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Now Available from RiffTrax…25 Replies to “Now Available from RiffTrax…”Commenting at Satellite News
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OK, laughing in spite of myself. I actually liked “The Hunger Games” (I read the books well before the film came out, and thought it a great series), but I’m not so ardent a fan of the movie that I can’t appreciate a riffed version of it. And some of the jokes here are pretty clever (loved the “McRib” comment, as well as the Woody Harrelson/Kurt Cobain line). All the same, I’m of two minds when Rifftrax takes on well-made movies. I appreciate that they help us not to take any film so seriously, but I’m not sure that there aren’t some movies that are above riffing. “Twilight” was one thing; “Harry Potter” has already been parodied and skewered so many times in the last decade it’s almost immune to more ridicule; this one feels a bit different somehow. I wonder other people feel as ambivalent as I do about this?
Didn’t see HUNGER GAMES. Might have to rent it first. Anyone want to let me know if the Rifftrax commentary is worth buying the film?
Thanks to MST3K ans Rifftrax I’ve developed a vicious intolerance of any movie made after 1989, with a huge budget and big actors. I’m not interested in blockbusters anymore.
God, my wife and I left this movie SO underwhelmed. In all honesty, I was underwhelmed by the book, too (and the second and third books, read only because I’m a completist, whelmed me less and even less, respectively). But come on, this movie was neutered beyond any possibility of saving. I read Battle Royale just before HG, to have some context, and while Battle Royale isn’t a GREAT book (and Fukasaku’s film version is VASTLY overrated), it’s certainly far more visceral and entertaining than HG. Plus, it doesn’t have HG’s weird, teaparty-ish satire of “the upper classes” (which, given the main character’s social surround, corresponds in our reality to East- and West Coast middle and upper-middle class professionals, not, you know, the REAL rich folks who pull all our strings).
So, uh, yeah, the Rifftrax. Can’t think of a film worthier of mockery, until the next overhyped and overrated big budget market movie hits DVD. Actually, Avengers just came out…
One more quick rant: people who like, and I mean REALLY LIKE AND VOCIFEROUSLY DEFEND, movies like the Avengers and Hunger Games – you do realize, don’t you, that these aren’t really GOOD films in any sense of the word? They are trash. They might be AMUSING trash, and I have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING against enjoying amusing trash, since that’s most of what I watch. But PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not actually think that there is anything of substance or significance in these films. There is not.
#4: I agree with you. I’m tempted to say that there’s much significance in those trashy UHF filler flicks like It Conquered the World, Them! Kronos, Earth vs the Flying Saucers,than many people are willing to cencede; films generally scolded by the critics and “academics”, or only enjoyed “ironically” (I really hate the phrase “so bad it’s good, if you enjoyed something then it was good for you, period).
Sorry, I’m in a ranty mood tonight.
I’m an academic, and I love, love, LOVE It Conquered the World. It’s just a cool movie (in my opinion). Some of my colleagues are teaching The Hunger Games this semester, which I think is kind of weird. (Okay, I’m traditional; I teach James Joyce–but I still LOVE It Conquered the World, and I love it as much as I love Joyce. I stopped worrying about the high-brow/low-brow stuff a long time ago. If I like something, I like it.)
I will say that Rifftrax makes me interested in stuff I’d never be interested in otherwise.
“…you do realize, don’t you, that these aren’t really GOOD films in any sense of the word? They are trash. They might be AMUSING trash….”
LA LA LA LA, I’M NOT LISTENING, LA LA LA LA LA LA LA
I like what I like as well, which includes a lot of movies on people’s crap lists, but who cares, more for me!
Oh Rifftrax, it wasn’t enough for you to make me watch Twilight and High School Musical??? Keep up the good work!!
I vowed never to watch titanic- but there’s a rifftrax for that so i i will relent and watch it eventually- This movie should be a great rifftrax- it has its over the top moments- hopefully alot of riffs about lenny kravitz;)
I’m also of two minds when it comes to the skewering of better movies. One one hand, fostering such a high degree of cynicism for every new thing that comes along pretty much bars you from, you know, just enjoying a movie or song or whatever once in a while. Of course, on the other, nothing on Earth is above criticism and ribbing.
…However, I dunno, in the end I think I prefer when they take down movies and shorts with an abnormally high cheese factor or that are cash grabs with no redeemable value whatsoever. Not every blockbuster is bad.
