Danny
To all you loyal fans and friends expecting the rapier wit and dream-haunting good looks of Franco or Nic, stand warned that my good looks are as pointy as my dream-haunting wit is good, for I am Danny and this is the first of what I hope will be many periodic guest posts. I call the series, “Blowin’ Up the Sweet Spot,” and so should you, otherwise it’ll be more confusing if one of us brings it up. And lest ye worry that a guest might impugn the integrity of this amateur-cinéaste/professional-alcoholic revolution: I’m on my third beer right now—I opened the copy of The Sweet Spot Cinema Style Manual that the fellas sent me and it was just a cleverly disguised mini-fridge full of jangling, ice-cold brews. Well, cheers all!
I recently saw Despicable Me and, while it was entirely what I had been expecting—if you saw the preview you saw the entire plot and all the best parts of the movie—at the end of the movie, I almost cried. This rather irked me because I realized that I’m so well-trained by movies that I bend to their whims, AND that most movies coming out today are nothing more than a glitzy conglomeration of tried-and-true effects honed over the years to manipulate your emotions (and when I say “effects” here, I don’t mean CGI, but rather those more subtle, less special, effects that have been around since the dawn of the talkies—those perfect pairings of sound and image that make you feel what you’re supposed to feel in the moment, whether or not the writing and directing have earned that response: the Illusion of Entertainment, as it has been called). I had no feelings whatsoever for these characters, but for 30 seconds, the music was right and the dialogue and its delivery were that perfect admixture of syrupy sentimentality and smoldering Hollywood sincerity that brought me to the brink of wetting my cheeks. I tell you, I almost punched the kid sitting next to me in his little head so that his associations with such moments would make him immune in the future to the Illusion of Entertainment. I’m just glad it was a second run theater and I only paid 2 bucks to see it or else I would’ve been reeeeeally pissed. They got me again! So then, people are gonna walk out of the theater with that same FEELING as they would a Pixar film and the less-discerning among them (i.e. the people who decided to see Despicable Me) will equate such substandard dreck with the real deal and every wannabe-subversive, computer-animated kid’s movie will be Pixar to them. Don’t even get me started on the people who can’t tell the Disney CGI movies from the Pixar ones–really? really?! You can’t tell the difference between Home on the Range and Finding Nemo? Bolt and Ratatouille? Chicken Little and Up? You can’t see how those could have been made by completely different teams of people, in universes separated by a vast swatch of black space known as talent? There is more creativity and human feeling—there are more friggin JOKES—in a 3-minute Pixar short than in an hour-and-a-half barrel-scraping Disney CGI bullshit feature. Those hacks aren’t worthy to sniff John Lasseter‘s balls outside the pants. They aren’t worthy to gargle Brad Bird‘s sputum. They aren’t worthy to mouth-toilet Pete Docter‘s leavings.
That said, this movie is obviously in debt to The Incredibles, which was a great movie. It was full of greatness. It had so much greatness that you could knock it off for years. Oh, wait, people have been. Despicable Me: “Think of it as The Incredibles, only from the side of the villains!” Megamind: “It’s like The Incredibles, only edgier, cos it’s from the villain’s point of view and it’s packed with today’s hottest comedy stars!” No Ordinary Family: “It’ll be kind of like The Incredibles, only less effective because we’ll stretch it out over 15 episodes before we get canceled!” And so on, until Pixar puts out another creative cow to be milked dry by the rest of the pack.
Sweet Spot Cinema 