They are arrogant, believe they know something that we all don't, and think that anything that is popular in the main stream can not possibly be any good because it is loved by the unwashed masses. As a hater of people in general, you would think I would abide by this logic. However, Pulp Fiction, for example, is a masterpiece whether I like it, you like it, or some d-bag who owns Hall Pass on Blu-Ray likes it.
Hipsters are the kind of people who hate their once-favorite band because it finally decided to start making money for itself, and point out the "flaws" in all your favorite movies to make you feel like a bad person because you didn't sit in a rat-infested theater beneath the subway to watch an independent French film with no subtitles.
A few days ago, I declared The Tree of Life to be a "Hipster Hall of Fame" movie. The Official Doctor of WCWBT, Phil LaPorta, then requested that I expand on this and create a Hipster Hall of Fame. Since I need the endorsement of a doctor, I decided to induct a few films into my inaugural Hall of Fame.
What constitutes a film for the Hipster Hall of Fame?
Generally, to be beloved by hipsters, a film has to be "under-appreciated" by the mainstream. It can't make a ton of of money at the box office, because hipsters hate financial success. The general public has to shun it. Most importantly, the film has to be wildly un-entertaining. You see, it's un-entertaining to us because we're all troglodytes who can't grasp the hidden meaning as to why this lump of meaningless garbage is actually as much fun as the Spider-Man ride at Universal Studios.
So, without further ado, here are a few quick inductees:
The Tree of Life
For the reasons I stated yesterday, but this is the King of all Hipsterdom. The story of the family is so fragmented that it's nearly nonsensical.
A little boy, for no specified reason, takes one of his mother's dresses out of the closet. He then holds it up. He then runs out of the house with it, through the woods for what feels like a good majority of my mid-20's, and then throws the dress down the river. This is never mentioned or explained ever again.
People stare at the sky and whisper vaguely to God.
There is a 30 minute "creation of the universe" section.
There is a 5 minute period where dinosaurs are shown.
There is a beach "afterlife" or whatever the fuck it was where for some reason every character but Sean Penn is the same age they were during the brief period we saw.
And that unbelievable eff-you shot at the end where this glowing orb that shows up 15 times randomly throughout this cirque-de-crap suddenly kind of sort of looks like a face which means WHAT? I don't know. Go to a hipster coffee house and find out*.
*Disclaimer: My favorite spot in Oradell is Cool Beans International Coffee & Teas. It is run by hipsters. Even has really hot 20 year old hipster girls as baristas with that weird half-shaved-head deal going on. They make absolutely sensational coffee and I am their best customer. Cool Beans is the rare spot where hipsters and non-hipsters can co-exist peacefully. So I do not want any of the hipsters who work at Cool Beans with their scruff beards and Bob Dylan shirts to turn me away if they ever stumble onto this blog.
Synecdoche, NY
The next two movies I'm listing are tough for me, because they are by two of my favorite filmmakers of all-time. Charlie Kaufman, aside from the incomparable Quentin Tarantino, is the best writer in Hollywood. His offbeat masterpieces like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation would all earn spots in a Bobby Top 25 Movie List.
Synecdoche, New York is letting the inmates run the asylum. This is the one time that Kaufman was allowed to write and direct one of his own projects. The film is about a theater director (played by the always-awesome Philip Seymour-Hoffman) who decides to write a play about the lives of people in New York.
Eventually, he decides to make the play about the lives of EVERY person in the entire city of New York on a soundstage big enough to simulate all of New York City.
For some reason Hoffman lives as a housekeeper for reasons I can't recall. For some reason somebody's house is CONSTANTLY ON FIRE for no discernible reason. For some reason, the guy who "plays" Hoffman in the theater production of everyone in NYC has been stalking him for 30 years.
Despite an unbelievably well-written speech mid-way through (check the Great Quote section at the bottom of this entry), this has no meaning at all and leaves hipsters scrambling to throw in our face that they know the "deeper" explanation of it all.
I love Charlie Kaufman, but this has to be some kind of prank on us all.
There Will Be Blood
Again, this pains me. I am a huge fan of Paul Thomas Anderson. Again, like Kaufman, this is somebody who gave me three exceptional films. Magnolia easily makes my All-Time Top 25, and both Boogie Nights and the wildly underrated Punch-Drunk Love would be fringe contenders.
