Why The Seltzerberg Movies Fail

Spy Hard, Scary Movie (partially), Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Meet The Spartans, Vampires Suck, and the upcoming The Starving Games and The Biggest Movie Ever Made 3D.  None of them are good.  The best among them is generally considered to be Scary Movie, which was composed of three screenplays mashed together.  Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg have yet to create a movie that rates higher than "bearable if you're doing something else while it's on".  Why is that?  Well, obviously, because they suck, but let's look a little harder at why they suck.

The movies are allegedly parodies.  Let's start there.  The first problem is that most of the time it's pretty obvious Seltzer and Friedberg have not actually seen the movies they are attempting to parody and instead think that just having seen the trailers they are qualified to mock them.  As a result, their parody is shallow and witless and usually involves jokes of which everyone else has already thought, if there are any jokes at all and they are not just recreating a scene from the trailer with their own actors.  Occasionally, they just steal jokes from other comedies and think that counts as doing a parody of said comedy.  But I digress.  To do a parody, you have to actually be familiar with the subject at hand.  My policy on parodies is that they should be funny to anyone, but get funnier the more familiar you are with what's being parodied, something that simply cannot be true when the writers have not actually seen the movie or, quite often, not even looked up its summary on Wikipeda or IMDB.

Now, a quick side-rant before I continue.  Most subcultures have a sense of humor about themselves.  That is, the D&D players, the metalheads, the goths, the science fiction nerds--they are all aware that what they're doing is at least a little bit ridiculous.  They take it seriously, just not 100%, and the people who do take it completely seriously are the ones that no one likes.  Despite the stereotypes of these groups being composed of the rabidly antisocial and humorless, most of them are perfectly nice people who happen to share an affinity for a certain game or genre or style and the culture surrounding it.  Back to the subject at hand:

As Mel Brooks said, "You have to love the things you parody."  When a parody is made with love, it will itself be beloved.  Many great parodies, such as Galaxy Quest, Metalocalypse, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and many episodes of Community are beloved by members of the culture they mock because of their affectionate touch.  In fact, in many cases, they even work as part of the genre itself (Dethklok's albums have sold quite well; Batman: The Brave and the Bold has some genuinely touching moments; Galaxy Quest won a Hugo Award.)

On the other hand, more direct or Juvenalian parodies such as Shrek (yes, it's a kids' movie, but hear me out) are made with a great amount of bile and hatred for their subject of parody (in Shrek's case, for squeaky-clean Disney values), but these can still work, if not quite as well.

The Seltzerberg movies, however, do not do any of that.  They are not motivated by feelings towards a particular film or genre, be it love or hate.  They are motivated by a desire to make money.  You'll recall in my Hot Chelle Rae rant I said "they don't want to make music, they just want to be musicians"; here, Seltzer and Friedberg do not want to make comedy, they just want to be comedians.   The result is a creatively sterile and utterly ineffectual non-parody of nothing in particular.

Of course, some parodies work even despite this.  Airplane! derives surprisingly few jokes from its genre of choice, aside from the overall story.  Instead, Airplane! makes use of a premise the writers found to be naturally ridiculous and instead of a parody, most of the jokes can be though of as using the premise as a vehicle for the Zucker-Abrahms-Zucker style of comedy, and it worked.  However, Seltzerberg fails at this because they do not write jokes.  They write references.  Airplane! uses plenty of references, but it always makes sure the reference doubles as a non-reference joke, even if it simply means ending the scene by having someone run into a control tower.  Seltzerberg movies reference pop culture trends and quote famous movies without thought of context or humor, thinking that just by pointing at something else they are being intelligent.

Now, why the Seltzerberg movies continue to exist is the subject for a rant for another time, but I always find (and hope that others who read this agree) that one of the best ways to learn how to do something better is by watching someone else fail and learning from their mistakes.  If nothing else, Seltzer and Friedberg have succeeded in providing a number of excellent non-examples of how to do a parody.

The Beatles

Holy crap, an update.

