Al & Miles At The Movies
Feb. 23rd, 2003 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
disbelief11Went to see Shanghai Nights over the weekend, as I freely admit to finding Owen Wilson a hottie and Jackie Chan enjoyable.
The plot was as goofy as I thought it would be. No surprise, really, since Al Gough and Miles Millar wrote the script.
I swear, the two of them are still 15-year-old virgins sitting in the basement of one of their houses, writing their scripts while under the influence of Mountain Dew and Pop Rocks. Sure, it could have been neat to have Arthur Conan Doyle and Charlie Chaplin as characters in the movie; that is, until Al & Miles ruined it by essentially putting a gigantic neon sign up to call the audience's attention to these things, so we would know they're cool.
Sirs, in-jokes and shout-outs are cool exactly because they're subtly done and not all of the audience will get all of them. If you don't trust the audience to be of average intelligence with an average attention span and you're constantly telling us how funny and cool you are...you are not funny and cool.
They do it in Smallville all the time too, which is why the show moves from being piquantly cheesy to throwing about anvils of cheese.
But Owen Wilson is still a hottie and he and Jackie Chan can still be funny together. Especially in the outtakes - the unscripted parts they ran during the end credits.
The plot was as goofy as I thought it would be. No surprise, really, since Al Gough and Miles Millar wrote the script.
I swear, the two of them are still 15-year-old virgins sitting in the basement of one of their houses, writing their scripts while under the influence of Mountain Dew and Pop Rocks. Sure, it could have been neat to have Arthur Conan Doyle and Charlie Chaplin as characters in the movie; that is, until Al & Miles ruined it by essentially putting a gigantic neon sign up to call the audience's attention to these things, so we would know they're cool.
Sirs, in-jokes and shout-outs are cool exactly because they're subtly done and not all of the audience will get all of them. If you don't trust the audience to be of average intelligence with an average attention span and you're constantly telling us how funny and cool you are...you are not funny and cool.
They do it in Smallville all the time too, which is why the show moves from being piquantly cheesy to throwing about anvils of cheese.
But Owen Wilson is still a hottie and he and Jackie Chan can still be funny together. Especially in the outtakes - the unscripted parts they ran during the end credits.
