Epic Cynic Snacks Theme Song
by Lando!
Hello Internet and welcome to a grumpy, yet
mildly enthusiastic episode of Screen Peeves
After my expedition through the most awful
content on Amazon Prime and Pureflix
I thought it would only be fair to strike
a balance and try to dig up the worst content
that I could find on Netflix
and it really didn’t take long at all, for
me to fall into a pit of digital despair.
Although, this time I won’t be focussing
on Christ-centered content specifically, as
although that would make this Experiment a
whole lot more Scientific I don’t want any
of the lovely Christian’s out there to think
that I’m gunning for them specifically,
and so today, to help me fall back under their
radar we’ll be looking at some movies that
have an appropriate amount of religion in
them instead.
And Netflix sure has plenty of tripe to choose
from with absolute nightmare productions like
The Open House
Ridiculous 6
The Kissing Booth
Tall Girl & Bright
They continually demonstrate a very keen eye
for producing complete guff, and will seemingly
cough up a budget for basically anyone with
half an idea if they appear to be desperate
enough.
Which means there’s an almost endless supply
of terrible, thoughtless crap to choose from,
and so I needed to find a way to narrow it
down a little bit.
One thing that never fails to frustrate me
to baking point is creators who shamelessly
steal ideas from others and don’t make any
real effort to understand exactly what they’re
stealing in the first place. Meaning they
add absolutely nothing of value to the medium
and just sort of coast along on the back of
other people’s hard work like the Kardashian’s
do with their surgeon.
This is made all the more unbearable when
the thing that is being copied is something
I personally hold dear, which is exactly what
I’ve discovered during my research.
Netflix have been so utterly careless with
their budgets that they’ve actually commissioned
4 projects in the past 4 years which have
all shamelessly stolen the exact same premise
from another much better movie, and one which
is quite possibly the greatest romantic comedy of all tim---
Yes, that’s correct, I’m talking about
Groundhog Day and I’m more than aware that
there’s a good chance I’m suffering from
a case of rose-tinted nostalgia glasses, but
I have rewatched this movie countless times
over the years and I am a firm believer that
it is one of Bill Murray’s finest projects
and a classic masterpiece in it's own right
It tells the story of a self-centered, arrogant
and bitter Phil Connors, who I’m ashamed
to say I actually relate to quite a bit.
“This is pitiful”
Phil is a weatherman for a small news network,
who is sent to cover the annual Groundhog
Day ceremony, which takes place in Punxsutawney,
a charming, rural town with a keen, friendly
community, which acts as the perfect antithesis
to Phil’s miserable character.
When, due to some unexplained phenomenon,
Phil awakens each morning to discover he is
reliving the exact same day, on repeat, indefinitely.
Phil’s selfish, nihilistic and complacent
attitude towards everyone & everything only
serves to make his own existence a misery
and so he begins to indulge selfishly, taking
advantage of his situation to be frivolous,
gluttonous and abusive, and after he has exhausted
all avenues of shallowness and materialism
and found no fulfilment or repose, he becomes
overwhelmed my the immutable nature of the
time loop he’s found himself stuck in and
he becomes suicidal
When he grows tired of repeatedly killing
himself, he is left with no choice but to
admit his own flaws and learn to become a
better person. So's to not exist in a perpetual
hell of his own creation, and finally transforms
into somebody capable of accepting love. Aww!
Groundhog Day is expertly crafted, and sticks
to its premise without falter, and by the
necessity of it’s own design provides a
perfect, organic character arc. It’s truly
outstanding; it’s funny, heartwarming, heartbreaking,
ridiculous, but also very real, and the perfect
allegory for our own search for fulfilment,
which is even more poignant now in our age
of mindless scrolling and incentivised individualism.
How many of you out there feel like you’re
just living the same day on repeat forever?
"That about sums it up for me"
Unfortunately, we don’t have the same options
as Phil to try out lots of lovely suicides,
so I guess we’ll all just have to skip that
bit and go straight to becoming better people!
Eugh!
Now, this idea has been appropriated and adapted
by other creators in the past to varying degrees
of success, and some of which are okay-ish!
Having made its way into an array of movies,
TV shows and Anime series, such as Re:Life.
Although I think the attitudes in that series
are a little TOO Japanese for my liking.
“I can hang out with high school girls and
no-one will call the cops!? Is it weird that
kinda makes me excited?”
The motif is handled much more appropriately
in ERASED, which has quickly become one of
my personal favourite animes, in which the
lead character Saturo is forced to repeatedly
relive various repressed memories from throughout
his life, enacting small changes in an attempt
to adjust the course of history, and save
his childhood friends from a serial abductor
that plagued his hometown.
The narrative is well paced and extremely
crafty, and offers a new take on the Groundhog
Day motif, pushing it in a completely different
direction by adding crime noir elements and
lots of unexpected turns, every episode ends
with such a gripping twist that it’s really
difficult to not binge the entire series in
one go!
Which, is what I actually did, thanks to today’s
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Which is only one step away from having the
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I’ve recently been enjoying Attack On Titan,
which is not only gorgeous looking with incredibly
impactful action sequences, but it really
caught me off guard with how emotionally affecting
it is. I’m sure many of you have seen it,
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And also, drop me some anime recommendations
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that.
And thankyou to Crunchyroll for Sponsoring
this video and helping me afford to not die!
The Groundhog Day motif has also been adapted
into various western movies over the years,
such as Source Code, Happy Death Day & Edge
Of Tomorrow
Most of which have stripped it of its comedic
soul and taken a far more serious approach
to tackling what is an inherently funny idea,
and some of which commit the ultimate narrative
sin of over-explaining HOW the time loop phenomenon
is occurring.
This was one of the main contributing factors
that made Groundhog Day so great. There's
no clumsy, bumbling explanation for why the
lead character is thrown into this bizarre
situation, but it’s instead left open to
the viewer’s interpretation. It’s up to
YOU to observe and decide why it begins and
why it ends, which makes for a far more engaging
experience.
The original draft of the Groundhog Day script
actually contained a scene attempting to explain
the phenomenon through some sort of stupid
Voodoo bullshit, but this idea was hastily
scrapped by director Harold Ramis, who rightfully
understood that it cheapened the story and
took away from any potential meaning that
viewers could infer.
Shame nobody else took note of this very important
factor when shitting out their own garbage
interpretation of this idea. I absolutely
despise it when writers of supernatural movies
attempt to explain the unnatural, outlandish
and ridiculous concepts in their stories,
in a way that lines up with widely accepted
scientific principles and it will never fail
to make me eyeroll so hard, that my optic
nerves get tied in knots so complex they only
exist in theory.
Like in Edge Of Tomorrow,
“Oh, so obviously, Tom, you’re living
the same day on repeat because… there’s
some black slime monster that wants to take
over the universe, so… it bends time, but
some of it got spilled on you and went inside
your brain, so you can kind of control it
now, but that’s actually really useful for
us, because now we can use your visions to
get the coordinates for it’s point of origin,
so that we can defeat it… with erm, science?
Or something”
Ughhh. And so, what could otherwise have been
a fantastic action/sci-fi movie, just becomes
the equivalent of a symbiotic episode of Clarissa
Explains It All with Guns.
And the creators of Happy Death Day didn’t
do much to save the movie from being absolutely
tedious, with their blatantly obvious attempts
to squeeze it into the Slasher Hall Of Fame
by giving the antagonist a quirky, creepy
mask, akin to other classic Slashers like
Scream or Friday The 13th, but this one just
ended up feeling really forced and passé,
like they were fulfilling some kind of quota
rather than trying to create anything interesting
or different.
The slasher genre is all about creating and
maintaining tension, through the audience’s
fear that the little, weak, squishy protagonists
could get their lives stabbed to bits at any
moment.
But any potential glimmer of tension is taken
away almost immediately by the fact that Happy
Death Day’s squishy little moron dies all
the time, and just gets to try again.
What would usually be a thrilling confrontation
with Mr. Knifey Stabby Man just becomes fucking
annoying.
Although they initially managed to avoid the
instant catastrophe of trying to explain the
unexplainable timeline phenomenon.
"It's very complicated"
"Try me!"
"Fine"
The same cannot be said for it’s pointless
sequel however, as the writers immediately
just ate their own script and went...
“Yep, erm time travel, I guess it’s just
inter-dimensional time travel…now… so”
Let’s just have a student explain that quickly
on a whiteboard,
and whatdya know this room full of fucking
morons now completely comprehends the immensely
complicated intricacies of quantum physics!
Please, show me more scenes of people explaining
complex scientific theories using a couple of basic everyday objects!
"So, a wormhole bends space like this!"
That definitely isn’t the most infuriating cliche ever
and doesn’t make me want to throw my brain
into a fucking wormhole.
I’m joking, of course, and have every intention
of keeping my brain firmly contained within
my skull, unlike whoever is responsible for
green-lighting projects at Netflix.
Who’s seemingly unfazed by their choice
to throw money at 4 projects that are all
slightly different variants of the exact same
idea.
Russian Doll and Bandersnatch being the least
offensive of the four
Russian Doll takes the Groundhog Day motif
and keeps it within it’s dark comedy roots,
which I do appreciate. Being a series, rather
than a film, it also takes advantage of the
longer format to experiment with a few new
ideas, but it still mostly amounts to Natasha
Lyonne walking around New York smoking a bunch
of cigarettes. The performances are fine,
if campy, and it has some genuinely funny
moments. But I realised when I came to write
this script, that I couldn’t actually remember
anything that happened, which isn’t the
best sign. So, I’m going to go ahead and
put this in the ‘meh’ category.
With Bandersnatch, Charlie Brooker took the
Groundhog Day concept and applied it through
a new medium which actually compliments the
core idea. On paper.
It’s an interactive movie/show/game, where
you, the viewer, gets to make certain decisions
to influence the story, although the actual
amount of control you have is arguable.
Being somewhat of a Charlie Brooker fan myself,
I was actually quite excited to watch… play...
I don’t know… bear witness to it.
But sadly, I found the end result to be far
too gimmicky, and just ended up being more
an irritating bore rather than interactive
piece of entertainment.
Bandersnatch’s main character, Stefan, re-lives
certain parts of his timeline, but it’s
actually the viewer that is forced to complete
the time loop themselves, provided they don’t
get bored and just turn it off first.
And although this is congruent with the overall
narrative on a meta level, and is very clever,
it suffers from becoming tiresome extremely
quickly as you are repeatedly forced to make
a variety of decisions; from some completely
insignificant choices that heavily reinforce
the feeling of novelty, to other complete
NON-CHOICES, which have the exact same perceivable outcome
and just feel like unnecessary speed bumps
to other seemingly innocuous choices that lead to completely disproportionate consequences.
and caused me to have horrible L.A Noire flashbacks
where you'd by vaguely unsure about the legitimacy of an interviewees answer to a question
and so you'd press 'Doubt'
and Cole would fly off the handle, and accuse them of being a world-shattering serial super terrorist
and send them to Death Row.
Writing wise, Bandersnatch isn’t an example
of Charlie Brooker’s best work, and although
it feels like he was trying to make some sort
of statement about determinism and free will,
there’s nothing substantial to hold on to.
Although I can appreciate the innovation,
creating Netflix’s first (and hopefully
last) choose your own adventure, I’ve never
felt the desire to rewatch Bandersnatch, unlike
a majority of Charlie Brooker's other works. And so, again,
this ends up falling into the Meh.
While these two are for the most part competent
and bearable, the same cannot be said for
Arq
A dull, sci-fi, borefest which shamelessly
steals the Groundhog Day motif, but unlike
ALL of the other appropriations of this idea,
this movie spends no time at all establishing
any of the characters and just immediately
throws us into action
having the initial time loop occur within
the first two minutes of the movie. Where
Groundhog Day crafted humour from the repetitive
nature of this plot element, Arq only serves
to create pure tedium, as we see Mr. Generic
Every-Guy wake up, check the clock and get
knocked out OVER AND OVER AND OVER again!
The movie gives us no incentive to root for
who I assume in the protagonist, but it isn’t
intentionally ambiguous to present some sort
of moral dilemma, it’s just horrendously
written, and the only opportunity for exposition
occurs when our presumed protagonists are
tied up and left completely unattended for
5 minutes while all the bad guys
go and get some lunch!
Gee, I sure hope they don’t try to cut their
bindings with the scissors on that desk, and
escape with relative ease
that would be really uncool of them.
So, Mr. Generic is apparently some kind of
scientist-hacker-guy who has in his possession
this big spinning magnet, I wonder if that
has anything to do with the time phenomenon?
He quickly explains how time travel works
with a neat little diagram, and he and Mrs.
Generic get to work attempting to escape this
peculiar situation.
There is an interesting twist that the other
characters get pulled into the loop with Mr.
Generic one by one, which is a nice idea,
I guess, however it’s executed very poorly
and the continuity is all over the place,
but we do slowly uncover answers to some of the questions the film raises
like; Why is this happening?
Because of the big magnet, of course!
How will they escape the time loop?
Err...
Well, the writers couldn’t actually figure that bit out, so they just don’t
It just ends on a shitty cliffhanger.
Whilst Arq is undoubtedly a steaming pile
of diarrhea, it’s not actually the worst
interpretation of this idea that Netflix has
concocted, NO! That special accolade is reserved
for Naked!
