Poncey boy Russell Smith. The only time you'll see a better-dressed cracker is on an hors d'oeuvres tray.
Russell Smith, whom I've described as "a well-dressed, well-coiffed, well-read cultural Pharisee who badly needs a good solid punch to the mouth", has for the most part managed to not get up my nose with his "I'm not really an essential member of society, but I play one at the Globe and Mail" scribblings. Chris "Planet Simpson" Turner, during a recent visit to Accordion City, mentioned Smith's fruitless (hah!) defense of capri pants for men. I like to think I have a rep for being a very open-minded guy, but upon hearing about that, I remarked "You know what we call guy like Russell? Chicks." The man has less macho than most of the salads I've eaten this week.
Perhaps we could take a little of the tsunami relief goodwill and hold some kind of local fund-raising concert to raise money to get him some testosterone patches. I envision Danko Jones being one of the acts, just to show him dude-itude.
Warren Frey wrote to me yesterday, informing me that Russell's back to his old tricks, having written his latest screed, titled The films stink more than the greasy audience. Since the Globe and Mail is going to make you pay to read the article online and since I generally say "I've seen better paper after wiping my ass" after reading Smith's stuff, I've copy-and-pasted the article for you below:
The films stink more than the greasy audience
By RUSSELL SMITH
It's time someone came out and said that not only are movies terrible, but that the whole experience of going to movies is highly unpleasant. How is it possible that this sensory stressfest has become the most popular entertainment of the contemporary age?
How can people possibly enjoy the lining up, the waiting with coats on for tickets, then the shuffling with the heated herd toward a crowded, windowless room? And when you get to that butter-scented trough, with its seats piled high with coats and scarves, the representatives of humanity who surround you are anxious: They are focused on their feed. This focus is quite dramatic. Their eyes are glazed and dilated, their shoulders are hunched over their cartons, they are stuffing themselves with viscous oil products with orange cheeze whip on fried nachos, with yellow "topping," with gallon jugs of liquid sugar. They have the concentration of chess players, of athletes before contests, of the starving. Do you like this, the greedy scrabbling in greasy boxes, the whole herd determinedly chomping and chewing and slurping . . . don't you feel even a little bit as if you're in the pig barn, at exactly the moment the big trough full of ground intestines slops over for all to rush towards and snuffle in?
They will settle down, after 15 or 20 intense minutes. Once they have had their fill of trans fats, they wipe the chemical film from their faces and they start talking to each other. This is where my angst goes up a whole notch on the hystero-meter. Because I have been trying to distract myself from the nauseating smells and the comical cacophony of crunching by watching the slides on the screen. These slides test your knowledge of Hollywood stars. They are there to remind you of death, of your inevitable subsumption into the great terrifying artistic void that is movieland. They are there to remind you that you do actually know all the stars' names, even without wanting to: As soon as you see the blurry visage and the clue "went postal" you murmur, automatically, Kevin Costner, and then you are amazed at yourself. How do you know every Hollywood star's name? It has happened by osmosis; you are so immersed in it every day, like a nacho chip in a tub of yellow goop, that it has seeped into your pores.
Anyway. The slides are at least better than hearing your neighbours begin to talk. The sociological lessons learned from overhearing conversations in cinemas are even more depressing. One learns that most people like to communicate by announcing what food they like to eat and what food they don't like to eat. This is an interactive discussion: Each participant takes a turn. You may change the subject slightly in the second or third rounds -- you may, for example, announce how tired you are today as compared to how tired you were yesterday or on Saturday, and then everyone may follow suit with similar admissions. This apparently amuses and interests most people, for it can go on for some time.
You will think that there is a merciful God when the lights finally dim, because the movie is about to start and save you from the insane boredom of your surroundings. But you will be very, very sadly mistaken. Because this is the beginning of the ads. These are ads you must watch. When you are watching television, you can change the channel during ads, you can get up and have a sherry. But here you are trapped, and the ads are amplified. Everyone sits docilely munching and slurping and watching extremely loud ads on a big screen for a half-hour. And they pay to do so. They pay to have various cheery jingles and swooshing automobiles blared at them for a half-hour. No one seems remotely uncomfortable or bored.
