It’s a damn fact: movies are made either for 13-year-olds or bicoastal glitterati/literati pc pundits. So if you want to watch the Avengers avenge something, or see a woman make love to a fish—because all men are you should excuse the expression pigs—be my guest. I prefer to stay home and laugh.
My resources o’ yuks are three, all on YouTube. My first discovery was “Honest Trailers”, seen below, making fun of a personal non-fave, the Lady Gaga gag me with a spoon edition of A Star Is Born.
Honest Trailers does both movies and TV, though mostly film, put together by some sort of outfit known as Screen Junkies. Each trailer subjects its subject to five or six minutes of wise-guy ridicule, focusing, for the most part, on Hollywood’s bloated “tent-pole” freaks, which I, for the most part, assiduously avoid. They also run a lot of panel shows, or podcasts, or whatever they are, which mostly consist of young people laughing at each other’s jokes, which I avoid pretty assiduously as well.
Next up is “Everything Wrong With”, dissecting the inanities of the same collection of billion-dollar blockbusters in more detail, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. Twenty minutes spent ridiculing a boring film can be almost as boring as the film itself, but sometimes the laughs are there. “EWW” is a product of “CinemaSins”, apparently the creation of two guys, Jeremy Scott and Chris Atkinson. They can be particularly effective when they go retro, examining, for example, the cigarettes n’ sexism ethos of the early Bond films, like Thunderball (seen below), and I wish they’d do more of them.
Finally, there's “Pitch Meetings”, a seriously one-man show done entirely, it seems, by Ryan George, who is both writer and on air talent, portraying both an eager writer and an eager producer, who furiously bat banalities and clichés back and forth on their way to a mega-million-dollar deal, shown below applying a beatdown to the picture George Clooney, and everyone else associated with it would like to forget, Batman and Robin.
So, Hollywood, you may not be witty yourself, but you can be the source of wit in others. And, these days, one out of two ain’t bad.