On the internet there has apparently formed a rather large backlash against The Beatles from people saying they suck various things they probably did not (I say "probably" because it was the sixties).  Anyway, the backlash seems to come less from the band's music and more from the fact that they are so often billed as "the greatest band of all time".  So let me state clearly: the most important and influential rock band of all time?  Perhaps.  The best?  Probably not.

Rock and roll, like most genres, changes and evolves as time goes by, and every once in a while it needs to be reshaped, typically whenever the existing style has started to grow stale.  The grunge revolution of the 90s, for example, or the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll attitude of the 70s.  The Beatles were one of the bands that did this, famously starting the British Invasion of the late 60s and early 70s.  So to understand why the Beatles were so huge, you should understand the stale state of rock and roll before they arrived.

Record company executives are not a new phenomenon, nor are they particularly worse now than they were in the 50s and 60s.  For years the basic formula was "pick up a bunch of kids that might or might not know how to play instruments, call them a band, sell a million albums, repeat".  And it worked.  Enter The Beatles.  The thing that made the Beatles so big wasn't so much that they were especially good, it's that they were better.  Now, I happen to own a pretty solid collection of vintage Mad Magazines from the era, and for several months after their introduction Mad was willing to brush off the Beatles as another one of the over-hyped talentless kludges of the era, albeit one that deserved a bit more attention due to their ridiculous hair and silly British accents.  They came around, but the fact that they could keep this up shows that the Beatles were not mind-blowingly talented performers or song-writers.  A lot of the backlash towards the Beatles comes from this period of music, and whenever someone says "The Beatles are the best band ever!", someone else is sure to bring up "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."

The thing is, though, the Beatles were at least competent.  They could carry a tune, and pretty soon people were willing to admit they could hum along with most of their songs.  This is what I mean when I say "they weren't good, they were better"; they were better than just about anything else on the radio or in the record store, at least when it came to rock.  And unlike many performers, they didn't stop improving once they got famous.  They kept practicing and experimenting and getting better.  When people talk about the Beatles in hushed, reverent tones, they're almost referring to their later stuff, typically starting with Revolver or thereabouts.

Anyway, we all know the story.  John goes Yoko-loco and the band breaks up.  This is where we get to the other crucial part of the Beatles: their legacy.  The Beatles were pioneers of a number of things that have become mainstays of pop and rock: the I-V-vi-IV chord progression, the use of instruments besides guitars, bass guitars, and drums in rock music, multi-track vocals, even just the idea of slower, more methodical rock like "The Long and Winding Road"; even if they didn't invent the ideas or use them first, they were the ones that codified their usage and they're the reasons we still use them today.  A pretty impressively massive number of musicians will claim their inspiration was the Beatles or an artist or group who were themselves inspired by The Beatles.

Famously, when asked if he thought Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world, John Lennon replied "He's not even the best drummer in the Beatles."  So, no, I'm not going to ask you to like the Beatles.  Like any band, they have a particular style that some people like and some people don't.  But I am a little sick of hearing they suck.

"HAGS"

Back when I was in middle and high school, I hated yearbooks.  My policy was "I've been at this wretched place for four years.  I will remember it plenty without the aid of a $110 paperweight."    My Junior year, my parents forced* me to buy a yearbook, which I have since thrown away.  Since then, I have never once, even for an instant, had anything resembling regret my decision to not get a yearbook.

[* And I do mean "forced".  I tried to warn them.  I do not feel at all guilty about wasting their money.  They wasted it.]

Despite this, I do not have a problem with other people getting yearbooks.  That's your prerogative.  And if you wanted me to sign it, I did.  However, every time I did, I saw an acronym for which I have an intense hatred, one I have not been able to fully vocalize until now.

"H.A.G.S.", or "Have a great summer", is awful.  First of all, it doesn't sound good.  It could easily be replaced by, say, "Have a nice summer", which forms the much nicer acronym "HANS".  That sounds much better.

Of course, my problem with it is not how it sounds, it is what it means: nothing.  It means nothing.  "Have a great summer" is bad enough, but some people decide four words is too much.  Four words.  So they go with "HAGS".  What are you saying with that?  I reiterate, nothing.  You are writing something down but you are saying nothing.  You are recklessly wasting ink.

