Keanu’s pussy doesn’t make you smart no matter how many gibberish religion references they make or in what amazingly high percentile of ‘morbidly obese’ and ‘virgin’ you fall into.
Check Rotten tomatoes. There was only one reviewer who had the balls to admit what a good movie this was in the face of the crowd:
That’s right. This fucking 90 year old fossil from fucking Colorado, featured writer for ‘The Colorado Senior Beacon’ has managed to out-smart, out-class and generally out-do every fuckhead critic on fucking earth. This woman is too old to remember when she’s not supposed to pee, and yet she still has the brains and balls to recognize a good movie in the face of public pressure.
You know what, I have a new fucking hero, and it’s not that tub of shame and bitterness Roger Ebert. I just added her top movie of all time ‘Cocoon’ to my Nexflix queue because I’m not living under this soul-draining fattyocricy any longer.
Ugly-Sexy - The one girl in this is the googly-eyed chick from SNL. I kind of have a hard time evaluating a person’s hotness when their googly-eyes suggest to me that at any moment she’s going to stab someone for crack money.
The other girl, though, is pretty hot, in a "friend of freaky crackhead" sort of way.
Establishment Fighting - Here’s the major flaw about people who fight the system via movies: Jack Black is supposed to be this Rock-and-Roll Non-Conformity Rebel or some shit, right. Well, when this movie went into post-production, he said he thought it "rocked" in a bunch of interviews. After the critics bitched it out, he apologized for it at Cannes. At motherfucking Cannes.
First off, if you’re this rough-edged irreverant rock and roller, what the fuck are you doing motherfucking at that arthouse shitfest? Second off, if you’re so against the establishment and conformity, why the fuck aren’t you sticking to your guns? You know this is a good movie, I know it’s a good movie, don’t pussy out infront of the cool kids, especially when those cool kids wear turtlenecks and barettes and think David Lynch makes an important statement. Some geriatric in a nursing home named Betty-Jo recently out-rock-and-rolled you on your own fucking turf, you pussy. I mean fuck, it’s not like those Cannes metrosexuals (notice my enlightened PC alternative to ‘fags’) actually like any movie that can’t be described as Kafkaesque or some other suicide queerboy shit.
By the way, you phoney Cannes cunts, reading The Stranger/Outsider doesn’t make you smart: that book is only like fifty fucking pages - I’ve read articles in People longer than that shit - and characters not having motivations isn’t smart and isn’t some secret message, it’s what talentless people write. At least Stephan fucking King, who you bitch about perpetually, actually has characters who don’t just do random shit for no reason.
Rotten Tomatoes Pull-quote - People Rotten Tomatoes links to are Cunts.
(by the way, I hope you enjoy that rainbow joke, because I’m partially colour-blind, and I had to literally steal HTML from a geocities gay activism site to make that work you lazy disrespectful shits)
