Peace In Our Time

So I saw Snakes on a Motherfucking-Plane. I came away with two feelings.

First, it was completely, entirely, awesomely up to the hype. The movie itself is pitch perfect in its absolute willingness to employ every ridiculous plot device and mechanism of absurd staging. Hell, it's almost McGuyver-esque in giving the audience a big "screw you" and just not apologizing for anything. (e.g. "There's only one illegal snake dealer that could be behind this...")

Second, despite its ridiculous packaging and absolute dedication to the gods of Tongue-In-Cheek. (Including what must be some of the most ridiculous piece of merchandising EVAR created -- namely, the "Snakes on a Sudoku" book), I definitely came away feeling that we had, seriously, seen the first movie of our generation. The audience was largely within the +/- 5 year of our age group,. If nothing else, large scale skepticism
coupled with large-scale youth enthusiasm recalls the experience of "Pulp Fiction" or "Chasing Amy" to the Generation Xers.

Moreover, SOAP is the first large scale covergence of many developing trends in technology, business, media, and advertising. In one movie, we saw the simultaneous bridging of word of mouth advertising, internet culture, youtube promotion, AND pop culture irony all together in one. Hipster is finally going Y-ster.

Furthermore (and most notably) for once, movie companies have started to become more coversant with their customer body. Not only has the rights to generating merchandise been largely allowed to their fan base (about time!), but internet culture itself has become powerful enough to influence the content of the movies being produced. Notably, the fan competition to create a theme song featured in the movie credits actually allowed internet fans themselves to be in the film. In many ways, I think we're going to see the business model applied to SOAP to many movies to come. And my bet is certainly on the movie hitting the largest profit to cost ratio of the summer.

In short: We're here. We're finally here.

We're saying, "Get these motherfucking snakes off my motherfucking plane."

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I'll be out this weekend in Cape Cod with the Fam. We'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming Sunday night.