"But what if I can't think of anything else to say?"
Then why on earth are you signing their yearbook?  Either you don't care about them, in which case you don't need to sign their yearbook, or you don't need to say anything else to them, in which case you don't need to sign their yearbook.

If you were taking a series of surveys which included the options "If 'yes', explain below; if 'no', continue to the next question," you would not check "no" and then add in the comment box "I have nothing to say here".  Or "IHNTSH".

And while I didn't have a problem signing people's yearbooks, I do still think of it as stupid for pretty much this reason.  If you're not going to remember the person, why get their signatures?  Why get their signatures in a particular book filled with signatures?  Couldn't it just as easily be accomplished by, say, blank paper, if there is something that cannot be said any other way?  I could buy that using the yearbook would save on paper if yearbooks did not now include about a dozen empty pages just for signatures.  And if you do want to remember them, then you already have a book with their picture in it.

I've been out of high school for a little short of a year now, and I've already started forgetting people.  Does this make me sad?  Do I wish I had some way to remember them?  No.  I don't care about them.  Hence "forgetting".  I can therefore save that brainspace for things like how to avoid hangover, which despite not drinking is still more personal and interesting than any of the brain-dead banshee seatfiller in my assorted classes.

Facebook has already made this tradition (and yearbooks in general) more obsolete than phone booths and pet rocks, which still have some value for some people compared with the alternatives.  Yearbooks, meanwhile, cost somewhere between $60 and $110, while Facebook is free.  In fact, even if you couldn't afford a computer, you could probably get a secondhand laptop for less than the cost of two years' yearbooks.  One, if you found a good deal.  But enough about yearbooks in general.

If someone gives you their yearbook to sign and you just intend to say "HAGS", it would be far easier to just say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I don't really have anything to say."  That may sound rude, but they'll find out that's what you mean anyway when they read their yearbook and see that you just wrote "HAGS".  In fact, I'd have less of a problem if you just signed your name and nothing else, because that's at least not pretending you have anything else to say.  Saying (in essence), "This is my name.  This is how I write my name.  It is in your book," is quite exactly equivalent to "This is my name.  This is how I write my name.  It is in your book.  Have a great summer," but more concise and accurate.

You don't care what kind of summer they have.  At least, not in any real capacity.  You certainly aren't hoping they have a bad summer in most cases.  But does that count?  It counts in the same way as being against child abuse or cancer.  Who on earth is in favor of them?  And if you did care about them enough to actively hope for them to have a great summer, you wouldn't be writing "HAGS" in their yearbook.

The Nice Guy: A Webcomic Review

“The Nice Guy”, written by Michael O’Connell with art by Tim Watts and color by L. J’amal Walton, is a travesty of a webcomic which is held together only by its own myopia and utter ignorance of itself.

It starts out:

Didn’t they already make this into a show?  I think it was called “promptly cancelled”.  Your idea is not novel nor interesting enough to sustain a webcomic.  Typically one places the horse in front of the buggy, but hey, I’m not going to tell you how to do your job.

Actually I am.

Therefore, the soundest career advice I can give is “Quit now.  Stop trying.  Never touch paper nor a keyboard again.”

Anyway, the website itself is pretty well-designed, I’ll give them that much.  It’s about the only nice thing I can say about this travesty.  But hey, why bother talking about something that’s going to be so totally eclipsed as to cease to matter?  This webcomic sucks irredeemably.  Let’s talk about that.

Let’s take a look at the characters:

At the very best, we have a boring character.  We know nothing that makes him distinctive or memorable or which makes him seems like an interesting person.  The closest we get is that he’s supposed to be some kind of uber-nice messiah, our beleaguered everyman.  The problem is, real people aren’t like this.  They have interests more specific than “romance”.  This isn’t a character outline, this is a dating site profile that gets zero hits.

“Rejection” does not count as a “turn-off”.  No one likes rejection.  That does not make him special.

As a result, the only defining characteristic of this character is his name.  And even that’s pretty boring.  Seriously, “Jeff”?  You are bound by nothing but limits of your imagination, and you come up with “Jeff”?  You’re trying to make a memorable character and you name him “Jeff”?  That’s like one step above “Johnny” for boring male lead names.  By the way, has anyone else noticed how many terrible movies have leads named “Johnny”?