Who can make it this far into the movie-watching experience without being so agitated, so depressed, so foul-tempered that even the greatest masterpiece would not provide anything, at this point, remotely resembling pleasure? At this point I have wanted to leave for half an hour, and that desire to leave will simply continue for the length of the film.
I don't even need to go into how disappointing that great payoff invariably is. You've heard me on this before: It doesn't help that 90 per cent of films shown here and discussed here are made by the great schmaltz factories, the megastudios of southern California. So that the great treat of this experience, the feature presentation that is the point of all this suffering, is going to contain a lot of very emotional music which lets you know when to feel sad or happy or scared, and a lot of huge close-ups of the sad faces of famous actors, and very probably a final scene with a sun-dappled forest with a deer emerging to remind our characters of their natural wonder. . . . (I'm thinking here of the film Kinsey, which I was persuaded to see because otherwise intelligent critics, their minds numbed by exposure to schmaltz of even more preposterous gooeyness, had proclaimed it brilliant, and which turned out to be, of course, another Hollywood weeper made according to the strictest rules of narrative convention.)
Honestly, why, why, why do we pay to have ads broadcast at us at insane volume? Why do we pay to have productive hours of our lives removed and replaced with the sameness, the predictability, the boredom of the grave? Explain it to me: rssllsmth@yahoo.ca .
By RUSSELL SMITH
It's time someone came out and said that not only are movies terrible, but that the whole experience of going to movies is highly unpleasant. How is it possible that this sensory stressfest has become the most popular entertainment of the contemporary age?
How can people possibly enjoy the lining up, the waiting with coats on for tickets, then the shuffling with the heated herd toward a crowded, windowless room? And when you get to that butter-scented trough, with its seats piled high with coats and scarves, the representatives of humanity who surround you are anxious: They are focused on their feed. This focus is quite dramatic. Their eyes are glazed and dilated, their shoulders are hunched over their cartons, they are stuffing themselves with viscous oil products with orange cheeze whip on fried nachos, with yellow "topping," with gallon jugs of liquid sugar. They have the concentration of chess players, of athletes before contests, of the starving. Do you like this, the greedy scrabbling in greasy boxes, the whole herd determinedly chomping and chewing and slurping . . . don't you feel even a little bit as if you're in the pig barn, at exactly the moment the big trough full of ground intestines slops over for all to rush towards and snuffle in?
They will settle down, after 15 or 20 intense minutes. Once they have had their fill of trans fats, they wipe the chemical film from their faces and they start talking to each other. This is where my angst goes up a whole notch on the hystero-meter. Because I have been trying to distract myself from the nauseating smells and the comical cacophony of crunching by watching the slides on the screen. These slides test your knowledge of Hollywood stars. They are there to remind you of death, of your inevitable subsumption into the great terrifying artistic void that is movieland. They are there to remind you that you do actually know all the stars' names, even without wanting to: As soon as you see the blurry visage and the clue "went postal" you murmur, automatically, Kevin Costner, and then you are amazed at yourself. How do you know every Hollywood star's name? It has happened by osmosis; you are so immersed in it every day, like a nacho chip in a tub of yellow goop, that it has seeped into your pores.
Anyway. The slides are at least better than hearing your neighbours begin to talk. The sociological lessons learned from overhearing conversations in cinemas are even more depressing. One learns that most people like to communicate by announcing what food they like to eat and what food they don't like to eat. This is an interactive discussion: Each participant takes a turn. You may change the subject slightly in the second or third rounds -- you may, for example, announce how tired you are today as compared to how tired you were yesterday or on Saturday, and then everyone may follow suit with similar admissions. This apparently amuses and interests most people, for it can go on for some time.
You will think that there is a merciful God when the lights finally dim, because the movie is about to start and save you from the insane boredom of your surroundings. But you will be very, very sadly mistaken. Because this is the beginning of the ads. These are ads you must watch. When you are watching television, you can change the channel during ads, you can get up and have a sherry. But here you are trapped, and the ads are amplified. Everyone sits docilely munching and slurping and watching extremely loud ads on a big screen for a half-hour. And they pay to do so. They pay to have various cheery jingles and swooshing automobiles blared at them for a half-hour. No one seems remotely uncomfortable or bored.
