And then there was rage…

Oh internet my internet I know it has been quite some time since I have given you love.  However like any good adult services provider on Craig’s List can attest to,  sometimes you have to follow the money and like a good wage slave work has taken a larger percentage of my time.  Sadly I have not missed any good movies recently since, well there haven’t been any.  Oh there have been a few films that have been a light in the darkness but like any good pessimist can agree with sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is an on-coming train.

While out at another film I happened to catch the trailer for Gnomeo & Juliet which looked like it could be, at the very least amusing.  Sadly this was not to be, as the saying goes about “Too many cooks” it also applies to “Too many writers” as well.  This piece of shit film had nine writers involved, ten if you include Shakespeare who if he were alive today would be filing rape charges against the others.  Now if you went to High School in the US then you more than likely had to suffer through Shakespeare’s immortal tragedy about teenage angst Romeo and Juliet.  Probably even had to read it aloud in English class in 9th or 10th grade.  In fact I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone living in an English-speaking country that does not have even a passing familiarity of the play.

Which leads me to ask this question/rant to the writers: WHAT THE FUCK?!? WERE YOU HOME SCHOOLED BY HELEN KELLER? I HAVE HEARD OF PHONING IT IN BUT THIS IS FUCKING RIDICULOUS! IF SHAKESPEARE WEREN’T DEAD ALREADY HE WOULD KILL HIMSELF FROM SHAME…

To date there has only been one movie that I have walked out of and this POS was really close to being the 2nd.  When the credits finally rolled I found that I was actually quite angry, which I suspect is definitely not the response the writers were looking for.  I found myself thinking about the audience in the theater, since this was an animated movie it had a large percentage of children and suffering parents.  During the film I remember the theater being very quiet, in fact the only laugh I can recall was from a woman sitting next to me when she guffawed at a really stupid statement made by one of the characters.  For the record I didn’t laugh once.

The concept of the movie was a cute one; an attempt to update and make more accessible a classic piece of literature to a younger audience or at the very least make it more interesting to a teenage audience that increasingly does not like to read.  They even have a garden gnome making a statement at the beginning of the movie making a statement that this film will not be a standard representation of the classic play.  As the gnome is reading the statement the classic stage hook is attempting to pull him from the stage.  The ironies of a tired comedy trope being used in a movie about a tired play is sadly  not funny.  In fact if anything it annoyed the hell out of me.

The film itself opens on a pair of side-by-side houses (one red, one blue) and the mailboxes state they are 2b and not 2b.  Sadly this is not the last of the “homages” just the first is a series of really, really bad ones.  So instead of the Montague’s and the Capulet’s we have the red gnomes and blue gnomes (with matching gardens!).  At this point I experience a red out and I just wanted the movie to be over.  The movie basically dissolves into a series of vignettes of other movies.  We have Grease meets West Side Story meets a classic cheesy kung fu movie mixed with a basic flick about revenge with a dash of Shakespeare.

If anything if I didn’t know any better I would have chocked it up to a film school students tongue in cheek research project but this is sadly not the case.