 Johnny.

 Johnny.

Also Johnny.  It’s like romance novels and “Grace”.  But I’m getting sidetracked.  The point is, Jeff sucks as a character.  But that’s okay.  Maybe he’s our Jerry Seinfeld, and the jokes aren’t about him, they’re him responding to everyone else.  Spoiler alert: he isn’t.  If he was, he wouldn’t be nice.  He’d have to be a jerk.  I bring this up because as we read the comic, we find out Jeff actually is a jerk, but he’s still not funny.  They have masterfully sidestepped any attempts at making this character endearing.

Okay, what about our supporting cast?  Next up is Frank.

Okay, at this point I’m beginning to suspect our author does not know what “turn-ons” and “turn-offs” are.

“But how else could I tell people up-front he’s cynical and apathetic?” says the author, hypothetically.

“You rewrite your character profiles, you idiot.  And while you’re at it rewrite your characters and your comic,” I reply.

Give him interests or something.  I get the feeling you didn’t fully think through this character.  Now, I’m a writer, so if I may, let me attempt to empathize with the author here:

“Oh, man!  I just thought of a great joke!  But how can I set it up?  Oh, I know, I’ll make one of my characters angry, because that’s the kind of character I need for this joke to work!”

I’ve been there.  So let me tell you, it is a terrible writing process.  Comedy comes naturally from well-developed characters and situations, not vice-versa.

Moving on now, we have Peg.

While in theory this meets my criterion of him having interests, I’d like to point out the list reads as: sports, clubbing, food, sex, cigars, picking things up and throwing them, beer, Call of Duty, leaving his underwear everywhere, forgetting anniversaries, and testosterone.  You see the problem.

Also his “turn-offs” just says “Hassles”.  Like, wow, really?  I would never have guessed someone disliked hassles.

And now perhaps the worst addition to this impressively-bad cast, Becki.

Becki is barely a character; the only thing that keeps me calling her a character is the technical definition.  She exists solely as Jeff’s primary conflict.  Oh, who am I kidding, only conflict; multiple plot strings is far beyond this comic’s capability.

“Aloofness”.  They aren’t even trying to be subtle.  This reads like Jeff wrote it, since it basically just lists the problems Jeff finds with her rather than, I don’t know, making her sound like a person.

Are you going to give us any insight into this, or just act like this is enough information?  What is her opinion on the matter?  Surely she must have realized she has a negative pattern, if it is the sole defining characteristic in her life.  She can’t even say, “I like knitting and I often pick bad men”.  She has literally nothing else about which to think.

“Men being nice to her” is a turn-off, says the self-described “nice guy”.  Okay, I’m going to come back to that.

So, our comic begins here:

Already we see some of the recurring problems with the comic.  The first and most important being: Jeff is not a nice guy.  He does not respect women for their minds, and he is not some poor maligned gentleman pushed aside by women only interested in jerks.  While you could say that I’m only saying this because real life doesn’t work like that, it doesn’t even work within the microcosm of the comic.  This author had the power to distort facts as much as he wanted, courtesy of artistic license, and he still can’t make his main character likeable.

The fact that she has a boyfriend means he no longer cares what she’s saying.  What she’s saying, need I remind you, is reflective of her personality, the thing about which you so fervently claim you care.  Because you can’t hump her as of the present.  You see the problem right?

The problem isn’t that you’re nice, Jeff, the problem is that you’re a jerk.  Speaking as an actual nice guy, I have, since about Freshman year of high school, had a nearly constant stream of beautiful girls throwing themselves at me.

Yeah, you laugh. 

Okay, fine, a little misogyny.  I’ve certainly seen worse things.  I’ve laughed at worse things.  If I need to remind you, I have in the past not only laughed at but made jokes about 9/11, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust.  The Nice Guy distinguishes itself by not being very funny.

 Funny.

Funny.

Not even a chuckle.  The problem is not rooted in its sexism.  I'm certainly no white knight, it's just simply not funny.