Who can make it this far into the movie-watching experience without being so agitated, so depressed, so foul-tempered that even the greatest masterpiece would not provide anything, at this point, remotely resembling pleasure? At this point I have wanted to leave for half an hour, and that desire to leave will simply continue for the length of the film.
I don't even need to go into how disappointing that great payoff invariably is. You've heard me on this before: It doesn't help that 90 per cent of films shown here and discussed here are made by the great schmaltz factories, the megastudios of southern California. So that the great treat of this experience, the feature presentation that is the point of all this suffering, is going to contain a lot of very emotional music which lets you know when to feel sad or happy or scared, and a lot of huge close-ups of the sad faces of famous actors, and very probably a final scene with a sun-dappled forest with a deer emerging to remind our characters of their natural wonder. . . . (I'm thinking here of the film Kinsey, which I was persuaded to see because otherwise intelligent critics, their minds numbed by exposure to schmaltz of even more preposterous gooeyness, had proclaimed it brilliant, and which turned out to be, of course, another Hollywood weeper made according to the strictest rules of narrative convention.)
Honestly, why, why, why do we pay to have ads broadcast at us at insane volume? Why do we pay to have productive hours of our lives removed and replaced with the sameness, the predictability, the boredom of the grave? Explain it to me: rssllsmth@yahoo.ca .
I have to agree with many of Russell's points, but does he have to be such a misanthropic Little Lord Fauntleroy about it? One iamgines he's going to write an article about the horror of going to the men's room ("...and the guy in the stall beside me was pooping too! In such close proximity!")
Russ better not commit any jailable offences. I figure some inmate would churn his ass like so much creamy butter within 30 seconds of his being put into his cell.
Warren pretty much sums up my own feeling when he writes:
While I'm forced to agree with him that the opening weekend movie
experience sometimes ain't all that, he bitches in such a godawful,
pretentious, "I'm superior and did I mention I wrote a book about the Toronto art scene" way that you want to reach through the screen and strangle him by his immaculately knotted tie.
Part of the problem for me is that I love movies, and I love most of
the movie going experience. Yeah, you can run into some real idiots,
and the deluge of ads is a little ridiculous. But when things click,
and you see a really good move like Lord of the Rings on opening
weekend, with a crowd that's just as hyped as you are to see a glorious
big screen spectacle, the movie theatre is almost magic. That's
something ol' Russ will never get, not that he'd bother trying.
Russell's article was enough to get the notice of MetaFilter, who thus far have provided an impressive 84 comments.
Office phone:
Google Talk:
To read her tripe is to subject yourself to every rich dim-witted female college freshmen(women?) talk about her boyfriend, his money, and how she wouldn't touch a dirty dish, or move the vacuum around.
She's so bad in fact that Wife & I had to change our paper from the National Pest to the Glove and Snail.
I'll take this priss over her anyday. I laugh.
Steve - Fooworks
Accordion Guy, when you carry on like a closet-case, you really diminish your credibility, even when you make otherwise good points.
Now I must wash in bleach.
You sense that maclaren would be as tedious in person as her prose, but I think smith would be a hoot to hang out with.
Adina
But seriously, Deenster, I'm quite sure he'd be fascinating company. That's why I accepted an invitation from a friend of his to meet him in person. Alas, it never came to be.
Still, were I a single man, I could cite a dozen different reasons why an intellectually inconsequential evening with Leah McLaren might be preferable over an night of scintillating conversation with Fancy Boy.
Have you read them? Utter hilarity! I think his secret is that he knows how to get under people's skin by being a pretentious little quiff - it's his "gimmick", don't fall for it or you'll let him win!
Anyway, as much as I kind of feel sorry for him, I too, am not above mocking him, because quite frankly, sometimes the little pansy is just asking for it.
http://storms.typepad.com/booklust/2004/10/mixedup_media.html#comments