What Is It About Blogs That Breaks Brains?: "This is amusingly incoherent."
This kind of crap pisses me off. I write a little about it in the comments thread, but basically I'm fed up with the idea that (for example) fans of "Snakes on a Plane" should be ashamed or that they were "wrong" because Snakes didn't break box office records.
We saw the same narrative with "Serenity". In Serenity's case, you've got a terrific movie which was awesome and enjoyed by a lot of people. But we're supposed to consider it a huge failure because it wasn't the absolute blockbuster moneymaker of the century.
Same with "Snakes"--all the people who had a lot of fun this summer looking forward to the cheesy horror movie with the goofy title are supposed to be "wrong" because the movie wasn't the biggest hit in the world.
How did Citizen Kane do when it opened? How did Dr. Strangelove do? How about Blood Feast or Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Diabolique? Night of the Living Dead?
Should we consider all these movies to be completely worthless if they weren't the biggest hit of their respective year?
In fact, the "Snakes" fever was something of an antidote to the mainstream "blockbuster" mentality, because it was fan- and niche-driven, but in a big way. It was a bunch of fans of something saying "Hey, we like this idea a LOT and we're gonna talk about it", and as a result, awareness of the idea gets boosted up into the next tax bracket, where EVERYBODY's looking at it. But the important thing (to me, and likely to most of the people who were looking forward to Snakes this summer) the important thing is just having fun and enjoying yourself, not necessarily making billions of dollars at the box office.
Jeff