I guess my problem with this is sort of similar to my biggest problem with Twilight: it’s not just that the protagonist is an unlikable martyr-complex hypocrite, it's that we’re supposed to agree with them and all the horrible selfish things they say and do.

But don't worry about them just making unfunny sexist jokes over and over; they're making the same unfunny sexist jokes over and over.  I’ve got some punchlines here: let’s take a looksie.  First up, “making a bet”:

 Next, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

A quick aside on this one--most of the time when there are a certain number of characters it’s because that number is necessary to the style and structure of the work, at least in cases where the work is good.  In this case the roommates, Black-Haired Unit and Blonde-Haired Unit, are entirely redundant characters.

And of course their personal favorite, “You’re disrespecting women and I’m disapproving of you.”

Move over, Gary Larson.
Now, I’d like to point out that in every case, he ends with some variation of “I give up”.  Those are some solid convictions which you can not and will not uphold there, Jeff.

And of course there’s just the flat out “Guys besides Jeff are jerks" angle.

  At one point, eschewing all pretense, they just flat-out end with a “yo momma” joke.

Saying something is stupid doesn’t make your joke funny, especially so when you're blatantly laughing at your own jokes.  Saying something is stupid in a funny way is funny.  Learn the difference.

But of course the biggest problem with this webcomic is Jeff and his belief that he is the sage Nice Guy who just needs a chance to show Becki he can make her happy.  To him, I say this:

Clearly this show is important to you.  We know you’ve known Becki for a while.  And yet you’ve never had a conversation long enough for you to even tangentially mention Firefly?  The show you faithfully watch every month?  On top of that, your “soulmate”--hold on, those scare quotes aren’t big or sarcastic enough:

“ soul mate ”

is someone who doesn’t even like your favorite show?  I mean, in a relationship, it’s not required that you like every single thing the other person likes, but if you don’t have any common interests, it’s usually a sign you’re not meant to be together.  Which would be fine if you were just in it for the sex instead of a long-term relationship.  And for as much as Jeff seems to dislike that Filler Characters B and C only date bimbos, Becki seems to be a pretty stupid hot girl.  More importantly (and remember I said I’d get back to this), it seems to me all too likely that Becki is not turned off by people being nice to her, she’s turned off by Jeff because he is a colossal dick.

Okay, nerds love nerd jokes.  This is particularly true of webcomics, where “geeky” is considered the norm amongst the audience.

 The Nice Guy has the “nerd” part down... sort of.  Its references are skin-deep, but they’re there.  What it doesn’t have down is the “joke”.

I can’t really explain the joke here for the same reason I can’t tell you much about Bigfoot.  I can’t quite say it doesn’t exist, but the evidence is spotty at best.

See, here’s the thing: an homage is not the same thing as re-using a joke.  An homage requires creativity, taking something the creator admires and putting it in a new light that both takes new humor from it while it shows affection for the original.  To explain what I mean, I'm going to show you this example from Malcolm in the Middle, which I could not find in video form:

 Malcolm: (laughs) Check this out.

Reese: What does it say?

Malcolm: Just read it, it’s funny.

Reese: I don’t read.  Not unless I absolutely have to for school.  Otherwise I feel like they’ve won.

Malcolm: You’ve never read the paper?

Reese: No.

Malcolm: Not even comics?  Like Peanuts.  You’ve never read Peanuts?

Reese: Nope.

Malcolm: Are you serious?  You’ve never read Peanuts?

Reese: Uh-uh.

 Malcolm: Go ahead!  I promise I’ll hold it!

See what it did there?  How it turned the old joke into a new joke?  How it used what someone else made along with its own existing comedic context?

This is what The Nice Guy does:

We’ve seen this before.  It’s.  Not.  Funny.  It doesn’t bring anything new to the table.

So we’ve pretty much confirmed the writer has absolutely no understanding of how comedy works.  But of course, the comedy was just a secondary goal.  The primary purpose of The Nice Guy is for the poorly-disguised-if-at-all author stand-in can talk about how terrible it is being him.

Oh no!  Gaining a new friend!?  How awful!  Sex is the only thing that matters.

