Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson. Jake Paul. Jake Paul. Who is “Jake Paul”? Is he on YouTube? Why have so many people become “YouTubers” and why have millions more allowed them to become millionaires? More power to the YouTubers, gold rush prophets; it’s the audience that annoys me. Why are people wasting their lives with this garbage?
The cliché, just below “Die Hard is a Christmas movie,” that “We’re living in a Paul Verhoeven movie” is still true, each year more precise: Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson. It’s something you’d see in a cutaway shot, or an establishing exterior; in fact, it was once a Simpsons joke: “TYSON VS. SECRETARIAT—INTERNATIONAL WATERS—SLAUGHTER IN THE WATER” with accompanying illustrations of Tyson and the Horse. A great joke, not a great reality to live in; for Paul may as well be the horse, and we’re yellow, sick for one reason or another: fluoride, beef tallow, seed oils, chronic inflammation. A future Best Picture winner in the vein of Spotlight: workers inside the FDA expose Big Cereal and Big Cupcake and rebuild the Food Pyramid at the behest of RFK Jr. His instructions will be detailed and personal, and he’ll be played by Ray Wise. The movie will win Best Picture and sweep all major categories, and it’ll be called Bloated.
Unlike Spotlight, it won’t take place in fluorescent offices and overcast Boston streets; the movies of the 2020s only come out at night, always under-lit and spelled out. A young woman could be fighting off a dragon or vampire, yet it sounds like they’re talking to their roommate or their lover: “That’s on you.” How many people “genuinely believe” that using clichés on a regular basis makes you stupid? Do you “genuinely believe” that everyone started saying “unserious” when Brian Cox said “You are not serious people” to his fictional children on Succession in early-2023? Is that “actionable information” or have I failed to hold myself accountable? Oh, you think it’s terrible? Time to kill myself.
The movies of the 2020s haven’t been funny, romantic, or sophisticated; the only genre that doesn’t feel like a stagnant pool of biohazard material is horror; even something as threadbare and undercooked as Heretic still feels real, is a real movie. Fly Me to the Moon isn’t real. Why was the sound improperly mixed? Is it a surround sound problem? Does anyone who knows anything pay any attention anymore? Theaters may power their projectors at 75 percent to save money in hard times, but Hollywood has sent them dull, desaturated trash spawned from a sequel to a reboot to an adaptation of a musical from a book to a movie that was once something interesting and compelling and real.
Twelve years ago, Kevin James’ Here Comes the Boom felt like a fake movie. Of course these bizarre exceptions would pop up every few years: Life Itself, Collateral Beauty, Knowing, The Wicker Man, Five Feet Apart. After the pandemic, tech companies and Hollywood know that their audience is already thinking if not eating like the people in WALL-E and they’ll put out whatever makes a ton of money. Unfortunately, Deadpool vs. Wolverine made a lot of money. There will be more fake movies like this.
Hospice cinema: We Live in Time. Wife beater cinema: It Ends With Us. Sex trafficking savior cinema: Sound of Freedom. The 2016 Election (Blue Version): Barbie. Lauded biopic: Oppenheimer. War movie without an enemy: Top Gun: Maverick. And coming up, the worst of all: Timotheé Chalamet as Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, sure to be an exceedingly dull and unnecessary movie about an artist far beyond both of them. Why even bother after Todd Haynes made I’m Not There in 2007?
Maybe the election will change things, but I doubt the Play-Doh movie hasn’t already been considered, developed, written, and brought three steps from pre-production. If John Waters can’t get money for his movie, surely under $50 million, then why should we expect fake Christmas movies like Red One to stop all of a sudden that the New Political Correctness is gone? Fake movies have as dodgy a success rate as real movies, and the more the tech companies become enmeshed in the film business, the more this poison is going to destroy our films and seep into our skin.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith
