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This article was written in response to my award winning series of papers dealing with destrutive trends and their origins
(-Jesse K, clearing things up)
Jesse K! I am astonished! Why, my skirt is blowing right up over my head! I
never expected to see
you reproducing such poorly informed misinformation on
THE INTERNET of all places, where people come to peruse truthful,
educated
commentary on well-researched material. It’s a good thing that the only people
who read this website
are you, me, and the porn site representatives who come by
once in a while to sign the guestbook. I am now going
to, point-by-point,
berate you for your ignorance.
First off, the trend of terrible, unfunny cross-dressing movies
that re-hash the
same gags over and over again did not start with “Tootsie.” This movie came out
in
god-damn 1982. I can guarantee that the first instance of cross-dressing on
film was waaay before the ‘80s.
Charlie Chaplain was doing it back in 1914,
for christ’s sake. But the precursor to the modern drag movies
that you’re
talking about (Sorority Boys, White Chicks, etc.) is the 1959 comedy “Some Like
It Hot,”
which was pretty much the prototype for every movie starring a man in
high-heels since then. It also exhausted all
the humor from “Hey, that guy’s
wearing a skirt!” before any of the Wayans brothers were even born.
I
think you’re giving Shaq a little too much credit as well. The problem with
Kazaam, as well as most of the
other movies you’ve named, is that they came out
during our lifetime. Nothing innovative or influential has
happened during our
lifetime. Kazaam is just another example of the trend of superstar-crossover
movies that have
been being made ever since the dawn of time. The original
“Tarzan, the Ape-Man” from the ‘30s was
olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller.
Joe Namath dropped a number of bombs on celluloid during the ‘70s. Even
Apollo
Creed from the Rocky movies was played by Carl Weathers, a football player.
And don’t even TRY to convince
me that there weren’t pop singers in films
before 1995. Aside from Elvis, and the Monkees, and their ilk, I’m
going to
cite as a counterpoint an entire genre: Musicals, which are old as dirt. I’m
not going to attempt
to pinpoint where they began, because I don’t have
extensive knowledge about the dawn of life on earth. I would
conjecture that
at some time during the mitosis of the first unicellular organism, the genetic
differentiation between
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers was already beginning to
occur.
Also, Lindsay Lohan was already an actress before she
ever became a singer.
(“Parent Trap” remake, remember? There were two of her.)
I would probably
concede that Mr. Nanny was at the forefront of the
action-heroes-taking-care-of-kids (A.H.T.C.O.K.) movement, as this is
a
relatively new development, however, Kindergarten Cop came out three years
earlier, so if I were to lay the blame
on one specific movie, that would be it.
But also, as you should be aware of, the AHTCOK comedy (which was hinted at by
the
1970s “Bad News Bears”) is only one specific permutation of the
Fish-Out-of-Water format. All of these
petty sub-genres—the AHTCOK movie, the
drag comedy, and the Black-Cop-White-Cop buddy film (which started with “48
Hours,”
not “Lethal Weapon”)—are all a part of a larger genre of comedy, and
therefore a larger problem.
Every Fish-Out-of-Water comedy that has ever been
made, has been guilty of using the same hackneyed premises that have
been
tricking people into watching worthless crap since the time of Shakespeare.
Differentiating between them only
blurs the fact that these movies are all the
exact same type of garbage for the exact same reason.
Oh, and the
seminal romantic comedy for the 90s was “When Harry Met Sally.”
My response:
I think Jesse T makes some accurate points here, but his ignorance only serves to throw into
sharp relief just how un-aware most people are about the viral trends spreading through our movie theatres. The reason
that movies like "Some Like it Hot" and all the earlier "men in women's clothing" comedies don't get counted is because they
are not what the CDC calls "the flashpoint". Before the begining of any major plague there are always a few scattered
cases. How many other movies in the 50's were entirely based around the comic potential of men with breasts? None,
and this is because it was an isolated outbreak. However, movie producers think differently now, and any movie that
achieves even moderate success is likely to have at least half a dozen rip-offs, spin-offs, sequals, or followers in production
within a week. Just look at the proliferation of Americanized J-horror. Before "The Ring" we had nothing, a few
years ago it came out, this year we have at least 6 similar movies. There is no way this can be a coincidence.
I will concede that Lindsay Lohan is a Actor turned pop-star, I was thinking of one of he hundred
other people who are identicle to her, only in reverse. Mea Culpa. As per the other claims about superstar cross-overs,
I will continue with my delightful disease metaphor from the first paragraph. Every year there is a Flu season, and
it is unpleasant but it passes with relativley little damage. In 1918 a deadly strain of the Flu appeared and killed
21 million people worldwide. Did Johnny Weismuller kill anybody? Now, did Jah-Rule? I rest my case.
His poitns about the original films of the AHTCOK and Black Cop White Cop genres are
well taken, and I must concede that my research for this article consisted mainly of thinking of the first movie I
could remember of that type. I ceratinly didn't mean to imply that these films were anything other than the begining
of a sub-genre within a sub-genre (Fish-out-of-Water Comedy). The reason these Sub-sub-genre's are singled out is because
they both hold a tremendous ratio of awful movies to good movies, which comededy in general does not come anywhere
near matching. I would also like to posit that "When Harry Met Sally" wasn't the true innovator of the genre
because It actually wasn't terrible, and all romantic comedies must, by law, suck. When I wrote this article that was
the first movie that came to mind, but I decided that it lacked enough of the conventions of the genre that I could categorize
it as a Comedy with elements of romance. In response to the larger, and most important point of the article, that
there has been no appreciable diminishing of entertainment in our life times, I say only this: "Baby Geniuses 2". And
you can't argue with that.
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