Archive for the ‘Esha Kallianpur’ Category
Snakes On A Plane: The Reaction.
School ended quietly this year. After a week of pretending that an unstructured, unproductive day was really fun, I realized I had nothing to do this summer but work once in a while, screw around in moderation, maybe do some SAT prep to project some ambition, and watch movies with my friends. I mean, that’s what an American summer is, right? If you live on the coast, you’ve got the beach; if you live in the city, you’ve got parades and other diversions. If you live in a sad suburban town without any place for teens to enjoy themselves besides in their basement with their parent’s liquor cabinet stocked, you’ve got the dark, gummy frigidity of a movie theater.So, like any patriotic citizen, I invested some money back into the summer blockbuster industry. Pirates of the Caribbean, Lady In The Water , X-Men III (though I am a devout lover of the X-Men franchise), I sat through all of them, their expensive special effects and disposable, tawdry jokes. But none of them, not even POTC: Dead Man’s Chest, with that migraine-aggravating cracken scene and general lack of plot direction, could compete with the absurdity and, well, what can I say, ridiculousness of Snakes On A Plane.
What began as an ironic and, let’s face it, pretty damn funny joke online turned into a Hollywood-processed beast of a bad summer flick. Like myself, anyone who spends enough time on the internet and is vaguely conscious of current pop-culture had to know everything about this movie. Samuel L. Jackson, who is hailed by skinny white bloggers and guys who wear unironic Air Force Ones alike for his ability to play the collected, down-ass hero/anti-hero, is a cop. He is on a plane. This plane’s got muthafuckin’ snakes. Hilarity… er, chaos ensues.
There is no need to explain the internet phenomena that spread once a Josh Friedman featured an entry on his blog about the movie and it’s overall gist. This isn’t a history lesson.
People who saw the fake trailers chuckled to themselves, maybe even kept it around as a joke for a while. I mean, something this bizarre has to have a little staying power, maybe a few months, right? Mock trailers were created, shirts were printed, fake newscasters quoted, and… wait, what? Songs were written? More and more people were getting in on the joke, which began to take away from the humor. Snakes On A Plane was becoming this year’s Napoleon Dynamite: a reasonable movie that would have been forgettable, but instead was turned into a cultural phenomenon that was inescapable. You turned on MTV and were faced with a bunch of emos singing about snakes on a plane. The kid from your chemistry class who worked alongside you at the pool wouldn’t shut up about how awesome Samuel L. Jackson is (as if you need a reminder). Your parents considered attending the first screening at your local theater with you. The kid you babysit was pointing to a puppet on Sesame Street and addressing it as a “muthafuckin’ snake”.
When would it go away?! The movie hadn’t even been released yet?
Besides the fact that the joke is rapidly getting stale, though not totally unfunny as of yet, Hollywood had to come in and lend a hand in the spoiling process. Some writers extol the producers and people behind the movie for turning it into a libertine, over-the-top nod to the fans, while others just cluck their tongue and roll their eyes at Hollywood for ruining everything. Personally, yeah, I see the hilarity, I get it, but I place myself in the latter catagory. The most recent issue of Rolling Stone put it best when they resigned that putting the famous line in the movie stole what made it funny in the first place. When did movie-making become egalitarian, or, rather, when did New Line think that it was cool to be that geeky short kid with the thick-framed glasses, awkward at the high school house party, who jerkily sips from his dixie cup and repeats every joke that leaves the supple, attractive mouth of the crookedly smiling, chiseled jock?
Well, I guess it’s hypocritical and futile for me to complain about this now, being that I just arrived home from the first showing of Snakes On A Plane at the Clearview 10.
That being said, the movie was great. It had something for everyone: explosions, expletives, gay jokes, scary moments, bad caricatures of hip hop culture, cop talk, surfing, fucking Jack Johnson, singing emos, boobies, swelling corpses, and, of course, muthafuckin’ snakes. It’s a fine bad summer flick, and if you can take the intense snake action, I highly recommend it.
It just may not be as funny as you wished it was.
- Esha Kallianpur