@4 – You’re using a lot of words to say “I don’t like it because it’s popular. In MY day…” There’s several newer movies that seem to be generally disliked by a lot of people, and for good reason, but Avengers and Hunger Games are not usually in that list. Hunger Games, like Harry Potter, is young adult fiction. That’s not an excuse for lower quality by any means, but WAS meant for older teenagers first and foremost.
And, anyway, no one likes that guy at the party who is so “enlightened” that he feels he has to lord his superior taste over everyone else.
#10 – That’s cool, having friends is way overrated anyway.
I’m not saying I don’t like it because it’s popular. I read HG with an open mind and was honestly disappointed; I can’t say I went into the film with an open mind, but I was disappointed far beyond what I thought I would be. Your point about HG being juvenalia points to a troubling trend in American popular culture (which is all pretty much aimed at juveniles these days), to wit: it’s okay to be mediocre as long as you’re slick, polished, and look like about $180 million. HOWEVER, you better be SAFE SAFE SAFE – not a hint of anything transgressive or challenging or interesting allowed.
But, as I was saying, all that is fine if the extent of one’s enjoyment is just enjoyment. It’s when somebody tries to make HG or Avengers or whatever else the subject of honest-to-Buddha ANALYSIS (remember the books about the philosophy of the Matrix that you used to see on store shelves? Please!) that I get riled up. That shows lack of perspective; it shows lack of cultural savvy. To speak to #6 for a minute, I firmly believe academics have no business teaching faddish pop fiction like HG unless the course is specifically about investigating trends in pop culture (i.e., HG shouldn’t be teach as literature qua literature. It’s not. It’s not worthy of it).
Is that snobbish? Sure is. There’s nothing wrong with reveling in trash culture – I do it all the time – but I think folks owe it to themselves to have perspective on trash culture and know what the legitimately good stuff really is.
schippers:
The older I get, the less certain I am of what is “worthy” of literature. That, and I teach a lot of historical literature that, in its day, was considered unworthy of any educated person’s time, but which now has the status of “classic.” I’m not saying “Hunger Games” is the equivalent of “Tom Jones,” but I think one needs to be careful about what gets designated as “literature” and what doesn’t. Sometimes self-consciously literary works are just highbrow trash; sometimes good fiction is also popular.
Which brings me back to the Rifftrax philosophy of taking down “big” movies because they’re overhyped and wildly popular and probably could stand to come down a notch or two. Rifftrax is hardly unique in doing this–there’s a YouTube channel called “Bad Lip Reading” which basically resynchs funny, incongruous dialogue over scenes from popular films. Their “Hunger Games” one is hilarious, and well worth checking out. And there is a danger in taking this stuff too seriously.
But, at the same time, taking on movies that are, at least, well-made and reasonably good as entertainment in their own right is a shift in thinking from MST, where the point was, as noordledoordle so articulately pointed out, to “take down movies and shorts with an abnormally high cheese factor or that are cash grabs with no redeemable value whatsoever.” And some of the riffs in the sample were, frankly, just cheap shots, like making fun of the odd names. The problem, for me, is not necessarily that they’re trashing a movie I happened to have enjoyed watching–although there’s certainly an element of that–but that they’re trashing a movie that at least accomplished what it set out to do. Whatever its intellectual or cultural merits or shortcomings are, no one can argue that “Hunger Games” is as bad a movie as, say, “Birdemic.” You have to do something different with the riffing when you take on one of these blockbusters, and I’m just not sure it works as well, because to me the original point of MST was that the riffs helped us all get through those really bad movies we wouldn’t have otherwise watched, not made us feel superior to all those stupid teenagers who actually like this stuff. Maybe the real question to ask is, would Rifftrax have bothered with “Twilight” and “Harry Potter” and “Hunger Games” if they hadn’t been huge, overhyped epics? And are they going to take on “The Dark Knight Rises” for the same reason, or would that be crossing a line somehow? Maybe once I figure that out, I can feel a little more comfortable about what they’re doing here.
By the way, is anyone saying “The Avengers” is anything more than a big, dumb popcorn movie, even if it’s a well-made big, dumb popcorn movie?
#12 – Oh gee, the Nolan Batman films. Let’s not get started on THOSE overstuffed couches. Again, moderately fun movies, slickly produced, but weighty and important and meaningful? No.
Also, I fully agree with you that it is sometimes difficult (although probably not as difficult as you hint at) to tell if a book is going to be embraced by the literati and subsequently ensconced in the canon. Though English lit is not what I took my grad degrees in, I offer by way of moderately educated opinion that the rapid upsurge of academic squee over contemporary authors whose work is, uh, probably not really worthy of such is most likely due to the need to build one’s academic fiefdom. It’s hard to get tenure if you’re not blowing a lot of hot air about something or other, and it’s always great to blow hot air about stuff that no one else has blown hot air about yet.