Starring Marlon Wayans, who we all know as
the culprit behind some of the most pathetically
lame movies ever committed to film.
He is one of the few “comedy” writer/producer/actors
that has almost managed to even out-poop the
modern king of humourless turds; Adam Sandler.
He’s right up there on the podium next to
David Spade & Tyler Perry, who have all essentially
herniated the entirety of their innards due
to the sheer unrelenting power with which
they’ve been forcing movies into existence.
Somewhere amongst the logs of low-grade excreta
that Marlon squeezed out in his early career,
there were actually some small kernels of
hope.
I have to commend his choices and performance
in Requiem For A Dream, which is one of my
personal favourite movies from the early 2000’s.
He was also on the right track when accepting
a role in a Coen Brothers movie, as they are
filmic auteurs, whose work is typically outstanding
and thought-provoking, such a shame that the
particular movie that Marlon chose to work
on ended up being the worst thing they’ve
ever made, but it’s definitely a step above
HIS other projects like Little Man, or White
Chicks, which were a couple of the vilest
entries into the mind-numbingly stupid “dress-up
comedies” that spawned around the turn of
the millenium, a genre which is still inexplicably
being produced to this very day, even Marlon
himself is still beating that dead horse with
every limb he can muster enough brain power
to control.
Haha, fat suit funny, hahaha, little man baby
funny!
"Goo goo, gaa ga!"
Even the first Scary Movie, whilst being crude,
cheap, and horrendously immature, was still
a relatively effective parody, which highlighted
how tedious and laughable horror movies had
become at the time, and was the perfect concoction
to impress and entertain the hormone riddled
mind of a younger, dumber me
and so I can’t completely dismiss that as
trash. I do look back on it now with a feeling
of shame and embarrassment, but it’s undeniable
that it had it’s time and place in my life,
and I’m sure many of you would agree.
However, the same cannot be said for the entire
library of decrepit, putrid, and downright
inane parody movies that were built on the
now crumbled bones of Scary Movie’s success.
Each more pathetic and tiresome than the last.
It’s actually pretty impressive just how
hopeless and dreadful these movies have gotten,
but I fear that we STILL haven’t seen the
end of it, as there have been various reports
claiming that the witless wankers responsible
for this worthless series of films are actually
now working on a Star Wars Parody titled:
“Star Worlds”
In a time where Star Wars has already become
a pathetic, humourless parody of itself, there’s
absolutely no reason AT ALL for anyone to
produce this movie, much less the gormless
boneheads that brought us such tragic offerings
as ‘Epic Movie’ and ‘Fifty Shades Of
Black’
Unfortunately or fortunately ‘Naked’ isn’t
actually one of these decayed and worthless
parodies
No, this time Marlon thought he’d try his
hand at an actual standard comedy for a change
and joined forces with director; Michael Tiddies,
who started, at the height of his career,
directing on the Fred TV Series and then sort
of plummeted headfirst downhill from there.
and they enlisted the help of script writer
extraordinaire Rick Alvarez, who’s directly
responsible for most of the insufferable parodies
mentioned earlier.
But, rather than even attempt to utilize the
few brain cells they have between them and
actually come up with their own idea, they
decided to just blatantly rip-off the premise
of one of my favourite movies!
Naked tells the story of Rob, a lazy, and
slightly unpunctual moron, who is running
late for his wedding.
The nature of Rob’s character is basically
irrelevant anyway, as despite the ridiculous
circumstances he finds himself in throughout
the movie, he undergoes no real development
and is basically a 1-dimensional puppet for
the director to throw around and dress up
like a twat.
The night before Rob’s wedding he agrees
to go for ONE DRINK with his buddies, and
so naturally, wakes up completely naked in
an elevator, with no recollection of what
happened last night.
Rather than immediately attempting to find
some clothes or any way to cover himself up,
Rob makes his way to the Hotel Lobby, and
Security is called to remove him from the
building, and so they chase him out of the
building, and then continue to also chase
him down the street, and then also jump the
barrier and chase him down a marathon track
because they’re thorough, I guess.
He’s aggressively tackled to the ground
and taken into Police custody, where it is
revealed that they believe somebody deliberately
trapped Rob in the elevator last night, and
they presume it was an intentional attempt
to prevent him from getting to his wedding
on time
I’m struggling to think of a more ineffective
way to try and achieve that outcome!
I mean, oh wow, what a mystery, I wonder who
doesn’t want Rob to get married?
Was it his friend?
Was it the Bride’s father?
Was it the Bride’s Lamborghini, douchebag,
ex-boyfriend who has for some reason also
been invited to this wedding?
