(quickly before another movie comes out)
“It’s a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.”- Francis Bacon
And so I don’t really know what it is about the angel fish in Fantasia that made me think for the first time, the words bobbing into my head like the answer from an 8 ball: this is sex. But regardless, I’d like to discuss it with you over coffee sometime if you’re free.
Once a tall boy bought me a ring-pop at the concession stand and then we got drunk watching an action movie and I cried too much to take notes. As Marina sang: "TV taught me how to feel, now real life has no appeal."
Do you remember the first time you saw Titanic and you knew but didn't know what that steamy hand print meant? What was it that Ingmar Bergman said about gratuitous sex scenes? The first DVD I ever bought was Sam Raimi's Spider-man. I still remember its main menu loop, and skipping through the chapters to watch that rainy upside-down kiss over and over again. Films taught us all how to drive men wild.
One of us has a framed Magic Mike XXL poster signed by Channing Tatum hanging in our office, can you guess who? When the lights came back on in the theater, our faces were all flushed. "I can't believe that was real," a dazed but happy mom next to me said. "It wasn't," her friend replied.
Listen, we aren’t snobs. We write about music videos, TV, GIFs, and Youtube phenomenons - The Fuck of the Century loves all of film’s half cousins and bastard children. We resist objectivity and its vague whiff of patriarchy and lean hard into the subjective, the elliptical, the impressionistic. We'd die for the subtleties of film as much as we live for its excess. I have the same passion for Jeanne Dielman battering veal cutlets as for the first time Dom and Brian race in The Fast & The Furious.
And listen, we only care about genre about as far as we can throw one. But if we must say, we are particularly partial to: shlock, existential, rouge, global-action, narcissistic theory, big-box, and dramedy. Basically: if it moves, it moves us.
Music videos are inarguably the most important medium of our young millennium - as Nathan Gardels said, we live in a world "where MTV has gone where the CIA could never penetrate" - and we are dedicated to decoding the information for u. The next big medium? Who knows! Vine died long ago so I’ve lost all my bets. The screen has been fucking with us for over a century and shows no signs of stopping. I was looking for That Guy on IMDB when Netflix asked me if I was still watching. True true, I murmured.
The other night after about sixxx straight hours of Ally McBeal it occurred to me that what I really want to know is how you feel. But you should know, we are terrible at keeping secrets.
Obviously the best course of action when you walk into any room is to say hello to everyone you don’t know. Relatedly - nothing makes you look smarter than asking a question. 65% of us wear glasses when we go out dancing.
Most critics are sooo serious they are nowhere near serious enough, we are looking for the sweet (g)spot. Stars are supposed to be wished upon - they are an excuse for lying down in the dark next to someone. Don’t flatten them on the page - they are meant to get you laid!
Sorry - we are almost all fake poets.
If you have any further questions, feel free to call us at 416-555-0173.
G+S