There Will Be Blood is a film that you feel you SHOULD like. It's an epic, nearly 3 hour drama, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. There's just one problem, it's painfully boring and nothing much happens.
Please be warned - I am in the vast minority here. Hipsters are joined by over 90% of critics who love the film. I'm probably wrong on this one.
All I know is that is after 3 hours of the camera slowly panning in on dark hills coupled with ominous music, I was prepared for a film experience I would never forget. And I kept waiting. And waiting. And then his fake brother showed up. And then the religious thing happened. And then the "I drink your milkshake" thing happened. And then he killed someone with a bowling pin.
Color Bobby unimpressed.
However, it should be noted that I recently read a book called The Advanced Genius Theory, which argues that if you declare an artist to be a genius, then he can never NOT be a genius. So if he does anything you don't like, it's simply because you can't understand it. Although this does sound suspiciously like hipster thinking anyway, so who can you trust?
The Artist
I didn't hate The Artist. I thought it was okay. Surprisingly good for what it was and gets enormous credit for keeping you reasonably entertained in 2012 with a black-and-white silent film.
However, The Academy Award for Best Picture should not go to a film that is "okay" or "surprisingly good". You shouldn't be able to stand toe-to-toe with Forrest Gump or No Country For Old Men if you merely go a bit above expectations.
Hipsters praise The Artist for being "brilliant". I'm not qualified to comment on this to be honest, because I am not an expert in silent film, but this movie comes off as just a regular silent film. It's not like they took the concept and ran with it to heighten it to a crazy level. It's the most simple plot ever (Star hits rock bottom, picked back up by a woman) that is simply presented in an ancient format.
Back in 2006, there was a worry that Brokeback Mountain would be unfairly critically acclaimed because it was just a standard romantic drama, but the characters happened to be gay. That film rose above that and became something all to its own and the biggest snub in Oscar history.
The Artist does not rise to that level. There isn't anything we aren't getting, except entertainment.
The Royal Tenenbaums
This movie is not funny. Made by the guy that hipsters line up to see like teen girls for a Justin Bieber movie in 3-D, Wes Anderson, this is a dark comedy that thinks it is way too cool for school.
Come on, just look at that guy. Wes Anderson is a hipster all the way. It's about a "wacky" disfunctional family who all live in the same giant house (I think? Don't remember. Don't care to look it up.) and all have to co-exist.
It contains funny people (Ben Stiller, Bill Murray) who are not funny.
And its best joke ("what if this was a real fire drill?") is totally, 100% stolen from an early Simpsons episode.
Any hipster will have you believe this dry, bland "comedy" is as funny as Lloyd Christmas giving the blind child a dead, decapitated parakeet with a poorly-scotched-taped-head. And it isn't.
BONUS MOVIE THAT WON'T MAKE THE LIST BECAUSE I LIKE IT TOO MUCH
Donnie Darko
I love Donnie Darko. It's smartly written, has some very quotable one-liners and is very enjoyable. But anybody who thinks the ending means anything other than "we-thought-this-would-be-confusing-and-fun-to-fuck-with-you-over" is flat-out LYING to you. Does he travel through time? Why? How? Why the fuck is she waving?
It reminds me of a fantastic thread I read on an IMDB message board for Independence Day last week. Someone commented that it's pretty ridiculous that Jeff Goldblum's character would be able to upload a virus into alien technology that would be so far advanced to us that it would be unfathomable to penetrate. Then somebody else remarked that Goldblum cracked their code, so he should be able to cook some kind of virus up based on that. Then another person remarked that the aliens would of course have a computer virus protection program. Still, someone ELSE remarked that although our technology is primitive, it is still foreign to THEM and maybe they weren't prepared for it.
What's the point of this debate? You're putting more thought into it then the writers ever did.
And there you have it. If this list upset you in any way, just head down to a hole-in-the-wall bar in the East Village and start talking really loudly about how much fun you had at Avatar, or how emotional Forrest Gump was, or better yet, tell them that you loved the "You jump, I jump" scene in Titanic before it was mainstream.
Great Quote
Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of
what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every
choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But
maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it
to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and
figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there
is: it's what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and
eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most
of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you
wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from
someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it
seems to but it doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague
regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to
make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to
make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I
feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking hurt for so
fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just to
get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to
hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody.
Amen.
---The Minister (Mark Litito), Synecdoche, New York
... I suggested this blog before it was cool.
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