Also, let’s not forget that the very concept of “studying a novel” would have once been utterly shocking, since it’s only fairly recently that novels have been thought of as anything but popular trash, pure and simple, fit only for consumption by the hoi polloi.
So, good points and all, but I think I’m fairly secure in believing that the Hunger Games books will survive, if at all, as footnotes in dissertations about the evolution of postapocalyptic fiction, or some such. And the movies will eventually be clogging up DVD bargain bins for years to come.
I am gonna just say that I loved the sample here. Lazy or not, the bit about Peeta/Peter by Bill was really funny. As a fan of all three books (sorry), I also questioned whether this should really get a treatment by Rifftrax, but the sample worked enough that I don’t mind.
BTW, Avengers is a movie about superheroes. Superheroes!
My local chain bookstore has an entire section devoted to “Teen Supernatural Romance”.
Probably not even relevant but I thought I’d mention it.
As someone who really enjoyed “The Hunger Games” (books and movie), this looks like a lot of fun.
Before he hung up the hat and tie, I was hoping that the Nostalgia Critic would do an episode on my favorite movie of all time–“The Last Starfighter”. Now I’m hoping it gets a Rifftrax, because while I love it, there are definitely some good jokes to be made.
schippers:
Quite agree with you about the Dark Knight movies–great fun to watch, but hardly cultural touchstones. At least I hope not.
As for your prediction about the eventual fate of “Hunger Games” DVDs: you’re probably right that they’re headed for the cutout bins, but I think it more likely they’ll be repackaged in increasingly oversized “special editions” until, in about 10 years or so, they remake the bloody things. Ditto for Potter and Twilight. Why make a movie once when you can make it over and over again?
Finally back to the Blockbusters! WOO HOO! And this looks like a great one, indeed. Keep ’em coming, fellas!
:victory:
Doug:
A group calling themselves Speedway Squad released an iRiff for “The Last Starfighter” if you’re curious. http://www.rifftrax.com/iriffs/last-starfighter-speedway-squad
The Last Starfighter? I wonder if Rifftrax would tackle. They could tear it to pieces!!! I loved it as a child, but have since looked back on it and laughed openly.
“That’s how the hostess greets you at Denny’s”. :)
Interesting discussion all, I am in the camp of not liking the riffing of non-terrible non-cheesy movies and generally agree with #10. IMHO, movies these days suffer not so much from being terribly executed/written as being bland, boring, retelling the same plots over and over and generally being completely inoffensive in every way. I don’t consider myself a film snob but in the last 5 years, the only movie theater I have been to (except for a couple of the live Rifftrax showings) is the local art house theater, I feel like I have already seen every present day blockbuster before it comes out. There is good stuff and bad stuff in the low budget world but at least there is some good stuff.
To further our discussion (and, perhaps, to vindicate schippers, if he needs vindicating, which I doubt), here’s an interesting article:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/10/whatever-happened-to-movies-for-grown-ups.html
No MST or Rifftrax content, I’m afraid–but it might provide some justification for Rifftax’s taking on non-cheesy films. Maybe.
And maybe even more to the point: if studios these days are unwilling to take risks with movies, there’s less of a chance of making the charming stinkers that we all love. I think Cheapskate Crow is right: movies are just bland and predictable, even ones that supposedly offer plenty of thrills (usually in the form of stuff blowing up). I sat through “The Avengers,” but got tired of seeing New York get pulverised yet again, and spent the last 30 minutes just waiting for the inevitable CGI explosions, final defeat of the evil forces, witty closing, and teaser set-up for the sequel. Ho hum. It may be true that no one’s making really good movies, but no one’s making really bad ones, either: that’s a sad fact for those of us who enjoy both the best and the worst cinema ever made. People here have often noted how the blandest MST episodes are the ones where the movie is just limp and uninteresting–maybe limp and uninteresting is now the new normal. Maybe, then, in the absence of the noble failures of so many of our favourite MST outings, all that Rifftrax will have to work with in the future will be teen blockbusters. Sad times, indeed, if true.
Well said, Blast. Your awesome pecs and delts ring with truth.
There aren’t so many terrible movies, but there are still some. Thank the Buddha for guys like Tommy Wiseau. Please, someone, give Mr. Wiseau a lot of money so that he can make more The Rooms.