Despite the police acknowledging that Rob
has been the victim of some sort of bizarre
crime
they still just put him in jail, which prevents
him from getting to his wedding on time
While making use of his one phone call to
try and figure out what the hell is happening,
the lights flicker and he gravitates and sort
of sucked into a portal, which transports
him back to the elevator earlier that day.
And so the Groundhog Day loop begins! But
rather than repeating the same day on a loop,
like the original, Rob repeats the same hour
on a loop instead.
Immediately reducing the potential for any
real variety, and also exhausting the movie’s
own recurring motifs with a greater efficiency
than I would’ve ever thought possible.
Rather than going through a spectrum of emotional
responses to his existence within a time loop,
like Phil Connors, or literally any human
being in that situation, Rob just blindly
accepts his new circumstances straight away, and gets to work trying to complete an arbitrary to-do list
of objectives before getting to his wedding
on time.
Cue a montage of him arriving to the church
in an increasingly stupid array of outfits,
which all result in him being physically thrown
out by the Bride’s father.
Because physical assault is a perfectly reasonable
& socially acceptable response to your future
son-in-law arriving at the church, on his
wedding day, in vaguely questionable attire.
Ha ha!
This is a perfect example of the greatest
flaw in this movie's writing, and a problem
that plagues a lot of the movies produced
by this team of twats, is that any potential
for logical or rational decision making is
completely abandoned in order to try and force
moments of humour.
Always opting to go down the LOL (XD) so RANDOM
route, rather than making the effort to set
up a logical premise and then deliver an actual
punchline. He’s doing silly things, laugh!
Another example of this occurs when Rob accidentally
enrages a violent gang, by knocking one of
their bikes over and so naturally they retaliate
angrily - by demanding that he eats a handful
of coins
Why, you ask?
Oh, so that he can throw them up in the next
scene, and that’s comedy, I guess.
He then proceeds to deliberately fuck up his
own hand
for literally no reason at all, other than
I guess, including this shot of a silly bendy
arm.
Ha ha?
Aside from the complete absence of rationality
or logic in any of the events that occur in
the movie, it’s also horrendously inconsistent
Firstly, with the nature in which the time-loop
occurs, sometimes Rob dies and reawakens,
other times Rob just gets punched back in
time, sometimes he just stands around and
waits and all of a sudden wakes up on the
floor, and other times a weird supernatural
portal that picks him up and sucks him in,
and he doesn’t question it or mention it
to anyone.
There’s also absolutely no regard for continuity,
as in different loops characters appear in
separate locations or have completely different
responses to the same events occurring
Rob’s mother exists both at the church and
in some random bar simultaneously, depending
on what suits the script at the time.
And towards the end of the movie, when a naked
Rob enters the Hotel Lobby, again, as he always
does, in exactly the same fashion as in all
the earlier loops, this time, rather than
chasing him out of the building and handing
him over to the police, the security offer
Rob assistance and show him the footage of
what happened the night before.
Apparently it was the Bride’s best friend
that trapped him in the elevator, because
they went on a date once and he didn’t call
her back.
That’s literally it, that’s the BIG REVEAL,
which is completely overshadowed by the fact
that these two instances CAN’T EXIST! It
doesn’t make ANY FUCKING SENSE. There's
absolutely no justification for why security
would assist him in one loop and attack him
in the other. Nothing has changed, how is
this possible?
And the final “perfect” run of Rob’s
hour has him somehow complete all of his to-do
list as well as a variety of random side quests
he’s stumbled upon in his various playthroughs,
which amounts to a list of tasks so impossible
to complete within the hour he has at his
disposal, that it makes me want to kick my
own head in.
But again logic is discarded altogether so
that we can have some cute callbacks to all
the side characters and shit celebrity cameos
who have all somehow abandoned what they should
be doing today to attend this wedding of a
man they couldn’t have possibly spoken to
for more than a few moments.
This movie is impossibly dreadful, and I laughed
at nothing. Everything that occurs is completely
inconsequential to the point that it’s frustrating.
The characters don’t learn anything, and
the movie offers nothing of value. It’s
just a lazy, cheap, pathetic waste of time,
and much like the other productions we’ve
looked at today, it really failed to understand
and acknowledge what made Groundhog Day so
great in the first place.
And so, inevitably was a massive failure.
And so, I’ve come to the conclusion that
the only chance anyone has of doing this original
idea justice, would be if Columbia Pictures
got their shit together and made Groundhog
Day 2…
Which is just the exact same movie, again!
"Well, it's Groundhog Day, again!"
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