By the way, I’ve already touched upon the sexist overtones that border on the hilarious considering their context, but I feel like I should at least cover the rest of that comic:

Ha ha!  Frank slept with a fat girl!  Everyone knows that means she’s worth less as a person.

And Becki is such a great person, isn’t she?  I don’t know how Jeff keeps his hands off of her.  Seriously, dude, what do you see in her?  When you were a little kid, did you think, “Someday, I’m going to marry a woman that’s stupid, insecure, and easily manipulated!”  If you did, then I’m starting to suspect you might be evil.  Like, hard-core, old-fashioned, Lifetime-Movie-of-the-Week-husband material evil.

Showing Peg constantly scoring because he’s callous to his sexual partners?  You really do respect women, don’t you, Mr. Author?

Okay, I’m going to have to be discriminating here, since there’s something horribly wrong with just about every one of these ~75 comics.

 Ha ha!  Frank likes Firefly.  That’s the beginning and end of this joke.

You’re so thoughtful and considerate, Jeff.  That seems like the perfect time to solicit sex.

Aaagh.  It’s really hard to narrow it down.  I need to step out for some air.

*****

 Okay, while the comic is mostly episodic, it has had a few small story arcs, a term which is misleading in implying there’s a story.  There’s the “summertime”... temporally sequential comics and the “worker’s comp” temporally sequential comics.

The best part of Becki is how she looks in a bikini.

That’s being too generous.  It implies there’s another aspect for it to be better than.

For as much as I dislike the fact that they're so blatantly objectifying women, they have at the same time created a woman with no use outside of being objectified.  I'm not sure how to feel.

SO FUNNY.

The comics take place one after another, but there’s no build-up or pay-off as a result.  Story arcs are there to develop characters and tension in a way that episodic comic strips can’t.  What did we learn here?  It’s just repeating the same non-jokes that we’ve seen in every comic before.

The workman’s comp arc: Frank fakes an injury, sues the company, and then he gets found out when the insurance people catch him playing basketball.  I’m not going to show it here because it would be redundant.  You’ve seen it before.

I have one more complaint about the writing, but I want to save that for the end.  For now, I’m going to focus on the art.  What can I say about it?  It’s... okay... I guess.  I’ve seen worse.  At the same time, though, it’s pretty obvious they’re not trying very hard.

 

Look at those poses!  That’s how real people stand!

What, did you take an art class and drop out after the first day?  “Ha ha!  I’ve learned what I need to know!  So long, suckers!”  I mean, I’m no artist--

 --but even I find this shameful.  Also the mouths are all way too big.  They scare me.

I take it Ctrl + C is getting a lot of use there, eh Watts?

Okay, now one final complaint, lodged against what I believe may be the single worst entry in this portfolio of growing shame in my gender:

Wh... what is this?  Is he joking?  He thinks it makes him a good person to not consider date-raping a girl?  That doesn’t make you a good person!  That qualifies you as a person!  Are you so horrible that you would disregard everything you claim to believe for sex with an unconscious girl?  You unforgivable hypocrite!  “You’re better than that”--clearly he isn’t!   “I deserve some counterpoint”?  You’re trying to rationalize date-rape?  You’re asking for someone to tell you to rape someone?  Keep in mind, you’re arguing against the angels.  I think we’ve found our devil in this equation!  The devil is telling you to do things more innocuous than the thing you were already contemplating doing!  You horrible human being!  Have you no sense of morality!?  I can’t even ask “don’t you realize raping is wrong?” because you obviously do and you’re trying to talk yourself into it anyway!  You are Skeletor!  You are Verminous Skumm!  You are Judge Doom!  You are evil for the sake of evil!  You are not a “nice guy”!  At this point I am willing to say you are beyond saving!  Get out of my sight, you repulsive slug!  You tremendous waste of carbon and peptides!

This webcomic is terrible.  No one has any reason to read it, and I’d be happy to never so much as hear of it again.  I say good day to you sir!

-Curly

Good comics cited: Boat Crime, XKCD, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and Hark! A Vagrant
Johnnies from The Room, Battlefield Earth, and Cool as Ice, respectively.