Do you guys remember when Adam Lambert sang MJ’s “Black or White” on American Idol and it was what it was? It was just so, so, so much better than what just happened here.
Now, the reason I made this blog was to really champion the things that I love. Sometimes because those things don’t get the respect they Absolutely Should, but mainly because I think being really earnestly excited about things is Awesome, and Good For The Soul, and, it’s important to be happy.
And so when, as is wont to happen, a pop culture travesty occurs, I am sometimes torn about whether or not I should share it with my gentle viewers. Sometimes I can’t hold it in. But sometimes the original is so much more incredible and weird than any “homage” (and just in case it’s not clear, I use sarcastic quote marks) could be that it is not even worth acknowledging anything else ever happened.
And so I bring you:
And as a bonus, my favorite Gene Kelly dance of all time:
Love.
I first realized Seann William Scott was a great actor approximately 17 hours into the mindnumbing pile of vomit that is Southland Tales. I was pretty excited about this movie before it came out, mainly for Sarah Michelle Gellar and the Rock, who, let’s face it, is always appealing. Plus, it was directed by the director of Donnie Darko! Which, I realized as I was entering the theater, I barely remember watching, and in fact can only conjure up odd dreamlike images of Patrick Swayze and giant metallic rabbits. But theoretically that was exciting.
The actual movie, starring Gellar as a porn star, Justin Timberlake as a lip-synching sniper, and pretty much the entire cast, past and present, of Saturday Night Live, is like a total mindfuck. And not in a good way, or a smart way. Just a boring and agressively confusing way. HOWEVER, Seann William Scott is a total revelation. Every second of screen time he got felt like a cool drink of water in the midst of a post-apocalyptic LA wasteland. I’m not exactly sure what his character’s deal was-he was a cop and an activist and maybe there were two of him?—but it didn’t ultimately matter. Even when his characters are lost, he posesses a calm authority that just completely sucks you in.
This discovery is made all the more surprising by the fact that I had expected this movie to (finally) be Sarah Michelle Gellar’s breakthrough to Serious Film Stardom. I mean, I clearly love Sarah Michelle Gellar (yep, Buffy), but at this point, my eagerness to see her new projects, already hanging on by a thread, has pretty much evaporated. Why is she always in such crappy movies? (Well, Scooby Doo 2 was actually kind of good.) I like to think about this though a kind of magnanimous, semi-feminist lens: she’s frequently complained about the lack of complex roles available for women in film. And it’s actually easy to see how the scripts or proposals for her movies looked like good opportunities for her to do some Acting. Even Simply Irresistable, the only romantic comedy she’s made, focuses more on her character’s growth as a chef than on her getting the guy. But something must fall apart along the way, because she never ends up making complete sense in the roles, and the movies themselves never fully gel.
